de Jon's

~<::::::>==;---,

will(wil)n.1.the power of making a reasoned choice or of controlling one's own actions 2.determination 3.attitude toward others [good will] 4.a)particular desire, choice,etc. of someone b)mandate [the will of the people] 5.a legal document directing the disposal of one's property after death-vt.1.to desire; want [to will to live] 2.to control by the power of the will 3.to bequeath by a will-vi.to wish, desire, or choose-at will when one wishes
will(2)(wil)v., pt. would an auxiliary used:1.to express simple futurity 2.in formal speech, to express determination, obligation, etc. in the first person and futurity in
the second and third persons 3.to express:a) willingness [will you go?] b)ability or capacity [it will hold a pint]-vt.,vi.to wish; desire [do as you will]

"The Will of the People"

Are We ...
"A government of the People,
by the People,
for the People ...?!...
Or Rather..." A government of the rich, special lobbys,
military-industrial co-operations and elitist profiteers
of the plan-it!"
These thieves are raping Our Mother Earth
and the on-going theft of Her wealth.
While they feed us all a die-it of self-fish systems.
Just another cult of the rat-race?
Maximize the profit for the short term, knee-jerk, miss-guided,
clones, fools,and all the droids...
whose only goal is the golden cow!
Welcome to the New World Oder of controllers
and exploitation specialists.
They'll greet You at the door of the church of greed
and offer You a host
of the flesh of Our Mother Nature
and a chalice of petro-salvation -
Her blood.
Drink up Your future ancestors...
radiating the Planet with the power
and glory of the bar-code.
Our legs are bound by restrictions;
as to Balance with our Environment!
Our hands are tied by courts and laws;
written to bind Our Freedom of movement
both without and within!...
free-dumb?
Our hearts are torn out to sacrifice at the altar
that feeds Us into the machinery
of Our common destruction.
We cry out at the loss of the country lands of Our birth,
awakening to dreams end.
Our heads are clouded;
as We suffocate in the stench of perversion
away from Common Truth.
Our Inner Spirit is not blind
nor tricked by the demons
wearing the masks of delusions.
They want Us, yet do not care for Us!
This will all fade into Nothing...
as the Light In Us All Is Lit!
We are All One People,
One Mind,
One Heart.
Look InSide for Sight...
and You Will Hear Truth!
The Moon Reveals; the Light of Wisdom
to dis-spell the darkness that bind Our progress...
the Light has come in Peace.
We are many People...
held together by a Common Link...
The Love Lines of One Heart, One Aim, One Destiny.

May The Great Spirit Bliss You All
Sun-Rise Ceremony
Alcatraz Island...On Liberated Native American Land!
UnThanksGiving...28 November 1991
nobody from nowhere doin' nuthin'
a.k.a. your own self

"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, “ -- George Washington

Filling the void
in Indian law doctrine
by: Editors Report / Indian Country Today
March 17, 2006

The U.S. Supreme Court has made ''a mess'' of Indian law, to quote one prominent scholar. After decades of increasingly arbitrary decisions, the closest thing it has left to a basic principle is the almost totally discredited ''doctrine of discovery.'' This artifact of 16th-century European rivalries was shaky enough when Chief Justice John Marshall reluctantly made use of it in 1823. We doubt that it will survive scrutiny in a forthcoming book by Indian Country Today Columnist Steven Newcomb.

In a recent human rights report, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed astonishment that U.S. Indian law still relied on this colonial relic. Without this justification for federal/tribal relations, the court will be operating in a dangerous intellectual vacuum. As ICT pointed out in '''Mental correction' at the court,'' (Vol. 25, Iss. 40), professor Robert A. Williams wrote: ''Filling that void is perhaps the greatest challenge confronting Indian rights lawyers, scholars, advocates and the Court itself today.''

The first step in this task is to return to the beginning. And to our amazement, we find that in the first decades after the initial contact was made, theologians in the first great European invasion of the Americas were working out principles for relations with the indigenous population that gave greater weight to Indian rights than the Supreme Court has done in the first years of the 21st century.

Relying on the teachings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Dominican theorists of 16th-century Spain produced a code of conduct toward the Indian nations that compares favorably with the Anglo-American tradition. The leading thinker, Francisco de Vitoria (1485? - 1546), expressly repudiated the doctrine of discovery. Sadly, this teaching was honored mainly in the breach, and it originated in reaction to horrendous atrocities. But the story deserves to be studied widely in Indian country and to be brought to the attention of Supreme Court justices at every opportunity.

It began with the arrival of Dominican missionaries in Hispanola in September 1510. Horrified by what they saw happening, they made a public protest in a famous Advent sermon in December 1511, delivered in the presence of the leaders of New Spain. ''Are the Indians not men?'' said the chosen orator, Antonio de Montesinos. ''Do they not have rational souls? With what right do you keep them in this servitude? With what authority have you waged these detestable wars against these people who lived peacefully in their own lands?''

The sermon was a bombshell. Diego Columbus, Christopher's heir as viceroy, complained directly to Spain's King Ferdinand and threatened to expel the Dominicans. The controversy in Spain mobilized the considerable intellectual resources of the Dominican Order.

Perhaps the leading theologian of the day was de Vitoria, professor at the University of Salamanca. He addressed the rights of the Indian nations and the basis of Spanish rule in the New World in two treatises written in 1532, which are now considered key to the emergence of international law. The first relectio ''On the Indians Lately Discovered'' begins with a justification for questioning a fait accompli. ''When we hear of so many massacres, so many plunderings of otherwise innocent men, so many princes evicted from their possessions and stripped of their rule, there is certainly ground for doubting whether this is rightly or wrongly done.''

Following the disputational style of Aquinas and the medieval scholastics, de Vitoria took up the standard arguments for subjugating the indigenous peoples, ''that they were sinners or were unbelievers or were witless or irrational,'' and refuted them. The fact they had no knowledge of Christianity or practiced sinful customs, not even human sacrifice, had no bearing on their inherent right to self-rule. De Vitoria turned to Aquinas' basic premise, that natural law was rooted in universal human reason, as opposed to divine law, which derived from revelation. Political authority derived from the Creator in the sense that he had made man as a political animal, with a natural tendency to live in a social order. The Indian nations fully satisfied the criteria for political dominion, for what we now call sovereignty:

''They are not of unsound mind, but have, according to their kind, the use of reason. This is clear, because there is a certain method in their affairs, for they have polities which are orderly arranged and they have definite marriages and magistrates, overlords, laws and workshops, and a system of exchange, all of which call for the use of reason; they also have a kind of religion.''

Indians might say we don't need a theologian to tell us we can take care of ourselves, thank you very much; but de Vitoria's audience was a kingdom that was stealing great wealth from the Native nations. In the midst of this record of blood and greed, his admonition is startling: ''The upshot of all the preceding is, then, that the aborigines undoubtedly had true dominion in both public and private matters, just like Christians, and that neither their princes nor private persons could be despoiled of their property on the ground of their not being true owners.''

This left the problem of justifying the Spanish presence in the New World, and de Vitoria was equally bold in demolishing the ''Seven False Titles'' for Spanish rule. Neither the Holy Roman Emperor nor the Pope could grant it, since their authority didn't reach this newly discovered non-Christian world. Discovery itself was meaningless, even though Columbus relied on it. It granted title only to the first arrivals in a deserted region; and the Indians were there first. This title ''in and by itself ... gives no support to a seizure of the aborigines any more than if it had been they who had discovered us.''

Even conversion of unbelievers wasn't a sufficient excuse. Conversion by force of arms was illegitimate, and Indians had no obligation to accept a religion that the Spaniards they met were observing so poorly. Ultimately, of course, de Vitoria did justify Spanish rule, but his grounds are still surprising. Indian princes, he argued, had allied themselves voluntarily with the conquistadors to pursue their own wars, ''as the Tlaxcaltecs are said to have done against the Mexicans.'' This was the mechanism for the expansion of the Roman empire, which the church approved as lawful.

We admit that we present the most humane of Vitoria's conclusions. Much of his argument is densely medieval, and he calmly presents the pros and cons of some distasteful conquistador prejudice. But the results vindicate his spirit. He set the intellectual ground for the remarkable career of fellow Dominican Bartolome de las Casas, a veteran of the New World expeditions, who devoted most of his long life to the defense of the Indian peoples. De las Casas envisioned a Spanish dominion over sovereign Indian nations, whose rights of self-government derived from Thomist natural law.

This is a vision far closer to the North American Indian insistence on tribal sovereignty than any of the doctrines now shaping Supreme Court decisions, such as that of discovery or the plenary power of Congress. Perhaps under new Chief Justice John Roberts the court might be receptive to the philosophic coherence of de Vitoria. There is the making of a Thomist bloc on the court, with Roberts, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, which might be willing to accept a ''natural law'' foundation for tribal rights.

Lawyers with the Tribal Sovereignty Initiative are understandably reluctant to prod the court to a basic shift in its thinking. Their approach so far has been conservative, to reduce the damage the court has shown itself highly capable of inflicting. But the present intellectual void in the highest tribunal on Indian law can only lead to future disasters.

We should close with the caveat that nothing human is totally pure. For all its courage in defending the Natives of the New World, the Dominican Order in Spain was also the agent for the fearsome persecution of heretics and secret adherents of Judaism. The much-admired humanity of de las Casas and de Vitoria has been obscured in historical memory by the fanaticism of Tomas de Torquemada. Still, it is astonishing that the 21st-century Supreme Court has shown a less principled regard for Indian rights than did the folks who gave us the Spanish Inquisition.

© 1998 - 2006 Indian Country Today
********************************************************************************
URL: http://indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412659

DRAFT, Articles of Impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, by Jason K. Feldman, Esq.

Articles of Impeachment
Of
George W. Bush, President of the United States,
Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States and
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense of the United States

RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense of the United States, are hereby impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment to be exhibited to the United States Senate:

Article I

WHEREAS, In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care of the laws be faithfully executed, caused the United States of America to engage in war with the sovereign nation of Iraq under false pretense, AND

WHEREAS, In his conduct of the office of Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the Vice President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/sites/afterdowningstreet.org/files/images/case_0.gifcare of the laws be faithfully executed, caused the United States of America to engage in war with the sovereign nation of Iraq under false pretense, IN THAT:

In October 2002, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney sought and received a resolution from the United States Congress to permit the use of force against Iraq.

George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney sought and received the resolution from Congress based upon information and belief that Iraq had possession of weapons of mass destruction and had a strategic connection to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney knew or should have known that such information was false.

On March 19, 2003, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney initiated hostilities amounting to a declaration of war against Iraq without the informed consent of Congress.

The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan included on or more of the following:

1. making, or causing to be made, false or misleading statements to the United States Congress;
2. withholding relevant and material evidence or information from the United States Congress;
3. misuse of the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States;
4. misuse of the military of the United States;
5. making, or causing to be made, false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into supporting hostilities against the sovereign nation of Iraq, and continuing to make such misstatements.

In all of this, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have acted in a manner contrary to their trust as President and Vice President of the United States, respectively, and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of United States.

WHEREFORE, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

Article 2

WHEREAS, In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care of the laws be faithfully executed, authorized, or cause to be authorized, the systematic use of cruel and unusual punishment of United States detainees in Iraq; AND

WHEREAS, In his conduct of the office of Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the Vice President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care of the laws be faithfully executed, authorized, or cause to be authorized, the systematic use of cruel and unusual punishment of United States detainees in Iraq; AND

WHEREAS, In his conduct of the office of Secretary of Defense of the United States, Donald H. Rumsfeld, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the Secretary of Defense of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care of the laws be faithfully executed, authorized, or cause to be authorized, the systematic use of cruel and unusual punishment of United States detainees in Iraq, IN THAT:

In 2003 and 2004, detainees under American control at Abu Ghraib prison and others in Iraq have been subject to torture and other cruel and unusual punishment.

The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan included on or more of the following:

1. general authorization of the use of harsh interrogation tactics against United States detainees in Iraq;
2. failure to supervise subordinates adequately, or to establish minimal safeguards against abuse of United States detainees in Iraq;
3. the condoning, acceptance or encouragement of abuse of United States detainees in Iraq;
4. the denial of any meaningful review of any aspects of the legality of the confinement of United States detainees in Iraq, including the imposition of torture.

In all of this, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld have acted in a manner contrary to their trust as President of the United States, Vice President of the United States and Secretary of Defense of the United States, respectively, and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of United States.

WHEREFORE, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

Article 3

WHEREAS, In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care of the laws be faithfully executed, lied to Congress in his 2003 State of the Union address concerning the purchase of uranium yellowcake from the nation of Niger by the government of Iraq; AND

WHEREAS, In his conduct of the office of Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the Vice President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care of the laws be faithfully executed, willfully and unlawfully disseminated, or caused to be disseminated, privileged and confidential information concerning the status of Valerie Plame as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency for the purpose of covering up the lie by George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union Address regarding the purchase of uranium yellowcake by the government of Iraq.

WHEREFORE, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

URL: http://impeachpac.org/?q=node/190

God and man at NASA:
A change in climate
Editors Report / Indian Country Today
February 10, 2006

A rebellion at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is highlighting a shift in the debate over climate change, a shift which leaves the Bush administration looking like religious obscurantists and indigenous prophets looking like the best scientists.

This debate has been running for at least a generation, and it might be the most important issue of the generation; but the latest round came to light at the end of January with charges that NASA officials had tried to silence their most prominent expert on climate change. The charges came directly from the target, James E. Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York City. Hansen has been sounding the alarm for nearly two decades about sharp rises in the global surface temperature attributable to man's activity. Some credit him with coining the phrase ''global warming.''

Futile official attempts to tone down Hansen occur at least annually, but he told The New York Times that the latest spate of warnings was the worst he had seen in nearly 30 years. He and his superiors were particularly angry that the threats ''of dire consequences'' came in phone calls rather than memos, which would leave a paper trail. All the campaign did, however, was to put him on the front page of the Times and give national publicity to his latest paper, stating that calendar year 2005 posted the highest global surface temperature in more than a century of measurements.

Hansen is a hard man to shut up, not only because he clearly has courage and a mission but also because so much of the political and scientific world is paying him attention. About the same time certain NASA public relations functionaries were trying to pressure Hansen, British Prime Minister Tony Blair lent his name to an official United Kingdom government report warning that the climate impact could be even more serious than previously thought. Blair wrote the forward to the report ''Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,'' published Jan. 30. The book compiles evidence from a meteorological office conference last February.

''It is clear from the work presented that the risks of climate change may well be greater than we thought,'' Blair wrote. ''It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth from a world population that has increased sixfold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.'' With a voice like Blair's behind him, Hansen is no cinch to hush up.

This pattern of dire warnings and political disparagement has been predictable, but this time something unusual happened. After Hansen's interview hit the paper, Times reporter Andrew Revkin began to receive a flood of complaints from other NASA employees charging political interference with scientific information. The most startling charges centered on a 24-year-old presidential appointee named George Deutsch, the point man in the attempt to muzzle Hansen. Deutsch, it seems, had also ordered a NASA Web designer to add the word ''theory'' after every mention of the ''big bang,'' the cosmological explosion at the origin of the universe.

In an e-mail leaked to the Times, Deutsch said the big bang is ''not proven fact; it is opinion.'' He went on, ''It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.'' Deutsch, a recent journalism graduate from Texas A&M University, appears to be a foolish young man whose theology is a shaky as his science. The big bang, now repeatedly confirmed by astronomy, was first posited by a Jesuit cosmologist, George-Henri Lemaitre, later director of the Pontifical Academy of Science. Initial resistance came from anti-religious scientists who suspected that it fit too neatly into church doctrine. Deutsch's venture into these depths has earned him the role of scapegoat; he resigned Feb. 8 after news of his resume inflation surfaced.

NASA's new administrator, Michael D. Griffin, responded to the Times articles with an agency-wide e-mail slapping down the public affairs office.

We hope that Griffin's message does the job of restoring ''scientific openness'' to an agency that has earned great good will throughout Indian country. Natives remember with appreciation the outreach that NASA, and its public affairs officers, extended during the space mission of astronaut John Herrington, a Chickasaw tribal member. But this political intrusion highlights an ironic feature of the global warming debate that tribal elders will relish.

Indigenous people have warned all along that European-style industrialization is devastating the natural balance. The dominant culture has scoffed at these ''New Age'' prophesies, but they turn out to have been based on solid ''scientific'' experience. Natives of Alaska and the far north have been seeing this warming firsthand, in their empirical observations. (The Goddard report said that the ''remarkable Arctic warmth'' was the main factor pushing 2005 to the top of the chart.)

Instead, it's the skeptics of global warming who have been blinded by religious preconceptions. Their endorsement of the ''conquest of nature'' derives from the first chapter of Genesis, as filtered through the apostle of economics, John Locke. According to Genesis, God created the Earth, and its plants and animals, for the sake of mankind. But, added Locke, ''he gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational.'' This rationale lies at the heart of the European settlement of America and also of modern industrialism. It mandates constant exploitation of natural resources to provide mankind with creature comforts, but turns a blind eye to the condition of nature itself. The use of the Earth quickly turns into its abuse.

(To be fair, we should say that a large number of churchmen repudiate this outlook. Evangelical Christian leaders recently launched an ''Evangelical Climate Initiative'' to reduce the causes of global warming.)

The indigenous outlook, on the other hand, here and across the globe, emphasizes co-existence with nature, not conquest. The other created beings have equal rights with man, and we all have a duty to seek a sustainable balance. Locke's heirs might deride this view as primitive and unproductive, but in the long run it is looking pretty wise, indeed.

Global warming is the ultimate vindication of the Native outlook. Rapid changes in climate and erratic weather patterns are threatening the creature comforts humankind has accumulated. The only way to avoid calamity is to seek a life in balance with nature.

Scientific evidence to support the Native view is now accumulating so rapidly that no amount of political interference can hush it up.

© 1998 - 2006 Indian Country Today
********************************************************************************
from: http://indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412436

US Intelligence Service Bugged Website Visitors Despite Ban
by Suzanne Goldenberg
from: The Guardian UK
December 30, 2005

Agency apologises for use of 'cookie' tracking files. Exposure adds to pressure over White House powers.

The intelligence service at the centre of the row over eavesdropping tracked visitors to its website, despite US government regulations. Monitoring files, known as "cookies", were discovered by a privacy activist at a time when the White House is on the defensive about its use of the National Security Agency to monitor the communications of US citizens.

Although the cookies were dismantled this week and the NSA issued an apology on Wednesday, the episode will add to pressure on the White House to engage in a national debate about its use of the agency, and its interpretation of the constitutional limits on George Bush's presidential powers.

The chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Arlen Specter, confirmed this week that he intends to conduct hearings into President Bush's secret order in 2002 authorising the NSA to conduct email and telephone surveillance of US citizens without a court warrant. The hearings are expected to get under way next month.

"There likely will be a national debate about whether the president really has the kind of power he's been using," Mr Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters.

In a posting on his googlewatch.org website a privacy activist, Daniel Brandt, says he discovered that the NSA was using tracking devices when he logged on to the agency website on Christmas Day. He found the site was using two persistent cookies that would not expire until 2035, well beyond the life of most computers.

While the use of cookies is seen as a convenience at commercial websites, allowing a visitor access without laboriously retyping passwords, their utility for government websites - which do not typically have repeat visits - is uncertain.

US government agencies have been barred from using persistent cookies since 2000 because of privacy concerns. The regulations were imposed after disclosures that the White House drug policy office had been using cookies to monitor visitors to its anti-drug advertisements.

However, Mr Brandt and others have noted repeated violations of the ban. Three years ago, the CIA website was obliged to remove its cookies after Mr Brandt noticed that the devices were still in use. Following his latest discovery, Mr Brandt sent faxes to the NSA public affairs office and the contractor running the agency's website. The agency issued an apology on Wednesday.

Although privacy advocates yesterday said the episode was of relatively limited concern given the scope of the NSA's surveillance capabilities, the tracking was viewed as an another example of unwarranted intrusion by the intelligence service. "This illustrates the principle that unchecked authority goes astray. In this case, it's a relatively trivial infraction," said Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists. "But to me the point is that we need more aggressive and penetrating oversight than we have."

Since the New York Times disclosed the domestic spying operation, the White House has worked strenuously to damp down public outrage, arguing that the surveillance was limited to those with known links to al-Qaida. However, that posture becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as new evidence surfaces on the range of the NSA activities.

In a follow-up story, the New York Times reported last week that the NSA had monitored far larger volumes of telephone and internet communications than initially acknowledged by the White House. Some of the information was obtained after US telecommunications companies allowed backdoor access to streams of telephone and internet traffic.

What is a cookie?

Cookies are packets of information kept on your computer by websites. Commercial sites use them for identification, authentication and tracking.

What does a cookie do?

Most are innocuous. They let websites remember your preferences without you needing to log in every time you visit. But cookies can also be used to keep track of the different websites you have visited.

How does it get on your computer?

Most useful cookies will be installed when you first log in to a service. However, the type used by the NSA are invisible to the user and are hidden on a web page and installed on any machine that visits it.
************************************************************************************
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1675272,00.html

Judge Resigns in Protest, Newspaper Says
December 21, 2005

(12-21) 04:18 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --

A federal judge has resigned from a special court set up to oversee government surveillance to protest President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program on people with suspected terrorist ties, The Washington Post reported.

The action by U.S. District Judge James Robertson stemmed from deep concern that the surveillance program that Bush authorized was legally questionable and may have tainted the work of the court that Robertson resigned from, the newspaper said in Wednesday's editions.

The Post quoted two associates of the judge.

Robertson was one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees government applications for secret surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage.

Quoting colleagues of Robertson, the Post said the judge had indicated he was concerned that information gained from the warrantless surveillance under Bush's program subsequently could have been used to obtain warrants under the FISA program.

The Post said Robertson, without providing an explanation, stepped down from the FISA court in a letter late Monday to Chief Justice John Roberts. He did not resign his parallel position as a federal district judge.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said early Wednesday she had no information to offer on the matter.

Robertson was appointed a federal judge by President Clinton in 1994. Chief Justice William Rehnquist later appointed Robertson to the FISA court as well.

Robertson has been critical of the Bush administration's treatment of detainees at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, most memorably in a decision that sidetracked the president's system of military tribunals to put some detainees on trial.

Robertson's resignation was reported hours after Vice President Dick Cheney strongly defended the surveillance program and called for "strong and robust" presidential powers.

Cheney — a former member of congress, defense secretary and White House chief of staff under President Ford — said executive authority has been eroding since the Watergate and Vietnam eras.

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it," Cheney said.

"I would argue that the actions that we've taken there are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president. ... You know, it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years," the vice president said, speaking with reporters Tuesday on Air Force Two en route from Pakistan to Oman.

Republicans said Congress must investigate whether Bush was within the law to allow the super-secret National Security Agency to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to al-Qaida.

"I believe the Congress — as a coequal branch of government — must immediately and expeditiously review the use of this practice," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

Snowe joined three other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, in calling for a joint inquiry by the Senate judiciary and intelligence committees.

Bush and his top advisers have suggested senior congressional leaders vetted the program in more than a dozen highly classified briefings. Several Democrats agreed said they were told of the program, but did not know the full details and had concerns.

West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, on Monday released a letter he wrote to Cheney in July 2003 that, given the program's secrecy, he was "unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., pushed back Tuesday, saying that if Rockefeller had concerns about the program, he could have used the tools he has to wield influence, such as requesting committee or legislative action. "Feigning helplessness is not one of those tools," Roberts said.

©2005 Associated Press
****************************************************************************
From URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/12/21/national/w041822S90.DTL

All Roads Lead Back To Cheney
by Wayne Madsen
December 14, 2005

Halliburton's connection to low wage slave trading in the Middle East and espionage inside the Vice President of the United States' White House office. Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, has some interesting partners in its work in occupied Iraq. On Dec. 11, WMR reported on links between Halliburton/Kellogg, Brown & Root and a Viktor Bout-owned airline based in Moldova, Aerocom/Air Mero. Bout's airlines have also reportedly been involved in flying low wage earners from East Asia to Dubai and on to Iraq where they work for paltry salaries in sub-standard living conditions. Halliburton/KBR has sub-contracted to a shadowy Dubai-based firm, Prime Projects International Trading LLC (PPI), which "trades" mainly in workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and other poor Asian nations.

In 2004, after a Filipino PPI worker was killed in a mortar attack on Camp Anaconda in Iraq, the Philippines government of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ordered PPI, which is based at P.O. Box 42252, Dubai, UAE, to send overseas Filipino workers OFWs) home from Iraq and Kuwait and banned it from further recruiting in the Philippines. Some of PPI's recruiting included running ads on the Internet. In addition to the other south Asian employees, the Philippine workers were employed by PPI under a Pentagon sweetheart umbrella contract let to KBR under the LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) III program.

Although little is known about PPI, it reportedly has been linked to Halliburton/KBR for a number of years and has been associated with Halliburton contracts in the Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Balkans during the time when Dick Cheney headed the firm. PPI has also been involved in operations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Filipino workers were involved in building the prison housing suspected "Al Qaeda" prisoners.

Inside sources report that PPI has some high level financial partners, including the al Nahayan royal family of the United Arab Emirates and Vice President Cheney. And there are connections to President Macapagal-Arroyo's ordering the repatriation of hundreds of Filipino workers home from Iraq and Kuwait and the discovery that U.S. Marine Corps and FBI spy Leandro Aragoncillo, a Filipino-American who worked as a Marine security aide inside Cheney's office until early 2002 and who was arrested by the FBI this past October, had stolen dossiers from Cheney's office that were considered damaging to Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo. Macapagal-Arroyo was sworn in as President on January 20, 2001 (the same day George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were sworn in) after a popular revolution ousted Joseph Estrada. Macapagal-Arroyo, the daughter of past Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal.


Aragoncillo passed Cheney's reports on Macapagal-Arroyo, some of which were obtained from National Security Agency intercepts, to Estrada, a political opponent of Macapagal-Arroyo and an ally of former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos. Estrada was planning a coup against Macapagal-Arroyo with U.S. support. Aragoncillo was linked to another U.S.-based Filipino spy -- former Philippine National Police officer Michael Ray Aquino -- who was also involved in passing Cheney's classified documents to Estrada. Aquino, who is wanted in the Philippines for involvement in murder, kidnapping, and drug trafficking, was also arrested by the FBI.

More importantly, Aquino's close friend, Estrada, is also a business associate of indicted GOP lobbyist/reputed gangster Jack Abramoff. Another high-level Filipino-American in the White House, Karl Rove's Assistant and Assistant to the President, Susan Bonzon Ralston, also served as Abramoff's personal assistant at the law firms Preston Gates & Ellis and Greenberg Traurig. Ralston has been called to testify before the grand jury and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the name of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson to the media.

Aragoncillo allegedly passed over 100 documents from a classified FBI computer system at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey while working there as an intelligence analyst for the FBI after he left the Marine Corps. It is significant that Aragoncillo admitted to spying while only working as an aide to Cheney and not when he worked for Vice President Al Gore during 1999 and 2000.

It now seems apparent that Aragoncillo and Aquino were part of an illegal Cheney covert operation to topple Macapagal-Arroyo in retaliation for her stopping PPI's recruiting efforts in the Philippines. That decision by Manila dealt a severe financial blow to the Halliburton/KBR LOGCAP profits in Iraq. It is also of note that Aragoncillo worked with national Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Cheney: Involved in the low wage slave trade, espionage, and war profiteering.

What was not anticipated by Cheney was that the FBI would step in and arrest Aragoncillo for culling classified information from the FBI's computers at Fort Monmouth. This case, like the AIPAC espionage case involving top Pentagon officials, has been largely ignored by the media. However, along with the Plame case and AIPACgate, all roads lead back to Cheney's office at the White House.

http://waynemadsenreport.com/
*************************************************************************************************************************
These two articles via http://www.rense.com/general69/roads.htm

We Do Not Have Clean Hands In Afghanistan

by Karl W B Schwarz
KarlSchwarz2008
11-27-5

A scant percentage of Americans know that ten days before President Kennedy was assassinated, he made a speech at Columbia University, during which he made the following statement:

"The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963

I have given a lot of thought to those words, his assassination, and what he was prevented from saying to America.

One of the things most noticeable to me since 1963 is how the Office of the President of the United States has been used to create and push bogus policy on bogus facts. History has shown that the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam war was staged by the United States. I have repeatedly seen this nation invent enemies or even arm enemies to create a war in the future for massive defense spending initiatives. I have also seen them implement policies based on lies just so the wealthy elite can make a lot of money, stained with the blood of dead American soldiers. Yes, they also use policy by gun point to steal what belongs to others and then hold themselves up high as Great Americans when they are mere thieves.

One of the coming email updates will address how the past three presidential administrations have undermined our national security by breaching every level of common sense when transferring high technology to the People's Republic of China.

Knowing what I know about Washington, D.C. (my office was there from 1989 to 1996), when I see our government act I look behind the scenes for what the real motives were.

Afghanistan-and why our President ordered our military to invade it-is just such a instance of bogus policy based on outright lies. I have been following this matter since 1999, well before the attacks of 9-11, due to someone I met in 1999. That person gave me information regarding a lawsuit in Texas and I followed it because I have been concerned for many years about the energy policies and foreign policies of this Republic. What you are about to read below is not my word against George W. Bush; it is a matter of public record in our U.S. Courts.

The military training for the invasion of Afghanistan started less then sixty (60) days after Bush was sworn into office, and waiting only for 9-11 to happen to justify the invasion. I also suspect that the drafting of the Patriot Act and the formation of Homeland Security started at about the same time.

If I were in a position to appoint the Real 9-11 Commission, it would start with four energy companies that have electrical plants in Pakistan, all attendees of the Cheney Energy Task Force and the list of Foreign and American names found by Sibel D. Edmonds. In short, I would see to it that the investigation started off with those that stood to benefit the most by attacking Afghanistan and taking over that pipeline and the list of names found by Sibel Edmonds to determine if they were the real perpetrators of 9-11 to put such policies into action. Our government has in the past, and is right now, suppressing the truth across the board regarding a wide range of matters that affect the lives of all of us. That stops when we as American citizens put a stop to it.

One of the missions of American Patriot Movement will be to remove the U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and conduct a full investigation of 9-11 with a panel of ten qualified, disinterested experts. Such a panel would also investigate the Cheney Energy Task Force and every person who participated. That is a pretty bold move, but I explain below why I would make it and open up landmark investigations aimed right at the heart of the problem.

It is my goal to find out the truth and present it to you. The major media outlets-television, print, radio and even many websites- are withholding information and entire stories that our current government does not want the citizenry to know. I look at it this way: - if you or I can find trails and answers, so can the major media outlets with their much finer investigative apparatus and greater resources. The inescapable conclusion is that those media either do not look, or they know and do not tell. I have put many in the media on notice and they ignore the facts; they look the other way and refuse to put the truth before their American audience. It is also an inescapable conclusion that the U.S. government has withheld this information as well and for what I believe is cause to cover up their crimes.

What you are about to read (if for the first time) was not heard from the U.S. government or major media. It is time all Americans stand up and demand straight answers to straight questions about the conduct of certain people in this Republic.

In the email update of November 19th, I introduced you to a Neocon that I have been watching for quite some time. In the email update of November 26th, I introduced you to a chapter in Neoconned Again that exposes the writings of Mr. Edward Luttwak. He is Jewish, ultra-conservative, a military advisor, and was an advisor to Reagan. If you stop to ponder that George H.W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and others were also involved in the Reagan Administration, the dots start to connect.

I have been following a court case through the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas since 1999 when I was first told about it by employees of the corporation involved. Long before 9-11 happened, I was looking at this corporation and the actions surrounding it, and everything I have found suggests I was on the right trail. Even after I started making these matters publicly known in my book One-Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas, executives of this corporation approached me discreetly to advise that I was not only on the right trail but the matter was even more complicated and serious than I knew. U.S. government officials were engaged in activities they did not disclose to the American public. Furthermore, those officials sought to hide information about those activities.

Some of you may know that I sent a demand letter to George W. Bush for the truth about seven hours before the first debate with John Kerry. You may not know that I also sent that demand letter to DNC and the Kerry campaign headquarters at the same time Bush received it at the White House. The following is from that Demand Letter ­ available at the following link - http://www.karlschwarz.com/letter.html You would have to read that Demand Letter to appreciate that Kerry and DNC just rolled over and were given the information to rip Bush to shreds.

1. I demand as an American citizen that you lift the "gag order" on Sibel D. Edmonds and let Americans know what foreign names and what AMERICAN NAMES she uncovered in her FBI translations that were involved in drug trafficking, money laundering and the financing of 9-11. Her facts and your "official story" lies do not add up. Americans demand the truth on that matter before the election.

2. I demand to know what energy companies were in that Cheney Energy Task Force meeting and what discussions there were as to the steps that would be taken to remove the Taliban and Bridas Corporation as the last remaining obstacle to the United States controlling the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline. I met that company in 1999 and have known since then about the Bridas v Unocal, $15 billion interference of contract lawsuit in US District Court, Southern District of Texas. I also know about the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision on September 9, 2003 that upheld the Bridas $500 million arbitration settlement and the March 22, 2004 denial of Writ of Certiorari at the United States Supreme Court, Case 03-1018, Turkmenneft v Bridas.

3. I demand to know how many prisoners are being held at GITMO and other places that are either BRIDAS EMPLOYEES or are persons that know all about Bridas Corporation and what your administration did to get control of that Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

When that letter was received, I got a "thank you" from federal investigators that suddenly had all kinds of people freaking out and contacting each other that this had surfaced. In sending that demand letter, certain people made the mistake of sending emails, telephone calls or scheduling meetings to discuss what they supposedly knew nothing about. In time the truth will be known by all.

Our freedoms and civil liberties-and effectively the power of our Constitution-have been altered because of 9-11 and the 9-11 Commission that was suborned by the Bush Administration and Congress. They have even covered up the Cheney Energy Task Force, in which I suspect that it was discussed that the landlocked oil deals in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would not be landlocked much longer, since Cheney and Bush intended to take control of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, or TAP as it is called, with military force.

The TAP was under contract from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, through Pakistan to the ocean with an Argentine oil company named Bridas Corporation and its parent Bridas S.A.P.I.C. On September 9, 2003, Bridas prevailed at the Fifth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals on a $500 million interference of contract lawsuit. That lawsuit was then taken to the U.S. Supreme Court and on March 22, 2004 the high court refused to hear the case or consider reversing the Fifth Circuit decision. See US Supreme Court, case 03-1018, State Concern Turkmenneft v. Bridas S.A.P.I.C., et al.

http://conlaw.usatoday.findlaw.com/supreme_court/
orders/2003/032204pzor.html

Bridas Corporation signed contracts with Turkmenistan in 1992 and 1993, long before our oil companies were welcome in these former Soviet satellites. Suddenly, after our presence started there, the Turkmenistan government issued on order blocking Bridas from exporting the oil and gas they had found from Turkmenistan. That was after Bridas had the foresight to start laying the groundwork for the pipeline across Afghanistan to get that oil to markets around the world. Bridas signed the agreement with the Taliban in 1996 and in 1997 a full court press was put on Pakistan and Afghanistan to get the deal into U.S. hands. They cut off the north end of that pipeline (Turkmenistan) and then the south end of that pipeline (Pakistan) and isolated the remaining element to Afghanistan / Taliban / Bridas Corporation.

The Bush Administration does not want any American knowing the truth about what happened in Afghanistan or that we breached a commercial contract with military force to take over a deal that was denied to US oil companies, because there was already a deal in place. Under the Clinton Administration they upended the Pakistan government to cut off that part of the Bridas Corporation deal. Under the Clinton Administration, they compelled Turkmenistan to breach its agreements with Bridas, hence the judgment award of $500 million for interference of contract. Clinton does not want you to know what actions were taken under his administration, and there were many.

The only remaining obstacle on 9-11 was the remaining agreement between the Taliban and Bridas Corporation. The Bush Administration, Congress, many in our major media, and even the 9-11 Commission and Cheney Energy Task Force all know about Bridas Corporation because that Argentine oil and gas company was standing in the way of our US oil companies and UK oil companies. The Caspian Basin oil is landlocked and there are only so many ways to get that oil out of the ground, to the ocean ports and into your gas tanks or home heating oil tanks.

There is the direct route from Turkmenistan across Iran to the ocean, but that is not politically popular since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran many years ago. There is: 1.) the route across the Caspian Sea westward, which is extremely costly; and through Azerbaijan through Turkey to the Mediterranean; and 2.) from Turkmenistan through Georgia to the Black Sea; and 3.) through the Ukraine to Europe; and 4.) the Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the ocean. Until one of those solutions was in place, the holes being drilled into the ground by British Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon and others could not go anywhere and could not produce revenues for those companies. A route northward through Russia would put US oil companies at risk to changes in Russian politics and the Eastward route through China was not deemed secure enough since China is soon to become the second largest user of petroleum in the world after the United States.

In short, the people that were in the Cheney Energy Task Force were the same people that stood to gain if we attacked Afghanistan and took the deal away from the Taliban and Bridas Corporation. They had spent years getting the deals, invested billions into drilling and could not turn a dollar of cash flow or profits until that pipeline was under US control. That is Economics 101 and when one considers that there is over $12 trillion in oil at stake and over $3 trillion in natural gas, that also might be Prime Motive Number 1 for 9-11. They probably could have joint ventured that pipeline with Bridas, but then Argentina would have been raking in billions in hard cash and not hanging on for dear life as they are now.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security advisor to Carter and Foreign Intelligence advisor to Reagan even wrote a book titled The Grand Chessboard , American Primacy and It's Geostrategic Imperatives about the grand adventure to take over the Caspian Basin and its mother lode of oil and natural gas. In case you are wondering, Mr. Brzezinski, as well as John Sununu, Nicholas Brady, James Baker, III and many other former Reagan and Bush I Administration people are also involved and have been for years.

http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard

If you are like me, you see no "geostrategic imperative" about sending your sons or daughters, wife or husband, off to some far away place just so a few elite insiders can make billions in oil in a deal they have conspired to take over for at least the past three presidential administrations. That is exactly what they have done and exactly why they suppressed the investigations into 9-11 and the Cheney Energy Task Force.

Consider for a moment Condoleezza Rice, who used to sit on the Chevron Board of Directors at that exact time that Chevron made the decision to invest billions into oil and gas production in the Caspian Basin and without any way in sight to get that oil to ocean ports. You cannot convince me that Ms. Rice was unaware of Bridas Corporation and that they had beat US and UK oil companies to the punch way back in 1992 and 1993 when they starting signing oil and gas deals with the Turkmenistan government. You cannot convince me that Ms Rice was not completely aware of the geostrategic imperative of that oil pipeline across Afghanistan.

If I had been a 9-11 Commission member, Ms. Rice would still be answering questions. I have many serious questions for her, and I am sure qualified, disinterested investigators would grill her, too.

The law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw was the firm that kept Bridas tied up in court at Fifth Circuit and at the U.S. Supreme Court. Senior partner of that law firm, while these lawsuits were in progress, is Richard Ben Veniste, 9-11 Commission member. He put on quite a show at the 9-11 Commission while his law firm kept Bridas tied up in court and not a word said that someone else had beaten the US and our oil companies to the contracts. This is the same law firm that helped Andy Fastow at Enron set up all of those bogus offshore SPE [Special Purpose Entity] that were special just to steal from investors.

http://www.mayerbrown.com/news/index.asp?page=12&archive=Y&nid

The Republic is now led by a dishonest government that will tell any lie to carry out any objective where it involves money, greed and power. They care not at all what they do in our name or what they do to undermine our freedoms and what this nation has always stood for.

I have given much consideration to the steps necessary to remedy this situation. Here are but a few:

1. Removal of all troops from Iraq, possible relocation of those armored divisions to Palestine; and

2. A series of Executive Orders that would shred the veils that this government hides behind. All investigations would be thrown wide open to public view, and all persons that deserve to be prosecuted would be prosecuted; and

3. Dismantling and re-defining of the Patriot Act so that it focuses on the problems, and not be used as a tool to undermine the Constitution and our freedoms; and

4. Fiscal sanity would start by reigning in the wasteful spending and the National Debt curve would start heading the other way; and

5. Possible price controls and definite investigation, prosecution of market manipulations; and

6. Barring of AIPAC from Capitol Hill due to them being a foreign lobbyist that is decidedly pro-Israel; and

7. Deregulation and breaking up the media monopolies and other monopolies that threaten this nation and the wellbeing of each and every one of us. None of us can make good decisions in a vacuum or when lies are being spoon fed to us as the news.

8. Appointment of a 9-11 Commission that would cut through the D.C. nonsense and get to the bottom of who to prosecute for the crime of 9-11 against this nation with possible charges filed against the past 9-11 Commission members on a wide range of legal issues.

Those would just be for starters to commence the clean up in D.C.

The State of California, liberal bastion that it is, should support me for one simple reason. I would force the 21 energy companies that plundered the rate payers of California to reimburse that $5.5 to $7.5 billion they stole and Bush did nothing about it but dole out miniscule fines compared to the crime. That some of those 21 firms are involved in the big Caspian Basin oil deals is something that deserves a full investigation regarding the light nature of their fines. These are the same firms that sat in on the Cheney Energy Task Force that the Bush Administration does not want anyone to look into.

I would also have the executives of four energy companies that were involved in this fleecing of California called before a legitimate 9-11 Commission for one very simple reason. They have electrical power generation plants in Pakistan and we would get to the bottom of who (what company or what name) was talking to them about cheap natural gas supplies after the Taliban and Bridas Corporation had been eliminated from the picture.

I would wager that the name of that person is not Osama bin Laden. I would also wager that the person or company knew all about 9-11 coming.

Neither the Bush administration nor the Clinton Administration wants Americans to know about Bridas Corporation or that it had signed major oil and gas development agreements with Turkmenistan as early as 1992 and 1993. Bridas then signed agreements with Pakistan and Afghanistan because the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is one of only a few routes to get the landlocked Caspian Basin oil to the ocean and distributed around the world. The folks at Bridas Corporation are not stupid. They knew full well that they needed a pipeline to the ocean to get their part of the oil and gas out to the world markets.

As mentioned earlier, one of the other routes is through the former Russian state of Georgia. The leader of that nation, Georgian prime minister Zurab Zhvania decided he was against the oil pipelines coming through his nation and he wound up assassinated shortly after he made that fateful decision. Our press painted the picture that he was killed due to his coziness with the "West", but the fact is he was against our pipelines coming through Georgia. You do the math.
http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/92/371/15532_zhvania.html

Both the Bush and Clinton Administrations do not want Americans to know that Bridas was interfered with in Turkmenistan and Pakistan to isolate both the Taliban and Bridas Corporation regarding the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, a pipeline that we now control through use of military force in Afghanistan. This raises serious questions about our true motives in attacking Afghanistan following 9-11.

We deserve to know why the Bush Administration does not want Americans to know that Bridas Corporation and their parent Bridas SAPIC, prevailed in our Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding interference of contract in Turkmenistan. That decision was handed down from a US Court on September 9, 2003, while the 9-11 Commission and Bush Administration were in cover up mode on 9-11. Bridas SAPIC v. Government of Turkmenistan, et al., No, 02-20929, 5th Cir The original lawsuit in Texas was Bridas S.A.P.I.C., Bridas Corporation v. Unocal, Turkmenneft, et al and was a $9 billion interference of contract lawsuit.

http://www.asil.org/ilib/ilib0620.htm

We deserve to know why the Bush Administration does not want Americans to know about the U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down on March 22, 2004, while the 9-11 Commission was still playing "Where's Waldo?" that the High Court denied the Writ of Certiorari and let the Fifth Circuit decision stand. Case Number 03-1018, Turkmenneft v Bridas S.A.P.I.C. See Certiorari Denied at this link: http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/orders/2003/032204pzor.html

You did not hear of this from Bush, Congress or the 9-11 Commission, and it is time you started asking why you did not hear about this from them. You did not hear about this from the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, CNN or FOXNews, but it is about time you started asking why you did not hear about this from them. It is time for Americans from every state start demanding to know why their Senators and US House representatives have been mum on this matter of what was in Afghanistan that we now control by use of military force.

How much oil is in the Caspian Basin? More than 200 billion barrels, a thirty-year supply and worth over $12 trillion dollars and climbing every time they increase the price of oil. For every day of 30 years, that is just shy of 10 supertankers full of 2 million barrels of oil. That is right ­ 10 supertankers a day for every day the next 30 years. That is the single biggest "motive" for any crime I have ever seen and was the probable reason that 9-11 was engineered so certain parties could take over that pipeline and that colossal oil and gas deal. How much natural gas? Reportedly as much as 12 trillion cubic meters, or about $3 trillion worth of natural gas on top of the vast oil reserves.

It is not my word against Bush and Clinton. The historical facts and U.S. court records say all that needs to be said about the possible taint on our real motives of heading towards Afghanistan. If our government's motives for invading Afghanistan were a lie, just like Iraq has been, the matter needs to be looked into and charges brought against certain people. Just consider that Afghanistan and our actions there are directly tied to 9-11. I have met very few people that think the 9-11 Commission was doing its job rather than covering it up.

Did you know about Bridas Corporation? Did you know about Mr. Ben Veniste's law firm being involved the Caspian Basin and keeping Bridas Corporation tied up in the court case while he was sitting on the 9-11 Commission?

These 9-11 Commissioners all have vested financial reasons directly and indirectly to see 9-11 covered up as it was:

Republicans

Thomas Keane, 9-11 Commission chairman, Amerada Hess, tied to Big Oil and major deals in the Caspian Basin region. Several Saudi oil companies are involved and Amerada Hess is in bed with at least one of them Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia. Delta Oil was one of the parties after the Afghanistan pipeline.

Fred Thompson, former Rep governor of Illinois, sits on the board of FMC and the oil equipment subsidiary doing well in the Caspian Basin. Afghanistan pipeline needed to get that landlocked oil and natural gas to the oceans and huge amounts of drilling is in progress.

John F. Lehman, John F. Lehman & Company, Rep, former Secretary of the Navy, now a private equity firm directly involved in Big Defense, known Neocon.

Fred Fielding, Rep, served on Bush transition team. Also sits on a board with Diane Allbaugh, oil industry lobbyist and wife of Joe Allbaugh, Bush Cheney 2000 campaign manager. Mr. Allbaugh was appointed head of FEMA and shortly before the Iraq Invasion in 2003 left to set up NewBridge Strategies, LLC, a consultant in getting into the big money Iraq Reconstruction projects. NewBridge Strategies, LLC is directly connected to the following well known and not so well known Republican entities.

http://www.newbridgestrategies.com/bios.asp

Joe M. Allbaugh, Chairman and Director
Joe M. Allbaugh is the CEO of The Allbaugh Company, LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based corporate strategy and counsel firm. A native of Oklahoma, Joe served as the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President George Bush until March 2003. Prior to moving to Washington, D.C., he was Chief of Staff to then-Governor Bush of Texas and was the National Campaign Manager for the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign.

Ed Rogers, Vice Chairman and Director
Ed Rogers is Vice Chairman of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, Inc., the firm he founded with Haley Barbour in 1991. From January of 1989 until August of 1991, Ed served as the Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States and Executive Assistant to the White House Chief of Staff. Additionally, Ed was the Senior Deputy to Bush-Quayle Campaign Manager Lee Atwater, from February of 1987, through the general election in 1988. Ed also worked in the White House Office of Political Affairs during the Reagan Administration.

Jamal Daniel, Advisory Board Member
Jamal Daniel is a Principal with Crest Investment Company, which invests in a wide-range of business ventures and is based in Houston. Prior to his work with Crest Investment, Jamal was a Director of the Uniteg Investment Company, Inc., providing U.S. and international investors with comprehensive real estate services ranging from acquisition and construction to financing and sales. Additionally, Jamal has extensive experience in structuring investing in energy and oil and gas projects throughout the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

For those of you who do not know this yet, Crest Investments is where Neal Bush acts as an advisor for $60,000 a year for about 3-4 hours of work a week. It is that "hogs at the feed trough" matter I addressed in a prior email.

Democrats

Richard Ben Veniste, senior partner Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw. Formerly was the lead counsel for Enron and all of those fraudulent offshore entities set up by Andy Fastow, and Mayer Brown used to share an office with Enron in Uzbekistan. Now Enron is Primus Energy, Cayman Islands, all former Enron International and former Halliburton people as management. Mayer Brown also kept Bridas tied up in court prior to, during and following 9-11, and while the 9-11 Commission was conducting a mock investigation. The name Bridas Corporation never came up publicly in any Congressional hearings or the 9-11 Commission.

Jamie Gorelick, sits on the board of Schlumberger, firm is raking in record profits from Caspian Basin business

Tim Roemer, has taken political donations for years while in Congress from Carlyle Group (Big Defense), Chevron (Big Oil and heavily involved in the Caspian Basin and Condoleezza Rice as former Chevron board member), and Van Scoyoc & Associates, major foreign lobbyist for Big Defense and Big Oil.

Any way you cut it, a 7 to 3 majority by people who have direct conflicts of interests is still a majority on the 9-11 Commission and makes it easy to cover up what really happened.

For those Americans that think Clinton ­ Gore had nothing to do with the lead up to invading Afghanistan over a pipeline we could not otherwise get control of, take a look at what Max Boot, senior fellow Council for Foreign Relations had to say in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor: The Neocons tried for years to get Clinton to act and felt they could get Gore to act in the event he won in 2000.

"What type of foreign policy/security strategy would an Al Gore administration have set after Sept. 11? How different would it have been from the one that emerged from the Bush White House?

I think it's likely that the Gore administration would have invaded Afghanistan after 9/11. I think it's unlikely they would have invaded Iraq. That's the big difference."

Gore was under the control of the same special interests that control George W. Bush.

They had been planning the takeover of that Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline for many years. If you understand that the same wealthy élite special interests own both parties in D.C., you understand the gravity of the problem. Bridas started signing contracts with Turkmenistan, the north end of that pipeline in 1992 and 1993. That is a provable and documented fact and it was also long before any of our oil companies were welcome in the region. Bridas also saw the strategic importance of having a way to get the landlocked oil and gas to the ocean and the shortest route to do that is from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to an ocean port.

Max Boot also does us all a service by having a Neocon provide a definition as to what a Neocon really is at this link: http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/180
============================================================

What the Heck Is a Neocon?
by Max Boot
Wall Street Journal
December 30, 2002

I have been called many names in my career -- few of them printable -- but the most mystifying has to be "neocon." I suppose I get labeled thus because I am associated, in a small way, with the Weekly Standard, which is known as a redoubt of "neoconservatism."

But what the heck is a neocon anyway in 2003? A friend of mine suggests it means the kind of right-winger a liberal wouldn't be embarrassed to have over for cocktails. That's as good a definition as any, since the term has clearly come unmoored from its original meaning.

'Mugged by Reality'

The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were "liberals mugged by reality."

They were never conservatives, only pretended to be. The resistance against Russian expansion is now a US driven expansionism of corporate interests, at the end of a gun and wrapped around it is a bogus War on Terror that has the United States being the world's foremost terrorist.

The only solution I can see to restore America is to consolidate the third parties, the disaffected Republican and Democrats who have figured it out, and Take Back America before we have nothing left worth having to take back.

I cannot stress enough that no single person can take there people on and win. It will take a grassroots effort that equals or exceeds either the DNC or RNC. It will take money and lots of it to get the media and air time needed to get the message out to America. The 2004 presidential election was a $1 billion show between Bush, Kerry and their wealthy élite / corporate backers.

If Americans want change, they have to be prepared to match RNC and DNC at least dollar for dollar to make that change happen.

The Campaign Website is up and open for contributions at www.karlschwarz2008.com/

It is time to Take Back America and that will require that all of us be in the front lines and not sitting back and watching the show. If you have the time, please forward this email update to all that you know, for their futures are at stake too.

Sincerely,
Karl W. B. Schwarz

KARL SCHWARZ FOR PRESIDENT 2008
The American Patriot Party, An Independent 3rd Party
Wake Up, End The Lies & Take Back America
www.karlschwarz2008.com/

A Day to Give Thanks?
by Ward Churchill
by gobble gobble
11/20/2001

gobble gobble!

Thanksgiving is the day the United States celebrates the fact that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony successfully avoided starvation during the winter of 1620-21.
But from an American Indian perspective, what is it we're supposed to be so thankful for?
Does anyone really expect us to give thanks for the fact that soon after the Pilgrim Fathers regained their strength, they set out to dispossess and exterminate the very Indians who had fed them that first winter?
Are we to express our gratitude for the colonists' 1637 massacre of the Pequots at Mystic, Conn., or their rhetoric justifying the butchery by comparing Indians to "rats and mice and swarms of lice"?
Or should we be joyous about the endless series of similar slaughters that followed: at St. Francis (1759), Horseshoe Bend (1814), Bad Axe (1833), Blue Water (1854), Sand Creek (1864), Marias River (1870), Camp Robinson (1878) and Wounded Knee (1890), to name only the worst?
Should we be thankful for the scalp bounties paid by every English colony -- as well as every U.S. state and territory in the lower 48 -- for proof of the deaths of individual Indians, including women and children?
How might we best show our appreciation of the order issued by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, requiring smallpox-infested items be given as gifts to the Ottawas so that "we might extirpate this execrable race"?
Is it reasonable to assume that we might be jubilant that our overall population, numbering perhaps 15 million at the outset of the European invasion, was reduced to less than a quarter-million by 1890?
Maybe we should be glad the "peaceful settlers" didn't kill the rest of us outright. But they didn't really need to, did they? By 1900, they already had 98 percent of our land. The remaining Indians were simply dumped in the mostly arid and unwanted locales, where it was confidently predicted that we'd shortly die off altogether, out of sight and mind of the settler society.
We haven't died off yet, but we comprise far and away the most impoverished, malnourished and disease-ridden population on the continent today. Life expectancy on many reservations is about 50 years; that of Euroamericans more than 75.
We've also endured a pattern of cultural genocide during the 20th century. Our children were processed for generations through government boarding schools designed to "kill the Indian" in every child's consciousness and to replace Native traditions with a "more enlightened" Euroamerican set of values and understandings.
Should we feel grateful for the disastrous self-concept thereby fostered within our kids?
Are we to be thankful that their self-esteem is still degraded every day on cable television by a constant bombardment of recycled Hollywood Westerns and television segments presenting Indians as absurd and utterly dehumanized caricatures?
Should we tell our children to find pride in the sorts of insults to which we are subjected to as a matter of course: Tumbleweeds cartoons, for instance, or the presence of Chief Wahoo and the Redskins in professional sports?
Does anybody really believe we should feel honored by such things, or by place names like Squaw Valley and Squaw Peak? "Squaw," after all, is the Onondaga word for female genitalia. The derogatory effect on Native women should be quite clear.
About three-quarters of all adult Indians suffer alcoholism and/or other forms of substance abuse. This is not a "genetic condition." It is a desperate, collective attempt to escape our horrible reality since "America's Triumph."
It's no mystery why Indians don't observe Thanksgiving. The real question is why do you feast rather than fast on what should be a national day of mourning and atonement.
Before digging into your turkey and dressing on Nov. 23, you might wish to glance in a mirror and see if you can come up with an answer.
Ward Churchill is professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. He's the author of "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present" (City Lights Books, 1998) and "Struggle For the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Expropriation in Contemporary North America" (Common Courage Press, 1992).
Ward Churchill, Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0339 - Ward.Churchill@Colorado.EDU - office: 303-492-5066

COMMENTS and REPLYS -----<::::::>~
Thankful for European Influence
by Molly McGuire • Wednesday November 21, 2001 at 09:18 PM

Actually, you should be thankful that Europeans brought science and reason to a continent that has made no progress in 10,000 years. Pilgrims were constantly under attack by hostile gangs of natives. North America was host to thousands of tribal battles during all of it pre-Columbian history.
Maybe you should thankful that the influx of Europeans upgraded the standard of living in a few years, that which the "Native American" was unable to do in centuries. The natives were starving to death and constantly roaming for food, always at war with each other.
So, it's not politically correct, and I'm certain you'll tell me to fuck off, but you are living indoors and reading from a computer, perhaps eating prepared foods because of the European influence. You precious natives were incapable of such achievements.
Racist Lies - An Outrage
by mark • Thursday November 22, 2001 at 12:02 AM

This is one of the most appalling comments I have read here - every sentence is just plain wrong. There is really no doubt that Native americans had world-class astronomy, mathematics, writing, architecture, medicine, urban planning, agriculture, sports (such as lacrosse), and political systems (such as the confederacy). There is also no question that Native American civilizations suffered European-sponsored near-total GENOCIDE. Not sure where you get your European history, but as far as I understand for the last few thousand years they've suffered constant full-scale wars, sometimes lasting for 100 years, not to mention the particularly brutal civil wars that encouraged colonization. In order to consolidate and expand their rule, European royalty improved the killing power of Asian firearms, spent vast resources to equip their soldiers with rifles and cannons, and went around the world looking for more gold to finance their wars.
Native Americans taught the "Pilgrims" (they called themselves "Saints", others called them "Separatists") how to survive; that's why some of us celebrate Thanksgiving. Luckily some Native Americans already spoke English thanks to dealing with so many shipwrecked sailors. The not-so-thankful Pilgrims soon turned to raiding and pillaging native villages for a living, and it wasn't long before the Natives were constantly under attack by hostile gangs of "Saints" and had no choice but to counterattack.
In Pre-Columbian times, Native Americans had plenty of food; whether from farming or hunting or gathering. Unfortunately many poor, malnourished Native Americans *are* starving Now. There has been massive environmental degradation of North America - whole ecosystems have vanished; and native American communities have been pushed to the most barren, least productive land by a centuries-long fullscale military assault (not to mention more insidious methods of terrorism, like distributing smallpox-infected blankets). Take a look at the Cherokees, who formed a wealthy, advanced nation state that was broken up and marched off to Oklahoma.
Lets look at some numbers:
Native American Life Expectancy, 1492: 40
European Life Expectancy, 1492: 35
Native American Life Expectancy, 2001: 46
Non-Native American Life Expectancy, 2001: 70
Total Native American Population
1492 approx 7,000,000 to 10,000,000
1896 254,000
1940 333,000
1990 1,959,000
There is no doubt that the European influence on America is a major force of world history and has, at this point, probably affected almost eveyone in the world to some extent. That's why it is worth reading about before you spout your racist lies here - or anywhere.
Rhetoric or reason?
by llivermore • Friday November 23, 2001 at 09:39 AM

::There is really no doubt that Native americans had world-class astronomy, mathematics, writing, architecture, medicine, urban planning, agriculture, sports (such as lacrosse), and political systems (such as the confederacy). ::
There is no doubt that what happened to Native Americans was/is a tragedy, but you hardly help the case by posting such rhetorical nonsense. While there are germs of truth in what you say, it's so extremely exaggerated that no one but the highly impressionable is going to take you seriously.
In reality, only a handful of Native American societies (there were thousands of different ones, some extremely primitive and some relatively advanced) had any form of writing, and it was a rudimentary form at best. Similarly, to equate Native American astronomy with European science (the Europeans had by then already developed telescopes and the beginnings of a realistic map of the universe, remember) is ludicrous. The remarkable thing about most Native American scientific acccomplishments (and even the use of the term "scientific" is misleading, as Native Americans had not developed the scientific method that is the foundation of European science) is not that they were anywhere near the equal of Europe's, but that they occurred at all in a society that was largely pre-literate and pre-scientific.
Similarly, claims about "urban planning" and "architecture" need to be taken in context: only a handful of Native societies had anything that could be equated with urban development. And if you're going to cite the few that did, it's only fair to consider that one of the most advanced of them, the Aztecs, also practiced slavery and human sacrifice on what writer termed "an industrial scale."
None of this is meant to imply that because Native Americans were not as scientifically or culturally advanced as the Europeans, they deserved to die or to lose their homeland. But if you want people to focus on that essential issue, you need to stick to basic moral values, not throw about wildly inflated rhetorical claims about cultural or technological equivalency. I need only point out that if the Native Americans were as advanced as you claim, they hardly could have been defeated by a relative handful of European invaders.
::There is also no question that Native American civilizations suffered European-sponsored near-total GENOCIDE.::
Actually, there is. While there were certainly instances of very cruel massacres directed against Natives (and, to be fair, by Natives against Europeans), the overwhelming majority - 80-90% -of Natives died not as a result of military action, but from coming in contact with European diseases to which they had never developed immunity. And before you raise the familiar cry about the smallpox-infected blankets, yes, such incidents occurred, but they were not systematic and only accounted for a infinitesimal percentage of Native deaths. The vast majority were simply an unintended and unexpected consequence of Natives not having acquired immunity to European illnesses. The Europeans did have such immunity largely as a result of living in close proximity in urban areas. Read William McNeill's "Plagues and Peoples" or Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" if you want scientifc and independent verification of this.
As for differing life expectancies of modern Native and European populations, it might be instructive to compare differing life expectancies between Natives who have integrated themselves into mainstream - i.e., Euro-American - society, and those who have remained marginalised on reservations and urban ghettoes.
no question.
by mark • Friday November 23, 2001 at 01:38 PM

Whether or not you consider native American culture - adobe villages, dug-out canoes, herbal medicine, wigwams or WHATEVER - to be noteworthy, my point is to refute the outlandish, racist notion that Europeans are alone capable of "science" and "reason" while American Indians are "incapable of such achievements."
If you'd like to play the civilization vs. civilization game, isn't it somewhat forgetful to blast the Aztecs for enslaving its prisoners of war while you laud the Euro-American societies which have enslaved, persecuted, and incarcerated countless millions of Africans and Native Americans?
"I need only point out that if the Native Americans were as advanced as you claim, they hardly could have been defeated by a relative handful of European invaders." - This exemplifies the sort of mindset typical of Americans who simpy refuse to believe or acknowledge that there has been an organized, militarized, state-and-religion-endorsed campaign to exterminate and assimilate Native Americans for 509 years - 1492 thru today. If you don't believe me perhaps you should ask a Native American - you act as if they were all Gone, Defeated, Nothing but a sad, primitive foot note in history. Actually Native Americans are still marginalized and still resisting. The struggle for indigenous rights continues in every country of the Western Hemisphere and before bodies like the WCAR.
The tone of your last sentence brings to mind the worst sort of antediluvian (or perhaps, not so antediluvian?) Social Darwinism. But you're right, I would be interested in such figures though I haven't come across them yet.
Thanksgiving
by Francisco Da Costa • Friday November 23, 2001 at 04:01 PM
frandacosta@att.net (415)467-4284 2554 San Bruno Avenue, S.F., CA 94134-1516
Here in California 18 treaties have not been ratified by the United States government. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe of the San Francisco area were once on the Federal Register and illegally removed in 1927. I guess the millions of non-Native Americans can come out with all the reasons to put down the Native American at hind sight. Especially those who always love to go on the defensive. We should learn more about the various tribes before we dare to cast our stones and spew out hatred. For starters visit the Muwekma Ohlone site: http://www.muwekma.org There is no doubt that any person who is fair minded gives thanks to the host. This land belongs to the Native Americans, always did. The least we all can say is "thank you". It is a shame in 2001 - after all these years with all the information out there we still cannot think and act right. Thanksgiving is a day set aside to give thanks - one can only really give thanks with humility. You can never be pompous and say "thank you" - it would NOT be right.
www.muwekma.org
Thankful for a Prosperous Life
by Elisa • Friday November 23, 2001 at 06:53 PM

When The Bureau of Tribal Affairs reneges on a treaty, it is terrible, it is a shame, and has led to some deaths sadly. When the hundreds of warring nations in North America violated a peace agreement, genocide resulted. Thousands of Pre-Columbian natives were exterminated long before any Pilgrim gave them cowpox or influenza. However, it has become convenient to trash all European influence, because it's easy to hate isn't it? You are reading a European-based language via a mechanism developed by a European scientific method.
As to the truth of previous posts, that the Native Americans were scientific and mathematical, there is little evidence that their maths had any complexity whatsoever. The life expectancy figures are incorrect, and Molly's comment contained no racist suggest at all. She merely said that the natives were not capable of the progress that the Europeans achieved. Nobody was: the Asians could not, the Africans could not, nor the South Americans.
no thanks
by mark • Friday November 23, 2001 at 07:26 PM

the life expectancy figures I cited come from reputable government and academic sources. If u have contradicting numbers please publish them here. American Indians and African Americans at retirement age live on average longer than Caucasian Americans at retirement age - because so many of their numbers have already been depleted by inadequate health care, malnutrition, crime, and the like; that is, a not-so-prosperous life.
Mayan mathematics and astronomy, and related systems in other societies of mesoamerica and the southwestern US, is widely understood to be at least as complex and useful as any other such system of the time.
You say: "Molly's comment contained no racist suggest at all. She merely said that the natives were not capable of the progress that the Europeans achieved. Nobody was: the Asians could not, the Africans could not, nor the South Americans." This is exactly what I am talking about: Your statement is without a doubt racist and has no basis in fact. Certainly each society exhibits its own particular sort of "progress," whatever that is. But extending this observation to a hierarchical philosophy and using such terms as "capable" and "incapable" is pure and simple racism.
History
by Bakunin • Friday November 23, 2001 at 08:02 PM

The presupposition of llivermore and elisa on this comment thread is that we cannot find a pattern of contemporary historical racism between European nations and indigenous populations. This is a proven historical fact, and it is a characteristic of European colonialism. (Other parts of the world also had their own versions of colonialism) It is also a characteristic of modern-day international relationships.
One may say that Native American tribes fought with each other and enslaved each other. Many have also recorded this about the history of Africa. One can also say this about Europe, with a long history of continental warfare. It is hard to find a historian who will suggest that warfare, slavery and exploitation is not a core component of human history within the last 2,000 years. (However, most anthropologists agree that pre-agricultural humankind lived without concepts of war, work, government, slavery, etc) But, if (as it seems mark and others on here are saying) we are looking at modern society ... that is, what are *we* doing now? And how can we be informed by contemoprary historical truths of international relationships? And what opinion should we have on things happening right now, if we are to be informed by historical experience?
In the context of contemporary history, the Europeans and more notably the U.S. Government has shown its reliance on these old and outdate methods of warfare and conquest. If you take contemporary history to mean the last 500 years, and moreso the last 200 years, as a measurement to say where we are today, why are people discounting proven European racism and conquest?
To suggest that Native Americans should be "grateful" for European conquest is an insult. And it is racism. And it is an ideological foundation for the historical colonialism/imperialism that I have just referred to. In the past 500 years, there has not been a global Native American empire which funds death squads and creates nuclear holocausts --- only a European/US one. The racial and cultural history of Europeans' interactions with Native Americans has only *one* history: the savage and brutal conquest of a "Manifest Destiny" perpetrated by Europeans.
Looking at the proven, admitted facts of what European governments (and the U.S. government) have done over the past 500 years in their conquests for territory and profit (even within the past 50 years with debt management, IMF, etc) is not "fashion" or "hate". It is looking at history and saying: "do we want to keep doing this?"
Humans share a quality with few other living creatures on this earth: the ability to pass down abstract information from one generation to another. This gift has given us the ability to have a history that goes beyond genetic memory.
So let's call it what it is. The relationships between Europeans and indigenous populations for the past 500 years including and up to today has been one of master and slave. There are countless historical examples, and any number of examples today.
Those who would denigrate the Native American culture, cheer on the genocide or minimize the historical and modern-day impact on people are nothing more than apologists for colonial domination. And they are propagating the same racist hatred that has characterized European history for the last 500 years.
And, within the context of modern international relations, you can only be on a couple sides: the side of the increasingly exposed international empire or the side of self-determination and cultural diversity?
The only revolution against colonialism that people from the U.S. can sympathize with is the U.S. war for independence. Don't you find that odd? Some would say that the arrogance to assume that only white Americans deserve independence is also racism. Some white Americans, of course, deny that.
More rhetoric and unreason
by llivermore • Saturday November 24, 2001 at 07:16 AM

::the presupposition of llivermore and elisa on this comment thread is that we cannot find a pattern of contemporary historical racism between European nations and indigenous populations.::
No it's not. You're just making things up to provide yourself with a spurious platform for your flights of slogan-rehashing.
Rhetoric-mongers like yourself use charges of "racism" as an all-purpose weapon when facts and reason fail to debunk an argument that doesn't fit neatly into their ideological framework.
In the first place, I never suggested, explicitly or implicitly, that there was no racism on the part of Europeans toward Native Americans. It would be stupid of me to do so in any event, as there are ample historical sources showing that many Europeans regarded Natives as being less than human, or at least, as not fully developed humans. But you conveniently ignore the fact that all human societies tend to regard themselves as intellectually and culturally superior to other societies. If Native Americans had left written records of their initial impressions of Europeans, they no doubt would be replete with descriptions of the perceived inferiority of European civilisation.
But in your eagerness to join the crusade of racist identity politics and self-flagellation that sadly characterises so much of contemporary leftism, you neglect to notice that the original discussion was not about whether racism existed in the colonial era, but whether Native American society was indeed, as Mark assserted, the technological equal of European society. Virtually all historical evidence indicates this is not the case. We can bemoan the tragic fate of Native Americans, and resolve that in the future we should not allow our government to treat people so callously, but to stand logic and history on its head by pretending that hunter-gatherer or simple agrarian tribal societies are in every way the equal of modern and post-modern industrial societies does nothing to accomplish that aim. It just makes you look silly and unworthy of being taken seriously.

Fuck Ward Churchill
by me • Sunday November 25, 2001 at 01:11 AM

Ward Churchill is a professional (academic) race baitor. He has come out in support of the terrorists attacks on the WTC. I wouldn't even bother to read any of this warped fuckers writings.
What is racism?
by Bakunin • Sunday November 25, 2001 at 01:55 AM

First, I should say that my response was to llivermore and elisa's comments compositely, as originally noted.
"leftism, you neglect to notice that the original discussion was not about whether racism existed in the colonial era, but whether Native American society was indeed, as Mark assserted, the technological equal of European society."
I understand why you don't think it is racism. What you have just posted, though, is a form of old colonial racism. Of course they have "inferior technology" ... just as they have "inferior toys" because they are not made out of molded plastic ... just as they have "inferior religion" and "inferior urban planning."
I hope you can understand that while you view this as a simple comparison of technology, you are ignoring that your standard of evaluation is racist to begin with.
There are billions of people who would say that the earth-destroying urban sprawl of contemporary USA is "inferior urban planning". Many would say that weapons of nuclear global holocaust is "inferior technology". Many would argue that the regimented, spend-your-life-working consumer lifestyle is not only "inferior," but dangerously groupthink-oriented and totalitarian in its quest for "productivity" and "technology".
If you think gadgets and superconductors and nuclear fission are the best technology we can come up with, that's a European view and yes, the Europeans were more technologically advanced. We have the ability to see what they did with their historical victory. What if the native Americans had been allowed to flourish? Would their technological development reflected their respect for nature? One can only imagine.
Native American technology was equivalent to European technology, just not where it mattered when you are faced with a genocidal invading army. The whole point of Thanksgiving is that the Native Americans "saved" the Pilgrims by teaching them agricultural concepts, housing concepts, etc that they were not able to figure out on their own.
At any rate, you could argue about whether or not their technology was equivalent all day. I just want to make clear that anyone who looks at it and presumes a European standard for evaluating technological and social progress is holding an historically racist viewpoint, no matter how much you call it "invalid political correctness"
Charges of "racism" = no rational argument
by llivermore • Sunday November 25, 2001 at 04:56 AM

::At any rate, you could argue about whether or not their technology was equivalent all day. I just want to make clear that anyone who looks at it and presumes a European standard for evaluating technological and social progress is holding an historically racist viewpoint, no matter how much you call it "invalid political correctness"::
First off, I never used the term "political correctness" or even referred obliquely to that concept.
Secondly, *you* can argue all day about whether European and Native America technology were equivalent, but few rational or reasonable people would bother, because the disparity between the two is so obvious, regardless of whose standards are used to make the evaluation. If you doubt this, please observe that even the most rabid proponents of cultural or technological equivalence - say Ward Churchill or yourself, for example - employ the white man's technology to expound their views, live in the white man's houses, and use the white man's medical science. In other words, you don't even believe your own rhetoric, or you'd be living in a grass hut and sending your message by smoke signals.
Thirdly, your entire approach is nihilistic, in that anyone who disagrees with you is "guilty of historical racism." That's not reason, that's demagogic name-calling. It really doesn't rise much above the level of a 16 year old calling his parents "fascists" because they won't drive him to the mall and buy him a new anarchy t-shirt.
P.S. Your choice of a namesake is revelatory as well. Bakunin, far from being a revolutionary freedom fighter, was a 19th century nutcase, who never accomplished much beyond getting in barroom brawls and the petty bitch fights that have historically characterised the anarchist left.
Racism exists, but is never a rational reason
by Bakunin • Sunday November 25, 2001 at 05:20 AM

The "white man's technology"? I wonder what the Japanese would say about personal electronics being "white man's technology".
Regardless, your backstepping shows even more that your position is founded on racism (which is by far one of the most irrational foundations ever).
Few "rational or reasonable" people believe this. All the technology we have comes from the "white man". People would be living in "huts".
I think it is plain to any "rational or reasonable" person that your retorts are just more and more layers of racist belief. You could have tried to show why your European social/tech/etc standard of "superior" and "inferior" was actually a more reasonable standard. But instead you resorted to knee-jerk racist bullshit, as cited above.
Earth to Llivermore
by mark • Sunday November 25, 2001 at 04:37 PM

llivermore writes, "If Native Americans had left written records of their initial impressions of Europeans, they no doubt would be replete with descriptions of the perceived inferiority of European civilisation."
Were you not aware that Native Americans do have written records? Have you not even Read any of them? Although much pre-columbian Native american writings were destroyed by European invaders (for instance, many of the holy books of the Mayan religion) that which survives is replete with vivid descriptions of European military technology, involuntary conversions, various difficulties adjusting (or not) to the "new" world, and relations with Indians, whether friendly or hostile.
llivermore writes, "you neglect to notice that the original discussion was not about whether racism existed in the colonial era, but whether Native American society was indeed, as Mark assserted, the technological equal of European society."
The original thread asserted and continued by me is that certain comments on this thread are Racist. For instance, statements that Native Americans are "incapable" of this or that, that Only Europeans are capable of this or that, and so forth. I do not claim that Colonial-era European and Pre-Colombian Native American technologies are "equal," only that large groups of people in their capabilities and capacities are equal. If you would like to argue with that (and you are of course within your rights to do so, as long as this newswire graciously allows racist posts) then I will call you also Racist. Frankly, why would any society ever want to possess the "equivalent" of Colonial European technology - technology used primarily for militaristic purposes and developed and maintained thru exploitation and imperialism on a massive scale...
Llivermore, sorry to steal your words but, to suggest that anyone could suggest that hunter-gatherer or simple agrarian tribal societies are in every way the equal of modern and post-modern industrial societies just makes you look silly and unworthy of being taken seriously.
llivermore writes "the most rabid proponents of cultural or technological equivalence - say Ward Churchill or yourself, for example - employ the white man's technology to expound their views, live in the white man's houses, and use the white man's medical science. In other words, you don't even believe your own rhetoric, or you'd be living in a grass hut and sending your message by smoke signals." What I am arguing is the following:
* Generally speaking, American Indians have not "upgraded their standard of living" since the conquest, since most were killed through war, persecution, and disease, and many Native communities have been pushed to the most unproductive lands and are today economically, politically, and culturally marginalized.
* There has been a pattern of racist attacks, in its totality what we call genocide, perpetrated against Native Americans (and other groups) by European Americans
* Racist attacks are continuing even in this thread
* Despite the fact that certain groups, for instance, American Indians, continue to be victimized and marginalized by the rich and powerful, all races are in fact equivalent in their capabilities and capacities.
* Messages such as Ward Churchill's are vital to remind us of past and present injustice, and to inspire constructive dialogue such as on this thread. Resistance, whether through words or even violence, will continue until there is justice for all peoples.
Ward Churchill is a scumbag
by me • Monday November 26, 2001 at 12:51 AM

To the stupid leftists out their-- Churchill supports the WTC. Any comment on that?
pacifism as pathology
by mark • Monday November 26, 2001 at 01:46 AM

Maybe you should ask him yourself - Ward Churchill, Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0339 - Ward.Churchill@Colorado.EDU - office: 303-492-5066
While you're at it you might want to pick up one of his tracts - see above.
To Mark
by me • Tuesday November 27, 2001 at 04:47 PM

I've actually read pacifism as pathology-- its mainly a guilt oriented, violence baiting tract to get white leftists into doing violent adventurism. Churchill supports the islamic fascists who flew the plane into the WTC. By the way being against pacifism (which I am) is not the same as supporting hideous mass murder like Churchill does.
Hello?
by Eric Vinyl • Wednesday December 05, 2001 at 12:58 PM
Can we point out for a moment that race and culture are not synonymous?
Thank you.

I-100 author smokes foes
by Alan Gathright / Rocky Mountain News
November 3, 2005

23-year-old turns tables on drug war with Denver victory

It's not even noon and Mason Tvert already has hit seven television and five radio news shows in his post-election victory lap as the architect behind an effort to make Denver the first U.S. city to legalize adult marijuana possession.

Tvert has drawn international coverage by turning the tables on the drug war.

He calls marijuana the "safer alternative" for society and criticizes the "hypocrisy" of elected officials who condemn pot while condoning alcohol use, despite studies showing that alcohol fuels deadly violence, car wrecks and abuse.

He even hounded Denver's super-popular, brewpub-owning mayor, John Hickenlooper, to debate - a challenge the mayor ignored.

"I've gotten calls from as far as Australia and Germany," Tvert said Wednesday after wrapping an appearance on a national Fox News morning show.

Not bad for a 23-year-old kid who just graduated last year from the University of Richmond, in Virginia.

The burly 6-footer defies the sleepy-eyed stoner stereotype. He's a hyper political junkie in a dark pinstriped suit who sticks like glue to his talking points while juggling nonstop interviews on two ever-buzzing cell phones.

For the record, the Phoenix native refuses to say if he smokes pot.

"That's like asking a pro-choice person if they've had an abortion," he said. Besides, he added, admitting smoking a drug that's still illegal under state and federal law would be "self-incriminating."

Indeed, Denver law enforcement officials and city leaders warn that amending local law will change nothing because possession busts will continue to be prosecuted under state law.

"It is still illegal to possess less than an ounce of marijuana anywhere in the state, and that includes Denver," Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey said in a statement Wednesday.

Possession of less than an ounce of marijuana is a petty offense and punishable by a fine.

Tvert accuses Denver officials of "defying the will of the voters" if they ignore the 7 percentage-point victory Tuesday for the Alcohol-Marijuana Equalization Initiative.

"We're going to be encouraging folks who do get cited under state law to take their cases to court," he said.

"And we will show just how damaging and how many problems it causes to keep citing nonviolent marijuana offenders who would otherwise be law-abiding citizens."

What's next for the Johnny Appleseed of weed? He vows to take the pot-beats-booze crusade to other Colorado communities, although he won't name any yet.

"This is something that is going to spread across the country because people are starting to open their eyes to look beyond 70 years of marijuana prohibition propaganda," he said.

After graduating from college in 2004, Tvert started the fight as a foot soldier for the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project.

He campaigned against Arizona congressional candidates who "think it's OK to send sick and dying people to jail for using" medical marijuana prescribed by their doctor.

In January, he moved to Boulder and created the nonprofit Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation, whose three-person board includes himself and current and former members of the Marijuana Policy Project.

After the University of Colorado and Colorado State University were rocked by student deaths from binge-drinking, Tvert engineered successful nonbinding student elections last spring urging university officials to make sanctions for marijuana no more severe than those for comparable alcohol violations.

In June, he moved into a south Denver townhouse and launched the Initiative 100 campaign, driven by 200 volunteers and funded by $32,000 in individual contributions, in-kind donations from his nonprofit group and independent billboard funding from a national marijuana-reform group.

Tvert's aggressive campaign drew harsh criticism - and lots of news coverage.

City Councilman Charlie Brown blasted SAFER for "deceiving" voters with lawn signs urging them to "Make Denver SAFER," which he said could have fooled people into thinking I-100 was an anti-crime initiative to boost police staffing.

A backlash by domestic violence groups also forced SAFER to cancel a billboard showing a battered woman with the slogan: "Reduce family and community violence in Denver" - without mentioning marijuana.

Undaunted, Tvert kept buttressing his arguments with studies underscoring alcohol's societal harm and even quoting former drug czar Barry McCaffrey, who said, "The most dangerous drug in America today is still alcohol."

Tvert dismisses suggestions that he's an out-of-state "carpetbagger."

"I'm really enjoying Denver, so I'm planning on staying around here for a long time," he said.

Mason Tvert

• Age: 23

• Birthplace: Phoenix

• Pets: "I used to have a guinea pig."

• Favorite book: Les Miserables

• Favorite movie: True Romance

• Web site: Saferchoice.org


Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
**************************************************************************
gathrighta@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5486

URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/election/article/0,1299,DRMN_36_4208491,00.html
===========================================================

To voters, issue was freedom of choice
by Sarah Langbein / Rocky Mountain News
November 3, 2005

'Adults can make own decisions,' backer says

What were Denver voters thinking when they passed an initiative to legalize small amounts of marijuana?

Were they too consumed with the munchies to think clearly?

Was the voting booth so smoke-filled that they couldn't see the ballot?

The jokes rolled in Wednesday - like the joints - as Colorado and the rest of the country learned that a day earlier Initiative 100 actually won, allowing adults to possess 1 ounce or less of marijuana. Television reports cashed in with Denver's slogan, saying that voters truly put the "high" in Mile High.

But for many Denver residents, the vote was nothing close to a joke.

One man, Jordan Dieterich, said he took the vote so seriously that he even prayed on it.

In the end, he said, he followed the Bible.

Quoting Genesis, Dieterich said that God created vegetation, and that includes marijuana plants.

"The earth brought forth vegetation," Dieterich read from the Bible, "plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good."

Dieterich, 39, said he no longer smokes pot but has an elderly friend who does for medicinal purposes.

"She's terrified that police will find out," he said. "She's afraid they'll knock on her door and arrest her.

"I feel like it should be a personal decision, that adults can make their own decisions."

That appeared to be the reasoning of most pro-pot voters in Denver.

Justin Nucci, 32, believes adults can make decisions for themselves.

"I've always been a person that felt that if somebody is willing to do something like that to their body, then it's their prerogative to do so," he said.

"It doesn't need to be regulated, for a personal-use quantity, by the police."

Cynthia Munson, 58, agreed.

"I wouldn't smoke marijuana, but it seems like everyone else does," she said. "And it seems like the police would have more time to go after real criminals instead of piddly amounts of marijuana here and there."

Denver law enforcers, including the police and district attorney's office, say Initiative 100 will not change the way they handle pot cases. Marijuana possession cases will continue to be prosecuted under the state law.

Tuesday's vote was followed closely by pro-pot organizations across the country, including the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project.

Spokesman Bruce Mirken said Denver's decision shows there is a change in how the nation is viewing marijuana.

"It shows that voters of all stripes are ready to grapple with this issue," he said.

He believes many voters compared pot to alcohol and wondered if it is really necessary to treat pot consumption harsher.

Mirken believes adults should have the choice of whether to unwind after work with a martini or a joint.

Tom Severance, 54, voted for I-100 - he doesn't think pot is any worse than alcohol.

"I just felt it was high time that pot was legal," he said.

Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
*******************************************************************************
Staff writer Kevin Vaughan contributed to this report.
langbeins@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2536

URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/election/article/0,1299,DRMN_36_4208492,00.html

2,000 US TROOPS DEAD IN IRAQ:
ONE SURVIVOR TELLS HIS STORY
From Ryan Parry in Kansas City, Missouri
27 October 2005
I went to fight in Iraq to get revenge for 9/11... I found out Bush had led us into a war that was immoral and totally wrong.
- IVAW Member, Tomas Young

Brave Tomas Young saw it as his patriotic duty to join the Army three days after 9/11. Tomas, 25, wanted revenge on the terrorists who murdered nearly 2,750 people in the Twin Towers. But on his first mission in Iraq - and before he had fired a single bullet in anger - he was left paralysed from the chest down after being shot in an ambush.

Now his anguish at never being able to walk again has turned to anger that he and thousands of others are being sent to fight an immoral war for George Bush. As America this week mourned its 2000th victim of the war, Tomas said: "I joined the Army to exact some sort of retribution on what happened to us, whether it be going to find Osama bin Laden or to get al-Qaeda. "I joined to get back for what happened. Nothing more, nothing less. But so far there have been 2,000 dead American soldiers and some 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians.

"That's certainly a lot more than we lost on September 11. What has happened in Iraq is wrong." Tomas, now confined to a wheelchair, is bitter that his Government's lies got him to enroll. And he is frustrated Mr Bush will not listen to the American public and withdraw the troops. He said: "From the start I didn't see a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but when Bush first said, 'Weapons of mass destruction', I bought into that a bit.

"However, when that reason became more and more bulls**t I started to fall off the bandwagon."It became clear they didn't have any strong connection and that's when I started to snap."

The young Army specialist is contemptuous of his President's attempts to justify the conflict. "Bush kept coming up with reason after reason that was proving to be wrong," Tomas said. "It reminded me of when I was naughty as a kid.

"Mom would find out my first excuse wasn't true, so I'd make up a second and third until I would finally admit what I'd done and take my whupping." His opposition to the war hardened soon after he was sent to Iraq with the 2nd Battalion 5th Cavalry regiment in March 2004. The soldier, of Kansas City, Missouri, recalled: "I was saying, 'See these oil fires? This is why we're here, guys. We're not defending freedom'. I realised my reasons for joining were being twisted."

The day that would alter his life forever came on April 4. He and his colleagues were sent to guard a rescue mission in Baghdad's Sadr City district. He found himself one of 25 troops crammed into a truck meant to hold 18. Tomas said: "The truck was beaten up. It was supposed to have a canvas cover and armour on the sides. It didn't have either. Space was so tight that I had my legs folded and was lying on my back so more people could get in. I was meant to have my M16 aiming off the side but I couldn't get enough room to pivot it around and shoot if I needed to."

Although the rescue mission went smoothly, his truck later came under attack from rooftop snipers armed with AK47s. Tomas said: "They opened fire and myself and three or four others got shot. It was like shooting fish in a barrel."

He was hit under the shoulder blade and the bullet severed his spinal cord, paralysing him instantly. "I went numb," he recalled. "I dropped my M16 and my fingertips were tingling. It was like a shock through my body. I went rigid. I remember looking at my hands and trying to will them to grab my M16, but couldn't get them to move. I tried to yell but all I could get out was a horse-whisper." A second shot tore into his knee. He scarcely felt it. Tomas was eventually airlifted to hospitals in Kuwait, Germany and, finally, Washington DC. He was constantly sedated and recalls little. But he remembers the emotional moment he came round and saw his mother, Cathy Smith.

"I'm a mommy's boy," he admitted. "I don't care how tough you are, when you see your mom after what I've been through you start to cry." Last Saturday, Staff Sgt George Alexander, 34, became the 2,000th US soldier killed in the conflict. He had been hit by a roadside bomb in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, five days earlier.

The death was viewed as a grim landmark by America's growing anti-war movement. Now Tomas is determined to ensure it is one of the last. He is a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War movement and recently joined leading activist Cindy Sheehan at a demo outside Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Her son Casey, 24, was killed in Baghdad on the same day Tomas was hit.

Tomas and wife Brie, 24, are now trying to look to the future and are thinking of having IVF treatment to start a family. But he remains angry about the way the war changed his life. And he called on Mr Bush to stop others suffering in the same way. "I'd probably be a little bitter even if the war was just," he confessed. "But the fact that I'm in this situation, compounded with the fact we went to an immoral war, makes it harder to accept.

"Bush led us into something that was wrong. He now needs to lead us out."
***************************************************************************
From: Mirror.co.uk http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16298292%26method=full%26siteid=94762%26headline=2%2d000%2dus%2dtroops%2ddead%2din%2diraq%2d%2d58%2d%2done%2dsurvivor%2dtells%2dhis%2dstory-name_page.html

Fast Car - Shadows On A Lonesome Road
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
October 22, 2005

"you got a fast car
and I want a ticket to anywhere
maybe we make a deal
maybe together we can get somewhere"
-- Traci Chapman, Fast Car

Top speed, headed toward the cliff, you're in the backseat hanging on for dear life, trying to catch at least a glimpse of the madman behind the wheel.

Fox puts these shows on television, and for all the world you can no longer tell the difference between the reality shows and the fantasy news.

I saw both at once Wednesday night in a church on Central Park West, as journalist Seymour Hersh and whistleblower Scott Ritter agonized about a phony war gone wrong before an enthusiastic crowd of New York liberals, but the level of discussion depicted al-Qaeda as an actual foreign enemy (rather than a CIA freak show) and Israel as a helpful ally, and hence never touched on the real issues. At least I got to hug Cindy Sheehan, America's much maligned antiwar heroine.

The level of reality of most of antiwar activity in the United States basically accepts the government's version of 9/11 and focuses its objection on the unnecessary carnage taking place all over the world thanks to U.S. policies, which of course is not a bad thing to complain about. But missing the point about the nature of the war and who is creating the violence -- it's not the neocons, it's the vast majority of the American people who support them who are letting this happen -- guarantees yet another useless and failed effort on the part of America's peaceniks, because they simply do not see the lies that have been told by the White House and TV talking heads have twisted the way everyone sees things.

It's not just the war we need to stop. It's the predatory behavior of a rancid system that regards people as numbers on a ledger sheet. Until why that happens is addressed, the other stuff will continue, no matter how much people complain about it.

So, after you've seen the bloated bodies floating face down in the bayou, "after the torchlight red on sweaty faces," after the bleeding babies in the prearranged pustule of Iraq ... reality is in your face, and now, as the weather goes South, the earth trembles, and your air is no longer fit to breathe, you ask yourself: who is that shadow chasing the speeding car that so terrifies the driver he would willingly drive straight over the precipice than simply have the courage to turn around and face his own inner fright -- because not to do so is to ignore one's destiny, and this destiny is the fate of all of us. How bad could it be to let the universe just wash over you? Especially since it's something you can't avoid anyway, no matter what your brand of magic trick.

We are the passengers in a car speeding way, way over the speed limit. Our lives flash before our eyes, like the guy on the plane to Hawaii who saw the passenger in front of him ripped out through a hole in the fuselage.

With what I was able to understand in my lifetime, it appears that humanity's own shadow has overtaken it. Yeats had it pegged. "The center cannot hold."

And we are all about to be catapulted into a reality we, pampered prodigals of a profligate lifestyle, have never before been exposed to. Odds are that most of us will wither in the heat and die. At least, those of us who aren't killed outright. If not by instantaneous vaporization, then by wrenching diseases that will contort our faces for all time in the rigor mortis horror of a Palestinian child gunned down by a laughing Israeli soldier for sport.

It is the natural consequence of constructing a society that avoids the real issues. I have some sympathy for Mao Tse Tung, whose social policies conceded that man was an unruly criminal and had to be constrained for the sake of peace.

With Mao it was not so much a lust for power as a necessary expedient to quell the unending bloodshed, but as with all dictatorial systems, it merely continued the cycle of violence. With the neocon cabal in the U.S., powered by total control of the world financial markets by a select few, the world government has far less compassion than Mao, as the continuing slaughters following the vilest example of treasonous perfidy ever recorded (that would of course be 9/11, a watershed event in human history when a government's massacre of its own citizens was approved by the masses because of the mind control the media had over them) continue to drench the world in blood.

Such a shadow on the human mind had not been seen since the Dark Ages (which really have yet to end), but even in this glittering technological age, humanity had never been so "in the dark" about what the real value of its collective life really was. For five thousand years people piled up trinkets against the coming night and finally, after years of searching for a safe pair of eyes, invented a friend who could not be defeated, someone who at sometime, in some place, is the one friend you can really count on, invention or not.

Who could have predicted, through all those eons, that following this path of following the dictates of an all-powerful God would lead to a situation for a species that first conquered the wilderness but then became its own wilderness. Look at the planet. See where the wilderness really is. It is where humans have been. The rest of the planet thrives without us.

What is it we were supposed to be doing? Funny thoughts cross your mind when you're pinned against the leather seat by the gravity compression of an accelerating fast car about to crash through a barrier from which there is no return.

First of which is .... what the hell am I doing in this car?

But the matter at hand is ... how can we get the driver to hit the brakes? Before we crash through the last fence.

I myself face this view this morning that when I return home from a short sabbatical that my house could be in toothpicks as the latest in a series of designer storms churns its way toward Florida's Gulf Coast. It is appearing more likely that the new weapon of choice for the totalitarian neocons is environment disaster -- first the tsunami, than various major quakes, and now hurricanes. It's a much cleaner and easier policy than trying to drum up support for wars with no reason except pure, profane profit.

And all of our leaders are in on the scam. Especially the current madman behind the wheel, who utters empty platitudes so meaningless, uncaring, and illogical that one can only conclude this is a suicide mission for profits. Exactly who profits, as we place our hands over our hearts and pledge allegiance to our team, remains a fuzzy mystery, as men in expensive suits gaze out from an opulent balcony on a European hillside and smugly ponder their geopolitical gamesmanship.

Meanwhile, we're in the car, paralyzed by our fear, beseeching the driver to get some common sense and stop the car, before it's too late for all of us.

Perhaps a better way to describe the view that confronts our bulging eyeballs is this one. Imagine you're in the cockpit of the large passenger airliner and someone has a gun to your head. In those final moments, you see the people in the windows of a skyscraper gesticulating in uncomprehending panic as the plane closes fast on the face of the building.

This is today's snapshot of our species of individual souls, trapped in the back seat of a fast car with a driver we don't really know and are afraid to ask about, hurtling at breakneck speed toward you know where ...
***********************************************************
John Kaminski is writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida currently hiding from the latest designer storm in New York City. Google him.

From: http://rense.com/general68/fast.htm

Money for Nothing
by Philip Giraldi / The American Conservative
October 24, 2005 Issue

Billions of dollars have disappeared,
gone to bribe Iraqis and line contractors’ pockets.

The United States invaded Iraq with a high-minded mission: destroy dangerous weapons, bring democracy, and trigger a wave of reform across the Middle East. None of these have happened.

When the final page is written on America’s catastrophic imperial venture, one word will dominate the explanation of U.S. failure—corruption. Large-scale and pervasive corruption meant that available resources could not be used to stabilize and secure Iraq in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), when it was still possible to do so. Continuing corruption meant that the reconstruction of infrastructure never got underway, giving the Iraqi people little incentive to co-operate with the occupation. Ongoing corruption in arms procurement and defense spending means that Baghdad will never control a viable army while the Shi’ite and Kurdish militias will grow stronger and produce a divided Iraq in which constitutional guarantees will be irrelevant.

The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.

Some of the corruption grew out of the misguided neoconservative agenda for Iraq, which meant that a serious reconstruction effort came second to doling out the spoils to the war’s most fervent supporters. The CPA brought in scores of bright, young true believers who were nearly universally unqualified. Many were recruited through the Heritage Foundation website, where they had posted their résumés. They were paid six-figure salaries out of Iraqi funds, and most served in 90-day rotations before returning home with their war stories. One such volunteer was Simone Ledeen, daughter of leading neoconservative Michael Ledeen. Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training, she nevertheless became a senior advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad. Another was former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s older brother Michael who, though utterly unqualified, was named director of private-sector development for all of Iraq.

The 15-month proconsulship of the CPA disbursed nearly $20 billion, two-thirds of it in cash, most of which came from the Development Fund for Iraq that had replaced the UN Oil for Food Program and from frozen and seized Iraqi assets. Most of the money was flown into Iraq on C-130s in huge plastic shrink-wrapped pallets holding 40 “cashpaks,” each cashpak having $1.6 million in $100 bills. Twelve billion dollars moved that way between May 2003 and June 2004, drawn from accounts administered by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The $100 bills weighed an estimated 363 tons.

Once in Iraq, there was virtually no accountability over how the money was spent. There was also considerable money “off the books,” including as much as $4 billion from illegal oil exports. The CPA and the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Board, which it controlled, made a deliberate decision not to record or “meter” oil exports, an invitation to wholesale fraud and black marketeering.

Thus the country was awash in unaccountable money. British sources report that the CPA contracts that were not handed out to cronies were sold to the highest bidder, with bribes as high as $300,000 being demanded for particularly lucrative reconstruction contracts.

The contracts were especially attractive because no work or results were necessarily expected in return. It became popular to cancel contracts without penalty, claiming that security costs were making it too difficult to do the work. A $500 million power-plant contract was reportedly awarded to a bidder based on a proposal one page long. After a joint commission rejected the proposal, its members were replaced by the minister, and approval was duly obtained. But no plant has been built.

Where contracts are actually performed, their nominal cost is inflated sufficiently to provide handsome bribes for everyone involved in the process. Bribes paid to government ministers reportedly exceed $10 million.

Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier’s name or provide a good description of him.

Paul Bremer, meanwhile, had a slush fund in cash of more than $600 million in his office for which there was no paperwork. One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag. Three-quarters of a million dollars was stolen from an office safe, and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA and told to spend it “before the Iraqis take over.” Nearly $5 billion was shipped from New York in the last month of the CPA. Sources suggest that a deliberate attempt was being made to run down the balance and spend the money while the CPA still had authority and before an Iraqi government could be formed.

The only certified public-accounting firm used by the CPA to monitor its spending was a company called North Star Consultants, located in San Diego, which was so small that it operated out of a private home. It was subsequently determined that North Star did not, in fact, perform any review of the CPA’s internal spending controls. Today, no one can account for billions of those dollars or even suggest how the money was spent. And as the CPA no longer exists, there is also little interest in re-examining its transparency or accountability.

Bremer escaped Baghdad by helicopter two days before his proconsulship expired to avoid a possible ambush on the road leading to the airport, which he had been unable to secure. He has recently been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor he shares with ex-CIA Director George “Slam-dunk” Tenet.

Considerable fraud has been alleged regarding American companies, much of which can never be addressed because the Bush administration does not regard contracts with the CPA as pertaining to the U.S. government, even though U.S. taxpayer dollars were involved in some transactions.

Many of the contracts for work in Iraq were awarded on a cost-plus basis, in which an agreed-upon percentage of profit would be added to the actual costs of performing the contract. Such contracts are an invitation to fraud, and unscrupulous companies will make every effort to increase their costs so that the profits will also increase proportionally.

Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, has a no-bid monopoly contract with the Army Corps of Engineers that is now estimated to be worth $10 billion. In June 2005, Pentagon contracting officer Bunny Greenhouse told a congressional committee that the agreement was the “most blatant and improper contracting abuse” that she had ever witnessed, a frank assessment that subsequently earned her a demotion.

Halliburton has frequently been questioned over its poor record keeping, and critics claim that it has a history of overcharging for its services. In May 1967, a company called RMK/BRJ could not account for $120 million in materiel sent to Vietnam and was investigated several times for overcharging on fuel. RMK/BRJ is now known as KBR or Kellogg, Brown and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been the focus of congressional, Department of Defense, and General Accountability Office investigations. Defense Contract Audit Agency auditors have questioned Halliburton’s charges on a $1.6 billion fuel contract, claiming that the overcharges on the contract exceed $200 million. In one instance, the company charged the Army more than $27 million to transport $82,000 worth of fuel from Kuwait to Iraq. Halliburton has also been accused of billing the Army for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers, though it was only actually serving 14,000. In another operation, KBR purchased fleets of Mercedes trucks at $85,000 each to re-supply U.S. troops. The trucks carried no spare parts or even extra tires for the grueling high-speed run across the Kuwaiti and Iraqi deserts. When the trucks broke down on the highway, they were abandoned and destroyed rather than repaired.

Responding to complaints, Halliburton refused to permit independent auditing and inspected itself using so-called “Tiger Teams.” One such team stayed at the five-star Kuwait Kempinski Hotel while it was doing its audit, running up a bill of more than $1 million that was passed on to U.S. taxpayers.

Another U.S. firm well connected to the Bush White House, Custer Battles, has provided security services to the coalition, receiving $11 million in Iraqi funds including $4 million in cash in a sole-source contract to supply security at Baghdad International Airport. The company had never provided airport security before receiving the contract. It also received a $21 million no-bid contract to provide security for the exchange of Iraqi currency. It has been alleged that much of the currency “replaced” by Custer Battles has never been accounted for. The company also allegedly took over abandoned Iraqi-owned forklifts at the airport, repainted them, and then leased them back to the airport authority through a company set up in the Cayman Islands. Custer Battles reportedly set up a number of shell companies in offshore tax havens in Lebanon, Cyprus, and the Cayman Islands to handle the cash flow.

Two former company managers turned whistleblowers have charged that the company defrauded the U.S. government of at least $50 million. The Bush administration’s Justice Department has only reluctantly, and under pressure from a Newsweek exposé, supported the rights of the plaintiffs in the case. The White House has indicated that it is not interested in assisting other investigations of fraud in Iraqi contracting, preferring to regard the CPA as a “multinational entity” and thereby limiting its vulnerability in American courts.

Another American contractor, CACI International, which was involved in the Abu Ghraib interrogations, was accused by the GAO in April 2004 of having failed to keep records on hours of work that it was billing for and of routinely upgrading employee job descriptions so that more could be charged per employee per hour. Both are apparently common practices among contractors in Iraq, and audits routinely determine that there is little in the way of paperwork to support billings. The GAO report also confirms that many private security contractors in Iraq have been charging the U.S. government exorbitant fees for their services, frequently because the contracts allow security costs to be rolled into the overall cost of the contract without being itemized. In one case, contract security guards were effectively being billed at $33,000 per guard per month while the average rate for a security specialist worked out to between $13,000 and $20,000 per month.

The CPA also spread its largesse around the U.S. armed forces, distributing over $600 million in cash to four regional commanders to fund reconstruction projects as part of the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program. An audit of one region disclosed that 80 percent of the funds could not be accounted for, and more that $7 million in cash was missing. It is widely believed that many of the contracting agents working under the regional commands literally stole the money. In one reported instance, an American contracting officer doubled the price of a multimillion-dollar contract and brazenly explained that the extra money would be for his retirement fund.

Unfortunately, the corruption of the occupation outlived the departure of Paul Bremer and the demise of the CPA. A recent high-level investigation of the Iraqi interim government concluded that the corruption is now so pervasive as to be irreversible. One prominent businessman estimates that 95 percent of all business activity involves some form of bribery or kickback. The bureaucrats and fixers who live off of bribery are referred to by ordinary Iraqis as “Ali Babas,” named after the character in The Thousand and One Nights who was able to access riches from a treasure cave by saying “open sesame.” For the average Iraqi businessman, there was formerly only one hand out, that of Saddam’s designated minion. Now every hand is out. The educated and entrepreneurial are leaving the country in droves, as is most of the beleaguered Christian minority. Huge government appropriations are approved by Iraqi lawmakers and then simply disappear. Meanwhile, life for the average Iraqi does not improve, and oil production, water supplies, and electricity generation are all at lower levels than they were when the U.S. took control in 2003. The only thing that everyone knows is that all the money is gone and daily life in Iraq is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein.

The undocumented cash flow continued long after the CPA folded. Over $1.5 billion was disbursed to interim Iraqi ministries without any accounting, and more than $1 billion designated for provincial treasuries never made it out of Baghdad. More than $430 million in contracts issued by the Petroleum Ministry were unsupported by any documentation, and $8 billion were given to government ministries that had no financial controls in place. Nearly all of it disappeared, spent on “payroll,” wages for “ghost employees” in the Ministries of the Interior and Defense. In one case, an Army brigade receiving money to support 2,200 men was found to have fewer than 300 effectives. 602 actual guards at the Ministry of the Interior were billed as more than 8,200 for payroll purposes.

Iraqi Airways carried 2,400 employees even though it had not operated for over a year and had no planes. The airline itself was sold to an unidentified buyer without any paperwork to show for how much it was sold and what assets were included. It has been alleged that the buyer might well have been Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi.

Nearly all payrolls in the national guard and national police were also inflated, leading to uncertainty over how large the security forces actually were—still an open question. Absentees from the nominal rolls of police and soldiers provided by government ministries are believed to number in the tens of thousands, and as the United States Congress has figured out, frequently cited figures on available trained manpower are largely imaginary.

Even the “coalition of the willing” partners have been quick to cash in. Polish helicopters purchased as part of a $300 million deal with arms maker Bumar Ltd. were found to be obsolete, largely unflyable, and were actually rejected by the Iraqis. Bullets purchased from Poland by the Defense Ministry cost three times the normal international price. Five Polish peacekeepers have been arrested for demanding $90,000 in bribes. Both British and American soldiers have also demanded bribes from shopkeepers and travelers.

In yet another instance of take-it-while-you-can, a senior Interior Ministry official flew to Beirut in a helicopter accompanied by $10 million in newly printed Iraqi dinars. He has yet to return. Interim Iraqi President Iyad Allawi’s Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan transferred $500 million to a bank account in Lebanon, allegedly to buy weapons, in a case that continues to be murky. Shaalan is reportedly vacationing abroad and has not returned to Iraq. A Bremer favorite at the Defense Ministry, Ziad Tareq Cattan, was responsible for a number of shady arms-procurement deals. A warrant has been issued for his arrest, an unusual occurrence, and he is avoiding detention by staying with family in Erbil in Kurdistan.

Countless billions will never be accounted for, and the full cost of corruption has yet to be tallied. Sources report that much of the money that was designated for the development of a national army and police force is actually going to units that are exclusively Kurd or Shi’ite in expectation of a day of reckoning over the country’s oil supplies. The Kurds have made no secret of their desire to continue their autonomy-bordering-on-independence and have stated that they regard Kirkuk as their own. The Shi’ites have possession of the oil-producing region to the south and are using their control of the Interior Ministry to fill police ranks with their own pro-Iranian Badr Brigade members as well as militiamen drawn from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army. The Sunnis are the odd men out, virtually guaranteeing that, far from becoming the model democracy the U.S. set out to build, Iraq will descend deeper into chaos—aided in no small part by the culture of corruption we helped to fortify.
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates,
an international security consultancy.
*************
From: http://amconmag.com/2005/2005_10_24/cover.html

Daniel Estulin: Breaking the Silence ... Bilderberg exposed!

Award-winning investigative journalist Daniel Estulin writes: When presidents, prime ministers, bankers and generals rub shoulders with European royalty at the annual secret Bilderberg meeting, they discuss the business of running markets and wars without being accountable to the public.

Bilderberg's Plans for the World

The Bilderberg group's secret annual meeting determines many of the headlines and news developments that you will read about in the coming months. But the Establishment media completely black out any news of it and remain strangely reluctant to lift the curtain hiding this major event. A number of high-ranking members of the press who attend the annual meeting are sworn to secrecy, and news editors are held responsible if any of their journalists "inadvertently" report on what takes place. Yet few have ever heard of this exclusive and secretive group of the world's most powerful financiers, industrialists and political figures.

Although the Bilderberg group has lost some of its past luster, on May 5-8, 2005 it met at Rottach-Egern (in Munich, Germany) under its usual secrecy that makes a freemasonry lodge look like a playgroup. Staff at the hotel were photographed and put through special clearance. From porters to senior managers, the employees were warned (under the threat of never working in their country again) about the consequences of revealing any details of the guests to the press.

The discussions that the Bilderbergers engaged in this year and the consensus they reached -- deciding how the world should deal with European-American relations, the Middle East powder keg, the Iraq war, the global economy and how to stave off war in Iran -- will influence the course of Western civilization and the future of the entire planet. Ironically, they met behind closed doors, protected by a phalanx of armed guards.

After three straight years of open hostility and tension amongst the European, British and American Bilderbergers, caused by the war in Iraq, the aura of complete congeniality amongst them has returned. Bilderbergers have reaffirmed and remain united in their long-term goal to strengthen the role the United Nations plays in regulating global conflicts and relations.

However, it is important to understand that the Americans are no more the "Hawks" than the European Bilderbergers are the "Doves." Europeans joined in supporting the 1991 invasion of Iraq by US President George Bush Senior, celebrating (in the words of notable Bilderberg hunter Jim Tucker) the end of "America's Vietnam syndrome." Europeans also supported former US President Bill Clinton's invasion of Yugoslavia, bringing NATO into the operation.

UN Global Oil Tax and Peacebuilding Proposals

A much discussed subject in 2005 at Rottach-Egern was the concept of imposing a UN tax on people worldwide through a direct tax on oil at the well-head. This, in fact, sets a precedent. If enacted, it would be the first time that a non-governmental agency (read the United Nations) directly benefited from a tax on citizens of free and enslaved nations. The Bilderberg proposal calls for a tiny UN levy at the outset, which the consumer would hardly notice.

Jim Tucker, formerly of the court-killed Spotlight magazine, wrote in the American Free Press (June 14�21, 2004) that: "...establishing the principle that the UN can directly tax citizens of the world is important to Bilderberg. It is another giant step toward world government. Bilderbergers know that publicly promoting a UN tax on all people on Earth would meet with outrage. But they are patient; it [Bilderberg] first proposed a direct world tax years ago and celebrates the fact that it is now in the public dialogue with little public attention or concern."

Bilderberg wants "tax harmonisation" so that high-tax countries can compete with more tax-friendly nations -- including the United States -- for foreign investment. They would "harmonise" taxes by forcing the rate in the US and other countries to rise so that socialist Sweden's 58% level would be "competitive."

According to sources, an unidentified guest at the conference asked how global taxation can be sold to the American public. One European Union commissioner suggested using as the battering ram the rhetoric of helping countries build peaceful, stable societies once conflict subsides. Someone asked for the timing of the appeal. A former commissioner mentioned that the best time to ask for cash is once the conflict subsides and the world is subjected to brutal images of destruction. A Norwegian Bilderberger disagreed. What looked to be Bjorn T. Grydeland, Norway's ambassador to the European Union, said that, on the contrary, it's much easier to get world attention and money for a region when a conflict rages.

This was confirmed a posteriori when Denmark's foreign minister Per Stig Moller, during a debate in the United Nations on 26 May, stated on the record that "[i]f the international community is not able to act swiftly, the fragile peace is at risk, with loss of more lives as a consequence." Denmark holds the EU presidency until July 1, 2005, when it will be replaced by the UK. [The changeover took place just before we went to press. Ed.]

Bilderbergers are planning to use what they nominated as a UN Peacebuilding Commission, apparently to help win the peace in post-conflict countries, as one of the tools in secretly imposing the UN tax on an unsuspecting world population.

Jim Tucker said as much in his Bilderberg report in the American Free Press (May 23) when he wrote: "There was some informal discussion of timing for a vote in the United Nations on establishing a direct global tax by imposing a 10-cents-a-barrel levy on oil at the well-head. This is important to the Bilderberg goal of establishing the UN as a formal world government. Such a direct tax on individuals is symbolically important. Bilderberg's global tax proposal has been pending before the UN for three years but the issue has been blacked out by the Bilderberg-controlled US media."

Mark R. Warner, governor of Virginia and a first-time Bilderberg invitee, expressed concern about how much additional financial responsibility the United States would take on as a result. At this point, Jose M. Durao Barroso, president of the European Commission, expressed a view held by many within Bilderberg that the United States does not provide a fair share of economic aid to poor countries. My sources confirm Jim Tucker's report that "Kissinger and David Rockefeller, among other Americans, beamed and nodded approval."

Although the US pays more into the foreign-aid piggy bank than any country in the world, the Bilderbergers and the United Nations are poised to demand much more funding from it to meet the Peacebuilding proposal.

NGOs and the Global Neighbourhood

The rise of the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) is a development that former US President Clinton suddenly (one day after it was discussed at Rottach-Egern) suggested to be among "the most remarkable things that have happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall." Ironically, Clinton's statement was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, a paper represented at the Bilderberg meetings by its vice-president, Robert L. Bartley, until his death in December 2003, and its editorial page editor, Paul Gigot.

The Bilderbergers have been vigorously debating, for the first time, whether to have unelected, self-appointed environmental activists given positions of governmental authority on the governing board of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) -- the agency which controls the use of the atmosphere, outer space, the oceans and, for all practical purposes, biodiversity. This invitation for "civil society" to participate in global governance is described as "expanding democracy."

According to sources within Bilderberg, the status of NGOs would be elevated even further in the future. NGO activity would include agitating at the local level, lobbying at the national level and producing studies to justify global taxation through UN organizations such as Global Plan, one of Bilderberg's pet projects for over a decade.

The strategy to advance the global governance agenda specifically includes programs to discredit individuals and organizations that generate "internal political pressure" or "populist action" that fails to support the new global ethic.

The ultimate objective, according to sources, is to suppress democracy.

If the plan proceeds, UNEP, along with all the environmental treaties under its jurisdiction, would ultimately be governed by a special body of environmental activists, chosen only from accredited NGOs appointed by delegates to the General Assembly who are themselves appointed by the President of the United States, who himself is controlled by the Rockefeller-Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)-Bilderberg interlocking leadership.

This new mechanism would provide a direct route from the local, "on-the-ground," NGO affiliates of national and international NGOs to the highest levels of global governance. For example, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a group of affiliated NGOs, recently petitioned the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO asking for intervention in the plans of a private company to mine gold on private land near Yellowstone Park. The UNESCO committee did intervene, and immediately listed Yellowstone as a "World Heritage Site in Danger."

Under the terms of the World Heritage Convention, the United States is required to protect the park, even beyond the borders of the park and onto private lands if necessary.

The ideas being discussed, if implemented, would bring all the people of the world into a global neighborhood, managed by a worldwide bureaucracy under the direct authority of a minute handful of appointed individuals and policed by thousands of individuals, paid by accredited NGOs, and all certified to support a belief system that to many people is unbelievable and unacceptable.

A Lesson for Tony Blair

Bilderbergers are celebrating the result they wanted: the return of a much humbled Tony Blair to 10 Downing Street, with a much reduced parliamentary majority.

European Bilderbergers are still angry at him for supporting America's war in Iraq. While teaching Blair a useful lesson in international politics, Bilderbergers feel he is a far safer candidate to continue on the path of European integration than his conservative rival, Michael Howard.

The EU Referendum in France

The first day of secret meetings at Bilderberg 2005 was dominated by talk of the European Union referendum in France and whether President Chirac could persuade France to vote "Yes" on 29 May. A "Yes" vote, according to sources within Bilderberg, would put a lot of pressure on Tony Blair to finally deliver Britain into the waiting arms of the New World Order through its own referendum on the treaty, scheduled for 2006. Matthias Nass, Deputy Editor of Die Zeit, wondered out loud that a "No" vote in France could undoubtedly cause political turmoil in Europe and overshadow Britain's six-month EU presidency starting on 1 July.

Bilderbergers hope that Blair and Chirac, whose at times open animosity has spilled into the public arena on more than one occasion, can work together for mutual benefit and political survival. Another European Bilderberger added that both leaders must put behind them as quickly as possible all past disputes on such topics as Iraq, the liberalization of Europe's economy and the future of the budget rebate that Britain receives from the EU, and work towards complete European integration -- which could disintegrate if France's often "hard-headed and obstinate people," in the words of a British Bilderberger, do not do the right thing, meaning give up voluntarily their independence for the "greater good" of a European federal super-state!

A German Bilderberger insider said that France's "Yes" vote is in trouble because of the "outsourcing of jobs." "Jobs in Germany and France are going to Asia and Latvia [to take advantage of cheap labour]." Latvia is one of the former Soviet republics that have been admitted to the European Union, bringing the total membership to 25 nations. A German politician wondered out loud how Tony Blair will go about convincing Britons to embrace the European Constitution when, due to the outsourcing of jobs, both Germany and France are suffering 10 per cent unemployment while Britain is doing well economically.

The Neo-conservative Lobby

In full force was that faction: the so-called "neo-conservatives," who have determined that Israel's security should come at the expense of the safety of the United States and be central to all US foreign policy decisions.

Most notable among them is Richard N. Perle, who was investigated by the FBI for conducting espionage on behalf of Israel. Perle played a critical role in pushing the United States into the war against Iraq. On March 27, 2003, he was forced to resign from the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board after it was learned he'd been advising Goldman Sachs International, an habitual Bilderberg attendee, on how it might profit from the war in Iraq.

Another neo-conservative figure on hand was Michael A. Ledeen, an "intellectual's intellectual." Ledeen serves for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think-tank founded in 1943 and with which Richard Perle has long been associated. AEI and the Brookings Institution operate a Joint Center for Regulatory Studies (JCRS), the purpose being to hold lawmakers and regulators "accountable for their decisions by providing thoughtful, objective analyses of existing regulatory programs and new regulatory proposals." The JCRS pushes for cost-benefit analysis of regulations, which fits with AEI's (and the Bilderbergers') ultimate goal of deregulation.

These neo-conservatives were also joined this year at Bilderberg by a handful of other former top Washington policymakers and publicists known for their sympathies for Israel, including: Richard N. Haass, former State Department official and president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); Richard Holbrooke, former assistant secretary of state and "father" of the Dayton Accord; Dennis Ross, of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, effectively an offshoot of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA); and Paul Wolfowitz, the newly elected World Bank president.

American Criminals: Public Policy in Private

In the United States, the Logan Act states explicitly that it is against the law for federal officials to attend secret meetings with private citizens to develop public policies.

Although Bilderberg 2005 was missing one of its luminaries -- US State Department official John Bolton, who was testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations -- the US Government was well represented in Rottach-Egern by: Allan E. Hubbard, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and director of the National Economic Council; William Luti, Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense; James Wolfensohn, outgoing president of the World Bank; and Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State, an ideologue of the Iraq war and incoming president of the World Bank. By attending the Bilderberg 2005 meeting, these people broke United States federal law.

Journalistic Whores

Bilderberg, at one time or another, has had representatives of all major US and European newspapers and network news outlets attend. High-ranking members of the inadequately named "international free press" attend on their solemn promise to report nothing. This is how Bilderberg keeps its news blackout virtually complete in the United States and Europe.

This year's invitees included: Nicolas Beytout, editor-in-chief of Le Figaro; Oscar Bronner, publisher and editor of Der Standard; Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post; Matthias Nass, deputy editor of Die Zeit; Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief of Time; J. Robert S. Prichard, president and CEO of Torstar Media Group (Toronto Star); C�neyt Ulsevere, columnist for H�rriyet; John Vinocur, senior correspondent for the International Herald Tribune; Martin Wolf, associate editor of the Financial Times; Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International; Klaus Zumwinkel, chairman of Deutsche Post; and John Micklethwait, US editor of The Economist and Adrian Wooldridge, Washington correspondent for The Economist. Micklethwait and Wooldridge acted as the meeting's rapporteurs.

Declining Energy Reserves and Economic Downturn

Of course, discussion at Bilderberg 2005 turned to oil. An American Bilderberger expressed concern over the sky-rocketing oil price. One oil industry insider at the meeting remarked that growth is not possible without energy, and that according to all indicators the world's energy supply is coming to an end much faster than the world leaders have anticipated.

According to sources, Bilderbergers estimate the extractable world's oil supply will last a maximum of 35 years under current economic development and population. However, one of the representatives of an oil cartel remarked that they must factor into the equation the population explosion and economic growth as well as demand for oil in China and India.

Under the revised conditions, there is apparently only enough oil to last for 20 years.

* No oil spells the end of the world's financial system -- which has already been acknowledged by the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, two newspapers that are regularly represented at the annual Bilderberg conference.

The conclusion: expect a severe downturn in the world's economy over the next two years as Bilderbergers try to safeguard the remaining oil supply by taking money out of people's hands. In a recession or, at worst, a depression, the population will be forced to dramatically cut down their spending habits, thus ensuring a longer supply of oil to the world's rich as they try to figure out what to do.

During cocktails one afternoon, a European Bilderberger noted that there is no plausible alternative to hydrocarbon energy. One American insider stated that currently the world uses between four and six barrels of oil for every new barrel it finds, and that the prospects for a short-term breakthrough are slim at best. This confirms a public statement made in 2003 by IHS Energy, the world's most respected consulting firm cataloguing oil reserves and discoveries, that for the first time since the 1920s there was not a single discovery of an oil field in excess of 500 million barrels.

One invitee asked for an estimate of the world's accessible conventional oil supply. The amount was quoted at approximately one trillion barrels. As a side note of interest, the planet consumes a billion (1,000,000,000) barrels of oil every 11.5 days. Another Bilderberger asked about the hydrogen alternative to oil.

The US government official agreed gloomily that hydrogen's salvation of the world's imminent energy crisis is a fantasy.

At the 2005 Bilderberg conference, the oil industry was represented by: John Browne, chief executive officer of BP; Sir John Kerr, director of Royal Dutch/Shell; Peter D. Sutherland, chairman of BP; and Jeroen van der Veer, chairman of the committee of managing directors at Royal Dutch/ Shell. (Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, Royal Dutch/Shell's principal shareholder, is a fully fledged member of the Bilderbergers. Her father, Prince Bernhard, was one of the founders of the group back in 1954.)

It should be noted that in late 2003, oil and gas giant Royal Dutch/Shell announced it had overstated its reserves by as much as 20%; in early 2004 it reduced its estimated oil and gas reserves by about 4.5 billion barrels, but in October had to apply an additional cut of 1.15 billion barrels in reserve estimates. In fact, Shell's three cuts in reserve estimates prompted the resignation of its co-chairman.

* The Los Angeles Times (January 18, 2005) reported: "For petroleum firms, reserves amount to nothing less than 'the value of the company'."

At Rottach-Egern in May 2005, the industry's top executives tried to figure out how to keep the truth about diminishing oil reserves from reaching the public. Public knowledge of the diminishing reserves directly translates into lower share prices which could destroy financial markets, leading to a collapse of the world economy.

An American Bilderberger wondered what it would take for the oil price to go back to US$25 a barrel. Another American Bilderberger, believed to be Allan Hubbard, laconically stated that the general public does not realise that the price for cheap oil can be the bursting of the debt bubble. Cheap oil slows economic growth because it depresses commodity prices and reduces world liquidity.

There is a strong indication, based on the information reported from the Bilderberg 2005 meeting in Rottach-Egern, that the US Federal Reserve is extremely concerned about the debt bubble. One American Bilderberger reported that if the price of oil were to go down to its previous low of $25 a barrel, the debt-driven asset bubble would explode. Martin S. Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, added that $50 a barrel involves greater cash flow.

According to publicly available information, the United States consumes daily approximately 20 million barrels of oil out of a total world consumption of 84 million barrels. At $50 a barrel, the aggregate oil bill for the US comes to $1 billion a day, $365 billion a year, about 3 per cent of 2004 US gross domestic product (GDP). About 60% of US consumption is imported at a cost of $600 million a day, or $219 billion a year.

A short, stout man asked if the surging oil price would influence economic growth. Someone sitting in the front row noted that higher energy prices do not take money out of the economy; they merely shift profit allocation from one business sector to another. After further discussion, a US General commented that war spending helps jump-start the economy, noting that the trick to keeping the opposition at bay is to limit collateral damage to foreign soil.

A British Bilderberger noted that oil at $120 a barrel would greatly benefit Britain and the United States, but Russia and China would be the biggest winners. An expert in international relations and policy studies noted that for the Chinese this would be a real bonanza. The Chinese import energy not for domestic consumption but, instead, to fuel its growing cheap exports -- a cost that would be duly passed on to foreign buyers. A European banker pointed out that Russia could effectively devalue the dollar by re-denominating its energy trade with Europe from dollars into euros, forcing Europe's central banks to rebalance their foreign exchange reserves in favor of the euro. Jean-Claude Trichet, Governor of the European Central Bank, was present during the debate.

Globalized Trading and the Rift with China

European and American Bilderbergers, realizing the most urgent of needs to expand into developing markets in order to help sustain the illusion of endless growth, have agreed to name Pascal Lamy, a French socialist and fanatical supporter of a European super-state, as the next World Trade Organization (WTO) president. It should be remembered that Washington gave conditional support to Lamy's nomination in exchange for European support of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank.

According to insider sources within the Bilderbergers, Lamy was chosen to help steer the global trading system through a time of rising protectionist sentiment in rich countries such as France and Germany, both reeling from high unemployment and reticent to accept increasingly muscular demands for market access from emerging economies. Third World States, for example, are insisting on cuts to EU and US farm subsidies. The WTO liberalization drive collapsed in acrimony in Seattle in 1999 and again in Cancun in 2003.

The Bilderbergers have secretly agreed on the need to force the poor countries into a globalized market for cheap goods while simultaneously forcing the poor into becoming customers. The current rift with China is a good example, as the Chinese have flooded Western countries with cheap goods, amongst them textiles, driving down prices. As a trade-off, the Bilderbergers have entered into an emerging market ripe and vulnerable to superior Western know-how. Similar developing countries are slowly acquiring more purchasing power, and the industrialized world is gaining a foothold in their domestic economies by targeting them for cheap exports.

Further discussion on China was led off with a series of rhetorical questions from the speaker.

Is China really abusing its competitive advantage, or is it being victimized by the US and the EU?

Is a trade war imminent?

Should China revalue the Yuan (its currency), and, if so, how should it do this?

An American Bilderberger noted that China in 2005 is one of the leading world economic powers whose actions influence the world economy. Another American, believed to be but not positively identified as Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, said that if China doesn't revalue the Yuan it would cause the entire world trade system to go out of whack. Someone mentioned that the current situation could be dangerous for the Chinese economy due to the creation of excess liquidity.

Elena Nemirovskaya, founder of the Moscow School of Political Studies, asked what would happen if the Yuan were allowed to float freely. An economist responded that this could bring about serious consequences to the world's financial markets. China's foreign exchange reserves are to a large extent made up of US Treasury bills. An appreciation of the Yuan would cause its dollar reserves to depreciate.

A German Bilderberger pointed out that this could force the Federal Reserve to have to raise interest rates, thus causing the current housing boom in the US to come to a screeching halt. An oversized Dutchman pointed out that the International Monetary Fund needs to play an active role in helping the Yuan.

"Is there a real danger, then," asked an Italian Bilderberger, "of this dispute deteriorating into an all-out trade war?" "Not likely," according to an unidentified blond man from Scandinavia, believed to be a Swede, "because China has totally integrated itself into the market economy."

An American Bilderberger and a member of the US government noted that all the posturing is part of the act to keep the voters back home happy.

China's moves into the Mekong region did not go unnoticed at the conference. William J. Luti, US Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, explained that China's rapid expansion into the Mekong region, comprising Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, could threaten US interests in the area. Such moves by China would give it an enhanced role in South-East Asia.

Over the last several years, China has invested heavily in transport infrastructure development linking China's southwestern Yunan province and the Mekong region.

A European Bilderberger pointed out that China is heavily dependent on oil imports. Someone asked for a figure. A tall, lanky man with glasses, believed to be Jeroen van der Veer, Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, responded that some 40% of China's supply is imported. In fact, China's move into the Mekong region is the result of acute awareness that the country's energy supplies are vulnerable to interference. Overall, 32% of energy supplies, China's lifeblood, passes through the narrow and easily blocked Strait of Malacca.

Indonesia-Malaysia Stand-off

A political and military confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia in the oil-rich Sulawesi Sea (both claim territorial right to the area of Ambalat) was the topic of much animated discussion among several American and European Bilderbergers during Friday afternoon cocktails. An American Bilderberger waving his cigar suggested using the United Nations to "further a peace policy in the region."

In fact, Bilderbergers at the lounge table all agreed that such a conflict might well give them an excuse to garrison the disputed area with UN "Peacekeepers" and thus ensure their ultimate control over the exploitation of this treasure, meaning untapped oil reserves.

Nobel Peace Prize Pressure

The appearance at Bilderberg 2005 of Nobel Peace Prize Committee Secretary Geir Lundestad was considered likely to mean, according to sources familiar with the discussion, a full court press by the American, British and Israeli delegation to the Nobel committee to prevent the Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu from winning the coveted award.

Vanunu spent 18 years in an Israeli prison -- eleven and a half of them in solitary confinement -- for providing evidence of Israel's nuclear arsenal to the London Sunday Times newspaper in October 1986. Should Vanunu win the Nobel for peace, it would bring uncomfortable attention to the Israeli nuclear arsenal, especially in the face of growing evidence that Israel and the United States are about to punish Iran for trying to develop its own nuclear weapons.

Strong pressure was applied on Lundestad not to choose Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector in Iraq, nor Mohamed El Baradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whom President Bush had tried to remove for not being tough enough on Iran.

Some of this year's other nominees are US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for supposedly protecting world peace; the European Union; French President Jacques Chirac, the main culprit for the "No" vote on the European Constitution; former Czech President Vaclav Havel; the now-deceased Pope John Paul II; Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya; and US Senator Richard Lugar and former senator Sam Nunn for their Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which is intended to dismantle nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union.

The Iran�Russia�China Alliance

According to reports, a French Bilderberger pointedly asked Henry Kissinger if the US Government's saber-rattling against Iran means the beginning of new hostilities. Richard Haass, CFR President, after asking for his turn to speak, dismissed the notion of an Iran invasion as unrealistic due to the sheer physical size of the country and its population size, not to mention the billions of dollars involved in getting the operation off the ground. Up to the eyeballs in the Iraq quagmire, the United States military is wary of any new adventures in hostile terrain against a much healthier enemy, both better prepared and organized.

A Swiss Bilderberger asked if a hypothetical attack on Iran would involve a pre-emptive strike against its nuclear sites. Richard Haass replied that such an attack would prove to be counterproductive because Tehran's counterattack options could range from "unleashing terrorism and promoting instability in Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, to triggering oil price increases that could trigger a global economic crisis." During dinner, according to several sources, Richard Perle criticized Haass's position and explained his opposition to his view.

A woman believed to be Heather Munroe-Blum, Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, Quebec, Canada, asked a rhetorical question about what would happen if Iran were to continue building its nuclear arsenal. Haass replied that in this scenario, the United States would have no choice but to grant Iran the same status as it does to Pakistan and India.

A US General commented that the China�Iran�Russia alliance is changing the geopolitical situation in the area. Rapprochement between Russia and China is viewed by the Bilderbergers as a significant event not to be taken lightly, even though it has received little media attention in the West.

A secret US government report was cited wherein, according to sources, the Chinese have spent upwards of several billion dollars in acquiring Russia's latest and most sophisticated weapons technology. Someone pointed out that the Sino-Russian alliance is not limited to military trade and that the non-military exchange of goods has grown 100% since the beginning of the Bush presidency.

A delegate at the conference, believed but not positively identified by Secret Service sources to be Anatoly Sharansky, a former Israeli Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, stated categorically during Friday night cocktails that the counterweight to the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis is the US-Israel-Turkey alliance. A financial expert from a European nation intervened by stating that Russia is much better off financially today than four years ago because tax revenue generated by fuel and arms production and exports as a result of heavy emphasis on military production has financed strong growth of wages and pension incomes, boosting private consumption.

A German Bilderberger pointedly asked Richard Perle if the "war on terrorism" will intensify over the second term of the Bush presidency. Perle reportedly gave no reply but screwed up his face and looked away.

The feeling of "enough is enough" wasn't limited to the European Bilderbergers, wary of Bush's delirious, Hitler-like proclamations of regime changes worldwide.

Bilderberg luminary Richard Haass pointedly told Richard Perle during Saturday night cocktails that the Bush Administration has overestimated its ability to change the world. Haass, according to several sources at the conference, is reported to have stated that regime change can be attractive because it is "less distasteful than diplomacy and less dangerous than living with new nuclear states." However, he noted: "There is only one problem: it is highly unlikely to have the desired effect soon enough."

A Possible Attack on Iran's Nuclear Facilities

The presence of US General James L. Jones, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and Retired US Army General John M. Keane at the Bilderberg meeting in Germany suggested to us that the next stage of the conquest is about to begin.

An American neo-con at an afternoon drink-fest said he was convinced that the "Iranian opposition movement" will unseat the mullahs. Nicolas Beytout of Le Figaro exclaimed: "You don't really believe that!" A tall, bald, well-dressed Swiss gentleman, believed to be Pascal Couchepin, head of the powerful Department of Home Affairs, replied reflexively that it will only succeed in having the Iranians rally behind their government. He ended by saying: "You don't know Iranians."

Tempers boiled over momentarily when a French Bilderberger, raising his voice, told Kissinger that "an attack on Iran will escalate out of control." According to sources working for the CIA and the special unit of the US Army charged with protecting the US delegation at Rottach-Egern, both the CIA and the FBI are in open revolt against the Bush White House.

A member of the Greek Parliament asked Eival Gilady, strategic adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: "What would happen if Iran were to retaliate?" Someone pointed out that even if the United States or Israel were to show restraint in their use of tactical nuclear weapons, an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would surely not only engulf neighbor states, raising the likelihood of a broader war, but also succeed in creating a nuclear disaster through nuclear radiation spilling over a wide area.

As a follow-up question, someone asked: "How much of this war has to do with America doing its utmost to prevent Iran from becoming a regional power?" A French Bilderberger wished to know if the impending attack on Iran would involve the United States and Israel working in tandem, or if it would be a NATO operation. The question was directed at NATO Secretary-General Jaap G. de Hoop Scheffer. Another European Bilderberger wanted to know how the US was planning to cope with three wars simultaneously, referring to Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran.

The reader should be reminded that there are now 150,000 US troops deployed in Iraq who are unable to move to another theatre of operations because of effective resistance tactics. The Israeli delegation was pressed to answer if Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The answer was incoherent.

What is so terrifying about Iran as a theatre of operations is that, according to our deep sources (both of whom belong to the Bilderberg group), there are two alternative dates set for the invasion. The earliest possible date would be in the "deadest of summer," some time in August, and the other alternative is a late autumn campaign. This substantially confirms the information provided by Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector, who stated that "George W. Bush has signed off on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005" (Aljazeera, March 30, 2005), although he did go on to clarify that the June date suggests that the US and Israel are "in a state of readiness."

Russian vs American Foreign Policy

Policy discussion began with a European expert on international relations pointing out that over the next several years Russia is poised to assert itself and increasingly challenge Bush Government foreign policy goals.

Someone openly asked the committee if the world is safer today than in 2001 and if it will be safer in four years' time. A Dutchman responded by saying there is little doubt that the hand of international terrorism has been substantially strengthened by the US Government's heavy-handed policy in the Middle East. A Danish Bilderberger wondered about what had happened to the US promise to take a lower-key approach in Iraq -- referring to the heavy-handed tactics employed by American troops in the siege of Fallujah, which played an important role in alienating a large cross-section of moderate Arab states. Additionally, the Dutchman pointed out, terrorism hasn't been confined to the Iraq theatre of operations but has escalated across Asia, Africa and most of the Middle East.

A blonde woman, believed to be Therese Delpech, Director of Strategic Affairs for the Atomic Energy Commission, said that unilateralist policy actions by the US will only succeed in alienating friendly nations and emboldening enemy combatants.

"US is not all-powerful ... it must coordinate its policy with other great powers to achieve its ends."

An oil expert believed to be from Britain, possibly Sir John Kerr of Royal Dutch Shell, focused on the oil pipeline from Siberia to northern China. The Bilderbergers openly wondered at the medium-term repercussions of this deal. An American investment banker asked just how much oil is expected to flow through this pipeline. Another member of the oil cartel offered 65-80 million tonnes per year as a ballpark figure.

India's Missile Tests

During Saturday night cocktails at the bar, neo-con Richard Perle was seen and heard talking to a group of Bilderbergers, amongst them Philippe Camus, President of the European Aeronautic Defense & Space Company (EADS), Donald Graham of the Washington Post and General James L. Jones about the near-future test-firing of India's Agni 3 intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. General Jones added that such a weapon would greatly increase India's capabilities because, according to the four-star general, India's strategic deterrents will be able to strike targets deep inside neighboring China. In fact, Dr M. Natarajan, head of the prestigious Defense Research & Development Organization (DRDO), said as much two weeks later on May 17 in New Delhi.

The 2005 German Elections

The Bilderbergers also discussed how to dust off the "boring" image of Angela Merkel, Germany's "future leader," ahead of the German elections on September 18, 2005.

A short, oversized male Bilderberger offered an opinion that in order for the widest cross-section of the German public to accept Merkel (leader of the Christian Democratic Union opposition) as Chancellor, it would be important to give a new definition to the term "family values." German Bilderbergers well versed in the conservative Bavarian collective psyche believe that Merkel, a divorcee with a doctorate in physics, doesn't have a "reliable" enough image to attract sufficient votes in this staunchly conservative area of the country. According to people within earshot of the discussion, the idea "in the up-coming campaign would be to stress the importance of families rather than marriage as an institution."

Bilderbergers pushing Gerhard Schroeder aside in favour of a new candidate could very well signify that, after three years of strife between American and European Bilderbergers over the war in Iraq, the secret society is ready to move forward with a much-revised and more cohesive policy. It must be remembered that Schroeder, along with French President Chirac, was one of the most vociferous European critics of the US-led Iraq intervention.

Both Schroeder, representing the left, and Merkel, representing the right, are owned by the Bilderbergers. It has been the group's policy since its inception in 1954 to own both horses in the race.

For the record, every US President belongs to the Bilderberg group or its interlocked sister organization, the Council on Foreign Relations. Although Bush Junior didn't personally attend the meeting in Rottach-Egern, the US government was well represented by William Luti, Richard Perle, Dennis Ross and Allan Hubbard.

Towards a One World Government

History teaches by analogy, not identity. The historical experience is not one of staying in the present and looking back; rather, it is one of going back into the past and returning to the present with a wider and more intense consciousness of the restrictions of our former outlook.

If democracy is the rule of the people, then secret government agendas and sinister, influence-peddling cliques which stand for cunning selfishness are incompatible with it. The whole idea of clandestine spheres of influence waging secret campaigns is therefore foreign to the notion of democracy and must be fought with zealous determination.

Through lies and obfuscations, Bilderbergers are desperately trying to foist onto the unwilling world population a totalitarian One World Government, a single global currency and a syncretic universal religion.

Those of us who care deeply about the future of politics -- domestic and international -- cannot afford to ignore the fact that the grimly political One World Government is no longer merely a shadow subculture. It has, in fact, emerged as the dominant force in world affairs.

Daniel Estulin
daniel.estulin@piensa.es

Award-winning investigative journalist Daniel Estulin is based in Spain where his book "Bilderberg Exposed" (Planeta, Madrid) climbed to #2 in the Spanish charts with more than 40,000 copies sold in the first three weeks. Estulin admits to an admiration of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez Frias "and his fight against the Bilderberg-controlled US government." Daniel Estulin may be contacted at email daniel.estulin@piensa.es
==================================================================
From: VHeadline.com Venezuela
http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=46238

Columbus & the Colonial Legacy

by S RICKY ROGERS‘

new internationalist
issue 226 - December 1991

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ Wayne Ellwood explores the myth of discovery
and looks at the famous mariner’s impact on the land and people of the Americas.

On a fine summer’s day the twin spires of the Martyr’s Shrine are clearly etched against a cobalt blue sky. The solid stone church, hewn from cold granite, has a commanding view of the rich farmland to the south and, just barely visible to the north, the shining silver lip of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron - one of the largest of North America’s Great Lakes.

Lake Huron is named after the indigenous people that used to inhabit this region of southern Ontario. Early French fur traders gave them the name Huron, though they called themselves the Wendat.

A century after Christopher Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, the Wendat were still a thriving nation of 30,000 people, largely untouched by the expanding legions of white Europeans probing the continent for wealth. They grew corn, beans and squash in the fertile alluvial soil, and lived in bark-covered longhouses in small tribal communities. Their lives were tuned to the cyclical rhythm of the seasons; as with most native people the physical and the spiritual world were one.

Today the Wendat are gone, though archaeologists continue to poke and prod the woods and fields of Huronia for remnants of their culture. Yet you can still catch a glimpse of their lives by wandering across the highway from the church to see ‘Ste Marie Among the Hurons’ - an astonishingly detailed, historical reconstruction of an early Christian mission run by French Jesuits. Fresh-faced college students in period costume re-enact life on the mission; men and women from a nearby Ojibway reserve take the part of the Huron.

The Ste Marie mission thrived for barely ten years, from 1640 to 1650, an outpost of Christianity in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, nearly 4,000 miles from Paris. At its peak 60 Europeans lived there including 23 priests - known to the Wendat as the ‘black robes’. By the time the Jesuits left, the Huron people had virtually disappeared.

What happened? Trading rivalries, stirred up by British and Dutch traders to the south, set in motion a deadly assault on Huron villages by other Indian groups, members of the Iroquois League. In March, 1649 a thousand Mohawk and Seneca warriors attacked the Huron. Two Jesuit priests were killed and eventually a shrine above the old mission of Ste Marie was built. Nearly 10,000 Huron, along with a handful of priests, took refuge on an island in Georgian Bay - known today as Christian Island. By spring, starvation, disease and cold had reduced their numbers to fewer than 300 people.¹

The Huron tragedy is one small footnote in the history of the Americas that has unfolded over the last 500 years. Unfortunately, the ingredients are all too familiar: commerce, Christianity, racism, disease and death. The Jesuits at Ste Marie, like their Spanish predecessors farther south, were men of their time. Both were steeped in the twisted religiosity and arrogance of the mediaeval Church. And both believed in the ‘doctrine of discovery’ which was to undergird the centuries of imperial expansion which followed. Europeans saw themselves at the apex of civilization; whatever European nation first ‘discovered’ another land had the right to colonize it, regardless of the people who lived there.

Hungry for gold
Within months of Columbus’ first landfall in the ‘new world’ Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal edict stating: ‘The Catholic faith and Christian religion, especially in our times shall be exalted, broadened and spread in every part of the world, salvation shall be sought for all souls, barbarian nations shall be subdued and led back to the faith.’

For the gold-hungry Spaniards this divine command quickly became a rationale for centuries of barbaric treatment of native Americans. Columbus himself set the stage on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the site of his first settlement. By his second voyage, in 1495, he was desperate for gold to repay the Spanish bankers who were financing him. Columbus refused to believe there was almost no gold on the island; instead he forced the island’s Taino inhabitants to bring him a ‘hawk’s bell’ full of gold dust every three months. The natives were made to wear a copper disc around their necks to prove they’d paid their tribute. Those caught without a disc had their arms hacked off, or were murdered outright.²

The conquistadors who followed Columbus were driven by the same frenzied greed. When Hemando Cortés met the Aztec ambassadors of the great lord Moctezuma in 1519 he was dazzled by the gold jewellery that adorned their bodies. ‘Send me some of it,’ the Spaniard ordered, ‘because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.’ - an apt description of the spiritual vacuum at the centre of the European soul.³ Several months later, when the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had been captured, nearly a quarter of a million Aztec warriors lay dead.

Thirty years later the Catholic priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, wrote his famous Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he graphically described the depredations of the Spanish fortune seekers. The Spaniards hurled themselves on the Indians ‘like wolves after days of starvation’, he wrote. ‘For 40 years they have done nothing but torture, murder, harass, afflict torment and destroy them with extraordinary, incredible,. innovative and previously unheard of cruelty ... Some natives they hung on gibbets, and it was their reverential custom to gather at a time sufficient victims to hang 13 in a row, and thus piously to commemorate Christ and the 12 Apostles.’

Las Casas estimated that 50 million Indians perished in Latin America and the Caribbean within 50 years of Columbus’ landing. Scholars now reckon that 90 per cent of the indigenous population of the Americas was wiped out in a century and a half - the greatest demographic collapse in the history of the planet and the proportional equivalent of nearly half a billion people today.

Much of that death and destruction was caused by illness. The people of the Americas had little resistance to old-world diseases like influenza, measles and small-pox. These imported pathogens cut a swath across the land, decimating whole Indian nations, often before the Europeans reached them. The Annals of the Cakchiquels, written during the Spanish invasion by one of the largest Maya groups in Guatemala, capture the terror of the times:

‘Great was the stench of the dead After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and the vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible. Your grandfathers died, and with them died the son of the king and his brothers and kinsmen ... oh, my sons! We were born to die!’⁴

Las Casas argued passionately that the Indians had souls like the Spaniards and should be treated with respect. But to no avail. The ideology of racial superiority was already firmly in place. Native people were damned outside the Christian faith, a point which was emphasized in the infamous requiriemento of the Spanish Crown. The Indians were given a choice: accept the Christian god willingly or face the consequences. The conquistador, Gonzalo de Alvarado, sent an abridged version to the Maya leader Kaibil Balam before attacking:

‘Let it be known that our coming is beneficial ... because we bring tidings of the true God and Christian Religion sent by the Pope - the Vicar of Jesus Christ, God and Man - and the Emperor King of Spain, so that you may become Christians peacefully of your own free will; but should you refuse the peace we offer, then the death and destruction that follow will be entirely of your own account.’⁵

Having demonized native people as a ‘dark force’ living outside the norms of civilization it was a simple step to apply the same label to black Africans. Columbus himself was a great advocate of slavery, and crammed 500 Taino people into a ship on his second voyage home. Later he proposed in a letter to the Spanish Queen Isabella: ‘The savage and cannibalistic Caribs should be exchanged as slaves against livestock to be provided by merchants in Spain.’

Slaves were soon captured from the West coast of Africa to replace the fast-dying native Americans: 4,000 were sold in Cuba and Hispaniola in 1517. The trade quickly took off as the demand for cheap agricultural labour increased in the new colonies of Brazil and Jamaica. Hundreds of boats crossed the Atlantic, disgorging their human cargoes in the ports of Kingston, Havana and later, Charleston, in North Carolina. The history of the slave trade is now well documented. And though the numbers can’t convey the cruelty and suffering, they bear repeating - just as the horror of the Nazi Holocaust should be studied anew by every generation.

Ideology of racism
The Atlantic slave trade lasted nearly 400 years during which time 15 million Africans were shipped to the Americas. Conditions during the crossing were so horrific that between a half and a third of the African captives died on route. Of the rest, most died within a decade of their arrival in the strange new land. By the time slavery was officially abolished in the late 1800s, one in four Africans was a slave.

Black Africans and indigenous Americans were yoked together as subhuman savages who could join the expanding Christian world - or be swept aside. The French priest, Father Dutertre, neatly summed up the dominant view of slavery in the 17th century: ‘Their servitude,’ he wrote, ‘is the principle of their happiness and their disgrace is the cause of their salvation.’⁶

Thus the ideology of racism was legitimized by the teachings of the Church. Both blacks and native people could be abused and exploited in the pursuit of wealth without moral qualm.

In their self-righteous desire to control the natives and subdue the vast wilderness, the Spanish - and later the French and English - attempted to rebuild Europe in the Americas. Aztec and Mayan temples were destroyed and their stones used to build the churches and cathedrals of the conquerors. It was inevitable that the destruction of Indian nations soon turned to the destruction of the natural environment. But what was it about this boundless, ‘new land’ and the ‘pagan practises’ of native Americans that caused Europeans to react with agitation and revulsion?

A clue lies in the ancient earth-based spirituality that native Americans practised and which Europeans looked at with both fear and longing. For Indian people the natural world was inseparable from the spiritual world. Time was circular, like the great Aztec calendar, and myth was as palpable as the rocks or the trees. All nature was a cathedral.

The American historian Frederick Turner argues convincingly that Indian spirituality was feared precisely because it was so appealing to European Christians whose own myths of meaning had been gutted by the Church:

‘In the same way that civilized men (sic) had cleared the earth, pruned back the forests, planted villages, towns and cities, so had Christianity stripped its world of magic and mystery, and of the possibility of spiritual renewal through itself. In cutting down the sacred trees in the mystic groves, in building its sanctuaries on the rubble of the chthonic shrines, and in branding all vestiges of ancient mythic practises [as] vain, impious and superstitious, the Church had effectively removed divinity from its world... its people [became] alienated sojourners in a spiritually barren world where the only outlet for the urge to life was the restless drive onward ...'³

The natural world became a satanic place of dark menace for the Europeans, an environment to be tamed and remade in the service of human progress. The natives on the other hand were lost to ‘the ooze of night and nature from which Christian history had redeemed itself.’ The only option, Turner says, was to take possession without becoming possessed: to take secure hold on the lands beyond and yet hold them at a rigidly maintained spiritual distance.’

Modern pirates
This the colonizing Europeans did with a vengeance. From Columbus to the present day the natural wealth of the Americas has been plundered, wildlife exterminated and the land, water and air poisoned. In the United States alone more than 140 major animal and bird species have become extinct since 1492.⁷ And still the essential environmental message of Indian people remains to be heard:

‘Without [the land and animals] our spirits will die. Non-natives sometimes think we are being romantic when we talk about these things. This is not about romance. This is reality and survival,’ says Norma Kassi from the Gwitch’in Nation in the Canadian Yukon.⁸

Today the single-minded greed of the conquistadors has been replaced by the bloodless ‘bottom line’ of corporate accountants. Multinational corporations have become the modern-day pirates, working hand-in-hand with the nation states that now occupy the lands of the Kayapo and the Apaché.

Whether it is timber on the land of the Gitksan-Wetsuwetan in British Columbia, or oil on the land of the Huarani in Ecuador, the rights of native Americans are still being trampled. Today, not a single country in the Americas recognizes native people as distinct nations with the right to self-government.

Nor has the other main legacy of the Columbus venture been dismantled. The ideology of racism continues to scar social relations and harmony in the Americas, from Chile to Canada. Afro-Americans and other people of colour are amongst the very poorest, with sky-high unemployment, decrepit housing, inadequate health care and crippling rates of alcoholism and disease. In the US, home of the ‘New World Order’, 43 per cent of all black children are born into poverty and the only stable jobs for young black men are in the army. Yet across the Americas these same people are being called upon to celebrate the anniversary of Columbus.

* * *

October 12, 1992 marks the 500th anniversary of what author Kirkpatrick Sale calls the beginning of ‘the European conquest of the world’. By the time next year has passed most of us will know more than we cared, or wanted to know, about Christopher Columbus, the middle-aged Italian sailor whose haphazard voyage across the Atlantic set in motion the colonial era.

But there are other lessons about which we will have a great deal to learn. The legacy of Christopher Columbus is still with us - the process of colonization and dispossession is still underway. But the hidden history of two continents is only slowly emerging. And the real ‘discovery’ of the Americas has yet to take place.

1 ‘The Jesuits and the Fur Trade’ by Bruce Trigger, from Sweet Promises ed. JR Miller (University of Toronto Press, 1991).
2 Columbus: His Enterprise, Exploding the Myth, Hans Koning (Monthly Review Press/LAB, 1991).
3 Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, Frederick Turner (Rutgers University Press, 1983).
4 Central America: A Nation Divided, RL Woodward (Oxford University Press, 1985).
5 George W Lovell, cited in Time Among the Maya, Ronald Wright (Penguin Books, 1990).
6 ‘The Voice of the Victims’, by Laennec Hurbon, Concilium, 1492-1992.
7 The conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale (Knopf, 1990).
8 ‘On the Land Forever’, speech to the First Interamerican Congress of Indigenous Peoples on Management and Conservation of Natural Resources, Panama City, 1989.

The Pretense Of Innocence
In A Poisoned Game

Remember those halcyon days of youth
when they taught us how to kill?
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
9-29-5

Show me a man who shoots a good game of pool and I'll show you a wasted youth.
- Damon Runyon

In order that the masses themselves may not guess what they are about WE FURTHER DISTRACT THEM WITH AMUSEMENTS, GAMES, PASTIMES, PASSIONS, PEOPLE'S PALACES .... SOON WE SHALL BEGIN THROUGH THE PRESS TO PROPOSE COMPETITIONS IN ART, IN SPORT IN ALL KINDS: these interests will finally distract their minds from questions in which we should find ourselves compelled to oppose them. Growing more and more unaccustomed to reflect and form any opinions of their own, people will begin to talk in the same tone as we because we alone shall be offering them new directions for thought ... of course through such persons as will not be suspected of solidarity with us.
- Protocols of Zion, 13:3 http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/przion5.htm

If the media can turn murderous monsters like George W. Bush into heroes, why shouldn't they turn an angel like Cindy Sheehan - bonafide representative of the mother of us all and only preaching for the welfare of us all! - into a devil?
- Johnny Barzakh

Ah, football, and the sound of a marching band, the snarfing of hamburgers and sipping of Schnapps on a crisp autumn day.

The task of the quarterback, surveying the field over the upturned butts of his linemen, is to identify obstacles to his objective, which is to get the ball into the end zone. You get "points" for that, and can "win the game." This is where we learn to regard people as obstacles rather than as actual and necessary parts of that thing we call our "self" (which means we abuse people for "points," just like in the real world, we abuse people for "money"). The concept that others are actually parts of our selves is mutilated in the newspapers every day, following the social policy that personal alienation from family and friends leads to more consumer spending; this policy makes us buy things to try and restore our shattered security. Much like the Book of Revelation, football sounds like a coded suicide mission to me. But then, life is a suicide mission. No reason to hold back. No reason not to be honest. Just understand what rituals mean and you'll score the real touchdown of connecting with the beauty of knowing.

Amid reds and golds and all the shimmering shades in between, October brings a resplendent hug of exhilarating colors to the pristinely manicured hills of Vermont. In the village, a high school marching band gayly struts up Main Street, while proud parents lean up against their pickup trucks, cradle their babies and beam. It's the day of the big game. Everyone wears their forced pride with the prescribed plasticity of a TV sitcom, and the town has practiced hating everyone connected with the archenemy, West Bumphuck Regional High School.

Yet, turnout for the fall festivities was down a bit this year owing to several families who made the trip to Washington or many other locations to protest America's insane war in Iraq. Still, not one of those present at the big parade in this small hobbit-like hamlet ever stopped to think that far away, a family just like theirs - practicing pretty much the same social rituals only using a strange language - are leaning on each other, watching their children with pride .... as American bombs rain down on their parade, while Jewish and British manipulators snicker in the background at babies bleeding in the Iraqi dust.

This is simply not talked about in Center of Town, America, and the great gray wraith hangs over the world with the heaviness of an evil too great to be confronted lest one's life be shattered.

As human civilization hurtles toward debilitating denouements on so many levels - nutrition, thought, environmental degradation - in America, the game goes on. People look the other way when the bogus avalanches of capitalism crush their neighbors. Take a hard look in the human mirror. Thus the town marches off to the field. Let the symbolic savagery begin. Let's break a few adolescent legs, and learn how to operate those weapons of mass destruction which we always accuse others of having at the same time knowing we have the best ones ourselves. This is our unspoken hypocrisy.

We live in a society that extols heroism without having fully examined the purpose of its uses. Thus, if the true purpose of sports is to weed out the cowardly from the brave and the conscientious from the cooperative, those who triumph are necessarily robots, because they have internalized a plan given to them by people who are essentially slave owners. Consider the spectrum of purposes you contemplated as a child and observe how the field of those choices was blunted, limited, by your participation in sports.

As someone who has the Baseball Encyclopedia crammed in a musty file behind his left ear, I can truly say I would trade every last batting average in that wasted brain space for the ability to play a musical instrument or speak another language.

You need to gather things you can use in the last card game you'll ever play, that's the purpose of life.

But that's not the game the world seems to be playing with us.

Instead, we are meat, choice cuts (and some not so choice) in the meatlocker of the Illuminati, required to be instantly available for all Bohemian Grove ritual sacrifices that are enacted throughout the world in places like Kabul and Baghdad.

We train our beef on the gridiron and other arenas, and the whole town turns out to cheer. We don't make the connection that in learning to throw that high-arching, glorious touchdown pass what we are really deposting in the end zone is our willingness - nay, our promised allegiance - to see a mushroom cloud incinerating innocent people ....

... on the basis of what our "leaders" (coaches, teachers, spiritual advisers) have told us to do. We don't question what they say, and we do it. Millions die needlessly, and we wave our flags, smug at the profits our lifestyles have brought us at the expense of billions of unknown others.

You scored a touchdown. Big hairy deal. What it took to get you to the game poisoned millions of people in the time it took to get you to the game.

Which is why I always say, if you're in these games, you're really out of the real game, which is alluded to above in the Protocols. The Protocols? Truer words were never spoken. If you have ever believed anything I have ever said, believe that.

Now we have a situation throughout the entire Middle East (and really, the world) that is serving as a prototype for our new human society, totally run by the numbers of men who cheat on their books. Justice is a hopeless cackle in a dark jail cell. Are you calculating the amount of time you have left before the hard rain hits your own house? Most people I know are.

The whole thing with Jews is that they have to choose to rejoin the human race, or they will be destroyed. The harmful attitude that afflicts them is that they believe they are better than everyone else, that they have a covenant with Yahweh, and this allows them to commit crimes against other people with impunity. In their hateful hubris that is really directed as their own shameful performance as an artificially constructed socioethnic group that was founded on several dangerous pathologies (child sacrifice being the worst), they continue to insist they will destroy the rest of the world if they don't get their way. This is what I call a childhood psychological illness that they need to cure, or it will be cured for them, guaranteed.

Mother Nature will do it to them if their fellow humans won't.

There is the possibility that the cure for this disease will kill us all. Some people, very powerful people, would prefer that. Who knows why? The fact is real, the reasons remain partly unknown, and certainly unrecognized by the vast majority of human lemmings.

All of whom our media present as heroes have been savages, their reputations couched in purposeful palaver. We venerate their legends. They are a part of who we are, of whom we try to emulate. Usually, it is a false image. And there are exceptions. Martin Luther King. Gandhi. Hawking. Keller.

I remember that giant Mayan ball court in the ruins of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. The fact that impressed me most was that the losing team got beheaded. Now that's real incentive to play hard. I wonder if that's how Iraqis feel, being used as a football in a geopolitical power struggle between much larger teams with only an ugly, bloody death in their immediate forecast.

It's the prototype future for human civilization, all because you chose to believe the lies they told you, and that power you gave them is the very thing that is turning Planet Earth into the poisoned graveyard of humanity.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
John Kaminski is the author of "The Day America Died: "Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001." http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Editors Note: A good friend has foward this video short -
http://filmstripinternational.com/

The Storm That Ate The GOP
Who will pity the soulless Republican Party
now that Katrina is mauling their regime?
by Mark Morford / SF Gate Columnist
September 14, 2005

Can you hear that? That low scraping moan, that painful scream, that compressed hissing wail like the sound of an angry alligator caught in a vise?

Why, it's the GOP, and they're screaming, "No, no it can't be, oh my God, please no, this damnable Katrina thing is just an unstoppable PR disaster for us!"

After all (they wail), who woulda thought dissing all those poor black people and letting so many of them die in filth and misery in the Superdome while our pampered CEO president enjoyed yet another vacation would cause such an ugly backlash, such harsh criticism of the glorious, rich-über-alles GOP creed?

Who knew it would lay bare our deeply inbred agenda of social injustice and civil neglect, and our systematic abuse of the country? This storm thing is so not the thing we need right now because, oh my God look, just look! We've been so golden! We've had the run of the candy store! We have been gods among swine!

Can you hear them? Hastert to DeLay to Frist to Santorum to Rove to Cheney to Bush himself, across the board and all down the snickering party line they keen, "It's not fair! We've been planning this regime, this overthrow for 40 years! We've worked so damn hard to drive a wedge into the culture and an ice pick into the heart of the nation, working like demons on meth to mangle this country's economy and sense of pride so as to boost corporate profits and lock down our wealth and empire!"

And now Katrina. And now a furious backlash we never predicted that could very well spell the death of our wanton free-for-all gluttony. Damn you, Mother Nature! Damn you, uppity female!

Just listen. Isn't that Dick Cheney, lying awake at night as the leeches drain his soul, muttering his woes to a well-narcotized Lynne? "Dammit, Lynney, what went wrong? We've got the House locked up and the Senate locked up and we can cram through any law or any referendum or toxic Patriot Act we like with next-to-zero outcry and no discussion on the floor ..."

We're successfully stuffing the lower courts with hundreds of homophobic neoconservative misogynist appointees and now we even own the Supreme Court -- the Supreme Court, pudding-thighs! -- and even the increasingly impotent California governor is more in our back pocket than we imagined. We've had the whole goddamn country under our thumb for five years, squirming like a stuck rat as we make out like robber barons.

What a run we've had! We've threatened major media into numb compliance and we run the FCC the way a pimp runs a cheap hooker and we've got a loudmouth right-wing pundit manning nearly every ideological outpost in every corner of the media globe while millions of stupefied 'Murkins still believe Fox News is a genuine source of integrity and honesty. Look at us go!

And don't forget, to back it all up and shore up the base, we've got so many hate-spitting pseudo-religious bonk jobs broadcasting their bile across roughly 1,600 militant Christian Midwestern talk-radio shows it would make Jesus himself cringe in pain, and even that soulless cretin Pat Robertson is comfy enough to start suggesting we assassinate foreign leaders who dare to dis BushCo.

Look what we've accomplished! We launched two brutal, devastating, unwinnable wars. We've let Osama bin Laden run happy and free for over four years, and counting. We just passed an obscene $12.3 billion energy bill that ensures our heroin-like dependency on foreign oil for the next two decades while misinformed 'Murkin GIs die in Iraq protecting us from $5 gallons of gas. Damn, we're good!

We torture innocent detainees in Iraq and abuse inmates at Guantánamo and chip away at women's rights and demonize homosexuals, and we strip the forests and gut the Clean Air Act and pollute the water and devastate the economy and cut welfare spending (whew!), and still the lemming people think we're gods because we keep them wrapped in fear and a whole pile of carefully orchestrated Rove-ian lies. We are, in short, f--ing geniuses.

But now, this. Now BushCo's spineless Katrina response and our party's obvious contempt for lazy poor people who don't own SUVs and Lockheed-Martin portfolios means Dubya's ratings have plummeted below 40, as many of his precious pet agenda items head for the Dumpster, including the gutting of Social Security and the gutting of Medicare and even more tax cuts for his wealthy cronies. Damn you, Mother Nature!

Even the media has stepped it up, taken off the kid gloves and begun hurling angry, pointed questions at BushCo for the first time in four years, ever since we muzzled them with one part threat and one part Rove and all parts corporate stranglehold. Hell, the damn media was on the ground in New Orleans within 24 hours of Katrina, beating our untrained monkeys from FEMA by three days. Who the hell do they think they are?

Ain't it a bitch? And now there are those who say the impermeable fortress o' pain known as the GOP might just lose the South next election due to its obvious lack of care for the lower classes, unless we can somehow scare them poor people into not voting again, or tell them if they vote Democrat they won't get any health care or food stamps or relief money or any of Barbara Bush's patronizing rich-grandma cookies. Hey, it worked last time.

So goes the GOP lament. Of course, it's not all bad (they say). Hell, the oil companies are as giddy as schoolgirls at being able to falsely jack up prices to over whopping 70 bucks a barrel, despite a recent (temporary) glut of supply. Halliburton is squealing like Jenna Bush at a kegger at scoring the contract to help rebuild New Orleans' infrastructure thanks to the fact that the former head of FEMA is now a Halliburton lobbyist, and the GOP plan to decimate FEMA and militarize emergency efforts is going -- pardon the pun -- swimmingly.

But something has shifted. Something is ugly and toxic in the water. This is what, I imagine, the GOP overlords are asking each other over cocktails and baby seal kabobs and whale-blood transfusions: Do you think the people are finally beginning to sense it? Are they finally waking up? You think they know that the fact that Bush is finally taking a modicum of responsibility for his administration's failure -- something he never, never does -- is a sign of true GOP desperation? Do you think they recognize that BushCo isn't really spending a dime on Katrina relief, that the $52 billion they just crammed through Congress without any discussion isn't actually going toward repairs and rebuilding at all?

You think people sense that all of it, every single dime, is going toward -- you guessed it -- PR? Spin control? You know it's true. Every government truck and every National Guardsman and every aid package and every miserable FEMA agent you see is merely in place to try and shore up Bush's miserable poll numbers, his dwindling support. Hell, it's the only reason Bush -- or his party -- does anything for the "good" of the nation.

But holy crap, it sure is expensive. It sure is annoying. It sure takes the GOP off its game of warmongering and finger-pointing and padding the pockets of the rich and pulverizing the economy like a ... like a ... yes, OK, like a hurricane. Damn you, Mother Nature.
****************************************************************
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata Column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle.
©2005 SF Gate
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/09/14/notes091405.DTL

BUSH'S BOOZE CRISIS
by JENNIFER LUCE and DON GENTILE
Published on: 09/21/2005

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

"Laura gave him an ultimatum before, 'It's Jim Beam or me.' She doesn't want to replay that nightmare — especially now when it's such tough going for her husband."

Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink.

A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him — but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months.

"The war in Iraq, the loss of American lives, has deeply affected him. He takes every soldier's life personally. It has left him emotionally drained.

The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope. "And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."

Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper." Bush's history of drinking dates back to his youth. Speaking of his time as a young man in the National Guard, he has said: "One thing I remember, and I'm most proud of, is my drinking and partying. Those were the days my friends. Those were the good old days!"

Age 26 in 1972, he reportedly rounded off a night's boozing with his 16-year-old brother Marvin by challenging his father to a fight.

On November 1, 2000, on the eve of his first presidential election, Bush acknowledged that in 1976 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents' home in Maine. Age 30 at the time, Bush pleaded guilty and paid a $150 fine. His driving privileges were temporarily suspended in Maine.

"I'm not proud of that," he said. "I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did that night. I learned my lesson." In another interview around that time, he said: "Well, I don't think I had an addiction. You know it's hard for me to say. I've had friends who were, you know, very addicted... and they required hitting bottom (to start) going to AA. I don't think that was my case."

During his 2000 presidential campaign, there were also persistent questions about past cocaine use. Eventually Bush denied using cocaine after 1992, then quickly extended the cocaine-free period back to 1974, when he was 28.

Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, told The National Enquirer: "I do think that Bush is drinking again. Alcoholics who are not in any program, like the President, have a hard time when stress gets to be great.

"I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening."
*****************************************************************************************
From: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/63426
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New Orleans as a portrait of ourselves and our future

by John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
from: 9-7-05

The dog opened his mouth to get the other bone, and as he did,
the bone he already had fell into the water.
— Aesop

All our seeming wakings are but the debris of evening waters.
— Edward Dahlberg

Still water is like glass.
— Chuang Tzu


Welcome to Bantustan, Louisiana, where the first stage of creating a large, armed, New World Order fortress, complete with gated communities and an Israeli wall against the sea and the riffraff, has begun. It is the inevitable course of human history, playing like a bad rerun of humanity’s medieval nightmares.

In the meantime, the chief sephardic rabbi in Jerusalem declared that the hurricane that obliterated New Orleans was God’s punishment because President Bush supported the eviction of Israeli settlers from Gaza. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3138779,00.html

Take a taste, a gargantuan, thirst-quenching slug of that delicious elixir brewed by humanity's most successful citizens, that Cajun cabernet of pesticide-fouled Mississippi River water curdling in the backwater blender of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, spiced by fragrances from all across the periodic table of toxic elements and spiced with a disease-bearing melange of decomposing dead animals.

Savor the bouquet. See how it tinkles on your tongue and wafts into your hairy nostrils. Close your eyes and you can envision the perfect portrait of human civilization.

They say we are 89 percent water. The quality of the water within us is directly correlative to the ingredients of the potion in the cauldron of New Orleans.

Note the bloated black man, floating face down in the brew. Boats rush past, to and fro, hoping to pry decomposing remains from dank attics, and occasionally, with luck, find some terrified child shivering in the stinking darkness, while National Guardsmen play cards at a nearby truckstop.

If there is a legitimate vision of hell in this life, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is it (although this act has also been seen recently in Fallujah, Kigali, Port-au-Prince and many other locations as well).

Where your last breath, to last you for all eternity, is the fetid stench of humanity's caustic creations, what kind of hope could there be for anyone? Why did four people last week die suddenly simply by breathing the air? Must be a new government test.

The two major conspiracy angles on the New Orleans disaster are (1) the hurricane was directed toward the city by artificial means, and (2) the rescue efforts were deliberately inept to increase the death toll among indigent African-Americans.

Culling the herd. That would be the neocon phrase, slurred out as humor by people like Barbara Bush.

But when you observe who keeps getting it in the face, without even perusing the obvious evidence all across history, you realize there is and has always been a continuing war on blacks, on the dark-skinned peoples of the world, and New Orleans is — whether deliberately contrived or not — a genuine manifestation of this nasty and pointless insanity.

Because so many ordinary people have tried to help New Orleans storm victims and been thwarted by bureaucratic officialdom, one can only draw the conclusion that the government has severely limited its rescue efforts because there is no place in corporate society for these people, and they need to be eliminated.

I thought it was very cool that so many of those like DU activist Dennis Kyne and others who went to Texas to support antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan smoothly moved their operation to New Orleans to help out.

This small remaining segment of morally decent Americans knows — much more authentically that the government could ever pretend to know — that when people are dying you don’t argue about causes or rules. Perhaps that is the true test of being human.

9/11 taught us that our government will sacrifice 3,000 of its own best and brightest without blinking an eye. New Orleans is the message that the number eligible in this category, especially if they’re black, is much, much higher.

And it is a confession that a real population control program is moving into high gear.

Good numbers in Indonesia, good numbers in New Orleans. Could a West Coast quake be far behind? Heck, they have already caused several of those in Iran.

And it's way past time for the government, after many decades of trying, to develop a really effective biological agent — the new flu as an expression of love in the New World Order world — and you begin to get some sense of how twisted we have become as a species.

Which leads to an examination of how twisted we have always been. Kind of like ... on the bridge at twilight, a man with a flashlight falls off a bridge, and what you can remember was the rhythmic flailing of his arms as he fell. I dunno. Maybe I'm thinking about 9/11 again ......

Now the new images are of floating, inert, face down in poison after rummaging through spoiled and flooded supermarkets looking for clean water. I found it heartwrenching that a top choice of New Orleans looters was disposable diapers.

How far? How far distant is the realization in the minds of everyone that we have created a monster, and that monster is what we do to ourselves and the planet.

Did you ever notice how the Andaman Island indigenents were not harmed by the tsunami, or how animals are never killed in these storms? I don't mean to point out faults in those who were caught in the floodtide, but as regards our fitness to survive as a society.

In our sparkling delusions, our high-minded ideals and low-flying scams, we have abandoned the planet. Soon the planet, which has gone out of its way to help us for millions of years, will abandon us.

Where will your dreams be then? Floating on the bayou, baby, with all the other dead birds.
:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on a part of the Gulf Coast of Florida that for some reason Hurricane Katrina inexplicably swerved around on its way to New Orleans. He is the author of "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001." http://www.johnkaminski.com/

U.S. leads the world in sale of military goods
by Frida Berrigan
Special to the Star-Telegram
09/12/05

"Star Telegram" -- As insecurity mounts from Najaf to New Orleans, more weapons and high-tech military equipment are flowing into some of the globe's most vulnerable and war-torn regions.

The Congressional Research Service recently found that global arms sales rose to $37 billion in 2004 -- the highest level since 2000.

U.S. companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing rang up $12.4 billion in weapons contracts -- more than one-third of the total and more than twice what Russia -- the second largest exporter -- sold.

The Departments of State, Commerce and Defense are all involved in different aspects of approving licenses, managing logistics and (in many cases) loaning or granting funds to nations as they seek weapons from U.S. corporations.

The findings, published in the annual "Conventional Weapons Transfers to Developing Nations" report, were released against the backdrop of the global war on terror in which many countries are increasing military spending as insecurity rises.

They also came in the wake of rampant and irresponsible use of guns in the hurricane-ravaged Southeast that hindered aid delivery, increased tension and led to more misery and suffering. The U.S. policy of arming friends and allies is alarming

The U.S. has a long-standing (and accelerating) policy of arming, training and aiding some of the world's most repressive regimes.

Close anti-terrorism allies include the authoritarian Uzbekistan and the thinly veiled military dictatorship of Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan.

In the Philippines, Colombia and elsewhere, U.S. weapons and military training have been turned against civilians. From Indonesia to the Sudan, U.S. geopolitical interests and access to resources are trumping concerns about human rights, ongoing conflict and the pressing need for development.

The U.S. transfers more weapons and military services than any other country in the world. In the last decade, the U.S. sold $177.5 billion in arms to foreign nations. In 2003, the last year for which full data is available, the Pentagon and State Department delivered or licensed the delivery of $5.7 billion in weaponry to countries which can ill afford advanced weaponry -- nations in the developing world saddled with debt and struggling with poverty.

Despite having some of the world's strongest laws regulating the arms trade, almost half of these weapons went to countries plagued with ongoing conflict and governed by undemocratic regimes with poor human rights records. In 2003, $2.7 billion in weaponry went to governments deemed undemocratic by the U.S. State Department's Human Rights Report, in the sense that citizens of those nations "did not have a meaningful right to change their government" in a peaceful manner.

Another $97.4 million in weapons went to governments deemed by the State Department to have "poor" human rights records.

The U.S. transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts in 2003, the last year for which full Pentagon data is available. From Chad to Ethiopia, from Algeria to India, transfers to conflict nations through the two largest arms sales programs totaled more than $1 billion.

When poor human rights records, serious patterns of abuse and histories of conflict are all factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 -- a full 80 percent -- were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

That's unacceptable. It's time that President Bush begin to honor his pledge to "end tyranny in our world" as part of the war on terrorism by overhauling U.S. weapons transfer policy. Greater global security will follow.

Frida Berrigan is a Foreign Policy In Focus scholar and a senior research associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center, a project of the World Policy Institute.

Copyright: Star Telegram
***********************
Source: Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10301.htm

Follow the Money for the Real Story
by Molly IvinsThe Chicago Tribune
Thursday 15 September 2005

Austin, Texas - Here's a good idea: Consumer groups and progressive congress-folks have joined in an effort to stop hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina from being further harmed by the new bankruptcy law, scheduled to take effect Oct. 17. This law was written of, by and for the consumer credit industry and is particularly onerous for the poor.

The bill was passed with massive support from the Republican leadership in Congress and from a disgusting number of sellout Democrats. While it was being considered in committee earlier this year, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) offered an amendment to protect victims of natural disasters. It was defeated, without debate, on a party-line vote.

Now, Congress has a chance to rethink some of the most punitive parts of the bill. Katrina victims who were planning to file before the new law goes into effect are out of luck - where are they gonna find a lawyer, let alone an open courthouse?

Under the new law, anyone whose income is above the state median must file under Chapter 13, a more restrictive category that requires some repayment of debt. The new law grants no exemption for natural disaster, even though it's going to be a little tough for some citizen sitting in the Houston Astrodome who no longer has a home to come up with tax statements, pay stubs and six months of income and expense data.

Meanwhile, it's an ill wind that blows no one good, so we should not be surprised to learn the first winner out of the gate on Katrina is Halliburton Co., whose deserving subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root already has been granted a $29.8 million contract for cleanup work in the wake of Katrina.

Of course, no one would suggest Halliburton and its subsidiaries get government contracts (it already has billions of dollars of Iraq rehab work) just because Vice President Dick Cheney is still on the payroll. Heavens no. The veep continues to get deferred pay from the company he once headed - $194,852 last year.

But Cheney has nothing to do with the Halliburton contracts - that, friends, goes through none other than the noted lobbyist and former head of - of all things - the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Since Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush's campaign manager in 2000, announced that he was leaving FEMA in December 2002, it appears he has been busy making sure reconstruction contracts in Iraq go to companies that give generously to the Republican Party.

Now, aren't you ashamed of yourself for thinking there's something wrong with that? Besides, Allbaugh is now with a big-time Washington lobbying firm, where he also represents Shaw Group Inc., and - voila - Shaw Group, too, already has a $100 million emergency contract from FEMA for housing management and construction and a $100 million order from the US Army Corps of Engineers for Katrina repair.

Congress has appropriated $51.8 billion in emergency funding for recovery costs, and it's estimated that the final costs could top $100 billion.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, told Reuters: "The government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests."

Now, Ms. Brian, get a grip. Not all the money goes to big, politically connected firms.

Michael ("You're doing a heckuva job") Brown liked to spread federal money around. In fact, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) was so annoyed by Brownie's distribution of largesse in Miami after Hurricane Frances that he urged President Bush to fire Ol' Brownie last January. What upset Wexler about the $30 million in FEMA checks to cover new wardrobes, cars, lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, furniture and appliances was that the hurricane did not affect Miami. It landed 100 miles away.

Some of you may have heard me observe a time or two - going back to when George W. was still governor of Texas - that the trouble with the guy is that while he is good at politics, he stinks at governance. It bores him, he's not interested, he thinks government is bad to begin with and everything would be done better if it were contracted out to corporations.

We can now safely assert that W. has stacked much of the federal government with people like himself. And what you get when you put people in charge of government who don't believe in government and who are not interested in running it well is ... what happened after Hurricane Katrina.

Many a time in the past six years I have bit my tongue so I wouldn't annoy people with the always obnoxious observation, "I told you so." But I did.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.
==================================================================
Source: TuthOut.org - http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091505A.shtml

Gold Hits 17 Year High
9-15-5

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. benchmark gold futures powered to a 17-year high Thursday as concerns about inflation and U.S. economic growth drew safe-haven buying and fund interest into the market, traders and analysts said.

The rally came as gold was in the rare position of breaking from its close inverse relationship with the dollar, which climbed against the euro on Thursday.

December delivery gold on the New York Mercantile Exchange's COMEX division finished at $459.30 an ounce, up $5.60, or 1.2 percent, in a range of $452.40 to $459.70.

The contract bolted higher on aggressive fund buying from the opening bell, hoisting the price for a most-actively traded futures month to the loftiest since June 1988.

The move lifted gold past key resistance at the $458.70 mark, set in December 2004 by the then-benchmark COMEX February gold contract.

Gold, which is often viewed as an inflation hedge by investors, has been bolstered recently by near record-high crude oil and gasoline prices as well as worries about U.S. economic growth after Hurricane Katrina, analysts said.

"People are buying gold because it is now apparent that we are going to see massive inflation," said Leonard Kaplan, president of Prospector Asset Management, in Evanston, Illinois. "Gold is the best hedge for inflation."

"Now you have momentum players and volatility players being attracted into the market," said George Gero, senior vice president at Legg Mason Wood Walker.

COMEX gold in June 1988 rose as high as $470 an ounce, as the market was gradually declining from its all-time high of $870 hit in January 1980.

The next major target that traders say would confirm gold was breaking to higher levels stands at last year's peak of $471 an ounce, set on Dec. 2 by COMEX spot December gold.

Kaplan said he believed gold might be able to extend its rise to perhaps $480, but then, in all likelihood, concerns about the historically high speculative long position in the New York futures market could spark some sort of a sell-off.

Bullion on Thursday hit a 2005 high at $455.60 an ounce in New York trading, coming within $2 of a 17-year peak. A jump above $456.75 would be a high dating back to 1988.

Spot gold fetched $455.10/455.80 versus $449.50/0.20 late Wednesday. The Thursday afternoon London fix was $454.80.

Gold priced in euros, meanwhile, made an all-time high at 373.08 per euro on Thursday.

In other precious metals, COMEX December silver gained 3.3 cents to end at $7.078 an ounce, dealing from $6.985 to $7.14. Spot silver reached $7.01/7.04 versus $6.98/7.01 late Wednesday. It fixed at $7.0275.

NYMEX October platinum hit a one-month high of $923.80 an ounce before closing at $919.70 for a gain of $2.20. Spot platinum last traded at $916/920.

December palladium rose $2.40 to $187.15 an ounce. Spot palladium was quoted at $184/186.
=================================================================
Source: http://rense.com/general67/gold2.htm

Gary Webb, African-American Paranoia, And the Black Consensus
By Bruce A. Dixon
from: http://www.blackcommentator.com/120/120_dixon_webb.html

Gary Webb, former investigative reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, passed away December 10, an apparent suicide. BC mourns his passing. In 1996 Webb broke a story detailing how CIA and DEA "assets" used cocaine shipments that ended up on the streets of black Los Angeles to fund the Reagan administration's mercenary armies in Nicaragua.

That the Reagan and elder Bush administrations financed their murderous proxy war in Central America in part with drug money after Congress cut off official funding was old news. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and John Kerry (D-MA) chaired House and Senate subcommittees, respectively, in the late 80s which uncovered ties between drug rings and the sharp knives of US foreign policy in the region. It was one sordid corner of the global web of arms trafficking and official criminality called Iran-contra. Rangel and Kerry called for further and deeper investigations, and both were shut down by their fellow lawmakers. The establishment press, so-called watchdogs of democracy, distorted Rangel's and Kerry's statements, ridiculed their allegations, and refused to examine their evidence or conduct probes of their own, effectively killing the story.

But in 1996, after a year's investigation, Gary Webb was the right man at the right place and time. The Mercury News was one of the first to put its content on the brand new world wide web. Webb convinced his editor to include significant amounts of his source material including court transcripts, audio clips, photos and more on the paper's web site. This time the story could not be contained. Between talk radio, especially black talk radio, and the web the story of how government-sanctioned operatives with immunity from prosecution played key roles in sparking the crack epidemic of the 80s achieved breakout dimensions. The Mercury News web site logged more than 1.2 million hits a day and the story was widely reprinted, quoted, distributed and discussed, especially in black communities across America, where popular outrage was immediate, incandescent and overwhelming. Black pastors, politicians and civic leaders and ordinary citizens demanded answers and action from an establishment prepared to give neither.

Gary Webb was attacked and viciously smeared in the mainstream media from the time the article appeared to his Los Angeles Times obituary last month. His editors cravenly apologized and took the story off their Website. By 1998, Webb combined new research with material that couldn't be used in the original series and authored Dark Alliance: The CIA, Contras, and the Crack Explosion, but his career as a reporter was over. Fired from the Mercury News and blackballed from employment at any newspaper, Gary Webb's life began the downward spiral that ended in his suicide last month.

But with the story having assumed a life of its own, discrediting its messenger would not be nearly enough. Hiding, losing, fibbing about and classifying bits of incriminating data were not enough, either. Some way had to be found to render the story illegitimate on its face - at least in white America - regardless of its mountain of damning facts, despite its constellations of interconnected dots. To fulfill this need on the part of our nation's ruling elite, a brand new, allegedly widespread and ethnically specific psychiatric disorder was invented. It was called "black paranoia."

Thus a flood of media pundits, white opinion leaders, editorial page writers and scholars-for-hire rushed forth to comfort white America with the news that their black neighbors, practically all African Americans, suffer from a peculiar case of chronic mass paranoia. A gargantuan, racist lie was deployed to swallow and conceal the truths that Gary Webb had labored so diligently to bring to light. "Black paranoia" was a very useful diagnosis, tailor-made to convince the white public that further examinations of the CIA connection to crack cocaine were pointless.

More than eight years after Gary Webb's courageous reporting, millions of outraged citizens demand probes into exit poll manipulations, selective purges of voter lists, widespread vote fraud and ubiquitous voter suppression efforts in the minority communities of battleground states during the recent presidential election. We should expect to see complainants mislabeled as "conspiracy theorists" - as if it were remarkable or unusual that Republicans cooperate in the furtherance of criminal acts. Tens or hundreds of thousands are serving time in US prisons for "conspiracy" of one kind or another, so it can't be that rare or that difficult to prove. But when all else fails, BC predicts that editorial pages, lazy scholars, media pundits and dittoheads everywhere will trot out their favorite race-specific psychiatric disorder to explain why the mere facts are not worth looking at. We will be told that "black paranoia" is the culprit, as if African Americans have not been denied their voting rights in recent decades through any number of ostensibly race-neutral mechanisms from California to Connecticut.

In fact, what the pundits call "black paranoia" is really what the Black Consensus looks like from inside the bubble of white American racism. Metaphors are dangerous, but bubbles are usually delicate and fragile things. An immense weight of lies and denial are already pressing down on the bubble of white racism and the load is about to get heavier. While African Americans and the rest of humanity outside the bubble are always hoping, praying and working for its collapse, we know not to count on it any time soon. And we know that even paranoiacs have some real enemies.

By Bruce A. Dixon
from: http://www.blackcommentator.com/120/120_dixon_webb.html

Gary Webb, former investigative reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, passed away December 10, an apparent suicide. BC mourns his passing. In 1996 Webb broke a story detailing how CIA and DEA "assets" used cocaine shipments that ended up on the streets of black Los Angeles to fund the Reagan administration's mercenary armies in Nicaragua.

That the Reagan and elder Bush administrations financed their murderous proxy war in Central America in part with drug money after Congress cut off official funding was old news. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and John Kerry (D-MA) chaired House and Senate subcommittees, respectively, in the late 80s which uncovered ties between drug rings and the sharp knives of US foreign policy in the region. It was one sordid corner of the global web of arms trafficking and official criminality called Iran-contra. Rangel and Kerry called for further and deeper investigations, and both were shut down by their fellow lawmakers. The establishment press, so-called watchdogs of democracy, distorted Rangel's and Kerry's statements, ridiculed their allegations, and refused to examine their evidence or conduct probes of their own, effectively killing the story.

But in 1996, after a year's investigation, Gary Webb was the right man at the right place and time. The Mercury News was one of the first to put its content on the brand new world wide web. Webb convinced his editor to include significant amounts of his source material including court transcripts, audio clips, photos and more on the paper's web site. This time the story could not be contained. Between talk radio, especially black talk radio, and the web the story of how government-sanctioned operatives with immunity from prosecution played key roles in sparking the crack epidemic of the 80s achieved breakout dimensions. The Mercury News web site logged more than 1.2 million hits a day and the story was widely reprinted, quoted, distributed and discussed, especially in black communities across America, where popular outrage was immediate, incandescent and overwhelming. Black pastors, politicians and civic leaders and ordinary citizens demanded answers and action from an establishment prepared to give neither.

Gary Webb was attacked and viciously smeared in the mainstream media from the time the article appeared to his Los Angeles Times obituary last month. His editors cravenly apologized and took the story off their Website. By 1998, Webb combined new research with material that couldn't be used in the original series and authored Dark Alliance: The CIA, Contras, and the Crack Explosion, but his career as a reporter was over. Fired from the Mercury News and blackballed from employment at any newspaper, Gary Webb's life began the downward spiral that ended in his suicide last month.

But with the story having assumed a life of its own, discrediting its messenger would not be nearly enough. Hiding, losing, fibbing about and classifying bits of incriminating data were not enough, either. Some way had to be found to render the story illegitimate on its face - at least in white America - regardless of its mountain of damning facts, despite its constellations of interconnected dots. To fulfill this need on the part of our nation's ruling elite, a brand new, allegedly widespread and ethnically specific psychiatric disorder was invented. It was called "black paranoia."

Thus a flood of media pundits, white opinion leaders, editorial page writers and scholars-for-hire rushed forth to comfort white America with the news that their black neighbors, practically all African Americans, suffer from a peculiar case of chronic mass paranoia. A gargantuan, racist lie was deployed to swallow and conceal the truths that Gary Webb had labored so diligently to bring to light. "Black paranoia" was a very useful diagnosis, tailor-made to convince the white public that further examinations of the CIA connection to crack cocaine were pointless.

More than eight years after Gary Webb's courageous reporting, millions of outraged citizens demand probes into exit poll manipulations, selective purges of voter lists, widespread vote fraud and ubiquitous voter suppression efforts in the minority communities of battleground states during the recent presidential election. We should expect to see complainants mislabeled as "conspiracy theorists" - as if it were remarkable or unusual that Republicans cooperate in the furtherance of criminal acts. Tens or hundreds of thousands are serving time in US prisons for "conspiracy" of one kind or another, so it can't be that rare or that difficult to prove. But when all else fails, BC predicts that editorial pages, lazy scholars, media pundits and dittoheads everywhere will trot out their favorite race-specific psychiatric disorder to explain why the mere facts are not worth looking at. We will be told that "black paranoia" is the culprit, as if African Americans have not been denied their voting rights in recent decades through any number of ostensibly race-neutral mechanisms from California to Connecticut.

In fact, what the pundits call "black paranoia" is really what the Black Consensus looks like from inside the bubble of white American racism. Metaphors are dangerous, but bubbles are usually delicate and fragile things. An immense weight of lies and denial are already pressing down on the bubble of white racism and the load is about to get heavier. While African Americans and the rest of humanity outside the bubble are always hoping, praying and working for its collapse, we know not to count on it any time soon. And we know that even paranoiacs have some real enemies.

Secret Patriot Act II to Give Hitler's Powers to Bush

NOTE: The info below sounds like science-fiction but isn't--e.g., "Under Section 501 a US citizen engaging in lawful activities can be grabbed off the street and thrown into a van never to be seen again. The Justice Department states that they can do this because the person had inferred from conduct that he/she was not a US citizen."

From: Sue Supriano
Date: December 15, 2004 9:43:47 AM GMT+07:00
Subject: Emergency- Patriot Act II

Dear All-

I urge you to read my little blurb at the end of the email which was written during Nazi times. For those who don't understand the relevance today maybe you will after you read about Patriot II below.

After the Jewish/gay-&-lesbian/activist holocaust of Nazi Germany, it has been constantly asked "How could the German people have let that happen? They must have smelled the burning flesh, heard the screams, seen and heard the trains full of people being carted through their villages and cities en route to the gas chambers and work camps. How could they have let it happen??" For those of you who aren't already understanding, concerned and active (and I know many of the recipients of this are already active and therefore "at risk") I hope this wakes you up.

May peace, harmony, love and courage prevail!!

Sue
----

Secret Patriot Act II to Give Hitler's Powers to Bush
Infowars.com
December 8, 2004

(Alex Jones wrote this back in 2003 and it won second place from Project Censored.
We're glad that this story is still circulating -- it is as important and
timely as ever. Now, the National ID Card and Patriot Act II have passed the
house and are in the Senate.)

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times
that no member of Congress was allowed to read the
first Patriot Act that was passed by the House on
October 27, 2001. The first Patriot Act was
universally decried by civil libertarians and
Constitutional scholars from across the
political spectrum. William Safire, while writing for
the New York Times, described the first Patriot Act's
powers by saying that President Bush was seizing
dictatorial control.

On February 7, 2003 the Center for Public Integrity, a
non-partisan public interest think-tank in DC,
revealed the full text of the Domestic Security
Enhancement Act of 2003. The classified document had
been leaked to them by an unnamed source inside the
Federal government. The document consisted of a
33-page section-by-section analysis of the
accompanying 87-page bill.

The Patriot Act II bill itself is stamped
"Confidential--Not for Distribution." Upon reading the
analysis and bill, I was stunned by the scientifically
crafted tyranny contained in the legislation. The
Justice Department Office of Legislative Affairs
admits that they had indeed covertly transmitted a
copy of the legislation to Speaker of the House Dennis
Hastert, (R-IL) and the Vice President of the United
States, Dick Cheney, as well as the executive heads of
federal law enforcement agencies.

It is important to note that no member of Congress was
allowed to see the first Patriot Act before its
passage, and that no debate was tolerated by the House
and Senate leadership. The intentions of the White
House and Speaker Hastert concerning Patriot Act II
appear to be a carbon copy replay of the events that
led to the unprecedented passage of the first Patriot
Act.

There are two glaring areas that need to be looked at
concerning this new legislation:

1. The secretive tactics being used by the White House
and Speaker Hastert to keep even the existence of this
legislation secret would be more at home in Communist
China than in the United States. The fact that Dick
Cheney publicly managed the steamroller passage of the
first Patriot Act, insuring that no one was allowed to
read it and publicly threatening members of Congress
that if they didn't vote in favor of it that they
would be blamed for the next terrorist attack, is by
the White House's own definition terrorism. The move
to clandestinely craft and then bully passage of any
legislation by the Executive Branch is clearly an
impeachable offence.

2. The second Patriot Act is a mirror image of powers
that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves.
Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First,
Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously
damaged the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot
Act reorganizes the entire Federal government as well
as many areas of state government under the
dictatorial control of the Justice Department, the
Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM
military command. The Domestic Security Enhancement
Act 2003, also known as the Second Patriot Act is by
its very structure the definition of dictatorship.

I challenge all Americans to study the new Patriot Act
and to compare it to the Constitution, Bill of Rights
and Declaration of Independence. Ninety percent of the
act has nothing to do with terrorism and is instead a
giant Federal power-grab with tentacles reaching into
every facet of our society. It strips American
citizens of all of their rights and grants the
government and its private agents total immunity.

Here is a quick thumbnail sketch of just some of the
draconian measures encapsulated within this tyrannical
legislation:

SECTION 501 (Expatriation of Terrorists) expands the
Bush administration's enemy combatant definition to
all American citizens who may have violated any
provision of Section 802 of the first Patriot Act.
(Section 802 is the new definition of domestic
terrorism, and the definition is any action that
endangers human life that is a violation of any
Federal or State law. ) Section 501 of the second
Patriot Act directly connects to Section 125 of the
same act. The Justice Department boldly claims that
the incredibly broad Section 802 of the First USA
Patriot Act isn't broad enough and that a new,
unlimited definition of terrorism is needed.

Under Section 501 a US citizen engaging in lawful
activities can be grabbed off the street and thrown
into a van never to be seen again. The Justice
Department states that they can do this because the
person had inferred from conduct that he/she was not a
US citizen. Remember Section 802 of the First USA
Patriot Act states that any violation of Federal or
State law can result in the enemy combatant terrorist
designation.

SECTION 201 of the second Patriot Act makes it a
criminal act for any member of the government or any
citizen to release any information concerning the
incarceration or whereabouts of detainees. It also
states that law enforcement does not even have to tell
the press who they have arrested and they never have
to release the names.

SECTION 301 and 306 (Terrorist Identification
Database) set up a national database of suspected
terrorists and radically expand the database to
include anyone associated with suspected terrorist
groups and anyone involved in crimes or having
supported any group designated as terrorist. These
sections also set up a national DNA database for
anyone on probation or who has been on probation for
any crime, and orders State governments to collect the
DNA for the Federal government.

SECTION 312 gives immunity to law enforcement engaging
in spying operations against the American people and
would place substantial restrictions on court
injunctions against Federal violations of civil rights
across the board.

SECTION 101 will designate individual terrorists as
foreign powers and again strip them of all rights
under the enemy combatant designation.

SECTION 102 states clearly that any information
gathering, regardless of whether or not those
activities are illegal, can be considered to be
clandestine intelligence activities for a foreign
power. This makes news gathering illegal.

SECTION 103 allows the Federal government to use
wartime martial law powers domestically and
internationally without Congress declaring that a
state of war exists.

SECTION 106 is bone-chilling in its
straightforwardness. It states that broad general
warrants by the secret FSIA court (a panel of secret
judges set up in a star chamber system that convenes
in an undisclosed location) granted under the first
Patriot Act are not good enough. It states that
government agents must be given immunity for carrying
out searches with no prior court approval. This
section throws out the entire Fourth Amendment against
unreasonable searches and seizures.

SECTION 109 allows secret star chamber courts to issue
contempt charges against any individual or corporation
who refuses to incriminate themselves or others. This
sections annihilate the last vestiges of the Fifth
Amendment.

SECTION 110 restates that key police state clauses in
the first Patriot Act were not sunsetted and removes
the five year sunset clause from other subsections of
the first Patriot Act. After all, the media has told
us: this is the New America. Get used to it. This is
forever.

SECTION 111 expands the definition of the enemy
combatant designation.

SECTION 122 restates the government?s newly announced
power of surveillance without a court order.

SECTION 123 restates that the government no longer
needs warrants and that the investigations can be a
giant dragnet-style sweep described in press reports
about the Total Information Awareness Network. One
passage reads, thus the focus of domestic surveillance
may be less precise than that directed against more
conventional types of crime.

SECTION 126 grants the government the right to mine
the entire spectrum of public and private sector
information from bank records to educational and
medical records. This is the enacting law to allow
ECHELON and the Total Information Awareness Network to
totally break down any and all walls of privacy.

The government states that they must look at
everything to determine if individuals or groups might
have a connection to terrorist groups. As you can now
see, you are guilty until proven innocent.

SECTION 127 allows the government to take over
coroners and medical examiners operations whenever
they see fit.

SECTION 128 allows the Federal government to place gag
orders on Federal and State Grand Juries and to take
over the proceedings. It also disallows individuals or
organizations to even try to quash a Federal subpoena.
So now defending yourself will be a terrorist action.

SECTION 129 destroys any remaining whistleblower
protection for Federal agents.

SECTION 202 allows corporations to keep secret their
activities with toxic biological, chemical or
radiological materials.

SECTION 205 allows top Federal officials to keep all
their financial dealings secret, and anyone
investigating them can be considered a terrorist. This
should be very useful for Dick Cheney to stop anyone
investigating Haliburton.

SECTION 303 sets up national DNA database of suspected
terrorists. The database will also be used to stop
other unlawful activities. It will share the
information with state, local and foreign agencies for
the same purposes.

SECTION 311 federalizes your local police department
in the area of information sharing.

SECTION 313 provides liability protection for
businesses, especially big businesses that spy on
their customers for Homeland Security, violating their
privacy agreements. It goes on to say that these are
all preventative measures--has anyone seen Minority
Report? This is the access hub for the Total
Information Awareness Network.

SECTION 321 authorizes foreign governments to spy on
the American people and to share information with
foreign governments.

SECTION 322 removes Congress from the extradition
process and allows officers of the Homeland Security
complex to extradite American citizens anywhere they
wish. It also allows Homeland Security to secretly
take individuals out of foreign countries.

SECTION 402 is titled Providing Material Support to
Terrorism. The section reads that there is no
requirement to show that the individual even had the
intent to aid terrorists.

SECTION 403 expands the definition of weapons of mass
destruction to include any activity that affects
interstate or foreign commerce.

SECTION 404 makes it a crime for a terrorist or other
criminals to use encryption in the commission of a
crime.

SECTION 408 creates lifetime parole (basically,
slavery) for a whole host of crimes.

SECTION 410 creates no statute of limitations for
anyone that engages in terrorist actions or supports
terrorists. Remember: any crime is now considered
terrorism under the first Patriot Act.

SECTION 411 expands crimes that are punishable by
death. Again, they point to Section 802 of the first
Patriot Act and state that any terrorist act or
support of terrorist act can result in the death
penalty.

SECTION 421 increases penalties for terrorist
financing. This section states that any type of
financial activity connected to terrorism will result
to time in prison and $10-50,000 fines per violation.

SECTIONS 427 sets up asset forfeiture provisions for
anyone engaging in terrorist activities.

There are many other sections that I did not cover in
the interest of time. The American people were shocked
by the despotic nature of the first Patriot Act. The
second Patriot Act dwarfs all police state legislation
in modern world history.

Usually, corrupt governments allow their citizens lots
of wonderful rights on paper, while carrying out their
jackbooted oppression covertly. From snatch and grab
operations to warantless searches, Patriot Act II is
an Adolf Hitler wish list.

You can understand why President Bush, Dick Cheney and
Dennis Hastert want to keep this legislation secret
not just from Congress, but the American people as
well. Bill Allison, Managing Editor of the Center for
Public Integrity, the group that broke this story,
stated on my radio show that it was obvious that they
were just waiting for another terrorist attack to
opportunistically get this new bill through. He then
shocked me with an insightful comment about how the
Federal government was crafting this so that they
could go after the American people in general. He also
agreed that the FBI has been quietly demonizing
patriots and Christians and those who carry around
pocket Constitutions.

I have produced two documentary films and written a
book about what really happened on September 11th. The
bottom line is this: the military-industrial complex
carried the attacks out as a pretext for control.
Anyone who doubts this just hasn't looked at the
mountains of hard evidence.

Of course, the current group of white collar criminals
in the White House might not care that we're finding
out the details of their next phase. Because, after
all, when smallpox gets released, or more buildings
start blowing up, the President can stand up there at
his lectern suppressing a smirk, squeeze out a tear or
two, and tell us that See I was right. I had to take
away your rights to keep you safe. And now it's your
fault that all of these children are dead. From that
point on, anyone who criticizes tyranny will be
shouted down by the paid talking head government
mouthpieces in the mainstream media.

You have to admit, it's a beautiful script.
Unfortunately, it's being played out in the real
world. If we don't get the word out that government is
using terror to control our lives while doing nothing
to stop the terrorists, we will deserve what we get -
tyranny. But our children won't deserve it.

HOW THE PATRIOT ACT COMPARES TO HITLER?S
ERMÄCHTIGUNGSGESETZ (ENABLING ACT):

At http://www.furnitureforthepeople.com/actpat.htm
you can read the following 4 Articles:

1) How the Patriot Act Compares to Hitler's
Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act)
2) A 21st Century Comparison of The Enabling Act and
The Patriot Act
3) Ten Key Dangers of The Patriot Act that Every
American Should Know
4) Bill Moyers' NOW Comments on the Patriot Act

~~Please tell your congresspeople and senators to repeal the
Patriot Act and to throw out current legislation
advocating a second act.

Thank you for your support!

Sue Supriano: Steppin' Out of Babylon - Radio Interviews
http://www.suesupriano.com
----

"In Germany first they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up." -- Pastor Martin Niemoller

Canyon In The Heart
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
1 December 2004

An abyss of icy silence divides those who care from those who don't.

In my dream, I am looking out over the edge of a vast cliff, searching the infinite distance for a word. How to describe the great divide between these two warring factions of the American psyche?

In the distance I seem to see two people standing back to back, staring off in different directions. Their teeth are clenched hard. Both are certain of their vision.

One, wrapped righteously in his beloved flag, figments fearscapes of terror, exploding skyscrapers, dead relatives ... and in his anger, seethes for the chance to lash out, like some vampire vigilante, at those he has been told did - or might do - these demon deeds.

The other, wracked by an inner pain of fruitless frustration, hears the screams, too, but they are the agonized death spasms of those who are the targets of America's retributive rage. He mourns for those who were nowhere near the scene of the crime, yet simply because of their language and their appearance, they have been deemed guilty and consequently are blown to pieces - bloody fragments of little children in the dust - by high-tech weapons that we all paid for.

This willing blindness that enables America to commit serial mass murder with no second thoughts is not entirely caused by media spin, although that plays a significant part. But there really are two different kinds of American people. And right now there is no communication between them.

Those who see and those who won't? Those who care and those who don't?

No, that's too simplistic.

Those who oppose America's grandiose slaughter in Iraq are called naive by those who support it. After all, there are acts of terror to be avenged, fair trials be damned!

Those who applaud the widespread killing by Americans in Third World countries are called heartless maniacs by those who oppose it, and try desperately to make their brothers see the slick men on TV are lying to everyone about practically everything.

Two men, back to back, countrymen yet enemies. Two factions, paralyzed by an enraged silence. One, bloodthirsty and implacable. The other, witnessing, perhaps, the end of civilization as we know it.

Those who think the world is a bank to be robbed, and those who think it is a garden to be tended? Those who are in on the scam and those who are victims of the heist?

Again, tending toward too simple. More and more, the weight that tilts the see-saw tends to be the media.

People make their decisions based on what they hear. What they hear tends to be from TV, or from those who still read, newspapers. More and more, TV and newspapers are owned by large corporations who are connected, by boards of directors of even larger corporations, to the companies who make the weapons.

Those who believe America is right to exterminate an entire nation tend to get their information from television, which reinforces their choice by showing nothing of the suffering of foreign peoples, ordinary families who speak other languages, being burned to death by napalm, or ravaged by flesh-piercing cluster bombs, heads blown apart like pumpkins by special ammunition designed to do just that, all the while, American boys, laughing at their high scores, in the time before they realize they will kill themselves for what they've done, if they don't first perish from the poisons their government told them it was safe to handle ...

facing one way.

And those who believe the American government is a criminal corporation that fixes its own elections, kills its own citizens, and has plans for billions of unfortunate souls that are simply too demonically tragic for most to even contemplate, screaming into the icy silence of the cadaverous heart the American political conscience has become .... facing the other way.

Those who believe, against all logic, that innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq were somehow a threat to the United States and should be killed with inhuman impunity, and those people educated in excess of the standard American public school brainwashing who realize that people are the same everywhere, and that the worth of a person is not dependent on the language they speak, the color of their skin, what they wear, or what religion they prefer.

Fact is, on a daily basis, Americans are killing innocent people who never did anything bad to us, and some people think that's a good thing, while others, including most of the rest of the world, consider it an unforgivable abomination, a needless display of public insanity that has suddenly and regrettably befallen all of America.

How does one conduct a dialogue between two groups so certain of their observations?

Why this polarization is significant is that there seems to be no basis for communication between the two factions. And that's a very bad sign.

Because when there is no talk, there is only war. And when there is war, as the people of Afghanistan and Iraq know so well, nobody wins, really.

Or, the only winners are those who are not involved in the fighting. Perverted billionaires who control the media and military contractors may be wringing their sweaty hands in a kind of pederastic glee, but everybody who's actually in the war, whether they are on the winning side or not, they're all losers. Big time.

Just ask the bereaved fiancee who just wrote me about her true love's untimely death while attacking Fallujah, who begged me to support the U.S. war effort. I had to tell her, hard as it was, that her future husband died for nothing, nothing more than the ill-gotten gains of Halliburton and Bush's other criminal friends.

I asked her to imagine her own town being attacked by high-tech savages who were lying about the reasons they were there, but she just couldn't, understandably enough, buried in the rubble of own grief.

In the same vein, much has been made about the religious pretensions of President Bush as he orders the mass murders of innocent people for reasons that have been long revealed to the public to be blatant lies.

So the character of the great divide in the American psyche becomes a little clearer. And oddly, the religious perspective is now identified with the side of evil. What justification could there be for killing innocent people for reasons everyone knows are lies. Yet George W. Bush says God told him to smite Afghanistan, and then Iraq.

The philosopher A. C. Grayling of the University of London noted exactly that a few weeks back.

"Why are the churches given a privileged - almost, indeed, an exclusive - position in the social debate about morality, when they are arguably the least competent organisations to have it?" he asked.

" ... religious morality is not merely irrelevant, it is anti-moral" Grayling argued.

"The great moral questions of the present age are those about human rights, war, poverty, the vast disparities between rich and poor, the fact that somewhere in the third world a child dies every two and a half seconds because of starvation or remediable disease. The churches' obsessions over pre-marital sex and whether divorced couples can remarry in church appears contemptible in the light of this mountain of human suffering and need. By distracting attention from what really counts, and focusing it on the minor and anyway futile attempt to get people to have sex only when the church permits, harm is done to the cause of good in the world."

"Asking them to take an especially authoritative line on moral matters is like asking the fox to set the rules for fox-hunting. Churchmen are people with avowedly ancient supernatural beliefs who rely on moral casuistry which is two thousand years out of date; it is extraordinary that their views should be given any precedence over those that could be drawn from the richness of thoughtful, educated, open-minded opinion otherwise available in society."

Could anything be clearer? Could there be any clearer advertisement for religion than George W. Bush, who goes to war on the basis of lies, commits genocide, kills his own citizens, fixes elections, and lies about everything .... and says he takes orders from Jesus? Could it be any clearer?

This impenetrable divide that separates Americans who say they are religious and yet violate every known teaching of Jesus by cheering the mass murder of innocent people from those who see the higher law of human compassion and honesty being violated on a daily basis by the pious psychopaths who have hijacked the American republic may not be crossed, except by bullets.

The words necessary to close the gap and heal this grisly wound that threatens the very life of America are lost - drowned out - by the constant war chants of the corporate TV fools and the echoing, approving chorus from the pulpits of most of the Christian churches and Jewish temples in America. You can't talk sense to psychopaths and that it what religions have become - a pathetic psychopathy that causes otherwise rational humans to suspend their belief in honesty and justice and believe things that are not true ....

Number one, like Muslims had anything to do with 9/11. That's the biggest lie of all right now, and it has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, all unnecessary. Those who are cheering these deaths are American churchgoers. And their cheers, their hosannahs to mass death, can be heard all over the world, in the stories of the bloodbath in Iraq.

Listen, right now, in the silence of the canyon of your heart - you can hear it. America's righteous religion. God tells George W. Bush what to do. Kill all those who oppose you. Take what you want from those who have what you want. Hey, it's in the Bible, which is also the Torah. Leviticus. Deuteronomy. All over the place.

Listen to the sound. The American sound of mass death. It is evil, and it is religious. In the silence of the canyon of your heart, it is all you can hear, and no words can blot it out.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida whose Internet essays have been collected into two anthologies, the latest of which is titled "The Perfect Enemy." For more information see http://www.johnkaminski.com/

# posted by amestizo @ 12/01/2004 04:43:00 PM