http://fredoneverything.net/ThisWeek'sFred.shtml

Faking It

A Brief Textbook Of American Democracy
Monday, January 19, 2004

While the United States is freer and more democratic than many
countries, it
is not, I think, either as free or as democratic as we are expected to
believe, and becomes rapidly less so. Indeed we seem to be specialists
in
maintaining the appearance without having the substance. Regarding the
techniques of which, a few thoughts:

(1) Free speech does not exist in America. We all know what we can't say
and
about whom we can't say it.

(2) A democracy run by two barely distinguishable parties is not in fact
a
democracy.

A parliamentary democracy allows expression of a range of points of
view: A
ecological candidate may be elected, along with a communist, a
racial-separatist, and a libertarian. These will make sure their ideas
are
at least heard. By contrast, the two-party system prevents expression of
any
ideas the two parties agree to suppress. How much open discussion do you
hear during presidential elections of, for example, race, immigration,
abortion, gun control, and the continuing abolition of Christianity?
These
are the issues most important to most people, yet are quashed.

The elections do however allow do allow the public a sense of
participation
while having the political importance of the Superbowl.

(3) Large jurisdictions discourage autonomy. If, say, educational policy
were set in small jurisdictions, such as towns or counties, you could
buttonhole the mayor and have a reasonable prospect of influencing your
children's schools. If policy is set at the level of the state, then to
change it you have to quit your job, marshal a vast campaign costing a
fortune, and organize committees in dozens of towns. It isn't practical.
In
America, local jurisdictions set taxes on real estate and determine
parking
policy. Everything of importance is decided remotely.

(4) Huge unresponsive bureaucracies somewhere else serve as political
flywheels, insulating elected officials from the whims of the populace.
Try
calling the Department of Education from Wyoming. Its employees are
anonymous, salaried, unaccountable, can't be fired, and don't care about
you. Many more of them than you might believe are affirmative-action
hires
and probably can't spell Wyoming. You cannot influence them in the
slightest. Yet they influence you.

(5) For our increasingly centralized and arbitrary government, the
elimination of potentially competitive centers of power has been, and
is,
crucial. This is one reason for the aforementioned defanging of the
churches: The faithful recognize a power above that of the state, which
they
might choose to obey instead of Washington. The Catholic Church in
particular, with its inherent organization, was once powerful. It has
been
brought to heel.

Similarly the elimination of states' rights, now practically complete,
put
paid to another potential source of opposition. Industry, in the days of
J.
P. Morgan politically potent, has been tamed by regulation and federal
contracts. The military in the United States has never been politically
active. The government becomes the only game available.

(6) Paradoxically, increasing the power of groups who cannot threaten
the
government strengthens the government: They serve as counterbalances to
those who might challenge the central authority. For example, the white
and
male-dominated culture of the United States, while not embodied in an
identifiable organization, for some time remained strong. The
encouragement
of dissension by empowerment of blacks, feminists, and homosexuals, and
the
importing of inassimilable minorities, weakens what was once the
cultural
mainstream.

(7) The apparent government isn't the real government. The real power in
America resides in what George Will once called the "permanent political
class," of which the formal government is a subset. It consists of the
professoriate, journalists, politicians, revolving appointees,
high-level
bureaucrats and so on who slosh in and out of formal power. Most are
unelected, believe the same things, and share a lack of respect for
views
other than their own.

It is they, to continue the example of education, who write the
textbooks
your children use, determine how history will be rewritten, and set
academic
standards-all without the least regard for you. You can do nothing about
it.

(8) The US government consists of five branches which are, in rough
order of
importance, the Supreme Court, the media, the presidency, the
bureaucracy,
and Congress.

The function of the Supreme Court, which is both unanswerable and
unaccountable, is to impose things that the congress fears to touch.
That
is, it establishes programs desired by the ruling political class which
could not possibly be democratically enacted. While formally a judicial
organ, the Court is in reality our Ministry of Culture and Morals. It
determines policy regarding racial integration, abortion, pornography,
immigration, the practice of religion, which groups receive special
privilege, and what forms of speech shall be punished.

(9) The media have two governmental purposes. The first is to prevent
discussion and, to the extent possible, knowledge of taboo subjects. The
second is to inculcate by endless indirection the values and beliefs of
the
permanent political class. Thus for example racial atrocities committed
by
whites against blacks are widely reported, while those committed by
blacks
against whites are concealed. Most people know this at least dimly. Few
know
the degree of management of information.

(10) Control of television conveys control of the society. It is magic.
This
is such a truism that we do not always see how true it is. The box is
ubiquitous and inescapable. It babbles at us in bars and restaurants, in
living rooms and on long flights. It is the national babysitter. For
hours a
day most Americans watch it.

Perhaps the key to cultural control is that people can't not watch a
screen.
It is probably true that stupid people would not watch intelligent
television, but it is certainly true that intelligent people will watch
stupid television. Any television, it seems, is preferable to no
television.
As people read less, the lobotomy box acquires semi-exclusive rights to
their minds.

Television doesn't tell people what to do. It shows them. People can
resist
admonition. But if they see something happening over and over, month
after
month, if they see the same values approvingly portrayed, they will
adopt
both behavior and values. It takes years, but it works. To be sure it
works,
we put our children in front of the screen from infancy.

(11) Finally, people do not want freedom. They want comfort, two hundred
channels on the cable, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, an easy job and an
SUV. No
country with really elaborate home-theater has ever risen in revolt. An
awful lot of people secretly like being told what to do. We would
probably
be happier with a king.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
end of article

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All,

Very intriguing game to add to your arsenal of wake-up calls! ;-)

http://www.inflationdeflation.com/index.html

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"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the
face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the
government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose
what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt
government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing
is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles.  Most people do not
have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to
fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think
at all."

~ Michael Rivero
***********************************

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash9.htm

FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY PAUL ONEILL SAYS INVASION OF IRAQ WAS PLANNED IN THE
FIRST DAYS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION LONG BEFORE 9/11, IN AN EXCLUSIVE
INTERVIEW SUNDAY ON "60 MINUTES"


Sat Jan 10 2004 09:12:37 ET


The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq including the
use of American troops within days of President Bush's inauguration in January
of 2001, not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously
reported. That is what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first
interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to Lesley Stahl
in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Jan. 11 (7:00-8:00 PM,
ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad
person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of
pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to
do is a really huge leap," says O'Neill.

O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main
source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him
documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration
was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and
planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall, including post-war
contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of
Iraq's oil. "There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret'
says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'" A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled
"Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil
exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40
countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.

In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a
National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was
all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying
'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.

Suskind also writes about a White House meeting in which he says the president
seems to be wavering about going forward with his second round of tax cuts.
"Haven't we already given money to rich people," Suskind says the president
uttered, according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting
he says he obtained from someone at the meeting, "Shouldn't we be giving money
to the middle?"

O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says
he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his
former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the White
House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine that I am going to be
attacked for telling the truth."

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Eric A. Smith
Hot Damn! Design
81-03-3959-5371
snowdog@...



9-11 Widow Files rico Lawsuit

public signatures sought to support Investigation

PHILADELPHIA, Jan 6 -- Ellen Mariani, whose husband died in the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks when UAL 175 was flown into the World Trade Center, has
filed suit in a US District Court alleging Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and
other co-defendents had sufficient warning to stop the terrorist attacks but
failed to either warn or protect the public.




According to a recent CBS News, the Republican 9-11 Commission Chairman agrees:



9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable

(CBS News -- December 18, 2003) For the first time, the chairman of the
independent commission investigating the Sept. 11

attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented,
reports CBS News Correspondent Randall

Pinkston....



Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New
Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the

administration and laying blame.



http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/17/eveningnews/main589137.shtml



Mariani's suit also charges the Bush Administration with burying evidence of its
failure and refusing to release vital information.



Philadelphia Attorney Philip J. Berg, who filed the suit on Mariani's behalf,
says the Administration must be held accountable. Berg launched the suit on
November 26, and has since put up a website explaining the details of Mariani vs
Bush, et al. The Bush Administration is currently trying to have the charges
dismissed in court.



Public support is critical, says Berg, who has posted an online petition.  "We
need at least a million signatures for them to take it seriously." He added that
mounting a class action is also being considered. Concerned citizens are urged
to read and sign the petition here:

http://www.911forthetruth.com



###



Related stories:

1. NY Times: Bush Warned bin Laden Would Hijack Planes
"The White House said tonight that President Bush had been warned by American
intelligence agencies in early August that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack
aircraft..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/politics/16INQU.html


2. CNN: Bush briefed on hijacking threat before 9-11
"President Bush's daily intelligence briefings in the weeks leading up to the
September 11 terror attacks included a warning of the possibility that Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda network would attempt to hijack a U.S.-based airliner, senior
administration officials said Wednesday"
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/15/bush.sept.11/index.html

3. UK Guardian: Bush knew terrorists would hijack planes
"George Bush received specific warnings in the weeks before 11 September that an
attack inside the United States was being planned by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
network, US government sources said yesterday…. The memo received by Bush on 6
August contained unconfirmed information passed on by British intelligence in
1998 revealing that al-Qaeda operatives had discussed hijacking a plane to
negotiate the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Muslim cleric imprisoned
in America for his part in a plot to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,718312,00.html

4. Sunday Herald: Britain warned Bush to expect 9-11 al-Qaeda hijackings
"Britain gave President Bush a categorical warning to expect multiple airline
hijackings by the al-Qaeda network a month before the September 11 attacks which
killed nearly 3000 people and triggered the international war against
terrorism."  http://www.sundayherald.com/24822

5. Village Voice: Officials Warned of Plans to Attack DC, NY with Planes
"The U.S. government had received repeated warnings of impending attacks—and
attacks using planes directed at New York and Washington—for several years.
The government never told us about what it knew was coming." 
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0332/mondo4.php


6. AP: 9/11 report, Rice conflict; Bush got specific data on threats
"...the briefing given to the president a month before the suicide hijackings
included recent intelligence that al-Qaida was planning to send operatives to
the United States to carry out an attack using high explosives." 
http://www.sunspot.net/business/nationworld/bal-te.rice29jul29,0,2620591.story?c\
oll=bal-business-headlines

7. MSNBC: White House Briefed on Imminent bin Laden Attack
"One such CIA briefing, in July 2001, was particularly chilling and prophetic.
It predicted that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike 'in the
coming weeks,' the congressional investigators found. The intelligence briefing
went on to say: 'The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass
casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been
made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.'" 
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3067907/

8. MSN: Condoleezza Rice's False Statement
A: "The overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was
likely to take place overseas."
- White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a May 16 news
briefing.

B: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
- Title of the CIA's Aug. 6 briefing memo to President Bush . . .
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066154

9. Newsweek: Day before 9-11, Pentagon Generals Cancelled Flights
"On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly
canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security
concerns."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/629606.asp (link dead)

10. SF Gate: Mayor got 8-hour warning Before 9-11 Attacks – September 12, 2001
For Mayor Willie Brown, the first signs that something was amiss came late
Monday when he got a call from what he described as his airport security - - a
full eight hours before yesterday's string of terrorist attacks -- advising him
that Americans should be cautious about their air travel.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/12/MN2\
29389.DTL


11. Florida State: Jeb Bush Declares Martial Law 9-7-01
"Based on the potential massive damage to life and property that may result from
an act of terrorism at a Florida port, the necessity to protect life and
property from such acts of terrorism..."
http://www.state.fl.us/eog_new/eog/orders/2001/september/eo2001-261-09-07-01.htm\
l

12. CBS News: Ashcroft Avoided Commercial Travel Prior to 9-11
"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling
exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice
Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said
Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his
term."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/printable303601.shtml

13. UK Independent: Taliban Mole Warning Ignored
"Weeks before the terrorist attacks on 11 September, the United States and the
United Nations ignored warnings from a secret Taliban emissary that Osama bin
Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil." 
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=331115

14. NY Times: "President Mubarek Warned US of Al Qaeda Plot”
"Egyptian intelligence warned American officials about a week before Sept. 11
that Osama bin Laden's network was in the advance stages of executing a
significant operation against an American target, President Hosni Mubarak said
in an interview on Sunday."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D16F73B5E0C778CDDAF0894DA40448\
2

15. Village Voice: US Ignored France Warnings
"A key point in unraveling why the FBI failed to follow up leads on Al Qaeda
terrorism now centers on the Bureau's contemptuously brushing aside warnings
from French intelligence a few days before 9-11." 
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0222/ridgeway2.php

16. Intl. Herald Tribune: White House Ignored Arab Warnings
"When the hubbub about what the White House did or didn't know before Sept. 11
dies down, Congressional or other investigators should consider the specific
warnings that friendly Arab intelligence services sent to Washington in the
summer of 2001."  http://www.iht.com/articles/58269.html

17. UK News-Telegraph: Israel issued urgent warning of large-scale terror
attacks
Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the
United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible
targets on the American mainland were imminent."
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$52PMOXQAADW5PQFIQMGSFFOAV\
CBQWIV0?xml=/news/2001/09/16/wcia16.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/09/16/ixhome

18. NY Post: FBI Warned D.C. It Was A Target
"A Minnesota FBI agent investigating Zacarias Moussaoui testified yesterday that
he notified the Secret Service weeks before Sept. 11 that a terror team might
hijack a plane and 'hit the nation's capital.'"  
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/57848.htm

20. Yahoo News: FBI Warnings Ignored
"An FBI supervisor, sounding a prophetic pre-Sept. 11 alarm, warned FBI
headquarters that student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui was so dangerous he might
'take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center,' a
congressional investigator said in a report Tuesday."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=512&ncid=716&e=4&u=/ap/20020924\
/ap_on_go_co/attacks_intelligence

21. Independent: America had 12 warnings of aircraft attack
"American intelligence received many more clues before the 11 September attacks
than previously disclosed, that terrorists might hijack planes and turn them
into weapons, a joint congressional committee was told yesterday."  
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=334633

22. Washington Post: 9/11 Probe Says Agencies Failed to Heed Attack Signs
"U.S. intelligence agencies received many more indications than previously
disclosed that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was planning imminent
"spectacular" attacks in the summer of 2001 aimed at inflicting mass
casualties." 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36754-2002Sep18.html

23. Yahoo News: Spy Agencies Had Pre-9/11 Threats on U.S. Soil
"U.S. intelligence agencies picked up threats of attacks inside the United
States and of using airplanes as weapons during the spring and summer before
last year's Sept. 11 attacks, but were more focused on the possibility of an
assault overseas, a congressional source said on Tuesday."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=578&ncid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20020917\
/ts_nm/attack_congress_intelligence_dc

24. Vanity Fair: Bin Laden Relatives Secretly Evacuated From NY
"Patrick Tyler of the New York Times is reporting from Washington: 'In the first
days after the attacks on Sept. 11, the Saudi Arabian ambasador to Washington,
Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of
Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States fearing they might be
subjected to violence.'"
http://www.guerrillanews.com/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=gnn&Numbe\
r=204363&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&part=all

25. Sydney Morning Herald: Administration Told US agents “Back off bin
Ladens”
"US special agents were told to back off the bin Laden family and the Saudi
royals soon after George Bush became president, although that has all changed
since September 11, it was reported today."  
http://www.old.smh.com.au/news/0111/07/world/world100.html

26. Ha'aretz Daily: CEO Says Workers Warned Hours Before World Trade Center Hit
-- FBI Investigating
"Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received
messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the
attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and
American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original
sender of the message predicting the attack." 
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744

27. NY Times: White House Approved Secret Evacuation of Bin Ladens After 9-11
"Richard Clarke, who ran White House crisis team after Sept 11 terror attacks,
says top White House officials personally approved evacuation of dozens of
influential Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, from United States
in days after Sept 11, when most flights were grounded."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/090503A.shtml

28. Tampa Tribune: Bodyguards tell of Secret Bin Laden Flight
"The hastily arranged flight out of Raytheon Airport Services, a private hangar
on the outskirts of Tampa International Airport, was anything but ordinary. It
lifted off the tarmac at a time when every private plane in the nation was
grounded due to safety concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks. "
http://www.dirtybush.com/connectthesedots.html


29. UK Minister: "Bush had Foreknowledge of 9-11 attacks"
"...it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11
attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war
that had clearly already been well planned in advance."  
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1036588,00.html
Contact: Eric A. Smith, Hot Damn! Design, Tokyo, Japan ● 81-03-3959-5371

# # #

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A group of people in New York city, belonging to a group I had not
heard of yet, "NYC Truth Group," unveiled a banner at the WTC site
which read: "THE BUSH REGIME ENGINEERED 9-11." Are people beginning
to wake up to the 9-11 fraud?

This incident goes a step beyond which happened some time back when
signs started appearing around the country which read simply: "BUSH
KNEW." Obviously knowing about something and engineering it are quite
different statements to make. The group is also making a hero of
Ellen Mariani who is bringing a lawsuit against the Bush
administration for knowingly allowing 9-11 to happen.

A number of people were visibly upset at the sight of the sign, but
according to the NYC Truth Group a far greater number of bystanders
applauded their efforts and said they were glad they were there.




'At least 20 women over the age of 40, of all ethnic backgrounds
said, "god bless you for being here." 90% of the people were open to
hear what we had to say, 9% were not, and less than 1% were very
frightened of us so they did what any frightened animal does, bark as
loud as they can. Another small percentage of people disagreed with
us whole-heartily, but chose to engage us in intelligent dialogue.
This included off-duty military personnel, more on that later in this
report.'

For those of us who remember the 1960s protests against the Viet Nam
war, which helped to bring and end to that illegal and murderous war,
may see a sign of hope here that protest is not dead, maybe just late
in coming.

This whole incident, especially the response of bystander, really
surprises me. I think more people are waking up than I had thought.
Here's the article posted at SeptemberEleventh.org:

http://septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2004-01-04-groundzero.php
==============================

NYC 9-11 Truth Takes Back Ground Zero
by Michael Kane
January 4, 2004

[snip]

The NYC Truth Movement permanently, and completely, took back Ground
Zero from the Neo-Conservative false-patriotic agenda. In true New
York fashion, 911 Truth activists unveiled the now legendary banner,
which read, "THE BUSH REGIME ENGINEERED 9-11" in front of the World
Trade Center footprint.

At least 20 women over the age of 40, of all ethnic backgrounds
said, "god bless you for being here." Dozens of photos were taken by
New Yorkers and tourists from all over the world (oddly enough,
including tourists from Saudi Arabia), and people were dying to get
our information. 90% of the people were open to hear what we had to
say, 9% were not, and less than 1% were very frightened of us so they
did what any frightened animal does, bark as loud as they can.
Another small percentage of people disagreed with us whole-heartily,
but chose to engage us in intelligent dialogue. This included off-
duty military personnel, more on that later in this report.

But it's clear, and definitive - New York supports the 9-11 Truth
Movement. The NY Truth Movement is calling for an international day
of solidarity this Saturday, January 10th. We will be at Ground Zero
and by extension, so will you. Make signs and banners of whatever 9-
11 Truth message you want to support, and hand out printed
educational material.

All day we championed American Patriot Ellen Mariani; we told
everyone of the lawsuit she filed against the Bush administration for
allowing the 9-11 attacks to happen for political gain. Over 1,000
Deception Dollars were handed out. One woman was distributing Mindy
Kleinberg's historic statement to the so-called "Independent"
Commission to investigate 9-11. We let everyone know the Commission
has been reduced to a Cover-Up Commission
http://propagandamatrix.com/multimedia_priorknowledge_911coverupcommis
sion.html.

Some handed out the recent, brilliant, New York Press weekly
newspaper http://www.nypress.com/16/53/news&columns/feature.cfm which
had 9-11 as the cover story. There were multiple strategies
implemented. The diverse opinions of the NY Truth Movement were well
reflected. I primarily stuck with the most damning evidence of all,
the controlled demolition of World Trade Center building 7.
http://www.911review.org/Wiki/Building7Collapse.shtml.

Obstruction of our Rights

Right at the very start, Jeff Blank was physically grabbed and forced
backwards away from the front of the World Trade Center Path Station,
and tossed across the street for merely holding a sign. Jeff is a
professional resistor of fascism, he heads the "Stop the Police State
Coalition"; Lyn Stewart is his defense attorney. Jeff created our
sign, and has been promoting this message in NYC for months. Nico
Haupt held the banner with Jeff, and as the police forcibly moved
them, Nico briefly grabbed onto a street pole in resistance.

I wasn't there for any of this. I showed up just after the fact as
Jeff was in the street yelling, loudly, about free speech and what it
means to be free. Very boldly, He compared the Bush regime to the
German Nazi regime. Police and Military looked on, as Jeff finished
what he had to say, scattered applause came from a few who showed
early support.

[snip]

That was the last of the police blatantly subverting our
Constitutional Rights to free speech. Officer Collins told us to move
our sign because we were "blocking a bus stop" but it was funny, no
busses were running. Not to mention that we were more than 10 feet
away from the bus stop. In fact, we weren't blocking the bus stop at
all. Some vendors actually were right in front of the bus stop, and
they immediately moved once the cops messed with us.

Once they moved, the bus stop wasn't blocked - end of the issue in
our eyes. The vendors get hassled regularly even though they have
permits. They were very much on our side, and I am personally
grateful for their silent solidarity. We weren't moving, not after
they illegally, physically, threw two of us across the street because
of their own fear of democracy and free speech. There is nothing
illegal about holding a sign in NYC; we were completely within our
rights. The police state mentality must be stopped, and will be
stopped, by the New York citizens ourselves.

Dialogue, Respect, Understanding.

At one point, two men were visibly upset with the wording of our
sign. They asked us directly why we were doing this, and how could we
possibly call the Bush administration a "REGIME"?

For the most part, I was the one responding to them. I quite simply
pointed to the illegal theft of the 2000 election. Plus many in
Europe have compared our illegal invasion of Iraq to Germany's 1939
invasion of Poland. He did not agree completely, though there was
much I was saying I could see he did agree with. He said he defends
our country everyday so that people like us can do what we do. He
clearly stated that we were within our rights, and said with a
smile, "hey man, this is New York!" I couldn't agree more.

After some intense, emotional debate, we came to a point of
understanding and respect. His main point was that we were calling
HIS BOSS (Bush) a criminal and that reflects on him and other
military men and women. I won't reveal how he defends our country; he
shared this with me in such a way that he did not expect it to be
reported.

I completely understood his impression, and immediately explained
that is not the case. We are not, in any way, attacking him and
others who defend this country. A Bronx Vet recently told me soldiers
in Iraq don't have the proper vest to stop the caliber of bullets
being shot at them. I said, "do you think this guy (Bush) cares about
our soldiers? $87 billion and they can't get our boys the proper
vests to save their lives? This guy is no patriot".

[snip]

Regardless, I will hope for the best, and continue to protest until
we get the bulk of this administration subpoenaed, under oath, and in
prison where they belong before they have a chance to stage another
attack and "delay" the election. William Safire has predicted exactly
that will happen as an "October Surprise" before the election.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/saf-j03.shtml

Let us remember, Safire is a political insider, Nixon's former
speechwriter. I don't think there will be another election if we
don't get these criminals thrown out, so we must get them subpoenaed
and in prison ASAP. That is my #1 priority (but hardly my only
strategy). Now is the time for everyone to be in the streets and
demand the White House be subpoenaed. More strategies are coming to
ensure this happens.

In addition, I ran into more than one fireman who completely
understood where we were coming from. These brave souls have many
unanswered questions and may be able to puncture the Achilles heal of
the Bush regime. Time will tell.

Victims Family Members Still Get No Respect

The new path subway station has been erected right where a majority
of the 9-11 victims remains lay. The Coalition of 9-11 Families
http://www.memorialfor911.com request for the Path Train station to
be named the "World Trade Center Memorial Station" was completely
ignored. That's just disgusting! One very simple, respectful, decent,
compassionate request is completely ignored by Port Authority and New
York State. Just pathetic, completely heartless, no empathy, no
understanding of what type of loss was experienced on that day. They
already ignored much of the Coalition of 9-11 families were promised,
and now they can't even make a very simple, respectful, name change?

In my opinion this is very similar to the struggle to properly honor
the remains at the African ancestral burial grounds in NYC
http://www.seeingblack.com/x091001/burial.shtml.

All they have up in commemoration at Ground Zero are these very
average plaques that say much more about the history of the WTC then
they do about the victims. In the near future, the NY 9-11 Truth
Movement hopes to raise awareness about the plight of the victims'
family members who, in part, feel they have been deceived in their
dealings with the State of New York, Port Authority, and the LMDC
(Lower Manhattan Development Corporation).


Full Article
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=42511
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04/ING\
PQ40MB81.DTL&type=printable

Quarantining dissent
How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech
James Bovard
Sunday, January 4, 2004

When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service
visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up
"free
speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush policies
(and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones
routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and
outside the view of media covering the event.

When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old
retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign
proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so
many
of us."

The local police, at the Secret Service's behest, set up a "designated
free-speech zone" on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a
third of a mile from the location of Bush's speech.

The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, but
folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president's path.
Neel
refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly
conduct; the police also confiscated his sign.

Neel later commented, "As far as I'm concerned, the whole country is a
free-speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who
criticizes them will be out of sight and out of mind."

At Neel's trial, police Detective John Ianachione testified that the
Secret
Service told local police to confine "people that were there making a
statement pretty much against the president and his views" in a
so-called
free- speech area.

Paul Wolf, one of the top officials in the Allegheny County Police
Department, told Salon that the Secret Service "come in and do a site
survey, and say, 'Here's a place where the people can be, and we'd like
to
have any protesters put in a place that is able to be secured.' "

Pennsylvania District Judge Shirley Rowe Trkula threw out the disorderly
conduct charge against Neel, declaring, "I believe this is America.
Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the
death
your right to say it'?"

Similar suppressions have occurred during Bush visits to Florida. A
recent
St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, "At a Bush rally at Legends Field
in
2001, three demonstrators -- two of whom were grandmothers -- were
arrested
for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated
zone.
And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush came to a rally
at
the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off into a protest
zone
hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome."

One of the arrested protesters was a 62-year-old man holding up a sign,
"War is good business. Invest your sons." The seven were charged with
trespassing, "obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct."

Police have repressed protesters during several Bush visits to the St.
Louis area as well. When Bush visited on Jan. 22, 150 people carrying
signs
were shunted far away from the main action and effectively quarantined.

Denise Lieberman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern
Missouri
commented, "No one could see them from the street. In addition, the
media
were not allowed to talk to them. The police would not allow any media
inside the protest area and wouldn't allow any of the protesters out of
the
protest zone to talk to the media."

When Bush stopped by a Boeing plant to talk to workers, Christine Mains
and
her 5-year-old daughter disobeyed orders to move to a small protest area
far from the action. Police arrested Mains and took her and her crying
daughter away in separate squad cars.

The Justice Department is now prosecuting Brett Bursey, who was arrested
for holding a "No War for Oil" sign at a Bush visit to Columbia, S.C.
Local
police, acting under Secret Service orders, established a "free-speech
zone" half a mile from where Bush would speak. Bursey was standing amid
hundreds of people carrying signs praising the president. Police told
Bursey to remove himself to the "free-speech zone."

Bursey refused and was arrested. Bursey said that he asked the police
officer if "it was the content of my sign, and he said, 'Yes, sir, it's
the
content of your sign that's the problem.' " Bursey stated that he had
already moved 200 yards from where Bush was supposed to speak. Bursey
later
complained, "The problem was, the restricted area kept moving. It was
wherever I happened to be standing."

Bursey was charged with trespassing. Five months later, the charge was
dropped because South Carolina law prohibits arresting people for
trespassing on public property. But the Justice Department -- in the
person
of U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr. -- quickly jumped in, charging
Bursey
with violating a rarely enforced federal law regarding "entering a
restricted area around the president of the United States."

If convicted, Bursey faces a six-month trip up the river and a $5,000
fine.
Federal Magistrate Bristow Marchant denied Bursey's request for a jury
trial because his violation is categorized as a petty offense. Some
observers believe that the feds are seeking to set a precedent in a
conservative state such as South Carolina that could then be used
against
protesters nationwide.

Bursey's trial took place on Nov. 12 and 13. His lawyers sought the
Secret
Service documents they believed would lay out the official policies on
restricting critical speech at presidential visits. The Bush
administration
sought to block all access to the documents, but Marchant ruled that the
lawyers could have limited access.

Bursey sought to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and
presidential
adviser Karl Rove to testify. Bursey lawyer Lewis Pitts declared, "We
intend to find out from Mr. Ashcroft why and how the decision to
prosecute
Mr. Bursey was reached." The magistrate refused, however, to enforce the
subpoenas. Secret Service agent Holly Abel testified at the trial that
Bursey was told to move to the "free-speech zone" but refused to
cooperate.

The feds have offered some bizarre rationales for hog-tying protesters.
Secret Service agent Brian Marr explained to National Public Radio,
"These
individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or
nonsupport that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route
and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these places
up,
so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, but, two,
we
want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening
and
not be injured in any way." Except for having their constitutional
rights
shredded.

The ACLU, along with several other organizations, is suing the Secret
Service for what it charges is a pattern and practice of suppressing
protesters at Bush events in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Michigan,
New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and elsewhere. The ACLU's Witold Walczak
said
of the protesters, "The individuals we are talking about didn't pose a
security threat; they posed a political threat."

The Secret Service is duty-bound to protect the president. But it is
ludicrous to presume that would-be terrorists are lunkheaded enough to
carry anti-Bush signs when carrying pro-Bush signs would give them much
closer access. And even a policy of removing all people carrying
signs --
as has happened in some demonstrations -- is pointless because potential
attackers would simply avoid carrying signs. Assuming that terrorists
are
as unimaginative and predictable as the average federal bureaucrat is
not a
recipe for presidential longevity.

The Bush administration's anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for
two
American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, resulting
in
some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free countries.

When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist
Mark Riley observed, "The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a
new
interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by George Bush and
his
Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as much
as
they like just as long as they can't be heard."

Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament
building and prohibited from using any public address system in the
area.

For Bush's recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British
police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city and
impose a "virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil
disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters," according to Britain's
Evening Standard. But instead of a "free-speech zone," the Bush
administration demanded an "exclusion zone" to protect Bush from
protesters' messages.

Such unprecedented restrictions did not inhibit Bush from portraying
himself as a champion of freedom during his visit. In a speech at
Whitehall
on Nov. 19, Bush hyped the "forward strategy of freedom" and declared,
"We
seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings."

Attempts to suppress protesters become more disturbing in light of the
Homeland Security Department's recommendation that local police
departments
view critics of the war on terrorism as potential terrorists. In a May
terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local law
enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who "expressed dislike of
attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government." If police vigorously
followed this advice, millions of Americans could be added to the
official
lists of suspected terrorists.

Protesters have claimed that police have assaulted them during
demonstrations in New York, Washington and elsewhere.

One of the most violent government responses to an antiwar protest
occurred
when local police and the federally funded California Anti-Terrorism
Task
Force fired rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protesters and
innocent
bystanders at the Port of Oakland, injuring a number of people.

When the police attack sparked a geyser of media criticism, Mike van
Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information
Center
told the Oakland Tribune, "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if
you
have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being
fought
against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that
protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist
act."

Van Winkle justified classifying protesters as terrorists: "I've heard
terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic
impact,
and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact.
Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people."

Such aggressive tactics become more ominous in the light of the Bush
administration's advocacy, in its Patriot II draft legislation, of
nullifying all judicial consent decrees restricting state and local
police
from spying on those groups who may oppose government policies.

On May 30, 2002, Ashcroft effectively abolished restrictions on FBI
surveillance of Americans' everyday lives first imposed in 1976. One FBI
internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews
with
antiwar activists "for plenty of reasons, chief of which it will enhance
the paranoia endemic in such circles and will further service to get the
point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of the
FBI's "belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented
because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate
commission
of act which might be criminal," according to a Senate report.

On Nov. 23 news broke that the FBI is actively conducting surveillance
of
antiwar demonstrators, supposedly to "blunt potential violence by
extremist
elements," according to a Reuters interview with a federal law
enforcement
official.

Given the FBI's expansive definition of "potential violence" in the
past,
this is a net that could catch almost any group or individual who falls
into official disfavor.

James Bovard is the author of "Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom,
Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil." This article is adapted
from
one that appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of the American Conservative.

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Nine hundred and Eleven Missing Pieces
What don't we know, and why don't we know it?
http://www.nypress.com/16/53/news&columns/feature.cfm

The Southern Solstice has passed, and with it the deadline for 9/11 families to
file their claims with the "Feinberg Fund," as it has come to be known. Of an
official death toll of 2976, claims have been filed by for 2,851. The claim
involves signing off on any future litigation against the government, the
airlines, the airports or any security firms.

One hundred and twenty-five claims remain outstanding, but little has been
written about any of these families. Where is the coverage of those insisting on
finding out what really happened on that day before they sign away their
"claims?"

First to stand up were five widows: Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy
Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken. Breitweiser's husband was killed in his office at
Fiduciary Trust on the 94th floor of the South Tower, while Casazza, Kleinberg
and van Auken are Cantor-Fitzgerald widows. They began lobbying for answers
early in 2002, navigating the labyrinth of American bureaucracy and hammering
the bureaucrats for direct answers to direct questions. In September 2002,
Breitweiser testified at the first televised public hearing before the Joint
Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) in DC.

Like many others, she wanted to know why, on May 16, 2002, National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated that she didn't "think anybody could have
predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World
Trade Center. That they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked
airplane as a missile."

Breitweiser knows the historical facts say otherwise. She noted the following
points in her statement. In her words:

. In 1993, a $150,000 study was commissioned by the Pentagon to investigate the
possibility of an airplane being used to bomb national landmarks. A draft
document of this was circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice Department
and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

. In 1994, a disgruntled Fed Ex employee invaded the cockpit of a DC-10 with
plans to crash it into a company building in Memphis. That same year, a lone
pilot crashed a small plane into a tree on the White House grounds, and an Air
France flight was hijacked by members of the Armed Islamic Group with the intent
to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower.

. In January 1995, Philippine authorities investigating Abdul Murad, an Islamic
terrorist, unearthed a plot to blow up 11 airliners over the Pacific, and in the
alternative, several planes were to be hijacked and flown into civilian targets
in the U.S. Among the targets mentioned were CIA headquarters, the World Trade
Center, the Sears Tower and the White House.

. In September 1999, a report, "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism," was
prepared for U.S. intelligence by the Federal Research Division, an arm of the
Library of Congress. It stated, "Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda's
Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives
(C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White
House."

Like many others, Breitweiser believes that American intelligence had long
speculated that terrorist organizations could and would utilize airplanes as
weapons.

She also included a March 11, 2002 statement by the director of the CIA, George
Tenet: "[The United States] never had the texture-meaning enough information-to
stop what happened." She offered a similar statement by the director of the FBI,
Robert Mueller, from May 8, 2002: "[T]here was nothing the agency could have
done to anticipate and prevent the attacks."

Once again Breitweiser argued that the facts indicated otherwise. As she said:

. Throughout the spring and early summer of 2001, intelligence agencies flooded
the government with warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American
targets, including commercial aircraft, by al Qaeda and other groups. The
warnings were vague but sufficiently alarming to prompt the FAA to issue four
information circulars, or ICs, to the commercial airline industry between June
22 and July 31, warning of possible terrorism.

. On June 22, the military's Central and European Commands imposed "Force
Protection Condition Delta," the highest anti-terrorist alert.

. On June 28, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, "It is highly
likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several
weeks."

. As of July 31, the FAA urged U.S. airlines to maintain a "high degree of
alertness."

. One FAA circular from late July noted, according to Condoleezza Rice, that
there was "no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil aviation
interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for
hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use caution." Two counter-terrorism
officials described the alerts of the early and mid-summer 2001 as "the most
urgent in decades."

Breitweiser is resolute in her assertions. Airport security officials, she
believes, could have done much more to prevent the hijackings. Beyond that,
however, she wonders what September 11 would have been like had the government
made the public aware of the threats. How many people, she asks, would have
chosen to board planes that morning? And how many of those in World Trade Center
2 would have remained in their offices, watching the inferno of Tower 1, had
they known of the possibility of an air attack?

One of the more compelling passages in Breitweiser's statement concerns a July
5, 2001 White House gathering of the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, Secret
Service and INS wherein a top counter-terrorism official, Richard Clarke, stated
that "[s]omething really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to
happen soon." Despite being put on heightened alert, intelligence agencies
ignored-or at least dismissed-what is now widely known as the "Phoenix Memo."

On July 10, an FBI field agent in Phoenix, AZ, named Kenneth Williams reported
suspicions of a hijacking plot. He recommended that the FBI investigate the
possibility that al Qaeda operatives were training at U.S. flight schools,
suggesting that Osama bin Laden's followers may have been securing jobs as
security guards, pilots and other personnel.

Too many questions remain, and Breitweiser is very thorough in outlining the
possible failures of not only our government's communication prior to the
attack, but its response. She wonders why, for instance, the NY/NJ Port
Authority didn't evacuate the World Trade Center when they knew that a second
plane was heading in? And why weren't the F-16s and Stealth bombers that tracked
on radar screens at approximately 8:05 a.m. used to prevent tragedy?

Concerning the attack on the Pentagon, Breitweiser notes that Washington Air
Traffic Control Center was aware of the first plane before it hit the World
Trade Center. And yet, the third plane-American Airlines Flight 77, soon to
plunge into the Pentagon-made a few "loop de loops" over DC one hour and 45
minutes after Washington Center was made aware of the hijackings. Why, she asks,
was our Air Force so late in its response?

In late 2002, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States-now known popularly as the "9/11 Commission"-was reluctantly created, in
large part due to the efforts of the widow Breitweiser. The commission's object
is not so much to get the facts straight, but to assign blame for "shortcomings"
and "failures" in the bureaucracy. It's what is known in intelligence circles as
a "limited hang-out."

On September 12, 2003, the widow Ellen Mariani filed a civil RICO suit in the
U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania naming George W. Bush,
Richard Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Norman Mineta,
Peter G. Peterson, Condoleezza Rice, George H.W. Bush and Kenneth Feinberg, in
addition to "Other unnamed past, present, officials, representatives, agents,
and private consultants of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" as defendants. She is
demanding a jury trial.

She also fired off an open letter to President Bush in which she claims that he
"intentionally allowed 9/11 to happen to gather public support for a 'war on
terrorism.'" She accuses him of being "fully aware of the unfolding events" yet
"[choosing] to continue on to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School to proceed
with a scheduled event and 'photo op.'" With America under attack, she writes,
our president "did not appear to blink an eye or shed a tear [but] continued on
as if everything was 'business as usual.'"

Speaking for the families of the victims, she poses the following questions to
President Bush:

Why were 29 pages of the 9/11 committee report personally censored at your
request?

Where are the "black boxes" from Flight 11 and Flight 175?

Where are the "voice recorders" from Flight 11 and Flight 175?

Why can't we gain access to the complete air traffic control records for Flight
11 and Flight 175?

Where are the airport surveillance tapes that show the passengers boarding the
doomed flights?

When will complete passenger lists for all of the flights be released?

Why did your brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, personally go to the
offices of the Hoffman Aviation School and order that flight records and files
be removed? These files were then put on a C130 government cargo plane and flown
out of the country. Where were they taken and who ordered it done?

Her letter ends ominously: "I will prove this in a court of law!"

So many, many questions. Why did World Trade Center 7 collapse? No airplane hit
that building, and before September 11, no steel skyscraper had ever collapsed
because of a fire. Yet three fell-very neatly and virtually into their own
footprints.

(Even if one allows the engineers their claims that WTC1 and WTC2 were designed
to collapse in on themselves, what of the perfect collapse of WTC7?)

The firefighters who were in the two towers were not in the least concerned
about a collapse, as demonstrated in the fire department's transcript of their
radio traffic. In fact, they stated that the fires were dying out and could be
extinguished with just a couple of lines of hose. Jet fuel burns like kerosene
or charcoal fluid-quickly and completely-yet Ground Zero burned for 100 days.

The idea of rigging the buildings for a controlled demolition was dismissed as
unrealistic by even the most suspicious types. How to gain access? Well,
President Bush's other brother, Marvin, had a security company covering the
World Trade Center, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines.

In The American Reporter (Jan. 20, 2003), Margie Burns raises the question of
Marvin Bush's role in September 11. She notes that two of the planes involved
that day were United, and another took off from Dulles airport. The firm that
handled security, formerly named Securacom, "listed [Marvin] Bush on its board
of directors and as a significant shareholder. The firm, now named Stratesec,
Inc., is located in Sterling, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., and emphasizes
federal clients."

The company, Burns writes, was never investigated. Rather, it has benefited from
increased security measures instituted in the wake of the attacks.

Some doubt altogether that a plane hit the Pentagon. On Sept. 12, Arlington
County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher made some revealing statements. When asked about
aircraft wreckage, he responded that "there are some small pieces of aircraft
visible from the interior during this fire-fighting operation.but not large
sections. In other words, there's no fuselage sections and that sort of thing."
When asked about jet fuel, he referred to a "puddle."

Look at pictures, however, and it's hard to believe that a Boeing 757 flew into
the Pentagon. The damage is not in proportion to the claim, especially when one
considers that two Boeing 757s are said to have taken down three skyscrapers.
The Pentagon was dented, the plane evaporated.

Nothing that has been reported as truth escapes examination. Even the 19 men at
the controls, now infamously known as the 9/11 hijackers, cannot be tied with
real evidence to the event itself. This, according to FBI Director Robert
Mueller. "Mohammed Atta" appears to have been a stolen identity, as per the real
Atta's father and his passport, which went missing in 1999, and on Sept. 23,
2001, the BBC reported that at least four other of the 19 men identified as the
hijackers were alive and well-and considerably unsettled.

Why would seismographs in the NYC area register two tiny quakes at Ground Zero
at the commencement of the collapse of each tower?

Why were the planes up in the air for so long? And why did they fly over so many
military bases? Was America's defense team on a crack break, or was it a
National Reconnaissance Office exercise, a wargame that involved hijacked
aircraft being splashed into buildings in New York and DC? The two that took the
towers flew within spitting distance of the Indian Point nuclear reactor
facility.

Condoleezza Rice's preposterous May 16, 2002, statement that no one could have
foreseen this scenario was particularly ironic given that Pacifica Radio
identified her that day as the source of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown's
"airport security" call warning him not to fly on Black Tuesday.

The internet is boiling with analyses of the 9/11 event. In Europe, a fair
number of people believe the American government was complicit in the attacks.
According to recent polls, one-third of young Germans believe this. Print and
broadcast media here ignore the questions, but it can't be kept from public view
forever. It's all out there. It's been two years, and we still have nothing but
questions and Grassy Knoll theories. The answers lay scattered in shreds and
pieces, waiting to be assembled.

Now come the widows, asking the right questions. Mariani's lawyer, Phil Berg,
makes a point to remind people that he is not in the least bit suicidal, or
given to playing with loaded guns. They may not be able to reassemble or
reanimate their loved ones in a literal sense, but these families who are
choosing the hard road, the Narrow Way, will get to the truth.

Volume 16, Issue 53

"None are so hopelessly enslaved,
as those who falsely believe they are free.
The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds
by masters who rule them with lies.
They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
~~ Johann Goethe

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2004 - Year of the Slave Wed Dec 31 19:04:30 2003, 67.1.155.235

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/yearoftheslave.html  You are a slave.

I know that's not what you want to hear as you hoist your New Year's
champagne, but it is the unpleasant truth that we all face going into
2004.

Movies and public school like to portray slaves as bound by chains and
beaten with whips, creating a polarized image of slavery that can be
pointed to with the comment, "You are not like that, therefore you are
not a slave." But history shows that slaves have been treated in all
manner of ways, some more cruel than others, yet even with the most kind
treatment, a slave remains a slave.

Setting aside the stereotyped image of a slave as a bleeding chain-bound
wretch, slaves throughout history are often hard to recognize. In some
cases, such as the Medieval Serfs, they were held slaves to the rulers
by religious belief, and did not see themselves as slaves even though
they were treated as such. The favored slaves of Asian potentates wore
jewels to make a movie star gasp, yet were still slaves for all their
finery and comfort.

So, what is a slave? How do we define a slave? What test do we use to
tell if someone is a slave. What makes them different from free people?

Free people can say "no". Free people can refuse demands for their
money, time, and children. Slaves cannot. There is no freedom without
the freedom to say "no". If someone demands that you do something and
you can say "no" and refuse to do it, then you are a free human being.
If you can be forced to do something or surrender something that you do
not wish to, then you are a slave. No other test need be applied.

When you are forced to surrender half your life's work to the government
in ever-increasing taxes, then you are a slave. Throughout history,
slaves were expected to perform the work needed for their own upkeep,
then perform additional work for the rulers. For Roman slaves, the ratio
of work-for-self versus work-for-rulers was about 50-50. The same ratio
applied to Medieval Serfs, and even to the slaves of the American south.
And, when you add up all the overt taxes, covert fees, tariffs, excises,
plus the increased price you pay for products to pay the taxes of the
companies that make those products, you will find that Americans are at
that same "half-for-self" versus "half-for-rulers" ratio! Can you say
"no" to the confiscation of half of your life? Can you even get the
masters to maybe reduce the burden by a significant amount? No?
Congratulations. You are a slave.

The masters have decided they want wars on anyone living over oil. The
idea is that it is better for American corporations to steal the oil
they need than to pay for it. Millions of Americans (and millions more
around the globe) did not want the war, but the masters started them
anyway, by lying to the people. Could you refuse the war? Can you refuse
being lied to? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

The rulers want your children for their future wars. Legislation for a
draft is already in Congress. Can you refuse the confiscation of your
children? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

The government has been caught lying over and over again to the people,
from who really did 9-11, to the legality of the tax system, to Cheney's
Energy Task Force papers, to Saddam's WMDs. Americans are the most
lied-to people on Earth. Can you refuse to be lied to? Can you punish
the liars? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

Vote fraud is rampant in the nation, and the mandated imposition of
audit-less electronic voting systems means that elections will be
decided (as Stalin admitted) not by those who vote but by those who
count the vote. Can you refuse a dishonest voting process? No?
Congratulations. You are a slave.

Just because you cannot see the slave-chains doesn't mean they are not
there. Chains made of steel are obvious, but chains made of beliefs are
not always recognized for what they are. Hitler enslaved the German
people to war with a belief that Poland was about to invade. LBJ
enslaved the American people to war with the belief that Vietnam had
attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Poland wasn't invading.
There were no torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin, but the slaves, held by
invisible chains of beliefs, went to war. Millions died.

In 2003, however, the chains started to become visible. The
Constitutional right to freedom of expression was confined to
"free-speech" zones. A slave may have an opinion, so long as it is not
expressed where it might upset the other slaves. The Constitutional
right to an armed populace, the means by which the men who set up a
nation of free citizens hoped to keep them free, is under constant
attack from those who fear a nation of free citizens, and who will not
sleep soundly until we are a nation entirely of slaves. Armed citizens
can, after all, say "no" and make it stick. That was why there was a
Second Amendment, to allow the people to say "no" to those who would
return them to the slavery they had so recently escaped from. Other
Constitutional rights and protections have been set aside. The
government can now search through your private records without cause and
without warrant, even break into your home and not have to tell you.
Simply by declaring a citizen an enemy combatant, the government can now
lock up US citizens without a charge and without a lawyer. You can be
prevented from traveling simply for having the wrong name. If you
purchase too much gold or take home too much cash, or hoard food, the
government will take notice. Having a Farmer's Almanac is grounds for
suspicion. Talking about the Constitution is now deemed grounds to
suspect a terrorist link. Torture is now espoused as "necessary" to
"deal with the crisis". Were you able to refuse those changes to the
Constitution? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

The government (at all levels) has borrowed trillions of dollars and
stuck your kids with the payments. Children not even born will be paying
off the bills. To declare the lives of children not yet born, let alone
old enough to vote, indentured to the state is slavery most obvious and
odious. Can you refuse responsibility for payments on debts the
government incurred without your permission? No? Congratulations. You
are a slave.

The government has borrowed so much money that it has long ago run out
of gold to pledge as collateral on the debts. Starting in Nixon's
administration, natural resources were used as collateral for the
mounting debts. Borrow more money, promise a chunk of public lands as
collateral. These land pledges were concealed behind "Environmentalism"
to disguise the real purpose. Numerous names such as "Wilderness
Reserve", "Wetland", "Heritage River", and so forth were used to conceal
the true scale of the confiscations. But the end result was the same.
Huge tracts of public land containing natural resources were walled away
from the public that owned them, mortgaged to the holders of the US
Government debt. We are well on our way from being citizens, to being
mere tenants. Were you able to refuse having your public lands placed at
risk by the US Government to cover loans you never authorized the
government to make? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

Trust funds under government control are being looted, from the Social
Security trust fund to Native American trust accounts to Federal
Retirement Funds. Congress pays lip service to the looting of Social
Security, but considers only more taxes to cover the looted shortfall.
Meanwhile, court cases over other looted trust accounts drag on without
resolution. Are you able to refuse corrupt and dishonest government? No?
Congratulations. You are a slave.

You are a slave because the ruling class can do what they want, take
what they want, and you cannot refuse. You may have freedom to decide
what TV channel to watch tonight, or just which style car you will drive
to your work in, but little power over the rest of your life. Even that
home you have worked to pay for over the last decade can be taken from
you at a moment's notice via "eminent domain". Can you refuse? No?
Congratulations. You are a slave.

In October 2001 I wrote that more damage would be done to our nation by
those claiming to save us from the terrorists than by any actual
terrorist act. Even as Bush claimed that the terrorists hated the US
because of our freedoms, he took what few remaining freedoms we had away
until we are more watched, more spied on, more limited, more silenced,
more taxed, and more enslaved that at any other time in our nation's
history. Not only are we slaves, we are at last starting to see that we
have been slaves all along. We did not have rights, because a right
cannot be taken away. What we had were indulgences, granted by the
masters to the slaves, to be removed when the masters grow fearful of
the slaves' resentment and anger.

I know this is a very depressing article to read on the New Year, but I
have watched through 2003 as people I care about lost their homes and
businesses, as the labors of a lifetime evaporated in stock market
manipulations by corporate crooks. These Americans who had worked hard
to achieve the American dream lost it all through no fault of their own.
Our schools are broke, hospitals under-staffed, the roads and bridges
and rails of the nation are crumbling while billions of dollars are
given away to foreign nations, favored cronies, and the ravenous war
machine. The priorities of the government that feeds on taxes seems
focused everywhere but on those who pay those taxes. And we can't seem
to refuse that either.

I think the state of the nation can be summed up by a simple contrast.
Tommy Chong is in jail for selling a pipe, while Ken Lay walks around a
free man with the billions he stole from his employees and investors.
Any way you slice it, that's a pretty screwed up situation.

I promised a reader that I would make some predictions for 2004 in this
article. I wish I hadn't because I am hoping I am wrong on most of them.

1. There will be another fake terror attack. The Neocon war agenda
cannot move forward without it. Those who hoped Iraq would be the end of
the wars are in for a rude shock. The hawks want the entire planet,
either directly ruled by the US, or ruled by obedient puppet regimes.
Another "attack" is needed.

2. The US will eventually lose their war of conquest of the world. The
US does not have enough troops to garrison the planet, and as Hitler
learned much too late, merely having superior weapons isn't going to win
a war when you've pissed off absolutely everyone else in the world. On a
more practical level, sooner or later the US will wind up at war with
someone who really DOES have nuclear weapons of mass destruction. That
this is the government plan is witnessed by the numerous underground
facilities which have been built or upgraded in recent years. You paid
for them, but you won't be allowed in them. Such an attack on the US is
small price to pay for those who promote these wars, not for America,
but for another nation standing by while its victims are tricked into
fighting each other.

3. Minus a war, the US Government will eventually collapse as did the
Soviet Union, dragged down by debt and corruption. As the final collapse
looms closer, look for the looting of the nation to become even bolder
than it is now. The last official act of any government is to loot the
nation.

4. I am opposed to violence. I wish it could be avoided but I do believe
that this nation is headed towards a collision between the rulers and
the ruled. The government fears this as well or we wouldn't see so much
bullet-proof Lexan between us and our "public servants". I think that
the reason we have not seen it yet is that Americans have been
conditioned to expect a hero or savior to come and make things right. We
know things have gone wrong, but we are waiting for someone else to fix
it, Superman, the cavalry riding to the rescue, Spartacus, the Messiah,
Batman, What Really Happened, etc. This belief that one should wait
quietly for a hero is part of the slavery mechanism, to keep you in your
place, rendering unto Caesar, breeding more slaves, waiting for
salvation that never comes. However, as history has shown, even the
patience of an entire people can run out, and I predict that when the
final upheaval comes, it will arrive as suddenly as that which occurred
in Romania. In November 1989, Romania seemed stable under the rule of
Nicholai Ceausescu. One month later, a sporting event erupted into a
spontaneous political protest and on December 25th, Nicholai Ceausescu
was tried and sentenced to death. Ceausescu proved that tyrants should
not confuse silence with consent. The Romanian people finally realized
that nobody was coming to save them, and they had the courage to save
themselves. The collapse of the USSR was equally rapid and almost as
unexpected. So shall it be in the US.

Like I said above, I hope I am wrong in my forecasts. However it is
clear that the US Government is under the control of individuals intent
on personal enrichment, or loyalty to a foreign nation above our own,
and seeing no reason at all not to continue on their present course.
Confrontation seems inevitable.

The founding fathers set up a nation in which government was by the
consent of the people. We The People agreed to certain obligations, and
the government we allowed to care for our national sovereignty agreed to
abide by certain limits set forth in the Constitution. The present
government has broken the agreement, discarding the Constitutional
limits on their power and authority while at the same time piling more
and more obligations onto the people. Were you able to refuse them? No?
This more than any of the other reasons is why you have ceased to be a
free human being, and are now a slave.

You are a slave. When you live under a government that takes your wealth
and your children and lies to you to keep you docile and scares you to
keep you obedient, how can it be otherwise?

You are a slave. You can stay that way, or not. It's that simple. Nobody
is coming to save you. There are no heroes, no cavalry riding to the
rescue. Whether you and your children will live as slaves or as free
human beings is entirely up to you.

      -- "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is
to be ruled by evil men.? Plato

There is a curse that says may you "live in interesting times."

[addendum: The fifth plank of the communist manifesto is the primary
vector through which the slavery took place. And here is the solution:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?X49E16CB6]

*****************************************************************
[Ignore the first sentence, "You are a slave," until you have finished the
article.  Then return and read it and see how the sentence strikes you.]
*****************************************************************

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/yearoftheslave.html

2004 - Year of the Slave

    You are a slave.

    I know that's not what you want to hear as you hoist your New Year's
champagne, but it is the unpleasant truth that we all face going into
2004.

    Movies and public school like to portray slaves as bound by chains
and
beaten with whips, creating a polarized image of slavery that can be
pointed to with the comment, "You are not like that, therefore you are
not
a slave."  But history shows that slaves have been treated in all manner
of
ways, some more cruel than others, yet even with the most kind
treatment, a
slave remains a slave.

    Setting aside the stereotyped image of a slave as a bleeding
chain-bound
wretch, slaves throughout history are often hard to recognize. In some
cases, such as the Medieval Serfs, they were held slaves to the rulers
by
religious belief, and did not see themselves as slaves even though they
were treated as such.  The favored slaves of Asian potentates wore
jewels
to make a movie star gasp, yet were still slaves for all their finery
and
comfort.

    So, what is a slave? How do we define a slave? What test do we use to
tell if someone is a slave. What makes them different from free people?

    Free people can say "no". Free people can refuse demands for their
money, time, and children. Slaves cannot. There is no freedom without
the
freedom to say "no".  If someone demands that you do something and you
can
say "no" and refuse to do it, then you are a free human being.  If you
can
be forced to do something or surrender something that you do not wish
to,
then you are a slave. No other test need be applied.

    When you are forced to surrender half your life's work to the
government
in ever-increasing taxes, then you are a slave.  Throughout history,
slaves
were expected to perform the work needed for their own upkeep, then
perform
additional work for the rulers. For Roman slaves, the ratio of
work-for-self versus work-for-rulers was about 50-50. The same ratio
applied to Medieval Serfs, and even to the slaves of the American south.
And, when you add up all the overt taxes, covert fees, tariffs, excises,
plus the increased price you pay for products to pay the taxes of the
companies that make those products, you will find that Americans are at
that same "half-for-self" versus "half-for-rulers" ratio! Can you say
"no"
to the confiscation of half of your life? Can you even get the masters
to
maybe reduce the burden by a significant amount? No? Congratulations.
You
are a slave.

    The masters have decided they want wars on anyone living over oil.
The
idea is that it is better for American corporations to steal the oil
they
need than to pay for it. Millions of Americans (and millions more around
the globe) did not want the war, but the masters started them anyway, by
lying to the people. Could you refuse the war? Can you refuse being lied
to?  No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

    The rulers want your children for their future wars. Legislation for
a
draft is already in Congress. Can you refuse the confiscation of your
children? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

    The government has been caught lying over and over again to the
people,
from who really did 9-11, to the legality of the tax system, to Cheney's
Energy Task Force papers, to Saddam's WMDs. Americans are the most
lied-to
people on Earth. Can you refuse to be lied to? Can you punish the liars?
No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

    Vote fraud is rampant in the nation, and the mandated imposition of
audit-less electronic voting systems means that elections will be
decided
(as Stalin admitted) not by those who vote but by those who count the
vote.
Can you refuse a dishonest voting process? No? Congratulations. You are
a
slave.

    Just because you cannot see the slave-chains doesn't mean they are
not
there. Chains made of steel are obvious, but chains made of beliefs are
not
always recognized for what they are. Hitler enslaved the German people
to
war with a belief that Poland was about to invade. LBJ enslaved the
American people to war with the belief that Vietnam had attacked the USS
Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Poland wasn't invading. There were no
torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin, but the slaves, held by invisible
chains
of beliefs, went to war. Millions died.

    In 2003, however, the chains started to become visible. The
Constitutional right to freedom of expression was confined to
"free-speech"
zones. A slave may have an opinion, so long as it is not expressed where
it
might upset the other slaves. The Constitutional right to an armed
populace, the means by which the men who set up a nation of free
citizens
hoped to keep them free, is under constant attack from those who fear a
nation of free citizens, and who will not sleep soundly until we are a
nation entirely of slaves. Armed citizens can, after all, say "no" and
make
it stick. That was why there was a Second Amendment, to allow the people
to
say "no" to those who would return them to the slavery they had so
recently
escaped from. Other Constitutional rights and protections have been set
aside. The government can now search through your private records
without
cause and without warrant, even break into your home and not have to
tell
you. Simply by declaring a citizen an enemy combatant, the government
can
now lock up US citizens without a charge and without a lawyer. You can
be
prevented from traveling simply for having the wrong name. If you
purchase
too much gold or take home too much cash, or hoard food, the government
will take notice. Having a Farmer's Almanac is grounds for suspicion.
Talking about the Constitution is now deemed grounds to suspect a
terrorist
link. Torture is now espoused as "necessary" to "deal with the crisis".
Were you able to refuse those changes to the Constitution? No?
Congratulations. You are a slave.

    The government (at all levels) has borrowed trillions of dollars and
stuck your kids with the payments. Children not even born will be paying
off the bills. To declare the lives of children not yet born, let alone
old
enough to vote, indentured to the state is slavery most obvious and
odious.
Can you refuse responsibility for payments on debts the government
incurred
without your permission?  No? Congratulations. You are a slave.

    The government has borrowed so much money that it has long ago run
out
of gold to pledge as collateral on the debts. Starting in Nixon's
administration, natural resources were used as collateral for the
mounting
debts. Borrow more money, promise a chunk of public lands as collateral.
These land pledges were concealed behind "Environmentalism" to disguise
the
real purpose. Numerous names such as "Wilderness Reserve", "Wetland",
"Heritage River", and so forth were used to conceal the true scale of
the
confiscations. But the end result was the same. Huge tracts of public
land
containing natural resources were walled away from the public that owned
them, mortgaged to the holders of the US Government debt. We are well on
our way from being citizens, to being mere tenants. Were you able to
refuse
having your public lands placed at risk by the US Government to cover
loans
you never authorized the government to make? No? Congratulations. You
are a
slave.

    Trust funds under government control are being looted, from the
Social
Security trust fund to Native American trust accounts to Federal
Retirement
Funds. Congress pays lip service to the looting of Social Security, but
considers only more taxes to cover the looted shortfall. Meanwhile,
court
cases over other looted trust accounts drag on without resolution. Are
you
able to refuse corrupt and dishonest government? No? Congratulations.
You
are a slave.

    You are a slave because the ruling class can do what they want, take
what they want, and you cannot refuse. You may have freedom to decide
what
TV channel to watch tonight, or just which style car you will drive to
your
work in, but little power over the rest of your life. Even that home you
have worked to pay for over the last decade can be taken from you at a
moment's notice via "eminent domain". Can you refuse? No?
Congratulations.
You are a slave.

    In October 2001 I wrote that more damage would be done to our nation
by
those claiming to save us from the terrorists than by any actual
terrorist
act. Even as Bush claimed that the terrorists hated the US because of
our
freedoms, he took what few remaining freedoms we had away until we are
more
watched, more spied on, more limited, more silenced, more taxed, and
more
enslaved that at any other time in our nation's history. Not only are we
slaves, we are at last starting to see that we have been slaves all
along.
We did not have rights, because a right cannot be taken away. What we
had
were indulgences, granted by the masters to the slaves, to be removed
when
the masters grow fearful of the slaves' resentment and anger.

    I know this is a very depressing article to read on the New Year, but
I
have watched through 2003 as people I care about lost their homes and
businesses, as the labors of a lifetime evaporated in stock market
manipulations by corporate crooks.  These Americans who had worked hard
to
achieve the American dream lost it all through no fault of their own.
Our
schools are broke, hospitals under-staffed, the roads and bridges and
rails
of the nation are crumbling while billions of dollars are given away to
foreign nations, favored cronies, and the ravenous war machine. The
priorities of the government that feeds on taxes seems focused
everywhere
but on those who pay those taxes. And we can't seem to refuse that
either.

    I think the state of the nation can be summed up by a simple
contrast.
Tommy Chong is in jail for selling a pipe, while Ken Lay walks around a
free man with the billions he stole from his employees and investors.
Any
way you slice it, that's a pretty screwed up situation.

    I promised a reader that I would make some predictions for 2004 in
this
article. I wish I hadn't because I am hoping I am wrong on most of them.

1. There will be another fake terror attack. The Neocon war agenda
cannot
move forward without it. Those who hoped Iraq would be the end of the
wars
are in for a rude shock. The hawks want the entire planet, either
directly
ruled by the US, or ruled by obedient puppet regimes. Another "attack"
is
needed.

2. The US will eventually lose their war of conquest of the world. The
US
does not have enough troops to garrison the planet, and as Hitler
learned
much too late, merely having superior weapons isn't going to win a war
when
you've pissed off absolutely everyone else in the world. On a more
practical level, sooner or later the US will wind up at war with someone
who really DOES have nuclear weapons of mass destruction. That this is
the
government plan is witnessed by the numerous underground facilities
which
have been built or upgraded in recent years. You paid for them, but you
won't be allowed in them. Such an attack on the US is small price to pay
for those who promote these wars, not for America, but for another
nation
standing by while its victims are tricked into fighting each other.

3. Minus a war, the US Government will eventually collapse as did the
Soviet Union, dragged down by debt and corruption. As the final collapse
looms closer, look for the looting of the nation to become even bolder
than
it is now. The last official act of any government is to loot the
nation.

   4.  I am opposed to violence. I wish it could be avoided but I do
believe
that this nation is headed towards a collision between the rulers and
the
ruled. The government fears this as well or we wouldn't see so much
bullet-proof Lexan between us and our "public servants".  I think that
the
reason we have not seen it yet is that Americans have been conditioned
to
expect a hero or savior to come and make things right. We know things
have
gone wrong, but we are waiting for someone else to fix it, Superman, the
cavalry riding to the rescue, Spartacus, the Messiah, Batman, What
Really
Happened, etc. This belief that one should wait quietly for a hero is
part
of the slavery mechanism, to keep you in your place, rendering unto
Caesar,
breeding more slaves, waiting for salvation that never comes. However,
as
history has shown, even the patience of an entire people can run out,
and I
predict that when the final upheaval comes, it will arrive as suddenly
as
that which occurred in Romania. In November 1989, Romania seemed stable
under the rule of Nicholai Ceausescu. One month later, a sporting event
erupted into a spontaneous political protest and on December 25th,
Nicholai
Ceausescu was tried and sentenced to death.  Ceausescu proved that
tyrants
should not confuse silence with consent. The Romanian people finally
realized that nobody was coming to save them, and they had the courage
to
save themselves. The collapse of the USSR was equally rapid and almost
as
unexpected. So shall it be in the US.

    Like I said above, I hope I am wrong in my forecasts. However it is
clear that the US Government is under the control of individuals intent
on
personal enrichment, or loyalty to a foreign nation above our own, and
seeing no reason at all not to continue on their present course.
Confrontation seems inevitable.

    The founding fathers set up a nation in which government was by the
consent of the people. We The People agreed to certain obligations, and
the
government we allowed to care for our national sovereignty agreed to
abide
by certain limits set forth in the Constitution. The present government
has
broken the agreement, discarding the Constitutional limits on their
power
and authority while at the same time piling more and more obligations
onto
the people. Were you able to refuse them? No? This more than any of the
other reasons is why you have ceased to be a free human being, and are
now
a slave.

    You are a slave. When you live under a government that takes your
wealth
and your children and lies to you to keep you docile and scares you to
keep
you obedient, how can it be otherwise?

    You are a slave. You can stay that way, or not. It's that simple.
Nobody
is coming to save you. There are no heroes, no cavalry riding to the
rescue. Whether you and your children will live as slaves or as free
human
beings is entirely up to you.

******************************************
e-mail:
myth@...
Web site:
www.mythoftheinnocentcivilian.com
******************************************

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

For those who've never directly heard President Eisenhower's fair well
speech concerning the military-industrial complex you may find this of
interest.  This link will get you where you want to go:

A/V of speech
http://www.ufocasebook.com/Video/ike.ram

Text of speech
http://www.eisenhower.utexas.edu/farewell.htm

******************************************
e-mail:
myth@...
Web site:
www.mythoftheinnocentcivilian.com
******************************************

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Government Officials Profited From Illegal Arming of Iraq

TomFlocco.com--Bush Concealed Iraqi Chemical Weapons Plant in Florida
which shipped WMD to Saddam Just Prior to Gulf War I

http://www.TomFlocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=30&mode=&order=0\
&thold=0

Members of the Bush 41 cabinet held sizeable and conflicting financial
positions in Gulf War-related companies. And the results of a financial
assets
analysis by his Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh, forced the elder
Bush to
employ a conflict of interest waiver -- kept secret from Congress -- to
absolve his cabinet from future culpability or prosecution should
Congress or
surviving Gulf War military families ever question or litigate their
private and/or
undisclosed financial links to Iraq.

Shockingly, Houston's Baker &Botts law firm -- owned by George Bush
Sr.'s
Secretary of State James Baker -- was mentioned in a billing statement
( for
legal services rendered ) by a Florida chemical company headed by an
Iraqi
terrorist and bio-chemical engineer. The Iraqi -- Ihsan Barbouti -- had
close ties
to World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, but was also the main
contractor for the Rabta chemical weapons plant in terrorist Libya.

Baker's law firm was linked to the Iraqi terrorist's Boca Raton chemical
company via multiple contracts for secret formulas and enzymes. But
Baker &Botts was also mentioned with Joint Venture Agreements connected
to Barbouti�'s  attorney during the period when illegal nerve gas
precursors were shipped by the Boca Raton company to Iraq just months
prior to the outbreak of Gulf War I hostilities.

******************************************
e-mail:
myth@...
Web site:
www.mythoftheinnocentcivilian.com
******************************************

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Terrocrat notices steam of "voluntary contributions" seems to be drying
up.

Terrocrat hires more gun goons to frighten the slaves and to "make
examples" of the more outspoken.

Some slaves join ranks of "law enforcement officers" because whipping
slaves is easier than chopping weeds.

Less slaves means less "voluntary contributions" flow to the terrocrats.

Repeat and reinforce cycle.

Finally, armies called. Armies, being destructive beasts, destroy.

Slave rebellion quenched. Contributions stopped. No slaves.

Army, law enforcement officers, and terrocrats all join industrial army
of weed choppers who plant, chop weeds, and harvest crops.

You see, after all considerations are made, it is a self quenching
modality.

"Terrocrat" is a term lifted from the Terra Libra papers found on
the Buildfreedom.com site.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3995.htm

Note: The first one minute forty seven seconds of this program is broadcast in
Dutch, The remainder is in English.

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http://www.antiwar.com/reese/reese9.html

Seymour Hersh, with his usual thoroughness, has documented Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld's latest scheme for Iraq. It is, in short, to set up death
squads, trained by Israelis and using Israelis as consultants in Iraq.

The Israeli role is supposed to be hush-hush, but not only Hersh, in his New
Yorker article, but also a British reporter in the Guardian have confirmed the
Israeli role. That will win a lot of hearts and minds in the Arab world. About
the only government they hate worse than ours is Israel's.

The idea is to hire some of the worst of the worst - members of Saddam's old
secret police - to infiltrate the resistance and finger key players for the
American murder squads. Thus, we climb in bed with the very people our boy
president likes to moralize about - those dreaded evildoers. Only now they will
be evildoers on our payroll instead of Saddam's. Only now, instead of bringing
democratic values to Iraq, we will show the Iraqis we are just as good at murder
as Saddam.

If you are one of those superpatriots who like to wrap themselves in the
American flag while you watch Fox News, don't be shocked. We did exactly the
same kind of things during the Vietnam War. I used to have, now and then, a
bloody Mary or several with a CIA man who had run the infamous Phoenix Program
in Vietnam.

There, the South Vietnamese would finger members of the Viet Cong, and we would
snuff them. Of course, my friend said in his cynical way, if the quota for the
month was 50, the South Vietnamese fingered 50; if it was 500, they found 500.
How many of the thousands we murdered were actually Viet Cong and how many were
innocent Vietnamese, nobody knows, except perhaps the South Vietnamese who were
involved. The number of people we murdered ranges from 21,000 (an official
figure) to 47,000.

Another friend of mine, on loan to the CIA from the Green Berets, paid Nung
mercenaries $5 for each Vietnamese head they brought in. They brought them in by
the croaker sack full, but of course a severed head can't tell you if the person
who used to wear it was a Viet Cong or just a poor farmer the Nungs happened
upon. After all, they hated all the Vietnamese without regard for ideology.

The same thing will happen in Iraq. Our paid evildoers will finger people they
have a personal grudge against or, if they are smart, innocent Iraqis actually
on our side. That way our death squads will endear us to the Iraqi people just
as the Israeli death squads have endeared them to the Palestinians.

Think of a wrong way to conduct an occupation, and the Bush administration will
adopt it.

The important thing about all of this is that the American people remember this
filthy tactic the next time we hear some politician waxing eloquent about our
great gift of freedom to the Iraqi people. The fatal flaw in our foreign policy
is that we always talk one way and act another way. Cold-blooded murder is
cold-blooded murder, whether the hit man works for the mob or the U.S.
government. Assassination violates every principle we claim to stand for.

The truth is that war and occupation are a dirty business, and they contaminate
everything and everybody involved. There are no good wars, and there are no good
guys on either side. All you have are degrees of evil. We committed enough
crimes against humanity in World War II that if we had lost, it would have been
our politicians and generals in the dock for war crimes.

If we can't refrain from acting like Murder Inc. and from sleeping with the
evildoers, let's at least drop the self-righteous bit. Hypocrisy so ill becomes
us.

� 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Everything old is new again. This 'strategy' isn't new; it's the Phoenix Program
(from Viet Nam, which Tom Ridge was associated with, and it wasn't new then).

The fully formatted report may be found at
http://wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=3119

US Operation Assassinate

Dec 8 2003

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers,Clients

From: Jude Wanniski Re: How to Pacify Iraq

Sy Hersh`s New Yorker article in the current issue speaks for itself.

Donald Rumsfeld`s fiendishly clever idea on how to pacify Iraq is to locate and
assassinate the men and women (and children?) who are plotting against the USA
to resist perpetual USA occupation.

Pre-emptive assassination! What a novel idea. If you kill everyone who you
suspect as opposing your vision of a world of peace and prosperity, we will have
a world of peace and prosperity!

MOVING TARGETS by Seymour M.Hersh Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq
repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?

Issue of 2003-12-15 The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of
the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month,
American officials and former officials said that the main target was a
hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the
underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies.
A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from
Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A.

paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by
January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents,
by capture or assassination.

The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military
leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls "Manhunts"-a phrase that he
has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had
to change much of the Pentagon's leadership to get his way. "Knocking off two
regimes allows us to do extraordinary things," a Pentagon adviser told me,
referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.

One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against
the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America's closest ally in the Middle East.
According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli
commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American
counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,
and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are
expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers-again, in secret-when full-field operations
begin.

(Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. "No one wants to talk
about this," an Israeli official told me. "It's incendiary. Both governments
have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a low
profile on U.S.-Israeli co�peration" on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and
Israeli officials agree, is intelligence.

There is much debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a
practical-or politically effective-way to bring about stability in Iraq,
especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent
and reliable information there.

Americans in the field are trying to solve that problem by developing a new
source of information: they plan to assemble teams drawn from the upper ranks of
the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to penetrate the insurgency.
The idea is for the infiltrators to provide information about individual
insurgents for the Americans to act on. A former C.I.A. station chief described
the strategy in simple terms: "U.S.

shooters and Iraqi intelligence." He added, "There are Iraqis in the
intelligence business who have a better idea, and we're tapping into them.

We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and
agency shooters break down doors and take them"-the insurgents-"out."

A former intelligence official said that getting inside the Baathist leadership
could be compared to "fighting your way into a coconut-you bang away and bang
away until you find a soft spot, and then you can clean it out." An American who
has advised the civilian authority in Baghdad said, "The only way we can win is
to go unconventional. We're going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus
guerrilla.

Terrorism versus terrorism. We've got to scare the Iraqis into submission."

In Washington, there is now widespread agreement on one point: the need for a
new American approach to Iraq. There is also uniform criticism of the military's
current response to the growing American casualty lists.

One former Pentagon official who worked extensively with the Special Forces
command, and who favors the new military initiative, said, "We've got this large
conventional force sitting there, and getting their ass shot off, and what we're
doing is counterproductive.

We're sending mixed signals." The problem with the way the U.S. has been
fighting the Baathist leadership, he said, is "(a) we've got no intelligence,
and (b)

we're too squeamish to operate in this part of the world." Referring to the
American retaliation against a suspected mortar site, the former official said,
"Instead of destroying an empty soccer field, why not impress me by sneaking in
a sniper team and killing them while they're setting up a mortar? We do need a
more unconventional response, but it's going to be messy."

Inside the Pentagon, it is now understood that simply bringing in or killing
Saddam Hussein and his immediate circle-those who appeared in the Bush
Administration's famed "deck of cards"-will not stop the insurgency. The new
Special Forces operation is aimed instead at the broad middle of the Baathist
underground. But many of the officials I spoke to were skeptical of the
Administration's plans. Many of them fear that the proposed operation-called
"pre�mptive manhunting" by one Pentagon adviser-has the potential to turn into
another Phoenix Program. Phoenix was the code name for a counter-insurgency
program that the U.S. adopted during the Vietnam War, in which Special Forces
teams were sent out to capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed to be working
with or sympathetic to the Vietcong. In choosing targets, the Americans relied
on information supplied by South Vietnamese Army officers and village chiefs.

The operation got out of control. According to official South Vietnamese
statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between

1968 and 1972; the U.S. counted more than twenty thousand in the same time span.
Some of those assassinated had nothing to do with the war against America but
were targeted because of private grievances. William E.

Colby, the C.I.A. officer who took charge of the Phoenix Program in

1968 (he eventually became C.I.A. director), later acknowledged to Congress that
"a lot of things were done that should not have been done."

The former Special Forces official warned that the problem with head-hunting is
that you have to be sure "you're hunting the right heads."

Speaking of the now co�perative former Iraqi intelligence officials, he said,
"These guys have their own agenda. Will we be doing hits on grudges? When you
set up host-nation elements"-units composed of Iraqis, rather than
Americans-"it's hard not to have them going off to do what they want to do. You
have to keep them on a short leash."

The former official says that the Baathist leadership apparently relies on
"face-to-face communications" in planning terrorist attacks. This makes the
insurgents less vulnerable to one of the Army's most secret Special Forces
units, known as Grey Fox, which has particular expertise in interception and
other technical means of intelligence-gathering.

"These guys are too smart to touch cell phones or radio," the former official
said. "It's all going to succeed or fail spectacularly based on human
intelligence."

A former C.I.A. official with extensive Middle East experience identified one of
the key players on the new American-Iraqi intelligence team as Farouq Hijazi, a
Saddam loyalist who served for many years as the director of external operations
for the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. He has been in custody since
late April. The C.I.A. man said that over the past few months Hijazi "has cut a
deal,"

and American officials "are using him to reactivate the old Iraqi intelligence
network."

He added, "My Iraqi friends say he will honor the deal-but only to the letter,
and not to the spirit." He said that although the Mukhabarat was a good security
service, capable, in particular, of protecting Saddam Hussein from overthrow or
assassination, it was "a lousy intelligence service."

The official went on, "It's not the way we usually play ball, but if you see a
couple of your guys get blown away it changes things. We did the American
things-and we've been the nice guy. Now we're going to be the bad guy, and being
the bad guy works."

Told of such comments, the Pentagon adviser, who is an expert on unconventional
war, expressed dismay. "There are people saying all sorts of wild things about
Manhunts," he said. "But they aren't at the policy level. It's not a no-holds
policy, and it shouldn't be. I'm as tough as anybody, but we're also a
democratic society, and we don't fight terror with terror. There will be a lot
of close controls-do's and don'ts and rules of engagement." The adviser added,
"The problem is that we've not penetrated the bad guys. The Baath Party is run
like a cell system.

It's like penetrating the Vietcong-we never could do it."

The rising star in Rumsfeld's Pentagon is Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary
of Defense for Intelligence, who has been deeply involved in developing the new
Special Forces approach. Cambone, who earned a doctorate in political science
from Claremont Graduate University in 1982, served as staff director for a 1998
committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned in its report of an emerging
ballistic-missile threat to the United States and argued that intelligence
agencies should be willing to go beyond the data at hand in their analyses.
Cambone, in his confirmation hearings, in February, told the Senate that
consumers of intelligence assessments must ask questions of the analysts-"how
they arrived at those conclusions and what the sources of the information were."
This approach was championed by Rumsfeld. It came under attack, however, when
the Administration's predictions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and
the potential for insurgency failed to be realized, and the Pentagon civilians
were widely accused of politicizing intelligence. (A month after the fall of
Baghdad, Cambone was the first senior Pentagon official to publicly claim,
wrongly, as it turned out, that a captured Iraqi military truck might be a
mobile biological-weapons laboratory.)

Cambone also shares Rumsfeld's views on how to fight terrorism. They both
believe that the United States needs to become far more proactive in combatting
terrorism, searching for terrorist leaders around the world and eliminating
them. And Cambone, like Rumsfeld, has been frustrated by the reluctance of the
military leadership to embrace the manhunting mission. Since his confirmation,
he has been seeking operational authority over Special Forces. "Rumsfeld's been
looking for somebody to have all the answers, and Steve is the guy," a former
high-level Pentagon official told me. "He has more direct access to Rummy than
anyone else."

As Cambone's influence has increased, that of Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary
of Defense for Policy, has diminished.

In September, 2001, Feith set up a special unit known as the Office of Special
Plans. The office, directed by civilians who, like Feith, had neoconservative
views, played a major role in the intelligence and planning leading up to the
March invasion of Iraq. "There is finger-pointing going on," a prominent
Republican lobbyist explained. "And the neocons are in retreat."

One of the key planners of the Special Forces offensive is Lieutenant General
William (Jerry) Boykin, Cambone's military assistant. After a meeting with
Rumsfeld early last summer-they got along "like two old warriors," the Pentagon
consultant said-Boykin postponed his retirement, which had been planned for
June, and took the Pentagon job, which brought him a third star. In that post,
the Pentagon adviser told me, Boykin has been "an important piece" of the
planned escalation. In October, the Los Angeles Times reported that Boykin,
while giving Sunday-morning talks in uniform to church groups, had repeatedly
equated the Muslim world with Satan. Last June, according to the paper, he told
a congregation in Oregon that "Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to
destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army." Boykin
praised President Bush as a "man who prays in the Oval Office," and declared
that Bush was "not elected" President but "appointed by God." The Muslim world
hates America, he said, "because we are a nation of believers."

There were calls in the press and from Congress for Boykin's dismissal, but
Rumsfeld made it clear that he wanted to keep his man in the job.

Initially, he responded to the Times report by praising the General's
"outstanding record" and telling journalists that he had neither seen the text
of Boykin's statements nor watched the videotape that had been made of one of
his presentations. "There are a lot of things that are said by people in the
military, or in civilian life, or in the Congress, or in the executive branch
that are their views," he said. "We're a free people. And that's the wonderful
thing about our country." He added, with regard to the tape, "I just simply
can't comment on what he said, because I haven't seen it." Four days later,
Rumsfeld said that he had viewed the tape. "It had a lot of very
difficult-to-understand words with subtitles which I was not able to verify," he
said at a news conference, according to the official transcript. "So I remain
inexpert"-the transcript notes that he "chuckles" at that moment-"on precisely
what he said." Boykin's comments are now under official review.

Boykin has been involved in other controversies as well. He was the Army combat
commander in Mogadishu in 1993, when eighteen Americans were slain during the
disastrous mission made famous by Mark Bowden's book "Black Hawk Down." Earlier
that year, Boykin, a colonel at the time, led an eight-man Delta Force that was
assigned to help a Colombian police unit track down the notorious drug dealer
Pablo Escobar. Boykin's team was barred by law from providing any lethal
assistance without Presidential approval, but there was suspicion in the
Pentagon that it was planning to take part in the assassination of Escobar, with
the support of American Embassy officials in Colombia. The book "Killing Pablo,"
an account, also by Mark Bowden, of the hunt for Escobar, describes how senior
officials in the Pentagon's chain of command became convinced that Boykin, with
the knowledge of his Special Forces superiors, had exceeded his authority and
intended to violate the law. They wanted Boykin's unit pulled out. It wasn't.
Escobar was shot dead on the roof of a barrio apartment building in Medell�n.
The Colombian police were credited with getting their man, but, Bowden wrote,
"within the special ops community . . . Pablo's death was regarded as a
successful mission for Delta, and legend has it that its operators were in on
the kill."

"That's what those guys did," a retired general who monitored Boykin's
operations in Colombia told me. "I've seen pictures of Escobar's body that you
don't get from a long-range telescope lens.

They were taken by guys on the assault team." (Bush Administration officials in
the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, including General
Boykin, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Morris Busby, who was the American Ambassador to Colombia in 1993 (he is now
retired), vigorously defended Boykin. "I think the world of Jerry Boykin, and
have the utmost respect for him. I've known him for fifteen years and spent
hours and hours with the guy, and never heard him mention religion or God." The
retired general also praised Boykin as "one of those guys you'd love to have in
a war because he's not afraid to die."

But, he added, "when you get to three stars you've got to think through what
you're doing." Referring to Boykin and others involved in the Special Forces
planning, he added, "These guys are going to get a bunch of guys killed and then
give them a bunch of medals."

The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle
an insurgency. One former Israeli military-intelligence officer summarized the
core lesson this way: "How to do targeted killing, which is very relevant to the
success of the war, and what the United States is going to have to do." He told
me that the Americans were being urged to emulate the Israeli Army's small
commando units, known as Mist'aravim, which operate undercover inside the West
Bank and Gaza Strip. "They can approach a house and pounce," the former officer
said. In the Israeli view, he added, the Special Forces units must learn "how to
maintain a network of informants." Such a network, he said, has made it possible
for Israel to penetrate the West Bank and Gaza Strip organizations controlled by
groups such as Hamas, and to assassinate or capture potential suicide bombers
along with many of the people who recruit and train them.

On the other hand, the former officer said, "Israel has, in many ways, been too
successful, and has killed or captured so many mid-ranking facilitators on the
operational level in the West Bank that Hamas now consists largely of isolated
cells that carry out terrorist attacks against Israel on their own." He went on,
"There is no central control over many of the suicide bombers. We're trying to
tell the Americans that they don't want to eliminate the center. The key is not
to have freelancers out there."

Many regional experts, Americans and others, are convinced that the Baathists
are still firmly in charge of the insurgency, although they are thought to have
little direct connection with Saddam Hussein. An American military analyst who
works with the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad told me
he has concluded that "mid-ranking Baathists who were muzzled by the patrimonial
nature of Saddam's system have now, with the disappearance of the high-ranking
members, risen to control the insurgency." He added that after the American
attack and several weeks "of being like deer in headlights,"

these Baathists had become organized, and were directing and leading operations
against Americans.

During an interview in Washington, a senior Arab diplomat noted, "We do not
believe that the resistance is loyal to Saddam.

Yes, the Baathists have reorganized, not for political reasons but because of
the terrible decisions made by Jerry Bremer"-the director of the C.P.A. "The
Iraqis really want to make you pay the price," the diplomat said. "Killing
Saddam will not end it."

Similarly, a Middle Eastern businessman who has advised senior Bush
Administration officials told me that the reorganized Baath Party is "extremely
active, working underground with permanent internal communications. And without
Saddam." Baath party leaders, he added, expect Saddam to issue a public
statement of self-criticism, "telling of his mistakes and his excesses,"
including his reliance on his sons.

There is disagreement, inevitably, on the extent of Baathist control.

The former Israeli military-intelligence officer said, "Most of the firepower
comes from the Baathists, and they know where the weapons are kept. But many of
the shooters are ethnic and tribal.

Iraq is very factionalized now, and within the Sunni community factionalism goes
deep." He added, "Unless you settle this, any effort at reconstruction in the
center is hopeless."

The American military analyst agreed that the current emphasis on Baathist
control "overlooks the nationalist and tribal angle." For example, he said, the
anti-coalition forces in Falluja, a major center of opposition, are "driven
primarily by the sheikhs and mosques, Islam, clerics, and nationalism." The
region, he went on, contains "tens of thousands of unemployed former military
officers and enlistees who hang around the coffee shops and restaurants of their
relatives; they plot, plan, and give and receive instructions; at night they go
out on their missions."

This military analyst, like many officials I spoke to, also raised questions
about the military's more conventional tactics-the aggressive program,
code-named Iron Hammer, of bombings, nighttime raids, and mass arrests aimed at
trouble spots in Sunni-dominated central Iraq. The insurgents, he told me, had
already developed a response. "Their S.O.P."-standard operating procedure-"now
is to go further out, or even to other towns, so that American retribution does
not fall on their locale.

Instead, the Americans take it out on the city where the incident happened, and
in the process they succeed in making more enemies."

The brazen Iraqi attacks on two separate American convoys in Samarra, on
November 30th, provided further evidence of the diversity of the opposition to
the occupation. Samarra has been a center of intense anti-Saddam feelings,
according to Ahmed S. Hashim, an expert on terrorism who is a professor of
strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College. In an essay published in August
by the Middle East Institute, Hashim wrote, "Many Samarra natives-who had served
with distinction in the Baath Party and the armed forces-were purged or executed
during the course of the three decades of rule by Saddam and his cronies from
the rival town of Tikrit." He went on, "The type of U.S. force structure in
Iraq-heavy armored and mechanized units-and the psychological disposition of
these forces which have been in Iraq for months is simply not conducive to the
successful waging of counter-insurgency warfare."

The majority of the Bush Administration's manhunting missions remain classified,
but one earlier mission, in Afghanistan, had mixed results at best. Last
November, an Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was killed when
an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft fired a Hellfire missile at his
automobile in Yemen. Five passengers in the automobile were also killed, and it
was subsequently reported that two previous Predator missions in Yemen had been
called off at the last moment when it was learned that the occupants of suspect
vehicles were local Bedouins, and not Al Qaeda members.

Since then, an adviser to the Special Forces command has told me, infighting
among the various senior military commands has made it difficult for Special
Forces teams on alert to take immediate advantage of time-sensitive
intelligence. Rumsfeld repeatedly criticized Air Force General Charles Holland,
a four-star Special Forces commander who has just retired, for his reluctance to
authorize commando raids without specific, or "actionable," intelligence.
Rumsfeld has also made a systematic effort to appoint Special Forces advocates
to the top military jobs. Another former Special Forces commander, Army General
Peter Schoomaker, was brought out of retirement in July and named Army Chief of
Staff. The new civilian Assistant Secretary for Special Operations in the
Pentagon is Thomas O'Connell, an Army veteran who served in the Phoenix program
in Vietnam, and who, in the early eighties, ran Grey Fox, the Army's secret
commando unit.

Early in November, the Times reported the existence of Task Force 121, and said
that it was authorized to take action throughout the region, if necessary, in
pursuit of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and other terrorists. (The task
force is commanded by Air Force Brigadier General Lyle Koenig, an experienced
Special Forces helicopter pilot.) At that point, the former Special Forces
official told me, the troops were "chasing the deck of cards. Their job was to
find Saddam, period." Other Special Forces, in Afghanistan, were targeting what
is known as the A.Q.S.L., the Al Qaeda Senior Leadership List.

The task force's search for Saddam was, from the beginning, daunting.

According to Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, it may
have been fatally flawed as well. From 1994 to

1998, Ritter directed a special U.N. unit that eavesdropped on many of Saddam
Hussein's private telephone communications. "The high-profile guys around Saddam
were the murafaqin, his most loyal companions, who could stand next to him
carrying a gun," Ritter told me. "But now he's gone to a different tier-the
tribes. He has released the men from his most sensitive units and let them go
back to their tribes, and we don't know where they are. The manifests of those
units are gone; they've all been destroyed." Ritter added, "Guys like Farouq
Hijazi can deliver some of the Baath Party cells, and he knows where some of the
intelligence people are. But he can't get us into the tribal hierarchy." The
task force, in any event, has shifted its focus from the hunt for Saddam as it
is increasingly distracted by the spreading guerrilla war.

In addition to the Special Forces initiative, the military is also exploring
other approaches to suppressing the insurgency. The Washington Post reported
last week that the American authorities in Baghdad had agreed, with some
reluctance, to the formation of an Iraqi-led counter-terrorism militia composed
of troops from the nation's five largest political parties. The paramilitary
unit, totalling some eight hundred troops or so, would "identify and pursue
insurgents" who had eluded arrest, the newspaper said. The group's initial
missions would be monitored and approved by American commanders, but eventually
it would operate independently.

Task Force 121's next major problem may prove to be Iran. There is a debate
going on inside the Administration about American and Israeli intelligence that
suggests that the Shiite-dominated Iranian government may be actively aiding the
Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq-"pulling the strings on the puppet," as one former
intelligence official put it. Many in the intelligence community are skeptical
of this analysis-the Pentagon adviser compared it to "the Chalabi stuff,"
referring to now discredited prewar intelligence on W.M.D. supplied by Iraqi
defectors. But I was told by several officials that the intelligence was
considered to be highly reliable by civilians in the Defense Department. A
former intelligence official said that one possible response under consideration
was for the United States to train and equip an Iraqi force capable of staging
cross-border raids. The American goal, he said, would be to "make the cost of
supporting the Baathists so dear that the Iranians would back off," adding, "If
it begins to look like another Iran-Iraq war, that's another story."

The requirement that America's Special Forces units operate in secrecy, a former
senior coalition adviser in Baghdad told me, has provided an additional
incentive for increasing their presence in Iraq. The Special Forces in-country
numbers are not generally included in troop totals.

Bush and Rumsfeld have insisted that more American troops are not needed, but
that position was challenged by many senior military officers in private
conversations with me. "You need more people,"

the former adviser, a retired admiral, said. "But you can't add them, because
Rummy's taken a position. So you invent a force that won't be counted."

At present, there is no legislation that requires the President to notify
Congress before authorizing an overseas Special Forces mission. The Special
Forces have been expanded enormously in the Bush Administration. The 2004
Pentagon budget provides more than six and a half billion dollars for their
activities-a thirty-four-per-cent increase over 2003. A recent congressional
study put the number of active and reserve Special Forces troops at forty-seven
thousand, and has suggested that the appropriate House and Senate committees
needed to debate the "proper overall role" of Special Forces in the global war
on terrorism.

The former intelligence official depicted the Delta and seal teams as "force
multipliers"-small units that can do the work of much larger ones and thereby
increase the power of the operation as a whole. He also implicitly recognized
that such operations would become more and more common; when Special Forces
target the Baathists, he said, "it's technically not assassination-it's normal
combat operations."

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http://www.wanniski.com/resubscribe.asp


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Subject: Do You Agree with Gore Vidal? You might be surprised ...


The Last Defender of the American Republic?
  An interview with Gore Vidal

  by Marc Cooper - 2002

  HE MIGHT BE AMERICA'S LAST small-r republican. Gore Vidal, now
  76, has made a lifetime out of critiquing America's imperial
  impulses and has -- through two dozen novels and hundreds of
  essays -- argued tempestuously that the U.S. should retreat
  back to its more Jeffersonian roots, that it should stop
  meddling in the affairs of other nations and the private
  affairs of its own citizens.

  That's the thread that runs through Vidal's latest best-seller
  -- an oddly packaged collection of essays published in the
  wake of September 11 titled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace:
  How We Got To Be So Hated. To answer the question in his
  subtitle, Vidal posits that we have no right to scratch our
  heads over what motivated the perpetrators of the two biggest
  terror attacks in our history, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
  and last September's twin-tower holocaust.

  Vidal writes: "It is a law of physics (still on the books when
  last I looked) that in nature there is no action without
  reaction. The same appears to be true in human nature -- that
  is, history." The "action" Vidal refers to is the hubris of an
  American empire abroad (illustrated by a 20-page chart of 200
  U.S. overseas military adventures since the end of World War
  II) and a budding police state at home. The inevitable
  "reaction," says Vidal, is nothing less than the bloody
  handiwork of Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. "Each was
  enraged," he says, "by our government's reckless assaults upon
  other societies" and was, therefore, "provoked" into answering
  with horrendous violence.

  Some might take that to be a suggestion that America had it
  coming on September 11. So when I met up with Vidal in the
  Hollywood Hills home he maintains (while still residing most
  of his time in Italy), the first question I asked him was
  this:

  L.A. WEEKLY: Are you arguing that the 3,000 civilians killed
  on September 11 somehow deserved their fate?

  GORE VIDAL: I don't think we, the American people, deserved
  what happened. Nor do we deserve the sort of governments we
  have had over the last 40 years. Our governments have brought
  this upon us by their actions all over the world. I have a
  list in my new book that gives the reader some idea how busy
  we have been. Unfortunately, we only get disinformation from
  The New York Times and other official places. Americans have
  no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. The
  number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against
  other countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are
  major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't
  even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as
  that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks.


  Americans are either not told about these things or are told
  we attacked them because . . . well . . . Noriega is the
  center of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of
  him. So we kill some Panamanians in the process. Actually we
  killed quite a few. And we brought in our Air Force. Panama
  didn't have an air force. But it looked good to have our Air
  Force there, busy, blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their
  leader, Noriega, a former CIA man who worked loyally for the
  United States. We arrest him. Try him in an American court
  that has no jurisdiction over him and lock him up -- nobody
  knows why. And that was supposed to end the drug trade because
  he had been demonized by The New York Times and the rest of
  the imperial press.

  [The government] plays off [Americans'] relative innocence, or
  ignorance to be more precise. This is probably why geography
  has not really been taught since World War II -- to keep
  people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up.
  Because Enron wants to blow them up. Or Unocal, the great
  pipeline company, wants a war going some place.

  And people in the countries who are recipients of our bombs
  get angry. The Afghans had nothing to do with what happened to
  our country on September 11. But Saudi Arabia did. It seems
  like Osama is involved, but we don't really know. I mean, when
  we went into Afghanistan to take over the place and blow it
  up, our commanding general was asked how long it was going to
  take to find Osama bin Laden. And the commanding general
  looked rather surprised and said, well, that's not why we are
  here.

  Oh no? So what was all this about? It was about the Taliban
  being very, very bad people and that they treated women very
  badly, you see. They're not really into women's rights, and we
  here are very strong on women's rights; and we should be with
  Bush on that one because he's taking those burlap sacks off of
  women's heads. Well, that's not what it was about.

  What it was really about -- and you won't get this anywhere at
  the moment -- is that this is an imperial grab for energy
  resources. Until now, the Persian Gulf has been our main
  source for imported oil. We went there, to Afghanistan, not to
  get Osama and wreak our vengeance. We went to Afghanistan
  partly because the Taliban -- whom we had installed at the
  time of the Russian occupation -- were getting too flaky and
  because Unocal, the California corporation, had made a deal
  with the Taliban for a pipeline to get the Caspian-area oil,
  which is the richest oil reserve on Earth. They wanted to get
  that oil by pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan to
  Karachi and from there to ship it off to China, which would be
  enormously profitable. Whichever big company could cash
  in would make a fortune. And you'll see that all these
  companies go back to Bush or Cheney or to Rumsfeld or someone
  else on the Gas and Oil Junta, which, along with the Pentagon,
  governs the United States.

  We had planned to occupy Afghanistan in October, and Osama, or
  whoever it was who hit us in September, launched a pre-emptory
  strike. They knew we were coming. And this was a warning to
  throw us off guard.

  With that background, it now becomes explicable why the first
  thing Bush did after we were hit was to get Senator Daschle
  and beg him not to hold an investigation of the sort any
  normal country would have done. When Pearl Harbor was struck,
  within 20 minutes the Senate and the House had a joint
  committee ready. Roosevelt beat them to it, because he knew
  why we had been hit, so he set up his own committee. But none
  of this was to come out, and it hasn't come out.

  Still, even if one reads the chart of military interventions
  in your book and concludes that, indeed, the U.S. government
  is a "source of evil" -- to lift a phrase -- can't you
  conceive that there might be other forces of evil as well?
  Can't you imagine forces of religious obscurantism, for
  example, that act independently of us and might do bad things
  to us, just because they are also evil?

  Oh yes. But you picked the wrong group. You picked one of the
  richest families in the world -- the bin Ladens. They are
  extremely close to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, which has
  conned us into acting as their bodyguard against their own
  people -- who are even more fundamentalist than they are. So
  we are dealing with a powerful entity if it is Osama.

  What isn't true is that people like him just come out of the
  blue. You know, the average American thinks we just give away
  billions in foreign aid, when we are the lowest in foreign aid
  among developed countries. And most of what we give goes to
  Israel and a little bit to Egypt.

  I was in Guatemala when the CIA was preparing its attack on
  the Arbenz government [in 1954]. Arbenz, who was a
  democratically elected president, mildly socialist. His state
  had no revenues; its biggest income maker was United Fruit
  Company. So Arbenz put the tiniest of taxes on bananas, and
  Henry Cabot Lodge got up in the Senate and said the Communists
  have taken over Guatemala and we must act. He got to
  Eisenhower, who sent in the CIA, and they overthrew the
  government. We installed a military dictator, and there's been
  nothing but bloodshed ever since.

  Now, if I were a Guatemalan and I had the means to drop
  something on somebody in Washington, or anywhere Americans
  were, I would be tempted to do it. Especially if I had lost my
  entire family and seen my country blown to bits because United
  Fruit didn't want to pay taxes. Now, that's the way we
  operate. And that's why we got to be so hated.

  You've spent decades bemoaning the erosion of civil liberties
  and the conversion of the U.S. from a republic into what you
  call an empire. Have the aftereffects of September 11, things
  like the USA Patriot bill, merely pushed us further down the
  road or are they, in fact, some sort of historic turning
  point?

  The second law of thermodynamics always rules: Everything is
  always running down. And so is our Bill of Rights. The current
  junta in charge of our affairs, one not legally elected, but
  put in charge of us by the Supreme Court in the interests of
  the oil and gas and defense lobbies, have used first Oklahoma
  City and now September 11 to further erode things.

  And when it comes to Oklahoma City and Tim McVeigh, well, he
  had his reasons as well to carry out his dirty deed. Millions
  of Americans agree with his general reasoning, though no one,
  I think, agrees with the value of blowing up children. But the
  American people, yes, they instinctively know when the
  government goes off the rails like it did at Waco and Ruby
  Ridge. No one has been elected president in the last 50 years
  unless he ran against the federal government. So, the
  government should get through its head that it is hated not
  only by foreigners whose countries we have wrecked, but also
  by Americans whose lives have been wrecked.

  The whole Patriot movement in the U.S. was based on folks run
  off their family farms. Or had their parents or grandparents
  run off. We have millions of disaffected American citizens who
  do not like the way the place is run and see no place in it
  where they can prosper. They can be slaves. Or pick cotton. Or
  whatever the latest uncomfortable thing there is to do. But
  they are not going to have, as Richard Nixon said, "a piece of
  the action."

  And yet Americans seem quite susceptible to a sort of
  jingoistic "enemy-of-the-month club" coming out of Washington.
  You say millions of Americans hate the federal government. But
  something like 75 percent of Americans say they support George
  W. Bush, especially on the issue of the war.

  I hope you don't believe those figures. Don't you know how the
  polls are rigged? It's simple. After 9/11 the country was
  really shocked and terrified. [Bush] does a little war dance
  and talks about evil axis and all the countries he's going to
  go after. And how long it is all going to take, he says with a
  happy smile, because it means billions and trillions for the
  Pentagon and for his oil friends. And it means curtailing our
  liberties, so this is all very thrilling for him. He's right
  out there reacting, bombing Afghanistan. Well, he might as
  well have been bombing Denmark. Denmark had nothing to do with
  9/11. And neither did Afghanistan, at least the Afghanis
  didn't.

  So the question is still asked, are you standing tall with the
  president? Are you standing with him as he defends us?

  Eventually, they will figure it out.

  They being who? The American people?

  Yeah, the American people. They are asked these quick
  questions. Do you approve of him? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh
  yeah, he blew up all those funny-sounding cities over there.

  That doesn't mean they like him. Mark my words. He will leave
  office the most unpopular president in history. The junta has
  done too much wreckage.

  They were suspiciously very ready with the Patriot Act as soon
  as we were hit. Ready to lift habeas corpus, due process, the
  attorney-client privilege. They were ready. Which means they
  have already got their police state. Just take a plane
  anywhere today and you are in the hands of an arbitrary police
  state.

  Don't you want to have that kind of protection when you fly?

  It's one thing to be careful, and we certainly want airplanes
  to be careful against terrorist attacks. But this is joy for
  them, for the federal government. Now they've got everybody,
  because everybody flies.

  Let's pick away at one of your favorite bones, the American
  media. Some say they have done a better-than-usual job since
  9/11. But I suspect you're not buying that?

  No, I don't buy it. Part of the year I live in Italy. And I
  find out more about what's going on in the Middle East by
  reading the British, the French, even the Italian press.
  Everything here is slanted. I mean, to watch Bush doing his
  little war dance in Congress . . . about "evildoers" and this
  "axis of evil" -- Iran, Iraq and North Korea. I thought, he
  doesn't even know what the word axis means. Somebody just gave
  it to him. And the press didn't even call him on it. This is
  about as mindless a statement as you could make. Then he comes
  up with about a dozen other countries that might have "evil
  people" in them, who might commit "terrorist acts." What is a
  terrorist act? Whatever he thinks is a terrorist act. And we
  are going to go after them. Because we are good and they are
  evil. And we're "gonna git 'em."

  Anybody who could get up and make that speech to the American
  people is not himself an idiot, but he's convinced we are
  idiots. And we are not idiots. We are cowed. Cowed by
  disinformation from the media, a skewed view of the world, and
  atrocious taxes that subsidize this permanent war machine. And
  we have no representation. Only the corporations are
  represented in Congress. That's why only 24 percent of the
  American people cast a vote for George W. Bush.

  I know you'd hate to take this to the ad hominem level, but
  indulge me for a moment. What about George W. Bush, the man?

  You mean George W. Bush, the cheerleader. That's the only
  thing he ever did of some note in his life. He had some
  involvement with a baseball team . . .

  He owned it . . .

  Yeah, he owned it, bought with other people's money. Oil
  people's money. So he's never really worked, and he shows very
  little capacity for learning. For them to put him up as
  president and for the Supreme Court to make sure that he won
  was as insulting as when his father, George Bush, appointed
  Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court -- done just to taunt the
  liberals. And then, when he picked Quayle for his vice
  president, that showed such contempt for the American people.
  This was someone as clearly unqualified as Bush Sr. was to be
  president. Because Bush Sr., as Richard Nixon said to a friend
  of mine when Bush was elected [imitating Nixon], "He's a
  lightweight, a complete lightweight, there's nothing there.
  He's a sort of person you appoint to things."

  So the contempt for the American people has been made more
  vivid by the two Bushes than all of the presidents before
  them. Although many of them had the same contempt. But they
  were more clever about concealing it.

  Should the U.S. just pack up its military from everywhere and
  go home?

  Yes. With no exceptions. We are not the world's policeman. And
  we cannot even police the United States, except to steal money
  from the people and generally wreak havoc. The police are
  perceived quite often, and correctly, in most parts of the
  country as the enemy. I think it is time we roll back the
  empire -- it is doing no one any good. It has cost us
  trillions of dollars, which makes me feel it's going to fold
  on its own because there isn't going to be enough money left
  to run it.

  You call yourself one of the last defenders of the American
  Republic against the American Empire. Do you have any allies
  left? I mean, we really don't have a credible opposition in
  this country, do we?

  I sometimes feel like I am the last defender of the republic.
  There are plenty of legal minds who defend the Bill of Rights,
  but they don't seem very vigorous. I mean, after 9/11 there
  was silence as one after another of these draconian, really
  totalitarian laws were put in place.

  So what's the way out of this? Back in the '80s you used to
  call for a new sort of populist constitutional convention. Do
  you still believe that's the fix?

  Well, it's the least bloody. Because there will be trouble,
  and big trouble. The loons got together to get a
  balanced-budget amendment, and they got a majority of states
  to agree to a constitutional convention. Senator Sam Ervin,
  now dead, researched what would happen in such a convention,
  and apparently everything would be up for grabs. Once we the
  people are assembled, as the Constitution requires, we can do
  anything, we can throw out the whole executive, the judiciary,
  the Congress. We can put in a Tibetan lama. Or turn the
  country into one big Scientological clearing center.

  And the liberals, of course, are the slowest and the
  stupidest, because they do not understand their interests. The
  right wing are the bad guys, but they know what they want --
  everybody else's money. And they know they don't like blacks
  and they don't like minorities. And they like to screw
  everyone along the way.

  But once you know what you want, you are in a stronger
  position than those who can only say, "Oh no, you mustn't do
  that." That we must have free speech. Free speech for what? To
  agree with The New York Times?

  The liberals always say, "Oh my, if there is a constitutional
  convention, they will take away the Bill of Rights." But they
  have already done it! It is gone. Hardly any of it is left. So
  if they, the famous "they," would prove to be a majority of
  the American people and did not want a Bill of Rights, then I
  say, let's just get it over with. Let's just throw it out the
  window. If you don't want it, you won't have it.

  http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/33/features-cooper.php

  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  Uncensored Gore
  The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and
  the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule.

  by Marc Cooper - November 2003

  It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn't born in an
  earlier time and somehow stumbled into America's
  Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so
  depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been
  quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the
  gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most
  controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.

  When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set
  off a mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of
  the last standing defenders of the ideal of the American
  Republic. His acerbic comments to L.A. Weekly about the
  Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world
  and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is
  at it again, giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent,
  and, with the constant trickle of casualties mounting in Iraq,
  his comments are no less explosive than they were last year.

  This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time
  American. After splitting his time between Los Angeles and
  Italy for the past several decades, Vidal has decided to roost
  in his colonial home in the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old,
  suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from the loss
  earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen,
  Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever.

  Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in
  mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years.
  Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep
  into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of
  their human foibles on display - vanity, ambition, hubris,
  envy and insecurity - their shared and profoundly rooted
  commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth
  comes straight to the fore.

  The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more
  than a few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping
  disdain for the crew that now dominates the capital named for
  our first president.

  As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links
  between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.

  MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and
  Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was
  actually Ben Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient
  regarding the future of the republic.

  GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better
  than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles -
  slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married
  into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes.
  Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have
  invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere.
  They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James
  Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints
  about the power of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to
  get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote
  at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had
  someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this
  Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good
  government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted,
  will give us, for a space of years, such government.

  But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such
  constitutions have in the past, because of the essential
  corruption of the people. He pointed his finger at all the
  American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he
  said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but
  rather despotism - the only form of government suitable for
  such a people.

  But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn't he? He argued
  that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional
  document.

  Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have
  another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn't
  working. Like taking a car in to get the carburetor checked.
  He said you cannot expect a man to wear a boy's jacket. It
  must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living. He
  was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each
  generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even
  the form of government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if
  you want! Jefferson didn't care.

  Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and
  he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be
  achieved would be to give the people a chance to change the
  laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to Jefferson. He
  said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you
  think it is only going to last a year.

  This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it
  would probably still be going on if there were at least one
  statesman around who said we have to start changing this damn
  thing.

  Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian
  Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time
  were effectively young America's two parties. More than 200
  years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of
  continuity in our current body politic?

  Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption
  Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The
  presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy
  TV time will probably be the next president. This is
  corruption on a major scale.

  Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism.
  Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be
  corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding
  with them and not giving a damn.

  Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just
  as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already.
  No one is punished for squandering the people's money and
  their pension funds and for wrecking the economy.

  So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible
  fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It's not even a
  campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so
  corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you
  have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian
  rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act
  is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with - even using
  much of the same language. In one of my earlier books,
  Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language
  used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going
  after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh - how their rights were
  going to be suspended only for a brief time - was precisely
  the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.

  In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find
  themselves comfortable in the current political system of the
  United States? Certainly Jefferson wouldn't. But what about
  the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a
  sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?

  Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the
  parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian,
  not by any means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very
  well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed
  there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a
  bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little
  nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married
  into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who argues that
  we must have a government made up of the very best people,
  meaning the rich.

  So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I
  can't think of any other Founders who would. Adams would
  surely disapprove of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don't
  think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already they
  were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over
  from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to
  do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how
  to be. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent
  with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that
  overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.

   But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious
  administrations in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of
  the national-security state, to LBJ's debacle in Vietnam, to
  Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So
  when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really
  talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more
  rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

  No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the
  first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet
  been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which
  there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be
  fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All
  you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the
  president himself. You can then be locked up without access to
  a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even
  executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled,
  stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place
  not even organized as a country - like Tierra del Fuego or
  some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT
  Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be
  despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who
  tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in
  Philadelphia. Hanged.

  So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the
  early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and
  then hanged by the Founders?

  No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and
  Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not
  belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go
  down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military
  administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel
  so much more at home. They would not be called Americans -
  most Americans would not think of them as citizens.

  Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

  I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take
  over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged
  president. We have despotism. We have no due process.

  Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration
  collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with
  Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is
  playing out, don't you get the impression that Bush is headed
  for the same fate?

  I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this
  business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA
  agent. It's often these small things that get you. Something
  small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this
  woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done
  is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA
  agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90
  percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will
  know, and they don't care.

  But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains,
  because there isn't enough money to go around. The states are
  broke. Meanwhile, the right wing has been successful in
  convincing 99 percent of the people that we ? are generously
  financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling
  welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans
  are always running against, the ladies they tell us are
  guzzling down Kristal champagne at the Ambassador East in
  Chicago - which of course is ridiculous.

  And now the people see another $87 billion going out the
  window. So long! People are going to rebel against that one.
  Congress has gone along with that, but a lot of congressmen
  could lose their seats for that.

  Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be
  re-elected next year?

  No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is
  not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don't want an
  election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting
  machines say no one can look inside of them, because they
  would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn't their job to
  count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the
  cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all
  three owners of the companies who make these machines are
  donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?

  So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these
  balloting machines. He can't lose.

  But Gore, aren't you still enough of a believer in the
  democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the
  end, those sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart?

  Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who
  would have thought that Harry Truman's plans to militarize
  America would have come as far as we are today? All the money
  we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere.
  There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing
  back for our taxes. I wouldn't have thought that would have
  lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did
  last.

  But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper
  ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are
  cast, he will be swept from office. He's made every error you
  can. He's wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People
  can't find jobs. Poverty is up. It's a total mess. How does he
  make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the
  people around him are not. They want to stay in power.

  You paint a very dark picture of the current administration
  and of the American political system in general. But at a
  deeper, more societal level, isn't there still a democratic
  underpinning?

  No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are
  still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which
  was the last time we had a government that showed some
  interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have
  governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about
  the welfare of the rich.

  Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

  Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has.
  Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president
  before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one
  has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row
  that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

  How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

  I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each
  action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a
  billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin
  who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And
  it won't be pretty.

  http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/52/features-cooper.php

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From: bob minarik
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2003 2:38 PM
Subject: The truth about the War on Terrorism


A book well worth your read!!!   James Bovard is one heckuva fine investigative
reporter whose previous works, exposing IRS theft and terrorism,  helped bring
about the butt kicking the IRS received in the late 90's.   (thanks pat)   <:) 
bob


The truth about the War on Terrorism

Terrorism and Tyranny is one of the most important books of the decade.

by Bill Winter
LP News Editor

http://www.lp.org/lpnews/0312/review.html

Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of
Evil, by James Bovard. Hardbound, 440 pages. Palgrave Macmillan. $26.95.
Available at: amazon.com.

There are two types of people who should read Terrorism and Tyranny: Those who
support the government's current War on Terrorism, and those who oppose it.

For the former, this new book by libertarian maestro James Bovard will reveal,
in the starkest terms, how your government failed you.

Because of bureaucratic blundering, the U.S. government ignored pre-9/11
warnings that terrorist attacks were imminent. Afterwards, it used the attacks
as an excuse to ram through a wish-list of oppressive laws (like the USA/Patriot
Act) and to invade Iraq, a nation that had no connection to 9/11. It made air
travel less safe by federalizing airport security. In the name of "fighting
terrorism," it increased its support for tyrannical nations around the globe
that have killed more people than terrorists ever have. And it has dramatically
expanded the power of the U.S. government (perhaps permanently).

For those who oppose the War on Terrorism, this book will confirm that
everything you fear is true. This war, as waged by President G.W. Bush, is,
quite simply, one of the greatest threats to freedom the United States has ever
faced. It threatens our economic liberty, our civil liberties, and our long-term
security.

In Terrorism and Tyranny, Bovard doesn't merely make assertions. He proves them
with a barrage of (footnoted) anecdotes, statistics, and facts. What he reveals
will shock, amaze, and infuriate you. For example:

* Bovard asks: Do terrorists hate us because they "hate freedom"? Answer: No.
Hong Kong finished first in an annual Heritage Foundation economic freedom index
-- yet wasn't attacked. Finland finished first in an annual Reporters Without
Frontiers press freedom index -- yet wasn't attacked. Sweden finished first in
an annual United Nations Freedom Index -- yet wasn't attacked.

Maybe, just maybe, Bovard suggests, al Qaeda attacked us for exactly the reason
they said they did: Because they are Islamic fanatics who hate the U.S.'s
support for Israel, and loathe the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the
home of their holiest city, Mecca.

* Bovard asks: Should the government have suspected that al Qaeda planned to
launch attacks on the U.S.? Answer: Absolutely.

In 1998, the CIA determined that Osama bin Laden was "actively planning against
U.S. targets." Also in 1998, U.S. intelligence learned that al Qaeda planned to
fly planes into the World Trade Center towers. In 1999, a study for the National
Intelligence Council warned that al Qaeda could crash-land planes into the
Pentagon. In 2000, U.S. intelligence learned that bin Laden planned to hijack
747s. In 2001, an FBI agent warned that an al Qaeda network was training pilots
in the U.S. to hijack planes. In July 2001, a National Security Council
counterterrorism specialist warned: "Something really spectacular is going to
happen, and it's going to happen soon."

What was the government's response? As of 9/11, the CIA had only five full-time
analysts monitoring bin Laden's terrorist network. Meanwhile, the FBI had over
2,000 agents working on drug cases. And on the night of 9/11, the FBI had 10
agents wiretapping a brothel in New Orleans.

* Bovard asks: Who's more dangerous, terrorists or governments? Answer: No
contest. Between 1980 and 2000, terrorists killed 7,745 people around the globe;
governments killed more than 10 million. In fact, in one devastating section,
Bovard notes: "The number of people killed during the final FBI assault on Waco
-- 80 -- exceeded the total number of American civilians killed in all
international terrorist attacks during the 1990s."

* Bovard asks: Are we safer with federal bureaucrats manning airport security
checkpoints? Answer: No. On September 11, 2002 -- one year after the 9/11
attacks -- the New York Daily News sent two reporters on 14 flights around the
USA, with box cutters, knives, and pepper spray in their carry-on luggage. Not a
single airport security checkpoint spotted the weapons. What was the response
from the Transportation Security Agency? A spokesman simply lied and said,
"Americans have never had a higher level of security."

* Bovard asks: Did the U.S. invade Iraq because of a proven link between Saddam
Hussein and al Qaeda, or because we had convincing evidence that Iraq possessed
WMD and planned to use them against the U.S.? Answer: No and no. In fact,
President Bush had decided years ago to invade Iraq.

Citing a Time magazine story, Bovard notes that in March 2002 -- a year before
the president announced that he was being "forced" to attack Iraq -- Bush popped
his head into a White House meeting and said, "F--k Saddam! We're taking him
out!"

U.S. intelligence had also learned from Iraqi defectors that Saddam had
destroyed his stocks of banned missiles, poison gasses, and biological weapons
after the Persian Gulf War -- but chose to ignore that fact.

Bovard's conclusion: Bush exploited 9/11 to "cajole Americans into acquiescing
to a preemptive attack against a nation that posed no threat to the United
States."

* Bovard asks: It the War on Terrorism making the world a better place for most
human beings? The answer: No, it's just enabling oppressive regimes to further
oppress their citizens. For example, President Bush praised communist China as
an ally in the fight against the "evil force" of terrorism. The 80 million
Chinese citizens killed by their own government over the past five decades must
be wondering about Bush's definition of "evil."

In addition, the Bush Administration requested $3.8 billion to train and arm 67
nations -- including such serial human-rights abusers as Uzbekistan, Nigeria,
and Indonesia -- to fight terrorism. Noted Bovard: Virtually every nation of
earth except for Cuba, Iraq, and Iran will now receive anti-terrorism military
aid from the U.S. government -- which means that U.S. taxpayers are being forced
to "underwrite many of the most oppressive regimes in the world."

These examples only hint at the unending cornucopia of information in the book.
Bovard has a unique style of writing. He's like a swarm of army ants; an
unstoppable force that gobbles up facts and leaves behind a desiccated landscape
that lays bare the lies told by politicians and bureaucrats.

Bovard is also the master of the telling anecdote. He recounts a Chicago Tribune
story about when U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey met Attorney General John
Ashcroft to express concern over the USA/Patriot Act. Armey told Ashcroft that
he didn't want the federal government to have the power to read all his e-mails.
Ashcroft replied, "Dick, we already read all your e-mails." Ashcroft apparently
meant it as a joke; Bovard (and most Americans) aren't laughing.

One important note: Bovard is no apologist for terrorists; he despises them and
the carnage they cause. He says the U.S. government should "finish off al Qaeda"
before they launch "another wave of devastating attacks." But a narrowly focused
strategy, targeting just al Qaeda, is the way to do it, he argues. An endless
worldwide War on Terrorism is doomed to fail. As former National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski noted: "Terrorism is a technique. You can't wage war
on a technique."

And Bovard argues that a non-interventionist foreign policy would go a long way
towards making Americans safer. He writes: "Killing foreigners is no substitute
for protecting Americans. The best defense against terrorism is to make fewer
enemies."

It's impossible to have many quibbles with a book as extraordinary as Terrorism
and Tyranny. Here's one: Bovard devotes a chapter to Israel's war on terrorism
(which some suggest the U.S. should emulate), and makes a convincing case that
overreacting to terrorism begets more terrorism. (It also paints a damning
picture of Israel's civil rights record.) But while informative, the chapter
doesn't necessarily contribute to his central thesis -- that the U.S. government
has grossly mismanaged the battle against terrorism, before and after the events
of September 11, 2001.

The bottom line: Terrorism and Tyranny is not just the best book you'll ever
read about the War on Terrorism. It's not just the best Libertarian book of the
year. It's one of the most important books of the decade. Whether you support or
oppose the War on Terrorism, you owe it to yourself to read it.

http://www.freeohio.us

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

An excellent, well-documented article at the link below:
From: texaca@...
Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2003 10:41 AM
Subject: Investigative Report Cheney Led Halliburton to Feast at Federal Trough

Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough
State Department Questioned Deal
With Firm Linked to Russian Mob

http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm

Just another day for the "Pigs at the Trough"....



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/Goff_Letter-Iraq-GIs.htm

Hold On to Your Humanity:
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq

by Stan Goff (US Army Retired)

Dissident Voice
November 15, 2003

Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,

I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper
like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you--some more
extreme than others--are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some
things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.

In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern
Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there,
I had my head full of shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit
about what it supposedly meant to be a man, and shit from a lot of my
know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though
they'd never been there, or to war at all.

The essence of all this shit was that we had to "stay the course in Vietnam,"
and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese,
and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We
stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for
life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many
on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.

When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the
United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of
trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first
question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country
presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people
had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.

When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the
politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would
be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make
sure everyone there could vote.

What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed
forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and
forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and committing
rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that
weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me--just in
country--and the people who had done those things to them.

What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between
1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half
a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very
young children.

My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance
we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how
easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire
world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about
their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States
government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.

So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie
for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this
obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.

And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you
probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and
cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was
there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of the Vietcong.

But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the role of
occupier when we didn't know the people, their language, or their culture, with
our head full of bullshit our so-called leaders had told us during training and
in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing
people we were ordered to dominate, but any one of whom might be pumping mortars
at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we started to ask is
who put us in this position?

In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to
expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and
killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made
these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back
in Washington DC with their fat fucking asses stuffed full of cordon blue and
caviar.

They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.

That you now. Just fewer trees and less water.

We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in
DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I
want to tell you the rest of the story.

I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either. I started
getting pulled into something -- something that craved other people's pain. Just
to make sure I wasn't regarded as a "fucking missionary" or a possible rat, I
learned how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people too crazy
to fuck with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting
someone's house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone,
man, woman, or child, with hardly a second thought. People who had the power of
life and death -- because they could.

The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust because of your
circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to you, and
what you have done and can't take back.

It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the
reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the
things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they
became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads
or hajjis. People had to be reduced to "niggers" here before they could be
lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive,
even when that wasn't true, but something inside us told us that so long as they
were human beings, with the same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were
not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes
even kill them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to
strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust
artillery fire onto the cries of a baby.

Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the important thing to
understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the
thing you might not get until it's too late. When you take away the humanity of
another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because it is
standing in the way.

So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though
we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more,
and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void where we
surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics -- drugs, alcohol, until we
realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off
into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt
others, especially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration
statistic or a mental patient.

You can never escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that
you needed that to survive, that you took things away from people that you can
never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get
back.

Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to emotionally
resuscitate us and bring us back to life. Many do not.

I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one else sees it. You
might hear it in my words. I hate being chumped.

So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive,
however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing.
But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for
an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for
some ticket-punching fucking military careerist to make his bones on. Especially
not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.

The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world's energy supplies to
twist the arms of future economic competitors. That's what's going on, and you
need to understand it, then do what you need to do to hold on to your humanity.
The system does that; tells you are some kind of hero action figures, but uses
you as gunmen. They chump you.

Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable commodity. They
don't care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing, about the
loneliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how you humanity is stripped away a
piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your illnesses, and hide your
wounded and dead from the public. They already are.

They don't care. So you have to. And to preserve your own humanity, you must
recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and know that
both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the
shots.

They are your enemies -- The Suits -- and they are the enemies of peace, and the
enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or immigrant
families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never
give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but you and I know that they
will never have to run, because they fucking aren't there. You are

They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw
you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having
their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are
parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to
live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and
the mysterious illnesses.

So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your being
there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can't tell you to disobey. That
would probably run me afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have to
take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience dictate. But it is
perfectly legal for you to refuse illegal orders, and orders to abuse or attack
civilians are illegal. Ordering you to keep silent about these crimes is also
illegal.

I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any
obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself
over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and
you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of
your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not
owe them your souls.

Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who have loved
you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to
look us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there like another
corpse.

Hold on to your humanity.

-- Stan Goff

US Army (Ret.)

Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion
of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book Full Spectrum
Disorder: The Military in the New American Century (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He
is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired
Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email
for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@.... Goff can be reached at:
sherrynstan@...

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

From: Joe Bryant
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 3:54 PM
Subject: Diet of lies.


A Strategy of Lies: How the White House Fed the Public a Steady Diet of
Falsehoods

Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their
decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is
a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal
with some serious rebound.

After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false
George W. Bush's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high
officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked
the news that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent.

Wilson isn't waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October,
the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to
reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.

The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner.
"Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception
Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations
in Gulf II" identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked
by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to "market" the military
invasion of Iraq.

Gardiner has credentials. He has taught at the National War College, the Air War
College and the Naval Warfare College and was a visiting scholar at the Swedish
Defense College.

According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire
in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was
designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research lead him to
conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant
"stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a
"meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the
allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein."

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and
Defense Department was, in Gardiner's final assessment "irresponsible in parts"
and "might have been illegal."

"Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to
the right decisions," Gardiner explains. Consequently, "Truth became a casualty.
When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage." For the first
time in US history, "we allowed strategic psychological operations to become
part of public affairs... [W]hat has happened is that information warfare,
strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way
into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to create an Office of
Strategic Influence early in 2002. At the same time British Prime Minister Tony
Blair's Strategy Director Alastair Campbell was setting up an identical
operation in London.

White House critics were quick to recognize that "strategic influence" was a
euphemism for disinformation. Rumsfeld had proposed establishing the country's
first Ministry of Propaganda.

The criticism was so severe that the White House backed away from the plan. But
on November 18, several months after the furor had died down, Rumsfeld
arrogantly announced that he had not been deterred. "If you want to savage this
thing, fine: I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name,
but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done -- and I
have."

Gardiner's dogged research identified a long list of stories that passed through
Rumsfeld's propaganda mill. According to Gardiner, "there were over 50 stories
manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for
the American and British people." Those stories include:


a.. The link between terrorism, Iraq and 9/11

a.. Iraqi agents meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta

a.. Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons.

a.. Iraq's purchase of nuclear materials from Niger.

a.. Saddam Hussein's development of nuclear weapons.

a.. Aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons

a.. The existence of Iraqi drones, WMD cluster bombs and Scud missiles.

a.. Iraq's threat to target the US with cyber warfare attacks.

a.. The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.

a.. The surrender of a 5,000-man Iraqi brigade.

a.. Iraq executing Coalition POWs.

a.. Iraqi soldiers dressing in US and UK uniforms to commit atrocities.

a.. The exact location of WMD facilities

a.. WMDs moved to Syria.

Every one of these stories received extensive publicity and helped form
indelible public impressions of the "enemy" and the progress of the invasion.
Every one of these stories was false.

"I know what I am suggesting is serious. I did not come to these conclusions
lightly," Gardiner admits. "I'm not going to address why they did it. That's
something I don't understand even after all the research." But the fact remained
that "very bright and even well-intentioned officials found how to control the
process of governance in ways never before possible."

A Battle between Good and Evil
Gardiner notes that cocked-up stories about Saddam's WMDs "was only a very small
part of the strategic influence, information operations and marketing campaign
conducted on both sides of the Atlantic."
The "major thrust" of the campaign, Gardiner explains, was "to make a conflict
with Iraq seem part of a struggle between good and evil. Terrorism is evil... we
are the good guys.

"The second thrust is what propaganda theorists would call the 'big lie.' The
plan was to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. Make the American people believe
that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks."

The means for pushing the message involved: saturating the media with stories,
24/7; staying on message; staying ahead of the news cycle; managing
expectations; and finally, being prepared to "use information to attack and
punish critics."

Audition in Afghanistan
The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first
tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on
Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply
involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an
"information warrior") proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for
providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras
after their "liberation" from Iraqi troops in 1991.

The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in
November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global
Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on
Afghanistan by highlighting "the plight of women in Afghanistan." CIC's Jim
Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign "the best thing we've done."

Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign "was not about something they
did. It was about a story they created... It was not a program with specific
steps or funding to improve the conditions of women."

The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even
involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a
shocking statement: "Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out
women's fingernails for wearing nail polish." Three days later, a horrified
Cherie Blaire told the London media, "In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish,
you could have your nails torn out."

Misleading via Innuendo
Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among
the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the "anthrax scare" to
promote the administration's pre-existing plan to attack Iraq.

In both the US and the UK, "intelligence sources" provided a steady diet of
unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists
were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters.

It wasn't until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was
"increasingly looking like" the anthrax came from a US military installation.
The news was released as a White House "paper" instead of as a more prominent
White House "announcement." As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were
behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an
intentional part of the propaganda campaign. "If a story supports policy, even
if incorrect, let it stay around."

In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, "We would have expected to
see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see
the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of
engineered or false stories from US and UK stories is long."

The US and Britain: The Axis of Disinformation
Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London
agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an "armed conflict"
and to always reference the Iraqi government as the "regime." Strategic
communications managers in both capitols issued lists of "guidance" terms to be
used in all official statements. London's 15 Psychological Operations Group
paralleled Washington's Office of Global Communications.

In a departure from long military tradition, the perception managers even took
over the naming of the war. Military code names were originally chosen for
reasons of security. In modern US warfare, however, military code names have
become "part of the marketing." There was Operation Nobel Eagle, Operation
Valiant Strike, Operation Provide Comfort, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation
Uphold Democracy and, finally, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The "Rescue" of Jessica Lynch
The Pentagon's control over the news surrounding the capture and rescue of Pfc.
Jessica Lynch receives a good deal of attention in Gardiner's report. "From the
very beginning it was called an 'ambush'," Gardiner noted. But, he pointed out,
"If you drive a convoy into enemy lines, turn around and drive back, it's not an
ambush. Military officers who are very careful about how they talk about
operations would normally not be sloppy about describing this kind of event,"
Gardiner complained. "This un-military kind of talk is one of the reasons I
began doing this research."

One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as
Newsweek reported: "as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations
Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM
Gen. Tommy Franks."

It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch's rescue
would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House's top
representative on the ground.

On the morning of April 3, the Pentagon began leaking information on Lynch's
rescue that sought to establish Lynch as "America's new Rambo." The Washington
Post repeated the story it received from the Pentagon: that Lynch "sustained
multiple gunshot wounds" and fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldier...
firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition."

Lynch's family confused the issue by telling the press that their daughter had
not sustained any bullet wounds. Lynch's parents subsequently refused to talk to
the press, explaining that they had been "told not to talk about it." (Weeks
later, the truth emerged. Lynch was neither stabbed nor shot. She was apparently
injured while falling from her vehicle.)

Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers let the story stand during an April 3 press conference
although both had been fully briefed on Lynch's true condition.

"Again, we see the pattern," Gardiner observed. "When the story on the street
supports the message, it will be left there by a non-answer. The message is more
important than the truth. Even Central Command kept the story alive by not
giving out details."

Gardiner saw another break with procedure. The information on the rescue that
was released to the Post "would have been very highly classified" and should
have been closely guarded. Instead, it was used as a tool to market the war.
"This was a major pattern from the beginning of the marketing campaign
throughout the war," Gardiner wrote. "It was okay to release classified
information if it supported the message."
http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=491&pageID=177&subSiteID\
=44

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

US army bulldozes Iraqi farms

By Chris Marsden
16 October 2003

An October 12 report by Patrick Cockburn in The Independent draws
attention to how US
soldiers in Iraq bulldozed groves of date palms and orange and lemon
trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment
of farmers who refuse to inform on guerrillas attacking US troops.

The action taken last month beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town
50
miles north of Baghdad, destroyed the livelihood of 32 farmers and
their
families.

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front
of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses. When
a
reporter from Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the
bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it.
One farmer told Cockburn, "They made a sort of joke against us by
playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees."

http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20031011/frontpage/121390.shtml
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Many soldiers, same letter
Newspapers around U.S. get identical missives from Iraq

LEDYARD KING GANNETT NEWS SERVICE The Olympian Online

IRAQ: Latest developments


Your thoughts about war with Iraq.
http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20031011/frontpage/letter.gif



WASHINGTON -- Letters from hometown soldiers describing their
successes
rebuilding Iraq have been appearing in newspapers across the country
as
U.S. public opinion on the mission sours.
And all the letters are the same.

A Gannett News Service search found identical letters from different
soldiers with the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry
Regiment,
also known as "The Rock," in 11 newspapers, including Snohomish, Wash.

The Olympian received two identical letters signed by different
hometown
soldiers: Spc. Joshua Ackler and Spc. Alex Marois, who is now a
sergeant.
The paper declined to run either because of a policy not to publish
form
letters.

The five-paragraph letter talks about the soldiers' efforts to
re-establish
police and fire departments, and build water and sewer plants in the
northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the unit is based.

"The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely
restored, and we are a large part of why that has happened," the
letter
reads.

It describes people waving at passing troops and children running up
to
shake their hands and say thank you.

It's not clear who wrote the letter or organized sending it to
soldiers'
hometown papers.

Six soldiers reached by GNS directly or through their families said
they
agreed with the letter's thrust. But none of the soldiers said he
wrote
it,
and one said he didn't even sign it.

Marois, 23, told his family he signed the letter, said Moya Marois,
his
stepmother. But she said he was puzzled why it was sent to the
newspaper
in
Olympia. He attended high school in Olympia but no longer considers
the
city home, she said. Moya Marois and Alex's father, Les, now live near
Kooskia, Idaho.

A seventh soldier didn't know about the letter until his father
congratulated him for getting it published in the local newspaper in
Beckley, W.Va.

"When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said: 'What letter?'
"
Timothy Deaconson said Friday, recalling the phone conversation he had
with
his son, Nick. "This is just not his (writing) style."

He spoke to his son, Pfc. Nick Deaconson, at a hospital where he was
recovering from a grenade explosion that left shrapnel in both his
legs.

Sgt. Christopher Shelton, who signed a letter that ran in the
Snohomish
Herald, said Friday that his platoon sergeant had distributed the
letter
and asked soldiers for the names of their hometown newspapers.
Soldiers
were asked to sign the letter if they agreed with it, said Shelton,
whose
shoulder was wounded during an ambush earlier this year.

"Everything it said is dead accurate. We've done a really good job,"
he
said by phone from Italy, where he was preparing to return to Iraq.

Sgt. Todd Oliver, a spokesman for the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which
counts
the 503rd as one of its units, said he was told a soldier wrote the
letter,
but he didn't know who. He said the brigade's public affairs unit was
not
involved.

"When he asked other soldiers in his unit to sign it, they did,"
Oliver
explained in an e-mail response to a GNS inquiry. "Someone, somewhere
along
the way, took it upon themselves to mail it to the various editors of
newspapers across the country."

Lt. Col. Bill MacDonald, a spokesman for the 4th infantry Division
that
is
heading operations in north-central Iraq, said he had not heard about
the
letter-writing campaign.

Neither had Lt. Cmdr. Nick Balice, a spokesman for U.S. Central
Command
in
Tampa, Fla.

A recent poll suggests that Americans are increasingly skeptical of
America's prolonged involvement in Iraq. A USA Today-CNN-Gallup Poll
released Sept. 23 found 50 percent believe that the situation in Iraq
was
worth going to war over, down from 73 percent in April.

The letter talks about the soldiers' mission, saying, "one thousand of
my
fellow soldiers and I parachuted from ten jumbo jets." It describes
Kirkuk
as "a hot and dusty city of just over a million people." It tells
about
the
progress they have made.

"The fruits of all our soldiers' efforts are clearly visible in the
streets
of Kirkuk today. There is very little trash in the streets, many more
people in the markets and shops, and children have returned to
school,"
the
letter reads. "I am proud of the work we are doing here in Iraq and I
hope
all of your readers are as well."

Sgt. Shawn Grueser of Poca, W.Va., said he spoke to a military public
affairs officer whose name he couldn't remember about his
accomplishments
in Iraq for what he thought was a news release to be sent to his
hometown
paper in Charleston, W.Va. But the 2nd Battalion soldier said he did
not
sign any letter.

Although Grueser said he agrees with the letter's sentiments, he was
uncomfortable that a letter with his signature did not contain his own
words or spell out his own accomplishments.

"It makes it look like you cheated on a test, and everybody got the
same
grade," Grueser said by phone from a base in Italy where he had just
arrived from Iraq.

Moya Marois said she is proud of her stepson Alex, the former Olympia
resident. But she worries that the letter tries to give legitimacy to
a
war
she doesn't think was justified.

"We're going to support our son," she said. But "there are a lot of
Americans that are not in support of this war that would like to see
them
returned home, and think it's going to get worse."

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When Did the Trouble Start?
by Stephan Kinsella
by Stephan Kinsella
mailto:Stephan@...

In my early libertarian days, I used to think America was basically on the
right track, until FDR�s New Deal screwed it all up. Before then, we had a
basically libertarian country. But I gradually keep pushing back the date
of when we got off track. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has shown (more Hoppe), our
entry into World War I elevated "an old-fashioned territorial dispute" into
"a purely ideological conflict: of good against evil." Thus, "As an
increasingly ideologically motivated conflict, the war quickly degenerated
into a total war." As Hoppe argues,
http://www.mises.org/hoppeintro.asp
http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications.php#democracy

What would have happened [...] if in accordance with his reelection
promise, Woodrow Wilson had kept the U.S. out of World War I? [...] If the
United States had followed a strict non-interventionist foreign policy, it
is likely that the intra-European conflict would have ended in late 1916 or
early 1917 as the result of several peace initiatives, most notably by the
Austrian Emperor Charles I. Moreover, the war would have been concluded
with a mutually acceptable and face-saving compromise peace rather than the
actual dictate. Consequently, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia would
have remained traditional monarchies instead of being turned into
short-lived democratic republics. With a Russian Czar and a German and
Austrian Kaiser in place, it would have been almost impossible for the
Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia, and in reaction to a growing communist
threat in Western Europe, for the Fascists and National Socialists to do
the same in Italy and Germany. Millions of victims of communism, national
socialism, and World War II would have been saved. The extent of government
interference with and control of the private economy in the United States
and in Western Europe would never have reached the heights seen today. And
rather than Central and Eastern Europe (and consequently half of the globe)
falling into communist hands and for more than forty years being plundered,
devastated, and forcibly insulated from Western markets, all of Europe (and
the entire globe) would have remained integrated economically (as in the
nineteenth century) in a world-wide system of division of labor and
cooperation. World living standards would have grown immensely higher than
they actually have.

Okay. So, it was all Wilson�s fault. Before WW I, America was a shining
city on a hill. Wilson really set us on the wrong course.

But wait. I think Lincoln is really the culprit here. For one, if the South
had been allowed to secede, as was its right, or had won, World War I would
not have turned out the way it did. So: no Lincoln, no War Between the
States, no WWI, no WWII. (While we�re at it, let�s blame all the white
slaveholders. They set in motion a chain of events that led to the War
Between the States, just so they could have cheaper cotton.)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/lincoln-arch.html

Okay, but before 1861, America was it. It was as close to minarchy as the
world has seen (never mind *ancient Ireland). Thank God for our
liberty-minded forefathers, Jefferson, Madison and crew.
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty11.asp

Hold on a second there. As Chantal Saucier has *pointed out in these pages,
the growth of the American Empire might be dated to Jefferson�s
unconstitutional expansion of empire with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
Had the unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase not taken place, we might have
avoided the War Between the States, WWI, WWII, et seq. Maybe I should take
down the prints of Jefferson paintings on my office wall, oui?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/saucier4.html

On second thought, I think the trouble started a little bit further back.
The Constitution as ratified in 1789 was fine as it was. Boy, what a great
achievement. But the Bill of Rights was added in 1791. If this had not been
done, then the so-called ^"incorporation doctrine" � whereby the Fourteenth
Amendment was held to "incorporate" most of the rights listed in the Bill
of Rights and apply them to the states � probably would never have been
invented. Thus, the erosion of federalism caused by this federal seizure of
power might never have happened, and there would be stronger structural
limits on federal action in place today.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kinsella/kinsella11.html

Who am I kidding. The real trouble really started two years earlier. The
Framers in 1789 had already agreed to add a Bill of Rights, as the price
for ratification. I think I need to push it back a couple more years, just
to be safe � since the real problem is that the federal convention called
in 1787 merely to propose amendments to the ^Articles of Confederation
^exceeded its mandate by proposing a new Constitution. Which led,
naturally, to the Bill of Rights, the War Between the States, WWI, WWII,
and the erosion of federalism and hegemony of the central state. As Hoppe
(Democracy, the God that Failed, p. 272) notes, the Americans "not only did
not let the inherited royal institutions of colonies and colonial
governments wither away into oblivion; they reconstituted them within the
old political borders in the form of independent states, each equipped with
its own coercive (unilateral) taxing and legislative powers. While this
would have been bad enough, the new Americans made matters worse by
adopting the American Constitution and replacing a loose confederation of
independent states with the central (federal) government of the United
States." We would have been much better off under the old Articles of
Confederation. We were just fine, until then. Yes, that was America�s
golden age: from 1776 to 1787.
http://www.usconstitution.net/articles.html
http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/essays/bernstein.argument.html

Except ... the transformation of the Union from confederation to
federation, and ultimately to centralized, dominant state, was nothing but
a natural result of the utopian idealism of the ^Declaration of
Independence in 1776. Why these guys thought they could cut the ties to the
traditional, monarchical, constitutional order and set up a new political
order imbued with the spirit of democracy in its stead, but limit its
growth with mere paper documents and platitudes is beyond me. After all, it
had never been done before. What was Jefferson thinking?
http://www.house.gov/paul/declaration.html

Let�s face it, the American experiment has been a failure. I�m starting to
think the trouble with America is ... the Americans. Why did we revolt,
anyway? Because of an amount of taxation imposed from Britain that is
miniscule by today�s standards? Yup, 1776 is where the trouble started.
(Incidentally, Maybe Hamilton is not the arch-villain, and Jefferson not
the libertarian hero, that we�ve thought all these years. After all, didn�t
^Hamilton prefer a limited monarchy, or at least an aristocratic republic?
As monarchy is preferable to democracy in many respects, can�t we say that
Hamilton was arguably better than Jefferson, at least in this respect?)
http://ragz-international.com/hamilton.htm
Thank goodness I don�t know more about European history, or I might keep
pushing the envelope back ever further, maybe back to the Garden of Eden.
But need I really stop at 1776? Come to think of it, if not for the
domination of America by all those New England WASPs, would we have had all
this mess? Would we have had the Constitution, the War Between the States
(all Presidents save Kennedy have been WASPs, no?), all the slave-owning
that led to the War Between the States? Would we have had Lincoln, and
Wilson, and Roosevelt? No, certainly not. (See also on this, Hans-Hermann
Hoppe, "The Western State as a Paradigm: Learning from History," Politics
and Regimes. Religion & Public Life, Vol. 30, 1997.) So, the problem is not
Americans per se, but Yankee WASPs.

Which leads me to think, the real trouble started in the sixteenth Century,
with that pesky Protestant Reformation. Couldn�t just leave well enough
alone, could you, guys?
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12700b.htm
September 5, 2003

Stephan Kinsella [send him mail] is an attorney in Houston. His website is
www.StephanKinsella.com.

From: "John Kaminski" <skylax@...>
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 10:14 AM
Subject: We are as others see us


We are as others see us

By John Kaminski
skylax@...

We are not who we say we are. To insist we are is to say that the rest
of the world doesn't count, that the opinions of our friends don't
matter, that their honest attempts at objectivity are not really
important to us.

We are not who we think we are, or claim to be. We are what others say
we are, which is why in courts and schools and businesses, we don't
accept what people claim about themselves; we ask witnesses, teachers
and references. We are who others say we are.

If we continue to say that our opinion of ourselves is all that
matters
and everything that others say is mere envy, we are practicing a
demented, paranoid self-centeredness, and will never be good neighbors
to anyone, nor legitimate citizens of the world. This behavior is
justifiably ostracized and ridiculed - and often treated medically -
in
most polite society.

Yet this is the course America is on, ignoring all the criticism from
people who have proven they're our friends, and following our own
selfish hearts without ever admitting that because of our behavior,
the
world is bleeding.

Recently, the august and enigmatic nation of France has tried to show
us
the error of our ways, and to show our gratitude we responded with
ethnic slurs and insults. The French have probably been our most
consistent allies over time; they even helped us fight the British on
occasion. They are our friends. But now, in our self-assured, insular
and arrogant ignorance, we castigate them for advocating the
elementary
rules of civil civilization.

Germany, Russia, Turkey, Chile and even Cameroon have out-achieved the
United States in the category of basic humanity and civilized behavior
in recent weeks, but Americans only scoff at their unsophisticated
naivet�. How could they dare preach peace when America has its heart
set
on war, no matter how unjust or predatory? Who do they think they are,
Americans demand to know, when the United States has already decided
what is best for the entire world?

Then, consider China's recent assessment of the United States, as
furnished in a report from the Xinhua News Agency.

Now you can say China is our adversary, and that everything the
Chinese
say about us is mere propaganda. Or, you can try to be honest, and
accept their observations as the semi-objective facts they are. You
tell
me - and yourself - as to whether this report has the ring of truth.

. The U.S. always issues reports about the state of democracy around
the
world but never reports objectively about itself. True or false?

The six-part Xinhua article challenges the myth of "American
Democracy,"
citing such human rights violations in the U. S. as widespread
violence,
suspicious judicial decisions, a widening gap between rich and the
poor,
systemic gender and racial discrimination, and pervasive interference
and exploitation in the affairs of other nations. Are these
assessments
untrue?

"Under the pretext of safeguarding this kind of democracy," the report
states,  "the United States continues to make rash criticisms of other
countries and interferes in their internal affairs. "Nevertheless,"
the
article noted, "well-informed people know that the so-called democracy
has been nothing more than a fairy tale since the United States was
founded more than 200 years ago."

Consider the facts this Chinese article uses to critique American
society. And ask yourself - without making any defensive judgments
about
the motives of China to obscure the credibility of what is being
said -
if these assertions are not true. Then ask yourself why these
questions
are not being asked by the very people who should be asking them -
namely ourselves.

. The 2000 election debacle further exposed the glaring flaws of the
so-called democratic election system in the United States. Fifty
million
voters cast ballots, less than one-fourth of the 205 million eligible
voters in the nation, a record low in U.S. election history. Is
democracy only a fairy tale? Xinhua asked. True or false?

The reports quotes Larry Makinson, executive director of the Center
for
Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that studies money and
campaigns.
"The depressing thing about American democracy is I can check the
fund-raising balances at the Federal Election Commission and tell you
what the election results will be before the election."

The article also says the judicial system in the U.S. is extremely
unfair:  90 percent of the persons on Death Row have been victims of
sexual abuse and  assaults. Most who were sentenced to death were too
poor to hire their own  attorneys. And it quoted a Columbia University
study insisting that in 68 percent of death penalty cases in the U.S.,
the sentence did not fit the crime. Sound familiar?

The Xinhua report also notes that spending for prisons far exceeds the
budget for education.

And that the gap between the rich and poor in the United States has
widened at the same pace as overall economic growth.

"Statistics show that the richest that account for one percent of the
U.S. citizens are in possession of 40 percent of the total property of
the country, while over 32 million citizens, or 12.7 percent of the
total population of the country, live under the poverty line," Xinhua
asserted.

Do we dare ask ourselves if this a real picture of democratic America?
Or is China just waxing propagandistic?

Is China correct when it insists that America "stop arrogantly
ordering
other countries around on the pretext of human rights" that the U.S.
itself doesn't really practice? Or are we just going to insist, along
with our very religious president, that China merely envies our
freedom?

And what do we make of it when someone who is our erstwhile enemy
speaks
to us more honestly than our own government? What kind of condition
are
we in when that happens?

When we encounter opinions about ourselves that may not coincide with
our own observations, we rightly must ask who is correct: them or us?
But we must be objective, or else the question is useless. So we turn
to
other sources for verification and decision, and in this case, one
more
favorable to our own need for self-respect, namely that quintessential
American newspaper, The New York Times.

The recent report by Roger Morris on how Saddam Hussein first came to
power in Iraq is especially enlightening.

He writes: "Forty years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, under
President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad,
carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein."

In 1963, the tyrant of the day who was seen as a threat to the West
was
Abdel Karim Kassem, a general who five years earlier had deposed yet
another Western-installed monarchy, Morris reports.

The Eisenhower administration's tolerance of Kassem as a counter to
Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Nasser of Egypt, was much like
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush behaved toward Saddam in the
1980's
against the common foe of Iran.  By 1961, the Kassem regime began
threatening and talked openly of challenging the dominance of America
in
the Middle East - all steps Saddam was to repeat in some form.
Kassem's
days, like Saddam's are now, became numbered.

In 1963, Kassem was overthrown and executed. The U.S.-installed
successor was the anti-Communist Baath Party, and a key U.S. liaison
in
the conspiracy was Saddam, then a 25-year-old who figured prominently
in
the bloodbath that followed. In 1968, in another coup assisted by the
U.S., Saddam came to power, by then, a good friend of the CIA.

To knowledgeable people in the Middle East and Europe, this history is
well-known. Most Americans have no clue about it. So when America
preaches about the nobility of its motives today in Iraq, much of the
rest of the world knows what vicious horsepoop it is.

George W. Bush is simply repeating a cynical pattern that the U.S. has
followed in Iraq and other Arab countries for decades on end, but most
Americans remain, in their trivia-dominated self-centeredness,
clueless.

And this is where we are today, as a nation. Will we listen to what
the
people of the world are telling us about ourselves, or continue to act
out our own self-deluded fantasies of messianic and racist
superiority?

For God's sake, the key to integrity is admitting our faults,
confessing
our sins. Everybody in the whole world realizes this. Yet America
admits
no faults, and by this megalomaniacal act, reveals to the world it has
no integrity, and is not to be trusted by its neighbors, nor by the
people of the world.

Will we risk the future of all life on this planet for the schemes of
a
few powerful men who are trying to steal money they don't really need
from all of the rest of us who genuinely do?

These are men who don't listen to anybody and truly fit the
description
of both schoolyard bullies and paranoid delusionals. One day, they'll
really get what's coming to them. We can't let them force us to share
the same fate that awaits them, and if we'd read a little history and
listened to the opinions of our friends, we surely wouldn't.


     John Kaminski is writer who lives on the coast of Florida and
occasionally has doubts about his own thoughts, but in such cases
usually relies on the opinions of his friends to determine if he's
right
or wrong.

Interrogating the dead Al-Qaida, or Are we Stupid?
http://paknews.com/editorials.php?id=1&date1=2003-03-04
<http://paknews.com/editorials.php?id=1&date1=2003-03-04>



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

======================================================
All,

In February, 2003, a Florida appeals court reversed a
$425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre
and against Fox News [as reported by SierraTimes.com
article below]. In effect, the court ruled that there
is no law that compels the Media to tell the truth. In
my usual area of interest and commentary, I most often
find myself appalled by court rulings; in this
instance I must agree with the outcome.  Of course,
there are enough statutes, regulations and rules in
print that, had the court been disposed to rule the
other way around, the written decision would no doubt
have contained an equal amount of convincing rhetoric
and citations.  Be that as it may, if we were to make
lying itself a crime, more people would wind up in
jail than out.  In the Freedom Movement I think we
sometimes get our principles confused and wind up
violating one in our eagerness to enforce another.

Mainstream Media just may be the single most serious
enemy faced by those who yearn to restore a way of
life based upon liberty, responsibility and honest
governance.  Yet, do we seriously believe that having
the gov't pass a whole new Title full of "Honesty
Statutes" is going to be healthy for our society? Of
course Media lies!  So does just about every saleman
who ever made a pitch.  How many exaggerations
("white" lies) have you heard from folks advancing
their pet theory or peddling this or that "strategy"
in the Freedom Movement? Some of these folks have
truly damaged others with their schemes and scams and
perhaps should be sued or incarcerated. On the other
hand, some honest patriots have become political
targets, are in jail and shouldn't be. Politically
motivated justice rarely is. Can any government be
trusted to correctly and honestly apply criminal
sanctions for "not telling the truth"?  How absurd is
that?

How many rationalizations are there for "selling blue
sky" to people "for their own good"?  Ask yourself if
you have ever been selective in your choice of which
facts to disclose -- or indulged in a bit of "spin" --
for personal advantage. Whatever happened to the no
victim/no crime principle?  Isn't that what tort law
is all about? Victims of dishonesty, if they are not
ashamed to expose their own gullibility and possible
lack of due diligence, can attest to their damages in
court and seek a favorable judgment from a jury of
their peers.

"Caveat emptor" is a legal principle that, like other
instances of adversity, builds character and
intelligence. This is what
www.mythoftheinnocentcivilian is all about.  People do
not have a God-given right to "honest gov't" or
"honest Media" or honest anything. They have a moral
duty to be honest themselves, to seek the Truth and
resist that which is not of the Truth. Unprincipled,
dishonest and ego-driven people are part of the human
condition and will always figure out ways to deceive,
no matter how many laws are passed and no matter how
many courts "rule" that they must be honest.  The
Truth is not a "civil right".  Good grief!  Look at
the courts themselves: perhaps the most gross example
of intellectual dishonesty on the planet is judicial
"sophistry".

Consider the instances in which Americans have already
allowed the de jure regulation of "truth telling" in
licensed professions.  There are volumes of laws
against "dishonesty" in law, in medicine, and in
various specific areas of commerce.  And what do we
see in law, in medicine, or in banking and financial
services? Dishonesty in these professions is a sick,
public joke -- a given.

It has been pointed out that once government launches
a "war" against something, what we get is decidedly
more of that something: gov't war on illiteracy (50's)
= the greatest dumbing down of the population in the
history of the nation; the gov't war on poverty (60's
- 70's)= more people on the welfare roles than ever;
gov't war on drugs = proliferation of drug use worse
than ever, including known CIA involvement in drug
sales to generate funding for illegal, "black-ops";
now gov't "war on terror" = the official gutting of
the Constitution and a de facto atmosphere of hysteria
and paranoia throughout America.  Does anyone
seriously want a gov't "war on dishonesty"? Talk about
having the fox guard the henhouse; might as well hire
the fox to butcher, package and deliver the chicken.

Human beings have not only a moral responsibility, but
a spiritual need to dig for the truth.  Each of us
must do the hard work to discount and expose sources
that lie, misrepresent, deceive, distort, and twist
("attorn") -- whether those sources be mainstream
Media, the courts, elected officials, or just regular
folks who can't seem to tell the truth. (One may, of
course, make judgments about lies without standing in
moral judgment of any particular liar; for it is
extremely difficult to know for sure why another
chooses or needs to lie.)

In this instance, a small group of some of the world's
most renowned liars (judges) have gotten it about
right: there is (or should be) no law compelling the
Media to tell the truth. Actually, to officially
empower government as "guarantor" of the Truth would
be about the worst mistake a "governed" people could
ever make.  In a "de facto" sense the mistake has
already been made. Look around at those poor lost
souls who in their daily lives quite obviously rely
almost totally upon Media and government for their
sense of reality. Codify that?

Having said all this, and having no particular
interest in criminal charges (with the possible
exception of the pipe dreams of misprision of felony,
sedition and treason) I confess to being greatly
intrigued by the possibility of some massive, class
action lawsuit against the several potential
defendants in the mainstream Media -- for damages in,
let's say, the trillions of dollars for fraud, both
actual and constructive, connected with conspiracy,
resulting in massive financial losses as a result of
taxes paid but not owed; wars fought under false
pretenses with the attendant loss of limbs, lives and
futures; and incalculable physical, emotional and
social suffering the exaction for which might only be
the giving up of one's own life in payment.

Where is the courtroom in which this lawsuit might be
filed?  Were there such a courtroom, and a brave,
honest judge to hear the case, what damages do you
suppose a civil jury could or would award? It's
fruitless speculation, but I would think that a jury,
fully informed of the magnitude of the damages in this
matter, might be inclined to engage in the ultimate
"jury nullification" -- lynch the defendants,
liquidate their assets and divide them equally among
the plaintiffs. The jury would be imposing a penalty
where there is no statute; but, what the heck, they've
been doing that in tax trials for decades. At least
this time it would be just.

In the final analysis, there will be such a courtroom,
and there is such a Judge -- but not in America and
not in the Hague, nor anywhere else on Earth. In the
meantime I don't mind sorting out the lies; I need the
practice to keep myself honest -- in preparation for
my own appearance before that Judge. ;-)

ICE
================================================
RE:
From: Jeff Bowman
From: AlthompsonCA@... [mailto:AlthompsonCA@...]

Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2003 8:17 AM
Subject: This is Big
Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie.

By Mike Gaddy

Published 02. 28. 03 at 19:31 Sierra Time

On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is
absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or
distorting information by a major press organization.
The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor
of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured
by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what
she knew and documented to be false information. The
ruling basically declares it is technically not
against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately
lie or distort the news on a television broadcast. On
August 18, 2000, a six-person jury was unanimous in
its conclusion that Akre was indeed fired for
threatening to report the station's pressure to
broadcast what jurors decided was "a false, distorted,
or slanted" story about the widespread use of growth
hormone in dairy cows. The court did not dispute the
heart of Akre's claim, that Fox pressured her to
broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster
from having to defend the truth in court, as well as
suffer the ire of irate advertisers. Fox argued from
the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in
front of three different judges, to have the case
tossed out on the grounds there is no hard, fast, and
written rule against deliberate distortion of the
news. The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron
Rupert Murdock, argued the First Amendment gives
broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort
news reports on the public airwaves. In its six-page
written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the
Federal Communications Commission position against
news distortion is only a "policy," not a promulgated
law, rule, or regulation. Fox aired a report after the
ruling saying it was "totally vindicated" by the
verdict.

http://www.sierratimes.com/03/02/28/arpubmg022803.htm

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From: "Paul Zimmerman" <plj120288@...>
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 06:06:32 -0500
Subject: [piml] Is Being Anti-War Being Unpatriotic?

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030221/index.php

Is Being Anti-War Being Unpatriotic?
Charley Reese

Some advocates of war with Iraq have questioned the
patriotism of some
Americans who oppose the war. This is a valid issue
that people ought
to
think about. What is "patriotism"? What is
"unpatriotic"?

My definition of patriotism is someone who loves the
land and the
people who
live there. It does not include loving the government.
Government, at
least
in the eyes of the Founding Fathers of this country,
is merely a tool
for
achieving a higher end � to wit, the protection of the
rights of the
people.
It was not just Thomas Jefferson who warned against
the dangers of
government. George Washington, in the opposite
political party, the
Federalists, warned that government was like fire � a
useful servant
but a
fearful master.

So, obviously, one might love the country but disagree
with the
government,
since the country and the government are not the same.
Under what
circumstances is it unpatriotic to disagree with the
government? The
Constitution defines treason, the ultimate unpatriotic
act, this way:
"Treason against the United States shall consist only
of levying war
against
them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid
and comfort. No
person shall be convicted of treason unless on the
testimony of two
witnesses to the same overt act or on confession in
open court."

(Note, by the way, that the Constitution always speaks
of the United
States
in the plural, just as my Confederate ancestors
believed them to be,
but
that is a subject for another column.)

No one opposing a war against Iraq is levying war
against the United
States.
"To adhere" means to give support and allegiance. No
one that I know of
is
supporting or pledging allegiance to the government of
Iraq.
Furthermore,
since there is no declaration of war by Congress,
there is legally no
enemy.
That, by the way, was how people who gave aid and
comfort to the North
Vietnamese escaped prosecution during the Vietnam War,
which, in the
legal
sense, was not a war.

During the past 100 years, the United States was
attacked only twice:
once
by Japan and, on Sept. 11, 2001, by al-Qaida. After
the attack by Japan
and
the subsequent declaration of war against us by
Germany, it would have
been
unpatriotic to argue against the United States
defending itself. It is,
in
my opinion, unpatriotic to argue against pursuing and
destroying
al-Qaida,
since we have been attacked by it and the leader of
that organization
has
declared war on us.

President Bush erred, however, by focusing his ire far
beyond al-Qaida.
There is no link between al-Qaida and Iraq. The
terrorist who Mr. Bush
claims is connected to al-Qaida has his camp in
Northern Iraq, which is
controlled by Kurds and the United States, not by the
Iraqi government.
When
Mr. Bush declared his intention to war against any
country "harboring"
terrorists, he opened a can of worms. He opened
another can when he
expanded
his war against terrorism to groups that have not
attacked the United
States.

Al-Qaida is a clandestine organization of separate
cells, each
containing a
few individuals. Are we harboring terrorists? There
certainly were and
probably still are al-Qaida people living in our
country, as well as in
Western Europe. Unless a government openly supports
al-Qaida, as the
Taliban
did in Afghanistan, I don't think you can say it is
harboring
terrorists
just because some members live there or pass through.
Al-Qaida is not
openly
operating in any country in the world today.

It is no more unpatriotic to disagree with the
government's foreign
policy
than it is to disagree with its domestic policy.
Policy disagreements
are an
essential feature of a free country. We don't say
someone is
unpatriotic if
he or she doesn't like the way the government operates
Medicare; we
should
not say that about people who disagree with the
government's foreign
policy.

� 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.



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======================================================
A tedious, sobering, but highly interesting read -- especially when
one reflects upon the state of the political parties (and other
sources of "belonging") in America throughout the last century or
so.  ICE
======================================================
From: "Tee" <eagle1@...>
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 8:01 AM
Subject: The New Leninism

http://antiwar.com/nagle/n021703.html

The New Leninism

I have a dream.  The Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square has been
purchased by an American foundation and carefully moved to Washington
to take its place among the monuments of the nation's capital.  It
has been situated in the center of the reflecting pool in front of
the Lincoln Memorial, and special stone walkways have been
constructed to rise from the bottom of the pond and provide access by
foot for state dignitaries on special occasions, such as the
anniversary of the revolutionary leader's birth on April 22nd, when
wreaths are laid and solemn tribute is paid.
The vision of US Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and a long line of
international statesmen all standing before the red constructivist
edifice, heads bowed and hands on heart, is the picture that captures
the true essence of historian Francis Fukuyama's "end of history."

WHAT LENINISM MEANS Historians have generally associated Lenin, nee
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, with Communism, because Lenin successfully
established a regime proclaiming adherence to the ideology of Karl
Marx, who articulated something called "Communism" in his theoretical
volumes.  "Marxism-Leninism," then, was "Marxism made concrete," and
after Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917, historians frequently
neglected to draw bold lines between "Communism"
on the one hand, and "Leninism" on the other.  This was true even for
historians highlighting the fact that Lenin played fast and loose
with the official ideology, and conceding the possibility of being a
Communist without being a Leninist or, theoretically, vice versa.

Leninism represents progress, but not necessarily Marxist progress.
It sees state power as a tool of progress on a global scale, as
summed up by Lenin himself in the simple equation, Communism = Soviet
[i.e., state] power + electrification of the whole country - not a
Marxist definition of Communism, whatever its meaning in terms of
left and right.  As an ideology devoid of left-right content,
Leninism could be defined as adherence to a purely political-tactical
set of principles, like "the end justifies the means" (i.e., use any
means necessary to achieve a desired outcome), "the worse, the
better" (i.e., fundamental change only comes when conditions are so
bad that social transformation is inevitable), and "give them enough
rope" (i.e., political elites will bring about their own demise by
their greed and corruption).  But even these tenets do not capture
the fundamental essence of Leninism.

LENIN AND THE HIGH PRIESTHOOD OF PROGRESS Central to Leninism, as
opposed to Marxism, was the concept of the "Party."
As British wine critic Roger Scruton wrote in his book An Intelligent
Person's Guide to Modern Culture:

Despite his intellectual mediocrity, Lenin has been a more decisive
influence on social and political ideas in Western Europe than any
other modern thinker, since it was his conception of the party which
offered to intellectuals their clearest vision of their social role.
The Leninist party is the new "exit" sign.  All and only
intellectuals can pass through its golden gates and into the social
stratosphere.  And in doing so they are released from earthly ties
and obligations and given absolute sovereignty over the world and its
goods.  They rediscover their priestly role, and with it the gift of
prophecy.

The "Party," not Marxism or Communism, forms the core of Leninism.
Lenin understood something fundamental about humans, or at least most
humans, and that is that they want to "belong." Those with a desire
to "belong" can be relied upon to command others to build the new
order, the others being outside history and reliable swallowers of
whatever is put in front of their faces.  The humans desirous of
belonging fear exclusion from the Party, where lies uncertainty, loss
of prestige, social unacceptability, and even material scarcity, and
so they agree to define themselves collectively by means of
identification of an "enemy." The shrill and inhuman rhetoric among
many in the current Party, for example, is a manifestation of their
desire to say and do whatever is necessary to remain among those
with "sovereignty over the world and its goods." Scruton is himself a
Party member at heart, as evidenced by his recent book about the West
and Islam.

Whether or not orthodox Marxism had primacy in the birth of Leninism,
Lenin found the ideology useful because of its "progressiveness," a
seductive force for modernity that pulled large numbers of
Scruton's "intellectual mediocrities" into its swirling vortex and
away from the un-sexy old monarchical, parliamentary-democratic
order.  Tsarist Russia was an empire of outhouses, and the new order
promised industry, electricity and technology.  With the abstract
vision of modernizing transformation in their heads, they embraced
the Party's mission of sweeping away resistance to the new world, and
of sweeping the current world into a rubbish tip.

Many of the intellectual mediocrities had only a tenuous grasp of the
formal ideology itself, just as now - when picturing societies on the
other side of the world they have never visited - War Party members
casually embrace the eradication of backward cultures in favor of the
great modernizing might of the Party.  Whether what actually remains
after the razing of these "backward" societies they've never seen are
desolate, ruined dumps of humanity is of no concern.  People in
countries like Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania do not become more
prosperous and "free"
by virtue of their homelands' admission into Leninist institutions
like NATO, the EU or the WTO, but they do achieve "progress,"
something all Party members appreciate even from a great distance.

Part of Leninism is what the neo-conservative writer, Party member
and high priest Michael Ledeen has termed "creative destruction" in
his latest book, The War Against the Terror Masters:

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and
abroad.  We tear down the old order every day, from business to
science, literature, art, architecture and cinema to politics and the
law.  Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and
creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and
shames them for their inability to keep pace.  We must destroy them
to advance our historic mission.

This is "cultural" Leninism, and indeed Lenin had no time for the
view that culture should be a social force on a par with politics and
economics.
He allowed people to pursue their individual cultural interests, as
long as they did not organize on a broad scale on the basis of common
culture, and in a way that threatened the supremacy of the Party.  So
it is with the current Leninists.

Some may argue that, because "progress" can be viewed differently,
the Party can be a different priesthood from a Leninist one, pursuing
different ends by different means.  Indeed, the concept of the Party
was also central to the Fascists and Nazis, who had their own view of
progress.  But fascism is a strain of Leninism, and Roger Scruton has
described Nazism as a "perverted outgrowth of the Russian
Revolution." Fascism is "perverted Leninism" because - from the point
of view of a political class with designs on power over the whole
world - it is a crackpot ideology.

Right Leninism (fascism) is racist, and therefore inevitably
alienates large numbers of people, people who otherwise be
politically utilized were it not for the exclusivity - and hence mean-
spiritedness - of the race-based, ruling Right-Leninist Party.
Desiring "sovereignty over the world and its goods" like any
Leninists, the Right-Leninist Party must ultimately deal with the
excluded population, even if it simply transports it to a far-away
place geographically in the short term.  Under Left (or Pure)
Leninism, the excluded population (dissenters) can be "assimilated"
by ideological indoctrination.  Those who resist will of course have
to be physically eliminated even under Pure Leninism, but it is
assumed they will number far fewer than the victims of Right
Leninism's "holocaust."

In the case of America, Right Leninism is not built into the
political system in a way that would allow it to facilitate world
conquest, and indeed America is not exporting racial or religious
dominance with its global interventionism.  The places that America
has invaded, bombed, and turned into dumps of international
administration have not become mono-racial theocracies.  Pure
Leninism, however, is comfortably accommodated in America's political
system in such a way that it can form the motivating force in
American foreign policy.

Lenin, a lawyer by profession, appreciated the potential for America -
founded on the principle of egalitarianism - to experience internal
social and economic tensions.  Even leaving Marxist dialectics aside,
the natural tendency of any nation-state to seek an accumulation of
material wealth abroad by force and imperialism already applied
visibly to America by the time Lenin sent Trotsky and Bukharin to New
York in 1916 to see what the place looked like.  Lenin said that
imperialism was the "highest stage of capitalism," a Marxist
euphemism for "give 'em enough rope," and Lenin predicted that
America - poorly designed for imperialism - would embark on
imperialism anyway, and stagger inexorably toward the same grave all
empires before it had fallen into.

DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM vs.  TRUE DEMOCRACY Those with unshakeable
faith in "democracy" will dispute the view of Lenin triumphant at the
end of history.  They will say that parliamentary democracies are now
the formal norm throughout the industrialized world, whereas Lenin
was not, in the final analysis, a democrat.  For these people,
Fukuyama's complacent view of the "liberal democracy" as the endpoint
of mankind's historical struggle, the resolution of the historical
conflict between conflicting ideas of social and political
organization, remains unsullied.  But to assert that the New World
Order will not be one, big, happy, multi-party "liberal democracy" is
not the same as saying it will be a dictatorship.

Lenin was not a democrat, but he was not a dictator either, unlike
his crude successor Stalin.  Lenin tolerated dissent within the un-
elected Party, and did not order the execution of Party members who
disagreed with him.  In fact, Lenin even conceded loss when outvoted
on the Politburo.
Party members were purged during Lenin's tenure, but there was not
the macabre culture of political show-trials of Stalin's era, the
most high-profile show trial during Lenin's leadership being the
trial of the SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries).  The SRs were not
Bolsheviks, but only shared power briefly with Lenin's Party in the
government after the Revolution, and ultimately proved
untrustworthy.  There were of course wars of conquest throughout the
territory of empire under Lenin, but these were pacifying and
unifying wars, just as there are plenty of pacifying and unifying
wars now in the world of victorious "liberal democracies" at the end
of history.

In much the same way as Lenin's Party did, the War faction of the
current Party also tolerates dissent from within its ranks, and so
far has not shot any dissenters.  Antiwar.com and other opponents of
the march to war can rant and rave all we like from outside the
Party, and demonstrators can gather by the hundreds of thousands in
cities all across the West, but these manifestations of popular will
do not threaten the War Party as long as they do not represent a
rival Party, tightly organized according to Leninist principles.

Instead of Communism, the War Party uses the progressive ideology
of "freedom, democracy, and universal human rights" to advance its
cause internationally.  This is of course a lie, a tactic used by
Hitler but also by Lenin, and to more lasting effect than by the ex-
corporal and Austrian WWI veteran.  To the less zealously religious,
the nation is shown as a force for tolerance, modernity and freedom
around the world.  In fact, the War Party's ideology is simply power -
  the power of the New World Order exported by force under the guise
of lofty, bogus language about liberation.  The real ideology is
about destruction, occupation and control.
It is about reshaping, uprooting and emptying out of populations and
societies.  And it is about crushing reaction or sentimental
resistance.
It is about Leninism.  Anybody with ambitions to be anybody wants to
be on the side of the Party, the destroyer.  The others are
irrelevant.

Inside America, meanwhile, an ideology is presented that is more
crude, more akin to Right Leninism.  Muslims are depicted as an enemy
at the gates, desirous of killing Christians.  Since most Americans
are Christians, this plays well.  Many Americans can be made to
believe that Islam is evil because people like Pat Robertson and Cal
Thomas - who they enjoy watching or reading with their morning
coffee - tell them so.  These are the good Americans who never go
anywhere and have never been the guest in the home of a Muslim in a
Muslim country.

When the Party speaks, these good people swallow the line with their
eggs and bacon, or their cheeseburgers and fries at lunchtime.  The
church is still down the road, and the godlessness of the New World
Order hasn't taken over their little neighborhood yet so they don't
care who gets bombed to pieces five thousand miles away.  Saddam
Hussein is an "evil man," so why not drop a bomb on him "over
there"?  "He's a long way away, so please just take care of him and
let me get back to the sports section." Most of these people are
Christians, but are oblivious to the fact that the vicious slime in
the columns of syndicated pundits about wiping out Muslims worldwide
is appealing to the very worst in their own human nature.

Lenin understood the newspaper readers - their hypocrisies, their
timidity, their helplessness and their malleability.  He also grasped
their short memory spans.  He knew that the average person anywhere
in the world can experience the tearing apart of the settled life he
or she has come to know, and the transformation of his or her
familiar surroundings into a dump, but will inevitably pick up the
pieces and adjust.  Destroy their gods, their myths, and the little
sentimental things they cherish, and do it by force, resolutely,
before they have time to think.  Is Leninism evil?
After all, we may think the dictator Saddam Hussein and his flaky
regime are monsters, but they are after all nothing as compared to
the destructiveness of the Leninist New World Order.  Yet, in the
end, perhaps there is a strange sort of peace under Leninism,
extended across the entire globe, with the Party sitting on top of
the world.  So maybe Leninism really is "justice" after all.

LENINISM AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER A Christian acquaintance recently
expressed the sentiment to me that America should wipe out all
Muslims around the world and "let God sort 'em out." When I inquired
gently as to how America would conquer, occupy and pacify all the
states that are home to the world's billion or so Muslims, he
responded: "One at a time." He was fully willing, from his home in
Richmond, Virginia, to entertain the idea of American armed forces
smashing non-Christian enemies across the globe one-by-one, because
it was "them or us." He even quoted passages of the Koran as evidence
that Muslims are duty-bound by faith to murder Christians.

If this demented view prevails, and it looks as if it may, then one
of two things will happen.  Either America will succeed in conquering
and controlling the whole world, imposing peace under the terms that
its political elite desires, or else America will fail, in which case
it will recede into non-superpower status.  Under either imperial
scenario, Leninism wins.

Under the first scenario, the world is united under "peace American-
style"
- no state religion, no sovereignty of nation-states, and humanity
united in a brotherhood of "universal human rights." Sure, there may
be reports coming in constantly of a war somewhere off in the
distance, a war to make the world "safe for freedom," and there will
be tales of the latest fate to befall the troops in their never-
ending battle against some eternally threatening enemy.  There may
also be a network of domestic citizen-informers to uphold state
security.  But core areas will be peaceful from day-to-day.  Under
the second scenario, American economic power recedes, and the
political elite in the rest of the industrialized world -
made up as it is of Leninists by virtue of their former membership in
Leninist parties (followers of the conceited Trotsky and so forth) -
sets the agenda in concert with Leninists from the once-powerful
United States.

Eventually, imperialism destroys the imperialist nation-state, and
one way or another the "liberal democracy" of America will be
rendered unrecognizable by its foolish imperial adventure.  In
countries where ordinary people have guns, such as America, even if
the country as a whole cannot secede from the New World Order, there
may be pockets of rebellion against the New World Order as that
country's own gods and myths are being destroyed.  Resistance will
not be based on a highbrow ideology - trendy Gramscian socialism, non-
Leninist Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc.  -
since esoteric ideas cannot unite and save the common man.  It will
be only a recognition of the need to protect what he honestly
believes is good and true about his life and his community in the
place where he lives, and the will to join with others to fight to
protect it.

In 1871, the Paris Commune lasted just over two months before it was
crushed by troops of the French government imposing peace on the
terms of the victorious Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War.  Its
rallying cry was not social revolution but popular self-government.
Resembling an admirable attempt to "secede" from the New World Order,
it failed not only because it lived its short life under constant
siege, but because the men who fought to defend it lacked effective
leadership and experience in administering government.  Scholar Hans-
Herman Hoppe, in his book Democracy - The God That Failed, writes
idealistically of secession from the New World Order thus:

The process of centralization has resulted in the formation of an
international, U.S.-dominated government cartel of managed migration,
trade, and fiat money, ever more invasive and burdensome governments,
globalized welfare-warfare statism and economic stagnation or even
declining standards of living.  Secession, if it is extensive enough,
could change all this.  The world would consist of tens of thousands
of distinct countries, regions and cantons, and of hundreds of
thousands of independent free cities such as the present-
day "oddities" of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong
Kong, and Singapore.  Greatly increased opportunities for
economically motivated migration would result, and the world would be
one of small liberal governments economically integrated through free
trade and an international commodity money such as gold.  It would be
a world of unheard of prosperity, economic growth, and cultural
advancement.

Prof.  Hoppe does not explain the means by which a region or canton
is to secede, but it may be that the spirit of the Commune - a non-
Leninist form of Communism - is what is required of any community
facing imminent destruction by the Leninist muscle of the New World
Order.  To survive, such a community would have to be united by a
bond of resistance, and led by men able to conceive of the enemy as
evil.  At the same time, it would have to think in a Leninist way in
order to beat the Leninism threatening it.
Almost no one seriously entertains the belief that this is possible,
any more than they entertain Prof.  Hoppe's sunny vision.  This only
goes to show Lenin's unmatched understanding of humans, and why Lenin
was right.

THE NUCLEUS OF WORLD LENINISM In 1988, I visited the Lenin Mausoleum
for the first time, when there was still an immaculate and elite
honor guard posted outside it at all times, and the changing of the
guard ceremony was a perfectly executed ritual.
The line to get in was very long but moved surprisingly quickly.  It
was cold, and I wore a fur hat along with the other visitors.  But as
I was about to enter the tomb, an armed guard reached forward and
pulled my hat off, ordering me to show a little respect.

Descending the steps into the chamber, I wondered why it had been
designed so grimly.  The marble walls were a mixture of black and
deep red on either side of the steps going down, and in the little
room at the bottom, the body of a physically small man in a black
suit was lying in a glass case under red lighting that made his
pointed goatee and the remnants of hair around his crown glow bright
crimson.  There was no chance to stop, only to look while moving, and
in moments I was climbing back out of the satanic setting into the
light.

The dark, constructivist tomb still sits in the place of honor where
it was built, but there is no changing of the guard ceremony and not
even any elite guards.  Only a few regular uniformed police stand
watch.  I hear tourists can still visit, as I did a few years after
the break-up of the Soviet Union, but the Mausoleum today is treated
as little more than a tourist curiosity in its host country these
days.  With the mafia-led Russian government ready to sell off loyal
outposts of empire piece by piece, as evidenced by the slow
strangulation of the Kaliningrad enclave on the Baltic coast, perhaps
the Kremlin will flog the Mausoleum to a Leninist US foundation for a
reasonable price.  Then the architectural offering to Lenin's memory
can move to a place in which the ideas of the diminutive man who's
body it occupies are truly respected, to World Leninism's new
headquarters: America.

From: "Paul Revere" <kryan@...>
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 9:01 AM
Subject: banking


I came across this in the www.bankfreedom.com and thought it did a
good job of explaining the banking system, a system that everyone
needs to be well versed in.  It an easy read.

The controversy is over which banking system to use.  There are two.
The following are the basics.

Tom Schauf believes we should use the following banking system.  The
Government prints United States Notes or gold or silver coins.  If
the government needs $1 billion to build a road, the government
prints $1 billion and uses the money to pay for the road.  The
taxpayers incur no debt and no tax and everyone equally benefits
using the road.  You work and earn $10,000.  You deposit the $10,000
in the bank.  The bank loans the $10,000 to borrowers.  Borrowers
repay the bank the $10,000 and the bank returns the $10,000 to you.
The one who funded the loan should be repaid the money.
Bankers bitterly oppose this banking system.  Honest Abraham Lincoln
used United States Notes saving taxpayers taxes and saved Americans
from going into debt.

Bankers, politicians, judges, sheriffs and the media favor the
following banking system.  If the government needs $1 billion to
build a road, the government prints $1 billion of cash.  The
government gives the cash to the bankers for free (or the cost of
printing the money).  The bankers loan the $1 billion of newly
created money to the government forcing the taxpayers into $1 billion
of debt, forcing the taxpayers to pay taxes of $1 billion plus
interest.  This is how the $5 trillion of national debt was created.
According to Bob Dole, about 40 percent of personal IRS tax goes to
pay interest on the national debt.  In the same manner, when you get
a local bank loan or credit card loan, the bank creates new money and
loans the money to you.  Every time new money is created, the bank
loans you the money.  Tom Schauf believes this banking system is
similar to stealing, counterfeiting or swindling.  If we followed
honest Abraham Lincoln, we would not have a $5 trillion debt and no
need for personal IRS tax.  Bankers argue bankers should get the
money for free and loan it to Americans creating huge debts for the
voters.  We should ask who profits from creating money and who has
more debts.

The controversy is simple.  Should we follow President Lincoln and
the US Constitution or should we allow the bankers to create money
and loan it to us creating huge debts for the average voter?

Tom Schauf, retired Certified Public Accountant, expert witness, has
written two books in everyday language teaching you how to explain
and understand the two banking systems.

People are confused as to what money is and where the money comes
from to fund a bank loan check.  Most people incorrectly think that
money is only cash and that other depositors funded the bank loan
check.  Everyone agrees the borrower should repay the lender.  We all
agree we should repay the one who funded the loan.  The problem is
that most people are confused as to who funded the loan.

In America, money is more than just cash.  Money is anything that has
value and can be sold for cash and is accepted as money.  If you use
gold to buy a car, the gold is used as money.  If you have $10,000 of
government bonds that can be sold for $10,000 of cash and you use the
bonds to buy a $10,000 car, you used the bonds as money.  Banks
routinely accept bonds as money and deposit the bonds into checking
accounts.  If the bank accepted $5,000 of bonds from you, deposited
the bonds into your checking account, and loaned the $5,000 to a
borrower, the borrower should repay the bank, and the bank should
return the $5,000 to you.  A bond is a fancy name for a promissory
note (agreement to repay a loan).  If you ask for a $10,000 bank
loan, the banker has you sign a $10,000 promissory note where you
agree to repay the loan.  The loan agreement says that the bank can
sell your promissory note to investors for $10,000.  The investors
want the interest.  If you do not pay the interest, the bank
forecloses and collects the money.  Both the bond and the note can be
sold for cash giving them equal value to cash.  According to the
Federal Reserve Bank publications, the promissory note that you
signed is money.

When banks deposit the borrower's promissory note into a checking
account, the bank accepted the promissory note as money.  If you
deposit money at the bank, it is like loaning the bank the money.  If
you deposit it or loan the bank the money, you can get the money back.

If you travel to Japan, you will go to a moneychanger to exchange
equal value of American money for Japanese money.  If you exchange
$100 of coins for $100 of cash, you traded value for value.  An
exchange is not a loan.
If you deposit $100 of cash and withdraw a $100 check, that is an
exchange, it is not a loan.  If you loan Joe $100 of cash and he
returns the $100 to you as a loan, two loans were exchanged.  Each
borrower should repay the loan.  If you loan the bank a $1,000 bond
or promissory note that can be sold for $1,000 cash and this loan
funds the bank loan check back to you, then both borrowers should
repay their loans.  The problem is that the bank demands that you
repay your loan as the banker refuses to repay or acknowledge the
loan from you to the bank!

This is the trick.  According to the Federal Reserve Bank
publications, the bank never loaned other depositors' money to fund
the bank loan check to you.  The bank recorded your promissory note
(money) as a loan from you to the bank.  The bank even recorded a
bank liability showing that the bank owes you $10,000 for recording
the $10,000 of money (promissory note) as a loan from you to the bank.

The proof is in Federal Reserve Bank publications Modern Money
Mechanics, page 6, and Public Debt: Private Asset, page 2, and many
other publications admit that the banker created new money when the
bank used your promissory note as new money which the bank deposited
into your checking account with your name on the checking account (a
deposit records the loan from you to the bank).

The $10,000 loan from you to the bank funded the $10,000 check
returned to you as a loan from the bank to you.  Two loans were
exchanged.  Bankers universally agree that the one who funded the
loan should be repaid their money.  They owe you $10,000.

The bank never loaned other depositors' money to you and the bank
never loaned one cent of the bank's money to you.  You funded the
loan to yourself!
You owe the bank $10,000 and the bank owes you $10,000 as proven by
the bank's $10,000 bank liability.  Bankers want you to believe that
the bank loaned you other depositors' money so that you feel
obligated to repay the loan and never ask the bank to repay the loan
from you to the bank.  If the bank never returns the $10,000 to you,
the bank gets your money for free and gets the liens on the nation's
assets for free (the bank forecloses if you do not repay the loan).
The bank gets $10,000 for free.  This has the economic effect similar
to stealing (refusing to repay the loan from you to the bank) and
creates $10,000 of new money which has the economic effect similar to
counterfeiting.

Did you agree to give the bank $10,000 for free and have the same
money returned to you as a loan?  The banker knows that you are not
that stupid.  If you believe that the borrower (banker) should repay
the lender (you), then the bank needs to pay the $10,000 bank
liability owing you money.  If the bank loaned you other depositors'
money, the money should be returned to the other depositors.  If the
bank altered your agreement, loaned you no money to obtain your
promissory note, recorded the money (promissory note) as a loan from
you to the bank to fund the bank loan check, then you should repay
your loan and the bank should repay its loan from you to the bank and
return the money to you.  The economics are similar to stealing your
car or money, selling it for cash, and returning the cash to you as a
loan.  The bank should return the car or money to you because you
funded the loan.  This trick allows the bankers to transfer nearly
all of the wealth to the banker for free forcing the others into
debt.  The controversy is simply: Should the borrower (bank) repay
the lender (you).  If yes, all bank loans could be canceled (paid
off).  When the bank repays the loan from you to the bank, it could
pay off the loan from the bank to you.

If a gunman stole your money and returned it to you as a loan, you
would call the police and demand the money be returned to you.  What
is the difference if a gunman or a banker took your money and
returned it as a loan?  One has a gun and the other, a suit and tie.
Both transferred your wealth to themselves for free and left you in
debt.  Refusing to pay a debt is similar to stealing.

We are not calling bankers criminals.  Bankers are excellent
businessmen who devised a method of getting your money for free and
getting politicians elected to make it appear legal.  The banker did
not steal from you, the banker never told you that he still owes you
money, that there is a bank liability owing you money, and that he
never paid you.

Judge Mahoney called the bankers robbers.  Congressman Louis
McFadden, Former Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and
Currency, called it a swindle.  What is the proof?  The Federal
Reserve Bank publications I Bet You Thought...page 27, and Modern
Money Mechanics pages 2-25, and others admit that the bank creates
new money every time that banks grant loans, the promissory note is
money, and the bank records a loan from you to the bank, resulting in
a new bank liability, showing that the bank owes you money from
recording the promissory note as a loan from you to the bank.

WHY HAVE I NOT HEARD OF THIS BEFORE?  Bankers use this secret to
transfer the wealth from you to the banker for free.  Bankers get the
liens (if you do not pay the loan, the lien allows the banker to
foreclose and get your property for free) on the nation's assets for
free.  Bankers are one of the biggest political funders of judges,
sheriffs, and lawmakers.  If a politician opposes the bankers, the
bankers fund their opponent next election.  Some politicians have
spoken out against the bankers.  The media refuses to report all the
news.  The other politicians have learned not to oppose the bankers
until the voters wake up.  Bankers own or control all major media
through either direct ownership, or by loans or advertising money.
The media controls who is elected.  You relied on the news, only to
learn that they did not want you to learn this secret.  It is all
about profits.

There is one thing that bankers fear: They fear informed, united
voters that can vote out any politician representing the bankers and
can vote in Statesmen representing people changing the banking system.

Tom's books have over 600 questions to ask the banker.  One person
sent the banker 40 questions.  The lender responded by sending
back "zero balance owed" on his car loan.  His $12,000 car loan
became zero.  We have heard similar stories from homes to credit card
debts.  At this time, bankers resist zeroing out larger loans.  We
are told that some lenders make you sign an agreement, saying that
you will not tell, so others will not ask to have their loans zeroed
out.  Bankers have routinely told Tom Schauf that if the American
voters ever learn what the bankers have done to this nation, they are
going to quickly exit the country.  One of the top bankers of this
nation told Tom that bankers control the lawmakers, judges, law
enforcement, and media.  The only thing that the bankers fear is
people learning the truth as to what the bankers have done.  Tom
Schauf says,"We need bankers.  We are not here to destroy the banking
system.  We must stop the economic effect similar to stealing,
counterfeiting, and swindling." The good news is that bankers and
government officials are now coming to Tom and joining him, knowing
soon that the whole nation will learn the truth.

HOW WILL THIS BENEFIT ME?  Court is not the answer.  Bankers control
the judges.  Judges profit from the current banking system.  Why
would the banker want to settle?  It is called damage control.  That
is why the tobacco companies wanted to settle.  The secret is out.
The banker must settle or they will be voted out of office.  OUR GOAL
IS TO GET YOU OUT OF DEBT.
There is no need to sue, lobby, sign petitions, or write nasty
letters.  We ask each people to teach a minimum of three others and
have them join us.  It is free, allowing everyone to join.  Three
becomes 9 and 9 becomes 27, and then
81, 243, 729, 2,187, 6,561, 19,683, 59,049, 177,147, 531,441,
1,594,323,
4,782,969, 14,348,907, 43,046,721...  The truth spreads very quickly
and the banks know if they do not settle, people will elect Tom
Schauf as president to really correct the problem.

Bankers remember American history.  About 160 year ago, the bankers
did the same thing to us.  The grass roots Americans organized and
voted in President Andrew Jackson.  He won by a landslide.  He
canceled their bank and corrected the injustice.

Public opinion changes public policy.  Twenty years ago, no American
would have predicted that tobacco companies would willingly settle
out of court.
Nazi Germany companies using slave labor have recently settled out of
court agreeing to give a billion dollars to victims and their heirs
for slavery in World War II.  Swiss banks are returning money to the
survivors of the holocaust.  Soon, the borrower (banker) will be
forced to repay the lender -
YOU!

Federal Reserve Bank publication Modern Money Mechanics gives the
bankers instructions on how to expand and contract the money supply
to create a recession or depression to increase bank profits and
foreclosures.

If we only used cash, and not give it to the banker for free to be
returned to us as a loan, or gold and silver as the only currency and
money, then banks could not use promissory notes as money nor create
bank induced recessions nor have the economic effect similar to
stealing, counterfeiting, or swindling.  If Lincoln was President
today, and if his cash was the only currency or money, we would not
have a $25 trillion debt or any need for personal IRS tax.

The American Revolutionary War resulted when the King of England
changed the banking system, resulting in the same banking system we
have today.  They left this part out of our history.  Today's banking
system came from England.
What England could not win in a shooting war, the bankers (from
England)
got for free by creating money and placing liens on your property.
If you can counterfeit money and loan it out or steal money and
return it to the victim as a loan, you will own nearly everything for
free.  Politicians allowed it because they personally profit from the
system.

Why are many families dependent on both spouses working?  If someone
kept stealing your money and returning it to you as a loan, both
spouses must work to repay the loan and to get back what was just
stolen.  If we correct the problem, one spouse could stop working and
you would have the same standard of living as you do today.  Today,
both spouses work because they do not understand how money and
banking made them poor and made the bankers and politicians rich.

You have a choice.  You can join us and profit from this information
or you an remain in debt and allow the bankers to get your money for
free.  To prove Tom is wrong, the banker must prove the Federal
Reserve Bank publications are wrong.  Why work and give your money to
the banker for free?

When you receive a credit card loan or a bank loan, you first become
the lender to the bank.  This creates a new bank liability owing you
money for the loan from you to the bank which funded the loan from
the bank to you.  Do you believe that the borrower (bank) should
repay the lender (you)?

Bankers and those supporting the banks have tried to misquote Tom
Schauf, but cannot prove the bank loan does not have an economic
effect similar to stealing, counterfeiting, or swindling.  They may
try and destroy the messenger but they cannot destroy the message.
There is one easy way to spot counterfeit information.  When you know
the truth, the counterfeit is easy to spot.  The key question is
simple.  Should the borrower repay the one who funded the loan?  If
they say yes, your loan is paid off.  If they say know no, you do not
need to repay the loan.  The law says if there is not mutual
understanding in the agreement, then there is no agreement.  They
cannot reveal the real agreement.  Tom's two books reveal the truth
in everyday language.  Bankers fear Tom's two books.

Slavery forces you to work for another for free.  President Lincoln
fought the Civil War to stop slavery.  Lincoln's United States Notes
(cash)
stopped banker's slavery.  Would you object if someone put you in
chains and told you you must work for them for free?  If you refuse,
they whip you until you decide that working for free is better than
being whipped to death.
Would you object if you had to work for a slave master every day for
4 hours for free?  Would you object to having to give your payroll
check to a slave master for free?  Well, guess what?  You have been
doing it all your life.
Before the Civil War, slaves knew they were slaves.  They took your
chains off, making you think you were free, but you still give them
your labor for free.

What would the voters say if Congress voted to have two classes of
citizens?
We have the masters and the slaves.  Congress just outlawed equal
protection (our Constitutional right) which ends two classes of
citizens, The new law allows masters to get nearly all the property
in the nation for free.
The slaves must pay rent to the masters to use the master's
property.  As you pay rent, the masters get your labor for free.  You
have to work to earn a payroll check and you must pay the masters
rent for your car, home, farm, TV, refrigerator, furniture, and
everything you have.  If you refuse to pay the rent, the master takes
you to court and the judge has the sheriff take your car, home, farm,
TV, and other assets away and returns them to the master.  The master
then rents your car, home, and TV out to another slave willing to
work for free and pay the rent.  We just described the economics of
banking in America.

The bankers are the masters and you are the slave.  You want to buy a
$20,000 car.  The master (banker) prints up $20,000 of new money and
buys the car from the seller.  The master has a lien (if the borrower
does not repay the loan, the master has a right to foreclose and take
your car) on the car.
A lien means that the bank/master really owns the car.  Now you must
work to earn $20,000 plus interest and give the banker your time for
free.  Every time a slave wants a home, the banker/master prints the
money and buys the house.  The banker/master gets the house for free
and you must work to earn a payroll check to buy the house from the
master.  EVERY TIME YOU FINANCE A CAR OR HOME, THE MASTER GETS THE
CAR OR HOME FOR FREE AND YOU MUST WORK TO BUY THE CAR OR HOME FROM
THE MASTER.

The banker/master must stop you from counterfeiting money like the
master.
If you could counterfeit money, you would become the master and the
banker no longer gets your labor for free.

The master understands that if everyone (masters and slaves) could
print counterfeit money, then everyone would just stop working and
print money.
Everyone would have a living room full of newly printed money.  The
master would not have any food nor gas to put in his car because
everyone stopped working.  The master understands the difference
between wealth and money.
Assets are wealth.  Assets are things you can sell.  You can sell
your house, car, farm, TV, gold, silver, food, and your labor.  You
sell your time to your employer for a payroll check that you can
exchange for a TV or food.
When a master counterfeits money, the counterfeit money is used to
get your wealth for free.  The master prints up money to buy a house
for free and then he gets your labor for free.  The master knows that
he needs you working so you produce wealth that he can get for free.
The farmer works to produce food.  The truck driver works to get the
food to the grocery store.
Employees at the grocery store work to get the food to you.  People
work to get the gas to the gas station so you have gas to put in your
car.  Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, roofers, and brick layers
will work for 4 or 5 months full time building a house.  The master
simply works for 5 minutes to print up the money to own the house for
free.  The master needs you to work and produce wealth so he can get
it for free, simply by printing money.  Then you must work to pay
rent to the master to use the car or the house you built.
When the master counterfeits money to obtain your wealth for free,
the newly printed money creates inflation.  Inflation decreases the
value of the money that slaves have in savings accounts.  Inflation
increases the cost of buying food and medicine for their children.
Inflation is like a tax.

In 1913, the income tax and Federal Reserve Bank came into existence.
The IRS is merely a collection agency for the Federal Reserve Bank.
The national slavery is simple.  The government prints the cash.  The
government gives the cash to the bank for free (for the cost of
printing the money which is about
3.5 cents for a $100 bill).  The bank loans the same cash to the
government.
This created a $5 trillion government debt we now have.  It is
impossible to pay off the $5 trillion of national debt the way
lawmakers structured the system.  Now, taxpayers must pay IRS taxes
to pay the bankers $5 trillion plus interest every year.  According
to former Congressman Bob Dole, in
1995, nearly 40 percent of personal IRS tax collected went to pay
interest on the national debt.

If you do not pay the tax nor give your labor to the banker for free,
the judge confiscates your bank account, car, and home.  They throw
you in prison and force you into slave labor in a prison work camp.
If we followed President Lincoln and end the slavery, the government
would issue United States Notes (cash) and never give the cash to the
bankers for free, only to be returned to the government as a loan.
Honest Abe would never enslave us like our Congress has today.

If banks loaned other depositors' money to you, it would be like
getting a loan from your neighbor.  No one counterfeits money and
becomes your master.
No one gets your labor for free.  There is equal protection under the
law.  No masters and slaves.  No one gets the nation's assets for
free.

Today, nearly half of the taxes go to the bankers for free.  The
bankers get your money for free and returns it to you as a loan.
Economically speaking, it is similar to a thief who keeps stealing
your car, selling it for cash, and returning the cash to you as a
loan.  This forces many wives to work to pay for the car that was
just stolen.  If someone kept stealing from you and returning the
value of the stolen property to you as a loan, you would be in
perpetual debt and have little money with huge monthly loan
payments.  If you stop the stealing, your wife would not have to work
for the master for free.
Your wife should not be forced to work for the master for free just
to stop the master from foreclosing or forcing you into bankruptcy.

How many hours a week do you work for the master for free?  Add up
your house loan payment or rent (your rent payment is given to the
landlord who gives it to the master), car loan, and bank loan
payments you make every month.
Add in your monthly credit card payments.  Add to this figure, half
of the taxes you pay to the IRS, to your state, and county.  Be sure
to add in sales tax, real estate tax, gas tax, and income tax.  Much
of the tax goes to the banker for free.  Divide this by your monthly
gross income.  This is the percent of labor you give to your master
for free.  Example: Your monthly bank loan and credit card payments
are $2,000.  Half of your taxes you pay for the month comes to
$1,000.  The master received $3,000 from you for free.
Your gross monthly wages are $5,000.  If you take $3,000/$5,000, you
work
60 percent of the time for the banker for free.  This means that if
we correct the problem, your wife could stop working, you could work,
and the family would have the same standard of living as if both
spouses worked and gave 60 percent of their money to the banker for
free.  If we correct the problem, your wife would have the option of
working or not.  If she worked, it would be like doubling the
family's income.  The banker no longer gets her payroll check for
free.  Your wife gets to keep her payroll check and spend all of it
on herself.  The banker does not get 60 percent of her money for free.
Today, the banker gets 60 percent of your payroll check for free and
uses it to buy that fancy house and take those dream vacations that
bankers take.  If you stop working for the banker for free, the dream
vacation you were giving to the banker for free is now your dream
vacation.  The house you gave to the banker for free is now your
house.  When you stop being the slave, you will have more time and
more money.  When you stop being the slave, you will have more time
to spend with your spouse and children and have more wealth and
money.  What would you be doing if you did not have to work?  Would
you take your children to the zoo?  Would you take a vacation?  Would
you have fun relaxing?

Should anyone give half their labor to the banker for free?  Do you
want your children to be slaves?

Why have you not heard this from the media?  The media profits from
your slavery when they accept advertising money from the masters.
Masters own or control the media to be sure that you never learn
about your slavery.  If you learn the truth, you will object to the
chains of slavery.The money masters create money and use it to hire
the best politicians that money can buy to ensure your slavery.  If
any politician, judge, or sheriff ever want to set you free from
slavery, the masters simply fund that politicians' opponent who will
keep you in slavery.  Read Tom Schauf's book and you will see how
bankers manipulate money to create recessions to increase profits.
You are forced into foreclosure.  Imagine a $250,000 home with a
$100,000 mortgage in foreclosure.  The bank can tell a politician
about the property, loan the politician $100,000 to buy it, and then,
two weeks later, sell it at auction for $250,000.  They both profit
from your misery.  Laws are used to take your wealth and give it to
the masters.  Laws are used to control you and stop you from ending
your slavery.  The Constitution was written to stop this slavery.
They can only fool the uninformed.  Now do you understand why they do
not want the slaves to have guns?

The Constitution gives us equal protection which prohibits two
classes of citizens ( masters and slaves).  The Constitution demands
that we use gold and silver coin to prevent slavery.  The
Constitution prohibits credit (money that the banks create, forcing
you into slavery).  The next time the media or politicians make you
think we are following the Constitution, you need to know who is
lying to whom.  They do not want you to understand modern day
slavery.  If you understand and object, they will not get your wealth
for free.  There are great profits to be made in slavery.

Their next goal is to ensure your slavery through a cashless society,
giving the banker absolute control over you.  Will you be slave or
free?  In this summary, we define counterfeiting as creating money.
It does not mean that the banker committed a crime.  When we use the
words, steal or theft or swindle, we only mean that the banker
received something for free or counterfeited money.  It does not mean
the banker committed a crime.  We are not saying the banker is a
criminal.  The voters deserve the government that they voted in.
Will you vote for a politician representing the masters or the slaves?

Who is fooling whom?  The bankers are trying to talk us into a
cashless society.  That will give the bankers absolute total control
over the slaves.
They will not have to place shackles on your wrists or ankles to
enslave you.  This is the time to join us, and act together, and
change the laws.

The banker was the master and you were the slave because he
understood money and banking and you did not know why it was so
important for bankers to loan other depositors' money and not create
money.  Will you join us and become free and wealthy or will you
remain a poor slave forever?  The vote of informed slaves will stop
slavery and enforce the Constitution giving us equal protection.
President Lincoln was right all along.

This summary hardly scratches the surface.  Tom wrote two books in
every day language exposing it all.  Each book comes with its own
cassette tape.

America's Hope: To Cancel Bank Loans Without Going To Court, Volume
I, by Tom Schauf.  The book has about 250 pages and over 50
chapters.  It shows the readers how to argue the bank loan agreement
like a CPA, expert witness, would in court.  Bankers fear you
learning this information.  Some lenders have offered to zero out a
car loan and let the borrower keep the car or have the borrower pay
50 cents or 20 cents on the dollar, and the bank zero out the loan,
and the borrower keep the house, or car, or item purchased.
Tom Schauf does not guarantee individual results.  Tom's next goal is
to help
5 million people at one time.  Tom wants you to read the book so you
can help teach others.  When you read the book you will see why
bankers do not want this exposed in court.  Bankers hope you do not
read this book.  Get the book before we settle out of court and this
book is no longer in print.

The American Voter Vs.  The Banking System, Volume II, by Tom
Schauf.  The book has over 300 pages and 40 chapters.  This book is a
continuation of Volume I.  You need to read Volume I before reading
Volume II.  Volume II gives more details and more sophisticated
arguments an expert witness would use in court or arguing the bank
loan agreements.  It has over 600 questions the bankers fear you may
ask.  The book gives more proof and convincing arguments plus court
cases the bankers lost.  Volume II gives you the Federal Reserve Bank
publications and page numbers admitting Tom Schauf is correct.

The big lie is very simple.  Banks lent you other depositors' money.
If the bank lent you other depositors' money, you feel you have an
obligation to repay the money.  If you believed the bank lent you
other depositors' money, you would not know the bank recorded a loan
from you to the bank.  You would never ask the bank to repay the loan
from you to the bank.  For the bank to get the liens on the nation's
assets for free, they must make you believe they lent you other
depositors' money.

If people are lied to often enough and believe the lie is the truth,
they will think the truth is a lie.  Tom's books point out how
bankers redefined words to mean the opposite.  They want you to be
utterly confused so they get your wealth for free.

If I counterfeit $100 of new money and loan the money to you, there
is $100 of new money and $100 of new debt.  This is called "debt
currency." For every new dollar created (counterfeited or printed)
and loaned there is one new dollar of debt.  We print new cash, give
it to the banker for free (cost of printing the money), and he
returns it to the government as a loan.  This process created the $5
trillion of debt taxpayers must repay to the bank.
The bankers got richer and the taxpayers got poorer.

Lincoln printed United States Notes (cash).  He used the cash to pay
for the Civil War.  There was no debt and no tax to pay for the Civil
War.  People call Lincoln's cash " debt free currency."There is one
problem with Lincoln's cash.  He called it a "NOTE".  A Note means
you owe money.
Lincoln should have just called it "U.S.  money." The bankers used
the word "note" to pass one law to destroy the value of the note.
The bankers greatly profited from this one law.  If the bankers have
the wealth, they use the money to hire politicians to pass laws that
add to the bankers' profits and control over the people.  Their next
step is a cashless society giving them total control over you.

Lincoln had the right idea.  He should have named his cash "U.S.
money."

Gold and silver has some advantages.  There is a problem.  History
shows bankers manipulating the price of gold and silver.

If the government prints $10 billion of Lincoln's money, taxpayers'
taxes are cut by $10 billion and the debt is reduced by $10 billion.
If we give the cash to the bankers for free and they return it to the
government as a loan, the taxpayers have $10 billion of more taxes to
pay and $10 billion of more debt.  The media, politicians and bankers
benefit by forcing you into more taxes and debt.  If the voters
understand money and banking, they would vote to change the system.
Can you trust a politician who did this to you?
Politicians blame you for voting in elected officials representing
the bankers.  They claim you get the government you voted in.  We
know the politicians could have fixed the problem.  They were more
interested in collecting money from the bankers then representing the
people who voted them into office.  They had to keep the truth from
us.

If the voters learned the truth, would they vote for more debt and
taxes or less debt and less taxes?  Would they vote for the economic
effect similar to stealing, counterfeiting and swindling or stopping
the swindling?  Those opposing Tom Schauf are opposing equal
protection.

If a robber stole $1,000 from you, it is nothing compared to what the
bankers got from you.  The bankers used the judge, sheriff and
lawmaker to get your wealth for free.  The media remained silent.
Can you trust the media?  Withholding the truth is equal to lying.
Now people are asking about the other things the media has remained
silent on.  If Lincoln's cash was the only money, the economic effect
similar to stealing, counterfeiting and swindling would be ended.
The bank could not use the promissory note as new money.

http://rense.com/general34/orwell.htm

An Interview With Orwell
By Hsing Lee
lee8798@...
1-22-3

Text - The dictionaries and definitions you are about to see are real. They
have not been altered in any way. The issues addressed in this film are
also real. The question is, what are you going to do about it?


INTERIOR LIBRARY

Me - (sits down with pen and paper at a table with some books. a Cambridge
American English Dictionary, a Cambridge International English Dictionary,
a mock copy of 1984, and a copy of Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays.)

Me - What a waste of time. English class. What's the point? I took this
stupid class for twelve years. Now I gotta PAY for school, and they STILL
make me take English? It's like I don't know enough English by now.


EXTERIOR LIBRARY

In first person POV, we swoop from outside through the doors, down the
hallway, and into the library. We see Me sitting at the table, and then
swoop at the copy of 1984, crashing into the cover.


INTERIOR LIBRARY

George - I beg to differ.

Me - What? (looks around)

George - Over here.

Me - (looks down at the mock 1984 cover) Whoa.


George - As I was saying, I beg to differ. I speak English. You speak
American.

Me (is stunned)

George - George Orwell here, at your service

Me - But you're dead!


George - Obviously. But there's no need to be rude about it. I'm here, and
that's what matters.

Me - You're George Orwell?

George - Didn't I just say that?

Me: This is too weird. I must be dreaming. I read some books you wrote when
I was in high school, 1984 and Animal Farm.


George - I may have written them too well. They've stopped teaching them in
a lot of places. That's why I'm here. You need to wake people up, because
bad things are happening. Horrific things. Things that happened in my time,
and must never happen again. You've already seen the beginnings of it, with
Enron and Worldcom.

Me - What do you mean?

George - Do you remember what Newspeak is? From my book?

Me - I think so.


George - In my book 1984, Big Brother conceived of a truly insidious method
of control. He was in the business of cutting vocabulary to the bone.
Eliminating all the words they considered obsolete; nouns, verbs,
adjectives, all kinds of words. They invented a lot of new words, and
phrases as well.

Me - Kind of like Compassionate Conservatism?

George - EXACTLY like compassionate conservatism, although I would probably
have shortened it to Vampirism. But that's beside the point.

When you take words out of the vocabulary, when you change the meanings of
words, and make some words synonymous with others when those words are
supposed to have two different meanings, it gets very difficult for people
to think about things like Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Take the word Revolution for example. How could there be a revolution if
you take away the word itself? How is the thought of revolution to form in
the minds of people who've never conceptualized such a thing?

Me - I think I see your point, but it's not like they can remove the word
revolution from the dictionary...


George - They don't have to. For there to be revolution, there must be an
ideology behind it. All you have to do is remove the ability to properly
shape and define a subversive ideology from the language. No new ideology,
no revolution.

Me - (puzzled) But you mentioned Enron and WorldCom. How do things like
Enron and WorldCom happen, and how do they relate to Newspeak? Isn't it
greed that makes things like Enron happen?

George - Yes, in part.

Me - Why only in part?


George - Because it's actually the American Way. You see, Big Brother and
the media have done some very interesting things with the English language.

When I came up with the concept of the Newspeak Dictionary, I never
imagined they'd actually have the audacity to PUBLISH one until they purged
all the other dictionaries.

I suspect the reason behind it is, the government is so confident of its
control; they no longer care if people point out that Americans no longer
speaks English.

Me - We DO speak English!

George - Again, I beg to differ. Let's examine the fundamental principle
behind the economy of the United States. Capitalism. In the English
language, capitalism means one thing, but in American Newspeak, it means
something else entirely.

You see those dictionaries? Open them up to Capitalism.

Me - (opens the International dictionary to Capitalism)


George - In the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Capitalism
is defined as an economic, political and social system based on private
ownership of property, business and industry, and directed towards making
the greatest possible profits for successful organizations and people.

Now look at the other one.

Me - (opens the American dictionary to Capitalism)

In the Cambridge Dictionary of American English, the Newspeak version,
Capitalism is defined as an economic system based on private ownership of
property and business, with the goal of making the greatest possible
profits for the owners.

Me - Wow.

George - Amazing isn't it? You see the problem. In the rest of the world,
capitalism means private ownership where success is financially rewarded.
Using America's Newspeak Dictionary, capitalism means private ownership
where the OWNERS, and not the company or the employees are the ones
entitled to capital, regardless of how badly the business does.

Success doesn't even come into play. In America, the owners are entitled to
the greatest possible profits, period.


Me - You weren't kidding about this Newspeak stuff.

George - No, I wasn't kidding. And it's not funny.

Look at some more examples. Look up Nationalism.

Me - (opens the International dictionary to Nationalism)

George - Nationalism, as defined in English from the same International
Cambridge Dictionary, is the desire for and the attempt to achieve
political independence for your country or nation. Nationalism is also a
great or too great love of your own country.


Me - (opens the American dictionary to Nationalism)

George - In the American Newspeak dictionary, Nationalism is the feelings
of affection, loyalty, and pride that people have for their country.
Nationalism is also the desire for political independence in a country that
is controlled by or part of another country.

Gone is the talk of 'too great a love' of one's country. The American
description of Nationalism is similar to what we in my day knew as Patriotism.

Now take a look at Communism.

Me - (opens the International dictionary to Communism)

George - The English definition is the belief in a classless society in
which the methods of production are owned and controlled by all its members
and everyone works as much as they can and receives what they need. Now
check the American version.


Me - (opens the American dictionary to Communism)

George - Americans define Communism as an economic system based on public
ownership of property and control of the methods of production, and in
which no person profits from the work of others.

No mention of classless society, or each working as they can and receiving
according to their needs. The English definition is based on Marx's
description of Communism, as it should be. The American version is not.

Me - That seems like a fairly minor change. I don't see this as being as
bad as the others.

George - That's because I'm not finished yet. Look at how both dictionaries
define Socialism.


Me - (opens the International to Socialism)

George - Any economic or political system based on government ownership and
control of important businesses and methods of production.

Me - (opens the American to Socialism...looks back and forth)

Me - They're the same! And they sound a lot like the American English
definition of Communism...


George - Yes, they do, don't they? You see, for our world to function
properly requires clear communication. When two people have two different
meanings for the same word, we have a communication breakdown. Neither one
is clear what the other is talking about. So now, to many Americans,
Communism is synonymous with Socialism.

Me - But why would they do this?

George: There are three reasons. First, there's confusion. The more
confused the masses are, the harder it is for them to form organized
opposition to tyranny. The majority of people schooled in the United States
quite literally can't read. They can read, but they're unable to comprehend
what they're reading, because they don't have the same vocabulary as other
people. It's all mixed up.

It's also done for purposes of isolation. By making these changes, the
Government isolates Americans from the rest of the world, because what the
average American sees as Patriotism, others see as Nationalism.

That's why in Newspeak, Nationalism is the feelings of affection, loyalty,
and pride that people have for their country. By taking out the 'too great
a love' from the definition, it's no longer understood that nationalism can
be a bad thing.

Me - I never thought of it that way before.


George - They're trying to move the definition of Nationalism as close to
the definition of Patriotism as possible. Eventually, the words will become
synonymous. For many Americans, they're already synonymous. Many people are
incapable of distinguishing between Patriotism and blind Nationalism.

Me - You're right. I've seen it happening since September 11.

George - Quite. What a tragic waste of life. I can only hope you'll learn
from it. I'm here to see that it doesn't happen again.

The third reason why Newspeak is done is for simplicity's sake. Propaganda,
as Hitler taught us, must be kept simple. It must cater to the lowest
common denominator. We know that America hates Communism. So by painting
Democratic Socialists with the same brush as Communists in the Newspeak
dictionary, we demonize the Socialists before they get a chance to speak
for themselves.

Me - I see your point. But it doesn't exactly explain Enron, does it?


George - No, but there's something else that you should look up. Look in
the Cambridge International English Dictionary under Profiteer.

Me - (opens the International dictionary to profiteer)

Me - OK just a sec...here it is...profiteer - noun, DISAPPROVING. A
profiteer is a person who takes advantage unfairly of a situation in which
other people are suffering to make a profit, often by selling at an
unusually high price goods which are difficult to obtain. a war profiteer.

George - Now look up Profiteer in the Cambridge American Dictionary.


Me - (searches American dictionary for Profiteer)

Me - OK. hmm...profit...profitable...profitability...profitably...profits.
HEY!

Wait a minute! There's NO LISTING in the American dictionary for Profiteer!

George - (Sighs) You realize you people should be paying me royalties for
this.

Me - This is crazy.


George - No, it's fascist, not crazy.

Me - No wonder Enron and Worldcom did what they did. According to the
American dictionary, they're actually entitled to act in like this aren't
they?

George - Precisely. In their eyes they did nothing wrong, because what they
did is in fact the very definition of Capitalism, according to the American
Newspeak Dictionary.

Me - No WONDER everyone looks confused when Bush talks. His mouth opens,
words come out, and everyone walks away thinking he said something different.


George - EXACTLY. Now you're getting the idea. Language can be used in
different ways to influence everything from comprehension to the very
fabric of history itself. Consider the word Anarchism.

Me - I know this one! You're talking about the Anarchist movement at the
turn of the 19th to the 20th century, where Emma Goldman and her colleagues
were pushing for a free society.

George - Yes. Look it up.

Me - (opens the International dictionary to Anarchism)


George - Anarchism is defined in the English language as the political
belief that there should be little or no formal or official organization to
society but that people should work freely together.

Leon Czolgosz, an Anarchist, assassinated President McKinley for drawing
America into the Spanish American war on behalf of the Skull and Bones
friendly United Fruit Company. In the end, United Fruit ended up owning
almost all of Latin America and the Caribbean. First, they staged the
attack on the Maine.

Me - I learned about that in school. The Maine was never attacked. But in
the end, the Spanish American war helped win Cuba and the Philippines their
freedom.

George - Bollocks. Imagine if Mexico was a superpower. Imagine they took
part of Texas away from the United States, and made it into a military
base. Would you consider America to be free?

Me - No, but -


George - Cuba DID win its freedom, but the US State Department turned
around and took it back. They took Guantanamo Bay, where your Camp X-Ray is
now, and kept it, even though they were asked to leave. Cuba has been under
military occupation ever since, on top of the economic blockade. The
Philippines was under military occupation until the 1990's, and it's been
re-occupied since 2001.

The Spanish American war was why an Anarchist assassinated McKinley.
Anarchism is opposed to empire building. They propose personal freedom for
ALL people. Try looking up Anarchism in the American Newspeak dictionary...

Me - (looks for Anarchism in the American dictionary)

Me - The word Anarchism isn't even there! The only definition is for
Anarchy: a lack of organization and control in a society or group, esp.
because either there is no government or it has no power.
(agitated) After that, it skips to Anarchist, and there no definition for
the word. There's just a statement that contradicts what the Anarchist
movement represents. Personal freedom.

It says, 'Belief in freedom doesn't make you an anarchist.'

(looking up mad) They've completely reversed the meaning of Anarchism!

George - Good man. Now you see. It's like the Anarchist movement never even
existed, when in reality, it's almost as old as Marxism. Emma Goldman was
fighting Big Brother for women's rights, and minority rights, fifty years
before the civil rights movement. She was jailed, then kicked out of
America for proposing equal rights, fifty-six years after the Emancipation
Proclamation.

Newspeak is a clever way to marginalize today's anti-globalization movement
isn't it? Present them as a new breed of nuts that want to cause global
chaos, when in fact Anarchism has nothing to do with actual chaos -


Me - Man. you're starting to scare me.

George - We haven't even got to the bad part yet. When you work for four
generations to create a population as dumbed-down as the American public,
there must be an underlying reason for such action. What do you think that
reason is?

Me - I don't know WHAT to think anymore.

George - FASCISM. It's been a slow, deliberate process since McKinley's
time, designed to lead America into a fascist or National Socialist model
of Empire. A Fourth Reich, if you will.


Me: NOW WAIT A MINUTE! Are you trying to tell me that America's been moving
toward Nazism since 1900? THAT'S BULL. Hitler didn't even publish Mein
Kampf until 1925! Even I know that.

George - Pardon my frankness, but your indignation sir, is exceeded only by
your ignorance. Whoever said that the ideas in Mein Kampf originated with
Hitler?

Me - But -

George - You weren't alive to see pictures of the concentration camps in
the Philippines. You didn't see the torture, the hangings, the
disemboweling and decapitation of the poor Philippinos by American GI's.
You didn't see the million people who were killed in the early years of the
US Occupation. No one teaches this part of the Spanish American War anymore.

There are lots of people here with me who saw it. One of them wants to talk
to you later. He has a brief message co-authored by him and an American
General, Smedley Butler.


Me - I've heard of him. He was the most decorated soldier in the Marine
Corps. Two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner.

George - He wrote a book called War Is A Racket, hoping people would
smarten up. Smedley's REALLY mad. He wanted to talk to you, but we took a
vote and decided against it. He's too angry, and he'd just end up yelling
at you.

But he told me to tell you that he wants his base closed. He says Okinawa
has suffered enough, and that you should all go home and stop raping little
Japanese girls in his name.

In any event, Sam's going to stop by when I'm done. But I digress.

After McKinley was shot, Teddy Roosevelt became president. After Roosevelt
came a Skull and Bonesmen named William Howard Taft. He was the overseer of
the Philippines, and from there he went to the White House.

Me - We didn't learn much about Taft in school.

George - That's because in 1909, he wrote a policy paper called Dollar
Diplomacy. Let me read you some of it.


George - (looks down to read from a book)

"In its foreign affairs the United States should present to the world a
united front. The intellectual, financial, and industrial interests of the
country and the publicist, the wage earner, the farmer, and citizen of
whatever occupation must cooperate in a spirit of high patriotism to
promote that national solidarity which is indispensable to national
efficiency and to the attainment of national ideals."

Note that Patriotism is in there. Not only patriotism: HIGH patriotism,
with a slew of repetition on the word National. High spirit, national
efficiency, and national ideals. Is this not NATIONALISM?

Look closer. A United Front. Solidarity of intellectuals, finance,
industry, the media, wage earners, farmers, and citizens, where the State,
and not the individual, is supreme. Is this not SOCIALISM?

What do you get when you put Nationalism and Socialism together?

Me - (in total shock) OH...MY....GOD!

George - God, dear boy, has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all. You
should be looking the other way, looking South. To the Deep Jim Crow South.

Me - (still in shock) My brain hurts. I've been living in this world for
twenty years. How is it that I don't know these things, but a dead guy
does? And why hasn't anyone told me this before?


George - First of all, there are many people out there who know this
already, and who are trying to tell people. Go talk to some of the men and
women who lived through World War II. They'll tell you what fascism and
Nazism are like, and how they have this way of sneaking up on you, when the
people get caught up in the patriotic fervor of the Drums of War. The
problem is, no one's listening to the men who fought the war.

Go to Yellow Times dot org and read some articles by John Brand. He knows
what he's talking about.
Me - I'll do that. (writes it down) Yellow Times dot Org.

George - It was Mussolini, the father of fascism himself, who said,
"Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of state
and corporate power."

Is that not precisely what you have today?

Millions for Kenneth Lay, and nothing for 401K's?

Billions in subsidies for big business, paid for with billions in cutbacks
from social services for the nation's poor and underprivileged?

Me - Yeah.


George - Where big business and government are concerned, one can no longer
tell where the head ends and the arse begins. The American people have been
FOCCED.

Me - You can say THAT again.

George: It doesn't mean what you think. FOCCED. F. O. C. C. E. D.

A handy acronym best used to describe the corporate powers that have
hijacked the American Republic, and replaced it with a fascist plutocracy.

The Finance, Oil, Chemical, Credit, Energy and Defense sectors of Wall
Street have turned America into their own personal piggybank, where
corporations and lobbyists control the government, write the laws, and
screw the American people.

Me - Wow. You got THAT right. We've been FOCCED!


George - As to your other question, now that I'm dead, I know pretty much
everything. But that's not important. I haven't much time left, and Sam's
getting impatient.

What's important is now that you know, what are you going to do about it?

Me - Huh? What do you mean what am I going to do? I can't do jack!

George - I'm not referring only to you. You're going to write this down,
and tell as many people as you can, as fast as you can. Not only will you
get an A in English, but if you tell two friends, and they tell two
friends, and so on, pretty soon enough people will know.

Me - But what's that going to accomplish?


George - Think for a moment. Nazism won't work if people know what the
Skull and Bones are trying to do. They can't function if too many people
know their agenda.

What amazes me is these people even use the Pirate Skull and Crossbones as
their symbol. They're TELLING you that they're a bunch of murderous,
profiteering pirates.

And yet you've sent THREE of them to the White House. What is wrong with
you people?

Me - Three of them? What do you mean?

George - William Howard Taft, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George Walker
Bush are all members of the Yale Fraternal Order of the Skull and Bones. A
fraternity that was founded and financed in 1832 by the Russell Trust. A
Trust set up by Russell and Company, which was the world's largest opium
dealer.

Prescott Bush, the grandfather of today's Bush, was also a member, AND a
Nazi collaborator besides. The beginning of the Bush family fortune came
from the use of Auschwitz slave labor in Poland.

Me: HOW DO WE NOT KNOW THIS?


George: Go back to your dictionary. Look up Conspire in the International
edition.

Me - (opens the International dictionary to Conspire)

Me - Conspire. To plan secretly with other people to do something bad,
illegal, or against someone's wishes. Events or conditions might be said to
conspire if they combine in such a way that they spoil your plans.

George - Now go to the American version.


Me - It only has the first half of the definition: to plan secretly with
other people to do something bad, illegal, or against someone's wishes.

George - Now look up Conspiracy in the International edition.

Me - There's a bunch of usage examples, and then this: A conspiracy of
silence is a general agreement to keep silent about a subject for the
purpose of secrecy. It also says, Conspiracy theory refers to the belief
that unpleasant things which happen, esp. to governments, are planned by
people who want to cause difficulties and do not happen by chance.

George - Read me some of the examples.


Me - The three men are accused of conspiracy, working illegally against the
government. She has been charged with conspiracy, planning with someone
else to murder. Fifteen years working for the same firm and she still
hadn't been promoted - there was a conspiracy against her -someone did not
want her to be successful. I think there was a conspiracy to keep me out of
the committee. When she stepped on the scales she weighed 4 kilograms
heavier - it was a conspiracy (she thought the machine was intentionally
showing the wrong weight)!

George - So we can agree that a conspiracy is a plot where a person,
persons or things work against someone or something? We can agree that many
things can be a conspiracy, in the most mundane circumstance?

Me - Yeah.

George - Legally in both England and America, a criminal conspiracy is when
more than one person plans a criminal action, or a group engages in ongoing
criminal actions. Now, look up Conspiracy in the American Newspeak version.


Me - There's no definition! And only one usage example, with no
qualification at the end of the example to explain why there's a
conspiracy. All it says is Eight men were charged with conspiracy to
smuggle cocaine. It's like they've left it vague on purpose.

George - Precisely. Note also that Conspiratorial and Conspiratorially have
been removed from the American version, as has the idea of a Conspiracy
theory.

Me - DAMN. You're right! It's a conspiracy!

George - (smiling) Now you're getting it. You take away the idea of a
conspiracy of silence. You make the concept of conspiracy vague. You remove
the ability to describe conspiratorial action, and the idea of acting
conspiratorially. This serves at least five purposes doesn't it?

First, it serves to dumb-down people's understand of conspiracy, so they
don't catch on to Big Brother's conspiratorial actions. Second, because of
the vagueness of the word Conspiracy, it makes it hard for people to
understand the simple fact that ANY plot by more than one person in
contravention of law is by definition a conspiracy.

Third, by removing the idea of a Conspiracy theory from the Newspeak
dictionary, we take legitimacy away from those who guess correctly about,
or try to expose a conspiracy in action.

By doing this, they marginalize anyone who comes up with a conspiracy
theory as a nut, because there's no such thing in the dictionary, so they
can say these people don't speak the same language as the rest of us, and
they're crazy.


Me - Wow. This is mind-boggling.

George - Fourth, once they've managed to marginalize anyone who's trying to
point out what's going on, they can operate more openly, because the public
will be the ones to shoot down conspiracy theorists.

Me - (nods profusely)

George - Finally, they rest assured that the public will never catch on,
because so long as they maintain the conspiracy of silence, so long as no
one talks, within a few generations, people won't even understand the
concept of a conspiracy of silence, or the concept of a vast, right-wing
conspiracy.


Me - Well this sucks. What are we supposed to do about it?

George - They have a weakness. Like Hitler, their strategy for wresting
power away from Congress and the people is dependent upon the BIG LIE.
Remember what I told you in 1984 about Big Brother's control mechanism.
Propaganda. Blind obedience. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom
is slavery.

Me - And two plus two equals five. Not anymore Mr. Orwell. Not for me.

George - Good man. Now you understand.

If the balloon bursts on the Big Lie, the game is up. They can't exercise
direct overt control, because there are two hundred and fifty million guns
in the country. The founding fathers knew what they were doing with the
Second Amendment.


George - (looks down as if reading)

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same
object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is
their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide
new guards for their future security.
That's what the Second Amendment is for.

Me - Hold on. Are you calling for armed insurrection?

George - Of course, not. Don't you know that under the Patriot Act, the
Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution have
been gone for a year as of October 26, 2002?

There is no First Amendment anymore, or habeas corpus. There's no more
right to attorney client privilege, or even the right to an attorney. You
can be thrown in jail for terrorism for exercising your constitutional rights.

Ask Sherman Austin, the Webmaster of Raise the Fist dot com about it. He's
been jailed for having a website, and using that website to exercise his
freedom of expression.

You can't even give moral support to Constitutional rights anymore, let
alone make a call for armed insurrection.

Me - But you just said we should throw off this government with two hundred
and fifty million guns!


George - I said nothing of the sort. All I'm saying is what another
assassinated president said.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable."

It doesn't have to come to that. All you have to do is make sure this
pathological liar who stole the election doesn't get back into White House.
Neither he nor any member of his family must ever again enter the White
House. No Skull and Bonesmen must ever again hold high office.

After that, you can worry about changing the electoral process, so the
people have democratic representation, instead of this ridiculous two party
system. I think it was the wrestler turned Governor Jesse Ventura who said,
"We get two choices in this country. That's only one more than in Russia."

Me - Yeah, this choice between more of the same and less of the same bugs
me too. I think it bugs most people, but they don't know what to do about it.

George - You can, you know. Do something that is. There are twenty-five
months between now and the next Presidential race. Do the math. If you only
tell two people about this every four weeks, and they in turn pass it on to
two people every four weeks, that's more than sixty-six million people who
will know about it, come the next election.

That's seventeen million more votes than won the last election, for talking
to one person every two weeks. Think about that. It's not as hard as you
believe.

Are you familiar with Chinese philosophy?

It was Lao-Tzu who said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a
single step."

One step. And then another. And another. Until the walls come tumbling down.

All you have to do is talk to people, every chance you get.

Me - I'll do that.


George - First, kick Mr. Bush out. And then get your act together. Force
campaign finance reforms. Take the lobby money out of the election process.
Allow corporations to match employee donations, but not to donate money
directly. Put an independent in the White House. Do it before you and your
friends end up at some Concentration Camp.

Me - I think I'm going to take some History classes. Political Science too.
AND English.

George - What a wonderful idea. One last thing. There's someone else who
wants to talk to you. Someone whose books, like mine, are being pulled from
schools at an alarming rate. He only has one thing to say, so it won't take
long.

(George is being shoved off the face of the book by a hand)


George - His name is Sam. You know him by the name Mark Twain. Goodbye,
young man. And DON'T forget to pass this on. The truth hurts, but silence
kills.

(Both George and Twain are now on the book cover, with Mark shoving at
George's head.)

Me - Goodbye Mr. Orwell. And thanks. Thanks a LOT. I don't know how to
explain it. I feel different. I feel awake. like I've awakened from a
really long dream. You've taught me more in a few minutes than I've learned
in years.

George - Good. That's what we came back for. Now, pass it on. I really have
to go now. Sam, say hello to our readers.

(Twain pushes George off the cover, and takes his place in the middle of
the cover)


Mark Twain - Hello.

Me - Hi Mr. Twain. This is a lot of stuff to remember, but I'll try and
keep it all straight. Mr. Orwell said you have something to say. What would
that be?

Mark Twain - I have a message from Smedley Butler and myself for the
American people. We hope you pay attention this time, because time is
running out.

(Close up on mock 1984 cover. Twain is looking directly into Camera.)


We tried to tell you once before:

It didn't do much good.

We tried to warn you long ago,

But your heads are made of wood.

One more try is all you get,

And then you're on your own.

Listen hard, and stand up NOW,

Before your chance is blown.

Forget their lies, ignore the goons,

Forget their stupid rules,

We've said it once; we'll say it again,

WAR IS A RACKET, YOU FOOLS!


The last phrase shows up in big text on the cover, and then it fades back
to Orwell's static picture.

Me - (is lying face down on the table, sleeping. He lifts his head, opens
his eyes, and looks down at the table. He picks up the copy of 1984, and
looks closely at it. He looks down at the table again.)

(On the table is a note scrawled on his paper, written with a calligraphy
pen.)

There are more wonders in Heaven and Earth than you or I have ever dreamt
of, Horatio...

(As we zoom in on the note, the picture fades away, leaving only the text
behind.)

(As the text fades, the credits scroll.)

Peace!