News media downplays Iraq war

"As America heads into a Presidential election year where Iraq is a central issue, mainstream media outlets plan massive cutbacks in war coverage and reductions in resources and personnel dedicated to reporting on the conflict."

Debunking Iran's Nuclear Program: Another 'Intelligence Failure' -- On the Part of the Press?

"Press reports so far have suggested that the belated release of the National Intelligence Estimate yesterday throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has deeply embarrassed, or at least chastened, public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. Gaining little attention so far: Many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly, which promoted (deliberately or not) the tubthumping for striking Iran."

How to Control the Story, Pentagon-Style

"From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and attacks by the U.S. military have only killed "militants," "criminals," "suspected insurgents," "IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers," "anti-American fighters," "terrorists," "military-age males," "armed men," "extremists," or "al-Qaeda.""

Manufacturing Consent for World War III

“All the ideological signposts for attacking Iran are in place. The country has been thoroughly demonized because it is not nice to women, to gays, or to Jews. That in itself is enough to neutralize a large part of the American ‘left’. The issue of course is not whether Iran is nice or not – according to our views – but whether there is any legal reason to attack it, and there is none; but the dominant ideology of human rights has legitimized, specifically in the left, the right of intervention on humanitarian grounds anywhere, at any time, and that ideology has succeeded in totally sidetracking the minor issue of international law.” - Jean Bricmont (2007)

US media poodles

"Despite bouts of superficial self-criticism, when it comes to war, the US media excel at following the White House line."

Very true. The best journalist on cable news anymore is Keith Olbermann. The most disappointing is Hardball's Chris Matthews.

How Did We Get Here?

You have the "mainstream" media to thank for the Iraqi quagmire

by Justin Raimondo - Ot 24, 2007

We keep hearing about the "liberal," "antiwar" media, which is supposedly spinning the "success" of the administration's "surge" in Iraq into a defeat. The stab-in-the-back thesis is being run up the flagpole by the neocons, in the hopes that at least some of their base – the most deluded of the Kool-Aid drinkers – will swallow it. Yet it was this supposedly liberal media that led us down the primrose path to war and occupation and immersed us in what Gen. William E. Odom calls the biggest strategic disaster in American military history – and they did it by instilling fear.

The Saddam-has-nukes narrative was the overarching theme that administration spokespersons sounded whenever they got the chance: Condi Rice's now infamous "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" meme spread like a viral infection through a schoolyard and was echoed by the mainstream media ad nauseam. In order to sound convincing, however, and present this theme in a credible manner, the War Party had to find semi-credible sources: that is, they had to invent credible characters who would echo their themes. In Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) they found an invaluable source of ready-made material.

Chalabi had set up shop during the Clinton years with the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which authorized "regime change" as official U.S. policy and poured millions into his coffers. In return, Chalabi and his cohorts produced a seemingly unending string of Iraqi "defectors" who simply did what any good storyteller does: they made it all up.

The role played by Judith Miller and the New York Times in legitimizing and spreading these tall tales has received much attention, and there is no underestimating how important this was: yet how do we explain the complete breakdown of the critical function in the vast army of reporters and editors who took Miller's sources on faith – virtually the entire English-speaking media? The Washington Post, USA Today, the New York Daily News, the New Yorker, 60 Minutes, and even sainted PBS, which did a Frontline documentary on the defectors a couple of months after 9/11 – all invested their journalistic integrity in Chalabi & Co. All wound up getting badly burned.

Some, like CBS's Leslie Stahl, have owned up to the temporary collapse of their critical faculties; others, like Vanity Fair's David Rose, are silent. It was Rose, after all, whose four-page spread in the glossy, perfumed pages of the magazine the elites love to display on their coffee tables made the most extreme claims about the imminent danger posed by Saddam: the Iraqis were feverishly working on a long-range missile project, which was perilously close to becoming operational. Not only that, but, according to Rose and his INC sources, the Iraqis had a "dirty bomb" in the works, as well as blueprints and the means to build chemical and biological warheads. The relentlessly visual Vanity Fair editors even included a map that purported to show where these various sites were located in Iraq, including a nuclear weapons development laboratory.

When none of this turned up in the aftermath of the invasion, did the editors of Vanity Fair cry "mea culpa"? Certainly not. Instead, they ran a piece, "The Path to War," that blamed "the media" for all that INC-generated misinformation – but failed to mention their own role in promoting it. The piece was written by Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, and – hold on to your seat – David Rose.

There were plenty of indications in the run-up to war that the intelligence being used to justify U.S. military action was bogus, and the most glaringly obvious one was the Niger uranium fiasco that played such a key part in the downfall of Scooter Libby. The president had claimed, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that the Iraqis were seeking uranium in "an African country" and that this constituted significant evidence that Saddam was circumventing the sanctions and pushing forward with his nuclear program, yet it wasn't long afterward that the alleged documentary "evidence" for this was exposed as a crude forgery. Surely this would have suggested, to even the most uncritical mind, that someone was making the case for war in bad faith – that there was an organized effort, inside the government, to lie us into war. Yet this connection was made by very few in the media, who continued to pump out defector stories as we rushed to invade.

At that point, the media was so invested in the administration's war narrative that they could not afford to raise questions about the veracity of the "intelligence" they were reporting as fact. This is why they fell for Chalabi's song-and-dance so readily. As John Walcott, the Washington bureau chief of Knight-Ridder News Service, put it:

"What he did was reasonably clever but fairly obvious, which is he gave the same stuff to some reporters that, for one reason or another, he felt would simply report it. And then he gave the same stuff to people in the vice president's office and in the secretary of defense's office. And so, if the reporter called the Department of Defense or the vice president's office to check, they would've said, 'Oh, I think that's… you can go with that. We have that, too.' So, you create the appearance, or Chalabi created the appearance, that there were two sources, and that the information had been independently confirmed, when, in fact, there was only one source. And it hadn't been confirmed by anybody."

The al-Qaeda connection was a subset of the master narrative, which conjured a frightening vision of a nuclear apocalypse as the price we would pay for inaction in Iraq. The list of prominent pundits who signed on to the al-Qaeda-Iraq axis of terrorism sub-narrative is impressive: George Will, Jim Hoagland, William Safire,Charles Krauthammer – the Washington Post was a veritable fount of disinformation on this subject. As for the rest of the media, they deliberately soft-pedaled the tenuous nature of the Iraq-al-Qaeda connection. As Bob Simon of CBS told Bill Moyers, "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it in a way almost light. If that doesn't seem ridiculous."

Ridiculous isn't quite the word that comes to mind: tragicomic, or perhaps even criminal, seems more appropriate. In his own defense, Simon avers that "a frontal attack on the administration's claims" would have been "premature," because, after all, "we did not know then that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We only knew that the connection the administration was making between Saddam and al-Qaeda was very tenuous at best."

The main connecting thread between al-Qaeda and Iraq was reported as an alleged meeting between an Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohammed Atta that supposedly took place at the Prague airport. CBS News and numerous other mainstream media outlets reported this with a straight face. Simon's report, which presented the al-Qaeda connection in terms of a "marketing" technique, ran in December '02: yet the alleged Prague meeting had been debunked on Oct. 21, 2002, in the New York Times, which reported that Czech President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports" of the alleged meeting.

The years of constantly repeating this theme – that Iraq planned and carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks – either implicitly or explicitly took their toll on the truth: until very recently, substantial majorities believed Iraq had been behind the attacks. Forty-one percent, according to a Newsweek poll taken this past summer, still believe it. In spite of persistent debunkings by the reality-based community, the narrative that places Saddam at the epicenter of 9/11 survives to this day.

The "liberal," "antiwar" media? Give me a break! In reality, we are saddled with "mainstream" news outlets that live in constant fear of the administration, of the War Party, of advertisers, of corporate suits who insist on seeking out the "good news" in Iraq – even if there isn't any. The pattern was established after 9/11, when news anchors were wearing flag pins on their lapels and downplaying civilian casualties in Afghanistan (which have now become a major issue between the government of Hamid Karzai and the U.S.). The same coziness with government officials and leading neocons – who always get airtime to give voice to the opinions of a rapidly shrinking minority of American public opinion – is all too readily apparent.

The "antiwar" media? Pal, you're looking at it!

The Hoax of Free Press

by Andrew Winkler - Oct 16, 2007

In my previous essay ‘The Democracy Hoax, ’ I spoke about how Western style democracy, especially in its most perverted form, the Anglo-Saxon two-party system, is the political equivalent of World Wrestling Federation: a staged competition with choreographed pretend fights and pre-determined outcomes. No matter who wins the election, the Matrix always wins. The biggest hurdle for anyone dreaming of becoming the leader of the opposition, leave alone the head of government in a Western country, is no election or pre-selction, but to convince the ruling elite that nobody else would serve them better in that role. Once that’s done, everything else - money, publicity - just falls into place.

Another cruel joke of the Matrix

Which brings me to the topic of this essay, a joke almost as cruel as the illusion of democracy: the hoax of 'free press'. Let’s start by asking, what ‘freedom of press’ actually means. The concept has been passionately promoted in the 18th and 19th century as part of the struggle of Jewish media against the historic European elites and really only means – in spite of all the fairy tales told by Jews to their Gentile supporters - ‘freedom of Jewish press’. Why else are Jews so quick to ignore ‘freedom of press’ when it comes to Jewish sensitivities? (The likes of ADL and CAMERA have developped a science out of curtailing freedom of press without throwing anyone into prison, for example by 'lobbying' advertisers, financial institutions and others to boycott a particular publisher.)

One of the taboo topics of Western societies is the question who owns the press. In most Western countries mainstream media are owned and controlled by Jews, in many cases as much as 90% of the market. How did the Jews gain such a strong-hold? The unfair 'Jewish advantage' goes far beyond the rampant tribal cross-promotion, most visibly in movies, where we are used to be constantly bombarded with Jewish brands such as Madonna, Ben&Jerry, Tiffany, Cosmo, Apple, Dell and Starbucks.

Although in theory it’s the readers and viewers who are deciding which media they are consuming, and 99.5% of them are Gentiles, they don’t matter all that much for the success of a media company. It’s the advertisers respectively their ad agencies – most of them Jewish - who chose which media to use for their campaigns. Everything else flows from there. The more advertising income media companies have, the most attractive products they can offer to their consumers.

Media ratings

I hear you asking: but what about ratings? Doesn’t the number of viewers and readers influence whether a media is used by advertisers? Much less than what most people think. Virtually all print media are wholesaled via Jewish distribution companies. If they want to push a particular media product, those distributors force their retailers to buy up to 20 times more copies than what they can actually sell.

The unsold copies then go back to the distributors for credit once the next edition comes out, and the distributors receive a credit note from the media company. Sounds harmless enough. The only problem here is that nobody tells the advertisers and their ad agencies how many of the sold copies are returned for credit. The ad agencies do know about the scam, but they are not going to let down their Jewish mates. And the more copies a media company ‘sells’ that way, the more they can charge for advertising.

I’m not saying that the official media sales figures are entirely fake. All that consumer exposure in newsagencies and supermarkets is bound to generate some real sales eventually. Anybody who understands anything about retail knows about the importance of product placement. The more copies of a particular media product consumers see on the shelves, the more likely they are going to buy it. And whose media products are Jewish media distributor pushing in such way? That’s right. Do I need to get into who owns the companies who measure TV ratings?

Jewish Interests

So whose interests are those Jewish media serving? Having all that advertising income from companies conned into believing that they are reaching far more consumers than they actually are, enables Jewish media companies not only to produce the glossiest magazines and hire the best writers and photographers.

Those advertising dollars also put Jewish media owners into a position to give generously for all sorts of Jewish causes, and they have to do so in order to get the above described support from their fellow tribesmen. That’s why Jews are renown to be such big donors. They give more than half of the funds raised by both Democratic and Republican Party in the U.S., inspite of being only one percent of the population. The situation in the UK and Australia, where Jewish donors control both Labour and Conservative respectively Liberal Party, is no different.

Jewish donors also give generously for seemingly less selfish causes. They donate – with a lot of media publicity, mind you - to buy toys and blankets for Israeli children hiding in bunkers from home made Palestinian rockets, usually landing in soccer fields or killing Arab Israelis. They also give to build Talmud schools to teach Jewish kids that Goyim are actually animals created by God to serve, enrich and entertain Jews, and that the 10 commandments only refer to how to treat other Jews. Those schools also make sure that all Jewish kids know that God wants his 'chosen people' to kill all Goyim living in the 'promised land', and while they are at it, kill also all neighboring people refusing to be enslaved. Calling that genocide, of course, would be anti-Semitic, wouldn't it?

Gatekeepers and corporate censors

Given the extreme Jewish control and ethno-centricity, it doesn’t surprise that no Jewish media company dares to do anything that their co-religionists might perceive as being decremental to their interests. Even more liberal newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent in the UK, who regularly feature articles critical of some of the Jews-only state’s worst human rights abuses and acts of aggression, they firmly steer away from where it really hurts, such as the question of Israel’s right to exist or the veracity of the official version of the so-called Holocaust.

Even more important than avoiding topics decremental to Jewish interests, is the pushing of views perceived to be beneficial. Whether it is the promotion of anything that ridicules and destroys despised Christian beliefs and values of their host countries, the pushing of the dogmatic belief in the Holocaust and other obvious lies such as the fraudulent ‘Wipe Israel off the map’ mistranslation by Mossad-owned MEMRI or the U.S. government’s ’12 Arabs with box cutters’ conspiracy theory, Jewish media consistently operate in ways serving Jewish interests only, rather than the interests of the entire community they are located in.

As long as Jewish ethno-centricity, supremacy and media control continues the way it is, and has been for a while, and as long as Jewish media keep prostituting themselves to the interests of a sectarian ruling elite, there will be no such thing as ‘freedom of press’, only ‘freedom of Jewish press’, that is the freedom of Jewish media to shaft the Goyim as they please.

Part 1: The Prohibition Game - Part 2: The Democracy Hoax

Andrew Winkler is the editor/publisher of Sydney based dissident blog ZioPedia.org and founder of Jews Anonymous.

Source: ZioPedia.org

Civil Society Lost in Media Sound Bites

Why people are not taking to the streets...

by Pablo Ouziel - July 22, 2007

In these trying times of wars, famines and all sort of manmade disasters, I strongly believe that we ought to confront our popular apathy and the abundant arrogance of our business, political, religious and military leaders. It is time for some serious introspection; without it we 'the common people', will continue to be duped into the simplistic media view of the world, that of the good and the bad.

Everyday I wonder what atrocity I am going to be enlightened with when I turn on the television set, Google the news or access the newspapers and magazines. Every time I wonder what messaging I am going to hear from leaders and experts, what angle they are going to take, either to justify one atrocity or to prepare us for another.

Why people are not taking to the streets, why we are not having collective global strikes, boycotting our bankers or rejecting the payment of our taxes.

Dramatic as this may sound, I cannot help but wonder if we are witnessing the disintegration of our 'civilized society' beneath the challenges permeating our world.

While media conglomerates are in constant expansion, pandering to stats and big businesses, various activist groups are busily engaged in fighting for their own separate causes, human rights of all sorts, poverty, corruption and all the rest.

Doubtless, they are all important key topics, but maybe it is time for a truly united and organized resistance to regain the direction of true democratic values, rather than "staying the course" with our individual fights, without a sense of fraternal and global direction. Considering the global menace of war that unifies the states, the media and the big businesses, maybe it's time for all groups to organize globally as well, and come together under the banner of peace, justice and equality.

In a letter from Noam Chomsky to Jan Tamás addressing the issue of the US intent to build a missile defence system in Eastern Europe (published in Znet), Chomsky expressed the following; "the installation of a missile defence system in Eastern Europe is, virtually, a declaration of war." He finished his letter by referring to the extraordinary appeal to the people of the world made by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Einstein over half a century ago, warning humanity about the choice it faced of putting an end to the human race or renouncing to war. Chomsky concluded with the following words; "accepting a so-called 'missile defence system' makes that choice, in favour of an end to the human race, perhaps in the not-too-distant future."

On Monday Reuters ran The following statement made by George W. Bush while sitting with the Polish President Lech Kaczynski in the Oval Office; "There's no better symbol of our desire to work for peace and security than working on a missile defence system."

Not everyone is impressed by Bush's logic, however. Valdimir Putin of Russia, has compared the United States to the Third Reich during a speech at the Munich security conference in February. Then a few weeks ago the Times reported; "Putin has warned the US that its deployment of a new anti-missile network across Eastern Europe would prompt Russia to point its own missiles at European targets and could trigger nuclear war."

Is it not clear that tensions are mounting and inching toward another global conflict; that such leaders are becoming increasingly fanatical, a fact that will bode disaster upon everyone caught in the middle?

And as if further antagonism is needed at these difficult time; when the Iraq war has proved to be a lie, Afghanistan is wrecked in mayhem, Lebanon is still recovering, and Palestine is falling apart, why antagonise the Muslim communities of the world by granting a Knighthood to Salmon Rushdie, who is largely perceived by them as one who has degraded their holiest of all symbols, their own prophet? Why add insult to injury, considering the humiliation they had to endure in Abu Ghraib, Kabul and Gaza?

But one has to remember that antagonism is not only targeting Muslims alone, considering pope Benedict XVI statement that other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches and Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation.

Moreover, was the UK's decision to expel Russian diplomats over a KGB agent fatally poisoned in London, the wisest and only possible handling of the affair keeping in mind what such event would trigger? Read the International herald Tribune and you will understand; the latter reported: "Russia on Saturday suspended participation in a key European arms control treaty, saying it will halt NATO inspections of its military sites and no longer limit the number of its tanks and other heavy conventional weapons."

One must admit that it's becoming increasingly harder to know the good from the bad. With half truths and media sounds bites, one is often forced to revert to his comfortable western reality: that of a mortgaged home, a stable job and a new car. But even such privileges are becoming harder to come by, and when they do, they come at so heavy a price, that of our silence and subjugation to the state, to the corporation and to the ever mindless media. Indeed, our civil society is in danger.

Media Distortions regarding Iran

by Global Research - July 19, 2007
CASMII - 2007-07-18

CASMII UK Press Release 18 July 2007 CASMII calls on journalists and the public to challenge dangerous distortion of news on Iran

The Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran has strongly criticised the Financial Times and launched a complaint with the Press Complaint Commission over the publication by the FT of a story [1] making incriminating and unfounded allegations about Iranian government's complicity with Al-Qaeda launching terrorist operations in Iraq, using Iranian territory.

The story by Stephen Fidler in the Financial Times, "Al-Qaeda linked to operations from Iran" , 6 July, makes serious allegations about Al-Qaeda and Sunni extremists linked to Al-Qaeda using Iranian territory as a base for launching terrorist operations in Iraq with the possible knowledge and cooperation of the Iranian government. The FT uses unsubstantiated allegations, invariably attributed to anonymous "officials" or "analysts", without questioning the plausibility of these dangerously incriminating claims.

Mehrnaz Shahabi of CASMII said today: "With brazen disregard for accuracy and truth, the FT fails to draw on the established evidence of the ongoing and irreconcilable hostilities between Iran and Al-Qaeda: Firstly, the hostilities between Wahabiism and Shiism is well known. The Al-Qaeda's virulent anti-Shiia ideology and Taliban's massacring of thousands of Shiiat in northern Afghanistan and executing Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e Sharif in 1998 , make an alliance between the two extremely unlikely. Secondly, there is a wealth of evidence of current and intensified hostilities directed at Iran by Sunni extremists, in which the US and the UK are known to be implicated. Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in New Yorker magazine of 5th March, discloses [2] a new strategy and major shift in American foreign policy, which is to contain a Shiite resurgence through covert alliances with and funding operations by Sunni extremists and Al-Qaeda, with the intention to undermine Iran. Hersh refers to secret funds being funneled into these operations which are totally unauthorised by the US Congress!"

The FT fails to make any reference to the ample evidence that Jundullah is one such group, which is linked to Al-Qaeda and is waging a major terrorist campaign inside Iran. Jundullah, a separatist group in Baluchistan, is thought to be trained and armed by the US, as part of the US policy of destabilisation and regime change in Iran. Also, The audio-taped announcement [3] last week by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the leader of an Al-Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq, threatens to wage war against Iran unless Iran stops supporting the Shiia government in Iraq. He says Al-Qaeda has been waiting for four years to wage a war with Iran. Notably the US which has remained silent on Al-Qaeda announcement, has made a similar announcement by the passage of an amendment to the Defence Authorization Act censuring Iran for proxy killing of American soldiers and destabilisation in Iraq and given Iran, a "stern warning", concurrent with the warning by Al-Qaeda. Sen. Lieberman, the author of the legislation is a vociferous advocate of war with Iran.

These confirm the convergence of interests between the US and Al-Qaeda around their deep enmity towards Iran and negate the spurious assertion that Iran is a beneficiary of continuing mayhem in Iraq.

Alarmingly, the FT's accusation of Iran's cooperation with Al-Qaeda is in chorus with the current US war propaganda against Iran, that is, Iran's complicity with Al-Qaeda, which according to the current US legislation can be used by President Bush as a pretext for a military attack on Iran without further recourse to the Congress. This outrageous accusation is the exact repetition of the accusation leveled against the Iraqi regime in US's "War on Terror" before the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq.

CASMII campaigns for ethical journalism on news coverage about Iran and calls on all responsible journalists and concerned individuals to challenge these dangerous inaccuracies and distortions.

Complaints should be directed to the FT editor, on letters.editor@ft.com

For more information or to contact CASMII please visit http://www.campaigniran.org/

Notes:

[1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9cc4d5f4-2be3-11dc-b498-000b5df10621.html
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh
[3] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070708/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_al_qaida_1

Lies, More Lies, and Damn Lies

by Eric Margolis - July 17, 2007

As Americans turn increasingly against President George Bush’s calamitous war in Iraq, and revolt spreads through Republican ranks, the White House is again resorting to its tried-and-true ploy of fanning grossly inflated fears of terrorism.

The president just made two preposterous claims last week that insult the intelligence of his listeners. First, Bush insisted US forces in Iraq are fighting "the same people who staged 9/11." Second, withdrawing US forces from Iraq, as the Democratic-controlled Congress is urging, means "surrendering Iraq to al-Qaida." These canards mark the latest steps in the Bush administration’s evolving efforts to mislead Americans into believing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are all part of a global fight against al-Qaida.

When marketers want to change the name of an existing product, they first place a new name in small type below the existing one. They gradually shrink the old name, and enlarge the new one until the original name vanishes. That’s what’s been happening in Iraq. When the US invaded, Iraqis who resisted were initially branded "Saddam loyalists," "die-hard Ba’athists," or, in Don Rumsfeld’s colorful terminology, "dead-enders." Next, the Pentagon and US media called the Iraqi resistance, "terrorists" or "insurgents." The reason for invading Iraq, the White House insisted, was all about removing the tyrant Saddam, seizing weapons of mass destruction, defending humans rights and implanting democracy.

Then, a tiny, previously unknown Iraqi group that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden appropriated the name, "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia." This was such a breathtakingly convenient gift to the Bush Administration, many cynics suspected a false-flag operation created by CIA and Britain’s wily MI6. Soon after, the White House and Pentagon began calling most of Iraq’s 22 plus resistance groups, "al-Qaida."

The US media eagerly joined this deception, even though 95% of Iraq’s resistance groups had no sympathy for bin Laden’s movement. Watch any US network TV news report on Iraq and you will inevitably hear reporters parroting Pentagon handouts about US forces "launching a new offensive against al-Qaida."

Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia didn’t even exist before 9/11, but that didn’t stop President Bush from trying to gull credulous voters. He simply ignored the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that found US-occupied Iraq had become an "incubator" for violent anti-American groups.

If the US were to withdraw from Iraq tomorrow, the nation would be split between warring Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties. The fake Al-Qaida in Iraq would end up at the bottom of the totem pole, or be wiped out by other Iraqis. Even Osama bin Laden and his number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, have blasted the phony al-Qaida in Iraq and called for an end to its attacks on Iraqi civilians.

Polls show that in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, White House disinformation strategy has worked. Today, an amazing 60% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. At least that’s down from the 80% who originally believed this Orwellian big lie in 2003. The White House continues to blur the facts and make Americans believe Iraq and Afghanistan are "central fronts in the global war on terror."

The fact recent polls found 60% of Americans – and 90% of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – still believe Saddam and bin Laden had colluded to launch 9/11 is shocking, but not surprising. Ignorance of foreign affairs and mindless flag waving are as American as apple pie.

Tens of millions of Americans are fed a steady diet of political or religious ideology disguised as news from the administration’s house organ, Fox News; from evangelical Christian TV and radio; or from the neoconservative’s version of Pravda, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. The rest are too busy watching brain-deadening TV pap to pay the least attention to events overseas. They remain unaware the faux "war against global terror" is now costing a mind-boggling US $12 billion monthly, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. That’s the cost of 3 nuclear-powered "Nimitz" class 97,000-ton aircraft carriers every month.

The Bush Administration has spent $610 billion dollars since 2001 on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, making them the second most expensive conflict in US history after World War II. Last week, US Homeland Security Czar Michael Chertoff allowed he had a "gut feeling" that an al-Qaida attack on America was imminent this summer. At the same time, Washington was abuzz with a leaked US intelligence report that al-Qaida – the objective of the so-called war on terror – had reconstituted and was as strong as prior to 9/11, 2001.

America’s sixteen intelligence agencies spend $40 billion annually, with another $15–20 billion in their hidden "black budgets." Homeland Security spends $44.6 billion. In spite of these gargantuan expenditures of a trillion dollars – that’s $1,000,000,000,000 – the best intelligence Czar Chertoff can come up with is "gut feeling?"

One suspects Chertoff’s worried stomach has far more to do with the growing Republican Party revolt against the president’s Iraq war than nebulous threats from Osama bin Laden’s loud but tiny group. Polls show the only area where Republicans still command popular support is the "war on terror." So Bush/Cheney & Co. are trying to use al-Qaida to scare Americans to vote Republican, just as they did prior to 2004 elections. It worked well last time and got Bush reelected.

But Americans are increasingly leery of the White House’s crying wolf. Many are also asking how Bush could claim "steady progress" was being made in his wars when it appears the al-Qaida movement is back to pre-2001 strength, anti-American groups are popping up across Asia and Africa, and Iraq is a bloody mess.

After six years of conflict, 3,600 dead and 25,000 wounded American soldiers, expenditure of $610 billion, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghans, collapse of Mideast peace efforts, and a Muslim World enraged against the US, nothing positive seems to have been accomplished by a leader who likes to style himself, "the war president."

As the White House now ponders an attack on Iran, we would do well to recall the famed words of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, "one more such victory and we are ruined."

More NeoCrazy Media Sycophany

Iran's Nuclear Sites

by Gordon Prather - July 14, 2007

According to Washington Post Staff Writer Joby Warrick, "intelligence agencies" and "nuclear experts" are "all asking the same question: Is Iran attempting to thwart future military strikes against its nuclear facility by placing key parts of it in underground bunkers?

"U.S. officials at several military and intelligence-gathering agencies said they are aware of the construction and are watching it closely, though none would comment publicly or speculate on the purpose of the tunnels.

"A tunnel complex would reduce options for a preemptive military strike to knock out Iran's nuclear program, according to U.S. officials who closely follow Iran’s nuclear activities."

Those dirty rotten Persians; frantically attempting to thwart a repeatedly threatened, but totally unjustified, act of aggression against them.

Warrick goes on;

"It also could further heighten tensions between the Bush administration and the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said he is committed to pursuing a peaceful use of nuclear power."

That dirty rotten Islamic; committed to pursuing the peaceful use of nuclear power.

Don’t tell Warrick, but Iran – as required by the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – concluded a Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, in return for which, Iran has been guaranteed the "inalienable right" to the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes "without discrimination."

Furthermore, the NPT requires that the Safeguards agreement be implemented by the IAEA so as "to avoid hampering the economic or technological development" of a signatory or its "international cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including the international exchange of nuclear material and equipment for the processing, use or production of nuclear material for peaceful purposes."

Here are the particularly pertinent provisions of that Iran-IAEA Safeguards Agreement [.pdf]

"Article 1

"The Government of Iran undertakes, pursuant to paragraph 1 of Article III of the Treaty, to accept safeguards, in accordance with the terms of this Agreement, on all source or special fissionable material in all peaceful nuclear activities within its territory, under its jurisdiction or carried out under its control anywhere, for the exclusive purpose of verifying that such material is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices."

As of this writing the IAEA continues to "verify" that there is no indication that any amount of NPT-proscribed materials has ever been diverted from a peaceful to a military purpose.

"Article 8

"(a) In order to ensure the effective implementation of safeguards under this Agreement, the Government of Iran shall, in accordance with the provisions set out in Part II of this Agreement, provide the Agency with information concerning nuclear material subject to safeguards under this Agreement and the features of facilities relevant to safeguarding such material.

"(b) (i) The Agency shall require only the minimum amount of information and data consistent with carrying out its responsibilities under this Agreement.

"(ii) Information pertaining to facilities shall be the minimum necessary for safe-guarding nuclear material subject to safeguards under this Agreement."

Since Condi Rice became Secretary of State, the IAEA Board of Governors have been demanding Iran provide them far, far more information than is required to be – in some cases even could be – supplied under the Iran-IAEA Safeguards Agreement.

"Article 18

"If the Board, upon report of the Director General, decides that an action by the Government of Iran is essential and urgent in order to ensure verification that nuclear material subject to safeguards under this Agreement is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, the Board may call upon the Government of Iran to take the required action without delay, irrespective of whether procedures have been invoked pursuant to Article 22 of this Agreement for the settlement of a dispute."

The key phrase in this article is that the Board can only call upon Iran to take certain actions "upon report of the Director General".

Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei has yet to report that he has been unable to verify that no Iranian safeguarded materials have been diverted from a peaceful purpose. Quite the contrary.

Hence, the IAEA Board has been corrupted. It has violated the Iran-IAEA Safeguards Agreement. It has violated the IAEA Statute. And when the Board had the Director-General "report" the "Iran dossier" to the UN Security Council last year, with a recommendation that sanctions be imposed on Iran, the IAEA Board may even have violated the UN Charter.

In any case, on March 29, 2007, Iran informed the IAEA that it had "suspended" its voluntary implementation of the so-called Additional Protocol to its Safeguards Agreement which had been "accepted in 2003, but not yet ratified by Parliament."

This "suspension" of voluntary compliance with an un-ratified modification of its Safeguards Agreement is probably what Warrick has in mind when he makes this absolutely false and highly inflammatory charge.

"In April, Iran unilaterally withdrew from an international treaty that would have required it to publicly disclose design plans for any new nuclear-related construction."

Under the subsidiary implementing agreements to the Iranian Safeguards Agreement of 1974 – which is the only agreement the NPT requires of Iran – design information on new facilities that are ultimately to be safeguarded is required to be submitted "normally not later than 180 days before the facility is scheduled to receive nuclear material for the first time."

According to Warrick, an IAEA spokeswoman told him last week that "We have been in contact with the Iranian authorities about this [construction] and we have received clarifications."

So, if the IAEA has received "clarifications," and Iran is still in compliance with its original Safeguards Agreement, who cares what questions Warrick’s "intelligence agencies" and "nuclear experts" might have. Apparently what the Iranians are doing is none of their business. If it was the IAEA could answer their questions.

And what about Warrick’s report that Iran’s construction is "reducing options" to "knock out" Iran’s Safeguarded nuclear programs? Is Warrick saying that US military and intelligence officials have told him they may "have to" nuke Iran’s Safeguarded nuclear programs in order to be certain they have knocked them out?

Well, what about the NPT? What about this result of the 2000 NPT Review Conference?

"The [Sixth] Conference notes the reaffirmation by the nuclear-weapon states of their commitment to the United Nations Security Council resolution 984 (1995) on security assurances for non-nuclear-weapon states parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons."

What assurances are those?

Well, basically Russia and China, as well as France and the United Kingdom, will "provide immediate assistance" to Iran if it "is a victim of an act, or an object of a threat of, aggression in which nuclear weapons are used."

How do you like them apples?

Bush acknowledges administration official leaked Plame's name, immediately 'moves on'

"Unfrigging believable - Not ONE of the so-called "Press" pressed Bush on his broken promise to fire anyone in his administration involved in leaking Plame's name. And, NOT a one of them challenged Bush when he flat out "LIED," not once, but twice about Iran's intention to wipe Israel off the map. This is just unfrigging believable."

Filed by David Edwards and Nick Juliano - July 12, 2007

At a White House press conference Thursday, President Bush acknowledged that someone in his administration leaked the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, but he avoided addressing the question of whether he saw it as a moral issue or was at all disappointed in his senior advisers.

Michael Abramowitz of the Washington Post asked Bush about his commutation of Libby's sentence, saying, "You spoke very soberly and seriously in your statement about how you weighed different legal questions in coming to your decision on that commutation. But one issue that you did not address was the issue of the morality of your most senior advisers leaking the name of a confidential intelligence operator. Now that the case is over ... can you say whether you were at all disappointed in the behavior of those senior advisers, and have you communicated that disappointment to them in any way?"

"First of all," responded Bush, "the Scooter Libby decision was, I thought, a fair and balanced decision. Secondly, I haven't spent a lot of time talking about the testimony that people throughout my administration were forced to give as a result of the special prosecutor. I didn't ask them during that time, I haven't asked them since. I am aware of the fact that perhaps somebody in the administration did disclose the name of that person, and, you know, I've often thought about what would have happened had that person come forth and said, 'I did it.' Would we have had this -- endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent on this matter? But it's been a tough issue for a lot of people in the White House and it's run its course and now we're going to move on. Wendell..."

Bush then immediately called on Wendell Goler of Fox News, who asked, "Why should the American people feel you have the vision for victory in Iraq?" Bush neither gave Abramowitz the chance for a follow-up question nor apparently remembered that he had already promised to call after Abramowitz on a different reporter, who raised an objection to being passed over.

Michael Abramowitz recently wrote an article for the Post titled "A Decision Made Largely Alone," about how Bush decided on the Libby commutation without consulting with Justice Department lawyers, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, or even old friends who had been lobbying on Libby's behalf.

No follow-up questions were asked about Bush's initial pledge, which was not kept, to fire anyone in the administration found to be involved in the leaking of Plame's name. Critics say Plame was outed in political retaliation against her husband, Joe Wilson, who was critical of the administration's rhetoric on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

What Christians Don't Know About "Israel"

Ever heard the saying, "what you don't know could kill you?" Well, take your blinders off and let THE TRUTH SET YOU FREE

by the late Grace Halsell

WHEN YOU OWN THE MEDIA, YOU OWN THE WORLD - Ellendra Jane

American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key positions in all areas of [the U.S.] government where decisions are made regarding the Middle East. This being the case, is there any hope of ever changing U.S. policy? American presidents as well as most members of Congress support Israel, and they know why. U.S. Jews sympathetic to Israel donate lavishly to their campaign coffers.

The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie elsewhere among those who support Israel but don't really know why. This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning, fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel and Zionism often from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood.

I am one of those. I grew up listening to stories of a mystical, allegorical, spiritual Israel. This was before a modern political entity with the same name appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday school and watched an instructor draw down window-type shades to show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed stories of a good and chosen people who fought against their bad "un-chosen" enemies.

In my early 20s I began traveling the world, earning my living as a writer. I came to the subject of the Middle East rather late in my career. I was sadly lacking in knowledge regarding the area. About all I knew was what I had learned in Sunday school.

And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow considered a modern state created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews persecuted under the Nazis as a replica of the spiritual, mystical Israel I heard about as a child.

When in 1979 I initially went to Jerusalem, I planned to write about the three great monotheistic religions and leave out politics. "Not write about politics?" scoffed one Palestinian, smoking a water pipe in the Old Walled City. "We eat politics, morning, noon and night!"

As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who started arriving in large numbers after the Second World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, and experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians.

My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem. My journey not only was enlightening to me as regards Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and sadder, understanding of my own country.

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I say sadder understanding because I began to see that, in Middle East politics, we the people are not making the decisions, but rather that supporters of Israel are doing so. And typical of most Americans, I tended to think the U.S. media was "free" to print news impartially.
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In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that editors could and would classify "news" depending on who was doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related stories of torture.

Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their heads. Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation, besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung them upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals. I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn't it news? Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply didn't know it was happening.

On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter to Frank Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio station WETA. I explained I had taped interviews with Palestinians who had been brutally tortured. And I'd make them available to him. I got no reply. I made several phone calls.

Eventually I was put through to a public relations person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my letter had been lost. I wrote again. In time I began to realize what I hadn't known: had it been Jews who were strung up and tortured, it would be news. But interviews with tortured Arabs were "lost" at WETA.

The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem published also was a learning experience. Bill Griffin, who signed a contract with me on behalf of MacMillan Publishing Company, was a former Roman Catholic priest. He assured me that no one other than himself would edit the book. As I researched the book, making several trips to Israel and Palestine, I met frequently with Griffin, showing him sample chapters. "Terrific," he said of my material.

The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went to visit MacMillan's. Checking in at a reception desk, I spotted Griffin across a room, cleaning out his desk. His secretary Margie came to greet me. In tears, she whispered for me to meet her in the ladies room. When we were alone, she confided, "He's been fired." She indicated it was because he had signed a contract for a book that was sympathetic to Palestinians. Griffin, she said, had no time to see me.

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Later, I met with another MacMillan official, William Curry. I was told to "take your manuscript to the Israeli Embassy, to let them read it for mistakes," he told me.

"They were not pleased. They asked me, 'You are not going to publish this book, are you?' I asked, 'Were there mistakes?' 'Not mistakes as such. But it shouldn't be published. It's anti-Israel'."
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Despite obstacles to prevent it, the presses started rolling. After its publication in 1980, I was invited to speak in a number of churches. Christians generally reacted with disbelief. Back then, there was little or no coverage of Israeli land confiscation, demolition of Palestinian homes, wanton arrests and torture of Palestinian civilians.

Speaking of these injustices, I invariably heard the same question, "How come I didn't know this?" Or someone might ask, "But I haven't read about that in my newspaper." To these church audiences, I related my own learning experience, that of seeing hordes of U.S. correspondents covering a relatively tiny state. I pointed out that I had not seen so many reporters in world capitals such as Beijing, Moscow, London, Tokyo, Paris. Why, I asked, did a small state with a 1980 population of only four million warrant more reporters than China, with a billion people?

I also linked this query with my findings that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and most of our nation's print media are owned and/or controlled by Jews supportive of Israel. It was for this reason, I deduced, that they sent so many reporters to cover Israel and to do so largely from the Israeli point of view.

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My learning experiences also included coming to realize how easily I could lose a Jewish friend if I criticized the Jewish state. I could with impunity criticize France, England, Russia, even the United States. And any aspect of life in America. But not the Jewish state. I lost more Jewish friends than one after the publication of Journey to Jerusalem, all sad losses for me and one, perhaps, saddest of all.

In the 1960s and 1970s, before going to the Middle East, I had written about the plight of blacks in a book entitled Soul Sister, and the plight of American Indians in a book entitled Bessie Yellowhair, and the problems endured by undocumented workers crossing from Mexico in The Illegals. These books had come to the attention of the "mother" of The New York Times, Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Her father had started the newspaper, then her husband ran it, and in the years that I knew her, her son was the publisher. She invited me to her fashionable apartment on Fifth Avenue for lunches and dinner parties. And, on many occasions, I was a weekend guest at her Greenwich, Conneticut home.

She was liberal-minded and praised my efforts to speak for the underdog, even going so far in one letter to say, "You are the most remarkable woman I ever knew." I had little concept that from being buoyed so high I could be dropped so suddenly when I discovered, from her point of view, the "wrong" underdog.

As it happened, I was a weekend guest in her spacious Connecticut home when she read bound galleys of Journey to Jerusalem. As I was leaving, she handed the galleys back with a saddened look: "My dear, have you forgotten the Holocaust?" She felt that what happened in Nazi Germany to Jews several decades earlier should silence any criticism of the Jewish state. She could focus on a holocaust of Jews while negating a modern day holocaust of Palestinians.

I realized, quite painfully, that our friendship was ending. Iphigene Sulzberger had not only invited me to her home to meet her famous friends but, also at her suggestion, The Times had requested articles. I wrote op-ed articles on various subjects including American blacks, American Indians as well as undocumented workers. Since Mrs. Sulzberger and other Jewish officials at the Times highly praised my efforts to help these groups of oppressed peoples, the dichotomy became apparent: most "liberal" U.S. Jews stand on the side of all poor and oppressed peoples save one: the Palestinians.

How handily these liberal Jewish opinion-molders tend to diminish the Palestinians, to make them invisible, or to categorize them all as "terrorists."

Interestingly, Iphigene Sulzberger had talked to me a great deal about her father, Adolph S. Ochs. She told me that he was not one of the early Zionists. He had not favored the creation of a Jewish state.

Yet, increasingly, American Jews have fallen victim to Zionism, a nationalistic movement that passes for many as a religion. While the ethical instructions of all great religions, including the teachings of Moses, Muhammad and Christ, stress that all human beings are equal, militant Zionists take the position that the killing of a non-Jew does not count.

Israelis today, explains the anti-Zionist Jew Israel Shahak, "are not basing their religion on the ethics of justice.

They do not accept the Old Testament as it is written. Rather, religious Jews turn to the Talmud. For them, the Talmudic Jewish laws become 'the Bible.' And the Talmud teaches that a Jew can kill a non-Jew with impunity."

In the teachings of Christ there was a break from such Talmudic teachings. He sought to heal the wounded, to comfort the downtrodden.

The danger, of course, for U.S. Christians is that having made an icon of Israel, we fall into a trap of condoning whatever Israel does, even wanton murder, as orchestrated by God.

Yet I am not alone in suggesting that the churches in the United States represent the last major organized support for Palestinian rights. This imperative is due in part to our historic links to the Land of Christ and in part to the moral issues involved with having our tax dollars fund Israeli-government-approved violations of human rights.

While Israel and its dedicated U.S. Jewish supporters know they have the president and most of Congress in their hands, they worry about grassroots America, the well-meaning Christians who care for justice.

Thus far, most Christians were unaware of what it was they didn't know about Israel. They were indoctrinated by U.S. supporters of Israel in their own country and when they traveled to the Land of Christ most did so under Israeli sponsorship. That being the case, it was unlikely a Christian ever met a Palestinian or learned what caused the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is gradually changing, however. And this change disturbs the Israelis. As an example, delegates attending a Christian Sabeel conference in Bethlehem earlier this year said they were harassed by Israeli security at the Tel Aviv airport.

"They asked us," said one delegate, "'Why did you use a Palestinian travel agency? Why didn't you use an Israeli agency?'" The interrogation was so extensive and hostile that Sabeel leaders called a special session to brief the delegates on how to handle the harassment.

Obviously, said one delegate, "The Israelis have a policy to discourage us from visiting the Holy Land except under their sponsorship. They don't want Christians to start learning all they have never known about Israel."
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Grace Halsell is a Washington, DC-based writer and author of Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and Politics.

Note: Grace Halsell died on August 16, 2000, In Washington, DC

Strike the Root

By Sheila Samples

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men"~~George Orwell

07/06/07 - Recently, Nova M Radio's Mike Malloy suggested the lethargy that appears to have descended on the American people is more "rage fatigue" than a lack of knowledge or comprehension of the damage wrought by this administration. I agree, although for many of us, rather than fatigue, it's more an inability to "focus" on any single atrocity about which to be enraged. There are just too many incoming horrors at any one time. We are in the throes of a national paralysis.

It's not that we don't know enough to be enraged. We know too much. About too many things. Our rage is splintered, spread too thin to be effective. For the past five years, people in this country and around the world have protested against Bush and Cheney's genocidal assault on two helpless nations. As they prepare openly for yet another bloody attack on yet another nation, we continue to sign petitions, hold meetings, march against the corporate machine -- all to no avail.

The issues catapaulting citizens into the streets are outrageous -- each one deserving of a "million man march" on its own merits. However, because we are frustrated by a relentless media blackout and by the deepening corruption, loss of freedoms and the tightening noose of tyranny, our cries are little more than a cacophony of discord -- an impotent racket.

Both Democrats and Republicans are branches of the same tree of corruption. When hacked off, a branch is instantly replaced by another, and another, each one stronger than the last. George Bush is but a snarled twig, waving at us with a frog in one hand and a firecracker in the other. As bodies of American citizens pile up in funeral homes and cemetaries across the nation; as more and more bodies of innocent men, women and children are strewn across the Middle East, it is becoming increasingly obvious the madness will not stop until we fell this tree -- dig into the darkness and strike the root. We must expose -- and impeach -- Dick Cheney.

There have been Cheneys throughout the annals of time who wreak their destruction from the shadows. In 743 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero warned, "For the traitor appears no traitor -- he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city. He infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist."

Dick Cheney must be impeached -- now -- before he lashes out from the dark side, and Iran is aflame; its terrified citizens displaced, dying -- dead. Whether to impeach is not up to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, no matter how many "arrows" she claims to have in her quiver. We've moved way beyond playing Cowboys and Indians with this gang.

Pelosi's statement on July 2 that Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence "does not serve justice, condones criminal conduct, and is a betrayal of trust of the American people" is rather ironic, considering her steadfast refusal to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for their acts of treason after being elected to do just that.

Nor is impeachment up to the presidential wannabes flip-flopping in disgraceful political one-upmanship as they vie for money to pour into the ravenous media machine. Any American who would hesitate to impeach a destructive, treasonous, power-mad dictator does not deserve to be president of this United States -- now or ever.

Other than Ohio's courageous congressman Dennis Kucinich, whose co-sponsor list to impeach Cheney has grown to 14, no other candidate dares to take a stand. No other candidate deserves a single vote.

Whether to impeach Cheney is not even up to us. We have no choice. The U.S. Constitution is very explicit about this matter. In just 31 words, Article II, Section 4, tells us, "The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

I can cite 3,588 reasons to impeach this man who lied -- is still lying -- so relentlessly to rush this nation into genocidal war. Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment barely scratch the surface of Cheney's treason and crimes against the state, but are more than enough to not only impeach, but to indict and convict him. A more detailed account can be found here.

The U.S. Constitution is the greatest perception of Liberty ever conceived. It was hammered out by men determined to prevent imperial presidencies, shadow governments and seizures of power by any one branch. It was conceived precisely to thwart efforts to destroy the republic by those whose only allegiance is to power and money. We must rid ourselves of the traitors in our midst, starting with Dick Cheney, the one man responsible for the corruption threatening our downfall.

If we are to survive, we must strike the root.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@sirinet.net

The Best of All Possible Worlds

It’s relentless. It just goes on day after day, month after month, year after year. The good guys; the corporations and the governments that serve them, the politicians who work in the governments that serve the corporations, the people who support the politicians that work for the governments that serve the corporations… all the lives on the trembling web that serve the hallucination of progress; of “moving forward”, of “staying the course” and supporting the troops “on the ground”… all these tired slogans that we didn’t have before that are now as essential as the cellphones that transmit the mindless chatter of the teenage girls that we have all become; more concerned with our hair than our fellows, more concerned with our stomachs than our hearts, more concerned with our self interest than the words which no longer have meaning such as, honor, integrity, courage and conviction…. but we are the good guys from the top down, working our way to the bottom where we will all be equal in the pecking order so described in this “best of all possible worlds”.

Then there are the rabble rousers that incite the public against the machine that so ably serves them. There are the mistaken handfuls in occupied countries; those known as terrorists who react against the occupier who has come to bring them freedom and democracy. They think of themselves as freedom fighters but we know them, for so we have been informed, as terrorists who put our righteous soldiers into Boothills on the ground.

Terror was once a small cottage industry, not a bustling concern by any means but certainly a potential growth industry. It took the wise minds of the corporations and their subsidiary of governments to recognize the opportunity that was there. In a few small years ‘terror’ has come to be as recognizable as Starbucks and, although not openly observable, is traded by proxy on the great stock exchanges of the day. Like a fire you must feed the flames and ‘they’ have shown themselves as able in this capacity as they have been in serving the common needs.

Some would say that the media which portrays and the fashion industry which clothes adolescent girls as full blown sluts, as the eternal seducing youth of those made weary by time… some would say that here were the instigators of the suddenly emerged child porn industry that now threatens the mind and attention of anyone so susceptible and which has given Dateline another growth industry and which has fed the corporate coffers of their subsidiary law enforcement branch, courts and prison and law industries which are a franchise of the governments that serve these corporations, but… we are all responsible for our actions. You cannot blame the man that goes looking for you dressed out of sight as a 12 year old who seduces you into an act with someone who doesn’t exist and then puts you into a system for something that wasn’t possible with someone who didn’t exist (except in your mind) where you become a product whose maintenance becomes yet another cash cow………….

………….riddle me this, if I work for a government enforcement arm which works for the alcohol and tobacco corporations and I ask you if you would like to get high on something other than the product that we serve and protect and you agree; have you not broken the law? It is pointless to argue that you were never going to get high. What is important was that you intended to. You might argue that the control of all substances, both legal and illegal are actually in the same hands, in the same way that the corporations have (through their governments) made the cottage industry of terror into a big business. But you see, even if this were so it is necessary for you to understand that the illegal side of the corporation’s product line must remain illegal due to the clear and untraceable profits that manifest and which… and here is the key… money is then put into research and supply so that you might have even better products on every level while still sustaining all of these feeding industries at a high level of profit so that those who make the money can share it out with all of us who are a part of Milo Minderbinder’s great plan for all of us in this best of all possible worlds. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

There are those among us who see hypocrisy and greed as major threads in the eternal weaving tapestry of human lives but… hasn’t it always been this way? If it has always been this way then, of course, this is the way it is supposed to be; to each according to their abilities in relation to the connections they have in relation to the corporations that serve our greater interests. Tell me if you are willing to do without the satisfaction of any appetite, whether natural or manufactured? Look at the countries where our magnificent system has not yet penetrated, where life is simple to the point of the absurd by comparison. Do you want to live there? These very countries actually serve an important purpose in the great scheme of life. How are we to have the resources we need unless they come from places where people don’t use them? Furthermore, do you want to fight wars ‘on the ground’ in your own country? Of course not. These other countries provide us the landscape necessary to test the weapons produced from some of our most important corporations and the profits from the sale of our improved weapons feeds the economy that feeds you, you dumbbell. Yet you wish to tear this down? You might as well snatch the bread from the hands of your children.

Can our corporations grow unless they increase the theater of their operations? Certainly they need to put their products on the shelves of every store in every country of the world. In order for us to thrive, all of the world’s people must purchase the products of the corporations who house and clothe and feed us. So it is that imprisoning the weak for appetites which we inflame is necessary to put “food on your families”. So it is that the deaths of those in foreign lands are a vital part of many industries upon which we depend. We cannot do without them. So it is that both the legal and the illegal, in the same hands, are indispensable to our way of life. Takeovers, mergers, supportive legislations and all attendant efforts toward a brighter future make all of our futures bright, even if we only serve as product ourselves. Sacrifice for the common good on the part of the common man is the highest form of service any of us can render and not only do we all profit thereby but we also learn the most important lessons of compassion and understanding as a result. Knowing what you know now it becomes impossible to pass the sidewalk lunatic, the homeless family in the cardboard box, the junkie, the prostitute, the alcoholic and the pedophile without recognizing what a vital service they perform. You must thank them. They are among our most selfless assistants. But remember, thank them only. Don’t interfere with misguided ideas and efforts toward helping them. This would, as you can see, upset the whole apple cart.

This is why Paris Hilton should not have gone to jail and why she should have gone to jail. This is why life is designed to provide and frustrate at every turn. This is why there is no satisfaction in the products we desire because we must always be longing for something we will never get. This is our impetus toward the shining city on the hill; that place we shall never occupy but which, in the very hope for that city we shall certainly live therein forever.

No longer fear for the future. The uncertainty of the future is your greatest security and the greater the uncertainty the greater the good for all. Perhaps you now realize that freedom actually is slavery, that war is peace and that you do indeed live in the best of all possible worlds.

Smoking Mirrors - January 25, 2007