-New Bush rule ‘kicks Patriot Act foes in the teeth’.
The Bush administration has been planning since last spring to issue a final burst of federal regulations just before leaving office. It was recently announced that over 90 new regulations would be finalized before November 22 — 60 days prior to the end of Bush’s term — making them difficult, though not impossible, for President Obama to reverse.
Although many of the regulations have to do with energy and the environment, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted on Tuesday that there’s also “one that’ll kick opponents of the Patriot Act right in the teeth.”
The proposed regulation “would allow state and local law enforcement agencies to collect intelligence on individuals and organizations even if the information is unrelated to any criminal matter,” Maddow explained. She added, “Even if they weren’t already watching you — they soon could be.”
-Documents linking Iran to nuclear weapons push may have been fabricated.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has obtained evidence suggesting that documents which have been described as technical studies for a secret Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program may have been fabricated.
The documents in question were acquired by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from a still unknown source — most of them in the form of electronic files allegedly stolen from a laptop computer belonging to an Iranian researcher. The US has based much of its push for sanctions against Iran on these documents.
The new evidence of possible fraud has increased pressure within the IAEA secretariat to distance the agency from the laptop documents, according to a Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA, who spoke to RAW STORY on condition of anonymity.
-John McCain: I aspire to be a dictator (VIDEO).
Just found this. I imagine some GOP apologist types have some sort of explaination for this. It’ll probably be something along the lines of a “Freudian Slip” rationalization. It’s too bad the 2 different times GWB said it there’s no chance it was a FS, and sure enough thats what we got. Regardless of who is ‘elected’, they’re inheriting a de facto dictatorial power throne.
-Violations of Law May Be Classified, Court Rules.
Information that would reveal a violation of the law may be properly classified as long as it is not deliberately classified for the purpose of concealing the violation, a federal judge indicated this week.
That view, in a ruling (pdf) against the ACLU by DC District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, all but nullifies one of the principal limitations on national security secrecy contained in the executive order on classification policy.
In section 1.7 of executive order 12958, as amended, on “classification limitations and prohibitions,” the President directed that “In no case shall information be classified in order to … conceal violations of law….”
The ACLU cited this provision in a recent FOIA lawsuit to argue that transcripts of detainee tribunal hearings could not be properly classified under the executive order if they revealed evidence of prisoner abuse or other illegal conduct. The court rejected that argument.
“Plaintiffs [ACLU] claim that some material was improperly classified because it may contain evidence that the government has violated the law,” Judge Lamberth wrote in an October 29 ruling. “But plaintiffs misapprehend the Executive Order,” he wrote (at page 6). “Executive Order 12958 prohibits classifying information ‘in order to … conceal violations of the law.’ However, there is no indication that these materials were classified ‘in order to’ conceal violations of the law….”
In other words, according to Judge Lambert, classifiers actually may conceal violations of the law as long as such concealment is not the specific purpose of the classification.
This narrow understanding of the executive order converts an important guarantee of the integrity of the classification process into an empty rhetorical gesture.
Under Judge Lamberth’s interpretation, the executive order provision limiting classification of violations of the law is not a limitation on the types of information that may be classified at all, but rather an unverifiable limitation on the classifier’s intention. The provision is not concerned with the consequences of classification (i.e., the fact that criminal activity will be concealed from public knowledge) but instead focuses on the mental state of the classifier. Did he or she specifically intend to conceal violations of the law? If not, the classification may proceed, even if concealment is the inevitable result. And since the classifier’s mental state is unknowable by others or may itself be concealed, the executive order’s limitation is deprived is of significant meaning.
In the past, the limitation on classification of violations of the law was construed more broadly as a public assurance that classification would not be used to conceal criminal activity by the government. (It was never understood to require publication of information about third-party crimes collected through classified intelligence or law enforcement methods.)
In 2004, the Federation of American Scientists cited the provision in a complaint (pdf) filed with the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), contending that the Taguba report (pdf, classified SECRET) that found evidence of criminal abuses at Abu Ghraib prison was improperly classified. ISOO, led by then-director J. William Leonard, undertook an investigation into the propriety of the report’s classification and reported some noteworthy results (pdf). Not only was the Taguba report released in declassified form, but the Pentagon undertook a Department-wide initiative to improve classification training, management and oversight. The “motivation” in the mind of the classifier never came up.
The Secretary of Defense himself also issued a Department-wide memorandum (pdf) to remind classifiers of their responsibility to exercise classification authority properly, and he specifically cited the prohibition on classifying criminal activity. In his September 16, 2004 memo, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld paraphrased the executive order limitation as follows: “It is important to state that classifiers shall not… use classification to conceal violations of law….”
Interestingly, Secretary Rumsfeld did not use the phrase “in order to” which Judge Lamberth singled out to justify his interpretation of the order as a prohibition only on deliberate concealment. The Rumsfeld paraphrase seems to reflect the prior understanding that classification should not be used “so as to” conceal violations of the law, regardless of the intentions of the classifier.
But if violations of the law may in fact be classified, then it is important for Americans to know that. If Judge Lamberth has made it easier for classifiers to conceal violations of the law, he also put the public on notice that this is how the national security classification system now functions.
*James Woolsey Iraq on 9/12 update.
Tonight I noticed thru the handy WordPress panel that Huffington Post linked to the site in reference to my old James Woolsey post:
*Neocon PNAC Member / CIA Director James Woolsey thumbed Iraq just 2 hours after 9/11
After seeing this I considered posting a link to the Archive.org source of the cited NBC clip. When I looked at the site I noticed a lack of link for the time-slot in question. I then went and found the (rather rare) original raw news-feed clip, that I have, where I found the bit. I made an error on the time, as I’ll explain shortly, below. But it turns out he was actually on 2 hours early making the same link anyways.
The article is authored by Muhammad Sahimi, and is about McCain’s foreign policy advisors. It’s actually an important piece, the sort I’d consider reposting had I seen it and not be linking here now.
He cited my blog site here in reference to the James Woolsey Youtube clip I uploaded a long time ago and did that writeup. I found that clip from the Archive.org 9/11 news archive. In February 2007 news happened, that implicated a backdoor to download raw quality MPG clips directly from the Archive’s archiving system. The Archive 9/11 stuff was rather unknown and I’m not even sure totally available, and these 1GB source clips weren’t meant for public consumption. So when the news broke during that whole ‘BBC reported WTC7 collapse before it did’ fiasco, some of us out there looked past the story and sought out where to find the clips.
So for less than 24 hours after the story went viral there was a limited window to grab whatever you could. From my take I found that portion inside there, later on. The filenames were quite different than how they’re now named at Archive. Those who took part in this ‘preservation of history’ effort ended up with rather random clips. Only a handful of complete sets of the ‘raw’ (not quite, but close) exist.
Here is the filename of the clip this post is all about:
V08554-10 nbc200109122209-2251.mpg
So that’s NBC, 2001, 09 (September), 12 (date), 2209-2251 (military time).
Somehow I slipped and mixed up the military time and confused that with it being 2:26 on 9/11, when it was actually 10:26 on 9/12. As I’ll point out below, Woolsey still made the link the same night only about 2 hours earlier.
On my bad, I’m not at all enjoying catching myself with such a ‘large’ error. In fact I wish someone would have spotted this mistake for me long ago. I’m sure I looked at the time more than once, but whatever happened I made the error, posted it, and never looked back. The ‘rarity’ of the situation helped it get overlooked by the sorts who would normally correct fouls, I suppose.
As was already present on Wikipedia, when I found my Woolsey clip, Woolsey did make the link to Iraq at 10:54 on the morning of 9/12. But now there is one clip posted on Youtube that might actually show Woolsey after midnight of 9/11 making the claim. This clip is stated to be “after midnight on 9/11″. Note that this timeslot isn’t available at Archive.org. But I do think it was from 9/12, as if you look at the ABC clip from 9/13 the anchors are different than the clip just before midnight on 9/11. [Another thing I find interesting is thatPeter Jennings mentioned that it was the second time ABC had him on that day (meaning 9/11).]
So this doesn’t hurt Sahimi’s article, in my view. Furthermore, Woolsey was one of the key Neocon drum beating war-hawks who was regularly on the nightly news of various networks screaming for war with Iraq in the early months directly after 9/11, as documented in Bill Moyer’s most excellent PBS presentation “Buying The War“.
Woolsey was a key instrument in propadandizing the population long before the Bush administration began parroting the ‘kill Iraq’ framework Woosley, Pearle and Kristol mantra. So it could be said that Woolsey and the other 2 should be charged before Bush & Cheney, or at least at the same Nuremberg show trial extravaganza.
I have many of the roughly 418 42-minute 1GB clips, but I haven’t played the Archive clips I don’t possess. Besides, it appears the clip now in question isn’t available, although I haven’t ever bothered comparing what is posted as quality-chopped streams at Archive with the master list of the original file set, that I do have. But since that time I have noticed many different news-feed uploads on the torrent networks, from time to time. I might even have that piece, although I have so much data I don’t have time ot look for it now. Note the Archive set is of what was broadcasted in DC.
-The New Neo-Con Reality.
Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch
October 28, 2008
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
–Bush White House aide explaining the New Reality
The New American Century lasted a decade. Financial crisis and defeated objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia brought the neoconservative project for American world hegemony crashing to a close in the autumn of 2008.
The neocons used September 11, 2001, as a “new Pearl Harbor” to give power precedence over law domestically and internationally. The executive branch no longer had to obey federal statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or honor international treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions. An asserted “terrorist threat” to national security became the cloak which hid US imperial interests as the Bush Regime set about dismantling US civil liberties and the existing order of international law constructed by previous governments during the post-war era.
Perhaps the neoconservative project for world hegemony would have lasted a bit longer had the neocons possessed intellectual competence.
On the war front, the incompetent neocons predicted that the Iraq war would be a six-week cakewalk, whose $70 billion cost would be paid out of Iraqi oil revenues. President Bush fired White House economist Larry Lindsey for estimating that the war would cost $200 billion. The current estimate by experts is that the Iraq war has cost American taxpayers between two and three trillion dollars. And the six-week war is now the six-year war.
On the economic front, the incompetent neocons overlooked the fact that a country that relocates its industry and best jobs abroad in order to maximize short-run profits becomes progressively economically weaker. Propagandistic talk about a “New Economy” built around financial dominance covered up the fact that the US was the world’s greatest debtor country, dependent on foreigners to finance the daily operation of its government, the home mortgages of its citizens, and its military operations abroad.
In Iraq the neocons gave up their hegemonic military pretensions when they put 80,000 Sunni insurgents on the US Army’s payroll in order to scale down the fighting and reduce US casualties.
In Afghanistan the neocons gave up more military pretensions when they had to rely on NATO troops to fight the Taliban.
US military pretensions came to an end in Georgia when the Bush Regime sent Georgian troops to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russian residents in order to end the secessionist movement in the province, thereby clearing the path for Georgia’s NATO membership. It took Russian soldiers only a few hours to destroy the US and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian Army.
The ongoing financial crisis has put an end to the pretensions of American financial hegemony and free-market illusions that deregulation and offshoring had brought prosperity to America.
In a long article, “The End of Arrogance,” on September 30, the German news magazine Der Spiegel observed:
This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success.
Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.
Gone are the days when the US could go into debt with abandon, without considering who would end up footing the bill. And gone are the days when it could impose its economic rules of engagement on the rest of the world, rules that emphasized profit above all else — without ever considering that such returns cannot be achieved by doing business in a respectable way.
A new chapter in economic history has begun, one in which the United States will no longer play its former dominant role. A process of redistributing money and power around the world — away from America and toward the resource-rich countries and rising industrialized nations in Asia — has been underway for years. The financial crisis will only accelerate the process.
Looking at his defeated adversary, George W. Bush, brought down by military and economic failure, Iranian President Ahmadinejad observed: “The American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders.”
Truer words were never spoken.
-Secret Bush Administration Plan to Suspend US Constitution.
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research
Antifascist Calling…
Several months before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved an updated version of the U.S. Army’s secret operational Continuity of Government (COG) plans.
A draft document published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks entitled, “Army Regulation 500-3, Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources. Army Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program,” dated 19 January 2001, spells out changes in Army doctrine.
Issued by Headquarters, Department of the Army and signed off by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Secretary of the Army, the document is affixed with a warning: “Destruction Notice: Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.” The restricted document as published by Wikileaks states:
History. This regulation is a revision of the original regulation that was effective on 10 July 1989. Since that time, no changes have been published to amend the original.
Summary. This regulation on the Army Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program has been revised to update Army COOP policy and extend the requirement for all-hazards COOP planning to all Army organizations. Classified information contained in the 1989 version of this AR has been removed and placed in a classified HQDA Operations Plan (OPLAN).
Applicability. This regulation applies to the Active Army, the U.S. Army Reserve (USAR), and when federalized to the Army National Guard (ARNG). In the event of conflict between this regulation and approved OSD or JCS publications, the provisions of the latter will apply. (”Army Regulation 500-3, Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources. Army Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program,” 19 January 2001, p. 3) [emphasis added]
“All-hazards COOP planning” is described as the means by which “the Army remains capable of continuing mission-essential operations during any situation, including military attack, terrorist activities, and natural or man-made disasters.” While the Army stresses the updates described in AR 500-3 relate to chemical, biological, nuclear attacks, “natural disasters” and “technical or man-made disasters or accidents,” current Army doctrine is also heavily weighted towards contingency planning for “civil disturbances.”
Two national “civil disturbance” plans, Garden Plot and Cable Splicer have been operational since the 1960s. Researcher Frank Morales has detailed how,
Under the heading of “civil disturbance planning,” the U.S. military is training troops and police to suppress democratic opposition in America. The master plan, Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, is code-named, “Operation Garden Plot”. Originated in 1968, the “operational plan” has been updated over the last three decades, most recently in 1991, and was activated during the Los Angeles “riots” of 1992, and more than likely during the recent anti-WTO “Battle in Seattle.” …
Equipped with flexible “military operations in urban terrain” and “operations other than war” doctrine, lethal and “less-than-lethal” high-tech weaponry, US “armed forces” and “elite” militarized police units are being trained to eradicate “disorder”, “disturbance” and “civil disobedience” in America. Further, it may very well be that police/military “civil disturbance” planning is the animating force and the overarching logic behind the incredible nationwide growth of police paramilitary units, a growth which coincidentally mirrors rising levels of police violence directed at the American people, particularly “non-white” poor and working people. (Frank Morales, “U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at Home,” in Police State America, ed. Tom Burghardt, Toronto/Montreal: Arm The Spirit/Solidarity, 2002, P. 59)
AR 500-3 should be viewed in this context. Plans for Continuity of Government have been in place since the 1950s. Originally conceived during the Cold War when fears of a nuclear strike envisaged by atomic war-gamers at the RAND Corporation, believed that an immobilization of government functions and a breakdown of civilian rule would follow a nuclear attack. But from their inception, COG planning has been shrouded in secrecy.
In addition to constructing nuclear-proof underground facilities where the civilian leadership could escape a decapitation strike, other COG provisions included a series of executive orders designating which officials would assume Cabinet-level posts and other Executive Branch positions. Officials so designated would constitute a “shadow government” should office holders be killed in an attack “or otherwise incapacitated.”
However, when these and other Pentagon “civil disturbance” plans surfaced in the 1980s during the Iran-Contra hearings, they were roundly criticized by members of Congress, civil liberties groups and the media before disappearing once again, down Orwell’s “memory hole.” The inherent dangers implicit in such plans are that unelected Executive Branch officers could assume the Presidency and other appointed offices subject neither to congressional scrutiny nor judicial oversight.
Exercising sweeping emergency powers buried within Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs), unelected officials could suspend the Constitution, declare martial law and create an Executive Branch dictatorship that rests solely on the power of the U.S. military.
Most troubling, Executive Branch officials under secret rules of a COG regime could suppress and usurp the lawful powers of Congress and the Judicial Branch (by force of arms if deemed necessary) as a means of ensuring “cooperation” under a “unitary executive.”
As we have seen, the “unitary executive” theory has been a salient feature of Bushist rule since the December 2000 judicial coup d’état, when the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision handed a contested election to George W. Bush by stopping the vote count in Florida.
Since assuming office, the administration has ruthlessly wielded executive power in order to achieve their antidemocratic agenda: from the looting of the economy through “deregulation,” massive deficit spending and tax cuts for their corporate “clients,” to waging a preemptive war of conquest in Iraq, the “unitary executive” has systematically shredded America’s constitutional system of checks and balances.
The Bush administration put COG plans into operation for the first time in U.S. history in the hours directly following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. They have never been rescinded.
Their implementation involves a rotating staff of 75-150 senior government officials and others from every Cabinet department in two “secure, undisclosed locations” on the East Coast. However, key congressional representatives have been kept out of the loop and House and Senate leaders have said they were not informed the “shadow government” had “gone live.”
So secretive are Bush administration plans that Peter DeFazio (D-OR), a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, was denied access in 2007 to the classified version of the COG plans contained in top secret Presidential Decision Directive annexes. This too, is unprecedented.
While the Bush administration admitted that COG was activated in 2001, their disclosure came only after The Washington Post broke the story based on confidential administration sources troubled by the scope of the program and its secretive implementation.
Since the late 1980s, Rumsfeld was a habitué of COG exercises along with Vice President Dick Cheney. Indeed early COG drills had been organized by the right-wing Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). As investigative journalist Andrew Cockburn revealed in his definitive political biography of the former Defense Secretary:
This highly secret program was known as Project 908, and among the individuals earmarked to take power when disaster struck was Donald Rumsfeld. … There, for several days, he would be immured in artificial caverns, staring at electronic displays streaming data of disaster and confusion, sleeping on cots and subsisting on the most austere rations. …
Insofar as the COG games gave the illusion of reality, they taught Rumsfeld and his fellow players some dangerous lessons, particularly when the fall of the Soviet Union induced some changes in the usual scenarios. Although the exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200 million in the Clinton era, the vanished Soviets were now customarily replaced by terrorists. The terrorism envisaged however, was almost always state-sponsored. …
There were other changes, too. In earlier times the specialists selected to run the “shadow government” had been drawn from across the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld found himself in politically congenial company, the players’ roster being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks. (Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, New York: Scribner, 2007, pp. 85-86, 88)
As researcher Peter Dale Scott revealed, in early 2006 the Department of Homeland Security awarded a $385 million contract to a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, to provide “temporary detention and processing facilities.” Scott wrote,
The contract–announced Jan. 24 by the engineering and construction firm KBR–calls for preparing for “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies, such as “a natural disaster.” The release offered no details about where Halliburton was to build these facilities, or when. …
After 9/11, new martial law plans began to surface similar to those of FEMA in the 1980s. In January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets. One month later John Brinkerhoff, the author of the 1982 FEMA memo, published an article arguing for the legality of using U.S. troops for purposes of domestic security. (Peter Dale Scott, “Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps,” Pacific News Service, February 8, 2006)
The DHS contract to KBR had been preceded by the April 2002 creation of the Pentagon’s Northern Command (NORTHCOM), specifically empowered by the Bush administration for domestic U.S. military operations in direct violation of Posse Comitatus prohibitions forbidding the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. At the time, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called NORTHCOM’s launch “the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1946.”
Sweeping indeed! Last month Army Times reported that the Army’s “3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team [BCT] has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys. Now they’re training for the same mission–with a twist–at home.” According to Army Times,
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks. …
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities. …
They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack. …
The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”
The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets. (Gina Cavallaro, “Brigade Homeland Tours Start Oct. 1,” Army Times, September 8, 2008)
While senior Pentagon brass have downplayed the significance of deploying a BCT that has taken part in aggressive occupation duties to suppress the Iraqi people’s resistance, Col. Lou Vogler, NORTHCOM’s chief of future operations said in an interview that the military “will integrate with law enforcement to understand the situation and make sure we’re aware of any threats.” An article published by the Army News Service disclosed,
During the exercise, commanders and staff of the force will train, rehearse and exercise–from academic classes to making decisions and executing orders–all to help prepare them for the mission they will assume on Oct. 1, said Vogler.
“It’s an opportunity for network building in an unprecedented assignment of forces,” said [Marine Corps Lt. Col.] Shores. “DOD always had allocated contingency sourced forces–but this is precedent-setting network building with the forces that we ultimately will go out and execute with. It’s an opportunity to get to know our forces, to see them in execution, to mission-orient them and be that much better–to be that much more responsive.”
One goal of the exercise is to exercise with partners from the civilian agencies they would support. To that end, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other interagency representatives are participating to ensure integration with civilian consequence managers who would lead a response, said Vogler.
“The overall federal response builds on the local and state response in accordance with the incident command system and existing plans and processes that are out there,” said Vogler. “The response force would supplement local efforts.” (”Consequence Management Response Force to join Army Northern Command,” Army News Service, September 15, 2008)
Vogler and Shores were discussing an exercise code-named Vibrant Response, that took place September 8-19 at Fort Stewart in Georgia. Three brigades form the core of NORTHCOM’s Consequence Management Response Force: the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Army Division; the 1st Medical Brigade, Fort Hood, Texas, and the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. All three units participated in Vibrant Response.
As researcher and analyst Michel Chossudovsky comments:
The BCT is an army combat unit designed to confront an enemy within a war theater.
With US forces overstretched in Iraq, why would the Pentagon decide to undertake this redeployment within the USA, barely one month before the presidential elections?
The new mission of the 1st Brigade on US soil is to participate in “defense” efforts as well as provide “support to civilian authorities”.
What is significant in this redeployment of a US infantry unit is the presumption that North America could, in the case of a national emergency, constitute a “war theater” thereby justifying the deployment of combat units.
The new skills to be imparted consist in training 1st BCT in repressing civil unrest, a task normally assumed by civilian law enforcement.
What we are dealing with is a militarization of civilian police activities in derogation of the Posse Comitatus Act. (”Pre-election Militarization of the North American Homeland. US Combat Troops in Iraq repatriated to ‘help with civil unrest’,” Global Research, September 26, 2008)
One scenario envisaged by Chossudovsky is that “civil unrest resulting from from the financial meltdown is a distinct possibility, given the broad impacts of financial collapse on lifelong savings, pension funds, homeownership, etc.”
One might reasonably inquire, what “precedent-setting network” does the Army have in mind that would “ensure integration” with “civilian agencies” such as FEMA (a branch of Homeland Security)? As the World Socialist Web Site reports:
It is noteworthy that the deployment of US combat troops “as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters”–in the words of the Army Times–coincides with the eruption of the greatest economic emergency and financial disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Justified as a response to terrorist threats, the real source of the growing preparations for the use of US military force within America’s borders lies not in the events of September 11, 2001 or the danger that they will be repeated. Rather, the domestic mobilization of the armed forces is a response by the US ruling establishment to the growing threat to political stability. (Bill Van Auken, “Army deploys combat unit in U.S. for possible civil unrest,” World Socialist Web Site, 25 September 2008)
As the 2001 COOP planning document describes, a host of on-going Army plans and exercises have been revised by the Bush administration. In addition to Vibrant Response discussed above, they include: Plan EXCALIBUR, a COG Army training exercise; ADOBE, described by investigative journalist William M. Arkin as a “FEMA continuity of government special access program designation.” Arkin describes special access programs or SAPs as,
Classified research and development, acquisition program, operation, intelligence activity, or plan that is so sensitive or critical that the value of the information warrants enhanced protection beyond that normally provided for access to Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret information. (William M. Arkin, Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World, Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005, p. 598)
The impetus for revising Army COOP was, according to AR 500-3 primarily because,
The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the former Soviet Union significantly reduced the probability of a major nuclear attack on CONUS but the probability of other threats has increased. Army organizations must be prepared for any contingency with a potential for interruption of normal operations. To emphasize that Army continuity of operations planning is now focused on the full all-hazards threat spectrum, the name “ASRRS” has been replaced by the more generic title “Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program.” (p. 13)
Towards this end, the Rumsfeld-era document states that the Army’s new “mission-critical” functions will be restructured so that, “Army COOP plans must ensure that the Army remains capable of continuing mission-essential operations during any situation, including military attack, terrorist activities, and natural or man-made disasters.” (p. 13) The Army, following various contingencies analyzed in the document will “coordinate with mission-essential external organizations and agencies.” (p. 14)
So sensitive are the political ramifications of these plans that under the heading, 3-12 Operational Security (OPSEC), the Army avers,
a. The success of COOP planning relies on denying access by unauthorized parties to information on COOP plans, procedures, capabilities and facilities.
b. Overhead imagery, signals intelligence, human sources, and exploitation of open literature during peacetime are threat capabilities used to gain knowledge of Army emergency plans, command and control systems, and facilities.
c. See Appendix B, Security Classification Guide, for guidance on the level of classification of COOP-related information. (COOP, op. cit., p. 20)
Appendix A of AR 500-3 lists relevant references for changes included in the COOP planning document. These include:
Section I
Required Publications
HQDA Operations Plan EXCALIBUR, 30 April 1999 (Being Revised)
HQDA Continuity of Operations Plan (cited in para 1-4.f)
Section II
Related Publications a related publication is merely a source of additional information. The user does not have to read it to understand this publication.
Executive Order 12656
National Security Emergency Preparedness (NSEP), 18 November 1988
DoD Directive (Dodd) 2000.12
DoD Antiterrorism/Force Protection (AT/FP) Program, 13 April 1999
CJCSM 3410.01
Continuity of Operations Plan for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (COOP-CJCS), 1 March 1999
Executive Order 12787
Prescribing the Order of Succession of Officers to Act as Secretary of Defense, 31 December 1991
DoDD 3020.26
Continuity of Operations (COOP) Policy and Planning, 26 May 1995
DoD 3020.26P
Continuity of Operations Plan, 21 June 2000 (Classified SECRET)
DoDD 3020.36
Assignment of National Security Emergency Preparedness (NSEP) Responsibilities to DoD Components, 2 November 1988
DoDD 3025.15
Military Support to Civil Authorities (MSCA), 18 February 1997
The Federal Response Plan, April 1999
Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 67, (Top Secret) Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG) and Continuity of Government (COG) Operations, Oct 21, 1998
Federal Preparedness Circular 65, Federal Executive Branch Continuity of Operations, (COOP), July 26, 1999
As Peter Dale Scott reported in CounterPunch, apparently members of Congress are considered “unauthorized parties” to be denied access “to information on COOP plans, procedures, capabilities and facilities.” Congressman DeFazio had been denied access to the classified annexes of National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (NSPD 51/HSPD 20) Scott wrote,
NSPD 51 contains “classified Continuity Annexes” which shall “be protected from unauthorized disclosure.” Congressman DeFazio twice requested to see these Annexes, the second time in a letter cosigned by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Carney. It was these requests that the White House denied. …
DeFazio’s inability to get access to the NSPD Annexes is less than reassuring. If members of the Homeland Security Committee cannot enforce their right to read secret plans of the Executive Branch, then the systems of checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution would seem to be failing.
To put it another way, if the White House is successful in frustrating DeFazio, then Continuity of Government planning has arguably already superseded the Constitution as a higher authority. (Peter Dale Scott, “The Showdown,” CounterPunch, March 31, 2008)
With the stunning revelations published by Wikileaks, it is abundantly clear that top Bush administration officials were busily revising Continuity of Government plans, including “civil disturbance” contingencies for suspending the Constitution and imposing martial law, long before the 9/11 attacks.
Since that fatal and tragic day seven long years ago, we have been told repeatedly by the government and their media sycophants that 9/11 was the day “when everything changed.”
We now know thanks to Wikileaks, that as with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the unprecedented and lawless surveillance of Americans, the illegal detention and torture of prisoners of war, that Bush administration assertions are no more than a pack of murderous lies.
One fact is abundantly clear from the mass of conflicting evidence and assertions made by proponents of various theories surrounding the 9/11 events: AR 500-3 demonstrates that from the very first moments after being installed in office, the Bush regime was involved in a “controlled demolition” of the U.S. Constitution.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.
-Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade.
I’m shocked to see the Establishment lapdogs at the NYTIMES put out such an explosive piece. Of course it falls short of further context into one of the major reasons or motivators for occupation in Afghanistan, and the so-called “War On Terror”. Check out the film War and Globalization – The Truth Behind September 11, my “Al Qaeda: The CI-A Team” article and my other local posts on War On Terror & 9/11.
WASHINGTON — When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.
Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.
Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon after the seizure, United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.
The assertions about the involvement of the president’s brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.
Both President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai, now the chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that includes Afghanistan’s second largest city, dismiss the allegations as politically motivated attacks by longtime foes.
“I am not a drug dealer, I never was and I never will be,” the president’s brother said in a recent phone interview. “I am a victim of vicious politics.”
But the assertions about him have deeply worried top American officials in Kabul and in Washington. The United States officials fear that perceptions that the Afghan president might be protecting his brother are damaging his credibility and undermining efforts by the United States to buttress his government, which has been under siege from rivals and a Taliban insurgency fueled by drug money, several senior Bush administration officials said. Their concerns have intensified as American troops have been deployed to the country in growing numbers.
“What appears to be a fairly common Afghan public perception of corruption inside their government is a tremendously corrosive element working against establishing long-term confidence in that government — a very serious matter,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, who was commander of coalition military forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and is now retired. “That could be problematic strategically for the United States.”
The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said in interviews last week.
Numerous reports link Ahmed Wali Karzai to the drug trade, according to current and former officials from the White House, the State Department and the United States Embassy in Afghanistan, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. In meetings with President Karzai, including a 2006 session with the United States ambassador, the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief and their British counterparts, American officials have talked about the allegations in hopes that the president might move his brother out of the country, said several people who took part in or were briefed on the talks.
“We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there,” one official said. But President Karzai has resisted, demanding clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, several officials said. “We don’t have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take to get a criminal indictment,” a White House official said. “That allows Karzai to say, ‘where’s your proof?’ ”
Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against the president’s brother.
Several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter. But White House officials dispute that, instead citing limited D.E.A. resources in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and the absence of political will in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects as the reasons for the lack of an inquiry.
“We invested considerable resources into building Afghan capability to conduct such investigations and consistently encouraged Karzai to take on the big fish and address widespread Afghan suspicions about the link between his brother and narcotics,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, who was the coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq at the National Security Council until last year.
It was not clear whether President Bush had been briefed on the matter.Humayun Hamidzada, press secretary for President Karzai, denied that the president’s brother was involved in drug trafficking or that the president had intervened to help him. “People have made allegations without proof,” Mr. Hamidzada said.
Spokesmen for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
An Informant’s Tip
The concerns about Ahmed Wali Karzai have surfaced recently because of the imprisonment of an informant who tipped off American and Afghan investigators to the drug-filled truck outside Kabul in 2006.
-Senate Slips Huge Pentagon War Funding Bill in Under The Radar.
By Tommy News:
The Senate has acted against the will of the American people and caved to the Bush Administration yet again. US Senators donned their Harry Potter invisibility cloaks and under the cover of darkness late Saturday night, with the smoke and mirrors distraction of the Wall Street bailout, quietly voted on and passed a huge, outrageous spending bill that gives an additional $488 Billion dollars to the Bush Administration and The Pentagon for funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There has been a near media blackout of this vote, and we need to get the word out that this outrageous warfunding is quietly continuing while the news media is being distracted by the gigantic and horrendous Wall Street bailout bill.
While we have all been preoccupied with the staggering $700 billion bail-out of wall street, boggled with the size of the dollar amount, having to raise the National debt limit and borrow money from foreign nations to fund it, late Saturday night the Senate passed a bill of a comparably huge dollar amount which made little news, but gives $488 Billion to the Pentagon for the continued funding of the the war, There has been a near media blackout of this vote, and we need to get the word out that this outrageous warfunding is quietly continuing while the news media is being istracted by the gigantic and horrendous Wall Street bailout bill.
The Pentagon is in line for a record budget. In addition to $70 billion approved this summer for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department would receive $488 billion, a 6 percent increase. The spending bill was bundled in with a bill which also offers aid to victims of flooding in the Midwest and recent hurricanes across the Gulf Coast. The total cost of the spending legislation exceeds $630 billion.
Such a huge bill usually would dominate the end-of-session agenda on Capitol Hill. But it went below the radar screen because attention focused on the congressional bailout of Wall Street.
The bill was quietly rushed to Bush’s desk to be signed into law, and John McCain rushed quietly back out of Washington and yet again avoided having to vote on another controversial spending bill. When the roll call on final passage occurred, McCain was at his campaign headquarters in Crystal City, Va., only five miles from the Capitol. McCain has missed a staggeringly huge number of Senate votes.
With the election fast approaching, I want to give you a breakdown of the 78-12 Senate vote as recorded in the Congressional Record. I urge you to take this outrageous spending vote into strong consideration when you cast your votes on November 4th.
*From the Congressional Record:*
-Bush, McCain and the Old Iran-Contra Team
Counterpunch has a good piece on the Iran-Contra war criminals who are in BushCo., and how McCain will be hanging onto them. Worth a read.
If people like Obama and the rest were actually agents of the American Public and true adversaries they’d be calling these war criminals out on this on a regular basis. Likewise McCain & friends would call out Obama on his war criminal head-national security advisor Zbignew Brzezinski.
-Bloomberg: Bushes’ `New World Order’ Is Yielding to `Post-American’ Era
Bloomberg (snippet):
Whichever man wins, he will inherit what Johns Hopkins University political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls a “post- American world,” replacing the U.S.-dominated “new world order” that President George H.W. Bush proclaimed after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
No longer the “hyperpower” of the 1990s, the U.S. is slipping toward a first-among-equals status, narrowing the foreign-policy options of whoever moves into the White House in January.
For 20 years, U.S. leaders “have assumed American dominance; they’ve assumed that they’re working in a unipolar world,” says Fukuyama, who gained fame in 1992 by declaring that the collapse of Soviet communism heralded the eventual triumph of liberal democracy in the “end of history.” Now, he says, “there’s been this big redistribution of power.”
The man throwing the NWO language around is Francis Fukuyama. It turns out that Frank was one of the prime advocates of Neoconservative thinking during its rise in the late 90’s. I’ve seen this guys name pop up over the past couple years, and have even read a writing or two of his. I was even aware that apparently he’s ’switched sides’ to a certain degree, attempting to distance himself from the more infamous Neocon radicals (Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc).
But somehow I managed to never take note that he wrote an apparently anti-transhumanism book titled “Our Post-Human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Future”. From the back cover:
A decade after his now-famous pronouncement of “the end of history“, Francis Fukuyama argues that as a result of biomedical advances, we are facing the possibility of a future in which our humanity itself will be altered beyond recognition. Fukuyama sketches a brief history of man’s changing understanding of human nature: from Plato and Aristotle to modernity’s utopians and dictators who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person’s descendants will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions.
The timeline of his transformation is quite a fascinating case in the annals of Neoconservatism that warrants some attention.
-Daily Show: Sarah Palin IS the Bush Doctrine
“Now I know her detractors will say that Palin actually supported the bridge until it became a political albatross and ended up keeping a lot of the money for it anyway; That she claimed to have visited Iraq when she really didn’t; Or that she didn’t really sell that plane on eBay; Or that she left the town she was mayor of $20 million dollars in debt; And that she made sure that women who were raped were charged for their rape kits.”
“Yea. Yea, it’s f*cking true.”
“She doesn’t need to know the Bush Doctrine – she is the Bush Doctrine. Her foreign policy experience consists of being able to see Russia from an island in Alaska. And a refueling layover in Ireland.”
*Why I FEAR Obama like no other, like no other.
Italian Translation HERE.
Updates in red. Surely there will be more to come. If McCain actually wins I’ll have to do one for him, but if you read the entire post you’ll see my reason for being convinced Obama will win, so for now it seems a waste of time spending this much time on McCain. Obama people seem to keep spouting off that McCain would be worse, but if you read the REASON that answers the initial question you’ll see my counter to that. I’d personally rather have McCain or Hillary. I wouldn’t vote for either, ever, but the answer to my initial question in this post will explain why I would prefer either. It seems that everyone wants someone that they like, under a tyrannical system bent on our exploitation. Loving the figurehead leader of a deeply corrupted system that deserves radical undoing is insane to me. I enjoy most getting the same attacks that I used to get from the Bush supporters back when he was the one getting literally the same credit as Jesus Christ. Apparently talking about the following makes you a “conspiracy theorist” “nutter”: The fact that Obama & McCain both support the fantastical “War on Terror” and aggravating a ‘New Cold War’ all to continue a US foreign policy of runaway military spending that amounts to roughly $1trillion per year and 800 overseas military bases in over 155 of 200 total world nations.
Amidst all the potential nasties, I fear one thing most. And this one reason alone is why I’ve deeply felt for some time that he will surely be the one “elected”. And I’ll premptively point out that the list of reasons that precedes this one thing almost wholeheartedly applies to McCain as well (worse in many cases).This won’t be a reason any Liberal or Conservative would ever expect, nor is the preceding list hardly particular in any ‘wedge issue’ topic. Vote None of the Above!
So is it…
…because Obama & Biden voted on the economic bailout bill ?
This is so massive I don’t even know where to begin.
…because Obama has set campaign funding record history in donations from the corporate & banking establishment(s) ?
It’s striking that for the first time a Democrat has recieved more investments in these areas than the Republicans. Why would they invest in him?
…because Obama constantly talks about ‘giving the little guy (YOU) a fair shot’, and then refuses to attend a Presidential debate featuring nominees from the other ‘third’ parties ?
…because he’s calling for a Stasi-like “national security force” consisting of middle & high school children that is larger than the US military ?
…because Obama’s proposal for a civilian national security force “just as well funded” as the US military means costs somewhere towards the $1trillion per year that the Pentagon already enjoys ?
…because he “believes” in the delusional “War on Terror” ? Link 1 Link 2 Link 3
…because Joe Biden is a “War on Terror” fearmonger who during the Dem debates spouted off the same fearmongering rhetoric as the GOP’s Neocons were using ?
…because Obama lies about al Qaeda being “stronger than ever” in order to fear-monger the population into supporting the Establishments foreign policy with him as the only solution ?
…because Obama is just another pawn of the privately-owned tyrannical Federal Reserve ?
The FR has devalued the dollar to being worth less than 4 cents since its inception in 1913. The monetary system orchestrated by the FR is designed to suck the wealth from the lower & middle classes while preserving the riches of the wealthy. When the system is designed to exploit the weaker, limited tax cuts for the poor have a marginal effect, meanwhile an expanded war machine adjusts the tax losses for a marked portion of the elite, and an ever increasing National Debt ensures more profits for the bulk of the national bankers.
The Federal Reserve helped create the original Great Depression, and now they’ve done the same by helping to cause the ‘New Great Depression’ via the Subprime Mortgage disaster. Now “the Fed” is gaining more power in the fallout.
…because Obama, like McCain, supports the notion of a military draft (sounds similar to annual legislative proposals from another Democrat -who endorsed him- for a ‘universal’ military draft that includes all women ages 18-40) ?
“If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some” – Barack Hussein Obama.
…because VP Biden is a War on Drugs hawk, a “war” which in practice undermines and persecutes minorities in particular ?
…because Obama gloats about mentioning the Middle Class while ignoring the ‘Lower Class’ in the same event and showing disdain for them on other occasions ?
…Biden voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which abolished education grants for prisoners ?
…because Obama voted for the new FISA Act, which granted immunity to telecommunication corporations for illegal wiretapping , and runaway governmental wiretapping ?
…because Barack didn’t support Dennis Kucinich’s drive to impeach Bush & Cheney, stating that “impeachment is not acceptable” ?
…because Obama has pledged to let Bush’s crimes remain buried for all time ?
…because Obama & Biden disregard the fact that the primary motivation for 9/11 terror attacks on the US is US foreign policy itself (meaning that continuing the perpetual war policy literally means never ending perpetual war) ?
…because Obama talks about ending the occupation of Iraq, but then votes to fund it ?
…because Obama claims to advocate closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, but has not supported two specific bills that would have done so ?
…because Obama wants to expand taxes in general, but in particular implement a “global tax” ?
…because Zbignew Brzezinski, his chief foreign policy adviser, is a flagrant neoliberal global imperialist who essentially created “Osama Bin Laden” and the “War on Terror” ?
…because he supports BushCo.’s Russian border missile “defense shield”, which is their ’solution’ of creating a “New Cold War” to ensure perpetual wars even with an eroding notion of a never-ending “War on Terror” ?
Link
…Obama & Biden voted for the PATRIOT Act, which dissolved majority of the Bill of Rights ?
…because Biden drafted legislation after the Oklahoma City Bombing, which was defeated for being too radical, and later claimed the PATRIOT Act was virtually the same bill ?
…because Obama told his supporters to “I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face” ?
…because Joe Biden supports what amounts to runaway copyright laws expanding “Big 5″ media content protection ? Because Biden bends over for expanded FBI powers, and supports banning private citizens rights to using software encryption ? Because Biden has about the most dismal Cyber Rights voting record possible including Dept. of Justice prosecution of file sharers and making it a felony to record Internet radio ? Link
…because Obama was soft on HR1951 / S1959, which was the open embracement of the modern day COINTELPRO which was used to violently repress civil rights groups (Black Panthers, etc) in the 60’s and 70’s ?
…because Joe Biden supports stripping US citizens rights & ability to defend itself (from tyrannical government) with firearms ?
…because Obama in Illinois as a state legislator supported banning the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic firearms, and then some ?
…because VP Joe Biden promised a Supreme Court ruling on mandatory “Verichip” implants for the US population ?
…because he’s just another front for NAFTA, even though he pretends he isn’t ?
…because despite criticising the “Politics of Fear”, he still supports both the War on Terror & Global Warming ?
After years of propaganda from each side on these matters he doesn’t even have to directly engage in pure fearmongering. He merely needs to mention the issues and support them. The effects of others fearmongering is already there to invoke. FACT: there isn’t an actual consensus on man made “Global Warming”.
…because he’s for an expanded global government UN ?
(This goes without saying)
…because Obama is a first term Senator, meaning we don’t even have a clear record of who we’re dealing with ?
…because he doesn’t speak about nor does his campaign respond to the Depleted Uranium US munitions issue ?
It turns out that most US military tank rounds -amongst many other munition types- are made from DU, which has a 4 billion year half-life and causes birth defects in now multiple countries where it has been used by US forces since the first Gulf War.
…because Obama hasn’t answered the question whether or not the President can declare war without the Congress ?
US Constitution says that “Congress shall have the power.. to declare war”. After WW2 the 2 Party System hasn’t declared a single war although fighting in dozens, arguably hasn’t won any, and many of them last to this day (Korea for example). The “Authorization” process has resulted in Vietnam & Iraq as prime examples.
…because, despite all the ‘Strengthening the Middle Class” & “regulations” rhetoric, Obama fronts for Wall Street’s corrupt infrastructure ?
The old axiom ‘Put your money where your mouth is’ sure comes to mind, but it goes further than just that. Link 1 Link2 Link 3 Link 4 Link 5
…because Obama dodges the new 9/11 investigation issue, and for sure doesn’t speak about it whatsoever ? Or because Joe Biden rabidly opposes a real investigation ?
Regardless of your view, it doesn’t take much research to conclude that the 9/11 Commission “investigation” was a total farce, and that the stakes are so high in this regard that to not insist on a full investigation goes beyond mere national suicide.
UPDATE: The day before 9/11, Joe Biden predicted 9/11′esque attacks, and then, in the days following Sept. 11th, he met with the Pakistani General who funded Mohammed Atta. Mahmood Ahmed, the General and head of the CIA-linked ISI, that was in Washington DC meeting with majority leaders of Congress during the attacks of 9/11, was never even mentioned during the 9/11 Commission hearings.
…because his wife and he are both Council on Foreign Relations members ?
The CFR is the ideological powerhouse organization in which te past 90 years worth of never ending “American Imperialism” perpetual war may be mostly to attributed to. The list of some members of this group should speak for itself: George H. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Allen Welsh Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Walter Lippmann, John McCain, David Rockefeller, Fred Thompson, Herbert Hoover, Michael R. Bloomberg, Sandy Berger, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Robert M. Gates, Gary Hart, John Kerry, Irving Kristol, John D. Negroponte, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Gerald Ford, Rupert Murdoch, Porter J. Goss & Newt Gingrich. BUT, not only does the CFR steer American Imperialism, its the powerhouse driving one world government. One example is the whole “North American Union” controversy. The NAU is driven almost completely by the CFR, whose mission resembles the dictatorial European Union. Much more can be said of this but these entries are meant to be short. NAU Link 1 NAU Link 2 NAFTA Link 1 SPP Link 1
…because he preached fearmongering to a foreign crowd in Germany about rampant border-less ‘threats’, where he in effect called for a “New World Order” without using those particular words ?
…because Obama and Dick Cheney of all people on earth are cousins (in a similar vein to how Bush & John Kerry are cousins) ?
So a few of these might seem flimsy, but that doesn’t discount my other points while when you add them in its just gets uglier and uglier.
…because his economic adviser (since Barack’s Illinois Senate campaign), Austan “the ghoul” Goolsbee, is Skull & Bones the same as the Bush’s and even John Kerry, despite there not being more than 900 living members of this nefarious organization at any giving time ?
At one point, during its rule, the Bush administration contained 11 S&B members, not to mention his dad and brother Jeb.
…because he’s another in a long line of Israel Lobby politicians ?
This is another touchy subject, but the fact remains that the Palestinians weren’t the ones who expelled the Jews from Israel, and in the modern sense there are ‘private citizen’ Zionist terrorists who commit the same atrocities as the Muslim extremists. And even though the Israeli government performs ‘Big Brother’ operationsagainst the Zionist terrorists -who literally call for genocide against their enemy- the vast majority of policies and actions by said Israeli government still complement their work just the same. The legacy of the Israeli government has been compared to the ‘apartheid’ South African regimes of decades past, but name calling happened in those decades. So for Obama to support the Israeli government has rammifications paralleling supporting the confederate leadership during the US “Civil” War. Now for the touchy side, Israel means lots of things for lots of different people.There are lots of different justificiations or rather rationalizations for continuing blind support for Israeli policies , that I don’t have time to get into here. But suffice to say, many assume it has to do with Biblical scripture, but the part that doesn’t make sense is we still find the same support by the so-called ‘heathen’ Liberal elitists. The answer to this paradox is the key to understanding the whole point of Israel: Israel is simply a US imperial beach-headfortress in the Middle East, to ensure American Imperialism over the Middle East. Which means their tyrannical policies get the blind eye, not that the Israeli Lobby runs the United States.
…because advanced computer analysis of his speeches has him as the “king of spin” compared to even the likes of Bush and Giuliani ?
…because BushCo. has already spent 8 years on turning the White House and the Imperial Presidency into a centralized dictatorial powerhouse, but Obama has failed to make sweeping & itemized promises to undo it all while he’ll be quite busy doing all of his other “change” to assume he’ll actually focus on cleaning up the dictatorial presidential executive orders, congressional legislation and over 1100 executive signing statements ?
NO! None of those are the reason.
I’m quite ‘used to’ those sorts of travesties & tyrannies already.
The reason is actually more simple and subtle: Crowd Control.
The Answer: Nobody can possibly subdue the masses like Obama can. That’s why he’s the Ruling Establishment’s man. After 8 years of BushCo. over half the population aren’t just pissed, they’re in complete distrust of the government in general. The control scheme to keep us ignorant and asleep is falling apart at the seams. And even more important than just having a pissed off political party the nations youth are waking up at an ‘alarming’ rate. The youth are the ones who protest. And Black’s have a history of rioting, while the current economic meltdown promises to underhand Blacks in particular.
Only Obama can can get the bulk Democrat’s, The Youth and Minorities under his wing, while at the same time not having too much of the GOP base pissed to all whits end. Consider if Hillary would have “won”: virtually the entire GOP base would have been up in arms. While there will still be an us vs. them sense of defeat and so forth, the same amount of hate wouldn’t exist, especially not right away. And since Obama is apparently in a position to start taking on Neocon foreign policy positions he seems poised keep even some of the staunchest Neocon types content.Besides Hillary wouldn’t have ever had the Obama effect on The Youth.
Meanwhile, it’s The Youth in particular that must be put under wraps. Further, considering African American voter disfranchisement in the past 2 presidential elections, I’d say that they’re already a whits end. What better way to garner their unbridled support than to allow them to ‘vote’ for a ‘Black’ man? For the majority of the population to be willingly controlled, we must trust, we must “Believe In” the system in general and the election process in particular.
————
Let’s say you happen to be amongst the puppeteers who run the big show from behind the scenes. Like if you were one of the many deeply embedded in the Military Industrial Complex, the central banking scheme, the Big 5 Media, etc. You know, the people that steer (electioneer) and even rig the elections. The “Disaster Capitalists” whose portfolios are set to make profits off of any and nearly all disasters. The people who seek world government aka global domination, and who use the United States as the machine to make that a reality.
Well if you’re one of these people then you face a serious problem: you can’t control a system when most of its population doesn’t trust you. Likewise, you can’t control an alert population. Most importantly: you can’t maintain a system of quiet domination when the youth of it are angry, and are making noise in the streets. Enter Obama.
To maintain a hegemonic system of never ending perpetual war -bent on global domination- you need a subdued and dumbed down citizenry. In particular, you need the youth not only ignorant to the hard truth, but you also need them to believe in your government. Therefore, the more cult-like you can get them the better.
For a spell Bush enjoyed such a scenario. But where it lacked, especially after the invasion of Iraq, was only about half the population idolized he and ‘his’ government. It wasn’t too long before one half of the population cursed his name to the ranks of Hitler, and nowadays maybe half of his own ‘cult’ doesn’t dodge him like the plague. Many who once gobbled up his every breathe as truth handed down from God Almighty now have awoken to the morbid truth of a nightmare that runs much deeper than Bush and his cronies. That nightmare is best known as the “American Dream”.
Back to the ‘criminal profiler’ view, as central social engineering planners, by necessity of career and worldview, you see the ‘08 election coming. You’ve had several years to study ‘your’ ‘market’ and ‘your’ ‘audience’. So as you and your think-tanks contemplate the best way to ensure your future goals, it would already be obvious that you need your masses truly on board. Total subservience; Total acquiescence; Or at least as close as possible.
But now, during the final stages of your plot for world control, of true militaristic technological totalitarianism, you face the youth in new ways. Many things, but 2 things in particular, besides ‘the war’ itself, compel them. First, the nation is barreling towards being $10 trillion in national debt, which means its the youth in particular in trouble. Second, there’s this pesky new thing known as the Internet helping the masses wake up to the reality that your controlled media ‘pentopoly’ would normally divert them from.
In this 21st Century reality you need a 21st Century ‘leader’ to whip the 21st Century masses into an all-time cultish fervor. The obvious choice would be Barack Hussein Obama. You really couldn’t ask for more from your position. It’s the best of both worlds, and after-all, thanks to careful engineering over many decades, there are only 2 realities for the masses to pick from (Left or Right).
After nearly 8 years of rabid hatred from most of the one half, and the youth of the typically marginalized masses beginning to wake up, you must get these segments of your control scheme under wraps. Especially considering each have the War doctrine among the top items of their lists. When you’re executing Vietnam’esque policy you can’t have a repeat of the response to such. You’ve already learned that lesson.
The solution to maintaining your policy goals is not to actually strip away the policies, but rather send in the perfect man to convince the masses that the policies will “change” and therefore they can go back to bed. You need the perfect oratory hitman, from your own ranks, of course. And the masses need him, because after most of a lifetime of deep-concerns revolving around ballgames, TV commercials and power-shopping they are a strained citizenry in light of the painful truth of modern years.
So with Obama its a slam dunk. By gearing the foreign policy just right, you’ll be able to keep much of the Right at least content. You will only be able to please the some of the staunchest pro-war-mongers so far, but that’s ok because many of them are already over with “BushCo.” obsession. Meanwhile, again, most Youth & Democrats & Minorities will be put back to sleep.
*The “War on Terror” is a Complete Delusional Fantasy
Here goes the “War on Terror Delusion” segment from my Neocon Wars film project.
Surely not everyone out there cares a whole lot to hear Ron Paul speak, nor would everyone have the time and patience to sit thru the entire 102 minute saga in front of a PC desk. But this short portion of the film is the most crucial. And its not even just Ron Paul arguing ‘his’ position, instead it mainly focuses around the conclusions and statements of Michael Scheuer (former head of the CIA’s Osama Bin Laden Unit), Robert A. Pape (worlds leading expert on Suicide Terrorism; Paul’s foreign policy advisor), and Chalmers Johnson (former CIA Advisor; a leading expert on American Imperialism) who are all highly credible people.
Other than trying to contribute to the campaign, the film project had 2 primary goals:
1. Expose American Imperialism.
2. Completely destroy the notion of the “War on Terror”.
Well this segment does both unequivocally:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8893899239301126063
BUT WAIT, THERES MORE!
In this 2 minute clip you can hear Bush & Friends admit over and over that it isn’t even about getting Osama:
http://www.youtube.com/IgnoranceIsntBliss
Watch full film in Google Video quality:
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4376374944190475658
Download it in FULL quality via Bitorrent:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=neocon+wars+torrent&btnG=Search
Download the tiny torrent file from whichever site and then open it with Azureus:
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/download.php
Bush is a fool? No, he’s playing US as the fools!
Bush is a fool? No, he’s playing US as the fools!
Everyday you see allegations that Bush is a fool… an idiot… he’s stupid… incompetent and so on. He often appears to be just that, so the assertion isn’t and commonly held belief isn’t without precident.
In truth it’s a mixture of his act, and what lying with virtually every breath he can muster is doing to his brain he when tries to talk. The incompetence that’s become the legacy of his presidency is mostly an act to coverup their true intentions, so they can get away with things like concentration of power, mass murder, neo-imperialism, degradation of of our “rights”, and so on.
Bush: The 10 Year Difference ; Source
Lying comsumes major cognitive “computing” power. Memories are generally like physical embodiments of of networks of “neurons” in the physical structure of the brain. When lying, instead of the subconscious easily conjuring up an embedded memory directly from the “unconscious” brain (where it’s stored / associated) and into the conscious mind and speech, a ‘twirling of the cognitive kaleidoscope’ is required to articulate the lie while crossexamining it with all of the other lies the person has commited on the topic, and any related. The comparison between simply reciting something you know (or think you know) is true, compared to when you have to consciously engage in a lie, is like comparing a matchbox car and a RC truck.
But isn’t Bush just some backwoods good ‘ol boy? No, he’s an ivy leaguer. He might be a chump style cut and run type who likes to do a little partying, but that’s not the issue with Bush today.
The Bush we all know today. LINK
Even if he does resort to drinking from time to time these days, with all of the emotional baggage he’s carrying around from this presidency (even if he didn’t have anything to do with things like allowing 911 to happen as the evidence suggests) he’s still got the best doctors / psychologists / etc. Him being the president surely has him on the best brainboosting nutritional suppliments, mental healtcare, propagandists engineering hsi speeches and staged events, and so on. And we all know Bush is the type to go jogging regularly so it’s not liek he’s a total burnout from whatever partying he does do.
The backwoods good ‘ol boy routine is Bush’s impersonation of how he views American’s, most particularly those he’s trying to have self-identify with him. He’s laughing in our faces. His entire act and his speeches are carefully crafted and groomed by some of the world’s top propagandists, perhaps even the world best propagandists. If you doubt that then you have much to learn about the spectre of politicians and presidents, because virtually every time you see the bigshots the event is staged.
Bush’s cronies playing the same act to avoid the law:
The Daily Show: Bush’s Band of Idiot Geniuses
People say Bush and his administration are stupid. Arrogent is more like it. People allege that “CT’ers” consider Bush and his administration stupid and incompetent in attempts to refute allegations that he/they could have had complucuty in 911. I would tend to think that CT’ers would be inclined to not fall for their incompetence game, as that act is the entire ‘justification’ for how 911 ‘was able’ to happen, and how they could have possibly “skrewed up” so bad taking us into Iraq etc. Instead of Iraq being an idiotic accident, it was a carefully crafted plan that was planned long before Bush became president, and the planners even included his brother Jeb over at PNAC.
There’s a choice documentary specifically about and titled “Stupidity”. In it they study the entire spectrum of stupidity, and the important view they present is how smart people like comedians use stupidity to be successful. The part important for this discussion is the surprise twist ending where they assert that perhaps GWB could be using stupidity to achieve “success”.
Now I wont go as far as calling him a genius, but he’s smarter than many would believe, and then there’s the propagandists behind him.
*Neocon PNAC Member / CIA Director James Woolsey thumbed Iraq just 2 hours after 9/11
While it was known that Woolsey was again thumbing Iraq later that day, this new clip is the first time anyone thumbed Iraq on national TV. (In propaganda) “you gotta keep repeating yourself for the truth to sink in”. -GWB
PNAC member and former Director of CIA James Woolsey named Iraq as a suspect of 9/11 at 2:26AM, 9/12/01, just over 2 hours after the day of 9/11.
James Woolsey just so happened to be a signatory in the Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, in 1998, which called for the removal of Saddam from power at that time. He was also one of the signers of another PNAC document, Statement on Post-War Iraq, on March 19, 2003. Woolsey served on the Rumsfeld Commission, and was a Commissioner on the National Commission on Terrorism which delivered the Report of the National Commissionon Terrorism to President Bill Clinton in June 2000.
While he wasn’t a participant in writing of the infamous Rebuilding America’s Defenses document, he was already a member at that time. This document, which was an uber-imperialist’s wet dream wishlist, called for a technological transformation of the military and imperialist domination of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian lands and regimes while highlight states like Iraq and Iran as action item threats.
Pessimism was expressed in the manifesto when they complained that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Full coverage of Woolsey and PNAC in the Bill Moyer’s film: “Buying the War”.
It’s funny they might say that, because on 9/11 they got just that, including a green light to exploit their Iraqi imperial ambitions. At least 16 memebers of PNAC are or were in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and even little brother Jeb Bush. It’s of little surprise that they didn’t ensure that “a new Pearl Harbor” didn’t happen. It’s not like they didn’t have some idea, as according to the 9/11 Commission Report the government had “tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands” of terrorism warnings, yet GWB wasn’t that concerned about terrorism.
Then on the night of 9/11, at 2:26AM, James Woolsey, a frontman stooge of Neo-American Imperialism, was already thumbing Iraq as a suspect sponser state of the 9/11 attacks.
“The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” -GWB
In the aftermath, PNAC’s imperislism manifesto ended up reading like a prophecy chart come true, as they got their “New Pearl Harbor”, and their 20 plus point list of technolgical transformation, and their green light for ultra-neoimperialism including the invasion Iraq, and so on.
Today Woolsey can be often seen in the media pounding the war drum and grandstanding for American Imperialism. He is Vice President of Booz Allen & Hamilton, the lead contractor for the Total Information Awareness program. He is also a member of the Policy Advisory Board to the Secretary of Defense. Woolsey attended the September 12-14, 2006, elitist deep-integration North American Union forum entitled the “Continental Prosperity in the New Security Environment”, held in secret at Banff Springs Hotel, in Banff, Alberta, Canada.
See Also:
Woolsey’s PNAC Signatories
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_Woolsey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._James_Woolsey,_Jr.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
Vote for Change? Atrocity-Linked U.S. Officials Advising Democratic, GOP Presidential Frontrunners
Vote for Change? Atrocity-Linked U.S. Officials Advising Democratic, GOP Presidential Frontrunners
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/3/vote_for_change_atrocity_linked_us
Presidential candidates are scrambling to win last-minute support in Iowa ahead of tonight’s caucus. Thousands of reporters have also descended on Iowa this week, covering everything from Mike Huckabee’s haircut to John Edwards’s rally with singer John Mellencamp.
But little attention has been paid to perhaps one of the most important aspects of the candidates: their advisers, the men and women who likely form the backbone of the candidate’s future cabinet if elected president. Many of the names will be familiar.
Senator Barack Obama’s list includes President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross.
1977-1981: The Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union
July 3, 1979: President Carter Approves Covert Aid to Anti-Soviet Forces in Afghanistan
December 8, 1979: Soviet Forces, Lured in by the CIA, Invade Afghanistan
October 1997: Brzezinski Highlights the Importance of Central Asia to Achieving World Domination
GRAND CHESSBOARD QUOTES:
“…To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
“Moreover, as ..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
“We also need education for citizens to be more efficient in their democracies, in addition to education for politicians that will create a new network of elites based upon character and social intelligence.”
“I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot…. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” -Zbigniew BrzezinskiYouTube – Barack Obama Endorsed by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Foreign Policy expert Brzezinski discusses his support of …
HOSTED BY THE OFFICIAL OBAMA CAMPAIGN YOUTUBE PAGE!
Advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton include many former top officials in President Clinton’s administration: former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/20/berger.probe/
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former national security adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger is under criminal investigation by the Justice Department over allegations that he took secret documents from the National Archives while reviewing Clinton administration records for the 9/11 commission.http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2005/04/doj040105.html
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray of the Criminal Division announced today that former National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger has pleaded guilty to a charge of knowingly removing classified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration.http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/101107_hillary_secretive_911.html
Berger was President Clinton’s designated representative to the 9/11 Commission…As President Clinton’s representative, Berger was granted access to specially classified material in the National Archives relating to the handling of information respecting the threat from al Qaeda and the Clinton Administration’s response in preparation for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Berger willfully removed classified material, hiding documents first in his pants and then under a construction trailer, destroyed them, and lied to officials investigating the theft.
Rudolph Giuliani’s advisers include Norman Podhoretz, one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement.
John McCain’s list of official and formal policy advisers includes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
Kissinger’s extradition to Uruguay sought over Operation Condor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxeBl4sLQSg
William Kristol of The Weekly Standard,
Moyers on the Neocons and William Kristol
Download | Play
Download | Play
and former CIA Director James Woolsey.
*Neocon PNAC Member / CIA Director James Woolsey thumbs Iraq just 2 hours after 9/11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bec2hTuzeNU
One of Mitt Romney’s top advisers is Cofer Black, the former CIA official who now serves as vice chair of Blackwater Worldwide.
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=53335
J. Cofer Black is GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s chief weapon against Islamo-fascism. The former CIA official chairs Romney’s Counterterrorism Policy Advisory Group. Also, the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11 and the CIA’s inspector general all condemn him for dropping the ball before Sept. 11, 2001. Black’s spot in Romney’s brain trust raises grave doubts about the former Massachusetts governor’s national-security judgment. At CNN/YouTube’s Nov. 28 debate, Romney said that when pondering terrorist interrogation, “I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some 35 years.” Actually, this is false. Black served the CIA for 28 years and directed its Counterterrorist Center (CTC) for less than three — from June 1999 to May 2002. -Capital Hill BlueMedia Matters – AP, networks mum on Romney-Blackwater connection
Duncan Hunter Exposes ‘Mitt Halliburtan’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJLI8Cr0Brs
Presidential candidate and current Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Duncan Hunter, today called on former Governor Mitt Romney to send a “clear statement” to the leadership of the company he founded, Bain Capital, to terminate a proposed business deal with a controversial Chinese corporation seeking to acquire U.S. defense contractor 3COM. Bain Capital is attempting to form a business arrangement with Huawei Corporation, a Chinese corporation founded by an officer of the Peoples Liberation Army of Communist China, which faces allegations of assisting Saddam Hussein in the targeting of U.S. aircraft and in helping the Taliban develop surveillance equipment.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth is advising Fred Thompson.
As for Mike Huckabee, it’s not clear. In December, Huckabee listed former UN Ambassador John Bolton as someone with whom he either has “spoken or will continue to speak,” but Bolton then revealed the two had never spoken. Huckabee also named Richard Allen, but the former National Security Adviser also admitted he had never spoken to Huckabee.
Bolton Not Swayed in the Slightest by the NIE on Iran
Bush Is al-Qaeda’s Strategic Ally
By Robert Parry
U.S. officials have finally admitted what has long been obvious: that George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” has been an expensive failure, costing hundreds of billions of dollars and claiming possibly hundreds of thousands of lives, but making the world no safer and quite likely more dangerous.
Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged as much on July 17 in releasing a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate that represented the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community.
The report, entitled “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” described a resurgent al-Qaeda that has regrouped in remote sections of Pakistan while exploiting Muslim anger over the war in Iraq to increase its operational strength internationally and to take aim at American targets, again.
“We assess that al-Qaeda will continue to enhance its capabilities to attack the [U.S.] homeland through greater cooperation with regional terrorist groups,” the NIE said. “Of note, we assess that al-Qaeda will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaeda in Iraq [AQI], its most visible and capable affiliate and only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the [U.S.] homeland.
“In addition, we assess that its association with AQI helps al-Qaeda to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for [U.S.] homeland attacks.”
In other words, Bush’s repeated warnings that the United States must fight Islamic extremists in Iraq so “we don’t have to fight them here” or so “they won’t follow us home” turn out to be the opposite of the truth: because U.S. forces are occupying Iraq, al-Qaeda has more resources and more recruits determined to bring the war to the United States.
The underlying reality is that Bush remains the perfect foil for al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists. The surging anti-Americanism, which derives from a widespread hatred of Bush, represents a recruitment boon for al-Qaeda, so much so that Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders understand that Bush and his stubbornness are indispensable assets to their cause.
Almost six years into the “war on terror,” Bush has overseen a strategy that has simultaneously alienated world public opinion – with torture scandals over Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons – while fueling Islamic extremism and giving new life to the 9/11 masterminds.
Unilateralist Arrogance
Much of the current dilemma can be traced to Bush’s special mix of arrogance and rashness. In 2001, even before the 9/11 attacks, Bush adopted a “unilateralist” approach to the world, asserting U.S. global hegemony under a strategy laid out by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.
At the center of this grandiose scheme was the belief that the oil-rich Middle East could be remade through violent “regime change” in hostile Arab countries like Iraq. Bush later broadened his target list to the “axis of evil,” tossing in Iran and North Korea and making clear that other lesser enemies included the likes of Syria, Cuba and Venezuela.
While this neoconservative plan wrapped itself in the noble language of “democracy,” the concept was always less about respecting the will of indigenous populations than in restructuring their economies along “free market” lines and ensuring compliant leaders.
Bush also grew enamored with his “gut” instincts about war, especially after U.S.-backed forces ousted Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders more quickly than many expected. Even though he let top al-Qaeda leaders slip away from Tora Bora in late 2001, Bush ignored warnings that he needed to finish the job there before turning America’s attention elsewhere.
Bush redirected the U.S. military toward Iraq, a country that wasn’t involved in 9/11 and actually had served as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism, both the strains from Shiite-ruled Iran and Sunni-dominated al-Qaeda.
But Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was something of a Bush family obsession since he angered President George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. In March 2003, Bush launched an invasion of Iraq and toppled Hussein’s government in three weeks.
After basking again in public adulation as the victorious “war president,” Bush stubbornly refused to acknowledge the growing seriousness of an Iraqi insurgency that rose up to challenge U.S. forces.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq – combined with the abuse scandals at U.S.-run prisons – fed popular anger across the Middle East. Thousands of young jihadists rallied to the cause of ousting the Americans from Muslim lands.
As the body count in Iraq grew, Bush dug in his heels even deeper. When Iraq slid into chaos and then civil war, Bush again refused to acknowledge the facts in a timely fashion.
Meanwhile, over the past six years, the wily and ruthless leaders of al-Qaeda came to understand that Bush was an invaluable poster boy. The more he was viewed as the “big crusader,” the more they could present themselves as the “defenders of Islam.” The al-Qaeda murderers moved from the fringes of Muslim society closer to the mainstream.
So, in fall 2004, with Bush fighting for his political life against Democrat John Kerry, bin Laden took the risk of breaking nearly a year of silence to release a videotape denouncing Bush on the Friday before the U.S. election.
Bush’s supporters immediately spun bin Laden’s tirade as an “endorsement” of Kerry and pollsters recorded a jump of several percentage points for Bush, from nearly a dead heat to a five- or six-point lead. Four days later, Bush hung on to win a second term by an official margin of less than three percentage points. [For details, see our new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.]
Boomerang Effect
The last-minute intervention by bin Laden – essentially urging Americans to reject Bush – had the predictable effect of driving voters to the President. After the videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts concluded that ensuring a second term for Bush was precisely what bin Laden intended.
“Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President,” said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret “strategic analysis” after the videotape had dominated the day’s news, according to Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.
Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years “parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. … Today’s conclusion: bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.”
Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush’s heavy-handed policies were serving al-Qaeda’s strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.
“Certainly,” Miscik said, “he would want Bush to keep doing what he’s doing for a few more years.”
As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts were troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. “An ocean of hard truths before them – such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected – remained untouched,” Suskind wrote.
Even Bush recognized that his struggling campaign had been helped by bin Laden. “I thought it was going to help,” Bush said in a post-election interview about the videotape. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the President, something must be right with Bush.”
Bin Laden, a well-educated Saudi and a keen observer of U.S. politics, appears to have recognized the same point in cleverly tipping the election to Bush.
Prolonging the War
Al-Qaeda’s leaders understood that a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq might mean a renewed assault on them as well as the loss of their cause celebre for recruiting new jihadists. With Bush ensconced for a second term, that concern lessened but didn’t entirely go away.
According to a captured July 9, 2005, letter, attributed to al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Zawahiri, al-Qaeda leaders still fretted over the possibility that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq could touch off the disintegration of their operations, as jihadists who had flocked to Iraq to battle the Americans might simply give up the fight and go home.
“The mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal,” said the “Zawahiri letter,” according to a text released by the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
In another captured letter, dated Dec. 11, 2005, a senior al-Qaeda operative known as “Atiyah” wrote that “prolonging the war [in Iraq] is in our interest.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Al-Qaeda's Fragile Foothold."]
Now, as the new NIE makes clear, al-Qaeda’s “Bush-second-term” strategy continues to pay big dividends. As U.S. forces remain bogged down in Iraq and Bush rebuffs urgent appeals from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress for a reversal of course, al-Qaeda expands its base and takes aim again at the American homeland.
In that sense, Bush remains al-Qaeda’s most important strategic ally. Arguably, too, al-Qaeda serves a symbiotic role for Bush, helping to keep the American public forever afraid and thus unwilling to challenge the president’s leadership.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/071907.html
=======================================
Iran: We Are Ready to Take on Al Qaeda
FOX News - Jul 11, 2007
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran on Wednesday said the country was ready to defend itself against threats byAl Qaeda, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Al-Qaeda militants held on Pak-Iran border
Hindustan Times, India - Jun 30, 2007
PTI Pakistani security forces have arrested three suspected Al-Qaeda militants on the porus Pakistan-Iran border while trying to enter the restive Balochistan province.
Bush Aides See Failure in Fight With Al Qaeda in Pakistan
New York Times, United States - Jul 17, 2007
By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON, July 17— President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged today that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan had failed, as the White House released a grim …
Chertoff’s ‘Gut Feeling’
Arab News, Saudi Arabia - Jul 23, 2007
Isn’t it true that Iran and Al-Qaeda that operates under a faux Sunni Wahhabi banner have always been ideologically at odds?
Iran ready to confront al-Qaeda attack
PRESS TV, Iran - Jul 11, 2007
After a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the Interior Minister has said that Iranian security & military forces are ready to face al-Qaeda threats. Stressing that al-Qaeda threat against the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a new menace, Interior Minister …
Kashmir: ‘Everybody knows the solution’
Rediff, India - Jul 26, 2007
Recently, newspapers have reported Al Qaeda’s [Images] presence in Kashmir — whether they belong to Al Qaeda or not, terrorists come from Pakistan.
Al Qaeda Front Group in Iraq Threatens to Go to War With Iran
MyFox Atlanta, GA - Jul 9, 2007
The leader of an Al Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shiites in Iraq within two months, according to an audiotape.
How The White House Will Manipulate Events and Emotions to …
The Daily Scare, OH - Jul 23, 2007
The quagmire in the battle against terror, in which the Busheviks have prima facie failed by being unable to beat back a relatively small hardcore Al-Qaeda movement, is really only a strategy from which they see opportunities to maintain power, …
Can’t Find Osama? Attack Iran: Philip Giraldi
Antiwar.com, CA - Jul 17, 2007
The July 17 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) “On the Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland” [.pdf] warns that al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself in the tribal areas of US ally Pakistan, that it has resumed training of cadres intending to carry out …
A new pretext for American militarism and domestic repression
Axis of Logic, MA - Jul 19, 2007
It states that Al Qaeda has “protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
US Official: Nearly Half Of Iraq’s Insurgents Are Saudis
Free Internet Press, NY - Jul 15, 2007
… publicly criticized Saudi Arabia the way they had Iran or Syria, the senior military officer said, “Ask the State Department.
9/11 – Fool me once…
American Chronicle, CA - Jul 22, 2007
As talk of a new 9/11 continues to increase, so do the attempts to link Iran to al-Qaeda and Iraq, and the expectation that Iran will be implemented in any major “terrorist attack”. Just recently Fox News (who else?) reported that “US troops detained …
Al Qaeda in Iraq threatens Iranians
Alsumaria, Iraq - Jul 9, 2007
On the other hand, Al Qaeda Emir Abu Omar Al Baghdadi said in web audio statement that he gives Iranians a two months deadline to stop supporting Shiites in Iraq or else they would wage a fierce battle against Iran and the region’ countries.
Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunni insurgents – USATODAY.com
| Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in … Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. … |
t r u t h o u t – Saudi Government Provided Aid to 9/11 Hijackers …
| There’s nothing direct,” said one senior law enforcement official overseeing the U.S. effort to investigate Saudi terrorist financing. … |
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IGNORANCE IS FUTILE!
By: “Ignorance Isn’t Bliss” (IIB)
THE BLEEDING EDGE OF THE MERGER OF TYRANNY AND TECHNOLOGY.
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“iXo A.I. Control Grid”
My exclusive film constructed entirely of quotes from government / military websites and documents. Presented as if from the war machine’s own ‘minds eye’. This video goes where no other film in existence does with the subject of the US military’s dream for engineered super-soldiers and a god-like cognitive self-aware artificial intelligence global computer grid. The animations and graphical images are also directly from military sources.
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“Road to Terrorstorm”
A project I started in 2006, got carried away with, then finally scaled it back down to the original ’simple’ concept and finished recently. A condensed compilation film of several older Infowars films mainly focusing on Police State & False Flag type tyranny pre-9/11. See them all in one package.
About Page: LINK
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“Neocon Wars”
An entertaining Ron Paul Star Wars parody that features intense style debate on US foreign policy which debunks the occupation of Iraq and the “War on Terror” in particular.
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“They Want Your Soul”
My first short video, from 2006. The first film in history to ever discuss US military (DARPA) “AI” (AGI) ambitions. Begins with a cynical look at “American” culture, with a touch of conspiracy and concludes with potential religious implications.
About Page / Research Guide: LINK
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Key Exclusive Articles:
*The Federal Reserve Suck Machine is propelling US into ‘Neocommunism’.
*Google’s A.I. quest to become God-On-Earth.
*Obama’s NBIC (nano-bio-info-cogno convergence) Agenda.
*Google’s 23andMe DNA Databank is Targeting Children.
*Mobile Google Android to condition people to embrace constant GPS tracking
*Why I FEAR Obama like no other, like no other.
*Google Founders Artificial Intelligence Quotes Archive
*The Nationalization of Fannie May & Freddie Mack: U.S. has overthrown foreign governments over far less
*The “War on Terror” is a Complete Delusional Fantasy.
*Pseudo-Individualism used to Divide & Conquer.
*Ignorance isn’t bliss: The I Dimension.
*Al Qaeda: The CI-A Team.
*HR1955/S1959 is the modern day COINTELPRO / Operation CHAOS.
*’Global Warming’ “Consensus” & “Causes”.
*Redefining Hypocrisy: Al Gore’s Assault on Reason & Depleted Uranium.
*The Media is Pro-Military-Imperialism Biased.
*”Freedom” = IMPERIALISM: It’s in the Language.
*9/11 Commission Report: “terrorist threats, was in the tens of thousands—probably hundreds of thousands.”
*Osama’s Satellite Phone: History Channel unwittingly debunks the 911 Commission Report.
*Lessons from the OSS: How NOT to be an ‘Enemy’ Propagandist.
*IIBFilms: DARPA’s iXo Artificial Intelligence Control Grid: ‘The Official Version.’
*American Imperialism: The “First Truth” about US.
*An Inconvenient Truth on Al Gore: Google & NASA A.I.
*The United States of Iran: A Reversology.
*The Neuropsychology of Pseudo-Skepticism.
*American Imperialisms death toll on the world: 27,000,000+.
*Official CIA Guidelines for Subversion, Diversion and Division of Populations.
*Political Delusions.
*The Establishment: Unrestrained.
*Google’s DNA ‘Bio-Piracy’ & Federal DNA Databanks.
*Neuroscience proves that the politically biased are legally insane and medically addicted/diseased!
*DARPA’s ‘open’ Artificial Intelligence programs (circa 2006).
*The US Government’s “Collective Society” Fantasy.
*DISA’s / NSA’s “Net-Centric” “Global Information Grid”.
Wired: Danger Room- Secrecy News
- Infowars
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- Dandelion Salad
- Global Research
- The Memory Hole
- Empire Burlesque
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- Climate Audit
- Defense Tech
- Fact Check
- Is it true that persons older than 59 can't get heart surgery in England?
- Is the ACLU suing to have cross-shaped headstones removed from military cemeteries?
- Was Obama rude to wounded veterans during a visit to the National Naval Medical Center?
- Is ACORN providing workers for the 2010 census?
- The 'Real' Uninsured
- Advertising Lab
