10/30 “Stability First”; Inside Ministry of Truth: Storytellers of the American Narrative; Iraqi War Dead& Collateral Damage To America’s Soul; The Great White Baby Hunter
Conquered states that have been accustomed to liberty and the government of their own laws can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them; the second, for the conqueror to go and reside there in person; and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of a few, who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror:
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
“Did you… really believe the nonsense they relentlessly throw at us about “sectarian violence”? Stop asking “But how can we ever know what the truth is” - use your common sense. Would any Muslim, shia or sunni … kill other Muslims while they pray in a mosque on a Friday? … Would they bomb holy places? And we’re not talking about any Muslims… supposedly (they tell us) we are dealing with Islamist fundamentalist extremists, people who allegedly follow the book to the letter without any compromise. And yet in the same breath we are told that these very islamist (whatever that new word means) fundamentalists are the same ones killing other Muslims. While they pray. In a mosque. On a Friday! In case you didn’t know in Islam it is among the greatest crimes to kill a fellow believer… Use your common sense, at least obey the rules of logic… [author must stay anonymous. Gamila Zahran]
‘Stability First’: Newspeak for rape of Iraq
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ27Ak03.html
“Stay the course also means don’t leave before the job is done. And that’s … we’re going to get the job done in Iraq. And it’s important that we do get the job done in Iraq.” - George W Bush, October 11
Iraq is not simply a US electoral issue. It’s a human tragedy of biblical proportions. Hence the urge at this point to situate the tragedy in a historical context. [*** see bottom of page for U.S. geostrategic agenda documents]
In AD 750 the Abbasid Dynasty “de-Bedouinized” Islam by defeating the Ummayad Dynasty based in Damascus. The culture of the Abbasid court ceased being Arab-only and started to include Persia and the Turks. Islam turned into a universal religion, no more constrained by geography. “Baldach” - that’s what European travelers called Baghdad up to the late 18th century - was catapulted to the center of the world.
From AD 786-809, under fabled Haroon al-Rashid - who established relations with Tang Dynasty China and the “illiterate emperor” Charlemagne - Baghdad gave the world astronomy, alchemy, hydraulics, diplomacy, fiscal administration and the postal service. Up to the early 12th century it remained the most important intellectual center in the world.
Baghdad had been under siege by the Assyrians and later by Cyrus the Great from Persia. But it was only in 1258 that Baghdad was sacked for the first time by what was then the equivalent of Desert Storm - the Mongols riding their lightning-quick horses under the command of Hulagu, Genghis Khan’s grandson. Legend has it that he erected a pyramid of 700,000 skulls out of his victims.
In 1401, another foreign invader, the Turco-Mongol Tamerlan (”Timur the Lame”), devastated Baghdad yet again. In 2003, after the devastation of “shock and awe”, came the Christian armies of President George W Bush. From the beginning the comparisons with Hulagu and Tamerlan were vivid in the popular imagination. Over time, Baghdadis - Sunni or Shi’ite - were saying, we will dictate our rhythm and impose ourselves over the occupiers. This is already happening.
Quagmire Iraq is not a 21st-century video game of Arabs playing extras in a slow-motion Armageddon. This is a wrenching story with rivers of real blood and a terrible accumulation of real corpses. The story was engineered in Washington - and the plot would not be advancing were it not for the United States. The US bears all the moral and legal responsibility for the destruction of the fabled former capital of the caliphate and the de facto Western flank of the Arab nation.
It is in this context that the current avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak in the US should be placed.
The recent bloody holy month of Ramadan in Iraq has reflected the hellish mechanism unleashed by the invasion and occupation - the daily, gruesome banquet of death provoked by state-sponsored terror, counterinsurgency, stoked by sectarian hatred or the total collapse of the social contract.
This logic of extermination of a society and culture was inbuilt in the process since March 2003. In fact, the systematic annihilation of 2-3% of the entire Iraqi population, according to a study by The Lancet, not to mention the 1 million people displaced since March 2003, follow the more than 500,000 children who died during the 1990s as victims of United Nations sanctions. Iraq has been systematically destroyed for more than 15 years, non-stop.
And it gets worse, because for the Bush administration all this death and destruction is just a minor detail in the “big picture”.
In a perverse replay of what happened in the Vietnamese jungles, the Pentagon lost the asymmetric guerrilla war raging in the Sunni belt. Sunni Arabs are totally alienated. Seventy percent are in favor of attacking the occupiers, no holds barred. No wonder Saddam Hussein is still popular. This month, about 500 Sunni Arab tribal chiefs and former Ba’ath Party officials in the police, army and intelligence got together in al-Hindiya, 25 kilometers west of Kirkuk, to pledge allegiance to Saddam, qualified as “supreme combatant and legitimate president”.
It’s true that Saddam’s regime had already started to disintegrate from the inside after the Gulf War of 1991 - a process coupled with the devastating effects of UN sanctions. The resulting loss of civic spirit accelerated the re-tribalization of Iraq. Even as tribal affiliation nowadays is the only way to solve any problem in Iraq, for the silent majority what really matters is security: nobody is troubled by perceived (by the West) Sunni and Shi’ite divisions; and most Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen share plenty of social, cultural and commercial interests. Contrary to Western-propagated myth, Iraqi civil society as a whole - apart from a few factions - abhors civil war.
The coalition of the drilling
World public opinion must switch to red alert. The real, not virtual, future of Iraq will be decided in December. The whole point is a new oil law - which is in fact a debt-for-oil program concocted and imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is the point of the US invasion - a return on investment on the hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money spent. It’s not war as politics by other means; it’s war as free-market opening by other means - full US access to the epicenter of the energy wars and the perfect geostrategic location for “taming”, in the near future, both Russia and China.
Very few observers have detailed what’s at stake. In US corporate media the silence is stratospheric.
US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman duly landed in Baghdad this past summer, insisting that Iraqis must “pass a hydrocarbon law under which foreign companies can invest”. Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani was convinced, and said the law would be passed by the end of 2006, as promised to the IMF.
No wonder: the Green Zone US Embassy colossus has always made sure that the US controls - via well-paid Iraqi servants - the Petroleum Ministry, as well as all key management posts in key Iraqi ministries. The draft hydrocarbon law was reviewed by the IMF, reviewed by Bodman and reviewed by Big Oil executives. It was not and it will not be reviewed by Iraqi civil society: that was left to the fractious Iraqi parliament - which can be largely bought for a fistful of dinars.
The Bush administration needs somebody to sign the law. The nation of Iraq as it emerged out of British imperial design is an artificial construct that can only be “tamed” by a hardcore strongman a la Saddam. It has to be “our” strongman, of course: when Saddam started to act independently he was smashed. Insistent rumors of a US-engineered coup to replace the hapless current premier Nuri al-Maliki have surfaced of late. Poor Maliki, if he clings to a minimum of integrity, can’t possibly sign the oil law. Enter the Washington/Green Zone-backed strongman a la Saddam: a likely candidate is former interim premier Iyad Allawi, who ordered the destruction of Fallujah in late 2004.
No matter what happens in the US mid-term elections next month, this is the post-December scenario: Iraq enslaved by the IMF; Big Oil signing mega-lucrative production sharing agreements (PSAs); “partial” troop withdrawal; relentless guerrilla warfare; further disintegration; open road to partition.
Vast swaths of the US electorate have now understood how the whole Iraqi adventure has been built on lies: lies about the causes of war, lies about the methodology of war, lies about the terrible consequences of war. Inevitably, the current media-targeted avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak had to be also meaningless. This includes “phased withdrawal”, “empowering” the Iraqi government, “putting security ahead of democracy” and “partitioning Iraq”. Surrealism in international relations would reach new highs (or lows) with the US ordering by decree that a sovereign nation must dismember itself. Compared with it, the current carnage in Baghdad - which is already divided anyway - would be a Disney flick.
There’s more: the Shakespearean despair over “Redeploy and Contain” or “Stability First” - newspeak coined by Bush family consegliere James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, staffed with plenty of pro-war neo-conservatives. A notorious casualty of the newspeak war seems to be “stay the course” - replaced, according to Press Secretary Tony Snow, by “a study in constant motion”. Anyway, the winner - after the mid-term elections - will be “Stability First”, which is basically a remix, with a horn section, of “stay the course”.
How can Americans - and world public opinion - be engaged in serious, meaningful debate when the Iraq tragedy is reduced to a mere catch phrase? This incoherent whirlwind, this “study in constant motion”, is the travesty that passes for Iraqi policy debate among educated elites.
Another reading is more ominous. It spells the Bush administration and its attached elites losing control - of everything. And that’s how they can become even more dangerous. On October 19, Vice President Dick Cheney once again stated that the only way out in Iraq was “total victory”. A recent historical parallel is nothing but gloomy. When the US was confronted with defeat in Vietnam, it did not “Redeploy and Contain”: on the contrary, death and destruction were extended to Laos and Cambodia. Baker’s “Stability First” might contain undisclosed subtexts.
“Total victory”, in Cheney’s [U.S. bipartisan imperialist NSS agenda] world view, means… control of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on the planet, 112 billion barrels of it in proven reserves plus 220 billion barrels still to be exploited, at a cost as low as US$1 a barrel; a cluster of sprawling military bases; the largest embassy/fortress-by-the-Tigris in the world; and the indispensable client regime.
In sum: a “Coalition of the Drilling” secured by the Pentagon’s Long War apparatus. It’s up to ancient and proud Baghdad to spoil the party. Baghdad survived and buried Hulagu. Baghdad survived and buried Tamerlan. Baghdad may as well survive and bury George W Bush.
and for U.S. terror war against native resistance to control Afghanistan
At least 85 civilians killed by NATO air strike in Afghanistan
Xinhua,http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-10/26/content_5253990.htm
At least 85 civilians were killed by a NATO air strike in a village of the southern Kandahar province of Afghanistan, an Afghan official and a witness told Xinhua on Thursday. Bismillah Afghanmal, a member of the provincial council of Kandahar, said a NATO air strike killed 85 civilians including women and children on Tuesday night in Nangawat village in Panjwai district of the province. He said there was no information of Taliban casualties in the bombardment. Ghulam Hasan, a villager from Nangawat, said about 90 civilians were killed and several injured in the NATO bombing… Meanwhile, Ghulam Hasan, a villager from Nangawat, said about 90 civilians were killed and several injured in the NATO bombing…Fifty civilian bodies had been dug out from the rubble until Wednesday, he added.
According to locals, 20 injured civilians from Panjwai district have been taken to Mir Wais hospital in Kandahar city, the provincial capital.
General: Patience needed in Afghan war
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS,http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1101ap_canada_nato_afghanistan.html
Friday, October 27, 2006 ·
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Thursday that NATO could be in for an extended stay in the central Asian nation and called on member nations to be patient.
Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry urged the global community to devote more resources to the rebuilding of the country as it struggles to contain a resurgent Taliban militia.
“We need perseverance,” Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry told the Asia Pacific Summit in Vancouver.
“We cannot win this in a year. We cannot win this in two years,” he said via satellite from the U.S. Embassy in Vienna…
Eikenberry, addressing the two-day gathering of business and government leaders from North America and Asia, said that despite a need for more troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the allied presence there was greater than any rebel force.
“There is no place in Afghanistan that we will not dominate,” he said. […]
Death sentence for President Saddam Hussein:
by Gilles Munier
http://www.uruknet.biz/?s1=1&p=27777&s2=27
The verdict of President Saddam Hussein’s first trial and that of seven former Iraqi leaders- the Al Dujail case- due on October 16th has been postponed till November 5 in order “to complete verifications”. Actually the postponement has been required by Bush’s public relations consultants in the hope that the announcement of the capital sentence on the Iraqi President, his half-brother, Barzan Al-Tikriti, former head of the secret services before 1984 and the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, will help the Republicans secure more votes in the coming half-term elections to be held …two days later. Unless an unforeseen event, the sentences will be enforced within 30 days. By hanging.
On October 3rd, at Managua, Donald Rumsfeld expressed his opposition to lengthy legal proceedings against Saddam Hussein. He wanted them to be swift. The other charges – the Anfal trial- brought against Saddam Hussein will be tried and capital sentences passed on …..posthumously. This method would, in the eyes of the Americans, blur the responsibility of the Western leaders, especially the huge responsibility of Rumsfeld himself, in the deliveries of arms to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. The origin of the combat gas used by both belligerents at Halabja will not be discussed nor the amount of kickbacks paid to political parties in France, the States and elsewhere…
The Court as a battlefield
Whatever our views on President Saddam Hussein, it is a fact that the war of aggression on Iraq is regarded as illegal and the arrest of its leaders, an illegal act. The verdict that will be passed on November 5 by “the Green Zone Magistrates” will have no legal standing.
At the outset, the Dujail case was to set an example, open to the public and aired in full. It has never been fair, transparent or impartial. And yet all had been rehearsed beforehand in detail with fake court sessions. The magistrates selected by Salem Chalabi, business lawyer and Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew, leader of the Iraqi National Council (1) had been trained in Great Britain. However, outside pressures, the expanding chaos in Iraq and the pugnacity of the Iraqi President and Barzan al Takriti turned the court into a battlefield.
The well-groomed performance, staged by a communication firm linked to the Pentagon, evolved into to a mockery of justice. To begin with, Salem Chalabi was accused of the murder of the General Director of the Iraqi Ministry of Finances. He is on the run. The magistrates showed outright bias and the defence counsels had never advance access to all detail of the prosecution’s case – 36 tons of accusing evidences collected by FBI agents without any …..knowledge of Arabic- and were never in a position to check whether the documents they received were genuine.
Khalil al Douleimi’s house, Saddam Hussein’s lead lawyer, was searched by US Special Forces and his files were confiscated. The defence lawyers were threatened to “be cut up into pieces” by “justice” minister Malek Dohane al-Hassan. Several were assassinated. At court sessions, anonymous witnesses were concealed behind curtains. Magistrates resigned or were dismissed and replaced off-hand. The selection of journalists allowed to report on the trial was one-sided. Last, the declarations of the accused, in particular of Saddam Hussein, have been truncated before being dispatched. Amnesty International which cannot be suspected of sympathies for the former Iraqi President says: “The Dujail trial …has been sullied by serious breaches which question the capacity of the Court, as it stands, to administer justice in an equitable manner, under the general human law and standards of international due process” (2). Could it be otherwise? The failed attempt on the life of Saddam Hussein, in Dujail in 1982, was masterminded in Iran by the al-Dawa party which today is at the helm. For its chiefs who have little concern for Western law the trial is just there to avenge its dead and to mobilize its militants.
Rivers of blood
On March 14, 2006, President Saddam Hussein called on all Iraqis to “support the resistance instead of slaughtering each and every one”. If civil war befalls Iraq, he insists, they would live “under darkness and in rivers of blood”. Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman; a hardliner, expelled the public from the court and warned him not to talk “politics” then he adjourned the trial.
Though there are similarities, a civil war is not yet occurring in Iraq. A war of liberation and a religious or ethnic strife are taking place. The Resistance hits the occupations forces and its collaborators while the US army shoots blindly. The pro-independence Kurds grab as much territory as they can from the Arabs and the Turcoman. The pro-Iran death squads carry out religious cleansing. Al Qaida kills Shias. The US secret services and Ahmed Chalabi pour oil over the fire through atrocious attacks and provocations such as the destruction of the Samara shrine. Moqtada Sadr’s Medhi Army tries to compete with the Iran-oriented Badr Group. Families from one side take revenge on the opposite side and vice versa. Blackmails, killings by the thousand, rapes, robberies, kidnappings, vendetta, tortures of all sorts, expulsions are what the Iraqis have to live with every day. The number of violent deaths since the invasion is much higher that what the Baathists were accused of by theirs detractors. And unfortunately, it is not over….
Many Iraqis lament at the loss of the security they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein. The dreadful time of embargo seems peaceful compared to what they endure today. That in Tikrit, 3000 persons demonstrated to claim the release of their President is understandable: it is his home town. (3). But more than 300 tribal leaders among them Sheikh Turki Hajim al-Ubaydi of the Al Ubayd (1,5 million members) demand his comeback to power (4) and some others, in the province of Kirkuk, declare that it is only then that Iraqis would reconcile (5). This should not be taken lightly.
If, as expected, the death sentence is reached on Nov; 5, 2006, nothing will tie the hand of the executioner. Saddam Hussein is under no illusion as to his fate. He said that he wishes to die by a bullet as befits a Commander in Chief of the Iraqi Armed Forces rather than by hanging as 57% of Americans wanted in March last (6). For many Iraqis, the death under these circumstances of a man who is a legitimate symbol of their Nation would open wide the doors of Hell. Civil war in Iraq would then be the bloodiest of all times.
Gilles Munier <>
2006-10-25
(translation from French – AFI-Flash n°65)
Notes :
(1) International swindler wanted by Interpol for the criminal bankruptcy of a Jordanian bank.
(2) http://www.amnesty.fr/index.php/amnesty/s_informer/communiques_de_presse/irak_les_irregularites_du_premier_proces_devant_le_tribunal_penal_supreme_irakien_ne_doivent_pas_se_reproduire
(3) Sunni mosques attacked in Baghdad
http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Sunni-mosques-attacked-in-Baghdad/2006/09/23/1158431935255.html
(4) Washington Post -3/9/06
(5) Al Hayat – 18/9/06
http://www.daralhayat.com/arab_news/levant_news/09-2006/Item-20060917-bd61464d-c0a8-10ed-01b6-e3381df75dc5/story.html
(6) Les Américains souhaitent l’exécution de Saddam, mais pas leurs alliés, selon un sondage
http://www.peinedemort.org/document.php?choix=1781
hey boy, you’re in ‘murikan country now…
Soldiers ‘hit Iraqis if they forgot nicknames’:
Mr Mutaira said that if one of the detainees had fallen asleep, he would be woken and asked to repeat his footballer nickname. “If we were not able to recite our respective nickname we would be kicked and beaten.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2425247,00.html
Massive Death Toll In Iraq
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
… 655,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of the American and British invasion.
Just to put that in perspective: relatively speaking, if the American people had suffered the same death toll, almost 7.5 million American citizens would be dead, and the names of 1.5 million Britons would have been struck from the register, for ever. That makes the illegal Iraq invasion of Iraq by the Bush and Blair governments (with strong moral and tactical support from the Zionists) one of the biggest war crimes in recent times and an event which undoubtedly qualifies for an honorable mention in the ignoble roll call of historical acts of genocide against an innocent people…. It has already been exposed that the killings and bombings are the work of “death squads” working out of the Iraqi interior ministry
Comment”>
that’s not enough, more imperialist liberation promised:
Conceding Missteps, Bush Urges Patience on Iraq
President Bush urged Americans to avoid disillusionment
over a war he said was still winnable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/world/middleeast/26prexy.html?th&emc=th
essential reading to distinguish friends & enemies
Iraq and its enemies
By Gabriele Zamparini
http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2006/09/iraq-and-its-enemies.htm
On 18 July 2006 the United Nations reported:
9. The reported number of civilian casualties continued an upward trend. (…) The total figure of civilians killed in Iraq, adding the figures provided by the Ministry of Health and the MLI, reaches 2,669 civilians in May and 3,149 in June 2006. According to the Ministry of Health, from January to June 2006 there were 6,826 civilians killed and 13,256 wounded. Including the figures of the MLI in Baghdad for the period, the total of civilians killed in Iraq from January-June 2006 was 14,338.
10. On 25 June, the Ministry of Health publicly acknowledged information stating that since 2003 at least 50,000 persons have been killed violently. The Baghdad morgue reportedly received 30,204 bodies from 2003 to mid-2006. Death numbering 18,933 occurred from “military clashes” and “terrorist attacks” between 5 April 2004 and 1 June 2006. The Ministry further indicated that the number of deaths is probably underreported. (1)
This past June, when the Los Angeles Times published “War’s Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000” [“according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies”] Stephen Soldz wrote:
Further, the fact that mortality estimates come from government sources raises questions as to the accuracy of attributed causes. After all, attributing deaths to “terrorist attacks” is more acceptable to the powers-that-be than is attributing tem to “American forces” or to pro-government militias and death squads. (2)
The Iraqi Health Ministry, which operates the Baghdad morgue and government hospitals, is in the hands of a religious party headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia, the Mahdi Army, is responsible of mass murdering and ethnic cleansing.
In spite of the propaganda coming from certain sectors of the Western antiwar movement and the so called “left” claiming that Muqtada al-Sadr is a hero of the Iraqi resistance and he’s fiercely anti-US and anti-occupation, the reality couldn’t be more different.
The Iraqi government will continue to work with Muqtada Sadr, the main force behind one of Iraq’s largest Shiite militias, a top Iraqi official said Friday. “We have to distinguish between the political line and the militia line,” said Iraqi Deputy President Adil Abd al-Mahdi. “We … are working a lot (with Sadr), and he is supporting the government. He has ministers in the government. And we are trying to distinguish between undisciplined groups from the disciplined ones. The government of (Prime Minister) Maliki is working very well on that issue.” Mahdi made his remarks Friday at the Pentagon, where he met with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (3)
It’s unfortunate – to say the least – that the “few bad apples” myth has been voiced in the West by many leftists and intellectuals. The huge amount of evidence we now have tells us that:
1) Muqtada al-Sadr is the leader of a bloody criminal organization, the Mahdi Army, that’s been committing mass murdering and ethnic cleansing in Iraq;
2) this organization is an important part of the Iraqi puppet government; and
3) it’s been cooperating with the occupation forces in the fighting against the Iraqi resistance.
In July, the Washington Post reported:
According to witnesses and a Washington Post special correspondent, carloads of men in tracksuits, suspected by residents to be members of the powerful Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army, pulled up outside the Malouki mosque and fired rocket-propelled grenades at the house of worship. During the firefight, a bullet pierced the shoulder of a mosque guard. Cars were gutted and burned. Residents said they did not know how many people died.
Gunfire clattered through the hot evening air; children bawled at the sound. In one home, a wife locked the front door and pleaded with her husband not to leave the house. A former army officer barked orders to neighbors who assembled to mount a defense: You go up to the rooftops. You guard the street corners.
Saleh Muhammed, an Amiriyah resident, told a Post special correspondent that he dialed 130 into his cellphone, Baghdad’s emergency number. “The Mahdi Army has attacked Amiriyah,” he told the Interior Ministry dispatcher.
“The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you,” said the dispatcher at the ministry, which is controlled by a Shiite party and operates closely with militias. “They are people doing their duty. And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army? Is it written on their foreheads?” He hung up the phone. (4)
“And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army?” is the same reply that too many in the West use every time someone tries to raise questions on the role of Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army.
“Among other death squads and militias, a truly independent investigation must question the Badr Organisation [the armed wing of the Shia Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq] and the Mehdi Army [the militia of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr] within the frame of the US-led occupation and its puppet Iraqi government of which Moqtada al-Sadr with his religious party is one of the most important components.” an article I co-authored with Uruknet’s editor Paola Pisi concluded on 6 July 2006. (5)
This request for a truly independent investigation was enough to attract the lightening strikes coming from the BRussells Tribunal that published and distributed an article by Max Fuller, accusing Paola Pisi and me of doing “exactly what the Occupation wants”. In this smear, Fuller twists, manipulates and distorts facts, evidence and logic so to be able to defend mass murdering and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Sadr Brigades and the Mahdi Army. The Middle East is Burning. The BRussells Tribunal Slanders Uruknet, the reply by the Uruknet’s Editorial Staff, far from being a “personal bickering” as it was so vulgarly suggested, tries to light the reality and the horror that Iraq and Iraqis are living every day on their own skin, a reality hidden behind mountains of propaganda.
There is much evidence that the Iraqi puppet government has been minimizing the number of casualties. [On this topic, please read Iraq between genocide and coincidences, an article I wrote on 26 June 2006 ]
A scientific study published at the end of October 2004 on the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet and buried by the US and UK governments and their obedient servants in the media tells us a different story.
‘Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey’ reads:
Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. (Interpretation)
Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. (Findings) (7)
The same study reads:
“The researchers found that the majority of deaths were attributed to violence, which were primarily the result of military actions by Coalition forces. Most of those killed by Coalition forces were women and children… Eighty-four percent of the [violent] deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery.” (8)
This study was published two years ago! But today, September 4, 2006, the front page of the “pro-Israeli” Independent reads: “Victims estimated at 41,639”.
This number comes from Iraq Body Count (IBC).
The Western mainstream media resort to IBC to give the number of the Iraqi civilians killed since the 2003 invasion. On this outrageous scandal I have written a number of times:
Darkness and Light
An exchange between Les Roberts and John Sloboda on Iraq Body Count and the Lancet
Silence kills and silence is complicity - email to Phyllis Bennis
Silence kills and silence is complicity - email to United for Peace and Justice
Silence kills and silence is complicity - ‘a follow-up’
Iraq between genocide and coincidences
Iraq Body Count - NOT JUST NUMBERS!
Shameless Mother Jones
THE BBC SMEARS MEDIA LENS - an email exchange with the BBC
IPS, nothing different… maybe worse
It’s bad enough when lies and propaganda come from our ruthless leaders and their servants in the state-corporate media. But what should we say when an even more pernicious propaganda comes from those who supposedly should be “on our side”?
The serious questions regarding Iraq Body Count are not a “ridiculous bickering” as a journalist “on the left” and supposedly “on our side” recently wrote me. These questions regard the very central issue of the Iraq invasion and occupation: the scale of the horror brought to the Iraqi People by our governments, with our money and in our name.
But the anti-war movement and the so called “left” is shamefully silent on this subject, when not defending Iraq Body Count against those who dared to ask questions. Why?
Shouldn’t we all be interested in what’s really going on in Iraq?
But this seems to be the point. In the West, too many on the “left” and in the so-called “anti-war movement” are not interested in reality. Iraq seems to exist just in function of their power games. Too often “peace and justice” have become a business that has nothing to do with the oppressed victims’ struggle and all to do instead with the acquisition of privileges and power that neutralizes real dissent and block change. The elites in the “left” and in the antiwar movement have become so obsessed with their own power, with their own “place in society” to be completely indifferent to the facts, to compromise with the perils of rewriting history, conceding points that shouldn’t be conceded.
For these two subjects, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army and Iraq Body Count, pass the truth about the horror that the Iraqi People have been forced to live since the new crusaders invaded their country. On both these subjects, vast sectors of the international anti-war movement and the so-called “left” have been silent at best when not actively cooperating with the propaganda machine.
I have been attacked many times because I keep asking questions to those who claim to be “on our side”. Which side, if I may ask? The only side we all should care is the side of the truth and running after it. The power that be wants us to be ignorant and brainwashed. For that purpose it has lowered the level of political discussion to “we and they”, “good and evil”. It seems too often that on the so-called “left” too many have been doing the same.
Postscript
Donny George, president of Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, resigned on August 7 and fled the country soon after, taking refuge in Syria.
Dr George says that, having worked for the SBAH for over 30 years, he retired on 7 August because his position had become “intolerable” over the past year. “The board has come under the increasing influence of al-Sadr [the militant Shi’ite party founded by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which has 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament and controls a number of ministries],” says Dr George. “I can no longer work with these people who have come in with the new ministry. They have no knowledge of archaeology, no knowledge of antiquities, nothing.” (…) “A lot of people have been sent to our institutions,” he says. “They are only interested in Islamic sites and not Iraq’s earlier heritage.” According to Dr George, the new President of the SBAH is Haider Farhan, an al-Sadr party member with no relevant experience for the post. “There is nothing to recommend him,” says Dr George. Dr George is well known in museums around the world, but says that he had come under increasing pressure to discontinue these international links which he believed were essential to the activities of the SBAH. “They did not like me having any contact with anyone from outside,” he says. He says that it had even become difficult to maintain a liaison with the Coalition representatives in Baghdad, making it harder to respond quickly to reports of troops damaging archaeological sites. (9)
“Horrible” is how the University of Chicago’s McGuire Gibson described the current situation regarding Iraq’s ancient monuments and sites to the Washington Post. And the future? “Donny’s departure raises a lot of questions, and I think the answers are going to be very disturbing indeed,” says Atwood. Jane C. Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, told ARCHAEOLOGY, “We view with regret and sorrow this latest evidence of the deteriorating situation with respect to Iraq’s antiquities and hope that every effort will be made to protect Iraq’s rich archaeological heritage.” (10)
But on the “left” is just wilderness and Ivory Towers…
NOTES
1) UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), Human Rights Report, 1 May – 30 June 2006
2) Los Angeles Times estimates Iraqi dead at 50,000, June 25th, 2006, Psyche, Science, and Society, Blog of Stephen Soldz: Psychoanalyst, Psychologist, Researcher, and Activist
3) Iraqi government working with Sadr, UPI, 25 August 2006
4) From Baghdad Mosque, a Call to Arms, By Joshua Partlow and Saad al-Izzi, Washington Post, Wednesday, July 12, 2006; A08
5) Iraq: Listening to the Survivors. The killing of Saddam Hussein’s lawyers and the Iraqi testimonies, by Paola Pisi and Gabriele Zamparini, Uruknet and The Cat’s Blog, 6 July 2006
6) Iraq between genocide and coincidences, by Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Blog, 26 June 2006
7) Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey, The Lancet, Published online October 29,2004
8) ‘Iraqi Civilian Deaths Increase Dramatically After Invasion’, October 28, 2004, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
9) Iraq’s top cultural official resigns, By Lucian Harris, The Art Newspaper, 26 August 2006
10) Iraq’s Heritage Critically Endangered, Archaeology, August 28, 2006
Big Brothers’ data bases:
8 Minute Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vgg19J-1XE&mode=related&search=8:37
Moves Toward Martial Law
In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohi! bitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions…
U.S.’ man for the Palestinian “final solution”
Lieberman Is Not an Israeli ‘Internal Affair’
Nicola Nasser,http://www.uruknet.biz/?s1=1&p=27770&s2=27
…Speaking to reporters Monday, Lieberman questioned the wisdom of past peace deals where Israel ceded occupied land to Arab adversaries.
He is on record also to call for the ethnic cleansing of 1.2 million Israeli Arabs by stripping them of their citizenship and transferring them to a cantonized Palestinian Authority (PA) without consulting their or the PA’s consent. A bill adopted by 12-11 votes by the Israeli cabinet last week to scrap its parliamentary system in favor of an American-style presidential rule could be his first step within this context; it raises the minimum that a party must achieve to enter parliament to 10% from 2%, which would eliminate Arab parties, whose combined strength has never quite reached 10%.
In 2004 he published his book “My Truth,” a call to draw Israel’s borders to exclude Arab citizens and include illegal Israeli colonial settlements Israel built on occupied Palestinian West Bank territory; he himself lives with his family in the colony of Nokdim. Earlier he spoke of “transfer” of Arab citizens, Gershom Gorenberg wrote in the Jewish daily Forward on October 20, 2006. “The problem with the Arabs inside Israel must come before the Palestinian problem,” he said.
On May 4 he called also for executing elected Israeli Arab members of Knesset for talking to elected members of the Hamas-led Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Four days later American The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) expressed grave concern over his inciteful statements.
When he served as minister of transport in a previous government, Lieberman called for all Palestinian prisoners, now more than ten thousand, held by the Israeli occupation authorities to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide the buses, Ha’aretz reported on July 11, 2002.
In 2002, Lieberman declared, “I would not hesitate to send the Israeli army into all of Area A [the area of the West Bank ostensibly under Palestinian Authority control] for 48 hours. Destroy the foundation of all the authority’s military infrastructure … not leave one stone on another. Destroy everything.” He also suggested to the Israeli cabinet that the air force systematically bomb all the commercial centers, gas stations and banks in the occupied territories (The Independent, March 7, 2002)…
instead of mobilizing its media and diplomatic corps to alert the world on the looming threat, the PLO kept absorbed by the internal divide and obsessed with plans on how to bring the elected Hamas to accept the U.S.-adopted Israeli dictates or squeeze it out of power, except for a rare statement that offhandedly shrugged Lieberman’s ascendancy as an Israeli “internal affair”!
“At the end of the day, what we hoped for is to have a partner in Israel who is willing to revive a meaningful peace process that will end this miserable situation between our two peoples,” said Saeb Erekat, who heads the PLO’s negotiations department, whose mission has been confined recently to educating Hamas and the Palestinian people on how to better understand the “realpolitics” of the US and EU-backed Israeli dictates….
Exclusive: Hillary Clinton On Israel, Iraq And Terror
By: Eli Chomsky
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19734/
On the eve of her expected reelection victory, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton met with the editorial board of The Jewish Press.
The former first lady (and current front-runner in opinion polls for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination) spoke at length about Israel, the ongoing war in Iraq, and the war on terror. Following are highlights of the discussion:
The Jewish Press: Israel recently concluded its war against Hizbullah in what many consider to be a stalemated position. How do you see things right now?
Sen. Clinton: First, I don’t think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake.
If we were going to push for an election, we should have made sure we did something to determine who was going to win instead of signing off on an electoral system that advantaged Hamas. […]
with u.s. greenlight & greenbacks
Israel draws up an assassination hit-list of Hamas ministers:
If Hamas resumes attacks deep inside Israel, the Israeli army is preparing to assassinate several Hamas leaders, particularly Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the official Israeli radio reported on Thursday.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&Do=Print&ID=16528
Hamas has instructed its followers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be on high alert following unconfirmed reports that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party are planning a coup against the Hamas government on Saturday.
http://tinyurl.com/yykzcc
KNOW THE ENEMY: AMERICAN SUPREMACY IS THE ISSUE: the genocidal sphistry of imperialist thinktank strategists
Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age
By NOAH FELDMAN
October 29, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29islam.html?ei=5070&em=&en=39854eee782a3241&ex=1162270800&pagewanted=print
…These worries about an Islamic bomb raise the question of why we trust any nation with the power that a nuclear capacity confers. Why, for instance, do we trust ourselves, given that we remain the only nation actually to have used nuclear weapons? The standard answer to why we keep our nuclear bombs — a response developed during the cold war — is that we must have the capability to deter anyone who might attack us first…
The truth is that we hold on to our nuclear capability not only as a matter of deterrence but also to maintain our own global strategic position. If we do not want Islamic states — or anyone else for that matter — to have a nuclear capability, it is not necessarily because we consider them especially likely to bring on their own destruction by using it. It is, rather, that we do not want to cede some substantial chunk of our own global power to them. This principle — if it is a principle — lies behind the general strategy that is embedded in the international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. Everybody involved understands that if any government got a chance to acquire nuclear power before the other treaty members had a chance to notice and impose sanctions, it would jump at the opportunity.
So the nonproliferation regime is not and could never be based on some principle of international fairness. But it does not follow that the United States and its allies should simply accept the development of nuclear technology by just anyone. It should be relevant to our deliberations that a particular candidate is our enemy. When it comes to Islamic states, there is serious reason to worry that, both now and in the immediately foreseeable future, popular anti-American [DOMINANCE] sentiment is especially likely to play an important role in the shaping of foreign policy….
Much of the reason for this close linkage between Islamism and anti-Americanism comes from Iran [’s REFUSAL TO BE CONTROLLED BY US ]. As an enemy of the United States, which has worked consistently against American interests, Iran is in a category by itself, most nearly matched by North Korea, the other still-standing member of President Bush’s axis of evil…
For many years under the shah, Iran was a natural American ally — precisely because it was Shiite and non-Arab, and uncomfortably close to the Soviet Union and its fantasy of a warm-water port. Even after the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, it is possible that the United States would have eventually reopened relations with an avowedly Islamic Iran had the government softened its anti-Americanism. The United States has never made secularism a condition of friendship. It has been fully prepared to support Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, and even used religion to cement the anti-Communist alliance during the cold war. The Iraqi Shiite Islamists have been willing to work alongside the Americans, and the United States has in return treated them as its allies, democratically chosen by the Iraqi electorate.[SIC]
Islamist anti-Americanism is the direct legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini’s success in marrying Islamic faith to anti-imperialism — making “Death to America” into a religious chant, not just a political slogan. Of course the United States was hardly blameless. It did everything it could to open itself to the imperialist charge, including, in Iran, backing the famous 1953 countercoup that removed from power Iran’s first democratically legitimate prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. Contemporary Islamists can also point to America’s continuing hypocritical support of regional authoritarian regimes….
United States support for Israel has always been an important part of the argument for Islamist anti-Americanism, but today it is by no means a necessary component. If U.S. support of Israel were to weaken, the American presence in Iraq and elsewhere in the gulf would easily substitute as a basis for hatred.
The United States therefore has strong reason to block its enemy Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — not simply because Iran will seek to become a greater regional power, as any nation might do, but because the Islamic Republic of Iran as currently constituted is definitionally anti-American. There need not be a direct threat of Iranian first use against either the United States or Israel for this reason to weigh heavily. A nuclear Iran will be a stronger and more effective enemy in pursuing anti-American policies under the banner of Islam…
Whether force, negotiation or some combination is the right path to take to keep Iran from going nuclear is of course a hugely important question. It turns on many uncertain facts, like the true progress of Iran’s nuclear program and how much it can be affected by air attack; Iran’s capacity and will to retaliate against an attack; whether there is any chance Iran would respond to negotiations; and the ability of the United States to withstand any retaliation while 150,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq. As we have recently learned in Iraq, it is not enough to think you have a good reason to go to war — you must also have a realistic understanding of the practical and moral costs of things going horribly wrong. Any choice, though, must be made against the backdrop of the reality that the Islamic government of Iran is not only unlikely to collapse soon — it is also very unlikely to become less anti-American in the near future.
The same, unfortunately, is true of the world’s Islamist movements, for whom anti-Americanism remains a rallying cry and a principle of belief. Perhaps the promotion of democracy in the region, pursued consistently by the United States over the long term, might someday allow the rise of leaders whose Islamism is tempered by the need to satisfy their constituents’ domestic needs — and who eschew anti-Americanism as wasteful and misguided. Iraq was the test case of whether this change could occur in the short term. But we failed to make the experiment work and gave Iraq’s Islamist politicians, Shiite and Sunni alike, ample grounds to continue the anti-American rhetoric that comes so easily to them. In the wake of our tragic mismanagement of Iraq, we are certainly a generation or more from any such unlinking of Islamism and anti-Americanism, if it is to occur at all. And Islamism itself shows no signs of being on the wane as a social or political force.
That means that the best we can hope for in nuclear Islamic states in the near term is a rational dictator like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, who sees his bread buttered on the side of an alliance with the West. […]
Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, is a law professor at New York University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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October 28, 2006
US Indymedia reporter killed in the Oaxaca insurrection
[IMAGE] A reporter for Indymedia in New York was shot twice and killed
yesterday while behind a rebel barricade in Oaxaca, Mexico. Bradley
Roland Will, age 36, was shot in the upper torso by paramilitaries in
the service of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Bradley Will died on the
street while still clutching his video camera. A photographer, Oswaldo
Ramirez, for Milenio newspaper was wounded in the attack.
[IMAGE] Bradley Will had been in Oaxaca since early October covering the
widening rebellion against the state government of the despot Ulises
Ruiz Ortiz. The Insurrection led primarily by public school teachers in
the organization Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) has
resulted in many confrontations with scores killed and wounded.
Bradley Will’s last published article was on October 17, titled “Death
in Oaxaca”. The article was on the assassination of Alejandro García
Hernández on the barricades set up by APPO. There are indications that
pro-government paramilitaries are targeting journalists. [no doubt with US assistance]
http://www.aztlan.net/us_reporter_killed_in_oaxaca.htm
John Pilger interview: exposing the rotten heart of the empire
www.bookmarks.uk.com
U.S.-ISRAEL ATTEMPT TO DESTROY EVERYTHING IN THE WAY OF ITS FASCIST WORLD ORDER MUST BE DEFEATED
Lebanon’s Irreplaceable Cultural Loss
By Mulham Assir
http://countercurrents.org/leb-assir281006.htm
The loss inflicted by the Israeli war on Lebanon is measured in the 1,400 people killed, the thousands maimed (with more continuing to be killed and maimed by the hundreds of thousands of cluster bombs left behind), the hundreds of thousands displaced or left homeless, and the wholesale destruction of infrastructure essential to life. And yet there is even more loss, impossible to put a number to and irreplaceable- Lebanon’s cultural loss
Imperialist Eugenics integral to U.S. “manifest destiny” Agenda
The Future of Man and the Neolib Malthusian Population Management Program
Kurt Nimmo
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=626
“…depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World.”
Henry Kissinger,National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974
I am guilty of killing off the South African Cape vulture. I lead a “consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable,” according to the WWF conservation group. “If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us,” declares WWF Director-General James Leape in China, the darling nation, indeed the template, of the Neoliberal Order.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t know anything about the WWF, so I looked it up over the “consumptive” internet. At first, I thought WWF stood for the World Wrestling Federation, a common enough mistake for an American, even though I don’t watch much television, and not because it is consumptive, but rather because I don’t take kindly to brainwashing. As it turns out, the the World Wrestling Federation changed its name to the World Wrestling Entertainment because the real WWF, or the World Wide Fund, sued the wrestlers for unfair trade practices.
According to people associated with the WWF, our problem is a “burgeoning human population,” and this requires a “raft of measures,” as professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey,” explains it…
In “consumptive” fashion, I did a Google check on the World Wide Fund. As it turns out, HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands helped found and served as the first president of the organization. In addition to his dare-devil playboy life, Bernard joined the NSDAP, the SA and a special branch of the SS, that is to say he was a Nazi. Bernard, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, “was not politically active and although this German aristocrat was never a fierce champion of democracy, there are no accounts of him ever having made fascist or anti-semitic remarks,” instead we are expected to believe “these memberships made life easier for an ambitious young man.” He met personally with Hitler and the dictator characterized Bernard as “a complete idiot,” or maybe that should be a useful idiot.
It is, to say the least, interesting the founder of an influential “conservation” organization was active in the German SS, notorious for wearing the Totenkopf, or skull and crossbones death’s head, and sending not only Jews, but Romani, Social Democrats, socialists, communists, homosexuals, “deviant artists,” and scads of others to concentration and death camps. Moreover, the Nazis were big into eugenics programs [started in usa], in particular the Aktion T-4 program, “which authorized specific doctors and officials to carry out mercy deaths-euthanasia-of those the state deemed unworthy of life…. physicians at hospitals and psychiatric institutions throughout Germany identified and recommended candidates for euthanasia,” according to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.
In addition, Bernard was one of two founders of the Bilderberg Group. Prince Philip of Britain, a member of the Bilderberg Group, also associated with the WWF, once said famously, or rather infamously: “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” Another Bilderberger, Henry Kissinger, is on record as stating in National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, “depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World.”
Leuren Moret, a Livermore nuclear weapons lab whistleblower, writes: “Depopulation policy became the top priority under the NSC agenda, Club of Rome and U.S. policymakers like Gen. Alexander Haig, Cyrus Vance, Ed Muskie and Kissinger. According to an NSC spokesman at the time, the United States shared the view of former World Bank President Robert McNamara that the ‘population crisis’ is a greater threat to U.S. national security interests than ‘nuclear annihilation.’ In 1975, Henry Kissinger established a policy-planning group in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Population Affairs…. It is no surprise that this policy was established under President Carter with help from Kissinger and Brzezinski—all with ties to David Rockefeller. The Bush family, the Harriman family—the Wall Street business partners of Bush in financing Hitler—and the Rockefeller family are the elite of the American eugenics movement.”
If not for the above stated fact the elite are proponents of eugenics, it would be easy to write off this Malthusian project as little more than reductio ad Hitlerem, or argumentum ad nazium, in other words the product of evil Nazis and the easily dismissed madman Hitler. However, according to T.D. Hall, in his study of German eugenics, this genocidal mindset was not limited to racist Nazis, but is a basic characteristic of all “socialisms” of the last century. From the “Malthus-Darwin doctrine,” Hall argues, emerges a chilling maxim: “Do nothing for the masses except that which accelerates their destruction.” According to Ernst Mayr, considered the American dean of Darwinism, “natural selection” provides no solution to the burdensome existence of “shiftless, improvident individuals.” According to Hall, “Mayr’s view is essentially a contemporary re-statement of the old eugenics propaganda. When Hitler and his Nazis commenced their programs of sterilization and extermination, they were operating on the firm conviction that for the sake of the German people and the future of man, National Socialism must take over where Natural Selection left off.”
Leuren Moret comments on the “natural selection” of the Neoliberal Order: “Two excellent examples of existing U.S. depopulation policy are, first, the long-term impact on the civilian population from Agent Orange in Vietnam, where the Rockefellers built oil refineries and aluminum plants during the Vietnam War. The second is the permanent contamination of the Middle East and Central Asia with depleted uranium, which, unfortunately, will destroy the genetic future of the populations living in those regions and will also have a global effect already reflected in increases in infant mortality reported in the U.S., Europe, and the UK.”
Moret continues:
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been proposing, funding and building Bio-Weapons Level 3 and Level 4 labs at many places around the U.S. even on university campuses and in densely populated urban locations. In a Bio-Weapons Level 4 facility, a single bacteria or virus is lethal. Bio-Weapons Level 4 is the highest level legally allowed in the continental U.S.
For what purpose are these labs being developed, and who will make the decisions on where bio-weapons created in these facilities will be used and on whom? More than 20 world-class microbiologists have been murdered since 2002, mostly in the U.S. and the UK. Nearly all were working on development of ethnic-specific bio-weapons (see Smart Dust, Roboflies &).
Of course, the “future of man,” in the current context, will be left in the hands of the Neoliberal Order. “The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries,” declared David Rockefeller at the Bilderberger meeting in June 1991 in Baden Baden, Germany. “The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values,” explained Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and founding member of the Trilateral Commission. One such value, no doubt, dictates the use of genocide and mass extermination, masquerading as depopulation, lest the South African Cape vulture go by the wayside.
U.S. Launching a new kind of warfare
Pete Warren
Thursday October 26, 2006
Guardian,http://technology.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329609881-117422,00.html
In November 2004, during the second battle of Fallujah, an American uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) - a robot plane - located a mortar battery that had been hampering the US operation to retake the town.The mortar’s position was logged by the UAV’s operator, who was sitting at his desk in Nellis Air Force base near Las Vegas, thousands of miles away. Using the internet, the operator contacted the operator of another armed UAV at a desk in central command (”Centcom”) - a safe area away from the theatre of war, with centres in Kuwait, Qutar or Iraq.
The two operators swapped information on the mortar in a secure internet chat room, guiding the armed drone to its position to destroy the mortar and its crew.
According to Lieutenant General John Sattler, commander of the coalition forces at the battle, it was a proving ground for the use of remote vehicles. “We learned that UAVs can provide the coordinates required for artillery as well as aviation [targeting]. Our UAVs gave us the grid coordinates of an enemy position and allowed us to clear the area for fires and estimate collateral damage,” says Sattler.
The new remote-controlled technology was also tested in 2001 in the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan, close to the Pakistan border, believed to be the last stronghold for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida fighters. Sending soldiers into the caves to try to capture fighters inside would carry huge risks. Instead, the US sent in armed Talon reconnaissance drones - small tanks equipped with camera and sensing equipment, and armed with anything from a sniper’s rifle to rocket launchers. They were used to identify caves and positions held by al-Qaida.
Information gleaned from the Talons was used to direct what rapidly became a mopping-up operation - although bin Laden was not caught.
But that is only the beginning. By 2015, the US Department of Defense plans that one third of its fighting strength will be composed of robots, part of a $127bn (£68bn) project known as Future Combat Systems (FCS), a transformation that is part of the largest technology project in American history.
The US army has already developed around 20 remotely controlled Unmanned Ground Systems that can be controlled by a laptop from around a mile away, and the US Navy and US Air Force are working on a similar number of systems with varying ranges. According to a US general quoted in the US Army’s Joint Robotics Program Master Plan http://tinyurl.com/yl7s52), “what we’re doing with unmanned ground and air vehicles is really bringing movies like Star Wars to reality”. The US military has 2,500 uncrewed systems deployed in conflicts around the world. But is it Star Wars or I, Robot that the US is bringing to reality? By 2035, the plan is for the first completely autonomous robot soldiers to stride on to the battlefield…
Among the 37 or so UAVs detailed in the “US Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap 2005-2030″ http://tinyurl.com/ozv78), two projects demonstrated in 2004 - the Boeing X45a and the Northrop Grumman X47a (both uncannily similar to the Stealth fighter) - are listed as Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems. A similar project, the Cormorant, which can be launched from a submerged submarine, can be used by special forces for ground support. A close reading of the UAV Systems Roadmap shows the startling progress the US has already made in this field, with systems ranging from fighters to helicopters and propeller driven missiles called Long Guns on display.
A POLITICAL WMD CALLED RELIGION:
Christian [-zionist] Supremacists
And American Imperialism
By Yoginder Sikand
http://countercurrents.org/us-sikand281006.htm
Christian fundamentalism is now firmly entrenched in America’s politics and society. It exercises a powerful influence in shaping the country’s domestic and foreign policies. So Esther Kaplan argues in her recently published book, ‘With God on Their Side’…
Christian fundamentalism and American Empire go hand-in-hand… This is illustrated, for instance, in the firm support given by American Christian right-wing groups for America’s imperialist offensives in the Muslim world. Thus, Kaplan writes that America’s invasion of Iraq was greeted as ‘big news’ by American evangelicals, hoping that American arms would pave the way for Christian missionaries to flood the Muslim world. ‘There is a tremendous amount of excitement about the opportunity’, Mark Kelly of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board announced when the American offensive against Iraq was in its second month. No sooner had Saddam fallen than American and other Western Christian evangelists descended on the hapless Iraq Muslims, armed with food aid, Jesus films and Bibles, in a well-designed campaign to convert them to Christianity. The events of 9/11 have given this Christian missionary zeal added impetus. Kaplan writes that since 2001 the number of Christian missionaries working in Muslim countries has gone up four times.
War-mongering Christian fundamentalists are implacably opposed to peace in the Middle East, Kaplan says. They insist that the Jews alone have the right to rule or live in Palestine, and they have been opposed to any suggestion of a Palestinian state. They see the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel as initiating what they call the Second Coming of Jesus, who, they expect, will return to establish a messianic global kingdom. All non-Christians would, they believe, then be killed and sent to hell. They also believe that those Jews who refuse to accept Jesus as the messiah would be slain. Yet, since they are fervent backers of the state of Israel, and because they identify Muslims as their principal enemies, they have been able to establish strong links with Zionist organisations in America and Israel, as well as with the Israeli state, a fact that Kaplan discusses in detail. Kaplan shows how the views of these Christian bigots find considerable support among key officials in the Bush administration and influence his politics in the troubled Middle East, further stoking the flames of war and destruction in the region….
Return of the Bell Curve
by Carl Bloice
BC Editorial Board
http://www.blackcommentator.com/203/203_left_margin_bell_curve_bloice_ed_bd.html
On more than one occasion over recent months I’ve heard or read something actually defending inequality. After a lifetime of hearing about the idea of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, I was hearing educated people saying inequality is what keeps the system going - a motive force propelling our society to ever new heights. At first, I found it hard to believe what I was hearing. Then, I thought perversely, if a little inequity is good for us, a lot of it must be better. After all, that seems to be the operating principle of the people currently in power in the nation’s capital. They keep pushing in that direction.
“The accepted view in social science is that inequalities are an inevitable condition of economic success,” economic professor, Jacques Mistral, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, commented back in July. He went on to note that the number of people in the U.S. without health insurance is growing and poverty rates here are “the highest among all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, in particular for children and seniors.”
Earlier this summer, belittling those it says “who would discredit American capitalism,” the editors of The Economist magazine wrote: “Any system in which the spoils are distributed so unevenly is morally wrong, they say. This newspaper disagrees. Inequality is not inherently wrong.” The editors went on to say inequality is not wrong if the society as a whole is getting richer; there is a safety net for the “very poor” and everybody has the chance to climb up through the system. Of course, that’s not saying much positive about the economic situation today – at least in this country. The safety net is being shredded, and the most tattered parts are those designed to help the very poor. As far as everybody – “regardless of class, race, creed or sex” – having the ability to move upward, well, there’s ample evidence it just ain’t happening.
In June, The Economist did a special issue on “Inequality and the American Dream.” It described the U.S. as a country “that tolerates inequality” and concluded that “… every measure shows that, over the past quarter century, those at the top have done better that those at the bottom” and “the gains of productivity growth have become increasingly skewed.” Simply put, the editors acknowledge that while more and more wealth is being created, those who already have are having more and those who have little are having to make do with less.
But here we are - in the richest country on the planet where one in five children lives in poverty. Where a worker who earns the minimum wage takes in $10,700 which $6,000 below the federal poverty level for a family of three. Sixty-one percent of minimum wage earners are women, many of them single.
While corporate profits have soared, inflation-adjusted wage growth has stagnated and the wages of the lowest paid workers amongst us have not kept up with inflation. From 2001 to 2003, inflation-adjusted income among households in the lowest 20 percent of the population decreased 5.1 percent.
Much is being made by some commentators about the income differences between workers at the lower end of so-called middle class and those employed at the higher level, more-skilled jobs. Much of this is statistical mirage. Income inequality is growing for the 80 percent of American workers who are characterized as “production and non-supervisory.” – that is, the working class.
Between 2002 and 2003 the number of Americans in poverty increased by 1.3 million and poverty rates for African American and Latino workers stood at over 20 percent. At the same time, real income for the bottom 40 percent of African-American households fell by nearly 6 percent
The income disparity of African American families as compared to whites actually increased over the past decade.
As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently observed, “economic disparities in New York, as in the United States as a whole, are wider than they have been since the 1920’s.”
Enter the “Bell Curve.” That’s the title of the 1994 book by early neo-conservatives Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s that asserts intelligence is largely a matter of birth, that there is little chance of altering that fact, and that poor people and African Americans in particular, are thus overrepresented among the unintelligent. Their screed was widely denounced for its racism and sloppy scholarship. Reactionary commentator Pat Buchanan, however welcomed it as shooting “a hole straight through the heart of egalitarian socialism which tried to create equality of result by coercive government programs.”
Those who would have us believe that inequality is not only inevitable naturally return to this discredited view over and over because its thesis advances their idea of the inevitable rise to dominance of the “cognitive elite” under conditions of advanced technology and globalization. They maintain that the U.S. is becoming a genetic “meritocracy.”
On October 5, The Economist returned to the subject of inequality in a special edition titled: “The Search for Talent.” In it, the term “Bell Curve” appears twice. In an editorial comment, ominously titled “the Dark Side,” the magazine said:
Competition for talent offers many benefits—from boosting productivity to increasing opportunities, from promoting job satisfaction to supercharging scientific advances. The more countries and companies compete for talent, the better the chances that geniuses will be raked up from obscurity.
But the subject is strewn with landmines. Think of the furor that greeted Charles Murray’s and Richard Herrnstein’s book “The Bell Curve,” which argued that there are differences in the average intelligence of different racial groups; or the ejection of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University because he had speculated publicly about why there are so few women in the upper ranks of science.
It would be wonderful if talent were distributed equally across races, classes and genders. But what if a free market shows it not to be, raising all sorts of political problems? And what happens to talented Western workers when they have to compete with millions of clever Indians who are willing to do the job for a small fraction of the price?
Notice that the Indians are not described as smarter, only more “clever” than the “talented Western workers.”
Then, in the main article, titled “The Revenge of the Bell Curve,” the magazine continues:
The second factor that links talent and inequality is that members of the talent elite are good at hogging “human capital.” They marry people like themselves. In the heyday of “company man,” bankers married their secretaries; now they marry other bankers. They work in jobs that add to their intellectual capital. They live in “talent enclaves,” away from ordinary middle-class suburbs, let alone inner-city ghettos. Above all, they pass on their advantages to their children. Students from the top income quartile increased their share of places in elite American universities from 39% in 1976 to 50% in 1995.
None of this is peculiar to America or other rich countries; the same thing is happening in the developing world in even starker form. Members of the talent elite there live in gated communities, some of them with American names such as Palm Springs, Napa Valley or Park Avenue, that boast international schools, world-class hospitals, luxury housing and splendid gyms.
“… The talent war is producing a global meritocracy—a group of people nicknamed “Davos men” or “cosmocrats” who are reaping handsome rewards from globalization. These people inhabit a socio-cultural bubble full of other super-achievers like themselves. They attend world-class universities and business schools, work for global organizations and speak the global language of business.
Countries that still insist on clinging to egalitarianism are paying a heavy price. Sweden, for instance, finds it hard to attract foreign talent. And across Europe, egalitarian universities are losing out to their more elitist American rivals.
The answer, then, to rising inequality is to cease “clinging to egalitarianism.”
Most of the world’s main problems today are inseparable from the dynamics of rapacious globalization and the so-called market economy. Without some fundamental changes, the future under this system will see increased poverty, more environmental degradation, and what writer Ronald Aaronson has termed “ever more uneven distribution of resources and the undermining of traditional societies and ways of life, for a culture dominated by marketing, advertising and uneven global development.”
The market economy – in all its aspects: production, service, education, housing, etc.) is driven by the pursuit of profit. It is that drive, and not some exorable drive toward a mythical “meritocracy” arising from technological change. One might think that in a world of expanding production and wealth creation there ought to be more not less job security and prosperity. Instead under the present setup, the already well-to-do and their progeny get more security and prosperity and working men and women and their families get less. That may be how the system works but it ain’t right and it doesn’t have to be….
BC Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union.
criminal capitalist family values
Mom sentenced to prison for ignoring infection
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Bellybutton_Infection.html
By MELISSA TRUJILLO
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
BOSTON — A mother whose 13-year-old daughter nearly died from an infection caused by a bellybutton piercing was sentenced Thursday to 2 1/2 years in prison for failing to seek medical attention for several weeks as the child grew sicker.
The girl wrote to the judge seeking leniency for Deborah Robinson, who was convicted this month of wantonly or recklessly permitting substantial bodily injury to a child under 14. She could have received five years.
“My mom is not in the least a criminal,” wrote the daughter… has made a full recovery. She testified in her mother’s defense, saying Robinson urged her to eat, gave her orange juice and adjusted the temperature in the apartment to make her comfortable.
The judge suspended one year of the sentence, and Robinson has already served more than 14 months in jail. Defense laywer Janet Macnab said she already should be eligible for parole….During her trial, Macnab said Robinson was a struggling single mother of two [now motherless & homeless wardens of the fascist state] who didn’t realize how sick her daughter was.[and likely has no health insurance] Robinson’s son also wrote to the judge seeking leniency for her.
The Ballad of Said and Nancy, Or: “Americans Against America”
by Mark W. Bradley
Speaking as someone who’s devoted his entire life to the reckless dismantling of our country’s defenses (and who tirelessly seeks to strengthen the hand of our merciless terrorist adversaries), I must tell you that posing as a “Civil Libertarian Defender of the Constitution” has proven to be the most effective and ingenious cover I’ve ever found for concealing my many and varied subversive activities. Let me explain…
In 1998, I joined a group called the “AAA.” No, I’m not talking about the folks who offer roadside service and package discounts for Disney World, but rather a left-wing organization know as “Americans Against America.” Our membership is made up mostly of people who pose as loyal Americans, and who act as if they really cared about the erosion of our Constitutional Rights, but whose abiding loyalty is to ancient foreign governments that have long-since ceased to exist.
I myself am a 12th generation Scottish-American, the descendant of undocumented aliens who snuck into America through the port of Baltimore in the early 1700s. Like most illegal immigrants, they refused to speak English (or at least anything recognizable as English); they multiplied like jackrabbits; they lowered the prevailing wage; and as soon as they found their way into the hills of Appalachia they formed gun-wielding gangs that threatened the peace and stability of the countryside. But how could it be otherwise? How can you expect people with names like Wallace, Gillespie, Ingram, Robertson, and Buchanan to fit into a civilized society? It’s just not possible.
The tragic fact is that my Scottish ancestors were never able to successfully assimilate into American culture, choosing instead to stubbornly cling to their separate and distinct ethnic identity. After 300 years of willfully clustering together in Scottish-only neighborhoods, is it really that surprising that my family’s true allegiance has never been to the United States at all, but rather to the 18th Century Stuart Monarchy in exile?
Alas, my story is hardly unique. The ever-expanding membership of “Americans Against America” now includes 10th generation Cajun-Americans who owe their fealty to the Bourbon Kings of France, 7th generation Turkish-Americans who seek to restore the once mighty Ottoman Empire, and even 5th generation Prussian-Americans who like to eat pickled-herring, wear spiked-helmets, and sit around singing martial songs about the “Good Old Days” under Kaiser Wilhelm II. We’re a diverse lot, and frankly the only thing we have in common is our irrational and relentless animosity toward the land of our birth. If short, we hate ourselves for our freedom.
One of our more outspoken members is an Egyptian-American stockbroker named Said, whose family fled Egypt during the Roman Occupation of 30 B.C., but who, to this day, remains steadfastly loyal to the Ptolemaic Kings. In order to show his solidarity with the deposed rulers of his ancestral home, Said often shows up for work as a receptionist at Smith-Barney wearing only a white linen skirt, a 30” diameter solid-gold collar, and a very realistic looking jackal-head mask. He works out regularly and weighs in at a rock-hard 270, so it’s a safe bet his co-workers at the brokerage firm aren’t inclined to ridicule his unconventional choice of attire.
One day last week, Said, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Osama bin Laden, and I arranged to have a quiet lunch together at an Olive Garden Restaurant just outside the Washington Beltway in Maryland. I arrived sporting a plaid kilt, tamoshanter, and sporran, while Said chose an iridescent feathered cloak crowned with an impressive ceremonial mask — a peregrine falcon carrying a two-headed cobra in its beak. Osama (for obvious reasons) came incognito. In an effort to avoid drawing attention to himself and his unusually large stature, he wore an eclectic Halloween costume that could best be described as “Hasidic Wookiee.” As for his dialysis machine, it was cleverly disguised as an early cubist rendition of R2D2 on a rubber leash. Needless to say, our little gathering was discreet enough to escape the notice of most of the restaurant’s patrons, although at one point I did overhear an elderly woman say to her husband, “No, I’m sure of it, that tall, furry guy wearing the black hat and pulling the slot-machine-on-wheels is definitely Jack Abramoff.” …( full article
Madonna’s African Safari: The Great White Baby Hunter
Angelina Can Eat My Ashes
by Leilla Matsui
Dear Madonna,
You are no doubt dismayed by the public outrage that has greeted your decision to adopt a baby boy from Malawi — a country that most people in the West probably only know from the ad campaigns of charitable organizations showing sickly babies covered in flies, while being watched over by your former wedding guests, now sockless and stubbled with earnest three-day beards. I imagine that you are shocked, truly shocked that anyone would question your decision to remove a child from such unimaginable suffering as having Bono and Bob Geldof breathing down his crib. And what kind of person would condemn someone so young to a life of grinding poverty, especially someone with millions at her disposal; a loving “mammy” who will tote her little “mchanga” around in a 1,200-thread-count batik Snuggly specially designed for him by Tom Ford himself, and provide him with every consumer item under the less skin-damaging sun. Little David Banda is the luckiest boy in the world, you repeat to yourself 666 times a day while fiddling with your little red thread bracelet, because that’s how every self-serving mantra eventually becomes truth. It’s written in the Khabible. One minute little what’s-his-name is languishing in an overcrowded, under funded orphanage in one of the poorest nations on earth, and the next minute he’s soaring over the ocean in a private jet to make his new home on a palatial English estate, where he will be tended to by a complete staff of servants and diapered in monogrammed Pampers. You have even sweetened the deal with a complete DVD box set of The Lion King so that he can immerse himself in African culture. You would think that would shut up those annoying people who think removing a child from his own people and culture is somehow a bad thing, even if said culture hasn’t yet invented pots to piss in….(full letter
Selling Satan: Iraqi War Dead And The Collateral Damage To America’s Soul
Phil Rockstroh
http://www.countercurrents.org/us-rockstroh261006.htm
Headline (Reuters): “United States numb to Iraq troop deaths: experts”
“O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick
All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too ignorant to know they exist — or too benumbed to resonate with their content.
Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of the citizenry of The Corporatists States of America have experienced a comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords experience when topping-off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel purchased with money plundered from their employee’s retirement accounts … Sans conscience above — sans conscience below.
Dante posited Limbo (that quiet suburban community ringing Hell) was a place reserved for those who evinced indifference to the world around them. It would seem our corporate/consumer version of Damnation (which now includes Casual Fridays in Hell itself) requires prescriptions for anti-depressants, urine tests, and Reality Television competitions to enter its inner most circles.
As stated, human beings have always possessed an immense capacity for self-deception — but, at present, we Americans can no longer afford stupid, naked monkey business as usual: The stakes are too damn high. When we, as a people, cannot or will not connect the needless deaths of well over half-a-million Iraqis with the oversized motor vehicles in our driveways, the situation has grown dire indeed.
How can we go on this way? At this point, a guilt-induced, collective nervous breakdown in the middle of our morning commute would seem to be in order.
By existing in this degree of denial, what have we conjured? What sort of a society do we call forth when our lives are as isolated, benumbed, inauthentic and devoid of conscience as they are at present? The answer is: We’re living in the midst of it — this hideous era of pervasive flimflam and permanent war. Call it: The Haliburtonization of everyday life. Again, as above — so below.
We live in a nation dominated by salesmanship (commercial, political, religious). Accordingly, the salesman’s credo is: a facile mendacity trumps a stubborn truth — because an honest mode of being would cause the buyer to become wary of the giddy lie of the pitch. Hence, complicity in its duplicity is what the corporate/consumer state demands of us.
The salesman’s counterfeit smile is, of course, camouflage. Beneath it is hidden a face more closely resembling that quintessential corporatist and Haliburton-allumni-in-good-standing: Dick Cheney; his joyless, thin-lipped, psychopath’s half grin is the true countenance of our death-enamored empire.
A salesman’s repertoire of manipulative enthusiasm and sham amiability fronts the whole criminal enterprise. Is it any coincidence that Las Vegas and prisons are the fastest growing population centers in the United States? — We’ve become a country comprised of clip-joints and jails — a land of suckers and criminals — with a cultural landscape peopled by corporate scam artists, congressional bagmen, and war criminals (hiding in plain sight in the highest offices of the land). It’s a natural progression, due to the fact that capitalism has always depended on a predatory class of sociopaths, has always relied upon thievery and murder, and, therefore, needs an endless supply of suckers and victims.
Yet, most of us Americans are no one’s victims. Any con artist worth his smarmy smile is aware of this fact: As a rule, a mark is made the victim of his own greed. Moreover — by means of our complicity in allowing our identities to be molded by a culture dominated by proliferate propaganda, empty salesmanship, and our own lies of omission — the fate of a hapless mark, bamboozled by self-inflicted selfishness, is the criteria we live out daily. Apropos, we’re now condemned to shuffle through our lives as somnambulating ciphers, dim denizens of a world made manifest by mountebanks.
We should be cautioned. History reveals: What a nation inflicts upon the world — its own people will, sooner or later, inflict upon each other. There is no need to warily scan the horizon line for its arrival, because we’re already living in the midst of the angst and emptiness we have wrought. Ergo, when dreams mean nothing — when words and images are rendered meaningless — our lives reflect these dismal states.
Words, images, and dreams are our internal analog of the vast, manifold, and incomprehensible sublime of the cosmos. When we dream: We are spiraling supernovas and spindling stalks of slime mold. We are schools of silent fish and we are the fulmination of thunder. We are uniquely ourselves; yet, we also contain all of existence. To lose our dreams is to lose our soul.
Hence: To have the verities of our inner selves twisted and distorted towards the selfish ends of corporate capitalism and the dishonest agendas of mass media-driven political discourse is to become estranged from passion, empathy, and imagination; thereby, we grow inured to phrases such as preemptive war, collateral damage and acceptable losses — expressions that we should find repellent, if not, flat-out mortifying.
If not, then it should follow: We should change the names of the civilian casualties of war, inscribed upon their respective tombstones, to simply read “Collateral Damage.” Moreover, narratives of bereavement should sound something like this: “You see, when the bombs of the Preemptive Warriors fell on our home — our child, now named, ‘Collateral Damage,’ was asleep in her crib, and she became ‘our little Acceptable Loss.’” Now try this: See how the statement above sounds when you substitute the names of your loved-ones — or even the names of your pets.
In opposition to empathy, the corporatist mode of being instructs us that human life, like material objects, exists merely to be used, used-up, then discarded; nature is to be subdued, exploited, and decimated; trees — toppled; rivers — dammed up; mountains — ground down to silt; words — degraded, attenuated, and stripped of meaning. Finally, they will come for us.
Instead, what if we were seized and shook by shamanic visions sent to us from an ensouled earth that had grown enraged by our ignorance and indifference towards its plight? What if these fantastic and terrifying narratives warned of dire events and augured destruction, in which, oceans rose, hurricanes churned, glaciers melted, the very young and the very old perished from extreme heat and cold, as clouds of pestilence descended upon the land?
Are these visions crackpot ravings — or last summer’s news and weather reports? What difference would it make whether these dire and dreadful circumstances are wrought by wrathful gods or Global Warming? The structure, plot, theme, and dénouement are essentially the same: Hubris and ignorance transform nature (human and otherwise) into a force of blind destruction, thereby rendering arrogant folly rending tragedy. Whether engendered by gods, or memes, or molecules — suffering is suffering; untimely death is untimely death, regardless of the cause.
We Americans have numbed ourselves in order to be able to live with our complicity in the crimes of empire. We have carpet bombed our rational minds into oblivion by the belief in chimeras such as “smart bombs.” Reason tells us: a truly smart bomb would be able to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. Therefore, for a smart bomb to exist, it would have to be a Frankenstein Monster Bomb, because, in order to exterminate the truly guilty, it would first have to kill its creators. Then it would go after the soulless bastards who ordered its use. Accordingly, smart bombs would be flying into Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s front doors as thick and fast as moths toward a glowing porch light on a warm summer night.
Only a society of numbed-out, reality-adverse imbeciles could believe in the existence of smart bombs. In a related matter, recent public opinion surveys have revealed close to seventy percent of the population of the United States does not believe in the Theory of Evolution, yet believes that a mythological character called Satan is a literal entity.
How did this epic ignorance come to be? How did we leave the 21st Century and blunder back to the 14th? Maybe this type of hocus-pocus, hoodoo, and religious legerdemain is necessary to keep an increasingly angst-ridden, over-worked populace from rising from our enclosures in Hell (also known as cubicles and work stations) and demanding a system that offers greater depth, meaning and resonance than the one presently afforded under corporate hegemony.
Is this how we became so passive and benumbed — because the life we’re offered and have accepted within the corporate/consumer paradigm is so limiting in its possibilities: it being a system that occludes and eventually destroys the natural world (both external and internal)? Is this the reason we have grown so dim — because our imaginations have been so deeply suppressed that its imaginings now rise as a living nightmare of literalization? Perhaps, Americans don’t believe in evolution — due to the fact we no longer believe that meaningful change can occur. And, perhaps, we believe in the literal existence of a soul-collecting Devil — because we know that we have lost our essential selves to a mysterious force that seems beyond our control. Having been seduced by the illusions of corporate capitalism (a false mythos that tantalizes us with promises of freedom but instead shackles us to exploitive labor and mind-numbing consumerism) we know we have made an ill-advised bargain with some dark force that has robbed us of our humanity. We know (maybe ineffably) that, here within the empire, our lives have lost an essential, soul-enhancing element.
It is possible we fear our souls are imperiled by the Devil, because, on some level of awareness, we grasp we have forsaken our ability to experience a life imbued by meaning, depth and resonance, due to our systematic suppression of those vital aspects of our character that are capable of imagining then creating a future containing greater possibilities than the shriveled pickings of the present.
We fear the licking flames of hell, I suspect, because we realize we have sold our souls at fire sale prices.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: .
Collaborators of Catastrophe: Inside the Ministry of Truth
Manuel Valenzuela
http://valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/2006/10/collaborators-of-catastrop_116183596570185445.html
The role of the fascist media is to protect the fascists, to smear those exposing truths, to ignore movements seeking truth to criminality, to enable the activities of the Bush cabal and to grant life to the manipulative mechanisms of the state. Its role is to keep the masses obedient, ignorant and subservient to the state.
Storytellers of the American Narrative
The creators of American reality, those propagators of charades and mirages who dwell inside the hallways of the Ministry of Truth – otherwise known as the Corporate Media – continue their dance of deception and whitewash, festering in their offices of propaganda, directing the narratives and the epics hundreds of millions of Americans consider truth. Much like the disappearance of warmth giving way to the crispness of cold arrives with each annual changing of leaves, so the remarketing of American reality is altered by the changing faces of circumstance. Today, this change is the complete disaster that is the occupation of Iraq, an endeavor whose initial fruition could not have taken shape without the blitzkrieg marketed incessantly into every home and mind in America by the Department of Propaganda, the Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists.
With the complete and utter failure of America’s experiment with hubristic imperialism outside its hemisphere, with the complete collapse in confidence by the people of the government and its leaders, with the fictional war on terror losing muster, with the American people questioning the Iraq debacle in growing numbers, the masters and lords comprising the Establishment have been forced to alter direction and appease the minds of the masses. Inside the Ministry of Truth the decision has been made, therefore, to open the curtains, if only minimally, to a small manifestation of truth and fact that has for three years been kept hidden from the people and that sheds light on the Iraq War and its horrific reality.
In the upper echelons of the Establishment’s pyramid and the corporatist power structure, there has arrived a realization that Iraq is and will remain lost, a miserable failure turning more putrid every day, forever becoming a gash that will not heal, a ghost whose lack of placidity will for decades haunt the psyche of America. The Bush Crusade, once seen by the elite as a harbinger of empire and hegemonic power, an excursion becoming the genesis of perpetual wealth and richness, has instead transmuted itself into the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the Pax Americana. In the span of three years, Iraq has surpassed Vietnam, in the totality of the circumstances, as a perpetual burn whose scab will continue to be pulled off by the shame of what America did to Iraq, by the embarrassment of such apparent failure, by the geopolitical suicide it committed in Mesopotamia and by the severed image of the nation in the eyes of the world.
For the American masses, meanwhile, a great discomfort at the disaster unfolding and the failure apparent has been born, as if the growing number of rotting corpses throughout Iraq have exported their terrible stench across the Atlantic to the far reaches of America, finally arriving to wake from the doldrums of comfort and laziness the minds of millions of American people. Yet these millions of Americans grow disquieted not because of the genocide committed by their military, not because of the death of 655,000, or the displacement of 1.5 million, but because of the complete failure in not succeeding and winning, because of the death of almost 3,000 occupying soldiers, for creating a new memory of debacle, quagmire, defeat.
The narrative so-meticulously concocted and crafted by the Ministry of Truth, of an America destined by the Christian deity for greatness, incapable of defeat, always triumphant in victory, forever carrying the torch of goodness, chosen to fight the forces of evil, a beacon of freedom and liberty to the world, has been shown as the sham that it is, a fantasy laced with the glazed sugar coating of Hollywood perfection and brainwashed delusions. The aura of arrogance, the spirit of invincibility, the confidence of victory, the manifest destiny of America has taken a severe and humiliating blow at the hands of a mosaic of “rag tag,” “sub-human,” “third-world,” “dark-skinned,” “Arab and Muslim” resistance fighters, or mujahadeen. The glorious mirror of fables of American prominence that has for decades been used to condition and brainwash the masses has been blasted into pieces by a war of choice and by a cabal of mass murder and criminality.
The job has thus fallen to the Ministry of Truth and its agents of propaganda to once again reassemble the many pieces of the smoking mirror and reconstruct in the mind of the American masses the fantasy and fiction of an America that only exists in the thoughts of the brainwashed and the easily manipulated. The mirror of American preeminence, splendor and greatness that has been used for decades to make servants of the population must be refurbished, lest the people wake from their hypnotized stupor to see that the American Dream is but one more charade, one more level of control over their lives, one more fantasy injecting fog and haze into myopic eyes, one more mirage whose true nightmare remains hidden by the warm glow of the television.
The reality of American life, with its elaborate system of chains and shackles that clandestinely enslave millions to the elite through the mechanisms of predatory capitalism, together with the true nature of America’s domination over the planet, destroying Earth, pillaging resources, ruining nations, birthing enormous suffering, killing millions, enraging billions, must never be allowed to penetrate past the firewalls of propaganda that have since birth been implanted inside the mind of the American masses. The Delusion of the American Dream must remain steadfast and firm so that the Earth’s Nightmare may be allowed to continue. Disastrous endeavors that dispel the self-aggrandizement inherent in America’s delusions attack the basic core of the American people’s conditioned minds, creating the mechanisms by which the citizenry begins to question the fiction they have lived all their lives.
If leadership can be so incompetent as to give birth to debacle and utter failure, even with the greatest military and resources the world has ever known, then how can it govern the rest of the nation’s problems? If defeat, eventual retreat and loss of nearly 3,000 troops, along with the maiming, of both body and mind, of countless tens of thousands more, is the result of an adventure that was supposed to end with flowers and candy thrown at our feet, signifying a marvelous, heralded victory proclaiming American greatness, then what has happened to the only nation blessed by the Christian deity? What does a humiliating withdrawal from Iraq do the American psyche when years of brainwashing seemingly disallow the reality now experienced from ever rising? With the Iraq failure – much like the Vietnam example before – firmly impressed upon the precepts and beliefs the system inculcates into our minds, contradicting that which we have been taught about ourselves, at odds with the fictions hammered into our psyche, an audacious challenge to the constructs of what the state and the corporation say is our reality is issued, making millions breathe above the murky water of lifelong conditioning, oftentimes for the first time.
For in the American narrative, the invincible American military, the most moral and virtuous in the entire world, fighting evil wherever it may rise, protecting humanity from evildoers, is not supposed to struggle against dead-enders, dark-skinned sub-humans or third-worlders. It is not supposed to get trapped in quicksand or quagmire, fighting for survival against an army of resistance fighters, most of whom were simple peasants before occupation. It is not supposed to become that which it has been sent to fight, yet transformed into terrorists and torturers and rapists and mass murderers has it become, dispelling the fallacies of the Dream we all believe to be real and true. In times of disaster and unwinnable war, where frustration and discontent grows, where unsettling facts become the thorns bursting the bubble of infallibility, the fantasy of what we think we are and the reality of what we truly are clash in a fiery battle for truth, unleashing in the mind of the less gullible the beginning sprouts of doubt, forging the genesis of what is a vortex of uncomfortable epiphanies and awakenings.
It is when the Dream jousts with Reality that awakenings to truth emerge …
Inside the Ministry of Truth, America’s departments of smoke and mirrors are hard at work, busy creating and re-creating the perception of reality of 300 million American citizens that must never be allowed to see beyond the bubble of the Dream. It is in these dark rooms where marketers and public relations gurus and spin masters and damage control experts and media executives and political Machiavellis gather, where America’s fantasy-laden reality is engendered and molded, where the strategies and campaigns conditioning Americans how to think are given life, to be disseminated through the airwaves and in print, penetrating minds and lives, making us the mere servant class of the elite. What can we expect, after all, out of an institution which has since its inception been financed and supported by the Establishment? What interests will be furthered and powers expanded by the corporate media when it is owned and operated by the corporate world, itself owned by the ruling class? What is to be expected when the Ministry of Truth is pregnant with the pretenders and contenders of elitism, the wanna bees of the ruling class, its placenta bursting with the elite’s sons and daughters and heirs to the thrones of propaganda and the Establishment? In the end, what can be expected when the hand that feeds the Ministry of Truth is part of the same body whose other hand exploits and oppresses the working and middle classes?
When it is understood who the Ministry of Truth works for, whose interests it has always pursued, then it becomes obvious whose version of reality we will forever see and be conditioned to accept. The Ministry of Truth does the bidding for the ruling class, doing its dirty work, concocting the excuses to wage war, the cataclysmic events needed to mobilize an entire population, the manipulations needed to create the citizenry’s acceptance. The Iraq war was allowed to transpire because of the direct role of the Ministry of Truth and all who work inside its bowels. Its lies and deceptions were flaunted while its truths and realities were purposefully hidden. The voices of dissent and debate were made extinct while those of warmongers and pro-war talking heads were granted an audience. The entire mechanisms of the corporate media were used to sell war to the American people, in the end succeeding in making Iraq and Iraqis the equivalent of Al-Qaeda. After that was accomplished, war was a foregone conclusion.
It was and still is the Ministry of Truth that terrorizes the masses with the state’s propaganda of fear, using every opportunity to wage psychological warfare against an entire population. It is the Ministry of Truth that whitewashes and suppresses vital documents and findings and the voices of whistleblowers, choosing to keep America in the dark even as the world entire sees the light. So much of the Iraq war has been swept underneath a rug of silence, for the Establishment knows that it was video and audio from Vietnam that gave birth to mass opposition to war. It was the Ministry of Truth that helped end the quagmire in Vietnam, which is why the Iraq war has been lived inside the vacuum of a black hole. The ruling class, it seems, learned their lesson well, which is why Americans are clueless about a war that seems to not exist within the confines of our borders and shores. It is the reason a complete media blackout exists, with only media embeds acting as the state’s stenographers allowed to report…
For five years now, the corporate media, along with its legions of presstitutes, pseudo-journalist hacks, government stenographers, talking heads, think tank pretenders, editor minions, executive servants and paid lackeys that comprise the acidic gases inside the bowels of the Ministry of Truth have collaborated in the giant productions called the Iraq War and the Psychological Warfare against the American People. These individuals are collaborators of catastrophe, collaborators to war crimes and crimes against humanity, granting life to genocide, rape, torture and perpetual suffering. Through their cameras and pens fear has hijacked America; through their oftentimes idiotic jingoism America has mutated to an authoritarian enclave; through their voices the greatest strategic disaster in American history has been allowed to fester; through their silence crimes of unspeakable criminality have been allowed to be perpetrated. It is because of their whitewashes and spinning and silent disregard of truth and reality that the nation finds itself threatened by enemies of democracy, liberty and freedom, not by enemies from abroad, but by those internal and entrenched, a much more dangerous cabal of terrorists than anything conjured up by the Ministry of Truth’s most creative fiction story-tellers…
Their job is the genesis of American ‘reality’… the dungeons of concocted reality…
That is today the role of the corporate media, the Ministry of Truth, using the television to brainwash and condition the masses, using its alluring glare to alter the brain function of human beings, from cradle to grave, using its tools to manipulate and lie to the public, all for the service of the fascist state, all for the sake of corporatism and its handlers. For what is the corporate media, with its legions of pseudo-journalists, hacks, spin masters, talking heads and untalented pretty faces dependent on airbrushes and layers of makeup, but the propagandists of today’s evolved fascist state? What are the keepers at the gate, whether from the right or the left, but the sons and daughters of Joseph Goebbels, bastard children of totalitarian thought, nursed from the bosom of history’s greatest propagandists, keeping authoritarian brainwashing alive and well, becoming the gatekeepers of tyranny, the destroyers of truth and reality.http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15411.htm
An imperialist saga: US giant steps over friends & enemies for global dominance …the ongoing amerikan manifest destiny crusade now playing as the “war on terrorism”:
Stuck in the Canal