The Digest

THE GENOCIDAL CRIMES OF CAPITAL PRODUCE ITS GRAVEDIGGERS and COLLABORATORS — WHERE WILL YOU STAND IN 2007?

“… his death will not increase or decrease our carefully planned actions until the U.S. invaders and their allies leave our country.”
Muhammad Ayash, a spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, a
leading Sunni group, said Saddam had served his country well, and had
been punished for the wrong reasons.

“He was executed for the good things he did such as fighting the U.S.
aggression against the Arab nation,” Ayash told IPS. “He stopped the
dark Iranian plans in the area, and helped Palestinians survive the
continuous Israeli crimes.”
A spokesman for the Al-Mujahideen Army resistance group in Ramadi
told IPS that his group saw Saddam Hussein simply as the leader of the
Ba’ath Party who was “a helpless man in jail when we conducted our
heroic operations against invaders.” …http://dahrjamailiraq.com

The spokesman, who refused to give his name, added: “We praise his
bravery in facing death, but his death will not increase or decrease our
carefully planned actions until the U.S. invaders and their allies leave
our country.”[…]

“The United States may have an opportunity to align its policy with Shi’ite groups, who aspire to have more participation in government and greater freedoms of political and religious expression. If this alignment can be brought about, it could erect a barrier against radical Islamic movements and may create a foundation for a stable U.S. position in the Middle East….
U.S. Strategy in the Muslim World After 9/11
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB151/RAND_RB151.pdf
Abstract
In light of 9/11 and the war on terrorism,
it is important for U.S. leaders to develop a
shaping strategy toward the Muslim world.

This study describes a framework to identify
major ideological orientations within Islam,
examines critical cleavages between Muslim
groups, and traces the long-term and
immediate causes of Islamic radicalism. It
also outlines political and military strategies
available to help ameliorate conditions that
produce extremism- radical
Islamic movements and may create a foundation for a
stable U.S. position in the Middle East.

Note: Iraq is the critical first step in the U.S. genocidal march to its fascist fantasy of global “manifest destiny”:

West’s attempt to divide Iraq on sectarian grounds
Abdujabbar al-Samarai , Azzaman
http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=28981&s2=13

[Iraq Redrawn map]
…Several years before the 2003 U.S. invasion, western media had already divided the Iraqi society into several ethnic and sectarian groups. Even western powers, particularly the U.S. and the U.K. had their prior invasion policies based on the fact that Iraq was divisible into at least three separate ethnic, sectarian and geographical regions.

SADDAM HUSSEIN: FROM CIA ASSET TO ENEMY OF THE STATE:

Selective Justice and the Execution of Saddam Hussein
by Gregory Elich
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Elich30.htm
…At one time, Saddam Hussein was backed and promoted by the US His brutal methods were regarded as effective measures in furthering US objectives. But as his actions began to threaten US interests, he earned opprobrium.

In his early years, Saddam Hussein was on the CIA payroll. Contacts began in 1959, when the agency sponsored him as a member of a small team assigned to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. The Prime Minister had made himself a target by committing the unpardonable sin of taking his nation out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. Hussein was set up in an apartment across the street from Qasim’s office and told to observe his movements. But CIA plans received a setback when the attempted assassination on October 7, 1959 was conducted in so inept a manner that it failed to achieve its objective. An over-anxious Hussein fired too soon, killing Qasim’s driver and only wounding the Prime Minster. Following the botched attempt on the Prime Minister’s life, CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents helped Hussein to escape to Tikrit. From there he crossed into Syria and then to Beirut, where the CIA provided him with an apartment and put him through a short training course. Even at that young age, a former US intelligence official recalls, Hussein “was known as having no class. He was a thug — a cutthroat.” But he did have excellent anticommunist credentials. From Beirut he was eventually sent to Cairo, where he remained under the watchful eye of his CIA handlers and made frequent visits to the US embassy to meet with agency officials.

US hostility towards Qasim had not abated, and he was eventually killed in a Ba’ath Party coup in 1963, after which the CIA gave the Iraqi National Guard lists of communists they wanted to see imprisoned and executed. According to former US intelligence officials, many suspected communists were killed under the personal supervision of Hussein. As one former US State Department official put it, “We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have got to be kidding. This was serious business.” With his image burnished through such accomplishments, Hussein first went on to become head of Iraqi security and then in 1979, president of the nation. He remained allied with the US during his first decade in power as he ordered the arrest of communists and other political opponents by the thousands. Nearly all would be tortured or killed. (1)

In 1980, Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops to invade Iran in an attempt to seize territory by force of arms. The resulting war dragged on for eight years, causing immense destruction and costing the lives of 1.7 million people in one of the twentieth century’s worst wars.

Relatively early in that war, in December 1983, President Reagan sent envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to meet Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and offer American assistance. Rumsfeld told Hussein that the US wanted full relations and “would regard any major reversal of Iraq’s fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West.” Just one month before, State Department official Jonathan Howe had informed Secretary of State George Schultz that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces on an “almost daily basis.” It was also well known by then that the Hussein government was engaging in widespread repression. Many thousands of individuals were being imprisoned, tortured, executed or sent into exile.

Howard Teicher worked for the National Security Agency when he accompanied Rumsfeld on that mission. Teicher recalls, “President Reagan decided that the United States would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran,” and formalized a policy of assisting Iraq in a National Security Decision Directive [NSDD] which Teicher helped draft. CIA Director William Casey “personally spearheaded the effort to ensure that Iraq had sufficient military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to avoid losing the Iran-Iraq war. Pursuant to the secret NSDD, the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.”

CIA personnel visited Iraq on a regular basis to provide surveillance intelligence gathered by US-supplied Saudi AWACS planes in support of the Iraqi war effort. Both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency directly assisted an Iraqi offensive in February 1988 by electronically “blinding” Iranian radar for three days. “The United States also provided strategic operational advice to the Iraqis to better use their assets in combat,” Teicher said. “For example, in 1986, President Reagan sent a secret message” through Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, acting as an intermediary, “to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran,” and “similar strategic operational military advice was passed” to Hussein through meetings with various heads of state.

Teicher “personally attended meetings in which CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Robert Gates “noted the need for Iraq to have certain weapons such as cluster bombs and anti-armor penetrators in order to stave off Iranian attacks.” The CIA supplied cluster bombs to Iraq through Cardoen, a Chilean company.

More than sixty officials of the US Defense Intelligence Agency were involved in the program that not only provided Iraq with intelligence on Iranian positions, but actually helped Iraq to develop tactical battle plans as well as plans for air strikes. Although it was well known by the later stages of the war that Iraqi forces were routinely using chemical weapons against the Iranians, American support for Iraqi offensives continued. “The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern,” recalled a former high-ranking Defense Intelligence Agency official. US leaders were more interested in ensuring the defeat of Iran. The Pentagon “wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas,” remembered a former official involved in the program. “It was just another way of killing people — whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn’t make any difference.”

Saddam Hussein received unstinting support throughout his war with Iran….
That Saddam Hussein was once regarded as a friend of the West is rarely mentioned these days. As long as he directed internal repression and external wars at those US policy makers loathed, he could count on support. It was only when his actions went against US interests that he was suddenly transformed into a tyrant and criminal. His methods had not changed. Only the Western perception of him had shifted, because he no longer served the purposes of global capital.

The US did much to create Saddam Hussein and others like him. It is impossible to avoid concluding that the trial of Saddam Hussein was little more than a case of selective justice, meant to provide post-justification for an invasion that was itself a grave violation of international law. Saddam Hussein’s crimes were real enough, but those acts would never have brought him to trial had he continued to operate within the parameters sketched for him by the West. The trail of Saddam Hussein is hailed as a triumph of justice, despite the fact that it was initiated and guided by an occupying power. Yet one wonders. Who will judge the Western powers that stand in judgment?
Gregory Elich is the author of Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit. He is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Korea Truth Commission. His articles have appeared in newspapers and periodicals across the world, including the US, Canada, South Korea, Great Britain, France, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, Russia, Denmark and Australia.

ARMING IRAQ 1982 - 1988
http://www.ishotthedeputy.com/

The following chronology is from an article by John King, which first appeared in UN Observer & International Report in March 2003. It is an accurate summary of United States’ involvement in the arming of Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war and beyond.

September 1980. Iraq invades Iran. The beginning of the Iraq-Iran war. (8)

February 1982. Despite objections from Congress, President Reagan removes Iraq from its list of known terrorist countries. (1)

December 1982. Hughes Aircraft ships 60 Defender helicopters to Iraq. (9)

1982-1988. Defense Intelligence Agency provides detailed information for Iraq on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb damage assessments. (4)

November 1983. A National Security Directive states that the U.S would do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq from losing its war with Iran. (1) (15)

November 1983. Banca Nazionale del Lavoro of Italy and its Branch in Atlanta begin to funnel $5 billion in unreported loans to Iraq. Iraq, with the blessing and official approval of the U.S. government, purchased computer controlled machine tools, computers, scientific instruments, special alloy steel and aluminum, chemicals, and other
industrial goods for Iraq’s missile, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. (14)

October 1983. The Reagan Administration begins secretly allowing Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to transfer United States weapons, including Howitzers, Huey helicopters, and bombs to Iraq. These shipments violated the Arms Export Control Act. (16)

November 1983. George Schultz, the Secretary of State, is given intelligence reports showing that Iraqi troops are daily using chemical weapons against the Iranians. (1)

December 20 1983. Donald Rumsfeld, then a civilian and now Defense Secretary, meets with Saddam Hussein to assure him of US friendship and materials support. (1) (15)

July 1984. CIA begins giving Iraq intelligence necessary to calibrate its mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. (19)

January 14 1984. State Department memo acknowledges United States shipment of “dual-use” export hardware and technology. Dual use items are civilian items such as heavy trucks, armored ambulances and communications gear as well as industrial technology that can have a military application. (2)

March 1986. The United States with Great Britain block all Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, and on March 21 the U.S. becomes the only country refusing to sign a Security Council statement condemning Iraq’s use of these weapons. (10)

May 1986. The U.S. Department of Commerce licenses 70 biological exports to Iraq between May of 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. (3)

May 1986. US Department of Commerce approves shipment of weapons grade botulin poison to Iraq. (7)

March 1987. President Reagan bows to the findings of the Tower Commission admitting the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. Oliver North uses the profits from the sale to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. (17)

Late 1987. The Iraqi Air Force begins using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq. (1)

February 1988. Saddam Hussein begins the “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq. The Iraq regime used chemical weapons against the Kurds killing over 100,000 civilians and destroying over 1,200 Kurdish villages. (8)

April 1988. US Department of Commerce approves shipment of chemicals used in manufacture of mustard gas. (7)

August 1988. Four major battles were fought from April to August 1988, in which the Iraqis massively and effectively used chemical weapons to defeat the Iranians. Nerve gas and blister agents such as mustard gas are used. By this time the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency is heavily involved with Saddam Hussein in battle plan assistance, intelligence gathering and post battle debriefing. In the last major battle with of the war, 65,000 Iranians are killed, many with poison gas. Use of chemical weapons in war is in violation of the Geneva accords of 1925. (6) (13)

August 1988. Iraq and Iran declare a cease fire. (8)

August 1988. Five days after the cease fire Saddam Hussein sends his planes and helicopters to northern Iraq to begin massive chemical attacks against the Kurds. (8)

September 1988. U.S. Department of Commerce approves shipment of weapons grade anthrax and botulinum to Iraq. (7)

September 1988. Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State: “The US-Iraqi relationship is… important to our long-term political and economic objectives.” (15)

December 1988. Dow chemical sells $1.5 million in pesticides to Iraq despite knowledge that these would be used in chemical weapons. (1)

July 25, 1990. U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad meets with Hussein to assure him that President Bush “wanted better and deeper relations.” Many believe this visit was a trap set for Hussein. A month later Hussein invaded Kuwait thinking the U.S. would not respond. (12)

August 1990. Iraq invades Kuwait. The precursor to the Gulf War. (8)

July 1991. The Financial Times of London reveals that a Florida chemical company had produced and shipped cyanide to Iraq during the 80’s using a special CIA courier. Cyanide was used extensively against the Iranians. (11)

August 1991. Christopher Droguol of Atlanta’s branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro is arrested for his role in supplying loans to Iraq for the purchase of military supplies. He is charged with 347 counts of felony. Droguol is found guilty, but U.S. officials plead innocent of any knowledge of his crime. (14)

June 1992. Ted Koppel of ABC Nightline reports: “It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush, Sr., operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into [an aggressive power].” (5)

July 1992. “The Bush administration deliberately, not inadvertently, helped to arm Iraq by allowing U.S. technology to be shipped to Iraqi military and to Iraqi defense factories… Throughout the course of the Bush administration, U.S. and foreign firms were granted export licenses to ship U.S. technology directly to Iraqi weapons facilities despite ample evidence showing that these factories were producing weapons.” Representative Henry Gonzalez, Texas, testimony before the House. (18)

February 1994. Senator Riegle from Michigan, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, testifies before the senate revealing large U.S. shipments of dual-use biological and chemical agents to Iraq that may have been used against U.S. troops in the Gulf War and probably was the cause of the illness known as Gulf War Syndrome. (7)

August 2002. “The use of gas [during the Iran-Iraq war] on the battle field by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern… We were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose.” Colonel Walter Lang, former senior U.S. Defense Intelligence officer tells the New York Times. (4)

This chronology of the United States’ sordid involvement in the arming of Iraq can be summarized in this way: the United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The U.S. supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The U.S. supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens. The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked U.N. censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.

John King
Long Prairie, MN, USA.
www.unobserver.com
Sources[…]

The Black Bull died today
By Mirza Yawar Baig
http://tinyurl.com/ygfsau
12/30/06 “Information Clearing House”– — They did it. They gave this Ummah a sacrifice on the day of Eid ul Adha. What an unforgettable Eid!! A human sacrifice. Not a sheep or goat. What a message!! Wow!! What a powerful message that I am sure has shaken all the thrones of the puppets who are watching the events. Poor puppets!!

Saddam Hussain, they say, is dead. The news reporting is one good example of the pimp press in full swing. If anyone who is not suffering from amnesia can recall, ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ was a phrase coined by American foreign policy experts to lie to their own nation and the world and justify their invasion of Iraq. Then their lie was exposed but by then their objective of looting Iraq’s oil had also been accomplished. They had control of the oil fields. And in the process a few hundred thousand Iraqis died at the hands of Americans; well that is inevitable - collateral damage. As they say Weapons of Mass Deception - which of course the pimp press is responsible for and continues to perpetrate on the world.

Death is not the “item” in the news. It is the death of the myth of American justice and freedom. So now we can all breathe freely as we see the true nature of the animal before us. Even those who continued to insist on living in doubt can deny it no longer. But watch out!! This news item and a million like it, floating on the net or shouting themselves hoarse on the TV are all focused on trying to make you and me distracted from the reality of what we are seeing here. So they talk about how brutal Saddam was and how many people he killed and how he ’started’ the Iraq-Iran war.

The issue of course is none of those things. If these were in fact issues, then we would see Bush and all his cronies and most of their puppets sitting on thrones in their gilded prisons, swinging from the gallows long before Saddam came anywhere near them. The issue is America’s right to invade a sovereign nation. Any country’s right to invade and occupy another sovereign nation and loot its wealth. That is the issue. Are we, the people of the world saying that it is the right of America or anyone with the power to do so, to take by force what they want from whoever they want? Are we, the people of the world, saying that it is the right of the rapist to rape? Are we, the people of the world, saying that it is the right of the bandit or the highway robber to hold you up and take from you what he wishes by force? Because in my opinion, by remaining silent, that is exactly what we will be saying. You decide what you want to do. I have already made my decision as you can see.

The pimp press and all those who it serves want you and me to forget these issues. And they believe that if they make enough noise, we will.

Remember O People! The name of the animal is Empire. And you and I have a choice. Sell your soul and bow your head in submission to the King. Or raise your head and it will be cut off. It’s as simple as that. Freedom is as it will be defined for you. Justice is as will be given to you. Democracy is as is approved for you. If you elect Hamas as your party of choice, that is not democracy. It will be sabotaged and ever willing pimps will be put in the place of the people you really wanted. If you have any sense you will see the writing on the wall and next time around you will elect Abbas. If not the Empire has unlimited power, money and people to enforce its will. All that will happen is that a 100 of you will die for every American soldier who comes to enforce the will of the Empire. That is a price that the Empire can and will extract. After all it did not get to where it is today by being made of sugar candy, did it?

Resources are for those who can take them and use them. Where they happen to be located is immaterial. Their owners are still the same. Those who come in the way because they happen to be located physically on those resources have a choice; move away quietly and maybe you will even be paid something. If not, you will be moved by force…not sideways…but 6 feet below. Now even the dumbest in the world should be able to understand that, no??

But no!! There are those who are dumber than the dumb. They are those who believe in their right to determine how they will live, by what code. They are those who believe that it is their right to live by their laws in their lands without apology to anyone. They are those who believe in their right to choose who will lead them. They are those who believe that foreigners can’t dictate to them, who they should elect to their councils. They are those who believe in their right to use what they own, to sell it to who they want, in whatever currency they choose to sell and at whatever price. They are those who believe that it is the right of the owner of a property to decide to sell or not and at what price. They believe that the buyer can’t dictate those terms to them. They are those who believe that all humans are equal irrespective of race, color or religion. They believe that a lack of melanin in the skin is not a sign of human superiority just as a surfeit of it is not. They believe that if this life is to be lived, then it must be lived with honor. They believe that a death with honor is far more preferable than a life without honor. They believe that enslavement is in the mind. And that until they accept in their minds and hearts that they are slaves, they cannot be enslaved. And such people will never be enslaved. No matter how many they kill.

What they don’t understand is that every head that is cut off to terrorize only strengthens the resolve that injustice must be removed from the face of the earth. And whatever price is to be paid, is worth the result. The plant of justice is fertilized by the blood of martyrs.

As I write this post I am reminded of the Arabic legend of the White Bull: At Thawr il Abyadh

Once upon a time three bulls lived in the forest. One white, one brown and one black. They were brothers and lived together in harmony. In that forest also lived a tiger who had his eye on the bulls. But every time he attacked one of them the others came to his aid and together they drove the tiger away.

The tiger decided that he needed to change his strategy. So one day when the Black Bull was away, he went to the other two and said, “You know, the Black Bull is black and dirty and evil. Why do you keep him with you? His is a disgrace to you. You are beautiful and noble. If the Black Bull is no longer there, you will have all the grazing to yourself. He takes away your food and adds no value to you.” The two bulls listened to the tiger’s spiel and said, “Well, you know, he is our brother. What can we do?”

“You need not do anything at all,” said the tiger. “I am your friend. I will do what needs to be done. Just don’t come to the aid of the Black Bull when he calls you.” The others agreed.

The next day, they heard the voice of the Black Bull calling for help in anguish and fear. They listened to him and went back to their grazing. Gradually the calls stopped. The two brothers could not look each other in the eye but then, nice green grass wipes away memories and after a little while it was as if the Black Bull never existed.

Then one day the tiger came to the White Bull when he was alone and said, “So are you happy with the advise I gave you? Didn’t I advise you well? Now here is another advise. You are the real king of the forest. You are White and clean and pure and holy and beautiful. You are wise and good. You deserve to live in solitary splendor like a king. Not with some dirty brown trash who you have to share your food with. Why do you need him? He is a liability and an embarrassment to you.”

“Well, what should I do?”

“You know the score. Nothing at all. I am there to take care of everything for you. Just relax.”

Next day, the White Bull heard the dying screams of the Brown Bull and closed his ears and went back to his grazing.

The White Bull lived for a few days all by himself, grazing where he wanted and drinking from the clean streams of the forest. Then one morning the tiger came again. From the look in his eyes, the White Bull knew that this visit was different. All his life flashed before his eyes. He recalled the time when the three brothers stood together, shoulder to shoulder. Then he recalled all the incidents since then. As the tiger sat before him, not in any hurry, knowing that the result was pre-determined, the White Bull said to him, “I have one last wish. Will you grant it to me?”

“Anything at all my friend”, said the tiger.

The White Bull then climbed a hill and when he got to the top of it, he called out to the people of the forest, “O! People, I do not die today. I died the day the Black Bull died.”

Video
U.S. soldiers lead Iraq children in obscene chant
American troops lead a group of Iraqi children in a profane chant, as seen in a video viewed by RAW STORY. In the brief, undated video at the siteliveleak.com, a U.S. soldier appears atop a military vehicle as another mills about, directing the children to shout, “F*ck Iraq.” The youngsters do not seem to understand what it is they are saying…

End of Another Year…
Riverbend, Bagdad burning
…Basically, with this execution, what the Americans are saying is “Look- Sunni Arabs- this is your man, we all know this. We’re hanging him- he symbolizes you.” And make no mistake about it, this trial and verdict and execution are 100% American. Some of the actors were Iraqi enough, but the production, direction and montage was pure Hollywood (though low-budget, if you ask me). That is, of course, why Talbani doesn’t want to sign his death penalty- not because the mob man suddenly grew a conscience, but because he doesn’t want to be the one who does the hanging- he won’t be able to travel far away enough if he does that. Maliki’s government couldn’t contain their glee. They announced the ratification of the execution order before the actual court did. A few nights ago, some American news program interviewed Maliki’s bureau chief, Basim Al-Hassani who was speaking in accented American English about the upcoming execution like it was a carnival he’d be attending. He sat, looking sleazy and not a little bit ridiculous, his dialogue interspersed with ‘gonna’, ‘gotta’ and ‘wanna’… Which happens, I suppose, when the only people you mix with are American soldiers… http://www.uruknet.info/?p=29386

On the Gallows, Curses for U.S. and ‘Traitors’
By MARC SANTORA
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/world/middleeast/31gallows.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

BAGHDAD, Dec. 30 — Saddam Hussein never bowed his head, until his neck snapped. His last words were equally defiant. “Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.”

The final hour of Iraq’s former ruler began about 5 a.m., when American troops escorted him from Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, to Camp Justice, another American base at the heart of the city.
There, he was handed over to a newly trained unit of the Iraqi National Police, with whom he would later exchange curses. Iraq took full custody of Mr. Hussein at 5:30 a.m. Two American helicopters flew 14 witnesses from the Green Zone to the execution site — a former headquarters of the Istikhbarat, the deposed government’s much feared military intelligence outfit, now inside the American base…

“Long live the nation!” Mr. Hussein shouted. “Long live the people! Long live the Palestinians!” … with his eyes wide open, no stutter or choke in his throat, he said his final words cursing the Americans and the Persians.

RELIGION AS POLITICAL WMD:

The Sigh of the Oppressed: Abraham and His Progeny
by Ron Jacobs
(full article

As mostly secular people, it is often hard to get around the religious nature of the resistance groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere in the so-called Muslim world. But, religion is a very real aspect of human existence, so we have to appreciate that and respect it. And deal with it. Marx said it was the opiate, but that wasn’t all he said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” In other words, religion is a source of hope for those who have no hope. It is this aspect of religious belief that does a lot to explain why religion is not only a factor in today’s world, but an incredibly popular phenomenon. Precisely because there is so little hope in terms of politics, the most oppressed have turned to religion in all its forms…..In short, we make god in our own image, no matter what form he or she may take and irrelevant as to whether or not one (or more) even exists. Yet, as implied at the beginning of this piece, skeptics would be foolish to ignore the power this concept holds over humanity and, even more importantly, the power that believers wield on the human stage.

KARL MARX ON RELIGION:
(excerpt) Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality
of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find
the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks
and must seek his true reality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion
does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and
self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has
already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside
the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this
society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world,
because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this
world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its
spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn
complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is
the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has
not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore,
indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is
religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real
suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the
demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions
about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that
requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the
criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that
man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so
that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism
of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his
reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses,
so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only
the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve
around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has
vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of
philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement
in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been
unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth,
the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of
theology into the criticism of politics….

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon,
material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes
a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of
gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it
demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to
grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself. The
evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical
energy, is that is proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion.
The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest
essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all
relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable
essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a
Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They
want to treat you as human beings!

note: THIS AUTHOR GETS THE ‘WHAT’ — NOT THE ‘WHY’:

Resource warfare intensifies across “Grand Chessboard” and Horn of Africa
[excerpt re: the ‘what’]
By Larry Chin
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1568.shtml

Turkmenistan in chaos
…Adding to the worsening crisis across the Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia) and Central Asia (Afghanistan), and continued chaos from Anglo-American occupation, Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov has suddenly died, leaving a gaping and dangerous power vacuum in gas-rich Turkmenistan — and throwing a key part of the “Grand Chessboard” into doubt.
Turkmenistan, under Niyazov, has been one of the central strategic players in the continuous resource war over the Caspian Sea region and Central Asia that has unfolded in bloody fashion since the late 1990s.

Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, Michel Chossudovsky’s America’s “War on Terrorism,” and Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon are three books that detail Turkmenistan’s war and oil connections. (So does Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, from the elite point of view.)
Turkmenistan is central in the continuing militarization of the Eurasian corridor, and the struggle over strategic Eurasian pipeline and transport routes, and involved in years of interconnected policies and operations related to 9/11 (see Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Bush Oil Team). It is for this reason that the vitally important Caspian Sea/Black Sea/Central Asian region as a whole is known as “Pipelinestan”.
US policy in the region has remained consistent for the past decade. As Chossudovsky wrote in America’s “War on Terrorism,” “US foreign policy consists in undermining and eventually destabilizing its competitors in the oil business, including Russia and China,” and “excluding Russia from the westbound oil and gas pipeline routes out of the Caspian Sea basin, but also in securing Anglo-American control over strategic southbound and eastbound routes.”

According to the coverage of Pepe Escobar and other analysts tracking energy warfare at Asia Times, Iran and Russia have become the more dominant regional pipeline players over the past few years, gaining serious advantage over the West and its consortiums. The increasing hostility on the part of the Bush administration (including its conquest of Iraq and violence aimed at Iran) is no surprise against a backdrop of failure.
It is a virtual certainty that covert operations, as well as “high level negotiations,” will intensify in the wake of Niyazov’s death, setting the stage for yet another political battle in Turkmenistan between the West led by the US … and Russia, China and regional competitors.

War in Somalia

At the same time, in key energy-rich theatres further south, across the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, Somalia has been invaded by Ethiopia. This genuine crisis has received scant coverage in American corporate media.

Somalia, and the greater Horn of Africa region, has been a site of simmering geostrategic conflict and rapacious foreign interests for many years, and in earnest since the spring of 2006. The energy wealth of Sudan is a key driver of recent military-intelligence operations, which now include plans by Bush-Blair for the establishment of a no-fly zone over the area…. the “war on terrorism” will be evoked as the cause of the violence (the need to crush “Islamic radicals” and “Al Qaeda”) and the likely pretext for military interventions. Similarly, a military intervention into Darfur will be conducted under the now familiar humanitarian pretext of stopping genocide and warlordism, masking the true and hidden objective: oil. […]

[editor’s note: the U.S. GRAND CHESSBOARD: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, spelled out in 1997 by democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski is based on the fact that energy/oil resources are the lynchpin of u.s. global domination, essential to give it leverage over imperialist ‘friends’ as well as enemies and thus global ‘primacy’. This agenda is a fully bipartisan geostrategic agenda, regardless of tactical differences — not, as Chin and others claim due to Bush regime’s personal connections to oil industry, or a so-called ‘peak oil’ /shortage crisis. see the following evidence:

1997 A geostrategy for Eurasia
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Foreign Affairs,76:5, September/October 1997 Council on Foreign Relations Inc.
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html

1997: THE GRAND CHESSBOARD: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives
Zbigniew Brzezinski
www.fromthewilderness.com

1997 US Army War College: “WE HAVE ENTERED AN AGE OF CONSTANT CONFLICT
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm

Israel former IDF Chief: What to do with Iran?:
We must coordinate independent strike with US, prepare for Iranian response
http://tinyurl.com/yjjtgg

Pentagon Requests Billions More War Money
If approved, the $99.7 billion request, detailed in a
17-page internal Defense Department memorandum, would set a
record for war-related spending.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/washington/30budget.html?th&emc=th

2007: SHOCK & OWE
By Frank Scott
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 29, 2006

A new year is a time to plan changes for the immediate future. When these are simply personal they can mean a new job, a new school, a new wardrobe or a new face. But it is more critical than ever to look at the social environment in which we make these personal plans. The system that dominates and shapes global reality grows more threatening by the day and demands our attention; it could destroy many of our possibilities for that future…

Global capitalism functions with a major nation presiding over the system, and the USA has played that role since 1945. But with a regime even more arrogant, ignorant and incompetent than those of the past, it has pushed humanity closer to potential disaster. Without radical change in the political economy of its foundation, the future may see further crumbling of its social structure. Failure of a system can be positive or negative, depending on whether the glass is perceived half full or half empty. But when the glass contains poison, the problem is not metaphysics or relativity.

This system is mortally dangerous to humanity in the present, and will become even more so the longer it continues into the future.

Thought and taught to be exclusively based on superior technological and political development, Western global preeminence often excludes the bloody massacres and colonial oppressions that were vital in its assumption and maintenance of control. But whether we accept established or revisionist historic views of the past, we need to see that capital’s present corporate commissars and their servant governments have brought humanity to a precarious state.

As the natural environment fairly cries out for change with storms, heat waves and droughts, the global majority who pay the heaviest price for the growth of minority wealth are raising an even louder voice. Their demands for social justice are more forceful than ever, but they cannot be achieved if the dominant system is maintained.

An empire in greater debt than can ever be repaid is nearing a financial crisis that endangers the foundation of its already morally bankrupt political structure. Another world may be coming, but this is no time for celebration among those who live in the world which is going. Americans face a major responsibility in helping to create a new world. If we don’t, we could go down with the old one.

The near insanity of doctrines and policies emanating from the imperial centers in the USA and Israel should strike fear everywhere, but especially among citizens of these two countries. There is an incredible contradiction between their alleged ideals of democratic prosperity, only achievable to small minorities, and their social outcomes which bring violent deprivation to vast majorities. Much of the world is in growing rebellion against this hypocrisy that claims to sow democracy and affluence, while it reaps oppression and poverty.

War and bigotry are founding principles of imperial power, and minority dominance is in the interest of its political economy. There can be no middle ground in a struggle against such power, just as there is no middle between hunger and starvation, except to those who regularly overeat. A new U.S. Congress will perform for its employers and play to this fictional middle, which it finds somewhere between great naiveté and total ignorance. It will call for meager and often divisive reforms, while maintaining the imperial order. The radical change needed by the world is only being affected outside the center of imperial power, but it needs to happen inside as well.

Emerging democracies and militant uprisings against authority are hopeful signs for the future. But unless demand for peace and social justice finds greater support at the source of the problem, its solution may not be achieved without greater international tragedies.

A just treatment of the planet’s resources, beginning with its people, warrants a more democratic U. N., out from under Western control. Unity among contesting nations and NGOs is always hard to achieve, but its necessity will become clearer as the world’s problems become greater. And the major problem is the control exercised by global corporate capital and its subordinates, over the production, distribution and general management of the earth’s resources.

The way to end the pillaging of social and natural environments is to begin transforming them into life support systems that acknowledge all humans as equal members of one race. That calls for an end to supremacist doctrines, whether they are national, political or religious. Many people are working to create a new world based on such a reality. It involves profound change that is being fiercely resisted by those who benefit most from the system of loss for the many, in pursuit of profit for the few. Hopefully, history will not be on their side. Realistically, the majority will have to make that history. Happy New Year.
Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears in the Coastal Post, a monthly publication from Marin County, California, and on numerous web sites. He is a native New Yorker who now lives in the San Francisco bay area. Email him at .

And the Empire Mourned…. Dissecting the Big Lie
By Jason Miller
http://tinyurl.com/yfmdnq

12/30/06 “Information Clearing House” — – With the intensity of Dale Earnhardt, Jr vying for victory in the Daytona 500, America’s mainstream media outlets have been racing furiously to imbue the citizenry of the Empire with unusually large doses of heavily choreographed agitprop.

Another un-indicted US war criminal has casually ridden off into a peaceful crimson sunset. In response, pundits, talking heads, reporters and various other infotainment personnel are working feverishly to perpetuate America’s collective delusion that we embody integrity, decency, and enlightened values.

Like virtually all of his predecessors and successors in the White House (regardless of their party affiliation), Gerald Ford was guilty of a host of egregious offenses against the human race. But the Big Lie must not die.

So in the wake of the United States’ recent facilitation of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, we in the self-proclaimed “bastion of human rights” are in the midst of six days of mourning for a man would have swung from the gallows long ago had he been judged by the same standards as Saddam.

In apparent deference to Ford’s tireless efforts to advance America’s savage brand of Capitalism, both the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ will be closed on Tuesday. Federal employees and postal service workers will also take the day off to mourn the loss of the 38th president (1).

Despite the deeply hypocritical show of reverence for one so maleficent, it is fitting that a military escort will deliver Ford’s casket to the Capitol’s Rotunda for viewing. Why wouldn’t soldiers bear the body of the former leader of a fascist state replete with rampant corporatism, militarism, and pathological nationalism? And why wouldn’t he lie in state in the Capitol’s Rotunda? After all, Congress has been deeply complicit in creating and preserving the nightmare some refer to as Pax Americana.

Since much of the Empire’s strength is derived from its stable base of obedient workers and consumers, preserving their illusions of the United States’ inherent “goodness” is crucial. Toward that end, consider a sampling of some of the mainstream media’s recent “Ford-lore”.

On 12/27, Newsweek published a piece by Barry Werth. Genuflecting to his corporate paymasters, Barry asserted:

Gerald Ford assumed the presidency when his government was sundering, qualifying him as one of history’s bravest leaders.

As Werth continued with his seemingly benign discourse, it is highly likely that his facial appendage began to resemble Pinocchio’s:

Many of those people who originally deplored the (Nixon) pardon for short-circuiting history and eroding the notion that no one, not even the president, is above the law, came around to agree that it was best for the country.

The Washington Post eulogized Ford with a favorable comparison to another perpetrator of wanton slaughter, a man who was responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Japanese civilians:

Truman, Ford used to say, “had guts, he was plain-talking, he had no illusions about being a great intellectual, but he seemed to make the right decisions.”

Many would say the same of Gerald Rudolph Ford.

The New York Times, the mainstream media’s “bulwark of liberalism” fueled America’s collective delusion with these choice quotes and observations:

….“He assumed power in a period of great division and turmoil,” President George W. Bush said in a statement broadcast early this morning. “For a nation that needed healing, and for an office that needed a calm and steady hand, Gerald Ford came along when we need him most. During his time in office, the American people came to know President Ford as a man of complete integrity who led our country with common sense and kind instincts.”….

….After a decade of division over Vietnam and two years of trauma over the Watergate scandals, Jerry Ford, as he called himself, radiated a soothing familiarity. He might have been the nice guy down the street suddenly put in charge of the nation, and if he seemed a bit predictable, he was also safe, reliable and reassuring. He placed no intolerable intellectual or psychological burdens on a weary land, and he lived out a modest philosophy. “The harder you work, the luckier you are,” he said once in summarizing his career. “I worked like hell.”….

(Author’s Note: Citizens of the American Empire needed soothing reassurance of their greatness after the humiliating results of the imperial invasion of Vietnam. And like the mainstream media, “Jerry” put no “intolerable intellectual or psychological burdens” on them).

….The pardon, intensely unpopular at the time, came to be generally viewed as correct. In May 2001, Mr. Ford was honored with a “Profile in Courage” Award at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Senator Edward M. Kennedy spoke and said he had originally opposed the pardon. “But time has a way of clarifying past events,” he said, “and now we see that President Ford was right.”….

….His basic philosophy involved fiscal prudence, strong national defense, suspicion of alien lands and a belief that citizens should earn a living rather than be given one…..

(Author’s Translation: Ford believed in slashing federal spending on programs benefiting humanity to enable increased military spending, was xenophobic, and was opposed to using public funds to aid the poor).

Now that you have perused samples of the rubbish our oligarch overlords are attempting to burnish into the minds of their unsuspecting plebeian underlings, consider how the affable “Jerry” enabled or caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings and ensured that the ruling elite in the United States would reclaim the power they had begrudgingly ceded to the masses in the face of economic upheaval, civil unrest, and powerful progressive movements.

Like our current unitary executive, Ford did not get into the Oval Office by winning an election. Also like Bush, in spite of the fact that the people did not vote him into office, Ford brazenly defied the will of the American public on an issue of great magnitude. Exercising the integrity of the mythologized Ford, “Jerry” fulfilled his end of the bargain he had made with Alexander Haig (3). In exchange for his ascendancy to the Empire’s throne, he shielded Richard Nixon from facing consequences for his multiple grievous transgressions of international and domestic laws.

Paving the way for Reagan and his successors to marginalize America’s poor, minorities, and working class and to gut our Constitution, Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, chose to keep habitual war criminal Henry Kissinger(4) on as his Secretary of State, and elevated future mass murderers, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to key White House positions.

Letting Nixon off the hook was a particularly sinister act in at least two ways. Ford, an unelected president in a purported constitutional republic, absolved a fellow patrician of grave violations of international law, the public trust, and the US Constitution. Thus Ford became Nixon’s accomplice. At the same time, he landed a crushing blow for the moneyed class in their persistent assault on the republic envisioned by men like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

Bear in mind that Ford pardoned a man who was responsible for the deaths of at least 600,000 innocent civilians. During the invasion and occupation of Vietnam, Nixon ordered secret bombings of neighboring Cambodia. The goal was to strike North Vietnamese supply and transit routes, but unfortunately for the Cambodian people, the B-52 carpet bombings did not distinguish the nationalities of victims(5).

Nixon’s use of illegal wire-taps was such a flagrant abuse of executive authority that Congress passed the FISA Law in 1978 to prevent similar breaches of Constitutional law (6). In the wake of Nixon’s immunity from prosecution, the Bush Regime has subsequently ignored the FISA Laws and run roughshod over the Constitution, without consequence. Thank you for setting the precedent, “Jerry”.

Ford also enabled Nixon to evade prosecution for obstruction of justice, perjury and possible income tax evasion (7). The IRS eventually ordered Nixon to pay $467,000, a relative pittance for a man of his means.

Despite the damage and suffering they left in their wake, Nixon and Ford both lived in security and wealth until their mortality finally caught up with them. Saddam met his maker as he dangled from the end of a rope.

Like his predecessor, Ford was quite enamored with Henry Kissinger. He once summarized him with this quip: “wonderful person. Dear friend. First-class Secretary of State. But Henry always protected his own flanks.”

Once Ford assumed the Empire’s helm, he wasted little time before collaborating with Kissinger in another imperial escapade. Consider the US role in Indonesia’s genocide that killed over 200,000 East Timorese:

“Jakarta Godfathers” by John Pilger, Guardian, 7 September, 1999:

“No help came, because the western democracies were secret partners in a crime as great and enduring as any this century; proportionally, not even Pol Pot matched Suharto’s spree. Air Force One, carrying President Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger, climbed out of Indonesian airspace the day the bloodbath began. “They came and gave Suharto the green light,” Philip Liechty, the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at the time, told me. “The invasion was delayed two days so they could get the hell out. We were ordered to give the Indonesian military everything they wanted. I saw all the hard intelligence; the place was a free-fire zone. Women and children were herded into school buildings that were set alight - and all because we didn’t want some little country being neutral or leftist at the United Nations.” And all because western capital regarded Indonesia as a “prize”.”

Declassified in 2001, several US government documents (8) clearly demonstrate that “Jerry” and Kissinger gave Suharto, Indonesia’s leader, their blessing to do as he wished with East Timor. Shortly thereafter Suharto launched a wave of US-supported state-sponsored terrorism (9) that lasted until 1999.

Obviously, Gerald Ford was far more shrewd and Machiavellian than the mainstream media’s recent wave of white-washing would indicate. Aside from his complicity in Nixon’s crimes (for which our Ministry of Truth has exculpated Ford by concluding that the pardon was necessary to “heal the nation”), and his role in the carnage in East Timor, he also aligned himself closely with J. Edgar Hoover. Ford played a pivotal role in the Warren Commission’s affirmation of Hoover’s “lone-assassin theory”. As a member of the Warren Commission, Ford convinced the group to alter the final version of their report to conclude that the same bullet killed Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Governor Connally. Robert Morningstar, who has researched the Kennedy assassination extensively, stated that the Ford revision was “the most significant lie in the whole Warren Commission report.”(10)…
Ostensibly, our society in the United States is based on democratic principles. In such a society, the purpose of the press would be to act as an independent check on the government’s power. However, our evolution into a corporate-dominated fascist state has obliterated the media’s independence. A handful of colossal corporations owns or controls over 90% of the mainstream media outlets in the United States.

As a result of this incestuous relationship, the Washington Post, CNN, and a mélange of others are but mouthpieces of the government singing a seductive chorus that engenders and sustains the Big Lie. Occasionally they bleat feeble opposition to imperialism and our rapid regression into a nation resembling a banana republic, but most of the time they beat the drums of war, promote the interests of the wealthy, manipulate the hoi polloi with fear, and perpetuate the myths of America’s virtue. Ethical journalists have little or no opportunity to ply their craft in such an environment.

Those who remain captive to the Big Lie will spend the next few days mourning the passing of a man who was fortunate to escape the death penalty with which his country is so infatuated. Those same comforting delusions of superiority, entitlement, and invincibility that enable men like Gerald Ford to act with impunity will entice many Americans to continue wearing the intellectual manacles of the Empire.[…]
Jason Miller welcomes constructive correspondence at
or via his blog, athttp://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/

A Hanging in Iraq
Luciana Bohne
Another disgusting spectacle in the disgusting story of US persecution of Iraq. First come the US funding and supporting of “strongman” Saddam Hussein in the torturing and killing of his people. Then comes the egging him on to war with Iran with 1 million dead for nothing but US area interests. Next, comes the Gulf War with the sowing of depleted uranium all over the desert and the towns, the “turkey shoot” in the desert against retreating Iraqi soldiers, followed by, incredibly, assisting Saddam in putting down the uprising against him, followed by the decade of continuing genocidal sanction (added to war!) that starved and killed by preventable illness over a million people without touching a hair of Saddam’s head but making the people dependent on him for food–thus securing his dictatorial power. Finally the invasion–the supreme crime in international law– predicated on lies, followed by the U.S. electorally-contrived installation of a dominantly Shia puppet regime which tries and condemns Saddam Hussein, the unappetizing but still legitimate (according to international law) head of the Iraqi state, and hangs him as a gladiator sport for the delectation of a gross, ever thirstier, blood-engorged leech like the Little Dictator from Crawford and his court of corporate thieves, oily opportunists, and conscienceless hangers on…

Once more, the US, via its pathetic proxies in the so-called state of Iraq, has inflicted a national humiliation on the Iraqi people. Saddam’s fate should have been determined by the people of Iraq in a sovereign Iraq, free of occupation. Only they have a right to judge–not the bullies who have stolen their country and plunged it into chaos.

The killing of Saddam by the occupation regime, which has caused the death of over half a million people in three years, will reverberate throughout the Arab world as a macabre publicity stunt by a desperate and defeated super power, unable and probably unwilling to restore electricity, provide security or employment–a cowardly super power which has had to resort to torture, detention, death squads, and assassination in order to quell a resistance it was too stupid, too racist, too greedy, and too arrogant and ignorant to predict.

Little wars belittle great nations, and the US in Iraq offers a case in point. Saddam is dead, so what? The US is terminally diminished. That’s what. Do the math. Count the dead. Ask the Iraqis. And the count is rising while the country is melting away–a political ghost. Saddam had blood on his hands, but, let’s face it, he was no match for the busy little gravediggers of the Little Warrior in DC and his equally murderous predecessors!

And in this miserably diminished country, the senators and representatives come and go in the halls of Congress, talking about impeachment, saying that it would be inconvenient. Let’s hang Saddam. Let’s throw the people a bone. Then we can go back to business as usual: the pursuit of a little war at a great cost to the taxpayers but even greater profits to their exploiters and abusers.

March on, march on. The Trojan horse that will break the siege of the Iraqi people’s will to resist shall not be found.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at .

Saddam’s Execution : The western anti war movement - the liberal left boot of imperialism
Posted by Kola on December 30, 2006, 12:51 am
Kola, Media Lens Message Board

The silence of the western antiwar movement on the lynching of Saddam Hussein is deafening and is increasingly beginning to prove what a lot of discerning people have suspected all along – that the mainstream anti-war movement (including large parts of its left wing) in the west is the well concealed left boot of western imperialism, the conscience of the conqueror.
The main reason given by western radicals – including many on this board for ignoring the assassination of the deposed Iraqi president is the crimes against humanity he has allegedly committed. How many of these ‘left’ activists then would welcome a Chinese invasion of the British Isles, the sacking of British cities, the incarceration and torture of tens of thousands of English youths in concentration camps scattered along the Yorkshire Dales, the murder of a million British citizens (the equivalent of the Iraq dead) if the reason Beijing gave for the invasion was to arrest, try and execute Tony Blair for the limitless war crimes he has directly and indirectly carried out in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine over the last three years – killing in Iraq alone (in 3 years) more than Saddam killed in 35.

Saddam Hussein has not been tried; he has been executed by the west’s leaders, while their ‘radical’ sons look the other way. If a serial killer was brought to trial in the UK and during the trial three of his defence lawyers were kidnapped, tortured and murdered, (clearly by state agents) the media lens message board for one will be heaving with anger and righteous fury, but now there is only silence.

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but as president of Iraq, he represented something which nobody ever talks about these days, the sovereignty of his nation, by his judicial murder by a foreign invader the sovereignty of every poor third world nation has just been executed. The reason why the left in the west cares so little about that is because the sovereignty of poor nations is as much a threat to them as it is to their ruling circles.

The multi billion pound human rights/NGO industry for one (the new missionaries) are as dominant in the third world as any multinational, and in many ways even more powerful, since they seduce the minds of the natives buying up activists by the barrel load, feeding them with inconsequential facetious drivel about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ all the better to cement the west’s moral and ideological supremacy over the natives.

Trade unions from the west struggle to organise in the third world to ensure the starving do not go beyond the level of loyal opposition to the western banks and companies that impose the crucifix of hunger on their children. Even the…assortment of ‘Mac’Trotskyist groups fighting for the ‘world revolution’ creating so called internationals - a global franchise they dress up as fraternity. The headquarters of the ‘world revolution’ sharing its capital with that of world finance.

The primary contradiction for the last 500 years has not been between classes but between nations[*see editor’s note below], the poor and the rich ones. It has been a struggle by the west to dominate and control the rest of humanity. While the ordinary people in the west do not participate in the oppression willingly, many of them share the same patronising and superior attitudes of their leaders. Thus even when they support the struggles of the oppressed in the poor world it is with conditions and qualifications that are never applied to them when they face similar circumstances.

It is this ingrained and unconscious superiority that made then overlook the humiliation of saddam – checking his hair on camera for lice, something they would have baulked at if it had probably been done on the German Herman Goring – who was treated with great personal dignity – in full uniform and well groomed throughout the trial at Nuremberg as was Slobodan Milosevic another ‘northern tyrant.

People fighting against imperialist enslavement in the poor world should accept the support of western radicals whenever it is forthcoming but should not subordinate the narrative of their struggle to the ‘friends of the people’ .

[* Editor’s Note: Nations are made up of people, all of whom regardless of nationality /’race’ / ethnicity belong to different classes, all ruled over at this time in the ‘western’ world by monopoly finance capitalist ruling classes or its pawns & proxies.
The fundamental contradiction is a class contradiction, between a miniscule class of finance capitalists who own/control the means of production and the vast majority of the peoples of the world whom they exploit and oppress. Capital’s basic operating law is that it must expand or die. The U.S., world-dominant white supremacist superpower, goes to war in the interests of its bipartisan finance capitalist ruling class, not the ‘nation’. ‘Globalized’ capital / imperialism means capital must operate globally though still based in nation states. Rivalry for survival is a killer. The U.S. must defeat or eliminate all rivals in order to expand and secure its global basis to maximize power & profit — or die.
Imperialist World Wars, such the current permanent global “war on terrorism”, are imperialism’s method of restructuring capital worldwide under its domination and realigning the world in ‘victor’s spoils’. Thus even when crises of capitalism drive it to war between / against nations, the class nature of the system is the driving force.]

U.S. HOLOCAUSTS for “FULL SPECTRUM MANIFEST DESTINY”

U.S. training Fatah in anti-terror [SIC] tactics: Underlying motive is to counter strength of Hamas, analysts say
- Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/14/MNGIPMV3N61.DTL&type=printable
http://tinyurl.com/yxegfm

Rice Told Lieberman: ´Choke Hamas´
American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Washington this month that Israel must “choke off” Hamas, the Hebrew newspaper Ma’ariv reported.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=118296

What U.S.-Israeli Genocidal Peace & Security Means for Pallestine
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
http://desertpeace.blogspot.com/2006/12/silence-of-lambs.html
artists Carlos Latuff and Palestinian Yasmine

This weekend the most important feast on the Muslim calendar will begin, Eid al Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice).
In reality, it is the Palestinian people that are still being sacrificed today, every day…. and no one seems to care. The west is silent, the Arab world is silent, Palestine stands alone…
Below is a report from the Palestinian Centre on Human Rights….. can you honestly remain silent after reading this?…..Keep in mind… these incidents are from this week alone….

Weekly Report of Human Rights Violations
Report, PCHR, 28 December 2006

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Continue Systematic Attacks on Palestinian Civilians and Property in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)

A Palestinian civilian died from a previous wound in the Gaza Strip.

4 Palestinian civilians, including two children, were wounded by IOF.

IOF conducted 22 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

IOF arrested 37 Palestinian civilians, including 6 children.

IOF have continued to impose a total siege on the OPT; IOF have isolated the Gaza Strip from the outside world and IOF positioned at various checkpoints in the West Bank arrested 3 Palestinian civilians.

IOF have continued to construct the Annexation Wall inside the West Bank; IOF razed areas of Palestinian land in Um Salamouna village, south of Bethlehem, and 4 demonstrators protesting the construction of the Wall in Bal’ein village, west of Ramallah, sustained bruises when IOF soldiers beat them.

IOF have continued settlement activities in the West Bank; the Israeli government approved the construction of 30 housing units in “Mashkhit” settlement to resettle 30 Israeli families from the evacuated “Gush Qatif” settlement bloc.

Summary

Israeli violations of international law and humanitarian law continued in the OPT during the reporting period (21 - 27 December 2006):

Killing: On Thursday morning, 21 December 2006, Hamdan Mahmoud Barhoum, 24, from al-Mawasai area in Khan Yunis, died from a wound he had sustained on 13 December 2006. According to PCHR’s documentation, Barhoum was seriously wounded by shrapnel from live bullets throughout the body, when IOF gunboats positioned opposite to Rafah seashore opened fire at a fishing boat on which Barhoum and two other fishermen were sailing. The three fishermen were wounded, but Barhoum was in a serious condition.

During the reporting period, a Palestinian farmer was wounded by the IOF gunfire in the northern Gaza Strip.

In the West Bank, 3 Palestinian civilians, including two children, were wounded in Qabatya village, southeast of Jenin, on 25 December 2006, when IOF soldiers who besieged a house in the village fired at civilians who threw stones at military vehicles.

Incursions: During the reporting period, IOF conducted at least 22 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, during which they raided houses and arrested 37 Palestinian civilians, including 6 children. IOF also raided offices of the Islamic Association in Beit Sahour town and a medical center in Beit ‘Awa village, southwest of Hebron, claiming that they were looking for wanted Palestinians.

Restrictions on Movement: IOF have continued to impose a tightened siege on the OPT and imposed severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.

Gaza Strip

IOF have imposed a strict siege on the Gaza Strip. They have closed its border crossings as a form of collective punishment against Palestinian civilians.

IOF have closed Rafah International Crossing Point since 25 June 2006, even though they do not directly control it. During the reporting period, the crossing point was not opened. IOF have partially reopened commercial crossings, especially al-Mentar (Karni) crossing, but many goods and medical supplies have been lacked in markets in the Gaza Strip. IOF have also continued to close Erez crossing in the northern Gaza Strip. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have been prevented from traveling through this crossing. IOF have allowed international workers to pass through the crossing. With this closure, only few Palestinian patients have been able to travel to hospitals in Israel and the West Bank. In addition, IOF have continued to prevent Palestinian fishermen from fishing for nearly 6 months.

West Bank

Israeli military bulldozers continue to destroy land and uproot Palestinians. (PCHR)
IOF have tightened the siege imposed on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. They have isolated Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. IOF positioned at various checkpoints in the West Bank have continued to impose severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians. Contrary to promises vowed by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, during their summit in Jerusalem on 23 December 2006 to ease the movement of Palestinian civilians, Israeli media sources reported that the Israeli Defense Minister, Amir Perets, rejected a plan to dismantle 27 checkpoints in the West Bank. During the reporting period, IOF soldiers positioned at various checkpoints in the West Bank arrested 3 Palestinian civilians.

Annexation Wall: IOF have continued to construct the Annexation Wall inside the West Bank. On 26 December 2006, IOF started to raze areas of Palestinian land in Um Salamouna village, south of Bethlehem, to construct a section of the Wall. It is worth noting that on 3 September 2006, IOF issued a military order seizing 152 donums[1] of land in Um Salmouna village to be used for “military purposes to establish a fence and a number of secure roads.” During the reporting period, IOF used force against Palestinian civilians and international and Israeli solidarity activists who demonstrated in protest to the construction of the Wall in Bal’ein village, west of Ramallah. Four demonstrators sustained bruises.

Illegal Settler Activities: On 26 December 2006, IOF started to place barbwires along a settler road that passes through Jenata village, southeast of Bethlehem. According to local sources, IOF closed the areas located near the road and started to place barbwires along it. During the reporting period, Israeli media sources reported the Israeli Defense Ministry approved the resettlement of Israeli families evacuated from the “Gush Qatif” settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip in 2005 in a deserted settlement in the northern Jordan Valley on the Palestinian side of the Annexation Wall. According to those sources, the ministry approved the construction of 30 housing unit in the settlement, which is known as “Mashkhit”, and 30 Israeli families evacuated from the “Gush Qatif” settlement bloc would be settled in those units. Furthermore, the Israeli Attorney-General declared that he would initiate a criminal investigation into the construction of settlements on private Palestinian land. This declaration came in response to a demand by the Israeli Peace Now to conduct a criminal investigation into the robbery private Palestinian land to build settlement. According to Peace Now, private Palestinian land accounts for 40% of land used for Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

QUESTIONING OFFICIAL HOLOCAUST NARRATIVE A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY OF U.S.-ISRAELI STATE TERRORISM
A Visit in Prison with Ernst Zuendel
by Daniel McGowan
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/McGowan30.htm
During the recent conference in Iran (Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision) I was in prison in Mannheim, Germany interviewing Ernst Zuendel. Labeled a “Holocaust denier,” Ernst has been in jail for almost four years without being charged with a violent crime or without even being convicted of a non-violent one. He is 67 years old. … Ernst’s interest in history and revisionism led him to dispute and challenge specific “facts” about the Holocaust…

Over the years such firmly held beliefs expressed in writing and later on his wife’s Internet site caused him to be charged with incitement. He was tried twice in Canada. In the middle of the second trial in 1988, Ernst sent the first forensic team to Auschwitz. It was this “Leuchter Expedition” and the subsequent Leuchter Report that he believed revolutionized Holocaust revisionism, taking it beyond the “he said, she said…” testimonies and into the realm of solid forensic science.

Such endeavors made him the target of those who protect the standard Holocaust narrative. He survived three assassination attempts, including by arson and pipe bomb, and although he lived in Canada for 42 years, he was never able to gain Canadian citizenship, even though immigration officials had described his application as “flawless.”
On February 5, 2003, Ernst was arrested at his home in the mountain region of eastern Tennessee. He was seized on the pretext that he had violated immigration regulations, or had missed an interview date with US immigration authorities, even though he had entered the US legally, was married to an American citizen, had been checked out by the FBI, had been given a health check, a work permit, and a social security number, had no criminal record, and was trying to secure status as a permanent legal resident.

After being held for two weeks, he was deported to Canada. For the next two years — from mid-February 2003 to March 1, 2005 — he was held in solitary confinement in the Toronto West Detention Centre, on the charge that he was a threat to national security. Like others who suffer rendition, there was no bail, no public trial, and no appeal. His mail was censored and the lights in his cell were kept on day and night.

On March 1, 2005 Ernst was put in handcuffs and leg irons on a private jet and deported from Canada to Germany where he has been held as an Untersuchungsgefangener or a prisoner under investigation. As in Canada, bail was again denied. On June 29, 2005, the state’s prosecutor, Mr. Grossman, formally charged him with inciting “hatred” by having written or distributed texts that “approve, deny or play down” genocidal actions carried out by Germany’s wartime regime, and which “denigrate the memory of the [Jewish] dead.” The trial began on November 8, 2005, eight months after he arrived in Germany.

Ernst is confined to his cell 22 hours per day. He has no access to phone or Internet and he may not communicate anything about the trial. He is able to receive two 30-minute visits per month, but all conversations must be in German or must be conducted through a prison-approved translator.

Still Ernst remains upbeat and convinced that he has made a contribution to the truth surrounding WWII and the Holocaust. He does not deny that millions of people suffered at the hands of the Nazis, including millions of Jews, who were worked to death and suffered from disease (especially typhus) and who were often deliberately murdered both inside and outside of concentration camps. But he does not regard Jewish suffering as unique. He considers his efforts to tell the truth about the Holocaust as ground breaking and is satisfied to let others continue the research.

Ernst believes that Zionists treat the Holocaust as a sword and a shield to deflect criticism of their racist quest to build a Jewish state in Palestine, a state in which over half the people today are not Jewish, “the state” being defined as all the land currently controlled by Israel, including West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. He regards himself as a political prisoner of Zionists who try to erase his contributions and punish him with defamation and imprisonment. […]

WHITE SUPREMACIST GENOCIDE IN THE ‘HOMELAND’ AGAINST THE BLACK NATION
HUD Using Tens of Millions of Katrina Money to Bulldoze 4,534 Reparable Public Housing Apartments in New Orleans When It Costs Less to Repair Them for the Tenants
by Bill Quigley

Gloria Williams and her twin sister Bobbie Jennings are 60 years old. They are two of the over 4,000 families who lived in public housing in New Orleans before Katrina struck who are still locked out of their apartments since Katrina. Their apartments are two of 4,534 apartments that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced plans to demolish. Demolition is planned even though it will cost more to demolish and rebuild many fewer units than it does to fix them up and open them. Ms. Williams and Ms. Jennings, and thousands of families like them, are fighting HUD, they want to return…..( full article )

World Responds to Palestinian Family’s Jailing Despite Media Silence
by Greg Moses
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Moses30.htm

…”I am very thankful for the support,” said Ibrahim in a late-night email Thursday. “And I hope when this nightmare is over, the Hutto women’s and children jail in Taylor, Texas will be shut down forever.”

The T. Don Hutto jail is where Ibrahim’s three nieces, nephew, and pregnant sister-in-law have been held for alleged immigration violations since early November. Ibrahim’s brother was separated from the rest of the family and placed at a jail in Haskell, Texas…

Thursday, Dallas attorney John Wheat Gibson announced via email that he had received official notice from ICE that clemency for two jailed families had been denied:
“Today we received written notice from Marc J. Moore, Field Office Director in charge of the T. Don Hutto concentration camp for children at Taylor, Texas, that our requests for clemency on behalf of the Ibrahim family and the Suleiman family have been DENIED. Nothing remains but habeas corpus based on local and international legal limitations on child abuse, kidnapping, and imprisonment. A well publicized suit in the Interamerican Court of Human Rights would be useful.”…

According to Gibson and Ibrahim, the family came to the USA from Palestine, using Jordanian passports, with five-year visas issued by the American embassy in Jerusalem. The family is pursuing asylum, but has been subjected to an order of deportation by ICE.

To date, the story of the families’ detention has not been reported by anyone other than the Texas Civil Rights Review, although our reports have been circulated around the world by blogs such as Latina Lista and activist websites such as CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Electronic Intifada, IndyMedia, Infowars, and Uruknet.

As a result of the story’s popularity on the internet Thursday, Ibrahim received messages and calls of support that kept him busy for many hours.
Especially significant for Ibrahim was an offer of support from Rita Zawaideh, Chair of the Seattle-based Arab American Community Coalition (AACC). Zawaideh and the AACC have been active in anti-Arab discrimination issues since Sept. 11, 2001.

“Unfortunately, discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans has only just begun with the need for a civil rights organization dedicated to and focused on the Arab and Muslim communities strong,” says the AACC website. “The Arab American Community Coalition is going to be around for quite some time.”

The Muslim community is preparing for a major religious holiday, Eid ul-Adha, that will run from Dec. 31 to Jan. 2. Wikipedia describes the holiday as “a commemoration of Prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismael for Allah”–a story that is also of great significance for Jewish and Christian believers, too. In the end, Ibrahim’s hand was stopped by God, but the prophet’s willingness to sacrifice his only son at God’s command is a very influential instruction about faith in the Abrahamic [or Ibrahimic] traditions.

As for Ahmad Ibrahim, besides being overwhelmed with child care, phone calls, and bad news, one other thing he pondered on Thursday was the effect of waiting until after the holiday season to stage a symbolic protest against the two-month-long jailing of three nieces, a nephew, brother, and pregnant sister-in-law.

An official with ICE in San Antonio also advised Ibrahim that the Homeland Security offices were located on private property where protesters might be subject to arrest.

As foster parent to a three-year-old niece who was born in the USA, and as an American citizen who hasn’t participated in protest activity, the mention of possible arrest on Homeland Security premises for the crime of holding a sign may have played a part in Ibrahim’s decision to postpone the event.

Whatever the effect on Ibrahim may have been, the thought of Homeland Security officials passing along such “advice” about arrests is a discomforting reminder to us all of the climate we seem to be sharing in the USA, where Homeland Security’s privatized offices serve as auxiliaries to the power of their privatized jails for children and pregnant mothers.

At any rate, we join issue with Ibrahim when he calls Homeland Security officials “criminals” for their treatment of his family, and we don’t mind if Homeland Security calls our well-chosen words “obscenities” as they did on Thursday when Ibrahim used them.

If there is an obscenity here, it will be found in the indelible memory of a Bible-thumping American culture that took a woman from the Holy Lands who was pregnant with a boy and instead of granting her amnesty from her torn-up homeland locked her and her family in jail during the Christmas holidays without even a single mention of the story being printed or broadcast through the usual media channels to an audience of self-proclaiming Christian conscience….

9/11 Debunking: Intellectual Dishonesty, Faith, and Illogic
http://ricefarmer.blogspot.com/2006/12/911-debunking-intellectual-dishonesty.html

The classy [capitalist] left -gatekeeper publication The Nation…published another 9/11 debunking article, by Christopher Hayes. Despite the publication’s claim to be disseminating “unconventional wisdom,” this article is quiteconventional in terms of debunking technique and the overarching belief that the system just needs some tweaking.

Hayes’ thesis is that although the 9/11 truth movement is wrong, the US
media and the Bush administration itself are much to blame for the emergence of this grassy-knoll conspiracy theory… Hayes latches onto the physical evidence argument and attacks the video “Loose Change.” This is classic debunker technique: attack your opponent’s weakest point, but make no mention of facts and arguments that you cannot counter… the 9/11 truth movement itself is much to blame here. Starting on the very day of the tragedy.
Bush quickly set to work concealing and destroying the physical evidence.
Crime scene cleanup began immediately, videos were quickly confiscated
(how did law enforcement agents know immediately where all those
videos would be?), and precautions were taken to keep evidence out of public view. As a consequence, there is virtually no physical evidence, and people who decide to take this route are reduced to arguing about simulations and melting points, and about photographs and poor-quality videos, whose provenance and chain of custody are in many cases unknown. A weakness of the 9/11 movement, therefore, is overemphasis on the physical evidence argument, which is a very easy target, instead of emphasizing the huge volume of known and verifiable facts which all point in the direction of US complicity in 9/11 (an excellent work in this respect is Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon).

And although Hayes does not explicitly say so in this article, implicit here
is the same logically flawed conclusion that other debunkers make. Namely, if they demonstrate that aircraft brought down the WTC towers, they demonstrate by extension that Bush’s 9/11 story is true. This is an absurd claim because even if they prove that planes brought down the towers, this proves only that planes brought down the towers. The other evidence — which is much better — still stands.

The breathtaking dishonesty of Hayes and his ilk lies in their constant
barrage against this easy physical-evidence target, while ignoring the
colossal volume of excellent circumstantial evidence against the Bush
regime. In fact, in my own debates with debunkers, I have found that they
actually refuse to address this evidence… Take the timeline, for instance
(David Ray Griffin’s analyses of timeline discrepancies highly recommended).
It never worked from the start, despite the 9/11 Commission’s efforts to tweak it into some sort of workable configuration. For about five years, honest people were pointing at this leaky story and asking questions. Then suddenly this year, the government gives it a major overhaul… but if
the first, official, Commission-approved timeline was the truth, what is the
need for a complete overhaul and major change in the story? …
Close scrutiny of the timeline (any version) shows that (the official)
story can’t possibly be true. Their reaction is the same as that of
religious authorities in the Middle Ages to the heliocentric theory. They
just reject it out of hand because it conflicts with their faith…

Debunkers do not want to talk about the war games that diverted and paralyzed air defenses, and confused air traffic controllers. They don’t want to discuss insider trading, or the connections with oil, drugs, intelligence services, “homeland security” , the Israel lobby, the money trail, the network of elites who stood to profit, or a whole slew of other damning evidence….To sum up, 9/11 debunking thrives on intellectual dishonesty, illogic, and a faith-based mindset. If the 9/11 truth movement wants to address this properly, it must get over its over-dependence on the highly speculative and theoretical physical evidence argument, and instead challenge debunkers with the vast body of known and verifiable facts that point to US complicity.

[editorial note: this debunker critic too obscures the critical political context: the 911 ‘mini Pearl Harbor” was the necessary pretext to justify the bipartisan state terrorist ‘war on terror’, a permanent U.S. world war to achieve its historical ‘manifest destiny’ mission of total world domination militarily with unprecedented crimes against humanity in order to eliminate all rivals and all opposition in the name of ‘freedom, democracy, stability and national security’.
To personalize this bipartisan agenda and its crimes against humanity–including 911– as a ‘Bush’doing is worse than absurd, it is disingenuous and misleading]

MORE MOTIVATION TO STOP IMPERIALISM!

Arctic Glory
http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/poles/mastpole.html

Why Did You Kill the Trees?
http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/why_did_you_cut_the_trees_grandma.html

GOOD SCIENCE & MEDICINE/”HEALTHCARE”: OXYMORONS IN PROFIT-DRIVEN CAPITALISM

The Spine as Profit Center
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/business/30spine.html?em&ex=1167714000&en=bf7be93d696ffb73&ei=5087%0A
By REED ABELSON
Spinal-fusion surgery is one of the most lucrative areas of medicine. An estimated half-million Americans had the operation this year, generating billions of dollars for hospitals and doctors.

But there have been serious questions about how much the surgery actually helps patients with back pain and whether surgeons’ generous fees might motivate them to overuse the procedure. Those concerns are now heightened by a growing trend among some surgeons to profit in yet another way — by investing in companies that make screws and other hardware they install.

The parts can be highly profitable. A single screw that goes into the spine, for example, sells for about $1,000 — at least 10 times the cost of making it.

Within the medical device industry, it has been well chronicled how companies use consulting ties and other financial relationships to try to gain favor with the surgeons using their devices. But critics are especially troubled by the emerging trend in spinal devices, which so far has occurred largely under the radar.

Doctors’ taking significant ownership stakes in spinal parts makers, critics say, provides an extra financial incentive for a doctor to recommend a surgery. It may be one of the most distinct examples yet of the way monetary considerations can play a role in the way doctors practice medicine.

Such doctors face “an awfully pernicious conflict of interest,” said Dr. Richard A. Deyo, a physician and health services professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

About 30 start-up companies have begun selling spinal devices, including screws, in the last couple of years. And industry experts say about a dozen companies have doctors among their investors. Because most of the companies are private and the relationships are not publicly disclosed, there is no way to know how many spine surgeons around the country are partial owners of device makers.

Typically, patients are not aware of the doctor’s financial interests. One patient who is suing her surgeon for malpractice learned only during the legal discovery process that her surgeon had a financial interest in the maker of the artificial disk he installed in her spine…

And now, devices “are the low-hanging fruit,” he said. “There’s a lot of money in devices.”

Science Meets Ignorance
Christopher R. Brauchli

Science is not as intimidating as it first appears. Anyone can do it. It is important, however, that when done by scientists it be properly vetted by amateurs. And it is important that ordinary people don’t have too much information since it will simply confuse them. Thanks to the actions of George Bush we will no longer have to fear an excessively informed public that may fall prey to the importunings of scientists who believe themselves able to educate the rest of us and, more daunting still, George Bush. That is because in a moment of unexpected enlightenment Mr. Bush has realized that one of the best ways to control what people think is to control the kinds of information to which people have access. Here is what Mr. Bush has done to restrict the scientific information available to would-be students towards the end of 2006.

He is closing all the libraries run by the Environmental Protection Agency and getting rid of pesky and superfluous scientific documents found in those libraries. The EPA has maintained 29 libraries around the United States for many years that contain information about human health, environmental issues, hazardous waste, pollution control, air quality and all manner of other things with which the EPA concerns itself.

In the 2007 library services budget request by the EPA, Mr. Bush cut $2 million out of the $2.5 million requested. In anticipation of Congressional approval the EPA has already closed its library in Washington D.C. to the public and has completely closed libraries in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo. In a letter to Congress protesting the cuts, EPA scientists observe that the $2 million cut is a small part of an $8 billion budget. That will not change Mr. Bush’s mind. Having little, if any knowledge himself and not having found that an impediment to becoming president, he sees no harm in making it harder for others to acquire that which he is lacking. Closing libraries is not the only way Mr. Bush hopes to keep citizens from being infected by knowledge. Scientists at the EPA, like its libraries, have been muzzled.

New regulations have been promulgated at the EPA that provide that when it comes to setting national air-quality standards, political appointees will have a greater role. Formerly independent outside scientists and professional scientists inside the EPA were responsible for setting safety standards for various pollutants. They made recommendations that were then sent to the political appointees who were the agency’s administrators. The recommendations were then forwarded to the White House. This was scientifically sound but it proved embarrassing to the administration when science ran up against the beliefs of George Bush and his political contributors. Under the new procedure this is less likely to happen since independent scientists will only be called on after political hacks and staff scientists have come up with what is now called “policy-relevant” science. The name suggests that policy and science should be given equal weight. The EPA is not alone in this most recent assault on knowledge-based decision-making.

New rules have been promulgated by the U.S. Geological Survey that will avoid having scientists making scientific pronouncements that go against Bush policy and beliefs. Under the new rules agency scientists at the USGS must submit all scientific papers and even minor reports or prepared talks to the USGS’s communications office. The new policy says that the USGS communications office and Mark Myers, the agency’s director, must be “alerted about information products containing high-visibility topics or topics of a policy-sensitive nature.” Mr. Myers and the office must be told prior to any submission for publication “of findings or data that may be especially newsworthy, have an impact on government policy, or contradict previous public understanding to ensure that proper officials are notified and that communication strategies are developed.”

According to Patrick Leahy, the agency’s head of geology and its acting director until September, the new procedure will “harmonize” the review process. It will avoid such unfortunate occurrences as the time in 2002 when the USGS warned that oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would harm the Porcupine Caribou herd. Mr. Bush didn’t believe that. One week later the USGS had a new report saying the herd would be unaffected by the drilling.
Commenting on the new USGS rules, Jim Estes, an internationally recognized marine biologist in the USGS said: “I feel as though we’ve got someone looking over our shoulder at every damn thing we do. And to me that’s a very scary thing. I worry that it borders on censorship.” Mr. Estes is right. We all have someone looking over our shoulders. He’s called George Bush.
Discuss this column at:http://humanraceandothersports.com/columns/336#comment