Anti-Terrorism Act is a License For and Weapon of State Terrorism

This is happening across the globe. Bush's "war on terror" has given every would-be dictator and despot the perfect opportunity to violently put down legitimate resistance movements by simply labelling them as terrorists.

by Prof. Jose Maria Sison - July 19, 2007

The Anti-Terrorism Act (Republic Act No. 9372 or the Human Security Act of 2007) is part of the global wave of fascist legislation and state terrorism generated by the so-called global war on terror under the Bush regime of the US government. Aside from being a tool of US imperialism, the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) is a repressive tool of the Arroyo regime for intimidating and suppressing the people’s democratic movement and the broad range of opposition forces.

Even before the enactment of the ATA, the Arroyo regime and its military and police minions have been committing gross and systematic violations of human rights in the name of combating terrorism. The use of the military, police, paramilitary forces and death squads and fanatical cults for the purpose of coercion and suppression coincides with the desperate drive of the Arroyo regime for political survival. We can therefore expect the regime to use such oppressive law as the ATA as a virtual license for and weapon of state terrorism and unbridled human rights violations.

The ATA adopts a highly emotive political term like terrorism as a legal term. This is given a vague and overbroad definition and does not contain a clear legal standard. Thus it allows and emboldens the political authorities to take arbitrary and ill-motivated actions against their opponents and the people in violation of their fundamental rights and freedoms.

In its attempt to define terrorism as a legal term, the ATA unwittingly admits that it is superfluous and unnecessary by enumerating and seeking to subsume as elements of terrorism crimes that are already well-defined in the penal laws of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP). These crimes include piracy, mutiny, rebellion, insurrection, coup d’etat, murder, kidnapping, serious illegal detention, and those involving destruction plus other crimes like arson and even illegal possession of firearms or explosives.

The ATA fails to show how such crimes transmutate into or rise to the level of the supposed super-crime that is hysterically called terrorism, except by suggesting that this involves ideological, political, religious and similar motivations and concerted activities by organizations and individuals (thereby attacking among others the freedom of thought and belief and freedom of assembly) and by pointing to the inevitable results of such crimes, like “sowing and creating a condition of fear and panic among the populace” and “coercing the government to give in to an unlawful demand” as supposed additional elements.

The ATA fails to define clearly and precisely what constitutes these highly political and subjective additional elements and by what scale and degree these aforesaid crimes in the criminal laws of the GRP need to reach in order to qualify as crimes of terrorism. However, the factotums of the Arroyo regime in the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) – the very same cabal that is behind previous failed repressive measures (CPR, Proclamation No. 1017, E.O.464, ID system, etc.) and directors of the bloody national security program (resulting in more then 860 extrajudicial killings, 200 abductions and more than one million displaced people, etc.)--presume that they can usurp legislative power and unlawfully continue the process of legislation in trying to fill in what is absent in the ATA under the guise of formulating implementing rules and regulations (IRR). People are waiting to see how the ATC will use the IRR and undertake further actions to outdo the already draconian ATA.

The ATA violates all the principles and standards of human rights established in the advance of jurisprudence and human civilization and in the particular struggle against the Marcos fascist dictatorship. It effectively sets aside due process and the presumption of innocence by hounding and pouncing on individuals on the basis of mere suspicion and raw intelligence, attacks the freedom of thought and belief, expression, association, assembly, right to privacy and other fundamental rights and freedoms. It resurrects the witch-hunts and inquisitions of the distant past. It creates a board of inquisition in the form of the ATC. It even seeks to extend its fascist long arm outside the jurisdiction of the country and connive with its US imperialist master and agents in inhuman renditions. It brings about conditions far worse than those under the martial law declaration of the Marcos fascist dictatorship.

The Arroyo regime calculates that the law can be made acceptable by first trumpeting it as a necessary weapon against such small bandit groups like the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah. But even right now, the regime is already threatening to use the ATA against the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People’s Army (NPA) and the chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). The position of the Arroyo regime violates the political offense doctrine well-established in the Supreme Court decision in the Hernandez case and the national and international laws that recognize and respect the right of the people to rebel against tyranny or oppression and the political integrity of national liberation movements founded on the just demands of the people.

At any rate, the Arroyo regime cynically estimates that the bandit groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah as well as the revolutionary forces of the CPP, the NPA and the NDFP chief political consultant are easy targets of proscription because their representatives cannot present themselves freely before the courts of the GRP. Even if the proscribed entities dare to present themselves before such courts, they would have no access to any of the secret statements and intelligence dossiers provided ex parte by the ATC to the designated courts.

The ATA is practically a bill of attainder insofar as it seeks through the ATC to proscribe and criminalize and subject to punitive sanctions entire parties, organizations like the CPP and NPA and their leaders and members effectively without any real due process beyond the inadequate and deceptive semblance of it in the ATA. The ATA uses the long-discredited notion of guilt by association in order to criminalize and subject an expanding number of people to punitive sanctions without truly any due process and without the presumption of innocence before personal guilt is actually proven in court.

The ATA is far more oppressive than the Anti-Subversion Law of 1957. This earlier oppressive law at least required the two-witness rule and a full judicial process before any one could be adjudged a “subversive” and subjected to punishment. But under the ATA, a supra-executive organ like the ATC relying on its political bias and on dubious and uncontested intelligence reports can practically adjudge any party, organization or natural person as a “terrorist” and subject this to punitive sanctions.

The ATA can be used to pressure, persecute or punish any party, organization or individual beyond those already proscribed and persecuted. The Arroyo regime can easily use the ATC to expand the targets of attack under the catch-all provisions of the ATA. The Council can arbitrarily designate suspected officers, sympathizers and members of any organized entity or any individual for that matter as accomplices or accessories in the crime of terrorism or in a supposed conspiracy to commit terrorism.

The Arroyo regime can use the ATA in an unlimited way to serve its selfish economic and political interests and intimidate and suppress the broad range of opposition, including the legal progressive forces and the conservative forces. We have already seen how the regime has generated waves of human rights of violations against the legal patriotic and progressive organizations and progressive party list groups, the social, peace and human rights activists among the religious, truthful journalists and other forces in the broad range of opposition to the regime.

The ATC can unleash against the political opponents of the Arroyo regime a series of oppressive actions, such as wiretapping and other forms of surveillance against which the victims have no prompt remedy; indefinite proscription and freezing of financial assets and accounts; fabricated charges of terrorism to cause the permanent imprisonment on the ground of nonbailability or house arrest which result in the curtailment of the freedom of expression, movement, communications and other rights; the three-day detention limit (easily extendible upon a mere claim by security officials of an “imminent terrorist attack”) either to force a confession and consequently imprison victims indefinitely on the ground of nonbailability or to eliminate witnesses and evidence of forced disappearances and thus to ensure impunity for the minions of the regime in committing torture, murder and other atrocities against their victims.

The entire nation and the people of the world have witnessed how the Arroyo regime has used the Cabinet Oversight Committee on Internal Security and the Anti-Terrorism Task Force (predecessors of the Anti-Terror Council and its Secretariat) to direct the murder, kidnapping and torture of hundreds of legal activists (including workers, peasants, women, youth, teachers, journalists, religious, human rights activists, lawyers, NDFP consultants and other people) and the large military campaigns to intimidate, harm and displace more than a million people from their homes and land under Oplan Bantay Laya I and II.

Given the license and weapon like the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Arroyo regime and its military and police minions are set to escalate human rights violations. Under such circumstances, we can expect the broad masses of the people and the revolutionary forces to intensify all forms of resistance. The Arroyo regime is bent on killing the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations with the use of the Anti-Terrorism Act. It can only fuel the flames of the armed revolution by escalating human rights violations in the futile effort to use brute military force to subjugate and pacify the people and the revolutionary forces.

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chief Political Consultant
National Democratic Front of the Philippines
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of People’s Struggle

The Reality of Jewish Ritual Murder

by Voltaire - July 19, 2007

Jews deny that they have a ritual where they ritually exsanguinate murdered gentile children to acquire blood to mix with Matzo bread. Unfortunately, the facts belie them. Leaving aside the confessions of numerous converted rabbis testifying to the reality of the practice, there are numerous documented cases from both antiquity and more recent times which stand the test of the facts quite solidly.

We will discuss three such examples:

(1) The Saint Simon of Trent case of the Middle Ages;

(2) The Father Tomaso Damascus case of 1840;

(3) The Schuessler and Grimes murders in Chicago in 1955.

The famous Saint Simon case led to the canonization of the murdered boy. Briefly, Simon was enticed by a Jewish doctor into his house with candy. There he was murdered and his body drained of blood. The body was later discovered in a river but there was no evidence of drowning. All parts of the boys body were punctured with multiple wounds and the corpse was completely drained of blood. The doctor was arrested, tortured and confessed to the crime. The instruments used to murder Simon were found at the doctors home and corroborated the confession in every detail. The doctor was condemned. The Jews of the town screamed for a new trial. Because of their wealth and influence the verdict was appealed not once, but twice. In both cases the verdict was upheld. Finally, years later, an investigator, Cardinal Ganganelli, was appointed by the presiding Pope to look into the ritual murder allegation. One of the cases to be re-opened was the Saint Simon of Trent case. Ganganelli approached his task with a distinct bias of disbelief in the ritual murder accusation. However, when writing his report, he had to admit that Saint Simon of Trent had, in fact, been the victim of a Jewish ritual murder. This case was the subject of Professor Ariel Toaff's book Pasque di Sangue, which affirmed the truth of the ritual murder charge and which was pulped and withdrawn from the market based on pressure from the Anti-Defamation League.

The Father Tomaso case of 1840 was one of the biggest criminal cases of the 19th century. A Catholic priest, Father Tomaso, went into the Old City Jewish quarter of Jerusalem to do shopping. While there he was kidnapped by several Jews and, under the direction of the chief Rabbi, his throat and that of his man servant were cut to obtain the ritual blood. The Jews were later apprehended and tortured individually without having the opportunity to coordinate their stories. They were all asked the same questions by the Turkish authorities and gave substantially the same answers. The remains of Father Tomaso and his servant were found in the sewer where all the Jews testified they had dumped them. All gave the same details of the blood rite and its requirements. The questions and their answers were written down by the Turkish authorities and have been preserved for posterity.

The Jews immediately took action to reverse the findings. Although all the European consuls present in Damascus affirmed the guilt of the Jews the Rothschilds in continental Europe and the Montefiores in England mounted a massive campaign to pressure their respective governments. Loan obligations were pressed on the French and Austrian governments. A gigantic press campaign on behalf of the condemned Jews was launched. A huge bribe was offered to Mehmet Ali in Egypt to reverse the findings but merely succeeded in commuting the sentences, not reversing the verdict of ritual murder. All the strings were pulled. Years later, the British Consul in Damascus, Sir Richard Burton, published an investigation into the matter titled The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam. The book was published without an appendix which Burton had written on the Father Tomaso case. When Burton passed a group of Jews associated with the Board of Deputies of British Jewry acquired an assignment of the rights to the manuscript from Burton's widow and have prevented its publication ever since. They will not say what the document contains. Although a very few Jewish scholars have been allowed access to the appendix, they too, have maintained the oath of silence.

The Schluesser and Grimes cases in Chicago in 1955 were the most recent well documented cases of Jewish ritual murder. In 1955 five corpses of several boys and girls were found murdered and unburied in Chicago. The bodies had all been completely drained of blood. They all had multiple puncture wounds and, on one of the boys, the wounds resembled those inflicted on Christ on the cross. The Chicago Sun, a major newspaper of the day, rushed into print a story suggesting that the murders bore the signs of a murder cult. At the pressure of Chicago Jewry the edition of the Sun was pulled off the news stands within ten minutes of hitting the streets. A few copies were, however, obtained by the patriotic Mrs. Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, who sent one to Mr. Schuessler, with the suggestion that his sons had been the victims of a Jewish ritual murder. Mr. Schuessler then made a fatal mistake. He asked the Jewish Sheriff of Cook County, Joseph Lohman, whether his boys had been ritually murdered. Lohman immediately place Mr. Schuessler under house arrest by two Jewish deputies. He was given polygraph and psychological tests which he passed with flying colors. Mr. Schuessler was then flown to Des Moines, Iowa for treatment by a Jewish psychiatrist. On the same day he arrived Mr. Schuessler, a specimen of perfect health, died of a "heart attack". The Jewish psychiatrist, a most unsavory character who had helped Jewish youth in World War Two evade the draft by inducing fake heart flutters and other ailments, took a vacation to Switzerland where he wound up mysteriously hanged in his hotel room. Prior to the good doctor's departure the Coroner of Cook County, a crusty old Irishman, had charged that the shrink had deliberately murdered Mr. Schuessler. The Coroner was warned by the District Attorney to shut up and a few days later, a small bomb blew off the front door of the Coroners house. He had nothing to say thereafter.

Mrs. Van Hining had, throughout the course of the case, been sending newspaper and other clippings to the noted British fascist and ritual murder investigator, Arnold Leese, in London. Mr. Leese was thereupon to die a very mysterious death in his flat and all the research materials Mrs. Van Hyning had been shipping him disappeared, never to be seen again. Finally, in a vey fitting conclusion to the case, Mrs. Schuessler, the mother of the murdered boys, was presented by the journalist, Irv Kupcinet, with a "donation" by the Chicago Jewish community of $100,00 which, multiplied by thirty to fifty times, would be $3-5,000,000 in today's money.

There were other suspicious circumstances. The Irish officers who investigated the case openly charged that evidence was being suppressed. One of the murdered boys had severe strangulation marks with deep fingernail cuts in his neck, suggesting the participation of a Jewess in the crime. There were other forensic signs of the use of an expensive automobile to transport the boys at some point before or after the commission of the crime, probably a Hewitt or some other luxury brand such as a rich Jew might possess. The murders were officially never solved.

As the reader will perceive documented evidence exists from both ancient times to present that Jewish ritual murder is a bloody reality. How widespread the practice is, nobody knows. But the extreme persistence of the charge against them, the continuity of the practice over the centuries and the immense cover up and outright murder to which they have resorted to combat the charge suggests a very ugly conclusion.

Hillary Clinton Shuns Fox Debates, But Pockets Murdochs' Money

by Thomas B. Edsall - July 19, 2007

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards may not want to participate in debates sponsored by FOX News, but they like taking cash from officials of the company considered an arm of the conservative movement by many liberal Democrats.

In April, Edwards led the charge in refusing to participate in a Fox-sponsored debate. His deputy campaign manager, Jonathan Prince, told AP: "We believe there's just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they're objective."

Within days, Clinton followed suit. Unlike Edwards, Clinton did not directly attack Fox in announcing her decision.

"We're going to participate in the D.N.C. [Democratic National Committee]-sanctioned debates only. We've previously committed to participating in the South Carolina and Tavis Smiley debates," Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said. The Fox debate was not DNC-approved.

Obama joined in with Clinton. Bill Burton, Obama's spokesman, said a CNN-sponsored debate would be a more "appropriate venue."

But in her most recent filing at the FEC, Hillary Clinton reported two large donations from the very top of the Fox corporate structure.

On June 5, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, gave her presidential bid $2,300. A few weeks later, his son, James R. Murdoch, chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting in London, gave $3,400. Altogether, NewsCorp/Fox executives gave at least $40,000 to the Clinton campaign.

In July 2006, the elder Murdoch hosted a fundraiser for Clinton's Senate re-election campaign, raising many eyebrows among Democrats. The Financial Times, which first disclosed the event, noted that Murdoch was a part of the "vast right wing conspiracy" named by Hillary Clinton as determined to destroy her husband's presidency.

She explained her willingness then to accept Murdoch's support to the FT: "He's my constituent and I'm very gratified that he thinks I'm doing a good job."

Asked about the Murdoch contributions to Clinton's presidential bid, Howard Wolfson, director of communications, said he had no comment.

Obama has taken more $14,000 from NewsCorp/Fox executives, although none came from the Murdochs themselves. In the broad network of NewsCorp/Fox holdings, with many Hollywood and entertainment entities, there are a substantial number of Democrats on the payroll.

Obama's contributions from NewsCorp/Fox executives included $2,300 each from Daniel Fawcett and Donna Isaacson; $1,000 each from Carla Hacken and Jospeh Hartwick; and a number of donations from other NewsCorp/Fox officials and employees. No comment from the campaign was immediately available.

Edwards received substantially less than Clinton or Obama. His contributions from NewsCorp/Fox executives Louis Supowitz, Jonathan Sarrow, Sean A. Riley, and Jonathan Sarrow total just under $1,000. There was no immediate comment from the Edwards campaign.

The Gentilistic Misunderstanding of Jewish Power

by Patrick Grimm - July 19, 2007

Jewish power is a subject I often talk about in my writings. In some of my more long-winded pieces I have referred to that power as something almost akin to “omnipotence” or “omnipresence.” One recent poster even says that the fact that Jews are criticized across the internet and that the criticizers are allowed to continue with the criticizing without being purged or molested, proves that Jews are not all-powerful. Point taken, but point irrelevant as well.

But neither I nor anyone else have ever claimed that their power is ‘complete’ and ‘total’ in the truest sense of those words, though it is obscenely disproportionate to their tiny numbers. But what I want you to think about is this: There are 18 million Jews upon this planet, yet they control almost all of the world’s media (even reportedly having bought a 50% share of Al Jazeera, oh the irony!), create and manipulate most of the world’s money supply, own every major publishing company in America and most of the publishing houses in Europe, have passed laws in every European country and in Canada outlawing speech that criticizes them and now have the world’s superpower fighting for them in Iraq and poised to kill for them in Iran. Yet some anonymous poster somewhere wants to quibble over the reality that modestly-frequented blogs say derogatory things about Jewish power. So what? Who is listening, for the most part, except the choir in the first place? Yet there is no harm in helping the choir to harmonize better and sing in key, is there?

What is also ignored is the fact that in our nation’s controlled socialist schoolhouses and libraries, there are ADL-mandated filters placed on most of the computers, blocking out, not hard-core and child pornography (the ADL and the ACL-Jew both assure us that this type of filtering would be unconstitutional) but any website or forum criticizing Jews, questioning the official “Holocaust story” of six million, bringing up uncomfortable realities about Jewish crime and misbehavior historically, and in general anything that digs into the stark facts of complete Zionist manipulation of our government and its institutions. Young children, even elementary school children should be able to feast their eyes on any type of perversion, no matter how twisted, but God help them if they were to learn the truth about those supremacist Jews who have waged thousands of years of war against every civilization that has ever had the misfortune to open their arms and their doors to them. The pattern is so consistent, and history tells its bloody story.

But because dissenting voices are allowed to dissent, and uncomfortable truths are allowed to be told, albeit in a confined environment with nowhere near the audience of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN or the Fox Neocon Channel, the Jews are supposedly quaking in their boots. I don’t buy it and neither should you. In fact, they are doing damage control as we speak, damage control that should easily dam up any “troublesome” thoughts that might otherwise leak into the mental stream of the American collective sewer.

Just the other night after turning on the TV for probably the first time in a week, I noticed on my television’s guide, all in a 7:00 time frame, a special on the World Trade Center spinning out the phony 9/11 Arab hijacker story, a program on the History Channel chronicling the heroic uprising of a brave cadre of Jewish prisoners at a German Nazi concentration camp, and then another informatively slanted presentation on a military station that portrayed brave little Israel fighting for her very survival, keeping herself from being “pushed into the sea” by evil Arabs who were full of unexplainable hatred of Jews whom they simply enjoyed killing for fun. Then, over on the Judeo-Christian network there was a Jewish rabbi tearfully and whiningly begging in a Jewish effeminate nasal for generous donations from conservative Christians for the poor and starving children living in Israeli slums. What an absolute joke! Perhaps the rabbi didn’t have the Rothschilds on speed dial.

These are the kinds of propaganda pieces that awash the American mind with lies, half-truths and distorted white noise. Yet the Jews need to worry about shutting Patrick Grimm and Jayne Gardener up? Millions of people sit like nodding zombies and soak in the bilge that is Jewish “entertainment” while my blog will finally hit 6,000 page views sometime this week. Who are you trying to kid?

Why give the average American flag-waving ingester of Judeo-agitprop a blatant photograph of what totalitarianism looks like by conducting internet pogroms of all political and ideological dissent? Yes, why indeed? I mean, the typical American is comfortable in his ignorance, and after all, he is working harder and harder to make the Jewish banking regime richer and richer and fatter and fatter. The Mammonites are getting more Mammonized, after all. Why clue in Joe Six Pack that his country is owned by an alien with alien allegiances, and literally no allegiances to the values he holds dear, old-fashioned ideals like working for a living and not cheating his fellow man out of his paycheck just because he can get away with it and it might help the “Tribe”?

To the Jewish behemoth athwart this country’s back and sucking the blood from it like a leech on a bender, people like myself, Ms. Gardener, Curtis Maynard, Mark Glenn, The West and others are simply nuisances to be ignored, and if necessary, stigmatized so that the brain-washed will obediently jettison all our “anti-Semitic” warnings about Jewish monopolies and Zionist treason. No, our little band of political dissidents don’t present a big enough threat to the Jews robbing this country, at least not yet. Whether the status quo changes or not still remains to be seen.

Another poster inanely remarked “The enemy SEEMS to be omnipotent! In actual fact, they cannot be. If they'd really been smart, they would have conned you into loving them. Their failure to convince you, to evangelize you, to wow you, to have you eating out of their hands, to tame you and turn you into lapdogs, is an indication of their failure. They are not really so clever after all.”

This is about the dumbest gas-bag garbage I have seen spewed from a typist’s fingers in quite a while. The Jews don’t want to “con us into loving them.” Gentiles are the ones who seem to be in such desperate need of love and approval from their masters, trying to prove themselves to be anti-anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic or not racist or some such foolishness. Get it through your thick skull. The Jews don’t care about being loved! I understand crystal-clearly that many of them believe it to be a given that they will be hated and resented for their “chutzpah”, their pushiness, their constant whining and their eternal victimology routine that has started to wear pretty thin on a lot of nerves.

Jews don’t want to be loved, my friend. They want to be FEARED. The Jewish mind has no need of love or approval, tacit or otherwise, from the Goyim. (Yet I’m sure that the very poster of the foolish commentary I just quoted has a secret creeping fear of being thought of as “anti-Semitic” or a “neo-Nazi.” Such is the weakness of the Gentile mind.) The Jews desire more than anything else for you to literally be frightened and horrified of their power, and their power is backed up by the big bad federal government. Their power can be a scary thing, but we must stand up to it with both courage and truth. When enough people on this globe realize that Jewish strength can only exist juxtaposed alongside Gentile weakness, they will see that like a cross makes a vampire wither, their own united opposition to Big Jewry will cause it to wilt like a flower deprived of water.

Why have Jews not “conned” everyone or “wowed” everyone? Quite simple really. There are enough human beings across this planet who have lived amongst Jews, and who see how they behave. No amount of “wowing” or Exodus movies can make people deny what they have experienced and seen with their own eyes. Why do so many Arabs hate Jews? They have lived around large numbers of them. Could there be any other explanation? You don’t get booted out of 79 countries (some of them more than once) because you have great people skills. No Jewish brainwashing campaigns are going to wash away a Gentile’s memory of getting burned doing business with a Jew. My father, who is a very hard-working and honest self-employed man, and who is also quite literally a sheer mechanical genius, has told me countless stories about Jews who have tried to rip him off.

And there’s another reason too. Word of mouth travels fast. In other words, the Jews’ reputation precedes them, and it will continue to precede them until their behavior changes. But the likelihood of that is the likelihood of you getting a good pork sandwich at your neighborhood kosher deli. Don’t hold your breath, at least not for too long. This con game has just worked too well for too many centuries for them to let go of it now. Yet it has also repeatedly backfired, as their dozens of expulsions prove. It will backfire again. History always repeats, yet never quite the same way.

The aforementioned poster states, obviously in a malaise of mental confusion or frontal lobe collapse that “Their failure to convince you, to evangelize you, to wow you, to have you eating out of their hands, to tame you and turn you into lapdogs, is an indication of their failure.” What sappiness! Is there one President, one Congressperson, one Senator or one prominent religious leader who is not their “lapdog”? These are the people with money and influence and the same criminals who pass our laws, who fib to their flocks and who help bankroll Israel and the rest of the spurious Zionist grocery list of greed, treason and globalism. If the dupes who run our nation are their “lapdogs” what difference does it make whether a guy with a blog or a website is enamored of Jews or not? They don’t waste their time on the small fish, Mr. Anonymous. They go right to the top. They surely have no desire to quell Patrick Grimm’s dissenting viewpoints. They schmooze with the money-men and the money-women. They use their strong-arming on them. As I said, they don’t have a great deal of concern about whether or not Patrick Grimm or Jayne Gardener send them a perfumed valentine every February.

I would almost find it flattering if the Jews did see me as a threat to their evil agenda. Yet I know I am a long way from having that kind of influence, the degree of reach that would induce the ADL to place me on a watch list. The crooked Jews who fashion media disinformation and slave day and night for its implantation into willing Gentile brains are sitting pretty, or so they hope. I think they have overplayed their hand again, and in the long run, this will prove to be yet another undoing for them. But I don’t think that we are quite on the absolute cusp of that undoing, though a guy can hope, can’t he? My work is simply an attempt to hurry the inevitability of the collapse of Jewish empire, which may have a few tiny hair cracks in its structure at the present moment. We shouldn’t count them out yet, but at the same time, they shouldn’t underestimate us either. After all, we built Western civilization and the only thing they have ever built is a welfare state in the desert.

AIPAC and Mahmoud Abbas

The Undemocratic Road to Defeat

By James Brooks - July 18, 2007

When the current Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) first "met" on March 6, 2006 (via videoconference, thanks to Israel's travel restrictions), the Palestinian Authority embarked on the final phase of its struggle to become a democratic proto-state. This was to be the first government formed under the new Palestinian constitution, the Basic Law passed by the PLC in 1998 and finally signed by President Arafat in 2002.

The government envisioned by the constitution is a dramatic departure from the autocratic days of Arafat. The bulk of practical state power, including "public order and internal security", is expressly assigned to the Council of Ministers, the prime minister's cabinet. The president has the power to hire and fire the PM, approve the cabinet, and declare states of emergency, but is otherwise little mentioned in the document.

When the Basic Law was drafted during the 1990s, Fateh dominated the PA. Its authors may have hoped its democratic processes and responsibilities would reform their party as well as their government. They could not have foreseen that when the Articles finally came to life, it would be too late for Fateh to benefit as expected. Nor could they have known that the constitution would be threatened at birth because Hamas had been elected to lead the government.

The legal obligation facing President Abbas sixteen months ago was to respect the new division of powers enunciated in the constitution. This was also his duty to the people, who had long demanded democratic reform and an end to one man-one clique rule.

But Abbas was given excuses to escape this obligation. Washington forbade him to cooperate with the elected Hamas government. A brutal economic excuse was supplied by the western powers' embargo against the PA. And, since he and his cronies had negotiated away control of the PA's tax revenues in the Oslo Accords, Israel was able to illegally seize the PA's money when the Hamas government took office.

What could he do?

He could have decided that the unity of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination was more important than the immediate needs of his cadres and the diplomatic bluster of Israel and its friends. He could have challenged the US, EU and Israel to support the democratic outcome of the elections, which would have forged a unified Palestinian front to shame the "international community" for its boycott and interference. He could have recognized that this strategy, conducted resolutely, would be more likely to restore the PA's revenues, more quickly, than any confrontational approach he could take with Hamas.

Instead, Abbas has been listening to his old guard while trying to take orders from Washington, beg for crumbs from Israel, defeat Hamas, form a national unity government, and lead the Palestinian people. Who knew the old stiff could be such a contortionist?

We know from people who know him that Mr. Abbas is a "good guy". We understand that the man has principles, but most of the time he seems incapable of acting on them.

He crossed the line when he allowed arch Zionist and former Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, in the Bush White House, to arm and train his security forces, including those of Mohammed Dahlan, his chief warlord in Gaza. This opened the door to a plot to wage civil war against Hamas in Gaza. When Prime Minister Haniyeh responded by asserting his constitutional control of Gaza's "public order and internal security", the plot was soon vanquished, with brutality on both sides.

Or was it? As if he had expected the outcome, Abbas made his next move with unaccustomed speed. The Bush administration directed it and the EU and Israel broke out in instant applause. The firing of Prime Minister Haniyeh may have been his last legal act as president of the PA. His new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, appeared to have his unconstitutional "emergency" cabinet waiting in the wings.

Abbas, ever the political chameleon, now plays the unlikely role of strong man, directing his "security forces" in the West Bank to round up and detain Hamas members, some of whom are tortured. He and Fayyad are collaborating with Israel's scheme to resume total control over Gaza's borders, enabling it to isolate and starve the people in the futile effort to crush Hamas.

Abbas has now struck an open alliance with Israel and the US against Hamas, despite its continuing plea for dialog to restore the unity government. Abbas is even willing to disgrace himself in front of his own people by making preposterous accusations against the group. 'They were going to blow me up! They are linked to Al-Qaida and are bringing it into Gaza! I won't talk to "murderous terrorists"!' Such talk, ridiculed at home, can only be fodder for the Zionist press and its many readers in Congress.

Now that Palestinian politics is everybody's business, let's put international forces in the Gaza Strip. That's what Mr. Abbas has been urging lately. Employ "peacekeepers" to complete the overthrow of the constitutionally mandated caretaker government and seal its usurpation by Abbas' Group of 13, so (ostensibly) beloved by Israel and the US. Somehow that would solve the "Hamas problem".

Simultaneously, Mr. Abbas claims to be a legitimate partner for immediate negotiations with the occupation. Since Israel traditionally signs treaties with the PLO, which Abbas chairs, these statements are worrisome. If he continues on this course, he could, at the very least, fracture the PLO, just as he is threatening to fracture the resistance by cutting deals with Israel to spare Fateh militants who quit.

AIPAC, Israel's powerful Washington "lobby", has just announced its support for Abbas' moves. The Zionists relish this chance to poison Abbas with their public praise while using him to weaken Hamas. "Divide and conquer" means that they defeat both halves. Why is he still playing along?

Study: Americans Don't Understand Others

Well, No Sh*t Sherlock - we didn't need a study to tell us that. We have the "war on terror" that tells us everything we need to know about American's understanding of others.

by Corey Binns, Live Science - July 18, 2007

Rugged American individualism could hinder our ability to understand other peoples' point of view, a new study suggests.

And in contrast, the researchers found that Chinese are more skilled at understanding other people's perspectives, possibly because they live in a more "collectivist" society.

"This cultural difference affects the way we communicate," said study co-author and cognitive psychologist Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago.

Simple study

The study, though oversimplified compared to real life, was instructive. Keysar and his colleagues arranged two blocks on a table so participants could see both. However, a piece of cardboard obstructed the view of one block so a "director," sitting across from the participant, could only see one block.

When the director asked 20 American participants (none of Asian descent) to move a block, most were confused as to which block to move and did not take into account the director's perspective. Even though they could have deduced that, from the director's seat, only one block was on the table.

Most of the 20 Chinese participants, however, were not confused by the hidden block and knew exactly which block the director was referring to. While following directions was relatively simple for the Chinese, it took Americans twice as long to move a block.

"That strong, egocentric communication of Westerners was nonexistent when we looked at Chinese," Keysar said. "The Chinese were very much able to put themselves in the shoes of another when they were communicating."

The results are detailed in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Collectivist societies, such as the Chinese, place more value on the needs of the group and less on the autonomy of the individual. In these societies, understanding other peoples' experiences is a more critical social skill than it is among typically more individualist Americans.

Gross oversimplification

"Of course, these are very gross oversimplifications," said Keysar. "Even in America, you can find collectivist societies. For example, working class people tend to be much more collective."

Culture appears to direct our eyes to read others' emotions, too.

Psychologists at Hokkaido University in Japan have found that Japanese gaze at the shape of a person's eyes, while Americans focus on the mouth. When people from the two cultures interact, these crisscrossed sightlines can lead to miscommunication.

"We all know people from different cultures are different. This is not new. But what research is now showing is how they're different and what are the implications," Keysar told LiveScience. "If we are aware of how we think differently, this can go a long way toward not allowing these differences to get in the way of reaching mutual understanding."

New Interior Minister: Bring only Jews to Israel

This is an interesting read considering Israel's "No Right of Return" for Palestinians

by Nurit Feler, Israel Jewish Scene - July 17, 2007

Newly elected minister Meir Sheetrit slams Israeli policy of bringing great numbers of 'quasi-Jews' to country, wants to introduce new criteria that will allow only 'bona-fide Jews' to make aliyah.

"It's time to bring only Jews to Israel," newly elected Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said Friday in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, and called for a new discussion on the Law of Return. "If we don't discuss these issues now, within a few years Israel will no longer be the State of the Jews."

Sheetrit said he was shocked to discover statistics about the number of non-Jews living in the country.

"Seventy percent of emigrants from the Former Soviet Union are not Jewish, the Falash Mura continue to pour in from Ethiopia, Jewish organizations roam the world and bring here quasi-Jews from all sorts of tribes, thousands of illegal residents from the Palestinian Authority live and work here uninterrupted, and thousands Africans infiltrate to Israel, when only a minority are Darfur refugees," he stated.

Sheetrit, who took up the position last week, said it was time for Israel to decide who it wants to see living here. "We retuned to our homeland after 2,000 years in exile in order to build a Jewish, Zionist state here, not a Foreign Legionaries country. Entrance to the country should not be automatic." His main concern, he stated, was that Israel might lose it Jewish majority due to reckless immigration policies.

According to Sheetrit, Israel should institutionalize a mechanism that would examine candidates for aliyah and make sure they are Jewish, and also that they have a clean record.

How would you decide who should be allowed in and who shouldn't?

"The way I see it, it is our duty to accept every Jew who wants to and is capable of coming here, on the condition that he feels he shares our destiny and wants his children to live here. Additionally, other criteria must be set, for instance 'criminality tests.' I don't want any criminal being imported here."

Sheetrit stated he was considering introducing citizenship tests in Israel, as well as obligating new immigrants to swear allegiance to the state. However, he added that he opposed using financial criteria, because "the Jewish and Zionist element is till the most important one."

Another al-Zawahiri Goose Chase Ensues

by Kurt Nimmo, July 18, 2007

Mossad is at it again, using one of its favored propaganda outlets, DEBKAfile. “Until the middle of last week, Zuwahiri [Ayman al-Zawahiri] sheltered with the local Pashtun tribes in Bannu, a town in the northwest Pakistan tribal federation of North Waziristan. The approach of Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces caused him to switch hiding places and move to Tank or Tang, a town 120 km south of Bannu,” Mossad would have us believe. “His former sanctuary of Bannu is situated 150 km as the crow flies from the South Afghan town of Gardiz which is a hub of al Qaeda-Taliban activity. The connection between the two towns is a twisting road of 400 km through Parachinar in Pashtun tribal land. According to DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, al Qaeda and Taliban leaders do not travel from place to place by road or vehicle but on horseback by night piloted by local guides.”

In other words, either “Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces” are so inept they stupidly announce their arrival, thus frightening off their prey, or somebody told Zawahiri of their arrival up front. Is it possible this warning caught up with al-Zawahiri by way of Pakistan’s ISI? Or is it possible al-Zawahiri is nowhere near North Waziristan?

Earlier this month, the Turkish Weekly reported: On July 5, 2007, al-Sahab, the Final Cut Pro division of “al-Qaeda,” no doubt run out of a basement in Langley, Virginia, posted a 95 minute video message by al-Zawahiri entitled “The Advice of One Concerned.” It contained a “desperate call for Muslims to support the ISI,” a call that makes certain sense as the “al-Qaeda” brand is indebted to Pakistan’s ISI (and the CIA).

The first part of Al-Zawahiri’s message is an urgent call for Muslims to support the ISI and a desperate attempt to establish the ISI’s legitimacy. In this part, Al-Zawahiri attacks Muslim scholars around the Islamic world for their persistent refusal to issue fatwas that support the ISI and, worse, for the harsh criticism they aim at the ISI and its jihad endeavor. According to him, these same scholars have endorsed with their silence political entities such as the Hamas government despite the fact that it lacks important qualifications which the ISI possesses. He stresses, for example, that while the Hamas government in Gaza “connects to its other half [government] in Ramallah [only] through television circuits and while the head of the government… can move between the two parts [of his government] only after the IDF permits him and searches him,” the ISI has a coherent government and its ministers can move freely in the ISI’s self-governed territory. Yet, Muslim scholars who criticized the ISI have never questioned the Hamas government’s legitimacy.

It is perfectly understandable al-Zawahiri supports the ISI, as he was recruited by the organization and helped Osama bin Laden run Maktab al-Khidamar, an ISI-CIA front organization in the 1980s. Not unlike the vicious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden were useful idiots, or as Marc Erikson characterized Hekmatyar, they were ISI stooges and creations. In fact, as Gerald Posner claims, citing CIA officials, Osama (and likely his inseparable sidekick, Ayman) met with Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rahman, Pakistani ISI’s head from 1980 to 1987, in Peshawar. Indeed, so successful was the ISI-Osama, later deemed “al-Qaeda,” working relationship that then CIA director William Casey and MI6 (and no doubt Mossad as a junior partner) gave their blessing to a massive recruitment effort of “jihadists” (then, as Reagan deemed it, “freedom fighters”) from around the world. On September 20, 2003, John Pilger wrote for the Guardian:

CIA director William Casey had given his backing to a plan put forward by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.

It should be noted that at this time the CIA launched a joint program with the ISI to export “militant Islam” beyond the backwaters of Afghanistan, as Ahmed Rashid notes in his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. It makes absolutely no sense to believe the ISI suddenly dismantled this edifice in order to simply and simple-mindedly get Osama, a goal we are told is at the top of Musharraf’s to-do list. In fact, the ISI runs Musharraf, not the other way around. Last September, the Defense Academy, a British Ministry of Defense think-tank, released a scathing report claiming “Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had supported al-Qaeda and the Taleban and aided the Madrid and London bombers,” according to the Times Online. “We don’t like anybody advising us to dismantle ISI, least of all the [British] Ministry of Defense,” an angry Musharraf responded, understanding well who runs things in Pakistan and understanding also the ISI proclivity of snuffing out those who rub it the wrong way. At any rate, Tony Blair rushed in to play kissy face and patch things up.

“DEBKAfile’s sources disclose that the US Senate’s decision to double the bounty for bin Laden’s capture, killing or information leading to his death or capture to $50 million, was recommended by President George W. Bush after he received an urgent message from Musharraf. The Pakistani president reported his people had picked up the trail of bin Laden’s trail in their pursuit of his deputy, but the tribal chiefs with knowledge of where the elusive al Qaeda leader was hiding were holding out for an exorbitant sum for their collaboration.”

Of course, all of this is pure nonsense, as Bush, or rather the neocons behind Bush, have no interest in capturing Osama or “Zuwahiri,” the former long dead and buried and the latter probably not anywhere near North Waziristan or even Afghanistan for that matter. However, the neocons have a vested interest in running the terrorism swindle for as long as possible, maybe for another hundred years, as promised. DEBAKfile and the Mossad have their assigned role, making up Brothers Grimm stories about colorful tribal chiefs and VIP “al-Qaeda” villains on horseback in the dead of night, once again escaping justice by the whiskers of their Wahhabish beards.

The Evilness of Jewish Chosenness

by Andrew Winkler, The Rebel Media Group - July 18, 2007

One of the biggest sources of frustration for human beings is the conflict between their childish need to blindly believe, and the realisation that they are all being lied to, even by those people they most trust. What - as a young child - is sometimes a necessity for survival, to believe, think and act as their parents, family, tribe are telling them, as a grown up often becomes a liability.

It isn’t always as harmless as believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. There isn’t always a well-meaning person around warning not to make a fool of yourself. Believing that you are the prettiest little princess or the bravest and strongest boy on the planet might be cute and healthy for the fragile self-confidence of a young child, but quickly becomes unbearable for everyone else, if not corrected by a sense of reality as a young adult.

If an ethnic group is threatened, oppressed or exploited because of her ethnicity, developing a sense of pride in whatever makes this community different, can be vital for the survival of this group. However if the same community becomes the dominating group, this sense of specialness can quickly develop to a tool of ruthless oppression.

When the combined onslaught of the Vikings and the Mongols destroyed Khazaria, her ethnic Turk inhabitants of converts to Talmudism – the ancestors of today’s Ashkenazi Jews - were dispersed all over Europe. Holding on to their Jewish religion and tradition enabled them to preserve their ethnic identity and - 750 years later - regain statehood, a positive development, had it occured with the approval of the affected native population. The disregard and utter contempt for the rights and humanity of the Palestinian people is the result of a deadly cocktail of traditional Jewish Chosenness, considering themselves as being God’s preferred people, Talmudic racism, considering non-Jews as subhumans that can be killed, exploited and abused at will, and Western military superiority.

While Ashkenazi Jews, for the past two hundred years, have been at the forefront of almost every human and civil rights movement, they are routinely refusing the very same rights to anybody in the way of Jewish greed respectively the consolidation and expansion of the Jews-only state. Such hypocrisy raises suspicion that Jewish advocacy for human and civil rights were always more about protecting Jews from anti-Jewish forces than about protecting universal human values.

Jewish chosenness and supremacism can no longer be ignored. The same beliefs that helped Ashkenazis to survive as an ethnic group, is now threatening everybody else, due to the stranglehold today’s Ashkenazis have over the governments and societies of the world’s most powerful nations. No longer are these governments acting in the interest of their countries but are conducting wars that ruin their own economies, even poison their own troops with depleted uranium, all in the interest of Jewish profits and Israeli expansion.

Jewish Chosenness must be treated as a mental disorder. It is as dangerous for all of us as are schizophrenia and even psychopathy. It is a threat to the very survival of mankind.

Absurd Terrorism Theories Invade the Homeland

by Kurt Nimmo - July 18, 2007

It is a busy news day, with the absurd propaganda coming fast and furious. Consider: “CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports that while the northern area of Pakistan, much of which is controlled by local tribes, has always been a stronghold of the Taliban, it’s now also home to a resurgent al Qaeda,” reports CBS News. “Even after five years of operations, what has been achieved? Osama bin Laden is still there, al Qaeda is still there, in fact it is spreading,” CBS reports Lt. General Ali Jan Mohammed Aurakzai as declaring earlier this year.

As usual, CBS’ “reporters,” actually Pentagon script readers, have not bothered to study history—not obscure history, mind you, but the sort of stuff revealed with a ten second Google search.

In October, 2001, Jane’s reported Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) “openly backs the Taliban and fuels the 12-year-old insurgency in northern India’s disputed Kashmir province by ‘sponsoring’ Muslim militant groups and ministering its policy of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ that so effectively drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan and led to their political demise…. The CIA has well-established links with the ISI, having trained it in the 1980s to ‘run’ Afghan mujahideen (holy Muslim warriors), Islamic fundamentalists from Pakistan as well as Arab volunteers by providing them with arms and logistic support to evict the Soviet occupation of Kabul.”

For some reason we are expected to believe Pakistan suddenly changed its tune and now wants to destroy the monster it created. Moreover, we are expected to believe Pakistan is unable to control the Taliban and “al-Qaeda,” the database, in its northern areas, as Lt. General Ali Jan Mohammed Aurakzai would have us believe, never mind former “Pakistani president General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, who was ultimately assassinated along with his ISI chief, expanded the agency’s internal charter by tasking it with collecting information on local religious and political groups opposed to his military regime. Under Gen Zia the ISI’s Internal Political Division reportedly assassinated Shah Nawaz Bhutto, one of the two brothers of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, by poisoning him on the French Riviera in 1985.”

How curious—the ISI’s Internal Political Division is capable of collating thousands of dossiers and even assassinating opponents on the French Riviera but it is entirely helpless when it comes to controlling the Taliban in a primitive backwater of its own nation. In fact, the Taliban and, yes indeed, “al-Qaeda” are ISI-CIA assets and will not be eradicated as they are so eminently useful. George Crile, a veteran producer for the CBS television news show 60 Minutes, described as “an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper” by Chalmers Johnson, characterizes “the U.S. clandestine involvement in Afghanistan” (i.e., creating, financing, and nurturing both the mujahideen and the Taliban) as “the largest and most successful CIA operation in history.” For some reason CBS News would have us believe the CIA decided to chuck its most successful operation. In other words, CBS is staffed with morons and cretins… well, high-paid bootlickers and sycophants, anyway.

Next up, CNN. Due to an unimpeded “radicalization process” straight out of Iraq—where, of course, “al-Qaeda” runs free, sort of like in Pakistan’s wild northern area, and where the dead Osama walks about free, never mind his very late stage renal failure—the CIA-ISI created terror group will “launch an attack in the U.S., according to domestic intelligence agencies,” using “tactics honed in Iraq,” no doubt tactics honed with the help of white guys in Arab garb and wigs.

In a report cobbled together by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, we learn “that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment” and “we” (meaning the neocons and their fellow travelers in Congress) “should have concentrated our efforts on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan from the beginning… We must responsibly redeploy our troops out of Iraq'’ and “concentrate our efforts on Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11,” never mind a complete paucity of evidence “al-Qaeda” attacked the country on nine eleven or mysteriously and remarkably changed the laws of physics or used voodoo to make NORAD stand down.

“The report says al-Qaeda is gaining strength in the ’safe haven’ it has established in tribal areas in western Pakistan along the Afghan border and is putting in place a stable leadership with top lieutenants,” a “safe haven” especially carved out, as it makes precious little sense to believe the most successful covert CIA operation in history, costing billions of dollars and spanning at least three U.S. administrations, would be stupidly tossed on the junk heap, never mind what Fox News tells you.

Naturally, all of this translates into a threat poised against the homeland. Fran Townsend, White House homeland security adviser, “predicted that al-Qaeda would intensify efforts to achieve the fourth element needed for an attack: the placing of operatives inside the US. Because of this risk, the US was currently in a ‘heightened threat environment,’” even though, of course, the neocons “have no credible information pointing to a specific imminent attack,” in other words, it is safe to venture out and shop. Townsend’s “warning” follows up nicely on the heels of Chertoff’s “gut feeling” that “al-Qaeda was preparing an attack,” as MSNBC reports, or rather script reads.

As should be expected, Congress critters “were quick to look for partisan advantage Tuesday in a new intelligence report describing a ‘persistent and evolving’ terrorist threat to the United States,” according to the New York Times. “Both parties sought to employ the report as a club in their fight over the Iraq War. Democrats said the report underscored the need to shift U.S. resources from the conflict in Iraq toward fighting al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide.

Republicans said the report underscored the importance of remaining steadfast in Iraq and beyond,” in other words, neocons fancy the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) summary as rallying call to invade a growing list of countries and slaughter more Arab and Muslim grandmothers and toddlers. One such threat, according to the NIE, is the “Lebanese militant group Hezbollah,” determined to attack “the homeland over the next three years,” never mind Hezbollah was organized to resist Israeli occupation and check Israel’s habitual desire to kill Lebanese, as it killed no shortage last summer.

As if to remind us the Democrats are on cue, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he believes it is a “travesty that Osama bin Laden remains at large nearly six years after the 9/11 attacks, and that the Bush administration and most congressional Republicans remain stubbornly wedded to a flawed strategy in Iraq.” Reid is wrong on both counts: Osama bin Laden is dead, so he obviously is not “at large,” and the neocon strategy in Iraq is not “flawed,” but rather a great success, as it has destroyed the country and killed around a million Iraqis since early 2003.

But then Iraq and Osama are trick ponies, brought to the gate repeatedly, not that most Americans are aware of this threadbare ploy. Millions to this day, regardless of methodical evidence to the contrary, believe Saddam was in cahoots with Osama.

“The NIE provides an urgent public reminder that our nation faces a persistent and ongoing threat from al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups,” declared the neocon fellow traveler, Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. As well, according to Hoekstra, the bogus threat of a resurgent “al-Qaeda” and Taliban provides a customized excuse to “change FISA to grant broader leeway for electronic snooping,” no doubt because Osama and Omar are placing so many telephone calls to their deep-freeze sleeper cells in Des Moines, Twin Falls, and other hot beds of imminent terrorism.

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."

Can't find Osama? Attack Iran Instead

by Philip Giraldi - July 18, 2007

The July 17 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "On the Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland" [.pdf] warns that al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself in the tribal areas of U.S. ally Pakistan, that it has resumed training of cadres intending to carry out "high impact plots" against the United States, and that the terrorist threat for the next three years continues worldwide and is even growing in places like North Africa and Britain. As always there is a bland euphemism to define the emerging situation, in this case that the United States will be experiencing a "heightened threat environment." And to make sure that the conflation of terrorism with Iraq is not lost on the reader, the "central front" in Iraq makes an appearance among the report's "Key Findings."

In a tour-de-force of misinformation disguised as fact, the report states, erroneously, that al-Qaeda in Iraq represents the principal threat for an attack on the U.S. homeland "because it has expressed a desire to attack us here." The "attack us here" theme has been around for several years, and it has lately been reinforced by the White House's incessant linkage of Iraq to al-Qaeda, culminating in a July 10 speech in Cleveland in which President Bush named the terrorist organization 30 times during comments that were ostensibly on the war in Iraq.

Anyone who follows terrorism even in a pedestrian fashion might politely suggest that the administration's position on the terrorism problem is nonsense. The main threat to the U.S. comes from the real original unadulterated al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Iraq, though a magnet and training ground for terrorist aspirants, is neither interested in nor capable of exporting its own particular brand of anarchy to America's shores.

Given the prominence of Iraq, the NIE is clearly more a political document than an objective assessment. It goes on to state that the U.S. has been on the offensive against terrorism, that it has "built new institutions" and "developed new tools." It is "constantly evaluating the threat" in hundreds if not thousands of meetings in Washington. Lots of meetings. Lots of reviews. Lots of worker bees working. The irrepressible Karen Hughes at State Department has summoned her Myrmidons, "countering al-Qaeda's violent message," challenging terrorists to cyber duels over the Internet. It's Star Wars all over again. "We remain vigilant." It's all there in the NIE.

But one might be forgiven for thinking, perhaps, that all is not well, that the terrorism problem is somehow worse now than it was in 2001. Such reflection, which would be appropriate for anyone who truly cares about the United States and its people, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the past six years of misdirection and mismanagement have made the world a much more dangerous place. In that light, one might conclude that the NIE is more a chronicle of failure than success, an admission that the White House and Congress have, in fact, been unable to protect the American people. It might also be observed that one doesn't get as much bang for the buck as used to be the case. The expenditure of half a trillion dollars in a "global war on terrorism" (GWOT) that has led to the deployment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, intelligence officers, and law enforcement personnel against no more than a couple of thousand terrorists concentrated in one of the world's most backward regions has not radically shifted the playing field in America's favor. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda carried out 9/11. Osama has been hanging around in Pakistan since late 2001, and he is still there, training new terrorists and planning.

And, if something is wrong in the GWOT, as usual no one is to blame, as-finger pointing would reflect badly on the political leadership. Retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the administration's failure to finish off a cornered Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora Mountains in December 2001, received his Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. He now sits on the boards of the Bank of America and Outback Steakhouse, and it is assumed that he will soon be named president of Oklahoma State University. Ex-CIA Director George Tenet, who claims he warned Condoleezza Rice about an impending terrorist attack but, inexplicably, failed to tell the president, just received a $4 million book advance. Paul Wolfowitz, whose lack of judgment guaranteed that the U.S. occupation of Iraq would not succeed, is now comfortably back at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute after his failure at the World Bank.

The blundering of the past six years in which America's friends overseas have been turned into enemies by arrogance and bullying, in which Washington's standing among nations has plummeted, has not resulted in any serious change of course. No one is responsible. The neoconservative architects of the Pentagon assault on Iraq that has turned that country into a failed state and a magnet for terrorism have left for greener pastures, but not a one has admitted to error or been publicly admonished. Several, including Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Council's Elliot Abrams, are still in positions of power, advocating a new war as part of a larger conflict that will go on indefinitely, everywhere.

And it's always convenient to blame it on the bad guys. Per the NIE, terrorism is not a problem because America's politicians, bureaucrats, and pundits stacked a hundred high in every office lining the Potomac have failed to understand the nature of the threat. It is rather because the terrorists have "evolved" and "adapted," hardly playing fair.

The NIE is not pleasant reading, even though it tries to make the essentially political point that everything possible is being done to protect "the Homeland." What it really is arguing is that everything that is being done should continue to be done, and more. That means more of the bloated bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security and the world's mightiest military budget. Another White House tactical response to the very real terrorist threat, which it doesn't want anyone to think about too much, is, predictably, to look for a diversion in the form of someone else to kick. With Iraq and Afghanistan in shambles, there just happen to be a couple of neighbors who can be credibly accused of "interference" with the U.S. military's civilizing mission. In the intelligence business it is sometimes necessary to use "disinformation" to establish a false factual basis or to create a straw man that can be used to divert attention from an unpleasant reality. If it is too hard to catch Osama bin Laden, it might be more convenient to talk about Iran instead. As Syria and Iran have both long been in the crosshair of the neoconservatives because of those countries' antipathy to Israel, it is reassuring to know that they have not been forgotten by the White House. It is possibly no coincidence that there has been a significant increase in the anti-Iran rhetoric emanating from both the Bush administration and Congress over the past few weeks, mostly seeking to establish a casus belli by contending that Iran is masterminding lethal attacks directed against U.S. troops in Iraq and NATO forces in Afghanistan. A tidy little war against Iran would be a useful diversion that would make everyone forget about the NIE and the inability to do anything about Osama bin Laden.

US Middle East Wars - Social Opposition and Political Impotence

by Prof. James Petras, Global Research - July 17, 2007

Everywhere I visit from Copenhagen to Istanbul, Patagonia to Mexico City, journalists and academics, trade unionists and businesspeople, as well as ordinary citizens, inevitably ask me why the US public tolerates the killing of over a million Iraqis over the last two decades, and thousands of Afghans since 2001?

“You cannot win the peace unless you know the enemy at home and abroad” US Marine Colonel from Tennessee.

Why, they ask, is a public, which opinion polls reveal as over sixty percent in favor of withdrawing US troops from Iraq, so politically impotent? A journalist from a leading business journal in India asked me what is preventing the US government from ending its aggression against Iran, if almost all of the world’s major oil companies, including US multinationals are eager to strike oil deals with Teheran? Anti-war advocates in Europe, Asia and Latin America ask me at large public forums what has happened to the US peace movement in the face of the consensus between the Republican White House and the Democratic Party-dominated Congress to continue funding the slaughter of Iraqis, supporting Israeli starvation, killing and occupation of Palestine and destruction of Lebanon?

Absence of a Peace Movement?

Just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 over one million US citizens demonstrated against the war. Since then there have been few and smaller protests even as the slaughter of Iraqis escalates, US casualties mount and a new war with Iran looms on the horizon. The demise of the peace movement is largely the result of the major peace organizations’ decision to shift from independent social mobilizations to electoral politics, namely channeling activists into working for the election of Democratic candidates – most of whom have supported the war. The rationale offered by these ‘peace leaders’ was that once elected the Democrats would respond to the anti-war voters who put them in office. Of course practical experience and history should have taught the peace movement otherwise: The Democrats in Congress voted every military budget since the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. The total capitulation of the newly elected Democratic majority has had a major demoralizing effect on the disoriented peace activists and has discredited many of its leaders.

Absence of a National Movement

As David Brooks (La Jornada July 2, 2007) correctly reported at the US Social forum there is no coherent national social movement in the US. Instead we have a collection of fragmented ‘identity groups’ each embedded in narrow sets of (identity) interests, and totally incapable of building a national movement against the war. The proliferation of these sectarian ‘non-governmental’ ‘identity’ ‘groups’ is based on their structure, financing and leadership. Many depend on private foundations and public agencies for their financing, which precludes them from taking political positions. At best they operate as ‘lobbies’ simply pressuring the elite politicians of both parties. Their leaders depend on maintaining a separate existence in order to justify their salaries and secure future advances in government agencies.

The US trade unions are virtually non-existent in more than half of the United States: They represent less than 9% of the private sector and 12% of the total labor force. Most national, regional and city-wide trade union officials receive salaries comparable to senior business executives: between $300,000 to $500,000 dollars a year. Almost 90% of the top trade union bureaucrats finance and support pro-war Democrats and have supported Bush and the Congressional war budgets, bought Israel Bonds ($25 billion dollars) and the slaughter of Palestinians and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.

The Unopposed War Lobby

The US is the only country in the world where the peace movement is unwilling to recognize, publically condemn or oppose the major influential political and social institutions consistently supporting and promoting the US wars in the Middle East. The political power of the pro-Israel power configuration, led by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), supported within the government by highly placed pro-Israel Congressional leaders and White House and Pentagon officials has been well documented in books and articles by leading journalists, scholars and former President Jimmy Carter. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has over two thousand full-time functionaries, more than 250,000 activists, over a thousand billionaire and multi-millionaire political donors who contribute funds both political parties. The ZPC secures 20% of the US foreign military aid budget for Israel, over 95% congressional support for Israel’s boycott and armed incursions in Gaza, invasion of Lebanon and preemptive military option against Iran.

The US invasion and occupation policy in Iraq, including the fabricated evidence justifying the invasion, was deeply influenced by top officials with long-standing loyalties and ties to Israel. Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 and 3 in the Pentagon, are life-long Zionists, who lost security clearance early in their careers for handing over documents to Israel. Vice President Cheney’s chief foreign policy adviser in the planning of the Iraq invasion is Irving Lewis Liebowitz (‘Scooter Libby’). He is a protégé and long-time collaborator of Wolfowitz and a convicted felon.

Libby-Liebowitz committed perjury, defending the White House’s complicity in punishing officials critical of its Iraq war propaganda. Libby-Liebowitz received powerful political and financial support from the pro-Israel lobby during his trial. No sooner did he lose his appeal on his conviction on five counts of perjury, obstructing justice and lying, than the ZPC convinced President Bush to ‘commute’ his prison sentence, in effect freeing him from a 30 month prison sentence before he had served a day. While Democratic politicians and some peace leaders criticized President Bush, none dared hold responsible the pro-Israel lobby which pressured the White House.

The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO) – numbering 52 – and their regional and local affiliates are the leading force transmitting Israel’s war agenda against Iran. The PMAJO, working closely with US-Israeli Congressman Rahm Emmanuel and leading Zionist Senators Charles Schumer and Joseph Lieberman, succeeded in eliminating a clause in the budget appropriation setting a date for the withdrawal for US troops from Iraq.

In contrast to the successful vast propaganda, congressional and media campaigns, organized and funded by the pro-Israel lobbies for the war policies, there is no public record of the big oil companies supporting the Iraq war, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon or the military threats of preemptive attacks on Iran. Interviews with investment bankers, oil company executives and a thorough review of the major Petroleum Institute publications over the past seven years provide conclusive evidence that ‘Big Oil’ was deeply interested in negotiating oil agreements with Saddam Hussein and the Iranian Islamic government. ‘Big Oil’ perceives US Middle East wars as a threat to their long-standing profitable relations with all the conservative Arab oil states in the Gulf. Despite the strategic position in the US economy and their great wealth '‘Big Oil' was totally incapable of countering their political power and organized influence of the pro-Israel lobby. In fact Big Oil was totally marginalized by the White House National Security Advisor for the Middle East, Elliot Abrams, a fanatical Zionist and militarist.

Despite the massive and sustained pro-war activity of the leading Zionist organizations inside and outside of the government and despite the absence of any overt or covert pro-war campaign by ‘Big Oil’, the leaders of the US peace movement have refused to attack the pro-Israel war lobby and continue to mouth unfounded clichés about the role of ‘Big Oil’ in the Middle East conflicts.

The apparently ‘radical’ slogans against the oil industry by some leading intellectual critics of the war has served as a ‘cover’ to avoid the much more challenging task of taking on the powerful, Zionist lobby. There are several reasons for the failure of the leaders of the peace movement to confront the militant Zionist lobby. One is fear of the powerful propaganda and smear campaign which the pro-Israel lobby is expert at mounting, with its aggressive accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and its capacity to blacklist critics, leading to job loss, career destruction, public abuse and death threats.

The second reason that peace leaders fail to criticize the leading pro-war lobby is because of the influence of pro-Israel ‘progressives’ in the movement. These progressives condition their support of ‘peace in Iraq’ only if the movement does not criticize the pro-war Israel lobby in and outside the US government, the role of Israel as a belligerent partner to the US in Lebanon, Palestine and Kurdish Northern Iraq. A movement claiming to be in favor of peace, which refuses to attack the main proponents of war, is pursuing irrelevance: it deflects attention from the pro-Israel high officials in the government and the lobbyists in Congress who back the war and set the White House’s Middle East agenda. By focusing attention exclusively on President Bush, the peace leaders failed to confront the majority pro-Israel Democratic congress people who fund Bush’s war, back his escalation of troops and give unconditional support to Israel’s military option for Iran.

The collapse of the US peace movement, the lack of credibility of most of its leaders and the demoralization of many activists can be traced to strategic political failures: the unwillingness to identify and confront the real pro-war movements and the inability to create a political alternative to the bellicose Democratic Party. The political failure of the leaders of the peace movement is all the more dramatic in the face of the large majority of passive Americans who oppose the war, most of whom did not display their flags this Fourth of July and are not led in tow by either the pro-Israel lobby or their intellectual apologists within progressive circles.

The word to anti-war critics of the world is that over sixty percent of the US public opposes the war but our streets are empty because our peace movement leaders are spineless and politically impotent.

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed).

From My Lai to Mesopotamia: When Atrocities become an "Accepted Technique"

by Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research - July 17, 2007

In his introduction to Robert Jungk's wake up call, 'Children of the Ashes', on the survivors of Hiroshima, the late, great James Cameron writes of what the American military psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton called 'the immersion into death'. Lifton went on to 'describe how his feelings about Hiroshima were multiplied later by the appalling US atrocity in My Lai, Vietnam.'

Another kind of horror, writes Cameron, is that such atrocities have become 'an accepted technique ...' There you have it. The deviant, unhinged, criminal sadism, from My Lai to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and the litany of inhuman, near unimaginable atrocities in America and Britain's invasions, are not 'isolated incidents', the deranged acts of the occasional 'bad apple'. The whole barrel needs decontaminating for the salvation of the odd good apple.

This month's Nation made it clear (again) how short the forty year road is from My Lai to Iraq. What was as shocking as the horrific acts perpetrated by U.S., servicemen (and women) described, was that it was impossible to find anyone who was surprised. Revolted, appalled, deeply shamed, but not surprised. Fairly or not, the perception of America's armed forces (with Britain not excluded either) is largely that of purveyors of lawless depravity.

The acts described by soldiers included shooting a two year old because of random firing after an explosive device went off, shooting a family dog, shooting a family in a car, where the bodies 'literally sat in the car for the next three days while we drove by them'. Specialist John Middleton explained a prevalent concept that 'if they don't speak English and have a darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want'. Goodness, to think that there are those who believed the western troops were the foreigners in a far away place. 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi - you know, so what?', said Specialist Jeff Englehart, admitting that 'guilt ... takes root', on returning home. No doubt, unlike the families of the dead Iraqis, he and his ilk will be sympathized with and treated for post traumatic stress disorder.

What of the: '..fourteen year old kid with an AK47 (who) decided he's going to start shooting at this convoy'? He would have been just nine or ten at the time of 'shock and awe' - and utter pant wetting terror. He would have spent between birth and nine or ten under an embargo which denied children even childhood, with ongoing illegal U.S., and U.K., bombings. 'Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to bits.'

House raids, said Sgt John Burns, involved '.. catching them in their sleep', ripping the man of the house out of bed 'in front of his wife, tearing 'the room to shreds ... you'll throw all the clothes on the floor ... dump the sofa cushions and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.' Hearts and minds, eh? One squad leader's mentality was described as to regard every Iraqi as a potential terrorist and '... kill them over here so we don't have to kill them back in Colorado.' One has to wonder what threat the ten year old with his three donkeys, all run over by the military, posed to Colorado. And where the seriously psychologically challenged soldier who posed with a spoon reaching to 'scoop out some ... brain', from a dead Iraqi in a body bag, was recruited? Brain matter, transported in jar, to 'fridge, it has long been reported, is the new 'trophy'. In Vietnam it was ears, heads, testicles.

Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, is incensed at the Nation's revelations. Iraqis are tragically 'caught in conflict's crossfire', bad decisions are sometimes made in 'the fog of war'. It was the reporting that was 'sensationalist and unethical', he wrote in a letter to The Independent. 'Readers, veterans and the Iraqi people deserve better.' Readers deserve the truth, the veterans told the stories - and the Iraqi people indeed deserve much better : to see many, many of the illegally invading army in the dock, tried with crimes against humanity.

Rieckhoff's letter rang a My Lai bell. Here again from Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim's meticulously researched 'Four Hours in My Lai.

'Lt. William Calley was the only serviceman to be charged for part in the massacre of 16th March 1968. He had thrown a defenseless old man down a well and shot him and: 'seeing a baby crawling away from a ditch filled with the dead and dying villagers, threw it back in the pit and shot it.' Sentenced to life imprisonment, President Nixon ordered he should be released from jail pending appeal. The Rieckhoff of the day, Judge Robert Elliot, releasing Calley on parole explained : 'War is war, it is not unusual for innocent civilians ... to be killed.' Massacred? Forget it. The Judge helpfully explained that: 'when Joshua took the city of Jericho in biblical times, no charges had been brought against him for the slaughter of the civilian population.'

'I think there is a good deal of evidence that we thought all along we were a redeemer nation', wrote the distinguished theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, of Vietnam in general and My Lai in particular: 'There was a lot of illusion in our national history. Now it is about to be shattered.' The mirror images could not be starker. The killings in My Lai: '.. took place part maniacally, part methodically ... they were accompanied by rape, sodomy, mutilations and unimaginable random cruelties .. it was a Nazi kind of thing ..', Bilton and Sim say they were told again and again and: 'Festering sores disfiguring the face of American society (erupted) in all their horror.'

To the army, My Lai was, of course, an aberration: ' .. wholly unrepresentative of the manner in which our forces conduct military operations.' Seventy percent of villages in one province alone, Quang Ngai, had been destroyed by aerial bombardment or artillery, a full two years before My Lai. 'We are here to kill dinks ... that's our job', commented one soldier. As in Iraq, there to kill 'Hajis', 'Sand niggers', 'Camel jockeys'. And as Vietnam's decimation, to kill from Al Qaem to Fallujah, to northern Tel Afar, to Baquba, Baghdad and across the nation. To rape, degrade, thieve, defile. These are not 'isolated incidents', but numerous documented and first hand reports.

Can it get worse? Oh yes. As Elana Schor and Roxana Tiron report: ' At the Pentagon's request, Senate Defense authorizers, tucked deep within the Defense BIll, a repeal of the Department's restriction on granting security clearances to ex-convicts, drug addicts and the mentally incompetent.

There are brave U.S., Iraq and Afghanistan veterans crossing the U.S., going to bases, risking imprisonment, attempting to persuade their colleagues to no longer participate in these invasions. Two days ago when the vast US Kitty Hawk docked in Australia, colleagues there distributed fact filled leaflets as sailors disembarked. Two uniformed personnel hid many amongst a pile of pizzas they had come to collect and asked that copies of two searing films on Vietnam and Iraq be slipped in their pockets to show back on the ship. Good apples, but back in occupied lands, numerous bad ones, commit atrocities with impunity and having lost 'imagination ... laugh among the dying, unconcerned'.(Wilfred Owen: Insensibility).