*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.
-Private Military Contractors Writing the News? The Pentagon’s Propaganda at Its Worst.
Months after the Pentagon pundits flap, the Department of Defense continues to hand down contracts for propaganda in Iraq and beyond.
Less than a week after the Washington Post reported that the Department of Defense will pay private contractors $300 million over the next three years to “produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to ‘engage and inspire’ the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government,” Virginia Sen. Jim Webb wrote a strongly worded letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “I have serious reservations about the need for this expenditure in today’s political and economic environment,” he wrote. “Consequently, I am asking that you put these contracts on hold until the Armed Services Committee and the next administration can review the entire issue of U.S. propaganda efforts inside Iraq.”
Such a review, if it were to happen, would be a formidable undertaking, one that would have to start with the declaration of the “War on Terror” itself. It’s a project the Bush administration has always approached as a PR campaign as much as a military one. Who can forget former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card’s explanation for the need to introduce the Iraq War to Americans in September: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” And remember the short-lived attempt by administration officials to re-brand the “War on Terror” by renaming it the “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism”? (Reports at the time were that administration officials worried that the original phrase “may have outlived its usefulness,” due to its sole focus on military might.)
Regardless of what you call it, the so-called “War on Terror” has cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in propaganda costs alone. As with so much of modern war-making, most of this work is carried out by private military contractors. With the word “Halliburton” now shorthand for waste, fraud and abuse for many Americans, taxpayers’ tolerance for war profiteering has reached new lows — especially when private military companies operating with no oversight undermine the very “hearts and minds” that mission propaganda is supposedly meant to advance.
Selling the War to Americans
Perhaps one of the Bush administration’s most egregious PR undertakings in the war on Iraq was revealed this spring, when the New York Times blew the lid off the Pentagon’s military analyst program, in which more than 75 retired military officials were recruited to spout pro-war rhetoric on major networks in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. These “message force multipliers,” as they were branded, were provided with thousands of talking points by the Department of Defense starting in 2002. In one memo, dated Dec. 9, 2002 and titled “Department of Defense Themes and Talking Points on Iraq,” a quote from Paul Wolfowitz — “We cannot allow one of the world’s most murderous dictators to provide terrorists a sanctuary in Iraq” — was followed with a bullet point: “Saddam Hussein: A Global Threat.”
The investigative piece by the Times said the project “continues to this day,” seeking to “exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.”
“Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.” It would be hard to overstate the implications of such a program, particularly for a country that claims to be a beacon of democracy.
Although the Pentagon was said to have suspended its PR briefings of retired military officials shortly after the Times story broke, since claiming that its inspector general is conducting an investigation, in reality there has been precious little fallout. However, in one promising move, earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission sent five letters of inquiry to TV military analysts in an apparent probing of the program. According to one report, “at issue is that some of them were also linked to Pentagon contracts, raising the issue of conflict of interest. In its letter signed by the chief of the investigations and hearings division enforcement bureau, the FCC suggests that TV stations and networks may have violated two sections of the Communications Act of 1934 by not identifying the ties to the Pentagon that their military analysts had.” Diane Farsetta at PR Watch, who has written extensively on the Pentagon’s pundits, particularly their work on behalf of defense contractors, says, “the good news is that that’s (a first) step toward conducting an investigation.”
Profiting off the “War of Ideas”
Beyond the Pentagon’s pundit “scandal,” the fact that propaganda contracts continue to be awarded to the very companies that have previously been implicated in ethical breaches for disseminating unattributed U.S. propaganda abroad is reason enough to renew alarm. More than the dollar amount, what is outrageous to Farsetta about the most recent propaganda contract is that it is “blatantly illegal.” “If you look at this most recent contract,” she explains, “one of the ’strategic audiences’ is U.S. audiences.” According to federal law going back to World War II, she says “no taxpayer money can go to propagandize U.S. audiences.”
The Washington Post story describes the contract as the latest in a series of cutting-edge PR initiatives undertaken since 2003 that represent a revolution in what it calls “the military’s role in the war of ideas.” “Iraq, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on such contracts, has been the proving ground for the transformation.”
“The tools they’re using, the means, the robustness of this activity has just skyrocketed since 2003. In the past, a lot of this stuff was just some guy’s dreams,’” said a senior U.S. military official, one of several who discussed the sensitive defense program on the condition of anonymity.
The Pentagon still sometimes feels it is playing catch-up in a propaganda market dominated by al Qaeda, whose media operations include sophisticated Web sites and professionally produced videos and audios featuring Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. “We’re being out-communicated by a guy in a cave,” Secretary Robert M. Gates often remarks.
The new contract was awarded to four companies, most of whom Farsetta refers to as “the usual suspects,” including Lincoln Group, the Pennsylvania Avenue company that in 2005 was found to have planted articles written by U.S. military officials in Iraqi newspapers without attribution. (Although the group was cleared of any illegalities, even then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recognized the potential breach, remarking, “Gee, that’s not what we ought to be doing.”
Selling the War to Iraqis
The main target audience for the $300 million contract is Iraqis. But, different from earlier propaganda efforts, the content is not simply meant to convince them of the noble intentions of their American occupiers. “Originally, the major focus was all about the U.S.,” says Farsetta. “The message then was, ‘Hey, you’re free now,’ but over time it has shifted to more ‘make sure you support your own government, your own police.’”
Indeed, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed official who described one component of the program:
“There’s a video piece produced by a contractor showing a family being attacked by a group of bad guys, and their daughter being taken off. The message is: You’ve got to stand up against the enemy.” The professionally produced vignette, he said, “is offered for airing on various (television) stations in Iraq. They don’t know that the originator of the content is the U.S. government. If they did, they would never run anything.
“If you asked most Iraqis,” he said, “they would say, ‘It came from the government, our own government.’”
A pretty blunt admission, to be sure, and one that lays bare the dubious ethical nature of the program (not to mention the extent that the military recognizes Iraqis’ antipathy for the U.S. government). But it’s not the first time the U.S. government has sought to play hand puppet with Iraqi media. Last spring, the NSA obtained and made public a document, along with a PowerPoint presentation, that revealed the Pentagon’s plans in the run-up to the war to create a “Rapid Reaction Media Team.” Jim Lobe, D.C. bureau chief of InterPress Services, covered the revelation in May 2007; as he wrote, the proposal was for a “six-month, $51 million budget for the RRMT operation, apparently the first phase in a one- to two-year ’strategic information campaign’”:
Among other items, the budget called for the hiring of two U.S. ”media consultants” who were to be paid $140,000 each for six months’ work. A further $800,000 were to be paid for six Iraqi “media consultants” over the same period.
Both the paper and the slide presentation were prepared by two Pentagon offices — Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, which, among other things, specialize in psychological warfare, and the Office of Special Plans under then undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith — in mid-January, 2003, two months before the invasion, according to NSA analyst Joyce Battle.
”The RRMT concept focuses on USG-UK pre- and post-hostilities efforts to develop programming, train talent, and rapidly deploy a team of U.S./UK media experts with a team of ‘hand selected’ Iraqi media experts to communicate immediately with the Iraqi public opinion upon liberation of Iraq,” according to the paper.
The ”hand-picked” Iraqi experts, according to the paper, would provide planning and program guidance for the U.S. experts and help ‘’select and train the Iraqi broadcasters and publishers (’the face’) for the USG/coalition sponsored information effort.” USG is an abbreviation for U.S. government.
In a rather extraordinary quote, the document boasted, ”It will be as if, after another day of deadly agit-prop, the North Korean people turned off their TVs at night, and turned them on in the morning to find the rich fare of South Korean TV spread before them as their very own.”
Circumventing Congress
In the United States, few lawmakers have had a chance to scrutinize this latest deployment of public funds for propaganda. (Like so many other contracts awarded to private defense corporations, this one was awarded with no Congressional approval.) But Webb’s letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggests that it could become an issue.
At a time when this country is facing such a grave economic crisis, and at a time when the government of Iraq now shows at least a $79 billion surplus from recent oil revenues, in my view it makes little sense for the U.S. Department of Defense to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to propagandize the Iraqi people. There is now an elected government in Iraq, which is recognized to have the power and authority to negotiate a long-term security agreement with the government of the United States. Clearly that government is capable, both politically and financially, of communicating with its own people in the manner now contemplated by these DOD contracts — and without being accused by adversaries of being a foreign government that is fulminating internal conditions through propaganda.
Laudable as his efforts to reign in contractors may be — much of Webb’s letter was devoted to military contractors more generally, and Blackwater specifically — his letter made no mention of the myriad ethical questions raised by the propaganda contract. To name a few, says Farsetta, “the fact that the media produced is overwhelmingly not attributed to the U.S. government;” “the fact that one of the ’strategic audiences’ listed in the contract is ‘U.S. audiences,’ in apparent violation of U.S. law;” and “the difficulties in holding private contractors operating in war zones accountable to any standard (ethical, performance or otherwise).”
Webb, who first learned about this contract as did most Americans, from the Washington Post, has called for a thorough review of the Pentagon’s “strategic communications” initiatives, including Congressional hearings.” Were this to happen, says Farsetta, “I would love for those hearings to include representatives from foreign governments and civil society groups where the U.S. has major propaganda operations, including Iraq and Afghanistan. The heads of firms like the Lincoln Group, L-3 and Rendon should also testify, under oath.”
But, she says, “What really bothers me is that Webb’s using the “we’ve given Iraq so much and now it’s time for them to step up” argument. That argument never fails to amaze and anger me. We bombed them in 1991, then for more than a decade placed them under such devastating sanctions that hundreds of thousands of children died, then bombed them more ferociously over a longer period of time. Yet some politicians have the gall to complain that the Iraqis aren’t doing enough now? That’s not to mention that the argument assumes that Iraqi leaders have the same priorities as U.S. officials. Personally, I say we need to get our propaganda and troops out of Iraq and pay them reparations.”
-Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11
And I’ve been saying all year that McCain is literally insane… This woman is certifiable. Even Bush has admitted that its not true.
FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 — Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.” The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.
“America can never go back to that false sense of security that came before September 11, 2001,” she said at the deployment ceremony, which drew hundreds of military families who walked from their homes on the sprawling post to the airstrip where the service was held.
Palin’s return to Alaska coincided with her first extensive interview since she became the Republican vice presidential nominee. In the interview, with ABC News correspondent Charles Gibson, she was confronted with questions about the U.S. relationship with Russia and her fitness for office, and she appeared to struggle when asked to define the “Bush doctrine” on foreign policy. Palin drew repeated follow-up questions from Gibson about whether she believed in the right to “anticipatory self-defense” and crossing other nations’ borders to take action against threats.
“I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hellbent on destroying America and our allies,” she said after several questions on the topic. “We have got to have all options out there on the table.”
That response put her in line with a view expressed by Sen. Barack Obama, now the Democratic presidential nominee, in August 2007, when he stirred controversy by saying that if he were elected president, he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government. “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said. At the time, McCain called Obama’s comments “naive.”
Palin continued to take a hard line on national security issues when asked whether war with Russia could be necessary if Georgia were to join NATO and Russia crossed its borders again. Palin replied, “Perhaps so.”
“I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help,” she said.
In the interview, Palin said “I’m ready” when asked whether she had sufficient experience to serve as vice president. She added that she did not hesitate when McCain offered her the No. 2 spot on the ticket.
“I answered yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink,” she told Gibson.
The event Thursday, held on a barren Army post on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, provided a powerful visual backdrop for Palin’s first solo appearance after weeks of traveling alongside McCain and reading from a carefully prepared script.
McCain aides were adamant that the ceremony had not been coordinated with the campaign, and officers at the installation said the Alaska governor had agreed to attend months before she was chosen for the GOP ticket. Palin’s son Track, 19, will deploy to Iraq with his unit later this month. McCain’s son Jimmy is with his Marine Corps unit in Iraq, but the senator from Arizona has taken pains to keep him out of the campaign spotlight.
As she has been since McCain plucked her from relative obscurity two weeks ago, Palin continues to be surrounded by senior McCain advisers even here; the senator’s top strategist, Steve Schmidt, and several others accompanied her to Alaska. The group is guiding Palin through a crash course on policy issues and is revising the campaign’s original plan to send her on fundraising missions separately from McCain.
Instead, seeking to seize on the outpouring of enthusiasm for Palin, McCain advisers are “seriously considering” having McCain and Palin campaign together on the road. It would be an unusual arrangement — running mates traditionally split up to cover as much ground as possible — but aides believe it would help brand McCain and Palin as a single unit. It would also prevent Palin from having to contend with her own dedicated press contingent as she works to become more comfortable with an array of national and international issues. The campaign is also cognizant of the fact that McCain has consistently drawn bigger crowds since adding Palin to the ticket.
“It is under serious consideration that they will spend more time together than not, and more time together than is traditional,” said a senior McCain adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “They are a great duo together, from the perspective of delivering a message.” The adviser added: “Sometimes these vice presidential selections, the pairings work in a magical way; they click.”
Other campaign formalities have also been taken care of in recent days. Aides confirmed that Palin and her husband, Todd, have been assigned Secret Service names: hers is Denali, after the Alaska national park and wildlife preserve that includes Mount McKinley; his is Driller, a nod to his work as an oilman on the state’s North Slope.
On the Army post outside Fairbanks early Thursday afternoon, thousands of soldiers stood in formation as a low sun beamed on the chilly tarmac. One officer who said he had come to know Track Palin said that the ceremony would have taken place in the same way had the governor not been tapped to run for higher office, and that her son was determined to remain as anonymous as possible.
Pvt. 1st Class Palin is being sent to Iraq with the Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division. Palin, 19, will be deployed to northern Iraq and will be primarily tasked with protecting and helping transport the deputy commander of his unit, Lt. Col. Michael W. Smith. His position is one of dismounted infantryman.
“He wants to pave his own route in life. He wants to do his own thing,” Maj. Chris Hyde said. “He doesn’t want to just be known as Governor Palin’s son.”
Hyde said Col. Burt Thompson had arranged the deployment ceremony to coincide with the Sept. 11 anniversary as a symbol of the importance of the military. “That was intentional,” Hyde said, describing the effort as a “theatrical” one but adding quickly that it had nothing to do with the Palins. “I talked to Track Palin last week, and he’s still just an all-American kid,” Hyde said.
The governor did not address her son by name in her remarks but spoke broadly on behalf of the troops’ families. “Don’t mind us — your parents, your friends, your family — if we allow for a few tears or if we hold you just a little closer once more before you’re gone,” she said. “We’re going to miss you. We can’t help it, we’re going to miss you.”
She continued: “You may not need our protection anymore. In fact, you’re the ones who will now be protecting us, protecting America.”
>Palin admits Iraq War ‘for oil’, but also proclaims it’s (and a new Alaskan Oil Pipeline) ‘Gods war’
AP:
In an address last June, the Republican vice presidential candidate also urged ministry students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it “God’s will.”
“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”
“God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she said.
We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.
This all begs the question: was she actually referring to the ‘God of Abraham’, or was she referring to George W. Bush?
Her influences from that church are also worth noting.
‘CIA helped draw up dodgy Iraq war dossier for No 10′
London Evening Standard
Monday, Sept 8, 2008
Secret advice from a foreign power, thought to be America, helped to shape the dossier that said Saddam Hussein could attack within 45 minutes and set out the case for war in Iraq.
MI6 chief John Scarlett, then chairman of the Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), turned to the foreign country as final touches were put to the now discredited dossier, it has emerged.
The document, which the Government is accused of ‘sexing up’ in the weeks before it was made public, contained a string of claims that later proved false.
These included the warnings that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction ‘within 45 minutes’ and that it was ‘beyond doubt’ that he was developing nuclear weapons.
Both claims were the key to convincing the public and Parliament of the threat posed by Iraq and were essential to putting together the legal case for war.
Now it has been revealed that Mr Scarlett canvassed foreign help – which sources claim came from America’s CIA – in the days before the dossier was published.
*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/
*Al Qaeda: The CI-A Team
NOTE: That A-Team parody clip is of my own creation. It was meant as a short segment of a much larger film that is now covered with dust crammed in the back of the top shelf of obscurity in my thinking. The only thing I had left for this clip was recreating the machine-gun logo (that’s original from the show). Last year, after sitting on the clip for a long time, I decided to do a detailed writeup of the justification of it.
Here it is:
Prelude: The Cold War:
Our story begins during the Cold War. The nature of the Cold War is remains fuzzy to most people, despite it lasting some 45 years, and the primary reason is because it was a covert war.
It is generally characterized as a battle between the 2 “superpowers”, or empires. It was best characterized as the United States (USSA) and the USSR competing in conducting covert operations in foreign nations on a global scale. It was obviously a struggle between 2 competing cross-spectrum economic systems and political ideologies. Extreme capitalism on the “right” (ultraconservatism), and extreme socialism (communism) on the “left’.
The means and methods the 2 sides used for control in their goals of imperial conquest were virtually identical:
1) Destabilization: This caused nation-states and various regimes to “need” the support of whichever side “they” identified with.
2) Revolutionary Uprisings: A primary vehicle for destabilization and covert regime change, or for ‘controlling’ “secular’ regimes. Revolutionary factions were trained in all forms of terrorism to reach their political goals.
3) Instigating Regional Conflicts: This caused the target nation states (wherever there were “interests”) to need to buy weapons from the military-industrial-complex driven empire-states (USSA & USSR). Often times the empires would even support both sides of a conflict if they had the opportunity.
Both sides were equally guilty of these crimes or at least the intentions of such. The victory all came down to efficiency. Obviously, the U.S. won, and so did the economic system as evidenced by today’s “globalization” (most global states were “nationalist” systems before the end of the Cold War).
U.S. Style Covert Control:
Choice examples of U.S. style Cold War “foreign policy”, for this essay, are as follows:
1: Create or support conservative violent uprisings to overthrow leftist regimes that maintained or sought to establish “nationalized” natural resources.
A choice example of this would be Nicaragua Contras who were radicalized Christian revolutionaries. This is what the “Iran-Contra” conspiracy was about.
en.wikipedia.org…
2: Installation of right-wing military dictatorships.
The best example of this would be Operation CONDOR, which the U.S. supported all throughout the 1970’s. This conquest involved overthrowing the democratically elected governments of most of the nations in all of South America. It involved assassinations (terrorism), and the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of political dissidents (people protesting the hijacking of their country).
en.wikipedia.org…
Then for the other ‘heathen’ side of the globe (Middle Eastern Asia), different and somewhat opposite tactics were employed:
A: The installation of ’secular’ regimes.
With this strategy the U.S. would put the secular regimes into power, if necessary, and then destabilize the region with radical Islamists. This would create a need for U.S. weapons and even presence in the form of military bases for “security”. Choice examples would be Saddam Hussein (who the CIA put into power), Egypt and so on. These are 1970’s examples. This sort of behavior actually goes back to 1953 with operation AJAX in Iran.
en.wikipedia.org…
B: Supporting monarchist or similar repressive regimes.
A good example here would be Bahrain and Saudi Arabia; again, 1970’s examples. Ideally, in all of the covert conquests, existing regimes would be persuaded or coerced into playing the ideal roles for their regional scenarios.
There are other forms and examples, but these are the most prominent.
X: Destabilization:
Ultraconservative’s (radical Islamists for example) were/are still guided and supported overall by the U.S. to play out their roles in destabilizing their regions (thus requiring the regimes to need U.S. backing).
While the Islamists are ideal tools for destabilizing a region, they’re not what the U.S. considers ideal regimes to hold power. While the US may seek to destablize ‘regions’ to gain influence and control, conversely it seeks regimes that will stabilize US led “globalization” efforts to gain resources and cheap slave labor. Regimes that destabilize globalization, whether secular or radical Islamic, are typically what you’d find on “terrorist state sponsors” lists as evidenced by Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and so on. Islamist regimes, in resource rich lands generally tend to destabilize globalization so they’re generally not given enough support to achieve their goals, while the secular regimes are.
Islamist revival movements gained followers across the Muslim world, but failed to secure political power except in Iran and Sudan.
-9/11 Commission Report; p.53
A good analogy for this destabilization concept is when leaders use fear mongering to scare their populations into supporting imperialistic militarism or domestic police state programs. You scare their grasp on security and self-”control” and they’ll accept the “solution”. This tactic can and often is applied to not only individuals but also entire regions. It’s a particular favorite of imperialist powers as far back as well recorded history goes. Of course, the USSR used similar but somewhat politically-opposite tactics, and so on.
Now there’s destablization in general, and then there’s more direct thuggish destabilization. Ideally, you install regimes in regions that are sure to produce opposition to ensure the new regimes codependency on US weapons and “aid’. This is a sort of ‘endemic’ self-sustaining destabilization. But then there often comes a need for directly focused destabilization to attain specific political goals, and this is where ‘focus groups’ such as Al Qaeda come in.
Afghanistan 1979-89: The Cold War Final Showdown:
The general version we get is that we helped the poor Afghani’s defend their territory from the “Evil Empire” the USSR, or, the other “superpower”. Then, after they (the mujahadeen) “won” the imperialist driven conflict, some of them branched off into “Al Qaeda” and decided to go after US, the remaining “superpower’.
1977-1981: The Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union
1978: CIA Begins Covert Action in Afghanistan
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
Early 1980: Osama bin Laden, with Saudi Backing, Supports Afghan Rebels
1982: Pakistani ISI Begins Recruiting Arab Fundamentalists to Fight in Afghanistan. Afghan opium production rises from 250 tons in 1982 to 2,000 tons in 1991, coinciding with CIA support and funding of the mujaheddin.
1984: Bin Laden Develops Ties with Pakistani ISI and Afghan Warlord
LINK
And now our story begins to take shape.
For perspective, however, one must consider the nature and relationship of the Bush’s and Saudi’s, which is rather common knowledge these days, but stretches back into the 70’s when GHWB was the CIA Director and established his Saudi / Bin laden relationship. Many of the ‘tactic’ examples above actually occurred during his tenures with the CIA in the 70’s and his vice-presidency during the 80’s, and much more.
This assistance was funneled through Pakistan: the Pakistani military intelligence
service (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISID), helped train the rebels and distribute the arms.
www.9-11commission.gov…
Post-Cold War: Finding an “Enemy”; Gaining a Tool:
At least since the Cold War there has been a need for excuses to maintain our imperial posture while distracting Americans from noticing that we’re an imperialist state. This is easy to do with “justifiable” and covert wars, but when the wars aren’t justifiable or covert people begin to wake up to the reality. ‘Coincidentally’, a new “Islamofacsist” ‘empire’ (anti-US Imperialism ragtag groups scattered throughout a vast region) began to appear.
These groups were none other than the majuahadeen religious freedom fighters that “we’ trained during the Afghan War. Their number one leader was the Bush connected Saudi money handler that helped the CIA coordinate the mujahadeen uprising, while his family and their associates were the ones in the Middle East who stand to gain from his anti-American exploits and the future “War on Terror”. Ironically, the imperialist-elitist leaders from the U.S. even stand to gain from his groups future exploits.
1980 and on: The U.S. itself as a Tool for American Imperialism:
The US is used for volunteer mujahadeen solider & fund-raising from early in the Afghan conflict. Mujahadeen support centers are established throughout the U.S.
A Muslim organization called al Khifa had numerous branch offices, the largest of which was in the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. In the mid-80’s, it had been set up as one of the first outposts of Azzam & Bin Laden’s MAK.[40] Other cities which included branches of al Khifa included Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Tucson.
www.9-11commission.gov…
The upcoming group, “Al Qaeda”, is later useful for agenda setting terror attacks throughout the US. It’s usefulness is 2 pronged: On the one hand it has effective use for domestic policy setting, and the other bring use for a new ‘never-ending’ “War on Terror” scheme of global imperialistic domination.
It is later found to be connected with the OKC bombing, and of course 9/11. Of course, the OKC connectosn are completely ignored by the government as it weakens their anti-militia stance, and this is all about control.
www.newsmax.com…
1989: Azzam, the primary leader of the mujahadeen, and seeker of peaceful political movements for revolutionary change throughout the Middle East, is mysteriously assassinated. Western journalists would later assert that UBL was responsible the assassination.
Enter Iraq:
Ever since Hussein was placed into power by the CIA, he became increasingly arrogant and impossible to play like a puppet by the US establishment. Efforts to use traditional CIA tactics like overthrows and assassinations were futile thanks to his use of body doubles and family centralized power.
1989: Usama returns home.
He denounced Saddam Hussein, claiming the Iraqi leader was about to invade Kuwait. In Saudi, such behaviour did not endear him to the authorities. He was told to shut up and refused, but all the time he was quietly advising the Saudi King Fahd of the danger coming from Iraq.
www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk…
August 1990: Saddam invades Kuwait after being given the green light by the US.
This plan fails, UBL attempts to work with Kurds through the 90’s. Saddam grows even more defiant to the US over time. We all know the rest.
Bin Laden had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army.
-9/11 Commission Report; p.61
“We are not in need of bin Laden, we don’t need his money and we don’t need his protection and we don’t want to use him or be used by him.
www.iol.co.za…
LIFG’s next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-M15 officer David Shayler.
www.jamestown.org…Here classic Mafioso bullying “protection” tactics are used twofold: On the one hand Qadhafi can seek ‘protection” from Al Qaeda, or on the other hand he can “join” the United States in “combating” the former. It’s really a no-brainer for any regime that’s trying to seek respect in the “civilized” world, as to take option one would only secure his name in the history books as a ‘barbaric’ state sponsor of terrorism.Ironically, the common thread running through Libya, bin Laden and the U.S. is the 1979-1988 Afghan war.
www.jamestown.org…LIGF was founded in the fall of 1995 by Libyans who had fought against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
en.wikipedia.org…Far from being soul-mates, Qadhafi and bin Laden have long been at odds; it was Qadhafi who, in March 1998, issued the first Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden, a fact little known in the West.Colonel Muammar Qadhafi’s decades-long confrontation with the West has never given him much purchase among militant Islamists in Libya. In fact, the LIFG has waged a violent insurgency for ten years – with a hostility toward the eccentric dictator so implacable that it refuses even to negotiate with his envoys.
www.jamestown.org…These groups came into open conflict with security services in the mid 1990s and also made a number of assassination attempts against Qadhafi, most notably in 1996 and 1998.
www.jamestown.org…
A Canadian intelligence report says al-Qaeda-backed militants in Libya want to assassinate Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, providing a possible explanation for the dictator’s recent attempts to improve relations with the West.The United States and Britain announced last Friday that Col. Gaddafi had agreed to dismantle Libya’s weapons of mass destruction programs. UN weapons inspectors are to arrive in the country as early as next week.
Yesterday, Col. Gaddafi called on other “rogue states” to follow his dramatic example if they were to prevent “tragedy” from striking their nations.
209.157.64.200…
I’d say this Al Qaeda supported history speaks for itself. Al Qaeda, the mujahadeen, weapons an heroin showed up right about the same time the US military was ready to move in. An echo of the Afghan War, but I thought “we” were done using these measures?
1991: US Convinces Bosnian President to Renege on Agreement
1992-1995: Pentagon Helps Bring Islamic Militants to Fight with Bosnians Against Serbs
1992-1995: KSM Fights and Fundraises in Bosnia
1993: Bosnian President Said to Grant Bin Laden Passport as Gesture of Appreciation
1993: Albanian Drug Smuggling Profits Fund Muslim Arms Buildup in Balkans
1993: US Begins Construction on Airfield Used for Bosnia Arms Pipeline 1994: Bin Laden Meets with Albanian Government Officials
August 30, 1995: NATO Launches Bombing Campaign Against Bosnian Serbs
1995-1998:< STRONG>Alleged Ties Between Al-Qadi Charity and Terrorist Groups Are Uncovered; No Action Taken
February 1995: Albanian Narco-Terrorism Destabilizes the Balkans
1996-1999: Albanian Mafia and KLA Take Control of Balkan Heroin Trafficking Route
February 1998: State Department Removes KLA from Terrorism List
Shortly Before February 1998 and After: KLA Receives Arms and Training from US and NATO
May 7, 1998: Al-Qaeda Leader Visits Bosnia; US Charity Is Funding Al-Qaeda There
October 1998: Islamic Conference Calls KLA Struggle ‘Jihad’
1999: US and British Special Forces Train KLA Operatives in Albania
Late March-June 1999: NATO Begins Bombing Campaign Against Serbs
June 2001: The KLA Begins an Offensive in Macedonia
Late June-Early July 2001: KLA Forces Are Rescued by US in Macedonia
July 15, 2001: The KLA Begins Ethnic Cleansing of Tetovo-Kosovo Corridor in Macedonia
September 20, 2002: Saudi Charity in Bosnia Linked to Al-Qaeda
www.theinsider.org…
They finally booted our bases between 91-92, and “Al Qaeda” support moved in shortly thereafter.
In September 16, 1991, despite lobbying by President Aquino, the Philippine Senate rejected a treaty that would have allowed a 10-year extension of the U.S. military bases in the country. The United States turned over Clark Air Base in Pampanga to the government in November, and Subic Bay Naval Base in Zambales in December 1992, ending almost a century of U.S. military presence in the Philippines.
en.wikipedia.org…Since its inception in the early 1990s, the group has carried out bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and extortion in their fight for an independent Islamic state in western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago with the stated goal of creating a pan-Islamic superstate
en.wikipedia.org…President Arroyo has demonstrated total support for the U.S.-led campaign, offering intelligence, logical support, and the use of Philippine air space, and opening two former American military bases, Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay. Most recently, she has agreed to receive U.S. troops’ advice and logistical support in the country’s fight against the Abu Sayyaf.By sending American troops to aid Filipino forces in defeating the Abu Sayyaf, the Philippines has become the only country besides Afghanistan to receive direct involvement of U.S. troops in the fight against terrorism.
www.cdi.org…
*Osama’s Satellite Phone: History Channel unwittingly debunks the 911 Commission Report
*”Saddam’s spy” is mostly responsible for the “successful” Troop Surge
Shoot-out between Saddam’s spy and al-Qaeda brings life back to streets
An enigmatic military intelligence officer from the old Iraqi Army is leading a revolt that has reduced the bloodshed in Baghdad
Amariyah has experienced a startling rebirth since that western-style shootout. In May its streets were filled with corpses being picked over by stray dogs. American troops ventured in rarely. When they did, they used heavily armoured vehicles, several of which were blown apart by mines.
Now the shops and cafés are open, and schoolchildren and women stroll the streets. Mr al-Obeidi’s men patrol on foot with American troops and Iraqi soldiers.
It has been a precarious journey from al-Qaeda fiefdom to what US commanders see as a possible model for the future of Iraq. The process has not been made clearer by the mystique surrounding the enigmatic man at the centre of the revolt.
ALSO:
US general says Iran helping stop Iraq bloodshed
Troops Find Iraq Torture House; Iran Helping Stem Weapons Flow
Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S.
ADD THOSE TO RON PAUL’S DEBUNKING OF THE TROOP SURGE MYTH:
MORE “NEWS” (BLACK PROPAGANDA):
“As violence continues to drop and hundreds of Iraqis return home each day, a result of extinguishing the influence of Al Qaeda, many eyes are focusing on the negative impact of Iran’s involvement in Iraq.
With Al Qaeda’s violence waning, Iran’s meddling is increasingly sky-lined against Iraq’s reformation. “
www.yorknewstimes.com…
The Record on CURVEBALL (Phony Iraq War Intel)
Declassified Documents and Key Participants Show the Importance of Phony Intelligence in the Origins of the Iraq War
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U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a model vial of anthrax during his historic presentation before the United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003. (Image extracted from a video available from the White House Web site.) |
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 234
Edited by John Prados
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm
Posted – November 5, 2007
For more information contact:
John Prados – 202/994-7000
Washington, DC, November 5, 2007 – CBS News’ 60 Minutes exposure last night of the Iraqi agent known as CURVEBALL has put a major aspect of the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq back under the spotlight.
Rafid Ahmed Alwan’s charges that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons and the mobile plants to produce them formed a critical part of the U.S. justification for the invasion in Spring 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s celebrated and globally televised briefing to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, relied on CURVEBALL as the main source of intelligence on the biological issue.
Today the National Security Archive posts the available public record on CURVEBALL’s information derived from declassified sources and former officials’ accounts.
While most of the documentary record on the issue remains classified, the materials published here today underscore the precarious nature of the intelligence gathering and analytical process, and point to the existence of doubts about CURVEBALL’s authenticity before his charges were featured in the Bush administration’s public claims about Iraq.
Memos Prove Rumsfeld Directed Psychological Terror Campaign
Rumsfeld ‘kept up fear of terror attacks’
Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, tried to maintain an atmosphere of fear in America as part of the Iraq war propaganda campaign, a series of leaked memos has shown.
One memo, written in April 2006, contained a list of instructions to Pentagon staff including “Keep elevating the threat” and “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines etc. Make the American people realise they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists”.
Another said “link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran”. He also urged staff to produce “bumper sticker statements” to rally the public around the war.
The memos, written between 2002 until shortly after his resignation in 2006, were leaked by undisclosed sources to the Washington Post. Rumsfeld was unpopular with many for his tough management style.
The newspaper reported that his emails were so numerous they were called “snowflakes”. He would send between 20 and 60 a day, often instructing his team to refute negative news stories in the media.
One note will please Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. It said: “We are getting run out of Central Asia by the Russians. They are doing a considerably better job at bullying those countries than the US is doing to counter their bullying.”
Rumsfeld also managed belatedly to embarrass Bush administration’s attempts to win hearts and minds in the Arab world. In one memo he said: “Too often Muslims are against physical labour” because oil wealth had detached them from “the reality of work”.
A White House spokesman yesterday repudiated the comment. “It’s not in line with the president’s views,” said spokesman Dana Perino.
Keith Urbahn, an aide to Mr Rumsfeld, told the Washington Post that the published memos were “selective” and “gross mischaracterisations” carefully picked from some 20,000 while he was defence secretary. There was no comment from Mr Rumsfeld.
‘Link Iraq to Iran,’ Rumsfeld argued before proof
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Memos_reveal_Rumsfelds_concern_with_marketing_1101.html
Ten months before the US aired formal proof of Iranian involvement in funding Iraqi insurgents, then-Secretary of Defense warned in secret Pentagon memos that Iran should be the “concern of the American people” and he issued explicit instructions to the military.
“[L]ink Iraq to Iran,” Rumsfeld wrote in one of thousands of “snowflakes” — short memos distributed throughout the Pentagon during his tenure.
The Washington Post obtained a handful of the memos and published excerpts from them Thursday. A newly disclosed memo, written in April 2006 as Rumsfeld faced retired generals’ calls for his resignation, tied Iran and Iraq together and claimed failure in the latter “will advantage Iran.”
The memo came as Rumsfeld was going to great lengths in public to avoid explicitly tying Iran’s government to Iraqi insurgents — although that was precisely the impression he left.
In March 2006, Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Peter Pace were asked about recent claims about Iranian-made weapons found in Iraq. Did the military have any “proof” Iran’s government was fueling the insurgency?
“I do not,” Pace acknowledged. Rumsfeld gave a more open-ended response.
“Unless you physically see it coming in …, you can’t know it,” he said. “All you know is that you find equipment — weapons, explosives, whatever — in a country that came from the neighboring country.”
The following month, when he was privately circulating the Iran-Iraq link, Rumsfeld publicly downplayed suggestions that the US was planning a military or nuclear strike against Iran.
“You know, someone comes up with an idea, runs it in a magazine or a paper; other papers pick it up and reprint it; editorialists then say, oh, Henny Penny, the sky is falling, and isn’t — opine on this and opine on that. And to the extent anyone starts responding to the kinds of things that have been circulated, it’s endless,” he said, insisting that America was on a “diplomatic track” in dealing with Iran.
It would be more than a year until Vice President Dick Cheney took to the deck of an aircraft carrier floating in the Persian Gulf in an apparent effort to antagonize Iran. And it was February of this year by the time American intelligence agencies were reported to have reached a “broad agreement” that Iran was supplying weapons to Insurgents.
The New York Times reported the assessment in February of this year, based largely on anonymous administration and intelligence sources. It acknowledged that specious administration claims four years ago could create difficulty in paving the way to war with Iran.
“Administration officials said they recognized that intelligence failures related to prewar American claims about Iraq’s weapons arsenal could make critics skeptical about the American claims,” reported Michael Gordon, the Times scribe whose by-lined accompanied Judith Miller’s on several key discredited pre-Iraq reports.
New memos reveal Rumsfeld’s PR efforts, from arguments with columnists to attempts to re-brand the ‘War on Terror’
The memos also show that Rumsfeld, who left the Pentagon’s top job the day after last year’s Democratic sweep of Congress, kept a tight reign on the military’s image. He issued a flurry of memos instructing his staff to respond to critical news reports and suggesting “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support. He also mulled re-branding President Bush’s signature foreign policy adventure, the “Global War on Terror.”
“Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked ‘for official use only,’” reports the Washington Post which obtained a sampling of the memos Wednesday.
The memos reveal Rumsfeld was concerned about how Americans viewed the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he suggested strategies to improve public opinion.
“Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” Rumsfeld wrote in April of 2006 after retired generals began calling for his resignation. He suggested that people would “rally” to sacrifice. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory.”
Rumsfeld suggested that the when the Pentagon responded to war criticism aides should “push people back, rather than just defending” Iraq policy, and he acknowledged privately that no “terminal event” would signal an end to the fight against terrorism. Eighteen months ago, Rumsfeld also urged military aides to begin connecting the war in Iraq to threats from Iran — a strategy that has since become de rigueur within the Bush administration.
“Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran,” he wrote in April 2006.
Rumsfeld also displayed concern with how the “war on terror” was being sold to the American people, and he suggested redefining the campaign as a “worldwide insurgency,” according to the Post, and he even proposed focus grouping the proposed name change.
“[T]est what the results could be,” if the war on terror were renamed, he advised aides.
A Pentagon spokesman accused the Post of using “selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations” from “some 20,000″ memos Rumsfeld penned as defense secretary.
Indeed, Rumsfeld’s snowflake production was prolific, and his instructions covered nearly every aspect of the Pentagon and were distributed to employees at all levels of the bureaucracy, sometimes rankling aides.
“Rumsfeld was into everyone’s business. No one was immune,” Bob Woodward recounted last year in State of Denial, which examined the Bush war policy. “Many in the Pentagon looked at the snowflakes as an annoyance. Others found them intrusive and at times petty. For some there was no way to keep up.”
According to memos obtained by the newspaper, Rumsfeld displayed an increasing concern with battling a pessimistic media that focused on missteps and setbacks in the Iraq war. A handful of snowflakes asked aides to respond to columns in the New York Post and Philadelphia Inquirer that were critical of the war. Rumsfeld even asked for clarification of his own assessments of the war.
“Please have someone find precisely when I said ‘dead-ender’ and what the context was,” he ordered one aide in September 2006.
Two months later, Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon reached its own dead end.
Hyping climate of fear, threat of violence to achieve political objectives is the very definition of terrorism
Prison Planet
Friday, November 2, 2007
“Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, tried to maintain an atmosphere of fear in America as part of the Iraq war propaganda campaign, a series of leaked memos has shown,” reports the London Telegraph.
In an April 2006 memo, Rumsfeld encouraged Pentagon officials to “Keep elevating the threat” and “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines etc. Make the American people realise they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists”.
Rumsfeld also urged his staff to concoct “bumper sticker statements” (mindless clichés) in an attempt to garner continued support for the occupation of Iraq.
In the most telling e mail, the former defense secretary ordered the Pentagon to “link Iraq to Iran,” heralding the birth of the now saturated propaganda talking point that Iran is fueling the violence in Iraq and helping to kill U.S. troops, despite the fact that British officials patrolling the Iran-Iraq border admit that there is “No concrete proof that Iran is supplying Iraq.”
Rumsfeld’s obsession with micro-managing every aspect of the propaganda offensive upon the American people led to him disseminating anything up to 60 “snowflakes” or memos every single day, much to the chagrin of Pentagon employees.
His insistence that an artificial climate of fear be maintained in America about the threat of new terror attacks in order to sell the unpopular war in Iraq are the smoking gun for criminal charges to be initiated.
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By several of the very definitions of terrorism, Rumsfeld has provably engaged in terrorism, by hyping the threat of terror to achieve a political objective.
- A psychological strategy of war for gaining political ends by deliberately creating a well-founded climate of fear among the civilian population.
- The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence against people or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies.
- The systematic use of terror, the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear for bringing about political change.
- The use of – or threatened use of – criminal violence against civilians or civilian infrastructure to achieve political ends through fear and intimidation, rather than direct confrontation.
- The calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear.
Under any of the definitions of terrorism listed above, Rumsfeld has demonstrably engaged in terror by artificially hyping the fear of new attacks as part of a strategy to achieve a political objective.
A Window On The “Snowflakes”
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/11/01/couricandco/entry3441874.shtml
A published report has opened a window on the world as Donald Rumsfeld saw it during his tenure as Defense Secretary. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld’s memos were known as snowflakes. There was a blizzard of messages from his office. The Washington Post obtained some of the wartime defense secretary’s 20,000 memos including one that drew sharp responses today from the White House and a leading Arab American group.
According to the Post, Rumsfeld contended that Muslims avoid “physical labor.” He expressed the belief that oil wealth removed Muslims “from the reality of work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world.” His memo said, “Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed.” Rumsfeld also warned, “An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism.”
White House press secretary Dana Perino said Rumsfeld’s observations were “not in line with the president’s views.” She said she could understand why Arab Americans would be offended by the comments attributed to Rumsfeld.
The report brought a terse reaction from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Spokesman Kareem Shora told CBS News Radio, “It seems very clear from the quotes that Mr. Rumsfeld had a very stereotypical, negative pessimistic view of Muslims. He’s labeling 2.2 billion people in the world as lazy and against physical labor. It’s going to be very harmful to our efforts in the Middle East and to winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.” The White House Press Secretary said the White House is already aware “that we have a lot of work to do to win hearts and minds across the Arab world and the Muslim world.”
The Post said the Rumsfeld memos were marked “for official use only.” They were not classified. The paper quoted a Rumsfeld spokesman who complained that the story was “based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos.”
From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld . . .
In Sometimes-Brusque ‘Snowflakes,’ He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103103095.html?hpid=topnews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 1, 2007; Page A01
In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid “physical labor” and wrote of the need to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.
The memos, often referred to as “snowflakes,” shed light on Rumsfeld’s brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked “for official use only.”
In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are “not unusual.” Pessimistic news reports — “our publics risk falling prey to the argument that all is lost” — simply result from the wrong standards being applied, he wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” he wrote.
People will “rally” to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory.”
The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him “go out and push people back, rather than simply defending” Iraq policy and strategy. “I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can’t win on the defense,” he wrote. “We can’t just keep taking hits.”
The only man to hold the top Pentagon job twice — as both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary — Rumsfeld suggested that the public should know that there will be no “terminal event” in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. “It is going to be a long war,” he wrote. “Iraq is only one battleground.”
Based on the discussion with military analysts, Rumsfeld tied Iran and Iraq. “Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran,” he wrote in his April 2006 memo.
Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld’s distillation of the analysts’ comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term “bumper stickers.”
“You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos — carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary,” Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. “After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records.”
In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a “worldwide insurgency.” The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to “end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world.” He then advised aides “to test what the results could be” if the war on terrorism were renamed.
Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims “from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed,” he wrote. “An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism.”
If radicals “get a hold of” oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he added, the United States will have “an enormous national security problem.”
The memos delve into issues beyond Iraq and terrorism. In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2006, Rumsfeld warned that the United States is “getting run out of Central Asia” by the Russians, who are doing a “considerably better job at bullying” than Washington is doing to “counter their bullying.”
As public discontent and congressional questioning grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one- or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.
“I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph Peters’ op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible,” he writes on Feb. 6, 2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried “chronic troop shortages in Iraq” while the Pentagon buys “high-tech toys that have no missions.”
On March 10, he commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a “better presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard.” A Washington Post-ABC News poll that month found that 65 percent of Americans thought that Bush had no plan for victory.
On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point analysis of the seven “mistakes” columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay — which he wanted to see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had “gone sour.”
“Please have someone find precisely when I said ‘dead-enders’ and what the context was,” he ordered Smith in September 2006.
A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that said the Army was ruined “is disgraceful,” Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The editorial said that “one welcome dividend” of Rumsfeld’s departure was that the United States would “now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down.”
Rumsfeld later reprimanded his staff, writing, “I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been.” He then instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army. “We need to get that story out,” he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft by Friday.
*The Media is Pro-Military-Imperialism Biased
I wrote this over a year ago. As with most of this stuff I’ve been transferring from my old spot, I could go MUCH further with this, but don’t have time.
When the Iraq war was first beginning, most had seemed to think that they were getting a somewhat accurate portrayal of the “reasons” we were driven to conflict. Because the media uncritically parroted the administrations every claims and fabrication, they were directly complicit not only selling the war, but US buying the war. From there, ensuring that people ar ejust content enough to be able to ignore or support the war.
When the war started, the media was right inside with military forces reporting “live” “from the scene”. They reported mostly the same “view” we ever seen the media portray in almost any war. All they ever seem to show is the tank shooting, the jet shooting the missiles, the troops running and maybe shooting. They try their best to make it look like something we’d pay money to go see in an action movie. They don’t show the other end of the things that are shooting.
They avoid mentioning that unexploded cluster bombs often result in civilians blowing their limbs off in later contact.
They refuse to mention how virtually all of the various munitions are made from depleted uranium, despite the fact that even the DOD admits that it’s a highly toxic and partially radioactive substance.
This is why the U.S. Army prefers to use depleted uranium over
tungsten ammunition. If you look on the chart you can see that the depleted uranium is a material that has a characteristic that allows it to sharpen itself as it penetrates the target.
www.xs4all.nl…
It’s critical that they don’t spoil the DOD’s avoid jail card, beause using it in most of the weapons platforms gives our military tremendous advantage, meaning less troops dying. Keeping the troops deaths extremely low isn’t important merely for caring abotu the troops lives, it’s about making sure that public support is easy to sway in all of the never ending global conflicts.
Then the war begins, and then it even “ends”. It’s never about actually leaving, it’s about establishing military bases and economic and political control. Or re-establishing as is the case with Iraq.
Then they still implicitly and explicitly help sell the current and upcoming wars.
CLEAR-CUT:
Conservatives often believe that the Media in general has a Liberal bias because they don’t show the good images like the soldiers playing with the kids:
Liberals on the other hand tend to believe that the Media has a Conservative bias, as they don’t show the other side of the coin:
It’s really quite clear when you step back that they only show just enough to mention the issue without getting anyone too upset that they might do something about it. They are “fair” in that they don’t show the good images otherwise Liberals would be able to see a clearcut bias. It’s likely they would percieve ”opposing bias” anyways thanks to what’s known as the “hostile media effect“, but because the Media doesn’t show the “good” images it maintains an “even balanced” appearance.
Hersh: U.S. Funds Being Secretly Funneled To Violent Al Qaeda-Linked Groups
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/25/hersh-qaeda/
New Yorker columnist Sy Hersh says the “single most explosive” element of his latest article involves an effort by the Bush administration to stem the growth of Shiite influence in the Middle East (specifically the Iranian government and Hezbollah in Lebanon) by funding violent Sunni groups.
Hersh says the U.S. has been “pumping money, a great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any congressional oversight” for covert operations in the Middle East where it wants to “stop the Shiite spread or the Shiite influence.” Hersh says these funds have ended up in the hands of “three Sunni jihadist groups” who are “connected to al Qaeda” but “want to take on Hezbollah.”
Hersh summed up his scoop in stark terms: “We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11.” Watch it:
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Hersh added, “All of this should be investigated by Congress, by the way, and I trust it will be. In my talking to membership — members there, they are very upset that they know nothing about this. And they have great many suspicions.”
Transcript:
BLITZER: Near the end of your article, you have this explosive point in there about John Negroponte, who is now going to be the deputy secretary of state, as opposed to the head of U.S. intelligence.
You write this: “I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence officials that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept the position of deputy secretary of state.”
Explain what you were hearing, because that is obviously a very explosive charge.
HERSH: Yes. It is probably the single most explosive, if you will, or depressing — or distressing sort of thing I discovered in the last few months, which is simply this. This administration has made a policy change, a decision that they are going to put all of the pressure they can on the Shiites, that is the Shiite regime in Iran, the Shiite — and they are also doing everything they can to stop Hezbollah — which is Shiite, the Hezbollah organization from getting any control or any more of a political foothold in Lebanon.
So they essentially, I quote the — I saw Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, and he described it this way, as “fitna (ph),” the Arab word for “civil war.” As far as he is concerned, we are interested in recreating what is happening in Iraq in Lebanon, that is Sunni versus Shia. And in looking into that story, and I saw him in December, I found this. That we have been pumping money, a great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any congressional oversight, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia is putting up some of this money, for covert operations in many areas of the Middle East where we think that the — we want to stop the Shiite spread or the Shiite influence.
They call it the “Shiite Crescent.” And a lot of this money, and I can’t tell you with absolute certainty how — exactly when and how, but this money has gotten into the hands — among other places, in Lebanon, into the hands of three — at least three jihadist groups. There are three Sunni jihadist groups whose main claim to fame inside Lebanon right now is that they are very tough. These are people connected to al Qaeda who want to take on Hezbollah. So this government, at the minimum, we may not directly be funneling money to them, but we certainly know that these groups exist.
My government, which arrests al Qaeda every place it can find them and send — some of them are n Guantanamo and other places, is sitting back while the Lebanese government we support, the government of Prime Minister Siniora, is providing arms and sustenance to three jihadist groups whose sole function, seems to me and to the people that talk to me in our government, to be there in case there is a real shoot-’em-up with Hezbollah and we really get into some sort of serious major conflict between the Sunni government and Hezbollah, which is largely Shia, who are basically — or as you know, there is a coalition headed by Hezbollah that is challenging the government right now, demonstrations, sit-ins.
There has been some violence. So America, my country, without telling Congress, using funds not appropriated, I don’t know where, by my sources believe much of the money obviously came from Iraq where there is all kinds of piles of loose money, pools of cash that could be used for covert operations.
All of this should be investigated by Congress, by the way, and I trust it will be. In my talking to membership — members there, they are very upset that they know nothing about this. And they have great many suspicions.
We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…
BLITZER: And your bottom line, Sy…
HERSH: … and could lead to a real mess…
BLITZER: Your bottom line is that Negroponte was aware of this, obviously, and he wanted to distance himself from it? That is why he decided to give up that position and take the number two job at the State Department?
HERSH: He — that is one of the reasons, I was told. Negroponte also was not in tune with Cheney. There was a lot of complaints about him because he was seen as much of a stickler, too ethical for some of the operations the Pentagon wants to run.
The War on Terror is a Complete and Utter Fraud
By nate
First, President Cheney’s boss King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, threatened Sunni terrorism in Iraq if we left:
Official: Saudis to back Sunnis if U.S. leaves Iraq
Then, the US Government denied that was the case:
US denies Saudis threatened to back Iraqi Sunnis
Now, it’s official. Even the Iraq Study Group Agrees:
Saudis Reportedly Funding Iraqi Sunnis
Hey, looky here. Breaking news:
Western Diplomats: Pakistani Intelligence Is Sponsoring Taliban Uprising
But is this anything new? If you’re a victim of mainstream talking points, you probably think Bushco’s friends are doing this behind their back. Think again:
Senate intelligence committee Chairman Bob Graham said there was a ’state sponser’ in 9/11 [PBS]
ISI (CIA ally) party to terrorism on US interests [BBC]
‘US ignored its own agency’s reports on ISI (CIA ally) backing Al Qaeda’ [FOX]
Pakistan Spy Service Aiding Bin Laden [BBC]
2 Allies Aided Bin Laden, Say Panel Members [LA Times]
ISI Agent Tells FBI Informant in January 2001, “Those Towers Are Coming Down” [NBC, Others]
You probably think only Arab governments support terrorism. Think again:
9/11 Hijackers living w/ FBI Informant. [CNN]
London Bombing (trains, buses) Orchestrator was an MI6 agent. [FOX]
London bombing (trains, buses) ringleader was an MI5 agent? [BBC radio]
civilian plane bomber was CIA agent? [BBC]
9/11 Hijackers traines at US Military Installations? [Newsweek]
The CIA hired al Qaida ops to fight in Kosovo Liberation Army? (Milosevic on the basis of US government memo) [1, 2]
Osama Bin Laden not Wanted for 9/11, According to FBI [FBI.GOV]
They’re Laughing at you. It’s about time you find out the horrible truth.
No single organization, nor any entire organizational structure, was complicit in 9/11. Really think about that. At first, it sounds absurd. That is, until you understand more about the historical nature of black operations, including documented false-flag terrorist events.
They are the most influential events in all of history but the mainstream media and public education have dutifully served their corporate, military and political shareholders by not educating you on these issues. You can begin your search for truth with the films below. Take notes. Check facts. The world is in grave danger so long as we remain uninformed but the truth is viral. Become a carrier.
9/11: Press for Truth, 1:24:21
Bush beckons followers to engage in propaganda
Bush calls for surge in ‘Support Our Troops’ bumper stickers
President Bush called on citizens Wednesday during a speech in Detroit, Michigan, to consider a surge in ‘Support Our Troops’ bumper stickers in a final push to victory in Iraq. With American forces taking more casualties, and the number of dead surpassing the nearly 3,000 killed during the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush has come under criticism for his “shortsighted and poorly planned” policies in the Middle East.
Rememeber that memories are physical structures inside the brain, and the more a network a brain cells (memory) is “excited” it is thus reinforced. This is why the Nazi’s, and also “cult of personality” types, plant their symbols and faces everywhere. Constant “excitation” of memories or mindsets, especailly social group based mindsets, reinforces the target mindset to take hold of the target individuals mind (preferably all throughout the day).
Exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon well known to advertisers: people express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them. This effect has been nicknamed the “familiarity breeds liking” effect. In interpersonal attractiveness research studies, the term exposure principle is used to characterize the phenomenon in which the more often a person is seen by someone the more attractive and intelligent that person appears to be.
Simply exposing experimental subjects to a picture or a piece of music briefly led those subjects to later rate it more positively than other, similar stimuli which they had merely not been shown earlier. In another experiment, students were shown a Chinese character on a tachistoscope faster than could be perceived consciously. Later, students rated these characters as better than those to which they had not been exposed. When asked, the students were able to cite specific and detailed reasons why they preferred the characters that they did (which must have been at least partially rationalization).
The effect might be explained by the idea that recognizing a familiar environment makes us feel safe. This effect was first studied by Robert Zajonc. A related effect relevant to advertising and propaganda is the sleeper effect.
The new “surge” comes as no surprise after Bush recently called for another “surge” of some $670 million in a media PR propaganda.
Bush Calls For Another Surge…In Propaganda
All told, the (president’s proposed fiscal year 2008) budget calls for $668.2 million for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the federal agency that supervises all US government non-military propaganda.
At the same time Bush’s budget proposes steep cuts to federal funds for public broadcasting by nearly 25%. According to the Association of Public Television Stations, the Bush budget would cut up to $145 million from the $460 million proposed FY 2008 budget for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting.
And exactly one year ago, the (admitted) total for propaganda spending was $2.3 Billion (tax payer dollars) since 2003 alone.
Bush Admin. spent over $2.6 Billion on advertising and P.R. since 2003, GAO finds
The Administration spent $2.6 billion on contracts with advertising agencies ($2.4 billion), public relations firms ($297 million), and media organizations and individual members of the media ($25 million).
The Department of Defense spent the most on media contracts, with contracts worth $2.1 billion. The Department of Health and Human Services spent more than $300 million on these contracts, the Department of Treasury spent $252 million, and the Department of Homeland Security spent $24 million during this period.
McCAIN’S BIG OIL TIES —FROM IRAQ TO COLOMBIA
by Nikolas Kozloff, NACLA News
When you consider John McCain’s ties to Big Oil, the GOP candidate’s claim to be a political maverick taking on special interests is nothing short of absurd. According to Progressive Media USA, a Washington, DC-based non-profit, the Arizona Senator has benefited handily from the oil sector. Indeed, McCain has netted at least $700,000 from the oil and gas industry since 1989.
In Congress, he has worked tirelessly to advance the interests of the oil industry. For example, McCain’s tax plan gives the top five oil companies $3.8 billion a year in tax breaks. McCain meanwhile has voted against reducing dependence on foreign oil, has twice rejected windfall profits tax for Big Oil, and has voted against taxing oil companies to provide a $100 rebate to consumers. If that were not enough, McCain also made a risky political decision recently to back new offshore oil drilling in the US.
McCain, Iraq and Chevron
Moreover, oil companies that have contributed to McCain have benefited greatly in terms of their foreign operations. One might cite the case of Chevron, for example, which has donated to McCain’s cloak-and-dagger International Republican Institute (IRI). Though the Arizona Senator seldom talks about it, he has gotten much of his foreign policy experience working with the operation. Since 1993, McCain has served as chair of the outfit, which is funded by the US government and private money. The group, which receives tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year, claims to promote democracy worldwide.
The hottest country in which IRI currently operates is Iraq. According to the IRI’s own web site, since the summer of 2003 the organization “has conducted a multi-faceted program aimed at promoting the development of democracy in Iraq. Toward this end, IRI works with political parties, indigenous civil society groups, and elected and other government officials. In support of these efforts, IRI also conducts numerous public opinion research projects and assists its Iraqi partners in the production of radio and television ads and programs.”
Prior to 2003, McCain was one of the biggest proponents of invading Iraq. Now that US forces are installed in the Middle Eastern nation, McCain wants the occupation to continue indefinitely, even for “a thousand” or “a million years.” Upon closer scrutiny, it is clear that oil companies have benefited from McCain’s hawkish Iraq policy. Though George Bush has scoffed at suggestions that the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with oil, recent press reports give some credence to such claims.
In April of this year, Chevron announced that it was involved in discussions with the Iraqi Oil Ministry to increase production in an important oil field in southern Iraq. The discussions were aimed at finalizing a two-year deal, or technical support agreement, to boost production at the West Qurna Stage 1 oil field near Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city. Since McCain solidified his position as the GOP’s nominee, Chevron Chairman David O’Reilly gave $28,500 to the GOP. Meanwhile lobbyist Wayne Berman, McCain’s national finance co-chairman, counts Chevron as one of his principal clients.
Colombia’s Oil Profile
Another war-torn country attracting McCain’s attention is Colombia. In early July, McCain took valuable time out of his presidential campaign to visit the Andean nation. Catching a fast ride on a Colombian drug interdiction boat near Cartagena, McCain praised the government for prosecuting the drug war and making “substantial and positive” progress on human rights. Contrasting himself to his presidential opponent Barack Obama, McCain endorsed the pending trade deal with the South American country.
For the most part, the US media ignores Colombia. When it does cover the Andean nation, it tends to focus on drug-related issues and cocaine production. As a result, the US public doesn’t know that Colombia is also a huge oil producer and that the US has important economic interests in this part of the world. US officials would like to guarantee a safe and steady supply of crude from neighboring countries like Venezuela and Colombia, thus lessening dependence on Middle East providers. Today, Colombia is the United States’ 12th largest foreign oil supplier (and third largest in South America after Venezuela and Ecuador) and ships 150,000 barrels of oil per day to the American market.
According to Oil and Gas Journal, Colombia had 1.45 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves in 2007, the fifth-largest in South America. The bulk of Colombia’s crude oil production occurs in the Andes foothills and the eastern Amazonian jungles. However, vast unexplored and potentially hydrocarbon-rich territories remain in the country, which shares many of the geological features of oil-rich neighbor Venezuela.
Since 1999, Colombia’s government has undertaken extraordinary measures to make the investment climate more attractive to foreign oil companies (in this sense, Colombia differs from other South American countries which have adopted a more nationalistic oil policy). The authorities for example have allowed petroleum corporations to own 100 percent stakes in oil ventures. The government has also established a lower, sliding-scale royalty rate on oil projects, mandated longer exploration licenses and forced the state-owned oil company Ecopetrol to compete with private operators. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the measures “have contributed to creating one of the most attractive oil investment regimes in the world.”
McCain’s Colombia Ties
One firm attracted by the generous new financial terms has been Chevron, the same company that contributed to McCain’s campaigns and the IRI and which has benefited handsomely from the opening up of Iraqi fields. In association with Ecopetrol, Chevron operates the Ballena and Riohacha natural gas fields in the Guajira province of northeastern Colombia. Chevron’s total daily average production in 2007 was 469 million cubic feet of gas per day.
But McCain’s Colombia ties go much deeper than this.
As Sam Stein noted on the Huffington Post, McCain’s “position as an independent arbitrator on Colombia—a country often criticized for its labor and human rights practices—is undermined by a bevy of advisers who have earned large amounts either lobbying for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, or representing corporations that do business with that country.”
To get a sense of the scope of McCain’s conflict of interest on Colombia one need look no farther than Charlie Black, a senior adviser to the Arizona senator. A successful 60-year-old Washington lobbyist, Black is a notorious figure within the GOP. Over the course of his career he has gained a reputation as a ruthless operator with a merciless instinct for exposing an opponent’s flaws.
Black, who enjoyed stints as campaign operator for George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, got to know John McCain in the late 1970s when the future Arizona senator worked as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate. In 1996, the pair became close while working on Senator Phil Gramm’s failed presidential bid. Today, Black is a frequent McCain campaign surrogate on television. On the trail he sits in a big swivel chair at the front of the “Straight Talk Express,” joining in McCain’s rolling news conferences.
Black’s Washington, DC public relations firm BKSH has developed a reputation for taking on foreign clients who display scant regard for human rights. In 1998, Black agreed to represent Occidental Petroleum (or Oxy), an energy company based in Los Angeles, California. At the time, the GOP spin master was surely aware of Occidental’s sordid past. In Colombia, the company had already acquired a reputation for its brutal and militaristic policies.
Charlie Black and Santo Domingo Massacre
The same year Black took on Occidental, the company was embroiled in controversy when the Colombian Air Force dropped cluster bombs on Santo Domingo, a village near an Occidental pipeline, killing 18 innocent civilians. Human rights groups and Colombian government officials said the bombing was a mistake that occurred because three employees of a Florida-based aerial security company employed by Occidental to monitor guerrilla movements had provided incorrect coordinates to Colombian military pilots.
The US employees of the security company dropped out of sight and Colombian government efforts to have them handed over for questioning and perhaps trial proved fruitless. Frustrated by the security company’s stonewalling, human rights groups filed suit in California in 2003 and 2004 against Occidental. Occidental still denies any responsibility for the bombing of Santo Domingo, and has claimed that it “has not and does not provide lethal aid to Colombia’s armed forces.”
Such affairs were apparently of little concern to Black, who lobbied Congress, the State Department, and the White House on Occidental’s behalf regarding “general energy issues” and “general trade issues” involving Colombia. McCain’s PR man also fought to win foreign assistance to Colombia and to block an economic embargo against the South American country.
Occidental and the U’wa
The Santo Domingo massacre was certainly a black mark on Occidental’s record. However, there were yet more controversies in store for the company.
Under an agreement with the Colombian government, Oxy acquired the right to explore for oil in the country’s northeast. Unfortunately, in granting Oxy its exploration permit, the government ignored a constitutional requirement that native peoples within the area be consulted first. Oxy quickly became embroiled in conflict with the indigenous U’wa, whose territory was nestled in the misty forests of northeast Colombia near the border with Venezuela.
As company geologists and engineers moved in to build roads through the indigenous reservation, so too did the Colombian army, which installed two military bases in the vicinity. It wasn’t long before the military began to harass local residents.
Known as a proud, strongly rooted people, the U’wa repeatedly denounced Occidental’s oil operation. The U’wa argued that oil exploration would threaten their people, damage the land, fill their territory with alien workers and destroy the world they knew. At one point the approximately 5,000 U’wa even threatened to commit collective suicide by leaping from a cliff unless the oil company stopped operations on their territory.
Tensions were ratcheted up when, in February 2000, Oxy began construction on its Gibraltar 1 drill site. Some 2,700 U’wa Indians, local farmers, students, and union members immediately attempted to stop Oxy’s construction. When indigenous peoples sought to prevent trucks from reaching the construction site, riot police used tear gas to break up a road blockade. Three U’wa children were drowned in a fast-flowing river as the U’wa fled the attack.
Two months later, when Oxy began to move heavy equipment and materials into the area, the U’wa again blocked local roads. While the protesters permitted other traffic to pass, they laid their bodies in front of Occidental trucks. In June, the government sent in riot police and soldiers; 28 demonstrators were subsequently injured and 33 arrested. Believing that the area might contain up to 1.5 billion barrels of oil, Occidental shortly thereafter began test drilling on U’wa ancestral lands.
Promoting Oil Development through Militarization
Even as tensions escalated within the U’wa reserve, McCain adviser Black was unperturbed. According to Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch, a human rights group that works on behalf of Colombian indigenous groups opposed to oil drilling, Black was “very active” while Congress was debating a $1.3 billion military assistance package to Colombia that became law in 2000. “We’d be making the rounds in Congress,” Soltani said, “and Oxy would be there making the rounds, too.”
Why would Black also be so interested in trying to secure military funding for Colombia? As Oxy’s oil operations expanded, acquiring military support proved increasingly vital for the company. Oxy was part owner of the Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline. The Caño Limón pipeline leads from Arauca to the Caribbean coast and crosses through the U’wa’ traditional lands. Not surprisingly, Oxy’s activities quickly attracted the attention of left-wing guerrillas who repeatedly blew up the pipeline. The attacks caused more than $500 million in losses to the company between December 1999 and December 2000.
The U’wa had long feared that oil exploration would bring bloodshed and conflict within their ancestral lands.
And as it turned out, the Indians were right.
Soon enough, Colombia’s wider civil conflict began to spill over into U’wa traditional territory. In March 1999, three U’wa supporters from the United States—Terence Freitas, Ingrid Washinawotok, and Laheehae Gay—were kidnapped and killed by FARC guerrillas in the department of Arauca.
While it’s unclear whether Oxy had any direct involvement in the killings, the company is known to have had links to the guerrillas. In testimony given before a Congressional subcommittee, Lawrence Meriage, Oxy’s vice president for communication and public affairs, acknowledged that Occidental personnel regularly paid off guerrillas in exchange for being left alone.
Meriage also claimed during the hearing that one benefit of Occidental operations in the U’wa region had been the increased presence of government troops. Indeed, Oxy paid a fee to the Colombian government on every barrel of oil produced. Meriage said that Occidental supported increased US military assistance to Colombia, and even urged the United States to expand its military operations in Colombia
In an effort to expand military funding to Colombia, the company spent nearly $4 million lobbying Congress in Washington. The investment paid off when the US government agreed to provide military aid, equipment and training to the 18th Brigade in Arauca, a unit which had been involved in grave human rights violations including attacks against trade unions and other members of civil society.
In May 2002, following a massive outcry by environmental groups, Oxy finally announced that it would return its controversial oil block to the Colombian government. Nevertheless, the company continued to operate in Colombia. Currently, the oil firm occupies the Caño-Limón oil field located in the Llanos Basin in the northeastern part of the country. The company also holds a 35 percent interest in the Caricare field and has signed a production agreement with Ecopetrol to operate the La Cira-Infantas field in central Colombia.
Although Oxy’s Caño-Limón field has yielded hundreds of million dollars annually in profits, the pipeline has been an ongoing target for guerrilla forces. In 2007, Occidental again found itself in the midst of a human-rights mess. This time, the company was accused in congressional testimony of being “complicit”—with several other major corporations—in the murder of three labor leaders.
Hopelessly Compromised on Colombia
Despite these ominous developments, Black continued his lobbying efforts over at BKSH. Over the long haul the PR man’s loyalty to Occidental proved enormously lucrative, with Black netting $1.6 million in fees for BKSH from 2001 to 2007. Occidental was surely pleased with Black’s work: in 2003, Congress approved a special appropriation of nearly $100 million for the protection of oil pipelines in Colombia.
McCain’s aides have repeatedly argued that the senator’s presidential campaign does not have direct connections to companies represented by such advisers as Black. The Arizona senator’s handlers assert that McCain should not be held accountable for any company misdeeds nor should the public presume that McCain is unduly influenced by corporate interests.
Granted, McCain may claim that there is a degree of separation between Charlie Black and himself. There are several problems with this argument however.
To begin with McCain appointed Black to his position, which speaks volumes about McCain’s political priorities. In the second place, the Senator has a personal connection to Oxy through Ray Irani, Occidental’s chief executive. In 2008, Irani doled out $2,800 to McCain’s presidential campaign and a full $25,000 to the Republican National Committee. Irani could easily afford the donation: in 2007 he was the tenth highest paid CEO in the United States, raking in a whopping $34.2 million from Occidental.
Throughout his political career, McCain has protected Big Oil on Capitol Hill. The Arizona Senator has eagerly accepted Chevron and Occidental money to ensure his own success. The oil lobby, which is surely hoping for a McCain win come November, can count on its man to ensure a healthy “investment climate” in Iraq and Colombia. If anyone happens to interfere with petroleum investment, warrior President McCain can be relied upon to back up US oil operations with the full might and resources of the US military.
—-
Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008).
This story first appeared July 8 on NACLA News.
RESOURCES
McCain Source, Progressive Media USA
http://mccainsource.com/
Colombia page, Energy Information Administration, US Department of Energy
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Colombia/Oil.html
McCain Heads to Colombia, Already Tied to Country by Lobbyists
by Sam Stein, Huffington Post, July 1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/01/mccain-heads-to-colombia_n_110108.html?page=2
“A Million Years in Iraq”—President McCain’s Dangerous Recruiting Poster for Insurgents
by Jon Soltz, Huffington Post, Jan. 4
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-soltz/a-million-years-in-iraq_b_79798.html
BKSH & Associates
http://www.bksh.com/
International Republican Institute
http://www.iri.org/
Destabilizing Haiti
New York Times editorial on the IRI, Feb. 3, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/03/opinion/edhaiti.php
United Steelworkers press release on Occidental Petroleum complicity with human rights abuses in Colombia
July 22, 2008
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=PRNI2&STORY=/www/story/07-22-2008/0004853487&EDATE=
See also:
OBAMA AND THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
World War 4 Report, July 2008
http://ww4report.com/node/5716
From our Daily Report:
FCC probe of Haiti telcom deal hits McCain backer
WW4 Report, July 29, 2008
http://ww4report.com/node/5832
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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Aug. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution
Ad Lab: Stage Design Magic as Propaganda Tool
One of the most interesting (for this blog) stories from the Iraq war was about the design of the U.S. military’s press room in Qatar:
“A scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the television programme Good Morning America. In 2001 the White House had put him in charge of creating background designs for presidential speeches – unsurprising to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without food.” (Le Monde Diplomatique, Jan 2008, but the details have been widely circulated since the war’s start).
Today, pictures of the two stages for the upcoming democratic extravaganza are making rounds on the net. Take a look at the designs: Republican (still a computer rendering; here’s another angle) and Democratic. From GOPConvention2008.com: “The stage was designed to facilitate the candid and personal tone that Americans have come to expect from Senator McCain. The intimate setting will be a fitting backdrop for Senator McCain’s acceptance speech.”
And some behind-the-scenes details from Denver Post: “They [DNC] will bring so many lights and speakers — as many as 300,000 pounds’ worth — the ceiling will have to be reinforced to hold them.”
Would love to know who’s behind the designs.
Update: thanks to AdLab’s readers (Nishad and Bonniel; see comments), we now know: for DNC, it’s Tribe Design and it’s David Nash (exec. producer, it’s his fifth straight convention; press release) for RNC.
Let me see if I can pull some pictures of other similar gatherings elsewhere. Should be a fun study. Stay tuned.
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Scheherazade in the White House
By Christian Salmon
A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘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’ ” (1).
Suskind’s article was a sensation, which the paper called an intellectual scoop. Columnists and bloggers seized on the phrase “reality-based community” which spread across the internet. Google had nearly a million hits for it in July 2007. Wikipedia created a page dedicated to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University: “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community’, their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah, right…’)” (2).
The remarks, which were probably made by Karl Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.
Disney to the rescue
The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provided a spectacular illustration of the White House’s desire to create its own reality. Pentagon departments, keen not to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf war in 1991, paid particular attention to their communications strategy. As well as 500 embedded journalists integrated into sections of the armed services, great attention was paid to the design of the press room at US forces headquarters in Qatar: for a million dollars, a storage hangar was transformed into an ultramodern television studio with stage, plasma screens and all the electronic equipment needed to produce videos, geographic maps and diagrams for real time combat.
A scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the television programme Good Morning America. In 2001 the White House had put him in charge of creating background designs for presidential speeches – unsurprising to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without food. Blaine claimed in a book in 2002 that he was the successor to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century magician who agreed to go to Algeria at the French government’s request to help it quell an uprising by showing that his magic was better than that of the rebels (3). It is not known whether that is what the Pentagon expected from Blaine but it seems that use was made of his illusionist talents for special effects.
Scott Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who worked within the Republican propaganda machine, created many backgrounds against which Bush made important statements during his terms of office. On 1 May 2003 he stage-managed the presidential speech on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier before a sign reading “Mission accomplished: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
The show didn’t end there. Bush landed aboard the carrier in a fighter plane renamed Navy One; on it was written “George Bush, Commander-in-Chief”. He was seen leaving the cockpit dressed in a flight suit, his helmet under his arm as if he were returning from war in a remake of Top Gun (the film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is a familiar face in Hollywood-Pentagon operations; he made a reality TV show, Profiles from the Front Line, on the war in Afghanistan).
The former New York Times theatre critic, Frank Rich, described the television coverage of this event and said it was fantastic – like theatre. David Broder of The Washington Post was captivated by what he called Bush’s physical posture (4). Sforza had to stage the scene carefully so that the city of San Diego, about 60km away, was not seen on the horizon when the carrier was supposed to be out in open sea in the combat zone.
But the staging was never as explicit as on 15 August 2002 when Bush solemnly spoke of national security in front of Mount Rushmore with its sculptures of the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. During his speech the cameras were placed at an angle that allowed Bush to be filmed in profile, his face superimposed on to those of his predecessors.
The image becomes the story
For Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the “great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve”, Sforza rented three barges to take the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan’s declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with the Statue of Liberty in the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was around the speaker’s head was as important as the head itself (5).
What is around the head turns an image into a legend: “Mission accomplished”, the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty – over time the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the desired emotion. For Americans in 2002 nothing could have had a greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was ready to concentrate on important matters.
According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control” (6). Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.
As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world. Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement” (7). This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”
NEW: PR Push for Iraq War Preceded Intelligence Findings
National Security Archive Update, August 22, 2008
PR Push for Iraq War Preceded Intelligence Findings
“White Paper” Drafted before NIE even Requested
For more information contact:
John Prados – 202/994-7000
Washington, DC, August 22, 2008 – The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados.
The documents suggest that the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials. For example, a July 2002 draft of the “White Paper” ultimately issued by the CIA in October 2002 actually pre-dated the National Intelligence Estimate that the paper purportedly summarized, but which Congress did not insist on until September 2002.
A similar comparison between a declassified draft and the final version of the British government’s “White Paper” on Iraq weapons of mass destruction adds to evidence that the two nations colluded in the effort to build public support for the invasion of Iraq. Dr. Prados concludes that the new evidence tends to support charges raised by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan and by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its long-delayed June 2008 “Phase II” report on politicization of intelligence.
Visit the Web site of the National Security Archive for more information about today’s posting.
Pentagon suspends program for military ‘media analysts’
by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) April 28, 2008
The Pentagon has suspended a public affairs program that has come under fire for using retired military “media analysts” as surrogates to get out its messages on the Iraq war, a spokesman confirmed Monday.Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the program was undergoing an internal review following criticism that the retired officers offered Pentagon talking points as their own during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and thereafter.
“It’s temporarily suspended so we can take at look at some of the concerns,” said Whitman.
Teleconferences and briefings for the military analysts have been halted pending the review, which is being conducted by the Pentagon’s public affairs office, he said.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has not directly addressed the issue since the New York Times carried a lengthy report on the program April 20, except to say that the analysts should make clear they were speaking only for themselves.
The New York Times found that the Pentagon laid on special briefings and conference calls for the retired officers, many of whom then repeated the talking points as military experts on television news shows.
The Times also found that many of the media analysts also worked as consultants or served on the boards of defense contracting companies, but that those ties often went undisclosed to the public.
The only time Gates has met with the military media analysts was in March 2007, Whitman said, revising his earlier recollection that the secretary met with them in September.
Whitman said the program was designed to provide information to the US public “by any number of means, the media being one of them — analytical assessments and discussions on network television is another.”
He said the Pentagon also interacted with bloggers, corporate leaders and education leaders as part of the effort to reach out to the public.
*The United States of Iran: A Reversology
*The United States of Iran:
A Reversology
NOTE: Most of these images probably need to be clicked on, and this story can’t really be told without them.
This is a little perspective into the Iran war situation that is sure to be a big fuss after Iran’s Presidents badly worded remarks the other day. Pretty stupid if you ask me because normally he has it by the balls being the weaker nation that is threatened by invasion from imperial America.
In any case I’d still like to give everyone a little satire and a perspective of what must be going through the minds of the Iranians in light of the American threat. Sorry pro-war people, but Iran isn’t going to invade US or nuke us ‘just because’.
“…but no matter how you slice it (German Nazism, Italian Fascism & “Divine” Imperial Japan), it was just plain old militaristic imperialism.” – The United States Military, in the WW2 prpaganda film, “Why We Fight” Part 1 : Prelude To War.
Our Declaration of Independence would have been on February 1, 1979, after we retook our government from Iran. Before this, in 1953, they had overthrown our democratically elected leadership to install a repressive regime (admittedly to control our vast oil fields).
We eventually seized their embassy here in our country because it was an Iranian intelligence command center and because we were still upset after they had enslaved us with imperial force for almost 20 years. This would have given the Iranian government plenty of polarizing propaganda because the Iranian public wouldn’t have known of the real nature of the relations between their country and ours. Instead, all they’d know is that some crazy looking Christian guy over here started some Christian revolution and then took their guys hostage. That would polarize them for decades just so long as the masses never realized what the affair was really about. (Iranian Hostage Crisis)
We would have an extra sort of resentment because Iran would be a full blown empire-state, bent on global domination, who had been using underhand tricks and military force when needed to control half of the nations on our side of the hemisphere. To add insult to injury, those countries were all Christian while they were Muslims who were trying to convert us. This would further polarize us into our ‘national religion’ and would have masses of us in an uproar that the Iranians would refer to us crazy extremist terrorists. (American Imperialism)
We would have an extra sore spot when thinking of Iran for the audacity of helping to influence (a Canadian) Saddam Hussein, after putting him in power, and then helping to build his chemical and biological weapons programs so that they could help him maim and gas to kill some 500,000 of our people in a 10-year war. (Iran-Iraq War)
Shortly thereafter, we would have seen further evidence of Iran’s imperial posture after watching them tell the ‘Canadian Saddam‘ that they wouldn’t intervene if he invaded his oil rich neighbor and then invaded him after he did. Not before they fabricated an emotional account of ‘Canadian‘ forces throwing babies out of incubators to rally the Iranian people to gain support for the war. (Kuwaiti Incubator Babies Hoax)
As the rest of the world, we’d be anxiously watching Iran build their “New World Order” (as their president in 1990 referred to it as) with their backroom deals, underhanded tricks and military force when needed. A good example would have been when they used Al Qaeda (still our enemy in this narrative) as they went sector to sector in the Yugoslavia war-zone region, throughout the 1990’s, which they had helped to instigate in 1991 (Iran is still representing our actual actions, AND ally of Al Qaeda in this line) [we seemed to have used Al Qaeda in the Balkan's in the late 90's].
Finally, they would have secured the area to install their pipeline connecting to our nearby Caspian Sea (assuming our nation had the best access to it like in Iran’s case). We would have gotten an extra sense of patriotism on our 1st of February Day of Independence national holiday knowing that they would much rather enjoy our beach front real estate for their pipeline beyond their age old desire to control our nations physical resources. Nevertheless, we’d probably found their Afghanistan pipeline interests (to connect to the Caspian Sea) interesting since the Caspian Sea holds some 47 billion barrels of oil and 257 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Soon thereafter, the world would have watched them get attacked on September 11th. In the months following, their president would declare US as being part of the “Axis of Evil”. He would later refer to the war as a “crusade” and as “World War 3″.
In the months following, Iran then rather justifiably invaded Mexico, ‘to get’ “Osama” (Usama), but then in a fit of imperialism marched into Canada. Next they began a propaganda war not only in the world press, but even more so in their own country.
We’d probably be too shielded and busy to note how the Iranians don’t seem to mind that propaganda is psychological warfare even when their own government is using it against them to justify wars, but other societies probably would. We’re too busy sucking up all of our nations propaganda since both sides are using against their own people. But at the end of the day the best way to view it is who’s propaganda is more honest. In our case it would be to rally us in preparation of the imperial machine that has our country surrounded.
To them, their foaming at the mouth would be justified because we took their intelligence wing embassy as “hostages” after liberating them from enslaving our nation. For some strange reason they don’t seem to understand how their imperialism is no different than any of histories other empires when you stack the bodies.
RELATED MAPS:
The domination of the Caspian-region dreams of the ultra(neo)conservative political faction ‘The Project for a New Iranian Century‘ that has been holding the reign’s of the nation were about to come into their firm grip. All they need is for us “to attack them” to swing their public opinion and give their overlords the green light to march their empire into the final stronghold in the ‘oil rich kingdom’ of the world ‘North America‘.
In all fairness, it’s not like our hypothetical leadership is helping by making outlandish comments and claims while even allowing the state-run news sites convey poor translations of such. Our leadership is also ballsy in choosing to break OPEC standards and switch from trading oil in the Iranian Dollar to the Euro. Canadian Saddam performed the exact same stunt during Iran’s contested 2000 election and got himself hung.
It’s important not to disturb Iran’s “Dollar Hegemony” because there isn’t any gold backing their Dollar. Its value is artificial because the world has to trade in Iranian Dollars to purchase oil. It’s why their country needs national debt and income taxes, yet for some odd reason nobody knows about it. They (many of them anyways) assume that the wars are simply for securing the oil, but it goes even deeper to maintain Iranian Dollar Hegemony. They need the national debt and inflation to pay for the wars that are required to maintain their busted ass system.
Anyways, all is well here, for now, in the land of the “free” ‘Totalitarian Christo-Fascists‘. Those “Totalitarian Islamo-Fascists” have another thing coming if they think they’re going to take US down!
About
IGNORANCE IS FUTILE!
By: “Ignorance Isn’t Bliss” (IIB)
THE BLEEDING EDGE OF THE MERGER OF TYRANNY AND TECHNOLOGY.
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IIB Films Lab Releases:
Upcoming Releases Information: COMING…
“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.
About Page / Research Guide: LINK
Torrent Download: COMING…
Google Video: LINK
“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
Torrent Download: LINK
Google Video: LINK
Research Guide: COMING…
“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.
About Page: COMING…
Torrent Download: LINK
Google Video: LINK
Research Guide: COMING…
“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
Torrent Download: COMING…
Google Video: LINK
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”.
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- 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?
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- Is ACORN providing workers for the 2010 census?
- The 'Real' Uninsured
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