French Bulldog is Catalyst for Investigation of Microchip-Cancer Connection
French Bulldog Léon (Léon's photograph has been reproduced with the permission of the owner)
September 8, 2007 Source Could a microchip implant like the VeriChip cause cancer? A French Bulldog named Léon was the catalyst for new questions about the safety of RFID implants.
One year ago, Léon's owner contacted me with startling news. She believed that her dog's cancerous tumor and his untimely death might have been caused by a microchip implant.
This was not just idle talk by a grieving dog owner grasping at straws to figure out why she had been robbed of her constant companion. This was a gutsy lady who refused to allow the vet to simply cremate the evidence.
This lady prefers to be known only by her first name of "Jeanne," so the Associated Press couldn't credit her properly as the original source for some of the explosive information in its article "Chip Implants Linked to Animal Tumors," but I have the leeway in this forum to share the behind-the-scenes story.
Jeanne spent a small fortune trying to cure her ailing French bulldog, Léon, after he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. When medical interventions failed and Léon passed away, she decided to hunt for the reason the fatal tumor in his body was attached to the glass-encapsulated microchip that had been injected into his neck for identification purposes.
Jeanne located a team of researchers in Italy who agreed to test tissue samples from a biopsy of Léon's tumor to determine if the microchip was implicated in his aggressive cancer. They documented their findings in a 2006 paper entitled, “Fibrosarcoma with Typical Features of Postinjection Sarcoma at Site of Microchip Implant in a Dog: Histologic and Immunohistochemical Study.” The full text is available online at: http://www.vetpathology.org/cgi/content/full/43/4/545.
Since Léon's suspicious cancer was not enough evidence to prove microchip implants were a threat, Jeanne decided to search for other proof of a link. She unearthed scholarly animal studies documenting a possible chip-cancer link and posted several of these at the website that she formed as a tribute to Léon:
http://www.noble-leon.com/resourcesAdvanced
Jeanne informed us of this research and even faxed us copies of these studies as they were difficult to obtain. Fortunately, my Spychips co-author Dr. Katherine Albrecht had access to the Harvard library and was able to take Jeanne's work further, analyzing additional studies that seemed to support a cancer-microchip link in animals.
Sometime later, AP Reporter Todd Lewan entered the picture, eager for an exclusive. He used his press credentials to gain further information, tie up the story with a perfect, documented bow, and broadcast it to media outlets around the world. He and Katherine tirelessly pursued the truth that you can now find published in the explosive AP story.
I promised Jeanne that Katherine and I would share the whole story, and that Léon would be remembered for his contribution. Here's to you, Jeanne and Léon! I'm so sorry it took tragedy for this information to be brought to light. I applaud your tenacity, bravery, and amazing research skills.
- Liz McIntyre
Before you consider microchipping your pet, yourself or your family, it would be wise to review the medical studies indicating the correlation between cancerous tumours and microchips here.
Wasn't it great when our pets could be tagged with microchips so they could always be returned to us in case they got lost? Well, now, in case we get lost, we are going to be microchipped too. This experiment in Indonesia, a country with neither the R&D or manufacturing technology to produce such an item, is now going to use AIDS patients as human guinea pigs to test human microchip implants. In case you are thinking, NO WAY!, I urge you to google or search this blog for NSPD 59 which gives the US government the right to do just that.
The most disturbing aspect of all this are the naysayers who have been denying that these plans are in the making, mostly because such information disturbed their sense of tranquility and security. Now there is little to be done about it: the laws are passed (in camera obscura), the R&D is finished and the chips have been manufactured. Only the testing is left and it begins this month.
Indonesian state to monitor AIDS patients with microchips
24-11-2008 Source Lawmakers in Indonesia's remote province of Papua have thrown their support behind a controversial bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips -- part of extreme efforts to monitor the disease.
Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan Monday.
But legislator John Manangsang said by implanting small computer chips beneath the skin of ''sexually aggressive'' patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and ultimately punish those who deliberately infect others with up to six months in jail or a $5,000 fine. The idea of implanting anyone with a microchip against their will is bad enough, but I can only imagine the possibilities for abuse on a government panel tasked with deciding which patients are "sexually aggressive" enough to qualify.
If you are still skeptical, as I know I would be, have a look at the University of Washingtons's test of RFID Ecosystems, reprinted below for your convenience.
The RFID Ecosystem Project
The RFID Ecosystem is a large-scale project with participants from various research groups at the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The project investigates user-centered RFID systems in connection with technology, business, and society. Past research on user applications of RFID has been limited to short-term technology and user studies in restricted scenarios. In contrast, the RFID Ecosystem provides a living laboratory for long-term, in-depth research in applications, databases, privacy, security, and systems.
A central question in this research is in the balance between privacy and utility. Are there user-centered RFID applications that are truly useful? If so, how can they be designed to minimize loss of privacy? Finally, if these applications are indeed useful, does the utility outweigh the potential loss of privacy? We seek to answer these questions through careful, long-term user studies in which participation is optional and participants have control over their data and may opt out at any time.
To this end, we have deployed a permanent, building-wide RFID test-bed in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering that includes hundreds of RFID readers and thousands of tags. The overarching goal of the project is to inform the community (including businesses and policy makers) of the risks, benefits, and challenges of user-centered RFID systems while proposing technological solutions whenever possible - and to do so before such systems become commonplace.
FAQ OF THE DAY: How will study participants carry the RFID tags, will they be implanted beneath the skin?
Those who choose to participate after the informed consent process (in which any questions will be answered as clearly and precisely as possible) will be asked to carry one or more EPC Gen 2 RFID tags. The tags to be used are paper thin and about the size of a credit card, participants will carry these tags in whatever way suits them. No tags will be implanted beneath the skin.
"Beyond the raw technology used in communicating between tags and readers, RFID consists of a rich ecosystem of software, hardware and services designed to manage the vast amounts of data RFID creates. The following image depicts this ecosystem in terms of how SkyeTek contributes value in addition to its partners."
One has only to read the history of central banking, or the writings of Smedley Butler of 1935 to be amazed at how similar the present is to the past. How can this be that the schemes of power are carried from generation to generation and visited upon each new generation anew?
If you are a Rothschild, you know: it's in the genes. The strategies, entitlements and resources to control the world are passed from generation to generation amoung the 'masters of the universe'. Don't believe it from me. Read it here from the horses mouth.
Baron David de Rothschild sees a New World Order in global banking governance
November 7, 2008 Source Baron David de Rothschild, the head of the Rothschild bank. The Rothschilds have helped the British government since financing Wellington’s army to fight the French in 1815.
“We provide advice on both sides of the balance sheet, and we do it globally. There is no debate that Rothschild is a Jewish family, but we are proud to be in this region. However, it takes time to develop a global footprint.“
Banks will deleverage and there will be a new form of global governance.
UAE National | Nov 6, 2008
The first barons of banking
By Rupert Wright
Among the captains of industry, spin doctors and financial advisers accompanying British prime minister Gordon Brown on his fund-raising visit to the Gulf this week, one name was surprisingly absent. This may have had something to do with the fact that the tour kicked off in Saudi Arabia. But by the time the group reached Qatar, Baron David de Rothschild was there, too, and he was also in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Although his office denies that he was part of the official party, it is probably no coincidence that he happened to be in the same part of the world at the right time. That is how the Rothschilds have worked for centuries: quietly, without fuss, behind the scenes.
“We have had 250 years or so of family involvement in the finance business,” says Baron Rothschild. “We provide advice on both sides of the balance sheet, and we do it globally.”
The Rothschilds have been helping the British government – and many others – out of a financial hole ever since they financed Wellington’s army and thus victory against the French at Waterloo in 1815. According to a long-standing legend, the Rothschild family owed the first millions of their fortune to Nathan Rothschild’s successful speculation about the effect of the outcome of the battle on the price of British bonds. By the 19th century, they ran a financial institution with the power and influence of a combined Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and perhaps even Goldman Sachs and the Bank of China today.
In the 1820s, the Rothschilds supplied enough money to the Bank of England to avert a liquidity crisis. There is not one institution that can save the system in the same way today; not even the US Federal Reserve. However, even though the Rothschilds may have lost some of that power – just as other financial institutions on that list have been emasculated in the last few months – the Rothschild dynasty has lost none of its lustre or influence. So it was no surprise to meet Baron Rothschild at the Dubai International Financial Centre. Rothschild’s opened in Dubai in 2006 with ambitious plans to build an advisory business to complement its European operations. What took so long?
The answer, as many things connected with Rothschilds, has a lot to do with history. When Baron Rothschild began his career, he joined his father’s firm in Paris. In 1982 President Francois Mitterrand nationalised all the banks, leaving him without a bank. With just US$1 million (Dh3.67m) in capital, and five employees, he built up the business, before merging the French operations with the rest of the family’s business in the 1990s.
Gradually the firm has started expanding throughout the world, including the Gulf. “There is no debate that Rothschild is a Jewish family, but we are proud to be in this region. However, it takes time to develop a global footprint,” he says.
An urbane man in his mid-60s, he says there is no single reason why the Rothschilds have been able to keep their financial business together, but offers a couple of suggestions for their longevity. “For a family business to survive, every generation needs a leader,” he says. “Then somebody has to keep the peace. Building a global firm before globalisation meant a mindset of sharing risk and responsibility. If you look at the DNA of our family, that is perhaps an element that runs through our history. Finally, don’t be complacent about giving the family jobs.”
He stresses that the Rothschild ascent has not been linear – at times, as he did in Paris, they have had to rebuild. While he was restarting their business in France, his cousin Sir Evelyn was building a British franchise. When Sir Evelyn retired, the decision was taken to merge the businesses. They are now strong in Europe, Asia especially China, India, as well as Brazil. They also get involved in bankruptcy restructurings in the US, a franchise that will no doubt see a lot more activity in the months ahead.
Does he expect governments to play a larger role in financial markets in future? “There is a huge difference in the Soviet-style mentality that occurred in Paris in 1982, and the extraordinary achievements that politicians, led by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, have made to save the global banking system from systemic collapse,” he says. “They moved to protect the world from billions of unemployment. In five to 10 years those banking stakes will be sold – and sold at a profit.”
Baron Rothschild shares most people’s view that there is a New World Order. In his opinion, banks will deleverage and there will be a new form of global governance. “But you have to be careful of caricatures: we don’t want to go from ultra liberalism to protectionism.”
So how did the Rothschilds manage to emerge relatively unscathed from the financial meltdown? “You could say that we may have more insights than others, or you may look at the structure of our business,” he says. “As a family business, we want to limit risk. There is a natural pride in being a trusted adviser.”
It is that role as trusted adviser to both governments and companies that Rothschilds is hoping to build on in the region. “In today’s world we have a strong offering of debt and equity,” he says. “They are two arms of the same body looking for money.”
The firm has entrusted the growth of its financing advisory business in the Middle East to Paul Reynolds, a veteran of many complex corporate finance deals. “Our principal business franchise is large and mid-size companies,” says Mr Reynolds. “I have already been working in this region for two years and we offer a pretty unique proposition.
“We work in a purely advisory capacity. We don’t lend or underwrite, because that creates conflicts. We are sensitive to banking relationships. But we look to ensure financial flexibility for our clients.”
He was unwilling to discuss specific deals or clients, but says that he offers them “trusted, impartial financing advice any time day or night”. Baron Rothschilds tends to do more deals than their competitors, mainly because they are prepared to take on smaller mandates. “It’s not transactions were are interested in, it’s relationships. We are looking for good businesses and good people,” says Mr Reynolds. “Our ambition is for every company here to have a debt adviser.”
Baron Rothschild is reluctant to comment on his nephew Nat Rothschild’s public outburst against George Osborne, the British shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nat Rothschild castigated Mr Osborne for revealing certain confidences gleaned during a holiday in the summer in Corfu.
In what the British press are calling “Yachtgate”, the tale involved Russia’s richest man, Oleg Deripaska, Lord Mandelson, a controversial British politician who has just returned to government, Mr Osborne and a Rothschild. Classic tabloid fodder, but one senses that Baron Rothschild frowns on such publicity. “If you are an adviser, that imposes a certain style and culture,” he says. “You should never forget that clients want to hear more about themselves than their bankers. It demands an element of being sober.”
Even when not at work, Baron Rothschild’s tastes are sober. He lives between Paris and London, is a keen family man – he has one son who is joining the business next September and three daughters – an enthusiastic golfer, and enjoys the “odd concert”. He is also involved in various charity activities, including funding research into brain disease and bone marrow disorders.
It is part of Rothschild lore that its founder sent his sons throughout Europe to set up their own interlinked offices. So where would Baron Rothschild send his children today?
“I would send one to Asia, one to Europe and one to the United States,” he said. “And if I had more children, I would send one to the UAE.”
Say 'sorry' now to all the so called conspiracy theorists who have been ridiculed and labeled 'nuts'. Unfortunately, all the 'I told you so's' of those who have been warning the general disbelieving populace of the New World Order and its methods of controlling people, will not be sufficient to gloat about the technology that is taking over our lives. The plans have been well laid and required R&D, testing and manufacturing which has been ongoing for years, in spite of the denial by well meaning, security seeking, delusional sheeple.
I will continue to post blogs here which detail the New World Order we are entering, surveillance be damned. You will not find this news in the NY Times, but you will find these RFID chips on your new drivers licenses and passports. Read and weep.
RFID technology that allows the remote identification of travellers in moving vehicles is being rolled out at US land border crossings this month. Crossing points with Canada at Blaine, and with Mexico at Nogales, came online last week, with Buffalo, Detroit and San Ysidro to follow, and a total of 39 planned.
The system uses the US PASSport (People, Access Security Service) card, which is intended to operate within the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) for US citizens entering the US via land and sea ports. Using "Vicinity RFID" it can read the cards from a healthy skimming distance of 20-30 feet, but according to the Department of Homeland Security this isn't a problem. The RFID chip on the card doesn't contain any personal information, only a unique identification number, and skimmers wouldn't have access to the data the number matches up with.
The system is intended to work like this. As a vehicle approaches the border post, the numbers of the cards inside it are read, and pictures and data on the holders are called up from a database. Then, presumably, the immigration officers check the faces of the passengers to make sure they match, and bust any who happen to be flagged as terrorists or loose criminals.
In addition to the PASSport card, some US states are beginning to issue Enhanced Driver's Licence/ID cards (EDL/ID), which have the PASSport RFID functionality added to a standard driver's license. These can also be used for land or sea entry to the US, but neither variety of card is valid elsewhere, or for WHTI air travel into the US. Obviously, they'd only be of any use at anybody else's border post if there were compatible readers there, and if the US had kindly shared its ID database with the relevant country.
So it's an internal passport system, one that's entirely incompatible with the biometric ID system that the US has gone to such pains to get the world to adopt. Were they only kidding, then?
A consistent concern in this blog is the restriction of our freedom to access information and to retain privacy as innocent citizens. Bit by bit, in front of our very eyes, as we fret about our finances, we are losing our freedoms. And I do not mean 'we' in the national sense, but rather in the global sense. This world we inhabit here, now, is very fragile and dependent upon technology and corporations none of us control.
Country by country falls to new measures to monitor and restrict its citizens movements and privacy, as 'we' are preoccupied with the media circus they wish to hypnotize us with. And it is working.
How many of you have thought how much information power you will have if your server begins restricting access to information and other bloggers? When sites disappear off the web, there is little to be done by the rest of us. Heads up bloggers. You will sorely miss what you do not pay attention to now.
How an Italian Judge Made the Internet Illegal
November 28th, 2008 Italian bloggers are up in arms at a court ruling early this year that suggests almost all Italian blogs are illegal. This month, a senior Italian politician went one step further, warning that most web activity is likely to be against the law.
The story begins back in May, when a judge in Modica (in Sicily) found local historian and author Carlo Ruta guilty of the crime of “stampa clandestina” – or publishing a “clandestine” newspaper – in respect of his blog. The judge ruled that since the blog had a headline, that made it an online newspaper, and brought it within the law’s remit.
The penalties for this crime are not onerous: A fine of 250 Euros or a prison sentence of up to two years. Carlo Ruta was fined and ordered to take down his site, which has now been replaced by a blank page, headed “Site under construction”, and a link directing surfers to his new site. Hardly serious stuff – except that he now has a criminal record, and his original site has disappeared.
The offence has its origins in 1948, when in apparent contradiction of Article 21 of the Italian Constitution guaranteeing the right to free expression, a law was passed requiring publishers to register officially before setting up a new publication. The intention, in the immediate aftermath of Fascism, may have been to regulate partisan and extremist publications. The effect was to introduce into Italian society a highly centrist and bureaucratic approach to freedom of the Press.
A further twist to this tale took place in 2001, with the realisation that existing laws were inadequate to deal with the internet. Instead of liberalising, the Italian Government sought to bring the internet into the same framework as traditional print media. Law 62, passed in March 2001, introduces the concept of “stampa clandestina” to the internet.
The suspicion expressed by a number of commentators is that this extension of the law suited government and publishers alike. The state was able to maintain its benevolent stranglehold on the media, whilst publishers could use the system of authorisation and regulation as a means to extend state subsidies to their ventures on the internet.
What few noticed at the time was that this law had the capacity to place blogs on a par with full-blown journalism. It would only take a judge to decide that something as simple as a headline was what defined a “newspaper”.
Australia: Private Intelligence Company Monitors Activists Online for Police
November 26th, 2008 The Australian: A PRIVATE intelligence company has been engaged by police to secretly monitor internet and email use by activist and protest groups, a report says.
The company was hired to monitor and report on the internet activities of anti-war campaigners, animal rights activists, environmental campaigners, and other protest groups, Fairfax Media reported.
It was hired by Victorian Police, the Australian Federal Police and the federal Attorney-General’s department.
The Melbourne-based firm has for the past five years monitored websites, online chat rooms, social networking sites, email lists and bulletin boards, the report said.
It has gathered intelligence on planned protests and other activities, and many of those on the watch list have broken no laws, the report said.
It also prepared threat assessments and intelligence reports for government agencies that included material from media reports, speeches, academic journals and publicly available company data, but no private correspondence was monitored.
The company was not named at the request of its management for fear extremists may target the firm.
The news comes a month after Victorian police were found to have targeted community and activist groups in a long-running covert operation.
By Bart Garzon Published: July 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON (AP) — George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, was indicted Monday on charges of high treason. The charges, filed by Attorney General Russ Feingold late in the evening, allege that Mr. Bush, knowing full well that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, falsified information in order to pursue the disastrous Iraq War. (See “U.S. Knew No W.M.D.s in Iraq,” on Page A1, and the petition at www.democrats.com/pardon.)
Federal District Judge Michael Ratner denied Mr. Bush’s request to represent himself. Ratner is the former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
High treason is usually defined as participation in a war against one’s own country; attempting to overthrow its government; spying on its military, its diplomats, or its secret services for a hostile and foreign power; or attempting to kill its head of state.
“In this case, high treason has been interpreted to include pursuing an illegal and devastating war that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and the lives of over 4,000 Americans and perhaps a million Iraqis, for essentially insane ends,” said Vincent Bugliosi, a former federal prosecutor whom Feingold named lead special prosecutor in the case. “In effect, the Iraq War amounted to a war against America,” added Bugliosi, who is also the author of the book, The Prosecution of George Bush for Murder.
Although the treason indictment came as no surprise to most observers, what was completely unexpected was the party who brought it.
“The case is highly unusual in a number of ways,” said Bugliosi, “not the least of which is that the defendant is actually accusing himself.”
In a press conference held close to midnight yesterday at his Crawford, Texas ranch, former President Bush cited his renewed Christian faith as the catalyst for this unprecedented action. “Last month, I had a conversation with Jesus Christ. A new conversation. And I’ve been very blessed to have been born again, again. This time, for real,” Mr. Bush read in a prepared statement to half a dozen stunned reporters.
“It’s taken a lot of soul searching, or more like deep-soul diving, I think is the term. But now I see that it was wrong to lead our nation to war under false pretenses. Millions have suffered for my sins, and I see now that it is only fitting that I should suffer as well.”
Mr. Bush’s self-accusation seems largely to have been plagiarized from years of accusations made against him in the press. It refers to his “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” and describes how he and his team attempted to make the “W.M.D. threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear certain, whereas in fact we knew there wasn’t one at all.”
“The death and economic collapse that resulted has been completely devastating to our nation and, most of all, to me,” read Mr. Bush’s indictment. “I want to make amends, and it is for this reason that I am requesting that I be indicted for high treason. I thank the court for allowing me to right my grave wrongs. Bring it on!”
Some analysts suggest that Mr. Bush’s self-indictment is part of a strategy to avoid the death penalty. Although treason carries a potential death sentence, Mr. Bush and his team of attorneys are seeking a triple life sentence without possibility of parole.
“We don’t want to be too cynical about Mr. Bush’s motives,” said a spokesperson for AfterDowningStreet.org, one of the main groups that had been pursuing Mr. Bush’s indictment. “But even if it doesn’t get moved to the I.C.C., requesting his own conviction is so unusual it could move some jurors, or even help with an insanity plea.”
A friend of Mr. Bush, speaking on condition of anonymity, revealed that Mr. Bush would attempt to move the case to the International Criminal Court, which does not have a death penalty, and was quietly pressing Secretary of State Naomi Klein to bring the U.S. under the court’s jurisdiction. In 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rejected the I.C.C.’s jurisdiction, saying it was “unaccountable to the American people.”
Mr. Bush maintained his characteristically jovial manner throughout the proceedings. “I could be executed, but what good would that do anybody? Especially me. I think the nation would rather I spend a good long while considering what happened — not only the tragic end of hundreds of thousands of lives, but the end of American capitalism, that I liked, I sincerely liked,” Mr. Bush said. (See also “An Exclusive Interview With George W. Bush,” on Page A9.)
The treason charge does not address compensation for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the war. It is expected that surviving family members of fallen American soldiers will file thousands of civil lawsuits alleging wrongful death.
For other news stories to brighten todays mood for tomorrow, visit here.
MOSCOW, November 24 (RIA Novosti) A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.
Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily Izvestia published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse."
The paper said Panarin's dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events.
When asked when the U.S. economy would collapse, Panarin said: "It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history.
Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global financial scale: America will no longer be the world's financial regulator."When asked who would replace the U.S. in regulating world markets, he said: "Two countries could assume this role: China, with its vast reserves, and Russia, which could play the role of a regulator in Eurasia."
Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work.
Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."He also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions."
He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.He even suggested that "we could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all."
On the fate of the U.S. dollar, he said: "In 2006 a secret agreement was reached between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. on a common Amero currency as a new monetary unit. This could signal preparations to replace the dollar.
The one-hundred dollar bills that have flooded the world could be simply frozen. Under the pretext, let's say, that terrorists are forging them and they need to be checked."When asked how Russia should react to his vision of the future, Panarin said: "Develop the ruble as a regional currency.
Create a fully functioning oil exchange, trading in rubles... We must break the strings tying us to the financial Titanic, which in my view will soon sink."Panarin, 60, is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare. Source
A Point To Ponder by animus mundi A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them. * "Not very long," answered the Mexican. "But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American. * The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family. The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?" * "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs . I have a full life." * The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat." * And after that?" asked the Mexican. * With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise." * "How long would that take?" asked the Mexican. * "Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American. * "And after that?" * "Afterwards? Well my Friend, That's when it gets really interesting," answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!" * "Millions? Really? And after that?" said the Mexican. * "After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends." * And the moral is:Know where you're going in life... you may already be there.
Anyone who doubts that the future of the USA has been hijacked by its own government is engaging in delusional thinking. The signs are everywhere. Whoever does not see them, is not looking. Best thing really for a country which has refused to admit that it cares nothing about any other country as long as its own decadent lifestyle is maintained. This article by Naomi Wolf and the following three in this blog should be very instructive to those who are interested. Those who are not interested will suffer the consequences nonetheless.
April 24 2007 Naomi Wolf From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
All the little crazy bits and pieces of news, that by themselves seem impossible and sheer fabrications, sometimes come together with clarity from a final piece of information.
For months, I have been reading about plastic coffins, railway cars designed for people, the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act, the assignment of a military brigade to FEMA, the building of camps, the threat of martial law unless Congress passed a bailout for banks, the FEMA plans for economic disaster and the new surveillance laws passed in camera obscura. I have provided references for articles on each of these at the end of this blog. I encourage the reader to use them as starting points for his/her own research.
The looming conclusion I have been avoiding is this: economic meltdown is ahead for the USA and martial law will be necessary. The legislation has been passed, the action plans have been implemented and by next summer, Americans will not recognise their country. I will not detail the economic evidence here; that is beyond the scope of this blog.
The thought of American leaders planning martial law is very difficult to accept. Yet here, you may find evidence which when pieced together may suggest just that. I urge you to make your own judgement after reviewing the information.
FEMA sources confirm coming martial law By Wayne Madsen Online Journal Contributing Writer Oct 13, 2008 (WMR) -- WMR has learned from knowledgeable Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers. The triggers include a continuing economic collapse with massive social unrest, bank closures resulting in violence against financial institutions, and another fraudulent presidential election that would result in rioting in major cities and campuses around the country.
In addition, Army Corps of Engineer sources report that the assignment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) to the Northern Command’s U.S. Army North is to augment FEMA and federal law enforcement in the imposition of traffic controls, crowd control, curfews, enhanced border and port security, and neighborhood patrols in the event a national emergency being declared. The BCT was assigned to duties in Iraq before being assigned to the Northern Command.
On April 3, 2008, WMR reported on a highly-classified document regarding the martial law scenario: WMR has learned from knowledgeable sources within the US financial community that an alarming confidential and limited distribution document is circulating among senior members of Congress and their senior staff members that is warning of a bleak future for the United States if it does not quickly get its financial house in order. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those who have reportedly read the document.
The document is being called the “C & R” document because it reportedly states that if the United States defaults on loans and debt underwriting from China, Japan, and Russia, all of which are propping up the United States government financially, and the United States unilaterally cancels the debts, America can expect a war that will have disastrous results for the United States and the world. “Conflict” is the “C word” in the document. The other scenario is that the federal government will be forced to drastically raise taxes in order to pay off debts to foreign countries to the point that the American people will react with a popular revolution against the government. “Revolution” is the document’s “R word.
Other articles from different sources which support this:
If indeed there is a chance that the materials below fit together rationally, and the conclusion is possible that martial law could be imposed, wouldn't you want to know about it. If the conclusion is wrong, then no harm has been done. At best, as medica consumers we can only come up with speculation which is informed probability as to what the truth is in any given situtation. We must be like Sherlock Holmes and detect our way to the logically supported probabilities. From my research, the probability here looks high. I hope this research will be helpful to you in making up your own mind.
Of particular interest in the new presidential executive order NSPD 59: the original article in Global research has disappeared but I have provided my blog url for this article as well as exterior sources.
by Sheilanagig November 20, 2008 The Irish economy is about to take a ride down the greased chute of major economic recession; in short, it is fecked. The best thing from this is that at least the government and the business sector are no longer trying to razzle and dazzle the people about the future.
In 2009, unemployment to hit 8%, GDP to shrink by 4%, exports to decrease by 6%, consumer spending down by more than 8%; and of course, this does not even touch all the inevitable social consequences that will surely follow these grim predictions. Economic recovery now predicted to take as long as eight years. We can only hope that these projections are not optimistic; and as Margot Channing once said, "Fasten your seat belts, this is going to be a bumpy night."
Watching the Dail debate on the current crisis is a bit like watching siblings fighting over who did what and should be reprimanded. If finger pointing were money, our government would be in fine shape. In this respect, Ireland is no different than any other country and is totally in line with our historical traditions of infighting for the best part of 800 years, no matter what the problem.
In reality, Ireland is a small open economy and can no more hide from global economic shocks than can any island in the path of a hurricane. Ireland has no natural resources to speak of and 90% of our export has been produced by American multinational companies who have located here to avail of low corporation tax. While this strategy may have worked for the past ten years, the affluence it has produced has cost Ireland in development of its indigenous business sector. Now, as the USA economy crashes, our dependence on it has become our greatest weakness.
In the mad rush to keep up with and even surpass the consumer materialism of our American cousins, the Irish have gorged themselves on credit to purchase all that 'stuff' their parents could never afford. Much like the post WW2 generation in the States, parents sought to give themselves and their children the consumer luxuries that were never available to previous generations. An entire generation has been suckled never knowing the hardship of want, able to splurge on any luxury, no matter how foolish, by using their plastic pass to Neverland, (credit cards financed by German money.) Ireland moved to the top of the EU as an economic success strategy; the future held the promise of more, more and more, as the population plunged deeper and deeper into debt.
The twenty something generation bought houses for a quarter million euros plus and all drove new 30K new cars, wore the lastest clothes and splurged on expensive vacations, all on credit. Every child had new mobile phones, designer shoes, the latest video games, personal computers and every other gadget the marketing machines said was needed to be 'normal'.
As the banks doled out money hand over fist, the property bubble inflated even larger than the American bubble, and still, the Celtic Tiger babies paid more and more for homes that were overpriced. All this revenue from property flooded the treasury coffers and the Irish thought they were now permanently among the richest countries in the world.
The Irish love affair with the American consumer lifestyle and business model beckoned us like the Pied Piper of Hamlet and we trustingly followed the tune right into the river. Razzle dazzle of American consumerism may have blinded traditional common sense; but surely few saw the underlying rotten structure of a lifestyle based entirely on debt and living beyond ones means. The Irish spent like drunken sailors with never a thought for tomorrow; but now the painful hangover has begun.
And 'begun' is the proper participle here, for property values have not hit bottom. In the USA, many properties have lost 30-40% of their value and are still dropping. Many states have enacted emergency legislation to give homeowners a chance before they are evicted from 'home sweet home'. Those who were the first victims of foreclosure often committed suicide, burned their houses down or simply walked away, homeless. Considering that Ireland's property bubble was even bigger than that of the USA, this hangover could be painful indeed, albeit on a smaller scale.
Besides blaming each other for our current state of economic decline, we could learn a few lessons with which to build a more stable future. The first lesson is, 'Monkey see, monkey do' is not the right strategy for a small open economy like Ireland. However desirable it is to liberalise trade, it cannot be done at the expense of our indigenous businesses. Our exports must reflect our comparative advantage which at present is the Irish brand. Strategies that work for large industrial countries cannot be copied without sacrficing our political and economic well being.
The second lesson is one forgotton from centuries of oppression at the hands of the English: compassion, not material stuff, is the wealth of any community or country. There are values more important for the soul of a culture than the profit motive; the main goals of progress cannot be me, me and me, but rather, we, we and we. Marketing must be brought around to build prosperity on cooperation and community, rather than turning people into shallow images of consumer affluence emphasizing competing for self worth based on purchasing power. Any product that uses un-ethical marketing which harms the culture and people, must be boycotted; and as a people, the Irish must have the sense and courage to act. Nothing hurts a capitalist like raiding the profit margin; the system is easily controlled with the right whip and carrot.
The third lesson Ireland must learn has to do with debt. While debt can provide liquidity to small and medium size enterprises for growth, it can be a disaster when used to excess for personal consumption. The key word is here moderation; somehow Irish consumers must learn to balance their personal debt level and appetites for consumer purchases, with their long term ability to repay the balances. When personal debt level reaches 125% of income, disaster is not far away. The 'I want what I want when I want it' mentality leads only to consumers digging deeper and deeper debt traps which they will remain in for decades. Of course, since the banks have no self discipline to curb their own greed, they certainly have no desire to limit credit expenditures to a healthy level for individuals. This must be a lesson passed on from parents to children; obviously if parents become undisciplined borrowers to satisfy whims, the next generation will do the same. The upcoming recession is a good time for Ireland to reflect on these lessons and to build again for the future, this time with more emphasis on who we want to be, rather than cloning ourselves after Americans. By building indigenous businesses and promoting our Irish products as our own brand of excellence, Ireland will again become prosperous, hopefully based on values other than crass consumer affluence.
All the right ingredients are present and the lessons to utilise them upcoming. With Irish courage and Irish heart, Ireland has the opportunity to lead the world in creating a more civilised economic model which honours both its heritage and other peoples of the world without imitating the failed American economy and culture.
November 16, 2008 by Donald M. Mihaloew Until now, it has been easy criticizing George "Dubya" Bush, for he, and his people, has made a debacle of their administration. Criticizing him as president has been an attractive alternative to looking at us as citizens.
For few of us would want to admit that any of this administration's dishonesty and incompetence would reside in us as well.
Though still wealthy and strong, America is in decline. It has moved beyond mere wealth acquisition and comfort seeking into a fear-based attitude that requires satiation. It's as though cornering personal and corporate markets has become the acceptable norm, where our necessities need to be luxurious and our luxuries necessary.
No longer is it only an economic issue; but now has become a psychosocial matter giving way to a craving that, in turn, always brings on decadence. It's not about material any more; it's about mindset. It raises the question of just how much is enough and can be defined as "a little more than I had yesterday."
When will it end? If it doesn't, we probably will. Are we there already? Why is the American dream at stake? Precisely because it wasn't a bona fide dream in the first place but rather a fantasy vision based in a sense of insecure scarcity and manifested in a craving, manipulative push for everyone to "get theirs," otherwise known as greed.
And greed comes directly from believing there isn't enough, as though America isn't rich enough.Why have we criticized Bush and his entire entourage? The seeds of decay, now fully evident in a pitifully failed and pernicious administration in D.C., are now showing up in an apparently failed society in the rest of America as well. Note the banking industry as only one example. But no one ambitious person or group can be successful in any endeavor at any time without tacit, though cryptic, agreement and co-operation from the general populace.
The question here is: Is this administration simply a manifested excess of what the overall population secretly desires? If possibly so, each of us has to look deeply in ourselves to find the answer to this inevitable, near sudden collapse of the American lifestyle. The issue is too complex for any single factor to be suspect, but nothing will change unless we look inward before outward.
This kind of introspection has not been nor will it ever come from Dubya. We have possibly all been co-conspirators and silent partners with this quasi-government, not conservative in philosophy, but rather narcissistic. Even if you did not vote for him, we are all still somewhat responsible for allowing the baseness of this regime to rise to the top of the vessel that once contained all the necessary elements of sustainability.
This sustainability is all but gone now and will take decades to redevelop. This redevelopment will not come only from any newly elected president or Congress, nor should it. For while competent leadership is essential, each of us must re-examine our values and begin choosing to live in a manner that befits continued mutual respect for other people, nations and for our total planet.What is the Dubya that exists in all of us? Perhaps it stands for Wanton, maybe even Wasteful, and maybe even just plain Wrong. It could stand for Waking Up, or being Watchful, or Wrestling honestly with ourselves and others in respectful dialogue. George "W" Bush needs to but won't see the "W's" that still exist in others who care to change a debilitative life style into something that allows for a Willingness to examine values, a Widening of perspective, and a Welcoming of a commitment to Wellness. Dubya, and the Dubya in all of us, needs a fuller appreciation of what life in this country could be without the craving. Will we do it? Or will we continue criticizing him, others and future presidents for not providing us with satiation?It would be beneficial to start measuring wealth in terms of character, integrity and gratitude rather than only in commodities, possessions and investments.
Thus the decline in America will stop if we redefine wealth as worthy citizenship. What we pay attention to determines what we miss.As H.L. Mencken once said, "As the office of the presidency is perfected, it represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people."Clearly, we are missing what is already "writ large" in past, present and future history. Bush may leave office, but we citizens remain. Let's get on with the necessary due diligence of change, growth, and evolution.
NEW YORK (AFP) November 20, 2008 The "dark side" of US counter-terrorism took center stage in the court case of a mentally ill Pakistani woman accused of attacking US officers in Afghanistan.
The New York federal judge in the case of Aafia Siddiqui highlighted defense allegations that Siddiqui was abducted and tortured by US or allied forces prior to extradition from Afghanistan on attempted-murder charges in August.
Siddiqui, 36, is undergoing psychiatric treatment at a government center in Texas and, according to her lawyer, suffers hallucinations featuring her dead or missing children.
Judge Richard Berman on Monday said the preliminary evaluation showed Siddiqui unfit to stand trial.
On Wednesday, he called for more information regarding allegations that the accused, once a high-flying, US-trained neuroscientist, vanished in 2003 and was held in secret captivity for five years.
The allegations, which the US government rejects, are not part of the court case, but still need to be addressed, Berman told prosecution and defense teams.
"Certainly it has a bearing on the clinical treatment ... and the issue of competence," he said.
The US government says Siddiqui had Al-Qaeda links and that if she went missing between 2003 and this year, that's simply because she was in hiding.
Prosecutors allege she was first detained in July by Afghan police and that shortly after, while in custody, she grabbed a rifle and shot at visiting US officers.
Defense lawyer Elizabeth Fink says that Siddiqui is not only innocent of those charges, but the victim of five horrific years in custody -- an experience responsible for her current mental illness.
According to her supporters, Siddiqui was abducted in Karachi in 2003 along with her three young children and held secretly, probably at a US military base in Afghanistan.
Fink quoted a 2001 statement by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he acknowledged that US anti-terrorism bodies use "the dark side," working "quietly, without any discussion."
Obtaining the truth is almost impossible, Fink told the court, although with Barack Obama's election as president, "God knows what's going to happen to this 'dark side' stuff."
Prosecutor David Raskin said there was "not a shred of evidence" that Siddiqui had been in the hands of US or allied forces prior to her July arrest.
"I can say to the court we have found zero evidence that Ms Siddiqui was abducted, tortured -- any of the things we hear repeated."
Siddiqui and her children were "certainly not in US custody, certainly not kidnapped by US forces, the 'dark side,'" he told the court.
"A more plausible inference is that she went into hiding because people around her started to get arrested and at least two of those people ended up at Guantanamo Bay," Raskin said.
However, both Raskin and Fink admitted they had little hard evidence to prove Siddiqui's whereabouts in that mysterious period.
With Siddiqui apparently in mental distress, and not attending her court hearings, she is unlikely to shed much light in the near future.
According to the preliminary medical report, as quoted by Fink, Siddiqui suffers visual hallucinations of one child, who is believed to be dead, and another, who is missing.
"She believes she lives with two of the children," Fink said.
The next court session, in December, will merely provide an update on Siddiqui's medical condition.
Meanwhile, Siddiqui's 12-year-old son, who was with her at the time of her arrest, was released by the Afghans in September, and lives with his extended family in Karachi.
However, Fink said the boy is also suffering mental illness. "He is heavily medicated, he is seriously disturbed. He is under psychiatric care."
Siddiqui's sister in Karachi "probably knows more about Mrs Siddiqui than anybody," Fink said, but "I can only speak to her on the phone, which is tapped."
Fink said she was considering a meeting with the sister in Europe.
Despite repeated allegations and media reports linking Siddiqui to Al-Qaeda, the accusations have failed to stick. She is not charged with terrorism but attempted murder of army and Federal Bureau of Investigation officers.
by SheilnagigNovember 17, 2008 This week a mother and two adult males living with her, were convicted of the horrifically abusive death of 17 month old Baby P. The citizens of Great Britain, outraged, are calling for the blood of the social service workers who were responsible for the monitoring of Baby P. Children dead as a result of parental abuse is nothing new anywhere in the world: in 1986, the case of Eli Creekmore rocked the USA.
Back in 1986, while the Vezzutos were waiting for the child who never arrived, another human tragedy was unfolding 3,000 miles away in Everett, Wash., outside Seattle. Three-year-old Eli Creekmore was absorbing one beating after another from his father Darren, an ex-convict. There were repeated complaints to authorities by many people who knew -- Eli's grandmother, doctors, child protection workers, even a waitress who saw the boy bleeding from his mouth as he tried to eat ice cream. His day-care teachers said he screamed in fear when his father came to pick him up. Still, authorities placed him in foster care only for brief periods and then returned him time and again to his father and to new beatings. On Sept. 26, 1986, Darren, angry that Eli was crying, kicked him in the stomach, beat him with a belt and left him wedged in a toilet bowl with a ruptured lower intestine. Eli died the next day. Darren was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 60 years. Eli's mother Mary, who said she was too afraid of Darren to help, got 10 months.
This list of child deaths by their carers and others is desperately long; and it would serve no purpose to provide more details here. In many of these cases, a public uproar at the death of a single child has been deafening in developed countries,drowning all other news stories from view. People pour their outrage, condemnation, empathy and vengeance into protests of the savage torture and neglect of a single innocent, thereby cleansing themselves of responsibility and then sinking into the deep relief of catharthis, as they return to their daily lives. Nothing is unusual about this; most people are either mothers or fathers or someone's child and it is natural for people to feel visceral outrage and empathy when they hear of such things.
But there is a deep and sordid irony here.
Googling 'iraqi child fatalities' will yeild thousands of urls which decry the effects of suicide bombers on Iraqi children, child fatalities from UN sanctions, the disruption of education facilities for Iraqi children etc. But you will search far and wide to find the total count of children maimed, dead and missing due to the USA invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa or Palestine; or any of dozens of other countries where the USA and Great Britain has been complicit in bombing, starving or orphaning children to further their interests in controlling the oil resources and corridors of the world. Searching Google to obtain the number of children suffering because of USA and Great Britain imperialistic activities in the above countries will be a frustrating task; most media attention is directed at the loss of lives to the children of Westerners. Perhaps the conclusion is this: if the media does not report the suffering of a child at the hands of adults, it does not exist and need not be thought of again. Or maybe a question is more appropriate: Why is maiming, bombing and starving children of the world to satisfy the voracious appetite of the USers for oil not child abuse? Does an Iraqi child whose arms are severed because of a US bomb qualify as less important than a child in Great Britain who dies because he is thumped in the head by the mother's 'evil' boyfriend?
The deaths of millions of children worldwide are financed by the outraged parents of the USA and Great Britain who object to the abuse of Baby P and Eli Creekmore, who pay taxes that are used to kill some other mother's child in a bid for imperial control of oil. Is this irony or am I just crazy? This sad contradiction is apparently lost on most Western folks; out of sight, out of mind.Moreover, it is a revelation of the extent to which Western people have become powerless over their own responsibilities as citizens of the world. If people can weep for Baby P, they need not weep for the maimed and orphaned children of Iraqi mothers.
Perhaps the neocons of Britain and the USA are correct: people are sheeple. Their compassion ends with their self-interest. Although the suffering of so many women and children, vanquished and permanently crippled, can be blamed on the leaders of superpowers, the irrational and inexcusable ignorance and denial of the masses to recognise these victims' of our tax monies used for war, must be laid squarely at the feet of the common person.
Until this happens, Westerners will be murdering hypocrites with the malleable minds of sheep; exactly what the Masters of the Universe think they are.
Countries that USA has bombed since the end of World War II:
By Naomi Klein November 14, 2008 "The Nation" The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.
In a moment of high panic in late September, the U.S. Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed -- a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "Treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice."
Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country's banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending -- for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. -- is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.
Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.
Despite all of this potential lawlessness, the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the lame-duck Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140 billion in missing tax revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy program. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.
Yes, there is only one president at a time, but that president needed the support of powerful Democrats, including Obama, to get the bailout passed. Now that it is clear that the Bush administration is violating the terms to which both parties agreed, the Democrats have not just the right but a grave responsibility to intervene forcefully.
I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. "None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression," explained one unnamed Congressional aide.
More than that, the Democrats, including Obama, appear to believe that the need to soothe the market should govern all key economic decisions in the transition period. Which is why, just days after a euphoric victory for "change," the mantra abruptly shifted to "smooth transition" and "continuity."
Take Obama's pick for chief of staff. Despite the Republican braying about his partisanship, Rahm Emanuel, the House Democrat who received the most donations from the financial sector, sends an unmistakably reassuring message to Wall Street. When asked on This Week With George Stephanopoulos whether Obama would be moving quickly to increase taxes on the wealthy, as promised, Emanuel pointedly did not answer the question.
This same market-coddling logic should, we are told, guide Obama's selection of treasury secretary. Fox News's Stuart Varney explained that Larry Summers, who held the post under Clinton, and former Fed chair Paul Volcker would both "give great confidence to the market." We learned from MSNBC's Joe Scarborough that Summers is the man "the Street would like the most."
Let's be clear about why. "The Street" would cheer a Summers appointment for exactly the same reason the rest of us should fear it: because traders will assume that Summers, champion of financial deregulation under Clinton, will offer a transition from Henry Paulson so smooth we will barely know it happened. Someone like FDIC chair Sheila Bair, on the other hand, would spark fear on the Street -- for all the right reasons.
One thing we know for certain is that the market will react violently to any signal that there is a new sheriff in town who will impose serious regulation, invest in people and cut off the free money for corporations. In short, the markets can be relied on to vote in precisely the opposite way that Americans have just voted. (A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans strongly favor "stricter regulations on financial institutions," while just 21 percent support aid to financial companies.)
There is no way to reconcile the public's vote for change with the market's foot-stomping for more of the same. Any and all moves to change course will be met with short-term market shocks. The good news is that once it is clear that the new rules will be applied across the board and with fairness, the market will stabilize and adjust. Furthermore, the timing for this turbulence has never been better. Over the past three months, we've been shocked so frequently that market stability would come as more of a surprise. That gives Obama a window to disregard the calls for a seamless transition and do the hard stuff first. Few will be able to blame him for a crisis that clearly predates him, or fault him for honoring the clearly expressed wishes of the electorate. The longer he waits, however, the more memories fade.
When transferring power from a functional, trustworthy regime, everyone favors a smooth transition. When exiting an era marked by criminality and bankrupt ideology, a little rockiness at the start would be a very good sign.
Most people who read these days understand that the USA is bankrupt and yet maintains over 700 military bases worldwide. In addition, it spends more than 4 billion dollars per week on the Iraq occupation. Soldiers do not kill without being paid. Munitions are not manifactured out of thin air. Of course the Federal Reserve can always turn on the printing press for dollars, which amounts to little more than adding a few zeros to some balance sheet on a computer. How are they getting away with this?
The answer is that the USA dollar has maintained status as world reserve currency since Bretton Woods. As long as it does so, the soldiers will be paid and the bombs will people manufactured with more worthless dollars from the Feds.
But how does the world manage to tolerate such a system of monetary imbalance, and why are we not changing this? How does the USA continue to maintain its military activities at the expense of its own citizens.
The short answer is support for the dollar from China and Japan. China at present is awash with dollars and yuan, but short on gold. China buys the USA debt (treasury bills) which allows the government to run its day to day operations and create more money to finance war activities. If China stopped supporting USA debt, the economic system and the war machine would deflate like an overly full balloon whose stopper is removed.
China is complicit in the war machine in this way but not to be confused as being an ally of USA warmongers; it is rather looking after itself and trying to cut its losses from holding so much dollar debt.
To be sure, Beijing regularly rails against what it sees as Washington's irresponsible stewardship of the dollar and against market volatility that endangers the stability that China craves.
But discussion of the crisis in Beijing is dominated by the risks for China of holding so many dollars in its reserves. Reuters
Once again we have ordinary people, soldier ants and worker bees, who have no (nor do they care to have) an understanding of global economics pointing fingers at each other and blaming everyone for the current situation. Divide and conquer has always been the most effective strategy of the elites seeking to maintain their power.
Until China and Japan find it in their self-interest to abandon the dollar as reserve currency, they will be complicit in the murders committed by the USA military. To this end, all concerned citizens with compassion for others should pressure their governments to abandon the dollar as the dominant trade currency.
Talking is not enough. Spending money on those items not produced in China, Japan or the USA is the only input we have. And let the economic powers that be know why.
The Bush gang's parting gift: a final, frantic looting of public wealth
The US bail-out amounts to a strings-free, public-funded windfall for big business. Welcome to no-risk capitalism
Friday October 31 2008 Naomi Klein In the final days of the election many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But don't be fooled: that doesn't mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700bn bail-out out the door. At a recent Senate banking committee hearing, the Republican Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. "How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?" Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bail-out.
When European colonialists realised that they had no choice but to hand over power to the indigenous citizens, they would often turn their attention to stripping the local treasury of its gold and grabbing valuable livestock. If they were really nasty, like the Portuguese in Mozambique in the mid-1970s, they poured concrete down the elevator shafts.
Nothing so barbaric for the Bush gang. Rather than open plunder, it prefers bureaucratic instruments, such as "distressed asset" auctions and the "equity purchase program". But make no mistake: the goal is the same as it was for the defeated Portuguese - a final, frantic looting of the public wealth before they hand over the keys to the safe.
How else to make sense of the bizarre decisions that have governed the allocation of the bail-out money? When the Bush administration announced it would be injecting $250bn into US banks in exchange for equity, the plan was widely referred to as "partial nationalisation" - a radical measure required to get banks lending again. Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary, had seen the light, we were told, and was following the lead of Gordon Brown.
In fact, there has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion." The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans - officially, the reason for the entire programme.
What, then, is the real purpose of the bail-out? My fear is this rush of dealmaking is something much more ambitious than a one-off gift to big business: that the Bush version of "partial nationalisation" is rigged to turn the US treasury into a bottomless cash machine for the banks for years to come. Remember, the main concern among the big market players, particularly banks, is not the lack of credit but their battered share prices. Investors have lost confidence in the honesty of the big financial players, and with good reason.
This is where the treasury's equity pays off big time. By purchasing stakes in these financial institutions, the treasury is sending a signal to the market that they are a safe bet. Why safe? Not because their level of risk has been accurately assessed at last. Not because they have renounced the kind of exotic instruments and outrageous leverage rates that created the crisis. But because the market will now be banking on the fact that the US government won't let these particular companies fail. If they get themselves into trouble, investors will now assume that the government will keep finding more cash to bail them out, since allowing them to go down would mean losing the initial equity investments, many of them in the billions. (Just look at the insurance giant AIG, which has already gone back to taxpayers for a top-up, and seems likely to ask for a third.)
This tethering of the public interest to private companies is the real purpose of the bail-out plan: Paulson is handing all the companies admitted to the programme - a number potentially in the thousands - an implicit treasury department guarantee. To skittish investors looking for safe places to park their money, these equity deals will be even more comforting than a triple-A from Moody's rating agency.
Insurance like that is priceless. But for the banks, the best part is that the government is paying them to accept its seal of approval. For taxpayers, on the other hand, this entire plan is extremely risky, and may well cost significantly more than Paulson's original idea of buying up $700bn in toxic debts. Now taxpayers aren't just on the hook for the debts but, arguably, for the fate of every corporation that sells them equity.
Interestingly, mortgage fund giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both enjoyed this kind of unspoken guarantee before they were nationalised at the start of this crisis. For decades the market understood that, since these private players were enmeshed with the government, Uncle Sam could be counted on to always save the day. It was, as many have pointed out, the worst of all worlds. Not only were profits privatised while risks were socialised, but the implicit government backing created powerful incentives for reckless business practices.
With the new equity purchase programme Paulson has taken the discredited Fannie and Freddie model and applied it to a huge swath of the private banking industry. Again, there is no reason to shy away from risky bets, especially since the treasury has made no such demands of the banks (apparently it doesn't want to "micromanage".)
To further boost market confidence, the federal government has also unveiled unlimited public guarantees for many bank deposit accounts. Oh, and as if this were not enough, the treasury has been encouraging the banks to merge, ensuring that the only institutions left will be "too big to fail", thereby guaranteed a bail-out. In three ways, the market is being told loud and clear that Washington will not allow the financial institutions to bear the consequences of their behaviour. This may be Bush's most creative innovation: no-risk capitalism.
There is a glimmer of hope. In answer to Senator Corker's question, the treasury is indeed having trouble dispersing the bail-out funds. So far it has requested about $350bn of the $700bn, but most of this hasn't yet made it out the door. Meanwhile, every day it becomes clearer that the bail-out was sold to the public on false pretences. Clearly, it was never really about getting loans flowing. It was always about doing what it is doing: turning the state into a giant insurance agency for Wall Street, a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who will most need state protections in the economic storms ahead.
This duplicity is a political opportunity. Whoever wins on November 4 will have enormous moral authority. It should be used to call for a freeze on the dispersal of bail-out funds, not after the inauguration but right away. All deals should be renegotiated, this time with the public getting the guarantees.
It is risky, of course, to interrupt the bail-out process. Nothing could be riskier, however, than allowing the Bush gang their parting gift to big business - the gift that will keep on taking.
A version of this column first appeared in The Nation (www.thenation.com) Source www.naomiklein.org
Speech delivered at the "Building a new world" conference at Radford University, Virginia,
May 23, 2008William Blum
My assignment here today, as I understand it, is to enlighten you all on how to quickly end the war in Iraq. And how to prevent the United States from attacking Iran. Or Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia. In short, how to put an end to the American empire.
Also, how to impeach Bush and Cheney.
And, while I'm at it, maybe, how to end poverty once and for all, how to save the environment, and how to legalize marijuana.
Well, good luck to us all.
Actually, as fanciful as all that sounds, I think that if the radical left had abundant access to the mass media, for a year or so, we could do it. It wouldn't even have to be sole access, just as much time on radio and TV networks as the conservatives and NPR-type centrists and liberals have.
As some of you may recall, two years ago Osama bin Laden, in one of his audio messages, recommended that Americans should read my book Rogue State. Within hours I was swamped by the media and soon appeared on many of the leading TV news shows, dozens of radio programs, and a long profile in the Washington Post. In the previous 10 years I had sent in dozens of letters to the Post mainly commenting on their less-than-ideal coverage of US foreign policy. Not one was printed. Now my photo was on page one.
A few people who called into the TV and radio programs I was on attacked me as if I and bin Laden were friends and I had asked him for the endorsement. I had to point out that he and I were not really friends; in fact, I hadn't spoken to him in months.
Some of the media hosts wanted me to say that I was repulsed by bin Laden's "endorsement". But I did not say I was repulsed, because I wasn't. What I said was: "There are two elements, involved here: On the one hand, I totally despise any kind of religious fundamentalism and the societies spawned by such, like the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the other hand, I'm a member of a movement which has the very ambitious goal of slowing down, if not stopping, the American Empire, to keep it from continuing to go round the world doing things like bombings, invasions, overthrowing governments, and torture.
To have any success, we need to reach the American people with our message. And to reach the American people we need to have access to the mass media. What has just happened has given me the opportunity to reach millions of people I would otherwise never reach. Why should I not be glad about that? How could I let such an opportunity go to waste?"
But many, perhaps most, of those who called in were not hostile. During a 45-minute interview on C-Span and on some radio programs, several people called in to say how delighted they were to hear views expressed that they had never heard before on that station, or had never heard anywhere. I received more than 1000 emails from people I had never been in contact with before, most of which were supportive. I estimate that I sold about 20,000 copies of my book because of my increased exposure.
In summary, I think that there's a very large audience of Americans out there just waiting for us to reach them. Many of them very much suspect that there are things seriously wrong with what the media, the White House, and the Pentagon tell them, but they don't know enough to really be sure or to try to influence others. And they're weighed down by the myths, the myths surrounding US foreign policy. I've gotten quite a few emails from people who tell me about friends and family who simply refuse to be swayed by the facts in my books or other sources. No matter how much these people are shown that what they believe is fallacious, they still refuse to reconsider their views. They say that the author must be quoting out of context or they simply don't care what the argument is.
Now why is that? Are these people just stupid? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions; consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about US foreign policy, and if you don't deal with those basic beliefs you'll be talking to a stone wall. Here are what I think are eight of those basic beliefs, or they can as well be called "myths":
(1) US foreign policy "means well". American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable, if not divinely inspired. Of that most Americans are certain. They genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can't see how benevolent and self-sacrificing America has been. The idea that the United States is seeking to dominate the world, and exploit it economically, and is prepared to use any means necessary, is not something that's easy for most Americans to swallow. They see our leaders on TV and their photos in the press, they see them smiling or laughing, telling jokes; see them with their families, hear them speak of God and love, of peace and law, of democracy and freedom, of human rights and justice and even baseball ... How can such people be called immoral or war criminals?
They have names like George and Dick and Donald, not a single Mohammed or Abdullah in the bunch. And they speak English. Well, George almost does. People named Mohammed or Abdullah cut off an arm or a leg as punishment for theft. We know that that's horrible. We're too civilized for that. But we don't consider that people named George and Dick and Donald drop millions of cluster bombs on cities and villages, and the many unexploded ones become land mines, and before very long a child picks one up or steps on one of them and loses an arm or leg, sometimes worse.
I like to ask the question: What does US foreign policy have in common with Mae West, the Hollywood sexpot of the 1940s? The story is told of a visitor to her mansion, who looked around and said: "My goodness, what a beautiful home you have." And Mae West replied: "Goodness has nothing to do with it."
That's one of the important points you have to make about US foreign policy -- goodness has nothing to do with it.
If I were to write a book called The American Empire for Dummies, page one would say: Don't ever look for the moral factor. US foreign policy has no moral factor built into its DNA. Clear your mind of that baggage which only gets in the way of seeing beyond the clichés and the platitudes they feed us all.
So when American officials state or imply benevolent motivations behind their foreign policy, we should not let them get away with claiming such intentions. Supporters of US policies have that rationale profoundly embedded in their thinking, and I find it very useful in discussions with such people to raise moral questions about the government's motivations. These people are not used to hearing such an argument. The media almost never mentions it. It's almost disorienting for Americans. Or I sometimes ask them what the United States would have to do abroad to lose their support? What for them would be too much? Try that.
(2) The United States is really concerned with this thing called "democracy". Even though in the past 60 years, the US has attempted to overthrow literally dozens of democratically-elected governments, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and grossly interfered in as many democratic elections in every corner of the world. Moreover, it would be difficult to name a brutal dictatorship of the second half of the 20th century that was not supported by the United States. Not just supported, but put into power, and kept in power, against the wishes of the population.
The question is: What do the Busheviks mean by "democracy"?
Well, the first thing they have in mind is making sure the country in question is hospitable to corporate globalization and American military bases; and if this means forcing a regime change, so be it. The last thing they have in mind is any kind of economic democracy, the closing of the gap between the desperate poor and those for whom too much is not enough.
(3) Anti-American sentiment in the Middle East comes from hatred of our alleged freedom and democracy, or our wealth, or our secular government, or our culture. George W. has declared this many times. But polls taken in many Middle East countries in recent years, by respected international polling organizations, show again and again that the great majority of those people really admire American society. There's no clash of civilizations. It's much simpler. What bothers them about the United States are the decades of appalling things done to their homelands by US foreign policy. That's what motivates anti-American terrorists. It's not the sex in American films and TV; it's the American bombs dropping on their homes and schools. It's not the alcohol and the miniskirts. It's the American invasions and occupations; American torture; support of Middle East dictators; unmitigated support of Israel.
It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long succession of Washington's awful policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations. No one likes being invaded or bombed or tortured or having their government overthrown by a foreign power. Why should there be any doubt about this? But Americans have to be reminded of it.
I don't think, by the way, that poverty plays much of a role in creating terrorists. The 9-11 hijackers, or alleged hijackers, were not a bunch of poor peasants; they were largely middle and upper class, and educated. Bin Laden himself is, or was, a millionaire. So we shouldn't confuse terrorism with revolution.
(4) The United States has been pursuing a War on Terror. But the fact is the US is not actually against terrorism per se, they're against only those terrorists who are not allies of the American empire. For example, there is a lengthy and infamous history of Washington's support for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. At this moment, Luis Posada Carriles remains protected by the US government in Florida, though he masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people. Venezuela, a key location in this murder plot, has asked Washington to return Posada to Caracas. But the US has refused. He's but one of hundreds of anti-Castro terrorists who've been given haven in the United States over the years along with many other terrorists from Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, and other countries.
The United States has also provided support of terrorists in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, including those with known connections to al Qaeda. All to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism. What's happened is that the War on Terror has served as a cover for the expansion of the empire.
Supporters of the War on Terror tell us that it's been a success because there hasn't been a terrorist attack in the US in the six -plus years since 9-11. Well, there wasn't a terrorist attack in the US in the six-plus years before 9-11 either. So what does that prove? More importantly, since the first American bombs fell on Afghanistan in October 2001 there have been scores of terrorist attacks against American institutions in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific -- military, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States, including two very major attacks in Indonesia with large loss of life.
But the worst failure of the War on Terror is that American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, including all the torture, have probably created thousands of new anti-American terrorists. We'll be hearing from them for a terribly long time.
(5) If Saddam Hussein had in fact possessed all the terrible weapons the US claimed he had, the invasion and occupation of Iraq would then have been justified. Of the numerous lies we've been told about the war in Iraq, this is the biggest one, this is the most insidious, the necessary foundation for all the other lies. Think about it -- What possible reason could Saddam Hussein have had for attacking the United States or Israel other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide? Because that's what would have followed an Iraqi attack on the US or Israel -- if not a nuclear devastation of Iraq, then a non-nuclear devastation of Iraq. But if in fact Iraq was not a threat to attack the US or Israel, then all we've been told about the war, before it began, and afterwards, is totally meaningless; all the accusations and discussions about whether the intelligence was right or wrong about this or that, or whether the Democrats also believed the lies, all meaningless.
And keep in mind, the same question applies to Iran: What possible reason could Iran have for attacking the United States or Israel other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide? Of course, what worries Tel Aviv and Washington is not so much the danger of such an attack, but the fact that some day Israel might not be the only nuclear power in the Middle East, a serious loss of their ability to dominate.
Sometimes, when I have a discussion with a person who supports the war in Iraq, and the person has no other argument left to defend US policy there he may say something like: "Well, just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein was overthrown?"
And I say "No".
And he says "No?"
And I say: Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone asked you afterward: Well, aren't you glad that you no longer have a knee problem? It's the same with the Iraqi people. They no longer have a Saddam Hussein problem. In general, the great majority of Iraqis had a much better life under Saddam Hussein than they've had under US occupation. That's been confirmed again and again.
(6) There are many who believe that invading and occupying Iraq has been a horrible mistake, but that doing the same in Afghanistan has been justified. Afghanistan has become "the good war". It was to revenge the deaths of September 11, 2001, was it not? Of course -- in a rational world -- revenge should be taken against those responsible for what happened on that infamous date. But of the tens of thousands of people killed by the US and its allies in Afghanistan the past six-plus years, how many, can it be said, had anything to do with the events of September 11? My rough estimate is ... none. So what kind of revenge is that?
Yes, Osama bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan and that's where the attack had been partially planned. But consider ... If Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the terrible bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, had not been quickly caught, would the government have bombed the state of Michigan or any of the other places McVeigh had called home and where he had planned his attack?
Whatever one thinks of the appalling society the Taliban created, they had not really been associated with terrorist acts, and the masses of Taliban supporters shouldn't have been held responsible if their leader, Mohammed Omar, one person, allowed foreign terrorists into the country, any more than I would want to be held responsible for all the Cuban terrorists in Miami. And most of the foreigners had probably come to Afghanistan in the 1990s to help the Taliban in their civil war -- a religious mission for them -- nothing the US government should have been concerned about. And remember, Mohammed Omar offered to turn bin Laden over to the United States if Washington presented proof of bin Laden's involvement in 9-11. The United States did not accept the offer.
(7) In the Cold War, the United States defeated what was known as the International Communist Conspiracy. The legacy of the Cold War is still with us; it keeps coming up, often used by conservatives in one way or another as an argument in support of the War on Terror.
Let me take you back a bit now. If you think what you have now is government lying and deceit, let me tell you that in my day, during the cold war, the big lie, the big huge lie they pounded into our heads from childhood on was that there was something out there called The International Communist Conspiracy, headquarters in Moscow, and active in every country of the world, looking to subvert everything that was decent and holy, looking to enslave us all. That's what they taught us, in our schools, our churches, on radio, TV, newspapers, in our comic books -- The Communist Menace, the red menace, more dangerous than al Qaeda is presented to us today.
The Communist Menace was international, you couldn't escape it. And almost every American believed this message unquestioningly. I was a good, loyal anti-communist until I was past the age of 30. In fact, in the 1960s I was working at the State Department planning on becoming a foreign service officer so I could join the battle against communism, until a thing called Vietnam came along and changed my mind, and my life.
It was all a con game. There was never any such animal as The International Communist Conspiracy. What there was, was people all over the Third World fighting for economic and political changes which didn't coincide with the needs of the American power elite, and so the US moved to crush those governments and those movements, even though the Soviet Union was playing hardly any role at all in those scenarios.
Washington officials of course couldn't say that they were intervening somewhere to block social change, so they called it fighting communism, fighting a communist conspiracy, and of course fighting for freedom and democracy. Just like now the White House can't say that it invaded Iraq to expand the empire, or for the oil, or for the corporations, or for Israel, so it says it's fighting terrorism.
Remember: The cold war ended in 1991 ... the International Communist Conspiracy was no more ... no more red threat ... and nothing changed in American foreign policy. Since that time the US has been intervening, bombing, and overthrowing governments just as often as during the cold war. What does that tell you? It tells me that the so-called "communist threat" was just a ploy, an excuse for American imperialism.
Keep this in mind: Following its bombing of Iraq in 1991 -- after the cold war was ended -- the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Following its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.
Following its bombing of Afghanistan in 2001-2, the United States wound up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Yemen and Djibouti.
Following its bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States wound up with Iraq.
This is not very subtle foreign policy. It's certainly not covert. The men who run the American Empire are not easily embarrassed.
And that's the way the empire grows -- a base in every region, ready to be mobilized to put down any threat to imperial rule, real or imagined. 63 years after World War II ended, the United States still has major bases in Germany and Japan; 55 years after the end of the Korean War, tens of thousands of American armed forces continue to be stationed in South Korea.
(8) The last myth I'd like to mention has to do with the media, and it affects the political views of Americans as much as any of the previously mentioned myths. It's the idea that conservatives and liberals are ideological polar opposites. In actuality, conservatives, especially of the neo- kind, are far to the right on the political spectrum, while liberals are ever so slightly to the left of center. Yet, we are led to believe that a radio or TV talk show on foreign policy with a conservative and a liberal is offering a "balanced" point of view. But a more appropriate balance to a neo-conservative would be a left-wing radical or progressive. American liberals are typically closer to conservatives on foreign policy than they are to these groups on the left, and the educational value of such supposedly balanced media can be more harmful than beneficial as far as seeing through the empire's actions and motives. The listener thinks he's getting more or less a full range of opinion on the topic and doesn't realize that there's a whole world outside the narrow box he's being placed in.
The fundamental political difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberalism sees a problem -- such as America's role as the world's bully -- simply as bad policy, while the Marxist sees it as something that flows out logically from US economic and military interests.
When a liberal sees a beggar, he says the system isn't working. When a Marxist sees a beggar, he says the system is working.
Ideology is a very important concept and I think that most people are rather confused by it, which is due in no small measure to the fact that the media are confused by it, or they at least pretend to be confused. The official ideology of the American media is that they don't have any ideology.
So all this I hope is ammunition you can use in trying to win over new recruits for the cause. And don't be shy about raising such points even when "preaching to the choir" or "preaching to the converted". That's what speakers and writers are often scoffed at for doing -- saying the same old thing to the same old people, just spinning their wheels. That's what some would say I'm doing at this very moment. You are part of the choir, are you not?
But long experience as speaker, writer and activist in the area of foreign policy tells me it just ain't so. From the questions and comments I often get from my audiences, in person and via email, and from other people's audiences as well, I can plainly see that there are numerous significant information gaps and misconceptions in the choir's thinking, often leaving them unable to see through the newest government lie or propaganda scheme. They're unknowing or forgetful of what happened in the past that illuminates the present. Or they may know the facts but are unable to apply them at the appropriate moment. Or they're vulnerable to being confused by the next person who comes along with a specious argument that opposes what they currently believe, or think they believe. In short, the choir needs to be frequently reminded and enlightened.
So that's your assignment. Go out there and educate, and agitate, and subvert. There's no magical tactic, only persistence. As the Quakers are fond of saying: If not now, when? If not here, where? If not you, who?
The American Empire: 1992 to present from the book Killing Hope by William Blum 2004 edition Following its bombing of Iraq in 1991, the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Following its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.
Following its bombing of Afghanistan in 2001-2, the United States wound up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Yemen and Djibouti.
Following its bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States wound up with Iraq.
This is not very subtle foreign policy. Certainly not covert. The men who run the American Empire are not easily embarrassed.
And that is the way the empire grows-a base in every neighborhood, ready to be mobilized to put down any threat to imperial rule, real or imagined. Fifty-eight years after world War II ended, the United States still has major bases in Germany and Japan; fifty ears after the end of the Korean War, tens of thousands of American armed forces continue to be stationed in South Korea.
"America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before," US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in February 2002. Later that year, the US Defense Department announced: "The United States Military is currently deployed to more locations then it has been throughout history."
Equally unsubtle are the announcements beginning in the early 1990s-coinciding with he pivotal demise of the Soviet Union-and continuing to the present, trumpeting Washington's desire, means, and intention for world domination, while assuring the world of the noble purposes behind this crusade. These declarations have been regularly put forth in policy papers emanating from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as from government-appointed commissions and think tanks closely associated with the national security establishment.
Here is the voice of the empire in 1992
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.... we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.... we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
1996: "We will engage terrestrial targets someday-ships, airplanes, land targets-from space.... We're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space.
1997: "With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we're going to keep it."
2000: "The new [military preparedness] standard is to maintain military superiority over all potential rivals and to prepare now for future military rivalries even if they can not yet be identified and their eventual arrival is only speculative.... Military requirements have become detached from net assessments of actual security threats. Generic wars and generic capabilities are proffered as the basis for planning.... Particularities of real threat scenarios have become secondary to the generalized need to show raw U.S. power across the globe.
2001: "The presence of American forces in critical regions around the world is the visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower and as the guarantor of liberty, peace and stability."
2001: "If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
2001: The Bush administration's "Nuclear Posture Review", directing the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries- China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria-and to build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations.
2002: In September, the White House issued its "National Security Strategy", which declared: Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.... America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.... We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed.... We cannot let our enemies strike first.... To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
Preemptiveness is essentially the rationale imperial Japan, without being overly paranoid, used to justify its attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and which Nazi Germany, as a sham pretext, used to justify its invasion of Poland in 1939.
To one observer, the meaning of the "National Security Strategy" was this: It dashes the aspirations of those who had hoped that the world was moving toward a system of international law that would allow for the peaceful / resolution of conflicts, through covenants and courts. In place of this, single power that shuns covenants and courts has proclaimed that it intends to dominate the world militarily, intervening preemptively where | necessary to exorcise threats.... Those who want a world in which no | power is supreme and in which laws and covenants are used to settle conflicts will begin a new debate-about how to contend with imperial America.
So intoxicated with the idea of dominance is the US national security state that when it announced, in November 2002, the formation of a public affairs group that would travel to battlefields "to interact with journalists, assist U.S. commanders and send news and pictures back to headquarters for dissemination," it described the operation as an attempt at "information dominance".
The Cold War is Over. Long live the Cold War. It is remarkable indeed that in the 21st century the government of the United States is still going around dropping huge amounts of exceedingly powerful explosives upon the heads of innocent and defenseless people. It wasn't supposed to be this way. In the mid 1980s, Michael Gorbachev's reforms instituted the beginning of the end for the Soviet police state. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and people all over Eastern Europe were joyfully celebrating "a new day". The United States then joined this celebration by invading and bombing Panama, only weeks after the Wall fell. At the same time, the US was shamelessly intervening in the election in Nicaragua to defeat a leftist government.
Soon thereafter, South Africa freed Nelson Mandela and apartheid began to crumble, and before the year 1990 was over Haiti held its first free election ever and chose a genuine progressive as president. It seemed like anything was possible, optimism was as widespread as pessimism is today.
However, when Bulgaria and Albania, "newly freed from the grip of communism", as the American media would put it, dared to elect governments not acceptable to Washington, Washington just stepped in and overthrew those governments.
The same period found the US bombing Iraq and its people, 40 days and nights without mercy, for no good or honest reason.
And that was that for our hope for a different and better world.
But the American leaders were not through. In 1993 they were off attacking Somalia, trying to rearrange the country's political map, more bombing and killing. They intervened to put down dissident movements in Peru, Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, just as if it were the Cold War in the 1950s in Latin America, and the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, still doing it in the 1990s, and into the new century. In the latter part of the 1990s, Washington could be found engaged in serious meddling in the elections in territories which had once been part of the Soviet sphere: Russia, Mongolia, and Bosnia.
In 1999, they bombed the people of Serbia and Kosovo for 78 seemingly endless days, the culmination of Washington's master plan of breaking up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, demonized as "the last of the Communists".
And once again, in the fall of 2001, grossly and openly intervened in an election in Nicaragua to prevent the left from winning.
At the same time, bombarding Afghanistan, and in all likelihood killing more innocent civilians than were killed in the United States on 11 September 2001,~3 as well as taking the lives of countless "combatants" (i.e., anyone who defended against the invasion of the land they were living in). Most of the so-called "terrorists" of foreign nationality residing in Afghanistan at the time, including those training at al Qaeda camps, had come there to fight against the Soviet forces or to help the Taliban in their later civil war; for them these were religious missions, nothing to do with terrorism or the United States.
Amongst the thousands of victims of the American invasion, not one has been identified as having a connection to the events of that tragic day. The 11 September terrorists had chosen symbolic buildings to attack and the United States then chose a symbolic country to retaliate against.
While continuing to savage Afghanistan in 2002, Washington found time to lend its indispensable support to a plot to overthrow Hugo Chavez and his populist government in Venezuela, Chavez having made it abundantly clear that Venezuela was not prepared to become a foreign outpost of the empire.
And all these years, still keeping a choke hold on Cuba; still, after a century of imperialist occupation, refusing to vacate Guantanamo Base in Cuba, converting it in 2002 to a modern Devil's Island for the illegal and grim imprisonment of men, as well as several children, kidnapped in various localities of the world in the so-called War on Terrorism.
There was none of the "peace dividend" that had been promised for the end of the Cold War, not for Americans nor for the rest of the world. What do we have here? The American people had been taught for nearly half a century that the Cold War, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the huge military budgets, all the US invasions and overthrows of governments-the ones they knew about-they were taught that this was all to fight the same menace: The International Communist Conspiracy, headquarters in Moscow.
But then the Soviet Union was dissolved. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved as well. The East European satellites became independent. The former communists even became capitalists.
And nothing changed in American foreign policy.
Even NATO remained, NATO which had been created-so we were told-to protect Western Europe against a Soviet invasion, even NATO remained, ever increasing in size and military power, a treaty on wheels which could be rolled in any direction to suit Washington's current policy-acting as a US surrogate ruling over the Balkans as a protectorate, invoking its charter to justify its members joining the US in the Afghanistan invasion.
And as Russia closed down its Cold War bases in Eastern Europe, Vietnam and Cuba, the United States was opening military bases in the territories of the former Soviet Union and in other regions of the world. While Russia closed down its radio intelligence station at Lourdes, Cuba, the United States was building a powerful communications listening station in Latvia, on the Russian border, as part of Washington's worldwide eavesdropping system.
The whole thing had been a con game. The Soviet Union and something called communism per se had not been the object of Washington's global attacks. There had never been an International Communist Conspiracy. The enemy was, and remains, any government or movement, or even individual, that stands in the way of the expansion of the American Empire; by whatever name the US gives to the enemy-communist, rogue state, drug trafficker, terrorist .
Is the United States Against Terrorism? Are we now to believe that the American Empire is against terrorism? What does one call a man who blows up an airplane killing 73 civilians for political reasons; who attempts assassinations against several diplomats; who fires cannons at ships docked in American ports; who places bombs in numerous commercial and diplomatic buildings in the US and abroad? Dozens of such acts. His name is Orlando Bosch, he's Cuban and he lives in Miami, unmolested by the authorities. The city of Miami once declared a day in his honor-Dr. Orlando Bosch Day.
He was freed from prison in Venezuela in 1988, where he had been held for the airplane bombing, partly because of pressure from the American ambassador at the time, Otto Reich, who in 2002 was appointed to a high position in the State Department by President Bush.
After Bosch returned to the US in 1988, the Justice Department condemned him as a totally violent terrorist and was all set to deport him, but that was blocked by President Bush, the first, with the help of son Jeb Bush in Florida. So is President Bush, the second, and his family against terrorism? Well, yes, they're against those terrorists who are not allies of the empire.
The plane that Bosch bombed, in 1976, was a Cuban plane. He's wanted in Cuba for that and a host of other serious crimes, and the Cubans have asked Washington to extradite him. To Cuba he's like Osama bin Laden is to the United States. But the US has refused. Imagine the reaction in the United States if bin Laden showed up in Havana and the Cubans refused to turn him over. Imagine the reaction in the United States if Havana proclaimed Osama bin Laden Day?
Washington's commitment to fighting terrorism can be further questioned in light of its support of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo who comprised the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA, in furtherance of its political-ethnic agenda, have carried out numerous terrorist attacks for years in various parts of the Balkans, but they've been US allies because they've attacked people out of favor with Washington. This despite the fact that the KLA has had ideological and personal ties to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and despite being categorized as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.
Moreover, in the 1980s and 90s, anti-communist Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians resident in the United States financed and instigated their countrymen abroad in bombings and other attacks on their governments and citizens, hoping to destabilize those governments; at times they traveled from the US to those countries to carry out attacks themselves; these actions-terrorism by definition-were carried out with the tacit approval of the American government, which turned a blind eye to the Neutrality Act, which prohibits American citizens or residents from using force to overthrow a foreign government.
George W. Bush has also spoken out vehemently against harboring terrorists-"those who harbor terrorists threaten the national security of the United States". Does he really mean that?
We must ask: Which country harbors more terrorists than the United States? Orlando Bosch is only one of the numerous anti-Castro Cubans in Miami who have carried out many hundreds of terrorist acts, in the US, in Cuba, and elsewhere; all kinds of arson attacks, assassination attempts and bombings. They have been harbored in the US in safety for decades; as have numerous other friendly terrorists, torturers and human rights violators from Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia and elsewhere, all allies of the empire.
The CIA was busy looking for terrorists in caves in the mountains of Afghanistan at the same time as the Agency sat in bars in Miami having drinks with terrorists.
The Imperial Mafia What are we to make of all this? How are we to understand United States foreign policy? Well, if one were to write a book called "The American Empire for Dummies", page one should say: Don't ever look for the moral factor. US foreign policy has no moral factor built into its DNA. One must clear one's mind of that baggage which only gets in the way of seeing beyond the clichés and the platitudes.
It's rather difficult for most Americans and Americophiles throughout the world to accept such a notion. They see American leaders on television smiling and laughing, telling jokes; they see them with their families, hear them speak of God and love, of peace and law, of democracy and freedom, of human rights and justice, and even baseball. These leaders know how to condemn the world's atrocities in no uncertain terms, with just the right words that decent people love to hear, just the right catch in their throat to show how moved they are. How can such people be monsters, how can they be called immoral?
They have names like George and Dick and Donald, not a single Mohammed or Abdullah in the bunch. And they all speak English. People named Mohammed or Abdullah cut off people's hands as punishment for theft. Americans know that that's horrible. Americans are too civilized for that.
But people named George and Dick and Donald drop cluster bombs on cities and villages, and the many unexploded ones become land mines, and before very long a child picks one up or steps on one of them and loses an arm or a leg, or both arms or both legs, and sometimes their eyesight; while the cluster bombs which actually explode create their own kind of high-velocity, jagged steel horror.
But these men [ American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home-the ones who make it back alive-with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things.
When I was writing my book Rogue State during 1999-2000 I used the term "American Empire" with some caution because it was not in common usage and I wasn't sure the American public was quite ready for the idea. But I needn't have been so cautious. The idea of United States world hegemony has come to be discussed not only openly, but proudly, by supporters of the empire-prominent American intellectuals such as Dinesh D'Souza of the Hoover Institution, who wrote an article entitled "In praise of American empire", in which he argued that "America is the most magnanimous imperial power ever."
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer has spoken of America's "uniquely benign imperium.
Michael Hirsch, editor of Newsweek magazine, added to the chorus of self-love songs with this:
"U.S. allies must accept that some U.S. unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable. This mainly involves accepting the reality of America's supreme might-and truthfully, appreciating how historically lucky they are to be protected by such a relatively benign power. "
Robert Kagan, a leading light of the American foreign policy establishment, had written earlier: "And the truth is that the benevolent hegemony exercised by the United States is good for a vast portion of the world's population. It is certainly a better international arrangement than all realistic alternatives."
In this way are people who are wedded to American foreign policy able to live with it-they conclude, and proclaim, and may even believe, that such policies produce a humane force, an enlightened empire, bringing order, prosperity and civilized behavior everywhere, and if the US is forced to go to war it conducts it in a humanitarian manner.... the present book documents in minute detail the exact opposite, showing the remarkable violence and cruelty, the suppression of social change, and the many other abhorrent consequences of US interventions for people in every corner of the globe for half a century.
The empire's scribes appear to be as amoral as the officials in the White House and the Pentagon. After all, the particles of depleted uranium are not lodging inside their lungs to radiate for the rest of their lives; the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are not bankrupting their economy and slashing their basic services; it's not their families wandering as refugees in the desert.
The leaders of the empire, the imperial mafia-George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, et al.- and their scribes as well, are as fanatic and as fundamentalist as Osama bin Laden. Allah Akhbar! God is great! ... USA! USA! USA!
[Robert] Kagan, an intellectual architect of an interventionism that seeks to impose a neo-conservative agenda upon the world, by any means necessary, has declared that the United States must refuse to abide by certain international conventions, like the international criminal court and the Kyoto accord on global warming. The US, he says, "must support arms control, but not always for itself. It must live by a double standard."
There is also Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat and advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blalr. Cooper writes:
The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. When dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era-force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself.
His expression, "every state for itself", can be better understood as any state not willing to accede to the agenda of the American Empire and the school bully's best friend in London.
So there we have it. The double standard is in. The golden rule of do unto others as you would have others do unto you is out.
The imperial mafia, and their court intellectuals like Kagan and Cooper, have a difficult time selling or defending their world vision on the basis of legal, moral, ethical or fairness standards. Thus it is that they decide they're not bound by such standards.
The Liquid Gold, Again The American occupation of Afghanistan served the purpose of setting up a new government that would be sufficiently amenable to Washington's international objectives, including the installation of military bases and listening stations and the running of secure oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan from the Caspian Sea region once the country had been pacified.
For years, the American oil barons had had their eyes on the vast oil and gas reserves around the Caspian Sea, envisioning an Afghanistan-Pakistan route to the Indian Ocean. The oilmen had been quite open about this, giving frank testimony before Congress on the matter.
After Afghanistan, they turned their lust to the even greater oil reserves of Iraq. Once again, the American public had to be primed. Renowned espionage novelist John le Carre has observed: "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history."
As this is written in April 2003, the United States has just completed the bombing, invasion and takeover of the beleaguered Iraqi society, causing great destruction, killing thousands of innocent people-civilians and soldiers-in the process, leaving countless others maimed and otherwise ruined. "It looks like it's a bombing of a city, but it isn't," declared US Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, in defense of American "precision bombing."
Washington looked at the results of its military actions, which others would call horrific, and labeled it "liberation", because the Saddam Hussein regime had been overthrown.
Prior to this, the imperial mafia had staged a year-long propaganda show to convince Americans and the world that the world's only superpower had no choice but to attack a sovereign and crippled country that had not attacked the United States, that had not threatened to attack the United States, that knew it would mean instant mass suicide for them if they attacked the United States. The imperial mafia's thesis was odd not simply because Iraq was not a threat-as the war's easy military victory demonstrated-but because the imperial mafia knew that Iraq was not a threat, at all.
They'd been telling the world one story after another about why Iraq was a threat, an imminent threat, a threat increasing in danger with each passing day, a nuclear threat, a chemical threat, a biological threat, that Iraq was a terrorist state, that Iraq was tied to al Qaeda ... only to have each story amount to nothing. They insisted repeatedly that Iraq must agree to having the UN weapons inspectors back in, and when Iraq agreed to this the imperial mafia declared that it wasn't good enough and proceeded to disparage the effort.
For it was war that the White House yearned for, and it was war that they got, as they thumbed their nose at the greatest anti-war protests the world has ever seen as well as the sweeping opposition of the United Nations and humanity's hard-won concepts of international law and collaboration for a more peaceful planet. It remains to be seen whether and how the world body will survive being relegated to humiliating irrelevance on the most important question that it can face, the UN being an institution which declared in the very first sentence of its Charter the determination "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has brought untold sorrow to mankind."
Did any of Washington's policy make sense? This sudden urgency of fighting a war in the absence of a fight? It did if one understood that the invasion was not about Sadaam Hussein's evilness or his alleged weapons of mass destruction. When weeks of US military occupation of Iraq failed to uncover any such weapons, the White House declared that WMD were not, after all, the real reason for the invasion. What they were really doing, they assured the world, was delivering various blows to terrorism. "We were not Iying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."
Amongst other reasons, the war was about the US replacing Hussein and installing a puppet government, as it did in Afghanistan; in this case an American occupation government, enabling American oil companies to move into Iraq to enjoy a laissez-faire feast; at the same time opening the country to all manner of transnational corporations as Iraq takes its place in the new world order of globalized economies, and the American Empire adds another country and a few more bases from which to further control and remake the Middle East in the imperial mafia's endearing amoral style, for which, presumably, the children of the region will sing great songs in years to come.
US agreement to allow the UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq in December 2002 had been no more than a bluff to cater to unexpectedly strong world opposition to Washington's planned invasion. Three months of inspections before the invasion began turned up nothing in the way of unambiguously prohibited weapons. Over the course of about seven years in the 1990s the UN inspectors had found and destroyed huge amounts of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq. Scott Ritter, chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, stated in 2002 that:
Since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed; 90-9S% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been verifiably eliminated. This includes all of the factories used to produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and long-range ballistic missiles; the associated equipment of these factories; and the vast majority of the products coming out of these factories.
In the same period, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, reported that his agency had:
dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities. We neutralized Iraq's nuclear program. We confiscated its weapon-usable material. We destroyed, removed or rendered harmless all its facilities and equipment relevant to nuclear weapons production.
This, then, was the alarming threat of Iraq which had to be wiped out, a society already terribly enfeebled by 12 years of sanctions, which US National Security Advisor Samuel Berger called "the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind".
US Foreign Policy: A Laboratory for Growing the Anti-American Terrorism Virus "We leveled it. There was nobody left, just dirt and dust."
US Army Major Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, speaking of the destruction of three villages in the Shahikot Valley in Afghanistan.
The American bombing of Afghanistan, begun on 7 October 2001 and followed by a military occupation of much of the country, gave rise to dozens of terrorist actions against American individuals and institutions, as well as Christian and other Western targets, in South Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere; a dozen or so attacks in Pakistan alone (including the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pear and the most disastrous one in Bali, Indonesia, on 12 October, which killed more than 180 people, almost all Australians, Americans, or British; the two leading suspects arrested in that case each stated that he had acted in retaliation for the US attack on Afghanistan and Muslims.
The subsequent attack on Iraq-a war nobody wanted except the imperial mafia-may have recruited thousands more throughout the Muslim world as the next generation of terrorists to carry out the jihad against The Great Satan.
Has the American power elite learned anything from being the frequent target of terrorism over the years? Here's James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA and member of the Defense Department's Policy Board, speaking two months after the beginning of the US bombing of Afghanistan, advocating an invasion of Iraq and unconcerned about the response of the Arab world: The silence of the Arab public in the wake of America's victories in Afghanistan, Woolsey said, proves that "only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S."
In a similar light, a phrase attributed to various leaders of the Roman Empire has been used by Bush administration officials: oderint dum metuant-"Let them hate so long as they fear."
The State Department may have learned something. At the time of the first anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack and subsequently as well, the Department held conferences on how to improve America's image abroad in order to reduce the level of hatred. But it's image they were working on, not change of policies.
And the policies scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.
"The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment," a senior Defense Department official told the New York Times in 2003, "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited."
The world can only wonder this: When will American wars of aggression, firing missiles into the heart of a city, and using depleted uranium and cluster bombs against the population become completely discredited?
They already have become such, but the United States, which wages war on the same scale other nations apply to mere survival, does not yet know it. Instead, it practices perpetual war for perpetual peace.
If I hear the 'O' word one more time, I may lose my patience with politics altogether. Unfortunate for me since I will most likely hear the 'O' word every week, if not more often, for the next four years. I am resigned to this; but for the moment a sense of the absurdity of it all will greatly improve my humour.
There seems to be two camps of opinion of 'O' since the election; those who love him, and those who hate him. I 'd like to take quick look at both.
Many Americans, and people around the world, are thrilled will 'O's election and float around in a sense of euphoria that everything will be OK now. The neo-cons are gone; America is vindicated and once again embraced by the world as the benevolent safeguard of democracy, as it has always claimed. These are mainly the liberals and other middle of the road groups who can once again feel the sunshine of god's love on America, and on their balance sheets. They hope without fear, because there is no point in learning anything that might upset their new found security for the future. 'O' is a sainted saviour in whom they have faith.
The other camp see 'O' as incarnate evil. Curiously, two political positions endorse this view; the left and right, both moderate and more radical. For the right camp, 'O' represents the moral decay of white society, the economy and the future. No doubt, this group will bellow the loudest when things start to fall apart, 'See, he has ruined our country!' For the left camp 'O' is simplyan extension of the American war machine who will continue on in the same evil path as his predecessor, indeed, the foreign policy imperialism that America has been pursuing for a hundred years, while cloaking itself in democratic rhetoric to hypnotise its populace. Both left and right agree that 'O' must go.
Not being privy to the elite power circles in the world and not knowing 'O' personally, leaves me somewhat at a disadvantage as to what to think. I can't help but engage in speculation; but I decry pre-emptive judgement. The second act is over and the outcome in the third seems inevitable and written into the opaque plot itself; I await in suspence for what will happen but welcome the intermission. We have little influence now and the world exhales in relief of ridding itself of the Bush Empire.
It is probably easier to list those realities which I know have not changed, nor will they in the near future; the American people were of the same cultural mentality on the morning of November 5th as they were on the evening of November 3rd, consumer zombies who believe their identity consists of stuff they own and how big their guns are. The global banking consortium is still calling the shots as to who gets what and who does what. The Cheney-Bush regime is not giving up power, especially at the climax of the game; they have a plan to move forward in some way that surely will mean more misery for people. They didn't care about life and people before, and they don't care now. The arms race that America has re-ignited will continue at full pace for probably decades. The American economy is falling apart from decades of mismanagement and may not recover for five to ten years.
What is 'O's role in all this. Is he the evil extension of a Bilderburg plan? Is he the fall guy that will be thrown under the bus so the neo-cons can rise to power again in 2012 to clean up the mess they will blame on him? Is he the transition team for the final Big Brother transition of nations into the new world order? Maybe he is the hero so many want and need him to be. The deck is stacked against him even if his heart is as pure as his rhetoric. There is someone who I know he isn't but I wish he was; 'Here I come to save the day. Mighty Mouse is on his way'. It might be a good PR image for him to weather the future disasters we shall all be faced with.
SHHHHHHHHHH They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will come. I am not sure how I came upon George Orwell's 1984 in my daily reading last week. I remember of course from school, but I must have been skiving during that lesson. Moreover, at that stage in my life, I lacked the maturity to understand the concepts. So it is just as well I came across it this week and reviewed it.
Since then, I see 1984 everywhere. Newspeak; what better term for our 'terrorist, anti-terrorist' redefinition of society. We no longer have un-constitutional laws which invade our dignity and rights; we have 'anti-terrorist' laws. Much of the time, the news of the world seems like an impossible mire of random puzzle pieces that don't fit together; but every once in a while a few pieces fit. And I get a tiny glimpse of the big picture. For real.
Here are the three puzzle pieces that fit this week:
Executive Order NSPD 59 (USA) which makes legal the holding of biometric information of everyone.
EU order to hold data on its MS citizens.
Manufacturing contract between USA and China to produce high resolution facial recognition security systems.
Some time ago, I came across a piece of EU news, that citizens data was to be made available to USA Homeland Security. After writing a few letters to my Member of the European Parliament, we succeeded in putting the issue on the parliament agenda. Here is a copy of the submitted amendment.
Amendment 42 Diana Wallis and Silvana Koch-Mehrin on behalf of the ALDE Group
Joint motion for a resolution PPE-DE, ALDE, UEN Commission’s Legislative and Work Programme for 2009 Joint motion for a resolution Paragraph 68 a (new)
Joint motion for a resolution Amendment 68a. Recognises that sharing data and information is a valuable tool in the international fight against terrorism, but also stresses the importance of safeguarding human rights and fundamental freedoms; regrets, in this context, that current negotiations between the EU and the US on concluding a data protection agreement, within the High-Level Contact Group, have taken place in camera without any transparency or democratic oversight and without any involvement of the European Parliament or of national parliaments and thus of European citizens; therefore insists that the Commission bring these negotiations to a natural close and make an appropriate legislative proposal to the Council and Parliament;
Why would the EU give away its citizen's data to the USA? Cui bono? I can certainly understand why the Commission would not want us to vote on it; noone I have spoken to is in favor of this subrosa agreement made by unelected officials.
I came across another news item from May of 2008 this week, which makes this little agreement have sense; this Executive Order is from the USA.
My guess is that very few people are aware of this order which has been passed behind closed doors without Congressional approval. The full text of the order can be viewed at the above url, following here are excerpts from the article defining the 'Universal Enemy'. I highly recommend a reading of the entire text of the order.
In a carefully worded text, NSPD 59 "establishes a framework" to enable the Federal government and its various police and intelligence agencies to: "use mutually compatible methods and procedures in the collection, storage, use, analysis, and sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information of individuals in a lawful and appropriate manner, while respecting their information privacy and other legal rights under United States law."
The Directive recommends: "actions and associated timelines for enhancing the existing terrorist-oriented identification and screening processes by expanding the use of biometrics".
The stated intent of NSPD 59 is to protect America from terrorists, but in fact the terms of reference include any person who is deemed to pose a threat to the Homeland. The government requires the ability:
"to positively identify those individuals who may do harm to Americans and the Nation... Since September 11, 2001, agencies have made considerable progress in securing the Nation through the integration, maintenance, and sharing of information used to identify persons who may pose a threat to national security.
The Directive is not limited to KSTs, which in Homeland Security jargon stands for "Known and Suspected Terrorists":
"The executive branch has developed an integrated screening capability to protect the Nation against "known and suspected terrorists" (KSTs). The executive branch shall build upon this success, in accordance with this directive, by enhancing its capability to collect, store, use, analyze, and share biometrics to identify and screen KSTs and other persons who may pose a threat to national security.
The executive branch recognizes the need for a layered approach to identification and screening of individuals, as no single mechanism is sufficient. For example, while existing name-based screening procedures are beneficial, application of biometric technologies, where appropriate, improve the executive branch's ability to identify and screen for persons who may pose a national security threat. To be most effective, national security identification and screening systems will require timely access to the most accurate and most complete biometric, biographic, and related data that are, or can be, made available throughout the executive branch."
NSPD 59 calls for extending the definition of terrorists to include other categories of individuals "who may pose a threat to national security".
In this regard, it is worth noting that in the 2005 TOPOFF (Top officials) anti-terror drills, two other categories of individuals were identified as potential threats: "Radical groups" and "disgruntled employees", suggesting than any form of dissent directed against Big Brother will be categorized as a threat to America.
In a previous 2004 report of the Homeland Security Council entitled Planning Scenarios, the enemy was referred to as the Universal Adversary (UA).
This project is due to be implemented one year from May 2008:
Implementation
(19) Within 90 days of the date of this directive, the Attorney General, in coordination with the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, the DNI, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, shall, through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, submit for the President's approval an action plan to implement this directive. The action plan shall do the following:
(a) Recommend actions and associated timelines for enhancing the existing terrorist-oriented identification and screening processes by expanding the use of biometrics;
(b) Consistent with applicable law, (i) recommend categories of individuals in addition to KSTs who may pose a threat to national security, and (ii) set forth cost-effective actions and associated timelines for expanding the collection and use of biometrics to identify and screen for such individuals; and
(c) Identify business processes, technological capabilities, legal authorities, and research and development efforts needed to implement this directive.
(20) Within 1 year of the date of this directive, the Attorney General, in coordination with the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, the DNI, and the heads of other appropriate agencies, shall submit to the President, through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, a report on the implementation of this directive and the associated action plan, proposing any necessary additional steps for carrying out the policy of this directive. Agencies shall provide support for, and promptly respond to, requests made by the Attorney General in furtherance of this report. The Attorney General will thereafter report to the President on the implementation of this directive as the Attorney General deems necessary or when directed by the President.
Of particular interest is article 17:
(17) The Secretary of State, in coordination with the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and the DNI, shall coordinate the sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information with foreign partners in accordance with applicable law, including international obligations undertaken by the United States.
The last clue comes from Naomi Klein article on China where Szenzhen has become the new surveillance model for America. The following excerpt can be found here.
Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test. In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. "It's called the 10-million-faces test," he tells me. Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing.
The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government's massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao's, have been invited to compete. "We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second," Yao tells me. "We are preparing for that now." The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: "It will happen next year."
When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government. To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company's proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is to "capture the image," Yao explains.
Next is "finding the face." He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos of the same person in the company's database of 600,000 faces. Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years earlier — proof that the technology can "find a face" even when the face has changed significantly with time. " It took 1.1 milliseconds!" Yao exclaims. "Yeah, that's me!"
In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao's programmers and engineers take each other's pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the speed of their search engines. "Everyone is preparing for the test," Yao explains. "If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed a market in China." Every couple of minutes Yao's phone beeps. Sometimes it's a work message, but most of the time it's a text from his credit-card company, informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made another charge. "Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter is spending money!" He shrugs: "She likes designers."
Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. "Ninety-five percent," he insists, "is just for regular safety." He has, he admits, been visited by government spies, whom he describes as "the internal-security people." They came with grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of "some protesters, some dissidents." They wanted to know if Yao's facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the photos.
Yao was sorry to disappoint them. "Honestly, the technology so far still can't meet their needs," he says. "The photos that they show us were just too blurry." That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the government's goal is not repression: "If you're a [political] organizer, they want to know your motive," he says. "So they take the picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person is."
Until recently, Yao's photography empire was focused on consumers — taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr (the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid's birthday party. The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS, FACE WATCH.
When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime and terrorism, he figured that face recognition "should be the next dot-com." Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field.
He learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits: fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts. In 2006, Yao tells me, "I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail." For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company's proprietary software, allowing him to "build a lot of development software based on L-1's technology." Since then, L-1's partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn't really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: "We'll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China."
Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company's research headquarters in New Jersey. ("Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It's such a historic place.") L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. "It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results." L-1's enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company's ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world.
But here's the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1's Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to "some large international opportunities," not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou. After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1's involvement in China's homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications.
She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company's head of research. "We have nothing in China," she tells me. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don't have any relationships at all." I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She'll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: "Absolutely, we've sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test." Yao's use of the technology, she said, is "within his license" purchased from L-1.
The company's reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with "crime control or detection instruments or equipment."
That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the "detection instruments" that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents. "The intent of that act," a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, "was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China." Pixel's application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in the face of the ban's intent.
By his own admission, Yao is already getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security forces, syncing L-1's software to their vast database, a process that took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says, he was on the phone "every day" with L-1, getting its help adapting the technology. "Because we are representing them," he says. "We took the test on their behalf."
In other words, this controversial U.S. "crime control" technology has already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, Yao's goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he gets, Yao says, he will "pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales." When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software kits are subject to the sanctions if "they are exported from the U.S. or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item." Based on both criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban. When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, "I don't know anything about that." Asked whether she would like to find out about it and call me back, she replies, "I really don't want to comment, so there is no comment." Then she hangs up.
You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it "captures" more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security's massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with "mobile iris and multimodal devices" so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department's "largest facial-recognition database system"; and produces driver's licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal.
Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in "extremely general" terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company's CEO would only say, "Stay tuned." It is L-1's deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn't just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it's U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1's China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.
Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police equipment to China. He tells me that L-1's electronic fingerprinting tools are "banned from entering China" due to U.S. concerns that they will be used to "catch the political criminals, you know, the dissidents, more easily." He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the Commerce Department's list of banned products, there is no explicit mention of "face prints" — likely because the idea was still in the realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government.
Whatever the legality of L-1's participation in Chinese surveillance, it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying "enormous pressure to open the floodgates."
Yes, it is now possible to access every detail about you, including medical records, from a camera on a street corner. And this technology is being manufactured in China for export to the USA.
I can't help but wonder what plans the EU has for this given England's recent draconian new laws on the elimination of privacy. Similar laws have already been enacted in Sweden and Ireland requires all phone records to be saved for five years.
So maybe George Orwell was right about Big Brother; he just got the year wrong. The book should be called 2009.
In an effort to create a dialogue with the new USA president Barack Obama, he will need some feedback from the internet on those issues the world feels most important for him to address.
Since this is an international forum, it is my hope that readers from all countries can respond here and this list can be sent off to Obama in the hopes it will have some effect on the future for all of us. Hope springs eternal.
Obama seems to have made good use of the internet to raise funds; perhaps now he will utilize this medium to raise the consciousness of his own people and administration. I will start with my little list.
Get the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Haven't these people suffered enough for the USA greed to control oil resources?
Close down Guantanamo.....AND....make reparations to its victims and its victims' families; and by the way, an apology to the world would not be out of line.
Put Joe Biden on a short leash.
Rescind all Executive Orders from the Bush megalomaniacs and try to re-instate the Constitution for your people.
Think Keynes: try to build a sustainable economy that does not depend on exporting war and producing products to kill people.
Endict George Bush and his cronies for war crimes and treason; the world needs closure on the horrors these monsters have inflicted on so many, directly and indirectly.
Take the god dam check book away from the CIA.
Scrap the missile plan for Europe; and stop using NATO to create hostility between peaceful sovereign nations.
Have the White House de-loused and de-bugged before you move in.
Try to educate your people a little better: don't you think adult age voters should know just the tiniest bit about economics and world politics?
Please offer whatever comments or criticisms you like. This is our chance to speak up and I am sure I have left out the interests of many countries and people. Even a 'Ditto' is a strong message.
A COPY OF ORWELL'S 'NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR' SENT TO EVERY MP
November 4th 2008 An Internet grass-roots campaign will this week deliver a copy of GeorgeOrwell's prophetic novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' to every Member ofParliament.The books will be inscribed with the words, 'This book was a warning, not ablueprint', and will arrive at Parliament on or before November 5th -- adate of well known historical significance for that building.
Outraged by the continual attack upon civil liberties within our nation, afortnight ago the Libertarian Party proposed reminding those in Westminsterwho they were elected to serve, and in whose interests the laws that theypass are meant to function.Spread purely by word of mouth, a campaign to send each Member of Parliamenttheir own copy of Orwell's dystopian classic met with overwhelming supporton the Internet, with many more books pledged than the 646 required toensure that every one of our elected representatives receive a personalcopy.
The Libertarian Party contributed just 75 books itself, with theremainder coming (directly, or via campaign donations) from people of allpolitical parties, and of none.The UK Libertarian Party leader, Ian Parker-Joseph, explained, "As thepeople of Britain become ever more spied upon and ever more heavily taxed,as the government attempts to control how much we should smoke, eat anddrink, as the state legislates to regulate ever more the minutiae of ourlives, the Libertarian Party want to remind people that we have the power,and that our elected representatives work for us.
"The Libertarian Party would like the people of Britain to remember that thestate is the servant of the people, and not our master. Moreover, we wish toremind those in Westminster of this fact."Many constituents of these MPs will be adding their own personal messagesto the books that they are sending," added Mr Parker-Joseph, "and it is asad reflection of how far towards Orwell's vision our country has alreadyslipped that some members of the public have expressed fear at the potentialconsequences of simply sending their MP a 60 year old novel.
Onecorrespondent wrote to me:I told my wife I was taking part in this campaign and her and the children’s answer was “don’t do it, you will get into trouble and have them after us”. I have been told on numerous occasions by my wife that you cannot win against the State so “why argue with them, why complain?” She believes that you cannot fight against the Government or powers that be and that if you do you will be watched and eventually “they” will come and get you so it is best not to complain, make waves etc. "What sort of society are we living in where people are so afraid of theirgovernment? Something is very, very wrong here" concluded Mr Parker-Joseph.
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Bush Administration Committed War Crimes Against Prisoners, Reveals Physicians for Human Rights Tuesday, November 04, 2008 by: David Gutierrez
The Bush administration has committed war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in its practice of torturing prisoners, according to the conclusions of a medical examination conducted by the organization Physicians for Human Rights.
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," wrote retired Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in the preface to the report. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.
Taguba was the general who led the investigation of allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. After releasing a report documenting the torture performed there, Taguba was forced out of the army.
In the new report, titled "Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact," physicians examined 11 former prisoners who claimed they had been subjected to torture by their U.S. captors. It was the first study to medically document first-hand accounts of torture "based on internationally accepted standards for clinical assessment of torture claims," the human rights group said.
The report "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," Taguba writes in the preface. "This story is not only written in words, it is scrawled for the rest of these individuals' lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors."
The torture suffered by the former prisoners was not the result of a few decisions by lower-ranking soldiers, Taguba said, but of a policy that came straight out of the White House and of doctors and psychologists who colluded with torturers.
"In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded," he writes. "The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect."
"Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted," he said.
The 121-page report documents medical evidence that the 11 prisoners examined had been subjected to beatings, shackling, involuntary medication, sleep deprivation, electric shock, sexual humiliation, anal rape, threats to their families and other forms of deliberate physical and psychological abuse.
"We found clear physical and psychological evidence of torture and abuse, often causing lasting suffering," medical evaluator Dr. Allen Keller said.
The Bush administration has repeatedly denied allegations that the U.S. tortures detainees.
Four of the men had been captured in or near Afghanistan between late 2001 and early 2003 before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay; seven had been captured in Iraq in 2003. All the men were eventually released without charge. Before their release, however, the report concludes that all were subjected to various forms of torture that "often occurred in combination over a long period of time."
Although the examination of 11 specific former prisoners did not allow the study's authors to make conclusions about the treatment of U.S. detainees in general, they noted that their findings were consistent with those of prior investigations. Because of this, it is "reasonable to conclude that these detainees were not the only ones abused, but are representative of a much larger number of detainees subjected to torture and ill treatment while in U.S. custody."
One of the former prisoners examined by physicians was an Iraqi man in his mid-40s, identified in the report as "Laith." The examination concluded that he had been subjected to electric shock and sleep deprivation, and that he and his family had been threatened with sexual assault.
"They took off even my underwear. They asked me to do some movements that make me look in a very bad way so they can take photographs. ... they were trying to make me look like an animal," Laith said. "And they asked me, 'have you ever heard voices of women in this prison?' I answered, 'yes.' They were saying, 'then you will hear your mothers and sisters when we are raping them.'"
"Laith appears to have suffered severe and lasting physical and psychological injuries as a result of his arrest and incarceration at Abu Ghraib prison," the report concluded. Another case was that of "Youssef," detained while trying to cross the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan without a passport. He was taken to an Afghan prison, where he reported "being stripped naked, being intimidated by dogs, being hooded and being thrown against the wall on repeated occasions." He was then transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he was forced to lie on the floor with his hands tied to his feet behind him, while interrogators demanded that he confess to being involved with the Taliban.
Physicians for human rights called on the U.S. government to formally apologize to all people who it had detained and tortured since autumn 2001. It further demanded that the Bush administration "repudiate all forms of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment"; establish an independent committee to investigate the cases and conditions of those detained at U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay; carefully monitor conditions at all U.S.-operated prisons; and hold torturers accountable.
"These men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution," Taguba said. "And so do the American people."
All blogs are really just small snapshots of a person's mind, heart and soul as they evolve together through life....
Small bits of the thread of life we weave together into the fabric of ourselves, in the hope we will make sense of our existence, individual and collective.
On this page, is the cloak I have fashioned from my fabric to warm myself in a universe which often makes little sense.
Inside my cloak, it is warm enough to face the blistering cold winds of the insane world in which I find myself.
If you find some a bit of 'the good stuff' here, it has been my pleasure.
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