When Refusing to Kill Has a Higher Sentence Than Murder

Ann Wright, t r u t h o u t

September 20, 2008

From the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military has come under intense criticism and scrutiny for the deaths of civilians. This week, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan to “acknowledge” the deaths of innocent civilians in attacks in those countries.

In the five and one-half years of the US occupation of Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by US military personnel at checkpoints, during convoy movements and during operations to find the “enemy.” In the half-decade of US military presence in Iraq, a very small number of US military personnel and an even smaller number of CIA and contractors have been charged with manslaughter or murder in these deaths. The deaths of most civilians are counted in the “costs of war.” A few dozen military have been court-martialed on allegations of mistreatment, manslaughter and murder of Iraqi civilians. With a very few exceptions, most who were court-martialed have been acquitted. Those who were convicted have generally served light sentences.

This week we see again that punishment is less for murdering four Iraqis than for refusing to participate in a war that many citizens, and many in the military, see as a crime against the peace – a war crime.

On September 18, 2008, the US Army sentenced Specialist Belmor Ramos to seven months in prison, demotion to private and a dishonorable discharge for standing guard from a turret in a Humvee while three others in his unit, the First Infantry Division, bound, blindfolded, shot in the heads and dumped the bodies of four unidentified Iraqi men into a Baghdad canal in 2007 in retaliation for deaths in Ramos’s unit. According to Associated Press reports, during the court-martial, Ramos admitted his guilt: “I wanted them dead. I had no legal justification or excuse to do this.”

Ramos had been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, for which he could have received a life sentence. The military judge in Ramos’s court-martial in Vilsek, Germany, would have sentenced him to 40 years in prison had the military prosecutor not agreed to a plea bargain for seven months to testify in the upcoming court-martials of the three non-commissioned officers – Sgt. John E. Hatley, Sgt. 1st Class Joseph P. Mayo and Sgt. Michael P. Leahy Jr. – who were charged on September 16, 2008, with premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and obstruction of justice.

Longer Sentences for Resisting War Than for Murdering Civilians

Just one month ago, US Army Private Robin Long was sentenced to fifteen months in prison, reduced to private and given a dishonorable discharge for having been absent without leave from the Army rather than serving in a war he believed was unlawful. He had been deported from Canada where he had been speaking on his concerns about the legality of the war for three years and was handed over by Canadian immigration officials to the US military for prosecution. One month earlier, US Army Private First Class James Burmeister voluntarily returned from Canada and was sentenced in July 2008 to six months in prison for refusing to return to Iraq after two previous tours in which he was hit by three IEDs. In May 2008, Private First Class Robert Weiss was court-martialed in Vilseck, Germany, and sentenced to 7 months in jail for refusing to go to Iraq. Also in May 2008, Private First Class Ryan Jackson was also court-martialed and sentenced to 100 days in jail for refusing to go to Iraq.

In 2007, the court-martial of US Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer who refused to deploy to Iraq, ended in a mistrial. He is still on active duty with the Army. Also in 2007, US Army Sergeant Mark Wilkerson refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to seven months in jail. The Army denied the conscientious objection application of US Army medic Specialist Agustin Aguayo; he refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to eight months in jail. Also in 2007, Specialist Melanie McPherson, a US Army Minnesota Reservist, refused to go to Iraq in a job she was not trained for; she was court-martialed and sentenced to three months in jail.

In 2006, US Army Specialist Dale Bertell refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to four months in jail. US Army Texas National Guard Specialist Katherine Jashniski refused to deploy to Afghanistan; she was sentenced to four months in jail. US Army Sergeant Ricky Clousing of the 82nd Airborne Division refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to three months in jail. US Marine Corporal Ivan Brobeck voluntarily returned from 18 months in Canada and was court-martialed for refusing to return to Iraq; he was sentenced to eight months in jail.

In 2005, US Army Sergeant Kevin Benderman refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to 15 months in jail; he served 13 months. US Army Specialist Blake LeMoine refused to return to Iraq and served seven months in jail. When the conscientious objection application of US Army Private Neil Quentin Lucas was denied, he refused to go to Iraq and served 13 months in jail.

In 2004, US Army Sergeant Camilo Mejia refused to return to Iraq and was sentenced to 12 months in jail. The highest-ranking non-commissioned officer to refuse orders to Iraq, US Army Sergeant First Class Abdullah Webster, was sentenced to 14 months in jail. He was within two years of retirement when he refused to deploy to Iraq. US Navy Petty Officer Third Class Pablo Paredes refused to deploy on a ship carrying Marines to a war he considered illegal. He was sentenced to three months confinement. The US Marines denied the conscientious objection application of Corporal Joel Klimkewixz and he was sentenced to seven months in jail.

In 2003, the US Marines denied the conscientious objection application of Marine Reservist Stephen Funk and sentenced him to six months in jail. All of the war resisters who have been court-martialed for refusing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan have been given either dishonorable or bad conduct discharges.

Thousands of other military service members who privately and silently oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been given administrative discharges upon their voluntary return to the military after having been absent without leave.

Light Sentences for the Murders of Iraqis

Some of the more prominent cases where US military personnel have been court-martialed, but not necessarily convicted, for the murders of Iraqi civilians include:

On August 29, 2008, a civilian jury in Riverside, California, acquitted former US Marine Sergeant Jose Nazario Jr. on charges of voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of four unarmed Iraqi detainees during the siege of Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004.

In June, 2008, a U.S. military judge dismissed charges against Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, who had been accused of failing to investigate the November 2005 massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. Of the eight Marines originally charged in the Haditha massacre, only one still faces prosecution. Criminal charges have been dismissed against six of the Marines and a seventh Marine was acquitted.

In 2007, seven Camp Pendleton Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with murder and related offenses in the April 2006 kidnapping and killing of a 57-year-old retired Iraqi policeman in the village of Hamdania northwest of Baghdad. Only one of the men, squad leader Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III, remains in jail, convicted of murder and sentenced by a Camp Pendleton military jury to 15 years. The other six either served out the terms they agreed to in plea deals or had their sentences commuted by Lieutenant General James Mattis, the Commanding General of Camp Pendleton. Mattis ordered the men below Hutchins’s rank released after a military jury in July 2007 found Corporal Trent Thomas guilty for his role in the murders but limited his sentence to time already served. In releasing the others, General Mattis determined that Thomas’s sentence created an unfair disparity for his fellow Marines who had been convicted with higher sentences.

In December 2007, US Marine Reservist Lance Corporal Delano Holmes was convicted of negligent homicide for the stabbing death of Iraqi Army Private Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin, a man he shared guard duty with at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, on December 31, 2006. Holmes killed Hassin, stabbing him 17 times, slashing him another 26 times and nearly slicing his nose from his face. A military jury sentenced Holmes to time served, the second time in five months that a Camp Pendleton Marine military court jury allowed a defendant convicted in a homicide case to be sentenced to only time served. Holmes was reduced in rank from lance corporal to private and given a bad conduct discharge.

In August 2008, Article 32 hearings were held in Vilsek, Germany, to determine whether to proceed with criminal charges against Staff Sergeant Jess Cunningham and Sergeant Charles Quigley for the death of an Iraqi. The hearing officer has not yet decided whether the two will be court-martialed.

In only one murder case in Iraq have convicted US military personnel received substantial sentences. In August 2007, a military jury convicted US Army Private First Class Jesse Speilman of rape and four counts of felony murder for the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and the murders of her parents and younger sister on March 12, 2006, in Mahmoudiya, a village about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Speilman was sentenced to 110 years in prison, but will be eligible for parole in ten years. During their court-martial, Specialist James P. Barker and Sergeant Paul Cortez testified they took turns raping Abeer while Private Steven Green shot and killed her mother, father and younger sister. They also testified that Green shot Abeer Qassin in the head after raping her. They then set her body on fire to destroy evidence. Cruz was sentenced to 100 years in prison under a plea agreement and will be eligible for parole in 10 years. Barker pleaded guilty at his court-martial and was sentenced to 90 years in a military prison, with the possibility of parole. Private Bryan Howard was sentenced to 27 months in prison under a plea agreement. Private Steven D. Green was discharged from the Army for anti-social behavior before the murders had been discovered. However, he was arrested and charged with rape and murder in the Western District Court of Kentucky. He will be tried in that court on April 29, 2009. His attorney has filed documents for an insanity defense.

Higher Punishment for Killing Fellow Servicemen Than Iraqis

Punishment for murder of other U.S. service members is dramatically higher than for murder of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

In April 2003, US Army Sergeant Hasan Akbar, a member of the 101st Airborne Division, allegedly threw grenades into a tent at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait that killed two officers and wounded 14. Akbar was sentenced to death in April 2005.

In June 2005, US Army 42nd Infantry Division Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez allegedly killed two superior officers with an anti-personnel mine and grenades inside one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, near Tikrit, Iraq. Martinez’s court-martial is underway at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Earlier this week, on September 14, 2008, two US Army soldiers, assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, were shot and killed, reportedly by another soldier at their base, near the town of Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad. The soldier who reportedly killed the two others is confined and will be brought before a military magistrate this week for pretrial procedural determinations.

Economic Problem and Solution In a Nutshell

July 21, 2008

The Federal Reserve bank is a private corporation. They are an international banking cartel which makes money by printing and loaning money at interest. They are acting to crash the economy through dollar devaluation–printing and loaning money without economic justification. This is for two reasons: further centralization of power and centralization of wealth.

Throwing the Federal Reserve bankers in jail and throwing away the key would be the best solution. You’ll never hear an outcry like this in the MSM since the international bankers own the MSM and the mainstream politicians.

We should create a true public fiat currency like the Lincoln Greenback. This will be fought hard by the international banking cartel who own the MSM and mainstream politicians.

Since these two solutions won’t likely come about without millions marching on Washington or storming the Federal Reserve banks, I’m proposing a list of solutions that can help.

Force the Federal Reserve to increase rates and reduce the amount of printing money.

Stop wasteful spending in Congress. Start reducing the national debt. Stop paying the Federal Reserve to print money.

Implement trade tariffs to bring back the idea of fair trade to make up for wage inequalities. This will result in economic growth as jobs come home to the U.S.

Drill for oil and get aggressive with domestic alternative energy solutions. This will result in economic growth as jobs come home to the U.S.

Tax reform. Implement the Fair Tax, a progressive national sales tax with a monthly prebate that replaces all income, capital gains, and corporate taxes. I’d suggest keeping a 10% corporate tax, which is still well low enough to keep jobs in America unlike the current high corporate tax, to pay for higher monthly prebates so that the Fair Tax will be even more attractive as a progressive tax.

Corporate tax acts as a sales tax. The costs are passed to the consumer. It also acts as a tariff to level the playing field between small business and corporations. If it is too high, like it currently is, it forces corporations to leave the country.

Tax reform will cure many ills of our current system and bring the jobs back home.

Be weary of solutions that may further consolidate wealth and power, such as the North American Union, Amero, and carbon taxes. Be weary of a gold standard since it can be manipulated by outside and inside forces.

Money is a means of exchange. It is not a commodity.

Islamabad Marriot Hotal bomb blastCCTV Footage Marriott Hotel (CCTV Camara picture)

Islamabad Marriot Hotal bomb blastCCTV

Footage Marriott Hotel (CCTV Camara picture)

The end of American capitalism as we knew it

Even where private deposit insurance exists, this is only sufficient to handle bank runs on a subset of the banks in the system. Private banks collectively cannot self-insure against a generalised run on the banks. Once the state underwrites the deposits or makes alternative funding available as lender of last resort, deposit-based banking is a license to print money. That suggests that either deposit-banking licenses should be periodically auctioned off competitively or that depostit-taking banks should be in public ownership to ensure that the tax payer gets the rents as well as the risks.The argument that financial intermediation cannot be entrusted to the private sector can now be extended to include the new, transactions-oriented, capital-markets-based forms of financial capitalism. – Willem Buiter

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September 17, 2008

Willem Buiter
FT.com

This is what I read this morning on FT.com: “The US Federal Reserve announced that it will lend AIG up to $85bn in emergency funds in return for a government stake of 79.9 per cent and effective control of the company – an extraordinary step meant to stave off a collapse of the giant insurer that plays a crucial role in the global financial system. Under the plan, the existing management of the company will be replaced and new executives will be appointed. It also gives the US government veto power over major decisions at the company.”

I almost decided to go back to bed, convinced I must be dreaming.The proximate cause of the demise of AIG as a private firm were its ‘monoline’ activities, its exposure to massive amounts of credit risk derivatives like CDS, many of them linked to the US real estate sector. The largest insurance supermarket in the world, with a balance sheet in excess of $1 trillion nationalised because it was deemed too big and too globally interconnected to fail! The fear that drove this extraordinary decision is that AIG’s failure would increase counterparty risk, actual and perceived, throughout the financial system of the US and the rest of the world, to such an extent that no financial institution would have been willing to extend credit to any other financial institution.Credit to households and non-financial enterprises would have been the next domino to fall, and voilà! , financial Armageddon.

I cannot judge the likelihood of the disaster scenario, but if there ever was a case for applying the precautionary principle in economic analysis, then this is it. It was also done in the right way, by insisting on controlling public ownership, i.e. nationalisation, of the company.The existing management is gone – again as it should. We will find out whether they left with golden parachutes or with just a carton box packed with their personal belongings.

The precise implication of the deal for the old shareholders will also matter for the ultimate judgement on its fairness and on what it does to incentives for future risk taking. Since the existing shareholders were obviously not completely wiped out by the deal, they do well out of it – probably too well. The public take-over appears to imply that all creditors other than the ordinary and preferred shareholders will be made whole. From the perspective of incentives for future excessive risk taking, this is regrettable.

A charge on the creditors, modulated according to the seniority of the debt, would have been preferable.But perhaps my concern about incentives for future risk taking is moot, because it assumes that private, profit-seeking enterprises will again, in the future, pursue the kind of financial activities engaged in by AIG.

If financial behemoths like AIG are too large and/or too interconnected to fail but not too smart to get themselves into situations where they need to be bailed out, then what is the case for letting private firms engage in such kinds of activities in the first place?

Is the reality of the modern, transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism indeed that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the tax payer taking the risk and the losses?

If so, then why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership?There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities, that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer.

Even where private deposit insurance exists, this is only sufficient to handle bank runs on a subset of the banks in the system. Private banks collectively cannot self-insure against a generalised run on the banks. Once the state underwrites the deposits or makes alternative funding available as lender of last resort, deposit-based banking is a license to print money.

That suggests that either deposit-banking licenses should be periodically auctioned off competitively or that depostit-taking banks should be in public ownership to ensure that the tax payer gets the rents as well as the risks.The argument that financial intermediation cannot be entrusted to the private sector can now be extended to include the new, transactions-oriented, capital-markets-based forms of financial capitalism.

The risk of a sudden vanishing of both market liquidity for systemically important classes of finanial assets and funding liquidity for systemically important firms may well be too serious to allow private enterprises to play. No doubt the socialisation of most financial intermediation would be costly as regards dynamism and innovation, but if the risk of instability is too great and the cost of instability too high, then that may be a cost worth paying.

These are issues that must be pondered not just in Washington but everywhere modern financial intermediation has taken root or is threatening to do so – in the financial heartland (Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, Zurich, Tokyo and Dubai) and in the emerging markets that until recently were having their ears bent on the desirability of precisely the kind of financial institutions and markets that have now turned into trillion dollar collapsing dominos.

From financialisation of the economy to the socialisation of finance. A small step for the lawyers, a huge step for mankind. Who said economics was boring?

Saving the Wealthy Class from Itself

Now that our government has stepped in to effectively take over the financial industry, it is time for it to suspend the collection and foreclosure of mortgage and other debt instruments until the crisis is over. We need a foreclosure and default holiday that the government can fund as it has done for the owners of the businesses it has acquired. If the government allows for the renegotiation of mortgages and other debt instruments that are in default, the panic selling will stop and the real estate and equity markets will be given a chance to recover by having far less selling pressure. That is just common sense. – SDrobny

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September 20, 2008

by SDrobny
http://www.opednews.com

The Gilded Age of America occurred after the Civil War and coincided with the industrial revolution of that period in which great wealth was concentrated to the upper classes. The wealth concentration to the very few resulted from the owners of business reaping most of the benefits of the productivity of the working class. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of 1893 and a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the progressive era accompanied by legislation to regulate the excesses of unfettered capitalism.
Approximately 30 years later we suffered the worst economic depression in our history because of the excesses of the 1920s unregulated capital and banking industries. Again the government stepped in to regulate the markets through the FDR administration, which prevailed for almost 50 years. The Republicans took control of government in 1981 and almost 30 years later we are again back into economic crisis. Do we now understand what the Republicans have done to our economy?

The reason all of this happens is because the productivity of America is not shared equitably between the working class and the ownership class. And when the working class runs out of money the economy has to tank as it has done several times in the last 140 years. Without government oversight and redistribution of wealth through a progressive tax system, the ownership class is actually self-destructing by stripping the working class of the ability to participate in the economy through consumption and investment. That is why we must help the rich predatory class understand that it is suicidal to continue the economic policy of the Republicans for the last 140 years.

One of the reasons the United States did not fall back into an economic depression after WW II was because there was a large underground economy during the war that made fortunes for those who had previously not had the opportunity to accumulate wealth. That, coupled with the shift to a consumer-oriented economy, allowed the U.S. to experience unprecedented growth from 1946-1962. Unfortunately the military budget has allowed for the skewing of wealth back up to the corporate class and the tax cuts of the Reagan and Bush regimes have again stripped the working class of its ability to participate fairly in economy.

When the middle class gets squeezed, mortgages are foreclosed and business loans default on a massive basis. This ultimately leads to unregulated and uncontrolled panic selling that we are experiencing right now. The lesson is very clear. Human nature is programmed to accumulate as much material wealth as possible to the detriment of the overall economy so it is incumbent upon government to prevent human instincts from destroying our economy.

Now that our government has stepped in to effectively take over the financial industry, it is time for it to suspend the collection and foreclosure of mortgage and other debt instruments until the crisis is over. We need a foreclosure and default holiday that the government can fund as it has done for the owners of the businesses it has acquired. If the government allows for the renegotiation of mortgages and other debt instruments that are in default, the panic selling will stop and the real estate and equity markets will be given a chance to recover by having far less selling pressure. That is just common sense.

I suggest that all borrowers be given an opportunity to have their loan payment plans be reduced to amounts that can be handled during this workout period. By doing that, there will be regular payments on these loans which will at least allow for some inflow to the financial companies that the government now owns. These types of loan assistance programs are central to our recovery and represent the necessary additional step to save the wealthy classes from themselves. It is not enough for the government to assist just the ownership of the financial industry. Now that the government is the effective owner, it must also fund the borrowers and keep the loans on the books to prevent even more of a crisis. The socialization of business that we are experiencing must be accompanied by a safety net socialization of the customer base in order for this plan to work.

A New and Revealing Study of the Influence of the Neocons: The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies

A New and Revealing Study of the Influence of the

Neocons: The Making of Recent U.S.

Middle East Policies

By BILL and KATHLEEN CHRISTISONThis book is a veritable bible on the neocons — and a frightening one. Anyone who thought that neocon thinking and policymaking had become passé with the political eclipse of the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith will be disquieted to find that these individuals were only the tip of the iceberg and that on all issues having to do with Israel neocon thinking lives on in policymaking councils and is about to be passed on to the next administration, whether it be Democratic or Republican. – BILL and KATHLEEN CHRISTISON

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Stephen J. Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Editions, Norfolk, Virginia, 2008

Not a few honest political analysts have long recognized the tight relationship between the Israel-U.S. partnership and the disastrous Bush administration adventures throughout the Middle East, including its backing for Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians. Stephen Sniegoski has had the persistence to ferret out mountains of impossible-to-challenge evidence that this Israel-U.S. connection is the driving force behind virtually all Middle East decisionmaking over the last eight years, as well as the political courage to write a book about it.

Sniegoski’s new book demonstrates clearly how U.S. and Israeli policies and actions with respect to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the other Gulf states, and even most recently Georgia are all tied together in a bundle of interrelated linkages, each of which affects all the others. The right wing of Israeli politics, the neoconservatives in the U.S. who strongly support Israel, and the aging Israel lobby in the United States all have worked together, and are still doing so, to bring about more wars, regime changes, and instability, specifically the fragmentation of any Middle Eastern states that might ever conceivably threaten Israel.

In addition, one purpose of such wars and other changes is explicitly to intensify the discouragement of Palestinians as the latter’s potential allies are knocked off one by one, making it easier for Israel, over time, to finish off the Palestinians. That’s the theory. Those who believe it is vital to improve the human rights situation and the political outlook for the Palestinians must not only work to reverse present Israeli policies, but it is probably more important that we in the United States work even harder to reverse U.S. policies.

This is a long but quite splendid book. After a foreword by ex-Congressman Paul Findley and an introduction by Professor of Humanities Paul Gottfried, Ph.D., the text itself has 382 pages covering the entire history of the neoconservatives from the 1960s to 2008. The author has clearly spent untold hours reading all the writings he could find by not only the top few neocons but also numerous others who are far less well known but still important figures in the movement.

The neocons, by the way, are by and large not conspiratorial. They prefer to write voluminously and act openly with respect to their philosophies and actions. The word “transparent” in the title of the book emphasizes this very point. On the other hand, the neocons are also very skilled propagandists and are more than willing to spin “facts” in many situations in ways that often do not leave readers with an honest, unvarnished version of “truth.”

Sniegoski states his own main argument as follows:

“This book has maintained that the origins of the American war on Iraq revolve around the United States’ adoption of a war agenda whose basic format was conceived in Israel to advance Israeli interests and was ardently pushed by the influential pro-Israeli American neoconservatives, both inside and outside the Bush administration. Voluminous evidence, much of it derived from a lengthy neoconservative paper trail, has been marshaled to substantiate these contentions.” [Page 351]

The author then points out that

“… what was an unnecessary, deleterious war from the standpoint of [“realists” in] the United States, did advance many Israeli interests, as those interests were envisioned by the Israeli right. America came to identify more closely with the position of Israel toward the Palestinians as it began to equate resistance to Israeli occupation with ‘terrorism.’ … Israel took advantage of the new American ‘anti-terrorist’ position. The ‘security wall’ built by the Sharon government on Palestinian land isolated the Palestinians and made their existence on the West Bank less viable than ever. For the first time, an American president put the United States on record as supporting Israel’s eventual annexation of parts of the West Bank. Obviously, Israel benefited for the very reason that the United States had become the belligerent enemy of Israel’s enemies. As such, America seriously weakened Israel’s foes at no cost to Israel. The war and occupation basically eliminated Iraq as a potential power. Instead of having a unified democratic government, as the Bush administration had predicted, Iraq was fragmenting into warring sectarian groups, in line with the original Likudnik goal.” [Pages 356-357]

And yet one more quote is in order here:

“Since one is dealing with a topic of utmost sensitivity, it should be reiterated that the reference to Israel and the neoconservatives doesn’t imply that all or even most American Jews supported the war on Iraq and the overall neocon war agenda. … A Gallup poll conducted in February 2007 found that 77 percent of [American] Jews believed that the war on Iraq had been a mistake, while only 21 percent held otherwise. This contrasted with the overall American population in which the war was viewed as a mistake by a 52 percent to 46 percent margin. … [Nevertheless,] evidence for the neoconservative and Israeli connection to the United States war is overwhelming and publicly available. There was no dark, hidden ‘conspiracy,’ a term of derision often used by detractors of the idea of a neocon connection to the war. … It should be hoped that … Americans should not fear to honestly discuss the background and motivation for the war in Iraq and the overall United States policy in the Middle East. Only by understanding the truth can the United States possibly take the proper corrective action in the Middle East; without such an understanding, catastrophe looms.” [Pages 371-372]

The reader will note that the above excerpts all come from near the end of Sniegoski’s book. Before reaching this point in the book, you will be treated to informative and well-written chapters on the origins of the neoconservative movement, the Israeli origins of the United States’ Middle East war agenda, and neocon planning against Iran, as well as chapters entitled “World War IV” (a very important chapter), and “Democracy for the Middle East.” A particularly important chapter on “Oil and Other Arguments for the War” argues that oil was not as important a reason for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as was Israel.

This book is a veritable bible on the neocons — and a frightening one. Anyone who thought that neocon thinking and policymaking had become passé with the political eclipse of the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith will be disquieted to find that these individuals were only the tip of the iceberg and that on all issues having to do with Israel neocon thinking lives on in policymaking councils and is about to be passed on to the next administration, whether it be Democratic or Republican.

Exposing the fallacy of anti-Zionism equaling anti-Semitism

Exposing the fallacy of anti-Zionism equaling anti-Semitism

Khaled Amayreh

21 September, 2008 Influential Zionist circles around the world have been bullying western governments to promulgate legislations that would incriminate critics of Israel on the ground that anti-Zionism is actually anti-Semitism in disguise. The Zionist efforts have not been a complete failure as some western politicians and lawmakers are shamelessly parroting the Zionist canard, ignoring the huge chasm between the pathological hatred of Jews, commonly known as anti-Semitism or Judeophobia, and the moral rejection of Israel’s manifestly criminal policies toward the Palestinian people. In recent years, a famous French author was found guilty of displaying “anti-Semitism” for writing a book on Zionist mythology with regard to Palestine. In Austria, a British historian was dumped in jail for questioning the Israeli-Zionist narrative regarding the holocaust. And in the United States, the country of the First Amendment, a major British Publishing House has been “ousted” because it publishes books the world-wide Jewish lobby considers “anti-Israeli.” Fortunately, there are many conscientious Jews who courageously reject the Zionist claim that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are two sides of the same coin. The small but increasingly active group, known as Natori Karta (guardians of the City) represents the most pronounced Jewish opposition to Zionism and Israel. The group believes that Zionism is inherently immoral and antithetical to true Judaism. In light, one is almost innately prompted to ask how can a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews who include Torah sages of impeccable credentials be anti-Semites? Well, the classical Zionist answer is that Jews who reject Zionism are self-hating Jews!!! This explanation, however, is as valid as claiming that Germans who rejected the Third Reich were self-hating or incomplete Germans. I am making this analogy because there is really more commonality between Zionism and Nazism than there is between Zionism and Judaism. What do they want? But what do the Zionists hope to achieve by trying to outlaw criticisms of and public opposition to Israel and Zionism, especially in the West? Well, their ultimate goal is clear. They want the rest of the world to recognize and acknowledge that Israel is a special nation since Jews are said to be a special people. They want the world to acknowledge that the rules and norms that apply to the rest of the world, e.g. the rule of international law, doesn’t apply to Israel. They want me and you and the entire humanity to acknowledge that while war crimes and crimes against humanity may be condemned when perpetrated by the “goyim” (the non-Jewish world), the same crimes must be tolerated and even accepted as legitimate when perpetrated by Jews. And when the world speaks up against such crimes when committed by Zionist Jews, the ready-made charge of “anti-Semitism” will be unleashed in the face of Israel critics. And if the critics happen to be Jewish, the disgusting mantra of “self-hating Jews” will be invoked to silence and intimidate the Jewish critics. Well, the world must never succumb to Zionist intimidation and bullying. We are supposed to be living in an ethical universe where right is right and wrong is wrong. And if we allowed these self-worshiping megalomaniacs, God forbid, to have their way, then at one point we would be forced to morph ourselves into robot-like slaves in the service of a universal satanic power that is hell-bent on controlling the peoples of the world by controlling the governments of the world. Hence, we must never allow ourselves to succumb to this monstrous “Jewish power” that is trying to bastardize universal morality and corrupt human conscience. We must continue to call the spade a spade even if we see it in the hands of the strongest of men. Israel is not hated because it is Jewish It is important though to make it abundantly clear that Israel is no more hated for being “Jewish” than Nazi Germany was for being Aryan or German. Israel is hated because of her evil ideology and equally evil practices. A country whose birth and survival were and continue to be at the expense of another people is an evil country and has no right to exist. A country that is dedicated to the destruction and obliteration of another people is an evil country regardless of how many admirers its has around the world. Israel is hated because of its systematic, institutionalized oppression, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, home demolition, apartheid, racism and slow-motion genocide of non-Jews as is the case in the Gaza Strip. Israel is hated because it oppresses people and discriminates against them in ways reminiscent of the Nazi era because the victims don’t belong to the “holy tribe”!!! In short, Israel is hated because of its evil acts, not because of its Jewish identity. Claiming that it is hated because of its religion or “race” is a canard amounting to a Big Lie. Anti-Zionism highest moral obligation There is no doubt that anti-Semitism, like Islamophobia and other forms of racism, must be fought relentlessly and uprooted, although this may well be an impossible task, given the human nature. However, anti-Zionism is a different thing, since Zionism represents evil in is ugliest form. Yes, Zionism produced many scientists and made some technological advancements. But so what? Nazi Germany, too, produced many scientists and made technological advancement. In the final analysis nations, like individuals, are primarily judged according to their moral credentials not scientific achievements, especially if these achievements are utilized to further injustice toward fellow human beings. This is why a given scientist who does and supports evil should be viewed as an evil man no matter how many prestigious awards he has won. For all these reasons, I believe that standing against Zionism is a high moral obligation upon the entire humanity. In the final analysis, combating Zionism also serves the best interests of the Jewish people .

What Have We Got to Lose?

by Gordon Prather

Perhaps you’re relieved, judging that the looming worldwide economic depression – which was not deliberately caused by Bubba Clinton or Dubya Bush or the Best Congress Money Can Buy – will make World War III less likely. But Bubba (with a complicit BCMCB) did deliberately launch missile attacks (violations of the UN Charter) in 1998 against Afghanistan and Sudan and against Baghdad (in violation of the Gulf War UN Security Council cease-fire resolutions), as well as bombing Kosovo in 1999 (in violation of the UN Charter). And Dubya (with a complicit BCMCB) did deliberately invade and occupy Afghanistan (in violation of UN Charter) in 2001 and Iraq (in violation of Security Council resolutions) in 2003. So, even though things are going so badly for Dubya in Iraq and Afghanistan, militarily, what makes you think he won’t take advantage of the looming worldwide economic depression to compound his criminal activities by attacking the nuclear facilities of Iran and/or of Pakistan? After all, Dubya has already authorized large-scale covert military incursions into, and aerial attacks on, Pakistan – our nuke-armed non-NATO ally – and has allegedly attempted to get our newest “strategic partner,” nuke-armed India, Pakistan’s mortal enemy, to get involved, militarily, with NATO, along the nebulous Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Why? Well, killing or capturing Osama bin Laden is now to be his legacy. Insanity! Back in 2005 Secretary of State Condi Rice had whizzed down to New Delhi to prevent India’s finalizing technical and commercial contracts for a $4.5 billion Iran-Pakistan-India natural-gas pipeline that is to provide Iranian natural gas mostly to India. In return for India canceling the “peace pipeline,” Condi held out the possibility that we would (a) lift sanctions imposed by Congress on India (as a result of the nuclear weapons tests India conducted in 1998), (b) allow India to be supplied with NPT-proscribed nuclear materials and equipment – to be subjected to special IAEA Safeguards – we had previously blocked , and (c) get the Nuclear Suppliers Group to completely disregard guidelines on restrictions to be applied to NSG exports to India. Well, as of this writing, the IAEA and NSG have given in to our strong-arm tactics, virtually destroying the IAEA-NPT-NSG nuke proliferation-prevention regime. But some worried members may prevent the BCMCB from approving the U.S.-India deal while Dubya is president. However, insofar as attacks on Pakistan are concerned, it doesn’t really matter who succeeds Dubya. Both McCain and Obama are on record as recognizing the need to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions as the true battleground in the War on Terror. Also, as far as attacks on Iran are concerned, it doesn’t really matter who succeeds Dubya, either. Both candidates have promised the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee – as well as serving Israeli officials – that they will satisfy the concerns of Likudnik paranoids, here and elsewhere, about the perceived threat of Iran’s nuclear programs. Some details of the alleged covert “nuclear weapons program,” obtained from the hard-drive of a laptop computer, allegedly stolen in Iran in 2004, had been supplied to us a few months later. We allowed the IAEA to take a peek at some of the contents in the summer of 2006. This year, IAEA Deputy Director Heinonen made a startling presentation – which he said was based upon smoking laptop information – to the IAEA Board of Governors which suggested Iran may have been working on a missile which may have been capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Whereupon, Dubya and Condi got – in contravention of the IAEA Statute and the UN Charter – the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1803, which, after “expressing the conviction” that the “verified” total suspension of Iran’s IAEA Safeguarded programs “would contribute to a diplomatic, negotiated solution, that guarantees Iran’s nuclear program is for exclusively peaceful purposes” – goes on to say that the Security Council is “determined” … to constrain Iran’s development of sensitive technologies in support of its nuclear and missile programs.” Of course, unless NPT-proscribed materials have been “diverted” to this alleged missile program, or the alleged sensitive technologies have actually been used in the physical or chemical transformation of NPT-proscribed materials, all of this is literally none of the IAEA’s business. Understand that IAEA inspectors have never, ever, accused Iran of diverting NPT-proscribed materials, to any program, peaceful or otherwise. In particular, in its latest report, “The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared material and has provided the required nuclear material accounting reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities.” Of course, Iran now flatly refuses to continue to address the endless allegations about its alleged “nuclear weapons program” which Bush-Cheney-Bolton-Rice has strong-armed the Security Council into requiring Iran to refute. So, Javier Solana, the European Union’s “foreign policy chief,” says the Iranian refusals will have to be addressed by the UN General Assembly. But, on March 28, Iran’s foreign minister wrote a letter to the UN Secretary-General, which began by noting – correctly – that Iran “has consistently complied with its obligations” under both the NPT and the IAEA Statute. It then went on to note the “irrational opposition” of the United States (and the Likudniks) to Iran’s exercising its “inalienable rights” as affirmed in the NPT and IAEA Statute, and further charged that their “instrumental manipulation” of the IAEA Board and Security Council had resulted in international law and the UN Charter being “seriously violated.” Then, just last month, 115 members of the Non-Aligned Movement issued a strongly worded declaration, expressing support for Iran’s insistence upon pursuing “without discrimination” its “inalienable rights” – affirmed under the NPT – and deploring the misuse (by Bush-Cheney-Rice-Bolton) of the IAEA for political purposes and the forced involvement of the UN Security Council in matters not properly its concern under the UN Charter. So, if the Iranian-Likudnik standoff now goes to the General Assembly for resolution, how do you think that will turn out? And what will the Likudniks do then?

The Ego Must Die

The Illusion of the Ego

What in us blocks our connection with the spiritual depths? If heaven is real, why am I not in contact with it? All religions and paths address this central question, under a variety of names, the most common today in the West being “ego.” The term ego, in this context, alludes to our deeply ingrained self-referential, self-seeking disposition. Ego cuts us off from other people, from Nature, from God, from our true self, from our true responsibility, and from fulfillment of our destiny. Our ego is the great usurper. It focuses on our local independence, falsely presuming it to be a global independence. The ego convinces us that we are truly separate beings with ultimately separate will, having no inherent connection with other people or with God.
Religions and paths portray the nature of our egoism and how to deal with it in one of two quite distinct modes. Usually, and to our misfortune, the ways reify and solidify ego into a something, an enemy, which must be overcome, which must die, which inherently resides in our tainted nature, which must be purified. True enough. One cannot argue with the accumulated wisdom of great religions. For our modern culture, though, the notion that our ego must die seems frightening. More importantly, the notion that we harbor inherent spiritual taints gets interpreted by our self-bashing, insecure psychology to mean that we are bad ¾ something that we in the West have been trained to believe since childhood. We believe we are not good enough. So we don the knowledge of being corrupt to our core as a mantle of supposed wisdom, and flock to those that teach it. Then the religious teaching about egoism simply gets co-opted by the self-denigrating side of our ego, eagerly adopted and accepted as yet another weakness. We hang our heads and beat our breasts and feel the better for it. Unfortunately, all this only strengthens our egoism and leads us into an endless cycle, akin to a dog chasing its tail.
Casting our ego as the enemy in a holy war, an inner jihad, and winning that battle is an exceedingly difficult proposition, primarily because the ego proves to be a most subtle adversary. In fact, the ego will even join the battle against itself. It will take it on and say “this is wonderful, I’m going to battle against ego, I will become free, I will be wonderful, I will be better than I am now, and I will be better than other people, because I will be a highly evolved spiritual being.” The ego joins our forces. As an enemy, it infiltrates our lines, wearing our own uniform, its soldiers and officers indistinguishable from ours. How does one fight a battle against such a devious and resourceful enemy? For most of us, it comes to nothing but an increased layer of suffering as we merely fight ourselves in the name of spirituality and sink more deeply than ever into the morass of self-centeredness. Only the rarest of souls find a way through this conundrum.
An alternative, but also traditional view casts ego in an entirely different perspective, not as an enemy, but as an illusion, and invites us to see our ego for what it is: an empty, ephemeral sham, a hall of mirrors, a self-referential web. The rise of Buddhism in the West is, in no small part, due to this kinder yet no less incisive and perhaps more tractable formulation of the problem of egoism.
Our belief in our ego, or separate self, is in part learned from society. All the people around us labor under a self-centered perspective on life, which naturally devolves to impressionable children. Repeatedly shining the light of awareness directly on this sense of separateness gradually disperses it. If we look carefully for our ego, for this separate self that we think we are, we shall not find it.
Am I my body? I can control my body, I can be aware of my body, and my awareness is greater than my body. So I am probably not my body.
Am I my feelings? I can be aware of my feelings and have some rudimentary influence on them, so I am probably not my feelings.
Am I my thoughts? My thoughts claim the title of I, thinking “I think,” “I am hungry.” But that “I” is just a thought, having no more substance than any other thought. It fools me though, this thought “I.” I believe in it. I believe it refers to something real and substantial, to the real me. But if I look at it clearly, I see it as only a thought with no real referent. At best, I may have a vague idea that I am some combination of my thoughts, feelings, and body. Again it proves empty to the perspicacious observer.
How about my awareness? Am I my awareness? Two problems here. First, I have some control over what I am aware of. So there must be something deeper. Second, the deeper I go into awareness, the less it is centered in me, so how can that be me as a separate entity, as an ego?
How about my attention? How about that in me that decides, my will? This is the subtlest of all. Yet again, the deeper I look into my will, the less it is centered in me, and the more it opens beyond me.
So wherever we look, we do not find this self, this separate person that takes our name, this self-important actor on the stage of our life. The more carefully and persistently we look, the more this once-compelling ego, this self disappears. Or perhaps we see that it never existed to begin with. Gradually, our belief in our ego assumes a porous quality, which rather than cutting us off from others, merely clouds our relationships intermittently. This separate self never was. Our devotion to it shrivels and we are left to truly be ourselves, to play our unique role in the larger story of our common life. When moments come in which we fall back into that trance of selfness, we feel uncomfortable, like in a shoe that no longer fits, and we let it go.
Our ego, this illusory pattern, however, endures with remarkable resilience and persistence. Complete freedom from ego comes only at a very high station of spiritual development, something to which we may aspire and work for with diligence. The best approach lies somewhere between the two outlined above. Seeing and letting go can only work insofar as we are able to see. The depth and subtlety of our seeing must increase. For this, efforts of various kinds are necessary. These efforts may include grappling with some of the propensities of our separate self. Doing so can illumine the tentacles of egoism, while creating energy for seeing more. Only we must not have the idea that such struggles will, by themselves, reform our recalcitrant self-centeredness. A project of reform by force is doomed to fail. Efforts at reform can only be useful to the extent that they help us to see. Sensing the energy body and working at presence also help us see. And seeing, it is said, leads to liberation: liberation from the illusion of the ego and into the freedom of interconnectedness.

Distinguishing ego from true self
(Quotations from Sogyal Rinpoche)

Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.
…you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions…
The more often you listen to this wise guide, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are…
The more you listen, the more guidance you will receive. If you follow the voice of your wise guide… and let the ego fall silent, you come to experience that presence of wisdom and joy and bliss that you really are.
(p. 120-121)
The ego
So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence… Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction… The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist…
{The ego’s greatest triumph} is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.
(p. 117)
©1999 by Deb Platt

Passion, Activist Burnout and US

eileen fleming

Activists are driven by passion fueled by a radical hope that the power of just one can indeed help change the way things happen to be. St. Augustine defined Hope as having two children: Anger at the way things are and Courage to do something about it.

Activists are hopeful people but they are not necessarily optimistic for optimists look at the world through rose colored glasses while activists adorn the dark shades of realism. Justice and Peace activists who fight the good fight are fueled by the desire to begin the world again which requires an over throw of the status quo. The work of activists provides no perks and success is as rare as an honest politician.

“Within apathetic, mainstream American culture, people involved in the various movements fighting for real change are a minority, and can be taken for granted…we losing incredible people with a lot to offer by not supporting them, we are also failing them as a community. If our goal is to make the world a better place and forge new societies and communities based on mutual aid and sustainability, what does it mean when we can’t even take care of each other and keep things running…The dominant culture in this country does not teach us to appreciate the hard work and contributions of the people around us. We need to change this pattern…Next time you are working on a project with someone, take some time out to think about the amount of work that the both of you have put into the project, not how much more you have to do. Recognize and respect the time taken to work on the project and any sacrifices either of you have made in order to get things done. Be vocal! Give praise; don’t just assume that because you aren’t criticizing someone that they know you think they are doing a good job…Give credit where credit is due….what is important is that we have dialogue.” [1]

But before we converse, we must look within to discern the desires of our own heart which is the birthplace of passion and the sanctuary of love and only love will birth positive change. I am not talking sentimental, romantic or erotic love, but pure love that sees ‘the other’ as oneself. Jesus reminded us that the greatest command is to love God first [and God is Love] and then we are to love all our neighbors [everyone on the planet] as we love our self: in other words we are to treat ‘the other’ as we desire to be treated, for the law of karma is that what ever we put out will return to us in spades.

During my first of five trips to Israel Palestine, the whistleblower of Israel’s WMD Program, Mordechai Vanunu spoke to me about his 18 years in jail for telling the world the truth that Israel was already nuclear in 1985 and I was blown away that this former Orthodox Jew who was baptized a Christian just weeks before being kidnapped by the Mossad stated, “The Shen Beet, you know like the FBI and the Mossad, like your CIA…tortured me by keeping a light on in my cell constantly for two years. They told me it was because they were afraid I would commit suicide, and the oppressive camera was for my safety. They recruited the guards and other prisoners to irritate me. They would deprive me of sleep by making loud noises near my cell all night long. I chose to read them 1 Corinthians 13 instead.” [2]

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with THE TRUTH! It always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.”- 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8

Psychotherapist Allen L. Roland wrote, “By loving yourself I mean giving full and honest expression of your deepest feelings regardless of the risks ~ which in itself is an act of love…Remember that love, joy and a state of soul consciousness, not anger, pain, resentment and ego consciousness lies deepest within each one of us and joins us to a Unified Field of love and soul consciousness…You cannot tap into your passion if you are careful or controlled by the ego’s need for outer validation versus inner validation. As such, you must be willing to say YES to yourself and not be controlled by fear particularly when you are on the path of the heart. YOU MUST LIVE YOUR DREAMS. And the ultimate dream is just being yourself and making a difference in the process. YOU MUST CONQUER FEAR…Most fear is false exaggerations appearing real and the most common fear is That being myself is not enough…YOU MUST SAY YES TO YOURSELF. When you say yes to yourself you are in sync with your destiny whereas saying no to yourself is the ultimate self-negation…YOU MUST MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Making a difference means being in service to a greater humanitarian need than the ego’s self-serving needs. And it starts by owning and believing in yourself. YOU MUST BE INNER DIRECTED…willing to stand alone and have faith in yourself even at the risk of those closest to you not understanding. Many are called, few listen and fewer still respond to their own inner voice but true passion begins with listening and responding to your true and authentic inner calling.” [3]Discerning ones inner calling requires being open to all of ones emotions, being open to all the people one meets, being fully present in every situation with a trust that the power of one can make a difference in our dysfunctional world that cries out for Tikkun; which is Hebrew for heal, mend and transform the world. The only way to do that requires we use our days living them to the full in service to ‘the other’ who is oppressed and who also is really our self in different skin and in a different place.

Martin Niemoller, came to German public awareness in 1933 with his book From U-Boat to Pulpit, outlining his journey from a U-Boat commander in World War I to a pastor in a Protestant church who survived Dachau.

He wrote about the apathy of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group after group.

I spin his poem like this;

They came for the Communists, and we didn’t speak up because we weren’t Communist.They came for the Jews, and we didn’t speak up because we weren’t Jewish.

They came for Lebanon’s Christians, and we didn’t speak up because we weren’t Marionettes.

They came for Sudan’s blacks, and we didn’t speak up because we weren’t Sudanese blacks.

They came for the Catholics, and we didn’t speak up because we were Protestant.

They came for the trade unionists, and we didn’t speak up because we were white collar.

They came for the gays and lesbians but we didn’t speak out because we were straight.

They came for the asylum-seekers and refugees; they fed us suspicions and fears, soothed us with mindless entertainment and tried to keep us clueless to the true facts on the ground as we pursued keeping bread on the table and a dry roof above head.

Then they came for those who listened to the voice of their conscience [another name for God] and spoke the truth from their gut.

But there was nobody left to speak up.

1. http://slingshot.tao.ca/displaybi.php?00860162. Fleming Eileen, MEMOIRS of a Nice Irish-American Girl’s Life in Occupied Territory pages 105-106.

3. http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/09/18.html#a2149

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September 21, 2008 By Eileen Fleming, Reporter and Editor http://www.wearewideawake.org/ Author Keep Hope Alive and Memoirs of a Nice Irish American Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory, Producer “30 Minutes With Vanunu.” Permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media if this credit is attached and the title remains unchanged. Only in Solidarity do “we have it in our power to begin the world again.”-Tom Paine

Execute

Execute

By Dick Eastman

The damage has been done and will continue all the way to the bottom for us — but not for them. The men behind Goldman-Sachs and JPMorganChase and BankAmerica are eliminating the competition, are gaining the assets they will no longer have to share with the lower circles of banking thought-they-were elites. This is a controlled economic event, a well-planned transfer of wealth, an intensified concentration of financial power among the credit monopolists. I offered the solution — no not social credit, of course no one is going to adopt that right path and I know that — but I offered a solution that was in the hands of American institutions that exist today, that would have ended the housing crisis and would have avoided the marble soul death of the American people — I see that other countries’ central banks are rushing to lower their reserve requirements to prevent the American disease from killing them too. You will recall that I proposed cutting the reserve requirement and having banks use the funds for interest free loans extending credit to the distressed homeowners and allowing stimulation of the people (as close as we could come to actually doing what social credit would do for us) — the proposal was here: http:// groups.yahoo.com/group/frameup/message/26239 — and it is still a good answer, although there are so many many fewer of households left to save from ruin now. But you know that our financial elites — who you know are our real ruling elites — do not give bailouts to the common man, but only to themselves, bailing out their own derivatives and other malinvestments — actually predatory investments knowing exactly that they could figure on the bailouts when they planned all of this. But of course they made it nearly impossible for us to declare bankruptcy from the condition their manipulations forced upon us. Of course they outlawed the people who have caught on to what was afoot from making their own short sells on this economy. And the Rothschilds’ IMF audited the Fed to learn exactly what could be gotten away with — this will help you remember http://www.rense.com/general82/audit.htm . There are gainers, but the media would have you believe their are only losers. Don’t be fooled; when Morgan and Goldman Sachs stocks go down in this crisis down it is only because they realized they were looking too good and standing too obviously pretty earlier in the week when everyone else was dying off and Morgan raised a penny. Their gains in monopoly power and in new regulatory advantage of incalculable wealth and advantage for them — they gain like Israel after 9-11. Anyway, I have been enjoying my retirement from “conspiracy theory” and home-schooling my 12-year-old daughter Madeleine is going well — I don’t even think about the world outside the house. My heath and happiness have increased — only at night or when driving past the empty houses for sale and the boarded up businesses — see picture above — does the truth break out in my mind and a cloud comes over Dad’s face. I wrote a solution back March on what should be done “If the Banks Fail” which is still available on rense here: http:// http://www.rense.com/general82/banks.htm On Friday, I re-hook up the computer to let my daughter view the youtubes her young friends have made — and when she is done I download my mail. The no-planers and gatekeepers are still controlling the 9-11 discussion. The pro-Obama, pro-Paul and pro- Barr people are still pretending to be on our side and most of you are believing it. But just as no herd of cattle was ever benefited by a maverick steer (especially one with the AIPAC brand) so we see that Obama’s advisors are all money power Zionists — his economic adivsors and his VP — are as close to Bush as Bill Clinton was close to Newt Gingrich on every issue of the Rockefeller-Rothschild globalist agenda. And St. Paul of the Golden Cross was so clever to “endorse Barr, McKinney and Nader and a few others” making it look like he is resistance, when in fact by not zeroing in one any one opposition candidate to support he has in effect taken all of that support people have given him and wrapped it in a big wet sack and tossed it into the black and bottomless well of nowhere and never. Paul has done his job for his masters — he has prevented real opposition from appearing, just as Kucinich and Perot before him. I have been reading Plutarch’s lives at night. His Lives of the Noble Greeks. Plutarch understood politics better than we do. If you ever homeschool your teens, have them read Plutarch’s biography of Alcibiades — and you will see the perfect type of the people who rule the world today. I was amazed that this account by Plutarch existed and that no one has told me about it before I discovered it from a copy purchased at Good Will when looking for some pants that fit. Every citizen of any commonwealth with any hope for saving his countrymen from penury and slavery should read this warning of what evil men are capable of and how they operate. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/ Alcibiades*.html Or here: http://www.bostonleadershipbuilders.com/plutarch/alcibiades.htm Now we know what the elites have been reading and why they love the classics and keep them to themselves. You may also wish to read about the founder of Sparta — for the type of man that we the people need today — for that read Plutarch’s history of Lycurgus http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/ Lycurgus*.html http://www.constitution.org/rom/plutarch/lycurgus.htm And that is about all from me this week. The watchman on the wall must sound the alarm or the blood of his city will be on his hands.

Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis

By Eric D. Hovde

Looking for someone to blame for the shambles in U.S. financial markets? As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded. And in my view, there’s no need to look beyond Wall Street — and the halls of power in Washington. The former has created the nightmare by chasing obscene profits, and the latter have allowed it to spread by not practicing the oversight that is the federal government’s responsibility.

I find it hard to stomach the fact that investment banks that caused this financial crisis immediately ran to the government asking for assistance, which Bear Stearns received and Lehman Brothers, thankfully, did not. This is one of many eerie parallels that the current meltdown bears to the Great Depression, when Washington and the taxpayers had to step up and take unprecedented action to stabilize the financial markets and the economy. Unfortunately, the government today has already put enormous taxpayer resources at risk — bailing out investment firm Bear Stearns, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer AIG, and proposing to buy risky assets from the banking system — to stop the economy from plummeting into another depression. But these events only underscore the toxic relationship between Washington and Wall Street that has brought us to this point.

To understand the role of that relationship in our current troubles, let’s go back to 1999. That was when the hype about the Internet reached its pinnacle. Technology spending by the government and corporations was booming as both sought to address economic and security fears surrounding the so-called Y2K problem, a potential massive computer shutdown at the start of the year 2000.

In the run-up to the millennium, the Federal Reserve, led by then-Chairman Alan Greenspan, began to pump money into the capital markets to deal with any financial problems that might arise from a Y2K meltdown. In the end, 2000 arrived to nothing but a wonderful celebration. But the monetary stimulus, coupled with the aforementioned hype, created an unfortunate bubble in Internet, technology and telecommunications stocks.

At the center of this bubble were the large Wall Street investment banks, which understood the profit potential in promoting the technology boom to overeager clients looking for the investment of a lifetime. From mid-1999 to mid-2000, Wall Street firms took approximately 500 companies public, raising a total of nearly $77 billion for these companies through initial public offerings, or IPOs. For every IPO, the investment banks themselves earned an underwriting fee of 6 percent, returning them an enormous profit.

But apparently that was not enough for Wall Street. As the middlemen between the insatiable investor demand for anything technology-related and young tech entrepreneurs needing to raise capital, the investment banks demanded the opportunity to invest in these companies before the public offerings, when the companies’s stocks were valued at a fraction of what they would bring post-IPO. It wasn’t uncommon for Wall Street firms to invest tens of millions of dollars in “anything.com” before taking it public, charge a multimillion-dollar fee for the public offering and then watch their investment multiply within a matter of months.

Main Street investors, meanwhile, did not realize that the investment banks had essentially thrown away their underwriting guidelines, which had been in place since the Depression, to take companies public. Among these guidelines were rules requiring that a company be in business for more than five years, be profitable for two or three consecutive years and have certain levels of revenue and profitability. The business models of many of the companies that went public simply weren’t viable. Once the Internet bubble burst and the dust settled, America’s corporate landscape was littered with bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and investor losses have been estimated at more than $1 trillion.

In an effort to offset the economic strain from these losses, the Fed once again rapidly increased the money supply and slashed short-term interest rates to 1 percent — a level that hadn’t been seen in more than 45 years. This enormous monetary stimulus (along with significant federal spending) energized the overall economy, but it also led to the greatest housing boom — and possible bust — this country has ever encountered. From 2002 to 2006, housing values appreciated at an astounding rate of 16 percent per year. It became impossible for the typical American family to buy an average-priced house using a conventional 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. Wall Street found another perfect opportunity to propel and take advantage of another forming bubble.

The result was the explosion of toxic new mortgage products that enticed homebuyers into supporting escalating housing prices while eliminating the need for the traditional 20 percent down payment. Whether it was interest-only loans, low- or no-doc “liar loans,” or piggyback home-equity loans, the mortgage and banking industries found a way to place almost anyone with — or even without — a credit score into a home. Wall Street played its part by packaging those mortgages into complex financial products and selling them to other investors, many of whom had no idea of what they were buying or the associated risks.

Once again, the investment banks raked in billions of dollars in fees, giving them incentive to keep lowering underwriting standards, allowing mortgage companies to originate and sell even the most unscrupulous home loans, which Wall Street then dumped onto the investment community. Wall Street never once questioned the ethics of these activities; it too was focused on the enormous rewards that allowed its firms to pay out an unfathomable $62 billion in bonuses in 2006 alone. Without Wall Street, the housing bubble would have ended shortly after the Fed started to raise interest rates in 2004, because no lenders would have originated these toxic mortgages if they had to keep the loans on their own balance sheets.

The price of all this greed? Sadly, because of the actions of the investment banks, the mortgage industry and the rating agencies, the investment community has now incurred an estimated $1 trillion and more in losses. Even more troubling, housing prices have dropped 20 percent from their July 2006 highs, with the very real likelihood that housing could contract another 15 to 20 percent — essentially wiping out more than $4 trillion in housing values. This would be the biggest hit since the Depression to Americans’ most important asset.

What is even more remarkable is that at the same time, firms such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman not only made billions of dollars packaging and selling these toxic loans, they also wagered with their own capital that the values of these investments would decline, further raising their profits. If any other industries engaged in such knowingly unscrupulous activities, there would be an immediate federal investigation.

Why is Washington so complicit in this intricate and lucrative affair? First, the Fed laid the groundwork for both these asset bubbles by lowering interest rates to historic lows. In an attempt to protect his legacy after the Internet-bubble collapse, Greenspan provided unprecedented stimulus to re-inflate the economy and maintain his popularity with Wall Street. (Remember the “Greenspan put”?) But in doing so, he spawned the largest debt and asset bubble in U.S. history.

At the same time, federal regulatory agencies such as the SEC stood idly by as Wall Street took advantage of the investment public during both the Internet and the housing bubbles. The SEC took almost no action against Wall Street after the dot-com implosion. And in the midst of the housing bubble, in 2006, only the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency pushed for any level of regulation to address subprime lending.

One has to wonder why Treasury secretaries under Presidents Clinton and Bush — Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, respectively — took no action to curb these abuses. It certainly was not because they did not understand Wall Street’s practices — both are former chief executives of Goldman Sachs. And why has Congress been so silent? The Wall Street investment banking firms, their executives, their families and their political action committees contribute more to U.S. Senate and House campaigns than any other industry in America. By sprinkling some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials, Wall Street bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement.

This is no doubt the same reason why so many members of Congress were consistently blocking attempts to reform and downsize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are essentially giant, undercapitalized hedge funds. These two entities have been huge money machines for Democrats in both the House and the Senate, many of whom recently had the gall to ask why these companies hadn’t been reformed in the past. Nor should several Republican congressmen and Senators who likewise contributed to watering down legislation aimed at reforming these institutions be let off the hook.

Wall Street’s actions are now profoundly hurting American families, communities and the entire U.S. financial system. People are being thrown out of their homes. Once seemingly indestructible financial entities are succumbing to the crisis they have created and have jeopardized the stability of the global financial system. Isn’t it ironic that the same firms that preached free-market capitalism are now the ones begging for a taxpayer bailout? Many investment professionals operating in my world believe, as do I, that we are facing the greatest financial crisis since 1929.

Fortunately, today we have safety nets, such as federal deposit insurance, that were non-existent during the Great Depression. Yet there has not been a time since the 1920s when Wall Street has enjoyed as much influence over Washington as it has for the last 12 years. Let’s hope that this influence fades rapidly — and that this financial crisis doesn’t end the same way as the one of nearly 80 years ago.

Syrian Tripwire For WWIII

Russian Rear Admiral Andrei Baranov has disclosed that 10 Russian warships are already anchored at the Syrian port of Tartus. Russian engineering crews are widening and dredging the port to accommodate additional Russian warships.

The Russians are making clear their intentions of using the large Russian naval presence in Tartus as a deterrent to Israeli air strikes against Syria using the powerful anti-air missiles on-board the Russian naval warships. These missile systems can sweep the sky over most of Syria and knock down Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighters. This changes the balance of power in the air over Syria.

This also places a tripwire for World War III in place in the Middle East. Any attack on Iran will also involve a war with Syria and Lebanon. This will now involve Russian military forces in direct support of the Iranian/Syrian alliance. Russia is a major nuclear power with the power to destroy every American and NATO city. George Bush has just agreed to sell Israel 1,000 very advanced American bunker buster bombs for use in the coming war with Iran, Syria, and Lebanon.

The neo-cons are going to get most of us killed.

Apocalypse Now?: New world order could have devastating implications for Western nations

Apocalypse Now?: New world order could have

devastating implications for Western nations

Peter Oborne.

Almost exactly seven years ago Al Qaeda terrorists targeted their hijacked planes into the Twin Towers at the heart of New York’s financial centre — and the world was transformed.

There were no deaths this week, but the effects of the carnage on the financial
markets will be far more profound and destabilising than the 9/11 atrocity.

For almost all of us, it will, I predict, be a change for the worse, and for a large
minority the consequences will be extremely distressing.

Here comes the apocalpse: Is the Western world entering a nightmare scenario, as depicted by Edvard Munch?

The Western world — Britain, Europe and the U.S. — has moved from excess to
austerity overnight. This week’s financial typhoon will savagely impact living
standards.

In due course, it will topple governments and lead to a permanent transfer of
economic and political power from Europe and America to the emergent and, in some
cases, such as China, semi-barbarous economies in the East.

I know I will be accused of being unnecessarily apocalyptic and irresponsibly
negative, but I believe that the greatest mistake we can now make is to
downplay the seriousness of the situation and bury our heads in the sand.

The seismic events which have seen the near-destruction of the investment banking sector and the collapse of insurance giant AIG are on the scale of the Great Crash of 1929.

That was such a disaster because it created conditions for the emergence of fascism in continental Europe and then World War II.

Although it is hard to predict the consequences, we should expect ramifications of equal significance — including the re-emergence of violent Far Right parties across the globe.

Some experts were talking this week as if the financial crisis was nearly over. They
could not be more wrong. The downturn has only just begun — and for most citizens
uninvolved with finance the consequences have not been felt at all.

But they will be felt very soon and very brutally. The British economy is in the same position as the Texan coast earlier this month as Hurricane Ike approached — apparently calm, with life going on as normal, but an almighty storm is raging just
over the horizon and heading our way with terrifying speed.

We can expect a sharp increase in personal bankruptcies. Yet the numbers will not peak until this time next year at the earliest.

Hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs, with many forced to sell their houses. Property prices will slump.

There will be extreme human suffering, panic and despair. Many careers will be
destroyed. This is considerably worse than the downturn of the early 1990s.

The orthodoxy from the British Government, the Confederation of British Industry and elsewhere that there will be a mild slowdown ending late next year is nonsense.

This crisis is vicious, dynamic and only just beginning.

Even those of us lucky enough not to lose our jobs and our homes will have friends and relatives who do.

Let us examine, first, the fate of City bankers from firms such as Lehman Brothers — all summarily dismissed when their firm went under this week.

They will receive no severance payment and almost no chance ever again of benefiting from the six-figure salaries and massive bonuses they have taken for
granted over the past few years.

That means they cannot service the huge mortgages they have taken out on hugely expensive houses. So this weekend they have become forced sellers — which means that thousands of new For Sale signs will be going up in London and the South-East
in the coming weeks.

Personal bankruptcy:Traders and investment bankers face an uncertain future

If these unemployed investment bankers had the misfortune to buy anywhere near the top of the market, they now face the prospect of personal bankruptcy.

This is because they will find that their houses are worth much less than they paid for
them, and will therefore be unable to repay their loan.

With so many vendors on the market obliged to sell at any price, it can be assumed that any London house will fetch 25 per cent less this weekend than it would have done this time last week.

Many of the younger bankers — those in their 20s and 30s with young families — now face utter disaster.

Of course, there is scant public sympathy for these former ‘masters of the universe’ who enjoyed good times.

But we already know that Thursday’s merger of Lloyds Bank and HBOS (supposing it
is completed: contrary to statements by Chancellor Alistair Darling, this is by no means certain) will lead directly to the loss of some 40,000 jobs among
bank workers.

There will be bloodletting on every High Street where there is both an HBOS and Lloyds outlet — one branch will undoubtedly be closed.

But that body-blow is just the start. Over the coming months, the financial typhoon will mercilessly spread outwards and wreak devastation on the economy.

Banks will foreclose on thousands of small businesses.Massive corporate failures are inevitable.

These disasters will then rebound on the financial sector, as company bankruptcies
and plunging house prices force fresh balance sheet write-downs and yet more sackings.

Unemployment — already rising fast and up 80,000 over the summer — is set to surge ahead and will increase well above the two million predicted by economists.

This will produce a vicious spiral. Every worker out of a job means less tax receipts and higher welfare payments.

In last March’s Budget (a work of fiction when it was published), Alistair Darling forecast borrowing this year of £43 billion. Even at the time, this figure was shockingly large.

It meant that only Egypt, Pakistan and Hungary among significant world economies had more profligate government spending than Britain.

As of this weekend, Government borrowing is out of control.

It will soar nearer £100 billion next year — more than double Darling’s estimate. This will cast doubt about Britain’s ability to finance our debt in the international
credit markets.

The International Monetary Fund has already warned Darling about his reckless spending. In the months to come, it will demand cuts in government spending, just as it did in the 1970s when the then Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, had to beg for an IMF loan.

Warned: Government borrowing is twice Chancellor Alistair Darling’s estimate and has bought a rebuke from the IMF

Darling will have to take urgent, painful action to reverse the splurge of recent expenditure — welcomed by financially ignorant Labour MPs — on public services, in particular health and education.

And whereas the responsible wing of the Labour Government, as it did in the 1970s, will support this prudence, the Left will call for extra spending to save jobs.

It is likely that the Labour Party will split on this issue — just as it did in the aftermath of the Crash in 1931 and again at the start of the 1980s. In the medium term, the only resolution to this debt crisis is a rise in inflation, as governments are forced to print money to fend off depression.

Savers should thus brace themselves for the return of double-digit price rises not seen since the early 1980s.

Driven by poverty, crime will also soar — particularly crimes against property. We should also brace ourselves for a return of political violence to the streets.

Certainly the British National Party will use the economic downturn to agitate against
immigrants, accusing them of having ‘stolen British jobs’.

The BNP made some striking gains at last May’s elections, and these will continue in the European elections next June.

This is the troubling prospect we face. But the worldwide consequences are just as
significant and we can expect the Euro to fail under the strain of economic collapse.

The Euro has never been tested by adversity. The single currency’s architects made one foolish mistake when they set it up ten years ago: they established monetary union ahead of political union.

In long-established democracies such as Britain and the United States, it is natural for one area of the country to help the other in times of difficulty.

For instance, there was no strong objection when taxpayers in the South were asked to bail out Northern Rock, even though its operations were concentrated in the North-East.

Fascist threat: Far right parties such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN in France could exploit the situation

However, that is not the case in mainland Europe where French taxpayers would refuse to contribute huge sums to bail out, say, the Italian banking sector.

That is why the Euro is likely to be destroyed by the coming economic storm — just as Britain’s membership of the European monetary system was smashed on Black Wednesday 1992.

The truth is that this week’s seismic events will come as a crashing humiliation to the European political class.

Like in Britain, this crisis will be exploited by the Far Right in countries such as France, Holland and Austria.

These countries have powerful neo-fascist parties which will relish recession, in particular singling out for blame ethnic minorities, just as the Nazis did in Germany after the 1929 crash.

The good news is that Britain — despite the efforts of Tony Blair and others — remains outside the Euro.

It means we can control our interest rates and allow the pound to depreciate, unlike so many European countries, some of which (such as Ireland) are already being devoured by recession.

Wall Street Crash: The US became more insular after the stock market crashed in 1929

But the biggest worry is what will happen in the U.S. Ever since the end of World War II, America has been the world’s policeman.

It has been able to play this role, and see off perceived enemies, such as Soviet Russia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, because for the past 60 years it has been the greatest global economic power.

The most important question facing the world today is whether the U.S. — already crippled by the estimated $2 trillion cost of financing the Iraq occupation — can afford to continue its global role.

The historical precedent is far from encouraging.

After the 1929 crash, the U.S. turned in on itself, resorting to protectionism.

It re-engaged with the world only after the attack by Japan at Pearl Harbour in December 1941.

It is too early to say for sure, but it is possible that America is at a similar turning point in its history.

President Bush’s decision to pour taxpayers’ money into so many bankrupt financial institutions has led to an explosion of U.S. national debt which will be hugely exacerbated by yesterday’s move in Washington.

As a result, U.S. global creditworthiness is in jeopardy, and it is likely that at some stage over the next decade the dollar will lose its unchallenged status as the world’s reserve currency.

There are signs that this process has already begun.

For this weakening of the currency was the fate of sterling in the economic crisis of the 1930s.

Indeed, the subsequent decision to take the pound off the Gold Standard in 1931 marked the effective end of the British Empire.

Rising power: China has emerged as a threat to US power, and the recent Beijing Olympics have only added to its stature

America’s global dominance — already threatened by the emergence of rival economic powers such as China — may soon be coming to its end.

The U.S. will probably retreat inwardly, becoming isolationist, at any rate temporarily — opening the way to a new and even more menacing global order.

It is inevitable that America will soon withdraw from Iraq, leaving its bitter enemy, Iran, unchallenged as the dominant regional power.

China will become ever more assertive and will want to humiliate Washington by seizing control of Taiwan, something the White House will be powerless to resist. It will move on to threaten nearby India.

Africa will become the scene of proxy wars between China and the West, just as it was the scene of proxy wars between the United States and Soviet Russia for much of the post-war period.

China, much to U.S. fury, will also start to meddle in Latin America.

The world that will emerge from the Great Crash of 2008, therefore, will be dark and unpredictable.

This weekend, all sensible families will go through their finances, anticipate the inevitable problems that lie ahead, and cut back at once on unnecessary spending such as eating out, second cars and foreign holidays.

For the past 25 years we have lived through a glorious party.

We have all — governments, companies, banks and, of course, consumers — lived beyond our means and are paying the price.

This weekend the hangover begins. It will be prolonged.

Life will be much closer to the austerity that followed World War II than the frenzied, debt-fuelled boom of the past two decades.

Perhaps our lives will be none the worse for all this. Our values will certainly change — many will say not before time.

Material objects should count for much less.

Almost overnight we have entered a new world, and we must learn to make the best of it.

Parliament was the target

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The attack occurred while Zardari was preparing to speak.

Updated at

Sunday, September 21, 2008 By Muhammad Ahmad Noorani ISLAMABAD: The Marriott attack was actually aimed at parliament where the entire civil and military leadership of the country had gathered, in violation of the security codes, but it was thwarted by the strict security arrangements. Two security check-posts established on the Constitution Avenue saved the top civil and military leadership of Pakistan gathered in the Parliament House, listening to the first address by President Asif Ali Zardari, top security officials said. The two security posts were installed on the Constitution Avenue, on the road leading to the Parliament House — one in front of the main gate of the federal secretariat and the other near the Prime Minister Secretariat. These two check-posts were in fact installed on Nov 3rd last, at the time of imposition of emergency. However, security checking at these posts remained tough and soft, depending on situation or intelligence reports. According to the officials, the checking at these check posts was made very strict on Saturday in view of the presidential address and the presence of the whole national leadership in the Parliament House. These security check-posts were allowing only relevant people to move towards the house on the Constitution Avenue. Advisor to the Prime Minister on Interior Rehman Malik, while talking to The News, revealed that his ministry had received two days ago information regarding suicide attack on the Parliament House at the time of the presidentís address. Rehman said the security of the capital was beefed up and the surroundings of the Parliament House were declared as red zone. He said that he and his experts believed that the truck which hit the Marriott on Saturday tried to enter in the red zone during the time of address of the president. “However, because of strict security measures the truck was barred to go towards the Parliament House,” Rehman said, adding: “This is our perception now that the terrorists had already set two targets, one direct and the other optional.î Security personnel at the two check-posts were not allowing the vehicles to move towards the Parliament House, diverting them to other roads. Rehman Malik also revealed that the truck was carrying construction materials, adding the terrorists made the best use of their mind, keeping in view the intense construction works going on in the area. They used such a truck to deceive the security officials. He, however, admitted that checking of trucks carrying construction materials was included in the security measures. He said that first there was a small blast, perhaps to disperse the security personnel. ìAnd then there was the major blast, the worst of its kind in the capitalís history,î he said, adding not less than 1,000 Kg of explosives was used in the explosion. When asked that when his ministry was mindful of a possible terrorist activity why such a great security lapse took place, Rehman said it was very hard to deal with suicide bombers all around the world. He maintained that such blasts were being even made in countries like India and the UK, adding security agencies were unable to control such activities despite their all out efforts. When asked about the weaknesses in the relief operations, Rehman defended his ministry by saying that all available resources were used and the Army rescue team was called. He said though the Pakistan Army had fire-rescue helicopters but those couldn’t be operated during night. Secretary Interior Kamal Shah, during a chat with this correspondent, said that besides the Islamabad police his ministry had deputed the Frontier Constabulary, the Rangers, intelligence agenciesí officials, bomb disposal squads and even the Pakistan Army was at disposal. Kamal said that the whole Islamabad, including areas like Shakar Paryaan and all hilltops were under strict security through 18 different security check-posts. He said that August 14th security arrangements were in place. Kamal Shah, while justifying the security lapse, said it is our culture that at the time of Iftar the security arrangements automatically become a bit soft. He said that the terrorists had no religion as they hit some moments after Iftar, exploiting the time.

Was the Marriott Hotel Bombing an Attack on US Marines?

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Was it an attack on US Marines? WAS IT ANOTHER INTELLIGENCE AGENCY BOMBING?

Updated at

Sunday, September 21, 2008 By Ansar Abbasi ISLAMABAD: Was there a top secret and mysterious operation of the US Marines going on inside the Marriott when it was attacked on Saturday evening? No one will confirm it but circumstantial evidence is in abundance. Witnessed by many, including a PPP MNA and his friends, a US embassy truckload of steel boxes was unloaded and shifted inside the Marriott Hotel on the same night when Admiral Mike Mullen met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and others in Islamabad. Both the main gates (the entrance and the exit) of the hotel were closed while no one except the US Marines were either allowed to go near the truck or get the steel boxes unloaded or shift them inside the hotel. These steel boxes were not passed through the scanners installed at the entrance of the hotel lobby and were reportedly shifted to the fourth and fifth floors of the Marriott. Besides several others, PPP MNA Mumtaz Alam Gilani and his two friends, Sajjad Chaudhry, a PPP leader, and one Bashir Nadeem, witnessed this mysterious activity to which no one other than the PPP MNA objected and protested. A source present there told The News that after entertaining them with refreshments at the Nadia restaurant at midnight when Mumtaz Alam, along with his friends, was to leave the hotel, he found a white US embassy truck standing right in front of the hotel’s main entrance. Both the In-gate and the Out-gate of the hotel were closed while almost a dozen well-built US Marines in their usual fatigues were unloading the steel boxes from the truck. No one, including the hotel security men, was either allowed to go near the truck or touch the steel boxes, which were being shifted inside the hotel but without passing through the scanners. Upon inquiry, one of the three PPP friends who was waiting for the main gates of the hotel to open to get his car in, was informed that the suspicious boxes were shifted to the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel. Mumtaz Alam was furious both at the US Marines and the hotel security not only for the delay caused to them but also for the security lapse he was witnessing. On his protest, there was absolutely no response from the Marines and the security men he approached were found helpless. Mumtaz Alam told the hotel security official that they were going to endanger the hotel and its security. He was also heard telling his friends that he would never visit the hotel again. He also threatened to raise the issue in parliament. One does not know whether the PPP MNA revisited the hotel after that mysterious midnight but his brother Imtiaz Alam, who is a senior journalist, was in the same hotel when the truck exploded at the main gate of the hotel. Imtiaz Alam had a lucky escape and found his way out of the hotel with great difficulty in pitch darkness. One of the lifts he was using fell to the ground floor just after he forced the door open on the 4th floor and got out of it.

President Zardari leaves for USA to attend UN general assembly session

t

President Zardari leaves for USA to attend

UN general assembly session

Will BUSH DO THAT MAGIC TRICK OF HIS, WHERE HE LOOKS INTO HIS EYES AND SEES HIS SOUL?

tend UN general assembly aves for USA to attend UN general assembly session

Major attacks in Pakistan in 2008

HOW MANY OF THESE

Major attacks in Pakistan in 2008

WERE THE WORK OF FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE

AGENCIES?

ISLAMABAD: An apparent suicide attack at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad killed more than 40 people Saturday in the latest carnage in Pakistan.

More than 1,200 people have been killed in attacks, most of them suicide bombings blasts, in the past year. Here is a list of major attacks since the start of 2008:

January 10: Sixteen police and four civilians killed in a suicide bomb attack on police outside the high court in the city of Lahore.

January 14: Bomb kills 10 people at a crowded street market in Karachi.

February 9: Suicide bomber kills 25 people at opposition election rally in the northwestern town of Charsadda.

February 16: Suicide car bomber strikes a rally by party of slain former premier Benazir Bhutto in the northwestern tribal town of Parachinar, killing 37.

February 22: Roadside bomb hits wedding party in northern Swat, killing at least 14 people.

February 25: Suicide bomber kills army surgeon general Lieutenant General Mushtaq Baig and seven other people in Rawalpindi.

February 29: A suicide bomber kills 44 people in Mingora, the main town in the troubled Swat valley, during the funeral of three policemen killed by a roadside bomb earlier in the day.

March 2: Suicide bomber kills 43 at a meeting of anti-militant tribal elders in the northwestern district of Darra Adam Khel.

March 4: Two suicide bombers attack Pakistan Naval War College in Lahore, killing five people and wounding 19.

March 10: Suicide attackers detonate two huge truck bombs in Lahore, killing 26 people and partly demolishing the Federal Investigation Agency building in the city.

March 15: Bomb blast at Italian restaurant in Islamabad kills a Turkish woman and wounds 10 others, including four agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

May 19: Suicide bomber kills 13 at an army bakery in the northwestern town of Mardan.

July 2: Suicide car bomb outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad kills eight people.

July 6: Suicide bomber kills 15 people in an attack on police in Islamabad during a rally to mark the anniversary of an army raid on the radical Red Mosque.

August 12: Roadside bomb rips through Pakistan air force bus in Peshawar, killing 13.

August 19: Suicide bomber kills 23 people at a hospital in northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan.

August 21: Twin suicide attacks kill at least 57 people outside Pakistan’s main arms factory in Wah, near Islamabad.

Aug 28: A bomb attack targeting policemen kill 10 people in the northwest garrison town of Bannu near the Afghan border.

Sept 3: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani escapes an apparent assassination attempt when two shots hit his motorcade, just three days before the country’s presidential election.

September 6: Suicide bomber kills 33 people at a security checkpoint near Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province.

September 11: Suspected militants hurl grenades and fire into a mosque in Peshawar killing at least 20 worshippers.

September 20: A suspected suicide attack outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad killing at least 40 people, with more feared trapped inside the building.

At least 45 killed, Hundreds injured in Marriott Hotel blast

At least 45 killed, Hundreds injured

in Marriott Hotel blast

At least 45 killed, Hundreds injured in Marriott Hotel blastAt least 45 killed, Hundreds injured in Marriott Hotel blastAt least 45 killed, Hundreds injured in Marriott Hotel blast

ISLAMABAD, Sep 20: At least 60 people were killed, including foreigners and several others injured when an explosives laden truck rammed into a five star hotel here on Saturday.

The wounded, many of them critically, have been brought the local hospitals.

The powerful explosion caused fire in many parts of the hotel besides shattering the windowpanes of the buildings around the hotel.

Rescue operation is underway to bring out the people trapped inside the hotel.

Emergency has been declared in the hospitals of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

About 1000 kilograms of explosive material was used in the deadly explosion, said police.

This hotel in Islamabad is a favorite place for foreigners to stay and gather, and it has previously been targeted by militants.

Ambulances rushed to the scene, where a fire also burned, smoke hovered and the carcasses of vehicles were scattered.

According to senior correspondent of Geo News, Hamid Mir, about 100 people are feared dead in the attack.

The blast left a vast crater some 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide in front of the main building where flames leapt from the windows and rescuers ferried a stream of bloodied bodies from the gutted building.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was hosting an Iftar dinner at the nearby Prime Minister’s Secretariat. The event was attended by President Asif Ali Zardari and Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. There was no reports of anyone being injured at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat.

The President’s House is located near the 290-room hotel which is a popular haunt among foreigners.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, and its exact cause was unclear. But Pakistan, a U.S. ally in the war on terror, has faced a wave of militant violence in recent weeks following army-led offensives against insurgents in its border regions, though the capital has avoided most of the bloodshed.

We Are In One Of The Great Vortexes Of History

Art by David Dees – Deesillustration.com,

We Are In One Of The Great

Vortexes Of History

By Karl Schwarz

We are in one of the great vortexes of history now. One of my degrees is in history. In many ways this is considered to be a largely “worthless” degree. Not too many jobs out there for historians. However, the study of history is the study of “us”; of what we are, of from where we came, and an indication of where we are going. If you stand back, from the “trees” of daily life, and look at the broad “forest” of our joint history as the human race, you can see clear patterns. Every so often the human race, or major parts thereof, goes through major life changing events: wars, revolutions, economic crisis/recessions/depressions. It is clear that we are now in one of the largest of such events; that we are in a great vortex and we have not even gone half way into this experience. Terms like “global financial meltdown”, “global financial catastrophe”, “World War III”, “global depression” are becoming standard in describing where we are and where we are headed. The world’s central banks are pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the global economy. Additionally government backed bailouts and arranged sales in the tens and hundreds of billions are now daily events, the total in America alone is now about one trillion dollars; and still the news continues to get worse. Many are rightly claiming to have warned us of the financial nightmare that we are now in. A nightmare that is more and more like a “tar baby”; the more we handle it, the worst it gets. One economic/financial crisis leads to another. Already serious worries about the US$455 trillion derivative market are beginning to creep into worried conversations and news stories. Elderly people, who can remember the “Great Depression” are saying we are going into another one; and increasingly serious economic experts are voicing the same opinion. We “knew”, or should have known, that the dismantling of governmental controls, erected in the aftermath of the Great Depression, would eventually cause a financial firestorm. We “knew”, or should have known, that the “hands off” approach of the last several administrations in America, and the United Kingdom and elsewhere, would lead to no good. We “knew”, or should have known, that all these new financial instruments, debt swaps, derivatives, etc., etc., were nothing but trouble. So, why did “we” let this happen. The answer is two-fold: the “we” is not us; and the “we” is us. The true masters of the financial world, and political world for that matter, are simply not the elected political leaders ~ they are largely just “front men” ~ the real power always is largely unseen and “behind the throne” and constitute a very tiny percentage of the human race. However, we ~ the great masses of people ~ are the very ones that empower those behind the throne/curtain, who like the Wizard of Oz can only maintain control if the masses chose to remain blind, stupid, and too lacking in courage and morality to see and change reality. The world’s economy and politics are largely controlled by a small number of global banking families, some of whom have been at the game for over 200 years. They have simply massive levels of money and resources of all types at their disposal. They control the central banks of America (the Federal Reserve, which is privately owned ~ no more a part of the constitutional Federal government than Federal Express [Fed Ex] is), the European Union, etc. These families follow a formula when they want to institute changes for their own benefit: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. For example, they organized the First World War, and it resulted in mass murder and economic crisis as it went on for years. In the Russian Empire the “thesis” was WWI, the “antithesis” was the effect on the population and the political “blow back” from the war. The “synthesis” was the rise of communism, which they financed and controlled, and the total police state control of the former Russian Empire that it gave them. Prior to WWI the Russian Tsar would not allow the Rothschilds and other global bankers to control his economy. The “synthesis” was one of the true goals of the “thesis” (WWI) and the “antithesis” (the population’s response to the horrors of war). The Great Depression was the antithesis to the excesses (thesis) of the 1920s and the result (synthesis) was a greatly expanded Federal government with massive programs (aimed at ending the Great Depression) that required vast amounts of funding from their privately owned Federal Reserve Bank and its ability to create money out of thin air and loan this back to the government and collect interest on it (instead of the government just creating the money itself without any interest being due to private bankers). Side benefits to the global banking families was a great shake out of wealthy Americans and their ability to capture a much larger amount of corporate ownership/control than had existed before (using cutouts, front men, and corporate control mechanisms established by them). The Rothschild’s Illuminati organization was instrumental in setting up (thesis) and controlling the French Revolution (antithesis) and the rise of Napoleon (synthesis). He in turn was instrumental in reshaping the world, and in a massive growth in governmental debt as nations throughout Europe borrowed money to arm themselves and fight in the various Napoleonic wars. The game of thesis, antithesis, synthesis is played on many levels and many such “games” are often ongoing at the same time (think of it as multiple interrelated games of space chess). The unchecked banking greed and the lack of proper legal controls and governmental oversight (thesis) has led to the current nightmare events of major banks and insurance companies failing or being bought out or funded by governments (antithesis). The synthesis is that, just in the United States alone, one trillion dollars of new public debt has been created in the last week or so to “solve” the problems. New debt that enriches the private owners of the Federal Reserve System. One trillion dollars of debt, on top of the already massive US national debt, that the American public has to pay interest on for many, many, years. Of course, the “debt solution” is itself a antithesis in a broader game with the synthesis being the New World Order (or a major step towards it). The current “solution” to the crisis that the FED and the Bush Administration have come up with allows the corrupt gains to remain privatized while socializing the losses that Wall Street and the global bankers have created. Its all a great evil scam and we, the public, are too stupid, too scared, too blind, too wrapped up in television/etc. to be educated as to what is really going on. And most importantly, we are simply too lacking in good morality to have the strength, the moral strength, to fight it. We are being told by the same governmental “leaders” that allowed the current economic crisis to happen on their watch, that they have fixed the problem with the latest round of new debt and governmental slight of hand. Don’t believe it for a second. We have just had a little more chewing gum and bailing wire slapped on the global economic system, but the system is collapsing and adding more national debt, no matter how many trillions are involved, will not cure the problem. In fact the cure, in this case, is simply more poison for the dying system. All of this has been planned. Do not let yourselves play the village fool saying “why did they let this get so out of hand”, or “you would think that they could come up with something….”. The global banking families, whose hands control the levers of political and economic power in most nations of the world (and certainly America, the United Kingdom, France, etc.), are very intelligent and are playing a very sophisticated game ~ actually the eco-political grand strategic control of the world is the most sophisticated of all games. As FDR use to say, “if something happens in politics you can bet that someone planned it to happen”. They are moving the world to a New World Order in which they will have absolute and total control of all wealth and all levers of political and military power. To a world that utilizes 21st Century technology to enslave the population. To a world that has a large percentage of the “unnecessary eaters” purged by the coming next world war. Don’t think that such a thing is possible? They organized, bankrolled, and created the communists and killed about 80 to 100 million people in the former Russian Empire and enslaved the remainder (and added most of Eastern Europe after the Second World War) in a communist police state using old technology. They bankrolled Hitler and his goons and set up the Second World War. They organized the beginning of the First World War; Trotsky was the controller of the team that killed the Hapsburg Archduke that was the spark that began the war (of course, they had spent years funding the military buildup and manipulating events to get Europe “ready” for the “Great War”). In the United Kingdom there is now one police spy camera for every seven citizens; it is impossible to travel down a major roadway for any distance without being under computer controlled police observation. The laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11, their organized false flag operation, are designed to control the population and to end Americans’ God given rights that our ancestors fought for. Similar laws have been passed in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the 7/7 false flag operation. Across Europe and much of the world, draconian measures have been passed into law by national parliaments, all in response to the so-called “war on terrorism”. All based on lies and the greed of a very small number of very powerful people leading the masses into the worst nightmare of human history. The fact that so many of the secret ruling elite are satanists should not be surprising. Ultimately, where their current End Game in the drive for a New World Order is taking us is a place of total global destruction. The various 21st Century weapons of mass destruction, such as global strategic advanced biowar and global strategic nuclear war and scalar war, are not weapons that are survivable for the human race in a new world war. When you view the current strategic scenarios in a cold analytical light and extrapolate what will happen you can only come to the conclusion that the game is a satanic one that the human race cannot win, and in fact, seems very similar to the rather strange last book of the Christian Bible. Sadly, there is no force, political or otherwise, that seems capable of reversing the trend to global economic disaster and global war.

Behind Closed Doors, Warnings of Calamity

By CARL HULSE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: September 19, 2008

WASHINGTON — Gathered in the conference room just off House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s personal suite on the second floor of the Capitol, the Congressional leadership had just received the sobering news Thursday night that America’s economy remained in peril despite a series of sudden interventions by the Federal Reserve.

Then the other shoe dropped. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. told top members of both parties — about to leave Washington to assail one another in a bitter election season — that they had no choice but to pull together and quickly pass legislation providing billions of public dollars to take bad assets off the hands of the nation’s financial institutions.

“Do you know what you are asking me to do?” said Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader who has struggled all year against concerted Republican opposition, according to multiple participants at the Thursday night session. “It takes me 48 hours to get the Republicans to agree to flush the toilets around here.”

At that point, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who duels constantly with Mr. Reid, reached over to assure his colleague they could work it out. “Harry,” Mr. McConnell said, “I think we need to do this, we should try to do this and we can do this.”

As Congress waited Friday for details of the plan, Congressional officials said members of both parties remained willing to move ahead despite reservations from the rank-and-file about exposing taxpayers to staggering costs that have yet to be disclosed.

In telephone briefings with lawmakers, Mr. Paulson and the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, sought to make it clear that the price of doing nothing could be calamitous.

“If we don’t get this, it will be nothing short of a disaster for our markets,” Mr. Bernanke told House Republicans in a conference call Friday, according to a detailed account of the call.

At the same time, Democrats sought to make it clear the final proposal had to take care of the general public as well as Wall Street.

Referring to a phone conversation with President Bush early Friday, Ms. Pelosi said: “As I told the president this morning, we are committed to quick, bipartisan action while ensuring that we uphold key principles — insulating Main Street from Wall Street and keeping people in their homes by reducing mortgage foreclosures, restoring market confidence and protecting American taxpayers from incurring hundreds of billions of dollars of debt.”

Yet it is evident that sentiments disclosed by the financial officials in the meeting Thursday night and in other briefings have made a strong impression on Congress. And the seriousness with which the administration is approaching the issue was evident in the fact that Mr. Bush for the first time in weeks also telephoned Mr. Reid, with whom he has had a strained relationship, to ask for his help in pushing through legislation.

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat, said that the Thursday-night session contained not a bit of levity and that the description of the financial predicament made him gulp. “When you get 20 politicians together and no one makes a joke, you know something is going on,” he said.

Although Mr. Schumer and others have declined to repeat precisely what they were told by Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke, they said the two men described the financial system as effectively bound in a knot that was being pulled tighter and tighter by the day.

“There was a long pause in the room,” Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, said.

In the Republican conference call Friday, Mr. Bernanke sought to remind lawmakers that voters have money at risk, not just Wall Street executives.

“Many of your constituents hold money in money markets — those funds are losing money,” he said, according to the account of the call provided by a listener. He blamed the deep problems in the housing market and said that the “critical issue is what do we do about these bad assets clogging up our credit system.”

The financial crisis comes at a delicate time for Congress. Lawmakers had been preparing to dispose of a few legislative issues and then adjourn at the end of next week for the elections. But the push for financial legislation has upended the schedule and given the two parties some incentive to work together.

Republicans warned Friday that Democrats should not try to take advantage of the situation, with Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, saying the plan has to be kept “as simple and straightforward as possible.”

“Loading it up to score political points or fit a partisan agenda will only delay the economic stability that families, seniors and small businesses deserve,” he said.

Some conservatives who had already raised the alarm over federal intervention in the markets remained deeply skeptical of the plan.

“We are being asked to go ‘all in’ with taxpayer dollars, and once our government and the taxpayer is on the hook, there is no fallback option,” said Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “My fear is that taxpayers will be left with the mother of all debts, the federal government becomes the lender and guarantor of last resort and our nation finds itself on the slippery slope to socialism.”

Yet Republican leaders appeared determined to go along with the administration plan. “This is a very serious, very unpleasant problem to deal with,” said Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, No. 3 in the Senate Republican leadership. “But we must act next week to solve this situation.”

In their Friday conference call with Treasury and Fed officials, House Democrats, according to participants, accepted that the bailout was necessary but also faulted the administration for a reckless economic approach that combined deregulation, deficit spending and bad management.

In the closed-door Thursday night meeting, Democrats sought to make it clear to Republicans that the underlying initiative for the financial rescue was coming from the administration and that it was the White House that owned the proposal.

Participants said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, was particularly emphatic, noting that the administration was requesting unprecedented action on short notice, effectively telling Congress, “Trust us.”

Why Israel Is Preventing Ahmadinejhad from Speaking At The World Body

Iran, the UN and the USS Liberty–Why Israel Is Preventing Ahmadinejhad from Speaking At The World Body

Well folks, it is time to finally let the cat out of the bag. My co-host of the Liberty Hour radio program (found at http://www.republicbroadcasting.org) USS Liberty survivor Phil Tourney and I want this story out there just in case anything untoward happens to either (or both) of us as well as making sure that the record is set straight in the event President Ahmadinejhad of Iran is not allowed to speak on the floor of the UN General assembly.

Earlier this week, I released a piece I wrote entitled ‘Killing The Messenger Before He Arrives–The Real Reason For Israel’s Latest Threat To Kidnap Ahmadinejhad’ in which I put forth the theory that the reason Israel is threatening to kidnap Ahmadinejhad and why the US has (at least as of this moment) denied him an entry visa into the US is because he might ‘possibly’ be planning on divulging information ‘so embarrassing’ to Israel and the US that it would prevent them from launching an attack on Iran.

Well the truth of the matter is, we know a lot more about this than the article suggests and the wordcraft I used in the article was me ‘playing dumb’ until I had a better handle on what Israel and the US were planning to do with regards to Ahmadinejhad being allowed to come to the UN. Now, just a few days before he is scheduled to speak he is not being given the opportunity and therefore Phil and I have decided that it is time to strike out with the truth.

The fact is this–There was the very good likelihood Ahmadinejhad was going to discuss Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty on the floor of the UN General Assembly or (per our request) even that he would yield 3 minutes of his time to give USS Liberty survivor Phil Tourney an opportunity to tell the world what Israel did to him and his shipmates 41 years ago.

Phil and I have no doubt that in the 2 months we were putting this thing together that our conversations regarding this were being monitored as well as our emails. As soon as we got word from our contact in Iran (who works closely with the president) that he was very positively disposed towards our request and that he had ordered his staff to assemble as much information on the USS Liberty possible, BOOM!!!–Israel threatens to kidnap him. This, coupled with the US preventing his visa into the US when the request was made months ago cannot be mere coincidence, and anyone who believes Israel is not listening in on every conversation going in and out of Iran needs to come into the 21st century.

Our hope was that by mentioning the unmentionable topic of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty 41 years ago (as well as the subsequent cover-up by the US government) that it would start a chain reaction of awareness–not only in the US, but all over the world–that would in essence draw a big red circle around Israel, where her past, present and future proclivity towards false flag operations would come under intense scrutiny, thus precluding her ability to launch another made-to-order event that would lead to the war to end all wars.

Therefore, Phil and I are requesting that everyone reading this press release shout it from the top of your lungs–THAT THE REASON AHMADINEJHAD IS BEING PREVENTED FROM SPEAKING AT THE UN IS BECAUSE HE MOST LIKELY PLANS TO DISCUSS THE ONE STRAW THAT MAY BREAK THE CAMEL’S BACK WITH REGARDS TO THE DANGEROUS FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN THE US AND ISRAEL–ISRAEL’S ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY.

Now, just as it was 41 years ago, dark, treacherous and treasonous elements operating within the highest levels of power in the two countries conspired to sink the ship in order to bring the US into Israel’s wars and now, just as they did 41 years ago, they are attempting to hide the truth from the American people. DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT AGAIN. THIS MAY BE THE LAST CHANCE WE HAVE OF SAVING OUR COUNTRY. TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW THAT IT IS ISRAEL’S ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY THAT IS KEEPING AHMADINEJHAD OUT OF THE US!!!

Mark Glenn
Phil Tourney
The Liberty Hour Radio Program

http://www.republicbroadcasting.org

archived show discussing this topic–

http://216.240.133.177/archives32/Glenn/2008/09/Glenn_2_092008_110000.mp3

U.S. interrogator: ‘You have three minutes to live’

Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle

By William Greider

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses–many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics–exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, a brave conservative critic, put it plainly: “The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson’s latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist lovefest between Washington’s one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks.”

A kindred critic, Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher in New York, defined the sponsors of this stampede to action: “Let us be clear, it is not citizen groups, private investors, equity investors or institutional investors broadly who are calling for this government purchase fund. It is almost exclusively being lobbied for by precisely those institutions that believed they were ‘smarter than the rest of us,’ institutions who need to get those assets off their balance sheet at an inflated value lest they be at risk of large losses or worse.”

Let me be clear. The scandal is not that government is acting. The scandal is that government is not acting forcefully enough–using its ultimate emergency powers to take full control of the financial system and impose order on banks, firms and markets. Stop the music, so to speak, instead of allowing individual financiers and traders to take opportunistic moves to save themselves at the expense of the system. The step-by-step rescues that the Federal Reserve and Treasury have executed to date have failed utterly to reverse the flight of investors and banks worldwide from lending or buying in doubtful times. There is no obvious reason to assume this bailout proposal will change their minds, though it will certainly feel good to the financial houses that get to dump their bad paper on the government.

A serious intervention in which Washington takes charge would, first, require a new central authority to supervise the financial institutions and compel them to support the government’s actions to stabilize the system. Government can apply killer leverage to the financial players: accept our objectives and follow our instructions or you are left on your own–cut off from government lending spigots and ineligible for any direct assistance. If they decline to cooperate, the money guys are stuck with their own mess. If they resist the government’s orders to keep lending to the real economy of producers and consumers, banks and brokers will be effectively isolated, therefore doomed.

Only with these conditions, and some others, should the federal government be willing to take ownership–temporarily–of the rotten financial assets that are dragging down funds, banks and brokerages. Paulson and the Federal Reserve are trying to replay the bailout approach used in the 1980s for the savings and loan crisis, but this situation is utterly different. The failed S&Ls held real assets–property, houses, shopping centers–that could be readily resold by the Resolution Trust Corporation at bargain prices. This crisis involves ethereal financial instruments of unknowable value–not just the notorious mortgage securities but various derivative contracts and other esoteric deals that may be virtually worthless.

Despite what the pols in Washington think, the RTC bailout was also a Wall Street scandal. Many of the financial firms that had financed the S&L industry’s reckless lending got to buy back the same properties for pennies from the RTC–profiting on the upside, then again on the downside. Guess who picked up the tab? I suspect Wall Street is envisioning a similar bonanza–the chance to harvest new profit from their own fraud and criminal irresponsibility.

If government acts responsibly, it will impose some other conditions on any broad rescue for the bankers. First, take due bills from any financial firms that get to hand off their spoiled assets, that is, a hard contract that repays government from any future profits once the crisis is over. Second, when the politicians get around to reforming financial regulations and dismantling the gimmicks and “too big to fail” institutions, Wall Street firms must be prohibited from exercising their usual manipulations of the political system. Call off their lobbyists, bar them from the bribery disguised as campaign contributions. Any contact or conversations between the assisted bankers and financial houses with government agencies or elected politicians must be promptly reported to the public, just as regulated industries are required to do when they call on government regulars.

More important, if the taxpayers are compelled to refinance the villains in this drama, then Americans at large are entitled to equivalent treatment in their crisis. That means the suspension of home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies for debt-soaked families during the duration of this crisis. The debtors will not escape injury and loss–their situation is too dire–but they deserve equal protection from government, the chance to work out things gradually over some years on reasonable terms.

The government, meanwhile, may have to create another emergency agency, something like the New Deal, that lends directly to the real economy–businesses, solvent banks, buyers and sellers in consumer markets. We don’t know how much damage has been done to economic growth or how long the cold spell will last, but I don’t trust the bankers in the meantime to provide investment capital and credit. If necessary, Washington has to fill that role, too.

Finally, the crisis is global, obviously, and requires concerted global action. Robert A. Johnson, a veteran of global finance now working with the Campaign for America’s Future, suggests that our global trading partners may recognize the need for self-interested cooperation and can negotiate temporary–maybe permanent–reforms to balance the trading system and keep it functioning, while leading nations work to put the global financial system back in business.

The agenda is staggering. The United States is ill equipped to deal with it smartly, not to mention wisely. We have a brain-dead lame duck in the White House. The two presidential candidates are trapped by events, trying to say something relevant without getting blamed for the disaster. The people should make themselves heard in Washington, even if only to share their outrage.

GOP blocks Iran sanctions to Make Obama Look Bad

Republicans in the U.S. Senate blocked an amendment that would have enhanced Iran sanctions.

Democrats have for months been trying to pass two sanctions-related bills that had passed overwhelmingly in the U.S. House of Representatives: One would have further isolated Iran’s energy sector in a bid to get the Islamic Republic to stand down from its suspected nuclear weapons program; the other, authored by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the Democratic presidential nominee, would have made it easier for companies and pensions to disinvest from Iran.

The Bush administration opposed the bills because it resists infringement on executive foreign policy powers, and also because it is conducting its own sensitive negotiations with Europe, Russia and China to isolate Iran. Pro-Israel insiders have said that Republicans also did not want to hand Obama a legislative victory in an election year.

Under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby, the sides combined the bills into a compromise amendment that was to have been attached to the must-pass Defense Authorization Bill; at the last minute on Wednesday night Republicans blocked the amendment, without offering an explanation.

Truck bomber kills at least 40 at Islamabad hotel

By Kamran Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A suicide truck bomber attacked the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Saturday, killing at least 40 people, wounding nearly 250 and starting a fire that swept through the building in the Pakistani capital.

The explosion came hours after new President Asif Ali Zardari, widower of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, made his first address to parliament a few hundred meters away, calling for terrorism to be rooted out.

As flames engulfed the tightly guarded hotel, part of a U.S. chain and popular with foreigners, diplomats and rich Pakistanis, police said there were still people trapped inside.

Zardari made a televised address to the nation early on Sunday and said the bombing was a cowardly attack which came as the country was celebrating democracy.

“This is an epidemic, a cancer in Pakistan which we will root out,” he said. “We will not be afraid of these cowards.”

Vital to the war against al Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups, Pakistan’s internal security has deteriorated at an alarming rate over the past two years.

The army is in the midst of a major offensive against al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border, while the U.S. military has intensified missile strikes against militants in the ethnic Pashtun tribal lands, infuriating many Pakistanis.

Militants have launched bombs attacks, most on security forces in the northwest, in retaliation for the attacks on them.

“They’re giving a very clear, unambiguous message that if the government pursues these policies, this is what we will do in response,” Talat Masood, a retired general and defense analyst, said after Saturday’s attack.

“They are saying ‘we can strike anywhere, at any time regardless of how good you think your security is’ … They are also giving a message to the people of Pakistan: Your government and army are allowing the Americans to attack our territory,” he said.

An al Qaeda video, released to mark the seventh anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, included a call for militants in Pakistan to step up their fight.

“You must stand with your Mujahideen brothers in Afghanistan and … strike the interests of Crusader (Western) allies in Pakistan,” Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan said on the tape.

20-FOOT CRATER

Saturday’s attack was the worst in the capital. It came six months after a civilian government took power and a month after it forced former army chief and firm U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf to step down as president.

A crater up to 20 feet deep was in the road in front of the hotel’s gates. The Interior Ministry said the bomb probably contained more than 500 kg (1,100 lb) of explosives.

The ministry said two foreigners were killed and hospital officials said at least five were wounded. They included a Danish diplomat, the Danish Foreign Ministry said. Up to six Saudi Arabians were missing, the Saudi ambassador said.

A security official said one American was killed.

The Interior Ministry said 236 people had been wounded.

Flames and smoke poured out of the 290-room, city centre hotel, which has been bombed twice before. Dozens of cars were destroyed and windows shattered hundreds of meters (yards) away.

Soldiers cordoned off the area and nearly six hours after the blast, the fire was nearly out.

A wounded hotel security official said a truck had been stopped at the hotel’s front security barrier and two small explosions had gone off minutes before the main blast.

“There was a warning from security, they told us to go to the back of the hotel,” Clemens Steinkanp, a German who was slightly wounded in the blast, said from a hospital bed.

“Nothing happened for five minutes … but then there was a huge blast. Everything fell and there were a lot of bodies around,” he said.

U.S. CONDEMNATION

Zardari is close to the United States and has vowed to maintain nuclear-armed Pakistan’s commitment to the U.S.-led campaign against militancy, even though it is deeply unpopular.

Britain and the United States condemned the attack.

“This attack is a reminder of the ongoing threat faced by Pakistan, the United States, and all those who stand against violent extremism,” U.S. President George W. Bush said.

The explosion brought down the ceiling in a banquet room where up to 300 people were at a meal to break the fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

A waiter, Mansoor Abbasi, was inside the hotel after the blast, calling out for survivors in the rubble. “I was just setting down a glass when it happened … Everybody started screaming,” said Abbasi, his jacket stained with blood.

The owner of the hotel, one of two five-star hotels in the capital, said the truck had been stopped at the front barrier and guards exchanged fire with the attacker.

“Some shots were fired. One of our guards fired back, and in the meantime he detonated all the explosives. All the guards on the gate died,” said hotel owner Sadruddin Hashwani.

In his address to parliament, Zardari said Pakistan must stop militants from using its territory for attacks on other countries. He also said Pakistan would not tolerate infringement of its territory in the name of the fight against militancy.

Zardari, who won a presidential election this month, is due to leave for the United States on Sunday, where he will hold talks with Bush.

CIA HAS BEEN TICKLING PEOPLE TO DEATH FOR YEARS

By: Peter Chamberlin

Michael Hayden said the clandestine agency is using Predator missile attacks to “tickle” enemy groups, to provoke a reaction.

“We use military operations to excite the enemy, prompting him to respond.”

The agency director was jokingly referring to the policy of committing multiple mass-murders of innocent citizens of Pakistan, as a tactic for provoking retaliation by their relatives. This immoral terrorist act is considered to be a legitimate military strategy by the demented CIA mind.  It sees no wrong in committing criminal acts, to cause others to commit further criminal acts, as a rationale for starting a divisive world war for resources, under the guise of “self-defense.  ”The idea that committing acts of war, to cause a greater war is not a war crime itself, is a product of a deranged psychopathic mind. This psychopathic mind personified by the CIA is the scourge of mankind.

The American use of the Israeli terror tactic of “targeted assassinations” to perhaps kill one “wanted” individual (remember no “war” has been declared there), without concern for the attendant civilian death is a war crime. The use of flying terror platforms to fire Hellfire missiles into crowds of innocent people, in a country that you call your “ally” is either pure idiocy or evil of the highest order.  The choice to fight a ground war from the air reaps little military gain at the enormous cost of widespread civilian death.

Agency Director Hayden said that the CIA is “working closely with the military…where American troops have fought Sunni insurgents.” If the agency was really working with our own military or with military leaders in allied nations then the war might not be at an impasse. In all war theaters the secret war has served to escalate the real war that our troops must fight, for political reasons. The question is, is the CIA a “rogue” agency creating problems for our own military, or is it doing so on White House orders?

Did the agency bother to consult with our allies the Pakistani Army on June 12, when it sent a Predator to kill 11 Pakistani soldiers at Gora Pai Outpost in the Mohmand region?

Hayden said, “Our pilots are targeting not structures, but individuals.”

But clearly, after watching the video of the Predator attack, who could believe that it is possible to identify who is being targeted on the ground by these terminator-planes?

Did the CIA bother to consult U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen on the September 18 Predator strike that killed six and wounded three, a mere hours after he personally reassured Pakistan’s prime minister of “cooperation and coordination” on security issues?

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who was one of those officials who met with Mullen, told reporters that Pakistani officials “were not informed” of the strike beforehand. Asked about Mullen’s statement, he said,

“It’s a clear, clear commitment to Pakistan to respect Pakistan’s sovereignty…and now if having said that there was an attack later in the night, that means there is some sort of an institutional disconnect on their side, and if so, they will have to sort it out,” he said.

Here we have evidence from a foreign perspective of the massive disconnect within the government of the United States, in this case, between the Pentagon and the CIA, over the spy agency’s running its own separate foreign policy in the war on terror. It is seen coming to a head over the covert military policy of the US spy bureau verses the legitimate policies of the actual military. This policy extends deep within the establishment reflecting the vast moral differences between most of our government and the super-secret spy bureau that flies our flag.

The brutal immoral CIA policies of terrorizing (sorry, I meant “tickling”) civilians to create panic and hopefully generate specific controlled reactions is not only the cause of the terror war, but it is the reason that the military cannot achieve anything approaching victory on either of the two other fronts. In Pakistan, as in all the world’s frontline states, the secret US policy actually creates terrorist groups to administer the “tickling” on behalf of the agency to the targeted people. This, in turn, make the local fight against insurgencies unwinnable, by any acceptable standards.

In Pakistan, the “local Taliban” (under the command of “public enemy number one,” Baitullah Mehsud), which US forces are allegedly targeting, are known among the local population as tools of the US, Indian, Afghan and Israeli secret services. Mehsud’s apparent immunity from American retaliation, his detailed knowledge of Pakistani troop movements and his highly-advanced communications equipment and weaponry is cited as proof of foreign sponsorship. In other words, the CIA is creating the justification (bombings in Pakistan and cross-border attacks from there into Afghanistan by CIA proxy fighters) that is providing a sort of legitimacy for military actions.

In Iraq, the same pattern of covert “tickling” was carried-out by shadowy US-connected terror groups, who drove the inter-religious civil war that successfully partitioned most of the country. The harsh attacks carried-out upon fellow Sunnis by these “al Qaida linked” groups pushed the Iraqis into fighting against themselves. The same thing was attempted in Lebanon with Sunni terrorist groups like Fatah al-Islam. In the Palestinian Territories the Security Forces carried-out the same function against the legitimate Hamas government forces. Before that, US-backed Muslim terrorists were brought into Yugoslavia who attacked (“tickled”) local Muslims to agitate for international intervention.

Before the demise of the Soviet Union and the creation of the new “Islamic threat” by the CIA, covert “tickling” operations were carried-out by our mercenary forces of right-wing extremist white guys in Europe, like Operation Gladio in Italy.  The secret CIA armies there tickled our unfortunate European allies into electing hard-right political parties which supported American aggression.

Throughout all the previous examples, the CIA has followed the same “shock doctrine” of applying terror bombings to targeted populations in order to stimulate planned responses. This form of mind warfare has been developed by government psychologists and behavioralists studying the phenomenon since the fire-bombings of WWII were used to manipulate the German population. The link between political terrorism and democratic reactions was discovered when intensive fire-bombing pushed frightened enraged German citizens to demand government concessions to appease Allied bombers. The science of the “shock doctrine” was developed from these studies, over time, by government scientists, who refined it down to its essence, learning to use smaller shocks to achieve the same reactions.

This same policy of psychological warfare became the principle tool of the CIA, where it was used over many decades upon both friend and foe of the United States, even upon the American people themselves.  Provocative “ticklings” of various types were administered to the American people to control social pressures, from the assassinations of our leaders, to the shocks of the destruction of our free press and our national economy. The American people were systematically shocked and demoralized, as we were driven like the cattle that they think we are down the road to the slaughterhouse.

On September 11, 2001, the wholesale slaughter of Americans began. American-allied intelligence agencies, worked in unison to administer the most severe “tickling” of all time, to a peaceful people who were normally slow to rouse to war, in order to start the stampede. Today, the CIA’s own war has been sabotaged by the very tactics it has chosen to employ, to the point where our voluntary military force is decimated and our national economy is following suit. The government psychiatrists and schemers overlooked their primary obstacle, they never figured on the depth of the human spirit to resist the great obscenity being cast upon us. Anyone who is given the ability to see automatically begins to fight back.

The CIA war against the people of the world and especially against the American people is one of the greatest tragedies and crimes of our time. Their hostile actions have brought the world to the edge of the cataclysm we now face. Whatever their ulterior reasons are for destroying the country that they have sworn allegiance to, they cannot be allowed to succeed in their terrorist plans. This is the government that must be overthrown, the secret government of the United States.

The CIA must be abolished.  Our remaining moral leaders must step forward to de-fund the agency.  Our military leaders must follow former Joint Chief Peter Pace’s example and refuse to carry-out immoral acts.  The terminator planes being used by the CIA must be grounded. The proxy forces that they have created to “Balkanize” Pakistan just as they have done in Iraq must by stopped.  Give the government there the help it needs by supporting the decisions it makes without attacking them for it.

Pakistan is not our enemy, but the CIA most definitely is.

peter.chamberlin@hotmail.com