http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-Bankers-Love-War-by-Scott-Baker-100228-838.html
February 28, 2010
Why Bankers Love War
By Scott Baker
Bankers have ample money to fund wars.
War is profitable for Bankers. It's the best investment they can make.
Henry George recognized this 130 years ago (indeed, it was WWI that sapped the strength of the Georgist movement). Other writers, such as Mason Gaffney, and Stephen Zarlenga, and many, many others, recognize it today.
Think about it from the point of view of a business that exists solely to sell debt (banks). What could be better than to loan money that:
1. Is strictly to the best debtor in the land: the U.S. Government
2. Will continue to be borrowed until the war is "won" (or, better yet, in modern times, to fund an endless series of wars on terror, in different lands, needing different - and expensive - weapon systems)
3. Will be spent on things that go BOOM, and then have to be replaced, over and over and over.
4. Has virtually no limit on upward costs, due to technological advancements. Almost every major country is developing drones of its own, (see here, here, here, here) meaning we could soon be embroiled in drone wars, without all those "messy" dead and shattered young people cluttering up the airwaves and discouraging further war-making. Of course there'll continue to be dead civilians, but that's just collateral damage, you know. Then, there's the Terminator scenario, whereby the newly self-aware machines turn on their creators as they come to realize their creators are the truly violent ones...they will be right.
So, banks love war, unless it's their buildings and personnel that get hit, but maybe, just maybe, even that doesn't matter, since the Supreme Court tells us, in Citizens United, that Corporations are people too. So, why not have a war without any human involvement at all? Just faceless corporations, launching drone wars by proxy governments safely sheltered in underground bunkers, laying waste to the Earth, where the Expendables (my term for the 99% of humanity that takes no part in making wars) are just sitting there, waiting to be obliterated? Sounds like a plan.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Parallels of Conquest, Past and Present
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=37514
2010-02-26
Parallels of Conquest, Past and Present
Like William the Conqueror who ignored the English battlefield dead, the US government has not identified – nor even made a good-faith effort to estimate – the number of Iraqis and Afghanis who have been killed. By suppressing the human toll, the war still can be sold as benefiting the Iraqi people. The reality of their intense suffering, however, is much different from the generally positive image that US propagandists seek to present, notes Douglas Valentine.
After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror’s army buried its fallen comrades, but left the corpses of the English defenders to rot in the fields.
Such is the brutal nature of war: the victor inflicts all manner of suffering and humiliation on the vanquished. Nearly a millennium later, what the United States is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is only marginally different.
William the Conqueror made no pretense about his brutal subjugation of the English. They hated him and resisted his occupation for 20 years, during which time he took their property and gave it to the Norman upper class.
Over 300,000 English people were murdered and starved (one fifth of the population) and some 300,000 French and Normans were planted in England in positions of authority.
During the repression, an English nobleman was likely blinded, castrated, and thrown into a dungeon in one of the hundreds of castles that William built across the countryside to defend Norman interests. The overall strategy was to eliminate native leadership and to terrorize the population into submission.
By the time William repented his sins on his deathbed in 1087, England had ceased being England.
While the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are different in many details, there are disturbing parallels in the extent of the carnage and the strategy of coercion, in the innocent blood that has flowed and the number of survivors who have been terrorized.
Like William the Conqueror who ignored the English battlefield dead, the US government has not identified – nor even made a good-faith effort to estimate – the number of Iraqis and Afghanis who have been killed.
That’s because the Bush administration – and now the Obama administration – have had an official policy of not counting the number of people killed, crippled, rendered homeless, starved, or condemned to disease and possibly insanity.
US government officials have claimed that this policy has been followed to escape the “body count” mindset that became notorious during the Vietnam War. But it also has made it impossible to quantitatively measure the amount of misery that US policymakers have inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan.
The lack of official numbers also has enabled the US government to cast doubt on unofficial estimates that put the number of Iraqi dead in the hundreds of thousands or possibly over one million. Most reports in the mainstream US news media cite much lower estimates, presumably to avoid offending the powers-that-be in Washington.
Out of the Press
As much as possible, US leaders have sought to keep the ugliness of these wars – the mangled bodies, the burned-off faces, the squalid refugee camps, the abused captives – out of the press and away from the public’s consciousness, thus to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American “exceptionalism.”
But the principal advantage of having no official casualty estimates and few photos of atrocities in Iraq is that the American people aren’t reminded of the horrendous consequences of a war launched by President George W. Bush under the false claim that Iraq possessed WMD stockpiles.
By suppressing the human toll, the war still can be sold as benefiting the Iraqi people. The reality of their intense suffering, however, is much different from the generally positive image that US propagandists seek to present.
And that is one big difference between the slaughter of Englishmen by William the Conqueror and the carnage unleashed by George W. Bush, the modern-day conqueror. William’s cruelty was done in the light of day.
Yet, it is not as if the US government doesn’t keep tabs on those killed, maimed or rendered as orphans. The government simply doesn’t want the American people to know the quantity or the specifics, all the better to strip the two conflicts of their human dimensions.
In Afghanistan, for example, the CIA and military have been conducting a census of every village, town and city in the country – much like William’s infamous Doomsday (or Domesday) Book, which assessed the property of every English landowner for the purpose of levying taxes or confiscation.
As commander of the US occupation army, General Stanley McChrystal wants to know the name of every Afghan, so his analysts can decide who is a Taliban and who is not, or in the even vaguer vernacular favored by the US military, who are the “bad guys.”
McChrystal’s survey seeks to determine where each man lives, how many people are in his family, who his wife and children and relatives are, where he works and where his property is.
In places like Marjah, considered a Taliban stronghold where a US-led offensive is currently underway, McChrystal is at a bit of a loss, but he still tries to obtain actionable intelligence through networks of spies and via all manner of electronic surveillance, including satellites.
Tracking the Taliban
This biographical information and other data about Afghanis are entered into a computer in McChrystal’s office, where the material is carefully monitored by the CIA and military special operations units.
Within a separate folder for suspected Taliban, every man is identified by the same biographical criteria as every other Afghan. In addition, each Taliban is categorized by his rank and position within the organization.
Low-level fighters are left to the Marines, while “high-value targets” get their own folder and are handled by the CIA and military special operations.
These “high-value targets” are given the kind of special attention that William the Conqueror reserved for English noblemen, who were viewed as especially important to kill or otherwise neutralize in order to pacify the countryside.
“High-value targets” in Afghanistan have the property (intellectual as well as physical, such as opium fields) that McChrystal wants to deny the Taliban. So, more biographical information is gathered about them, and their movements are tracked 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Through spies and sophisticated electronic surveillance, McChrystal even has a very good idea when they are leaving one safe house and traveling to another. The jets are fueled, and the drones are in the sky, waiting.
And this is how and why 27 Afghan civilians were slaughtered on Feb. 21 while traveling between remote provinces in a caravan of minibuses. The CIA and military special operations forces were alerted that some “high-value target” was traveling with his family, and McChrystal seized the opportunity to kill them all.
In a dirty war like the one in Afghanistan, killing “high-value targets” almost always involves murdering them while they are at home or while traveling with their families; otherwise they are much less accessible and thus harder targets.
Killing enemy leaders along with their entire families has a psychological-warfare impact, too, putting this secret policy under the intelligence rubric of “black propaganda.”
It is psychological warfare because these mass killings have a sobering effect on low-level Taliban who wish to rise in the ranks. It is a form of propaganda that every Afghan citizen is aware of, and it is “black” because it is not officially acknowledged, keeping the American people in the dark.
The mainstream US news media plays along by rarely citing the obvious facts of this dirty war. The killing of civilians is dismissed as an accident that is accompanied by a routine apology from General McChrystal or some other US spokesman.
Savagery, Past and Present
Though US media propagandists treat McChrystal as an honorable and hard-working warrior, the truth is that he is no less savage than William the Conqueror. Both spread terror by killing their enemies, dismembering bodies and inflicting death and cruelty on non-combatants as well.
The primary difference is that William and his army did their killing up close with battle axes and swords for everyone to see, while McChrystal and his high-tech killing machine inflict carnage from far away with 2,000-pound bombs or with missiles fired from drones – and then cloak the horror behind censorship and propaganda.
These cover-ups are essential because the American public might otherwise bolt against Washington’s imperial adventures, which often end up with working-class American soldiers dead or maimed while US corporations snake away with valuable resources from the conquered countries or otherwise use them for economic or geopolitical ends.
This strategy works because most Americans don’t know – and many may not care to know – the names and biographies of the victims.
Douglas Valentine is author of The Phoenix Program as well as The Strength of the Wolf and the new book Strength of the Pack. His Web site is DouglasValentine.com.
2010-02-26
Parallels of Conquest, Past and Present
Like William the Conqueror who ignored the English battlefield dead, the US government has not identified – nor even made a good-faith effort to estimate – the number of Iraqis and Afghanis who have been killed. By suppressing the human toll, the war still can be sold as benefiting the Iraqi people. The reality of their intense suffering, however, is much different from the generally positive image that US propagandists seek to present, notes Douglas Valentine.
After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror’s army buried its fallen comrades, but left the corpses of the English defenders to rot in the fields.
Such is the brutal nature of war: the victor inflicts all manner of suffering and humiliation on the vanquished. Nearly a millennium later, what the United States is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is only marginally different.
William the Conqueror made no pretense about his brutal subjugation of the English. They hated him and resisted his occupation for 20 years, during which time he took their property and gave it to the Norman upper class.
Over 300,000 English people were murdered and starved (one fifth of the population) and some 300,000 French and Normans were planted in England in positions of authority.
During the repression, an English nobleman was likely blinded, castrated, and thrown into a dungeon in one of the hundreds of castles that William built across the countryside to defend Norman interests. The overall strategy was to eliminate native leadership and to terrorize the population into submission.
By the time William repented his sins on his deathbed in 1087, England had ceased being England.
While the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are different in many details, there are disturbing parallels in the extent of the carnage and the strategy of coercion, in the innocent blood that has flowed and the number of survivors who have been terrorized.
Like William the Conqueror who ignored the English battlefield dead, the US government has not identified – nor even made a good-faith effort to estimate – the number of Iraqis and Afghanis who have been killed.
That’s because the Bush administration – and now the Obama administration – have had an official policy of not counting the number of people killed, crippled, rendered homeless, starved, or condemned to disease and possibly insanity.
US government officials have claimed that this policy has been followed to escape the “body count” mindset that became notorious during the Vietnam War. But it also has made it impossible to quantitatively measure the amount of misery that US policymakers have inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan.
The lack of official numbers also has enabled the US government to cast doubt on unofficial estimates that put the number of Iraqi dead in the hundreds of thousands or possibly over one million. Most reports in the mainstream US news media cite much lower estimates, presumably to avoid offending the powers-that-be in Washington.
Out of the Press
As much as possible, US leaders have sought to keep the ugliness of these wars – the mangled bodies, the burned-off faces, the squalid refugee camps, the abused captives – out of the press and away from the public’s consciousness, thus to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American “exceptionalism.”
But the principal advantage of having no official casualty estimates and few photos of atrocities in Iraq is that the American people aren’t reminded of the horrendous consequences of a war launched by President George W. Bush under the false claim that Iraq possessed WMD stockpiles.
By suppressing the human toll, the war still can be sold as benefiting the Iraqi people. The reality of their intense suffering, however, is much different from the generally positive image that US propagandists seek to present.
And that is one big difference between the slaughter of Englishmen by William the Conqueror and the carnage unleashed by George W. Bush, the modern-day conqueror. William’s cruelty was done in the light of day.
Yet, it is not as if the US government doesn’t keep tabs on those killed, maimed or rendered as orphans. The government simply doesn’t want the American people to know the quantity or the specifics, all the better to strip the two conflicts of their human dimensions.
In Afghanistan, for example, the CIA and military have been conducting a census of every village, town and city in the country – much like William’s infamous Doomsday (or Domesday) Book, which assessed the property of every English landowner for the purpose of levying taxes or confiscation.
As commander of the US occupation army, General Stanley McChrystal wants to know the name of every Afghan, so his analysts can decide who is a Taliban and who is not, or in the even vaguer vernacular favored by the US military, who are the “bad guys.”
McChrystal’s survey seeks to determine where each man lives, how many people are in his family, who his wife and children and relatives are, where he works and where his property is.
In places like Marjah, considered a Taliban stronghold where a US-led offensive is currently underway, McChrystal is at a bit of a loss, but he still tries to obtain actionable intelligence through networks of spies and via all manner of electronic surveillance, including satellites.
Tracking the Taliban
This biographical information and other data about Afghanis are entered into a computer in McChrystal’s office, where the material is carefully monitored by the CIA and military special operations units.
Within a separate folder for suspected Taliban, every man is identified by the same biographical criteria as every other Afghan. In addition, each Taliban is categorized by his rank and position within the organization.
Low-level fighters are left to the Marines, while “high-value targets” get their own folder and are handled by the CIA and military special operations.
These “high-value targets” are given the kind of special attention that William the Conqueror reserved for English noblemen, who were viewed as especially important to kill or otherwise neutralize in order to pacify the countryside.
“High-value targets” in Afghanistan have the property (intellectual as well as physical, such as opium fields) that McChrystal wants to deny the Taliban. So, more biographical information is gathered about them, and their movements are tracked 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Through spies and sophisticated electronic surveillance, McChrystal even has a very good idea when they are leaving one safe house and traveling to another. The jets are fueled, and the drones are in the sky, waiting.
And this is how and why 27 Afghan civilians were slaughtered on Feb. 21 while traveling between remote provinces in a caravan of minibuses. The CIA and military special operations forces were alerted that some “high-value target” was traveling with his family, and McChrystal seized the opportunity to kill them all.
In a dirty war like the one in Afghanistan, killing “high-value targets” almost always involves murdering them while they are at home or while traveling with their families; otherwise they are much less accessible and thus harder targets.
Killing enemy leaders along with their entire families has a psychological-warfare impact, too, putting this secret policy under the intelligence rubric of “black propaganda.”
It is psychological warfare because these mass killings have a sobering effect on low-level Taliban who wish to rise in the ranks. It is a form of propaganda that every Afghan citizen is aware of, and it is “black” because it is not officially acknowledged, keeping the American people in the dark.
The mainstream US news media plays along by rarely citing the obvious facts of this dirty war. The killing of civilians is dismissed as an accident that is accompanied by a routine apology from General McChrystal or some other US spokesman.
Savagery, Past and Present
Though US media propagandists treat McChrystal as an honorable and hard-working warrior, the truth is that he is no less savage than William the Conqueror. Both spread terror by killing their enemies, dismembering bodies and inflicting death and cruelty on non-combatants as well.
The primary difference is that William and his army did their killing up close with battle axes and swords for everyone to see, while McChrystal and his high-tech killing machine inflict carnage from far away with 2,000-pound bombs or with missiles fired from drones – and then cloak the horror behind censorship and propaganda.
These cover-ups are essential because the American public might otherwise bolt against Washington’s imperial adventures, which often end up with working-class American soldiers dead or maimed while US corporations snake away with valuable resources from the conquered countries or otherwise use them for economic or geopolitical ends.
This strategy works because most Americans don’t know – and many may not care to know – the names and biographies of the victims.
Douglas Valentine is author of The Phoenix Program as well as The Strength of the Wolf and the new book Strength of the Pack. His Web site is DouglasValentine.com.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Plan B? US Plans for Possible Delay in Iraq Withdrawal
Get real! They never planned to leave! Not until the last drop of oil has been plundered!
February 23, 2010 by The Washington Post
Plan B? US Plans for Possible Delay in Iraq Withdrawal
by Craig Whitlock
The U.S. military has prepared contingency plans to delay the planned withdrawal of all combat forces in Iraq, citing the prospects for political instability and increased violence as Iraqis hold national elections next month.
Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. general in Iraq, speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon, Monday, Feb. 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)Under a deadline set by President Obama, all combat forces are slated to withdraw from Iraq by the end of August, and there remains heavy political pressure in Washington and Baghdad to stick to that schedule. But Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Monday that he had briefed officials in Washington in the past week about possible contingency plans.
Odierno declined to describe the plans in detail and said he was optimistic they would not be necessary. But he said he was prepared to make the changes "if we run into problems" in the coming months.
Iraqis are scheduled to go to the polls March 7 for parliamentary elections that Iraqi and U.S. officials describe as a political milestone for the country.
With less than two weeks to go in the campaign, however, concern is rising over whether the results will be undermined by political boycotts, low turnout or an increase in bloodshed. Religious enmities and rivalries are already resurfacing.
Although U.S. diplomats and military officials said they are working intensely behind the scenes to hold the political process together, they are finding that their influence in Iraq is steadily on the wane.
"The Iraqi mood is very nationalistic at the moment and just not interested in extending the American presence," said Marc Lynch, a political science professor at George Washington University and an expert on Iraqi politics. "When the United States gets really involved in contentious issues now, it just turns into political dynamite."
U.S. officials said the likelihood that they would keep combat forces in Iraq past August is remote. Many of the forces are needed in Afghanistan, where Obama has approved a surge of 30,000 troops.
"We would have to see a pretty considerable deterioration of the situation in Iraq, and we don't see that, certainly, at this point," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday.
Under Obama's plan, about 50,000 troops will remain in the country through 2011 to train Iraqi forces, perform counterterrorism operations and help with civilian projects. The United States has signed a legal agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw all forces by the end of 2011, and Odierno said there has been no discussion about renegotiating that timetable.
U.S. commanders have already reduced the presence in Iraq to about 96,000 military personnel, Odierno said -- the first time since the 2003 invasion that fewer than 100,000 U.S. troops have been in the country. The U.S. military presence reached a peak of 166,000 troops in October 2007.
"Right now, our plan is to be at 50,000 by the 1st of September," he said. "And if you ask me today, I'm fully committed and I believe that's the right course of action."
With several major coalitions competing for power, U.S. officials said they are bracing for a prolonged period of political instability in Iraq after the elections. Many predicted a repeat of 2005, when it took Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki several months to form a government.
"How long this is going to take, this government formation, that is really the rub," Christopher R. Hill, U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, told the Council on Foreign Relations last week. "There's a good reason why people are worried."
But Hill said the United States needs to be mindful of its limited ability to affect the political situation in Iraq these days. "I'll tell you what our leverage is," he added. "Our leverage is not somehow threatening to withdraw troops or threatening to invade some boardroom with troops. Our leverage is to say: Iraq, if you want a good relationship with us -- a long-term relationship with us -- we need to make sure these elections are democratic."
A handful of violent incidents Monday highlighted how volatile the security situation remains just weeks before the parliamentary elections.
Near the northern city of Kirkuk, which is contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens, a Kurdish Iraqi army colonel was killed Monday, police said. Gunmen with automatic weapons ambushed Lt. Col Ali Ihasan east of the city, officials said.
Meanwhile, police said gunmen stormed a house in the southern outskirts of Baghdad and killed eight members of a family, including children. Some of the residents were beheaded, police said.
A spokesman for Ahmed Chalabi, the erstwhile U.S. ally and a candidate in the upcoming elections, said late Monday that the slaying targeted a man who had been active in the campaign. The spokesman, Entifadh Qanbar, also a candidate, identified the head of the family as Shahid Majeed Mayrosh and called him a "courageous activist" for the Iraqi National Alliance. Other Iraqi authorities declined to corroborate the assertion.
Iraqi and U.S. officials have reported a spike in rocket attacks targeting the Green Zone in Baghdad and American bases. U.S. officials said Shiite militia groups have stocked up on rockets and other weapons, which they say are smuggled from Iran.
American officials say it has become harder to understand the scope and dynamics of violence in Iraq now that the U.S. military has a small footprint in Iraqi cities.
"Is this the beginning of sectarian warfare, is it tribal, is it AQI?" a U.S. military official said, using the abbreviation for the Sunni insurgency group al-Qaeda in Iraq. "It's hard to know if these are localized killings for political reasons or violence to spread a blanket of fear so people don't go to the polls."
Correspondents Leila Fadel and Ernesto Londoño in Baghdad and staff writers Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2010 The Washington Post
February 23, 2010 by The Washington Post
Plan B? US Plans for Possible Delay in Iraq Withdrawal
by Craig Whitlock
The U.S. military has prepared contingency plans to delay the planned withdrawal of all combat forces in Iraq, citing the prospects for political instability and increased violence as Iraqis hold national elections next month.
Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. general in Iraq, speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon, Monday, Feb. 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)Under a deadline set by President Obama, all combat forces are slated to withdraw from Iraq by the end of August, and there remains heavy political pressure in Washington and Baghdad to stick to that schedule. But Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Monday that he had briefed officials in Washington in the past week about possible contingency plans.
Odierno declined to describe the plans in detail and said he was optimistic they would not be necessary. But he said he was prepared to make the changes "if we run into problems" in the coming months.
Iraqis are scheduled to go to the polls March 7 for parliamentary elections that Iraqi and U.S. officials describe as a political milestone for the country.
With less than two weeks to go in the campaign, however, concern is rising over whether the results will be undermined by political boycotts, low turnout or an increase in bloodshed. Religious enmities and rivalries are already resurfacing.
Although U.S. diplomats and military officials said they are working intensely behind the scenes to hold the political process together, they are finding that their influence in Iraq is steadily on the wane.
"The Iraqi mood is very nationalistic at the moment and just not interested in extending the American presence," said Marc Lynch, a political science professor at George Washington University and an expert on Iraqi politics. "When the United States gets really involved in contentious issues now, it just turns into political dynamite."
U.S. officials said the likelihood that they would keep combat forces in Iraq past August is remote. Many of the forces are needed in Afghanistan, where Obama has approved a surge of 30,000 troops.
"We would have to see a pretty considerable deterioration of the situation in Iraq, and we don't see that, certainly, at this point," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday.
Under Obama's plan, about 50,000 troops will remain in the country through 2011 to train Iraqi forces, perform counterterrorism operations and help with civilian projects. The United States has signed a legal agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw all forces by the end of 2011, and Odierno said there has been no discussion about renegotiating that timetable.
U.S. commanders have already reduced the presence in Iraq to about 96,000 military personnel, Odierno said -- the first time since the 2003 invasion that fewer than 100,000 U.S. troops have been in the country. The U.S. military presence reached a peak of 166,000 troops in October 2007.
"Right now, our plan is to be at 50,000 by the 1st of September," he said. "And if you ask me today, I'm fully committed and I believe that's the right course of action."
With several major coalitions competing for power, U.S. officials said they are bracing for a prolonged period of political instability in Iraq after the elections. Many predicted a repeat of 2005, when it took Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki several months to form a government.
"How long this is going to take, this government formation, that is really the rub," Christopher R. Hill, U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, told the Council on Foreign Relations last week. "There's a good reason why people are worried."
But Hill said the United States needs to be mindful of its limited ability to affect the political situation in Iraq these days. "I'll tell you what our leverage is," he added. "Our leverage is not somehow threatening to withdraw troops or threatening to invade some boardroom with troops. Our leverage is to say: Iraq, if you want a good relationship with us -- a long-term relationship with us -- we need to make sure these elections are democratic."
A handful of violent incidents Monday highlighted how volatile the security situation remains just weeks before the parliamentary elections.
Near the northern city of Kirkuk, which is contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens, a Kurdish Iraqi army colonel was killed Monday, police said. Gunmen with automatic weapons ambushed Lt. Col Ali Ihasan east of the city, officials said.
Meanwhile, police said gunmen stormed a house in the southern outskirts of Baghdad and killed eight members of a family, including children. Some of the residents were beheaded, police said.
A spokesman for Ahmed Chalabi, the erstwhile U.S. ally and a candidate in the upcoming elections, said late Monday that the slaying targeted a man who had been active in the campaign. The spokesman, Entifadh Qanbar, also a candidate, identified the head of the family as Shahid Majeed Mayrosh and called him a "courageous activist" for the Iraqi National Alliance. Other Iraqi authorities declined to corroborate the assertion.
Iraqi and U.S. officials have reported a spike in rocket attacks targeting the Green Zone in Baghdad and American bases. U.S. officials said Shiite militia groups have stocked up on rockets and other weapons, which they say are smuggled from Iran.
American officials say it has become harder to understand the scope and dynamics of violence in Iraq now that the U.S. military has a small footprint in Iraqi cities.
"Is this the beginning of sectarian warfare, is it tribal, is it AQI?" a U.S. military official said, using the abbreviation for the Sunni insurgency group al-Qaeda in Iraq. "It's hard to know if these are localized killings for political reasons or violence to spread a blanket of fear so people don't go to the polls."
Correspondents Leila Fadel and Ernesto Londoño in Baghdad and staff writers Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2010 The Washington Post
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Biden wants US warheads with worldwide reach
Of course Biden wants US warheads with worldwide reach. It's the only way the patriarchal psychopathic elite can fist-f**k the world into slave obedience!!!
http://www.inteldaily.com/2010/02/biden-wants-us-warheads-with-worldwide-reach/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+inteldaily/feeds+(Inteldaily.com)&utm_content=Google+Reader
FEBRUARY 19, 2010
US vice president Joe Biden says Washington should seek an “adaptive missile defense shield” and conventional warheads with global range.
Biden, who spoke at the National Defense University on Thursday, added that development of programs such as the planned anti-missile in Europe would allow the United States to decrease its nuclear weaponry.
“Capabilities like an adaptive missile defensive shield, conventional warheads with world-wide reach and others that are developing and being developed will enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons as other nuclear powers begin to draw down even further,” the vice president said.
Biden was also making the case for the big jump in spending so that scientists can make certain the aging US nuclear stockpile remains ready for use, if needed, without test explosions.
The new administration budget allocates USD 7 billion for scientists and laboratories that maintain warhead readiness — an increase of about 13.5 percent and one of the largest in the next spending plan.
The 2011 budget also calls for spending an additional USD 5 billion on those projects over the next five years.
Biden comments come while US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev agreed in July to cut their respective number of nuclear warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 under a new treaty. — Press TV
http://www.inteldaily.com/2010/02/biden-wants-us-warheads-with-worldwide-reach/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+inteldaily/feeds+(Inteldaily.com)&utm_content=Google+Reader
FEBRUARY 19, 2010
US vice president Joe Biden says Washington should seek an “adaptive missile defense shield” and conventional warheads with global range.
Biden, who spoke at the National Defense University on Thursday, added that development of programs such as the planned anti-missile in Europe would allow the United States to decrease its nuclear weaponry.
“Capabilities like an adaptive missile defensive shield, conventional warheads with world-wide reach and others that are developing and being developed will enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons as other nuclear powers begin to draw down even further,” the vice president said.
Biden was also making the case for the big jump in spending so that scientists can make certain the aging US nuclear stockpile remains ready for use, if needed, without test explosions.
The new administration budget allocates USD 7 billion for scientists and laboratories that maintain warhead readiness — an increase of about 13.5 percent and one of the largest in the next spending plan.
The 2011 budget also calls for spending an additional USD 5 billion on those projects over the next five years.
Biden comments come while US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev agreed in July to cut their respective number of nuclear warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 under a new treaty. — Press TV
Perpetual Wars & the Permanent Wartime Presidency
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2010/02/15/the-makings-of-a-police-state-part-vii/
The Makings of a Police State-Part VII
Monday, 15. February 2010
With almost a decade under its belt, our multi-front war on a vaguely defined notion of terrorism targeting never-really-defined enemies across the world and here in the newly rephrased ‘homeland’ has come to define the state of our nation. Even the meager limitations on presidential powers of the last six decades have in effect been nullified and replaced with a newly declared and interpreted authority mirroring those of past emperors and kings, and of any classic authoritarian regimes’ rulers.
One look at the last decade’s successfully won legal arguments on behalf of the executive, the presidency, is enough to establish the common theme that ‘the war on terror is global and indefinite in scope, and that it effectively removes all traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.’
Whether it is illegal domestic eavesdropping or unlawful detention and torture, these newly claimed and boldly practiced presidential entitlements rely on one factor, and that is the extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Here is a perfect example of the new permanent wartime presidency in action; boldly, loudly, and unfortunately thus far successfully:
On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president’s war-making powers in legal briefs as “plenary” — a term defined as “full,” “complete,” and “absolute.”
The current status of our nation’s president’s war-making powers is defined, recognized, and has been practiced as ‘plenary;’ complete and absolute. Now, let’s add to this the fact that our multi-fronted war on terror is global and indefinite, a war open-ended in time and with no national boundaries. What do we have with this equation? A permanent wartime presidency with absolute powers. The Constitution indeed granted the president the power to fight with any resources Congress makes available in wartime, and accordingly the executive is expected to do whatever it takes to protect the nation, even if it leaves some room for abuse of this power. But did our founders factor in the notion of indefinite, open-ended, perpetual wars, and with them, a permanent wartime presidency status? The Constitution gave presidents the freedom to defend the nation, but what about the nation’s need to protect itself against the abuses of this freedom, including the creation of perpetual wars accompanied with indefinite and absolute presidential powers?
The following excerpts are from the Devil’s Advocate, John Yoo:
Critics of presidential war powers exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war, and they also fail to examine the potential costs of congressional participation: delay, inflexibility, and lack of secrecy. Legislative deliberation may breed consensus in the best of cases, but it also may inhibit speed and decisiveness. In the post-Cold War era, the United States confronts several new threats to its national security: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the emergence of rogue nations, and the rise of international terrorism. Each of these threats may require pre-emptive action best undertaken by the president and approved by Congress only afterward.
…
The Constitution creates a presidency that can respond forcefully and independently to pre-empt serious threats to our national security. Instead of demanding a legalistic process to begin war, the framers left war to politics. Presidents can take the initiative and Congress would use their funding power to check him. As we confront terrorism, rogue nations, and WMD proliferation, now is not the time to engage in a radical change in the way our government has waged war for decades.
…
Mr. Yoo considers a thorough congressional review and authorization based on findings and careful review as tending to ‘exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war.’ If put in an appropriate context, this exaggeration could probably have prevented a preemptive attack on Iraq based on false and made-up intelligence on nonexistent WMD, and we may have saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives, tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and would have prevented the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians’ lives. Only in John Yoo’s book of ‘cost & benefits analysis’ would this make it to the ‘exaggerated cost column.’
As for ‘Congress would use their funding power to check him,’ his pretend innocence would not get a pass from even the most naïve or ignorant. Considering where the real funding of the inhabitants of our congress comes from, taking into consideration the old adage ‘thou shall not bite the hand that feeds you,’ and understanding the power of ‘bacon sent home,’ who is Mr. Yoo kidding here; really?
Let’s look at it from the other side of the fence. What executive office wouldn’t want to possess this level of power? How many presidents would resist gravitating towards the enormous powers granted to a Commander in Chief in practice? How many of today’s ‘viable’ presidential candidate’s bread is heavily buttered by the war industry? Here is how Richard Norton Smith put it during an interview:
However you define national emergency, whether it’s a foreign war, whether it’s a civil war, whether it’s an economic depression, whether it’s a Cold War or the current war on terror, the fact is power gravitates towards the president…It’s a tug of war, Jim, that’s been going on, a constitutional tug of war between the executive and the legislative branch. And what I was picking up off what Ellen said I think the last 75 years has, if anything, distorted what the founders intended. Because of the Great Depression, because of World War II, because of the Cold War, now the war on terror, the fact is that that tug of war has actually been very one-sided. I don’t think this is the presidency that the founders really envisioned.
…
A Little Bit of History
On November 19, 1973, the Special Committee on the Termination of the National Emergency presented Senate Report 93-549 at the first session of the 93rd Congress. The Introduction to the report, an examination of existing War and Emergency Powers Acts, states:
Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency. In fact, there are now in effect four presidentially-proclaimed states of national emergency: In addition to the national emergency declared by President Roosevelt in 1933, there are also the national emergency proclaimed by President Truman in 1950, during the Korean conflict, and the states of national emergency declared by President Nixon in1970 and 1971.
These proclamations give force to 470 provisions of Federal law. These hundreds of statutes delegate to the President extraordinary powers, ordinarily exercised by the Congress, which affect the lives of American citizens in a host of all-encompassing manners. These vast ranges of powers, taken together, confer enough authority to rule the country without reference to normal Constitutional processes.
Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens.
With the melting of the Cold War-the developing détente, with the Soviet Union and China, the stable truce of over 20 years duration between North and South Korea, and the end of U.S. involvement in the war in Indochina-there is no present need for the United States Government to continue to function under emergency conditions.
As we all know the establishment did not let the ‘melting Cold War’ argument stand. During the Reagan era the Cold War reached new heights, with a massive military buildup in an arms race with the USSR, before it came to an end. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine the panic experienced by the real powers as the Berlin wall and with it the several-decade Cold War came crumbling down. How could the massive Military Industrial Complex, and those feeding upon it, survive this ‘ending,’ and find a way to sustain itself? How about maintaining the role and power of the Executive Intelligence Complex? The creation, existence, and practices of these agencies were based on and justified by the ‘Evil Empire,’ and with it gone, so was the justification sold to the public for the existence of many dependent upon it here in the States.
Sure there were other wars; Gulf War, Kosovo… But those were mini-wars; peanuts. What was needed, that is for the sustainability, survival, and even the fantasy of expansion, was another long-lasting war. Not a dingy little country or two, and certainly not a clear-cut enemy and pinpointable target to hit and be done with. No. In fact, learning from experience, it had to be something that could not end with some darn wall coming down, or a massive regime being taken out. An open ended war; a war with undefined enemies in many colors, with many tongues, and scattered across the world; a war that could be pointed at one place, then at another, and yet another without having to fit any military definition of target or strategy; a war with no boundaries; a war with no possible end. A war that couldn’t even be defined as a war, yet could act as the mother of all wars – a Perpetual War.
If anyone laughed at even the fantasy of such an absurd objective, they certainly weren’t the ones who had the last laugh. All that was needed to make it happen was the creation of a state of emergency. After all, it had been done for a long time, and done so very successfully. People were used to it – living under various degrees of a state of emergency for many decades. Just take it up a notch or two, then sit back and watch the panic take root and spring into full bloom. Jazz it up with a disaster-loving and panic-driving media, and the state of emergency will go into full effect. And from there – hello Perpetual War.
Here is more on the report by the Special Committee on the Termination of the National Emergency:
A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency. The problem of how a constitutional democracy reacts to great crises, however, far antedates the Great Depression. As a philosophical issue, its origins reach back to the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic. And, in the United States, actions taken by the Government in times of great crises have-from, at least, the Civil War-in important ways, shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency.
…
Because Congress and the public are unaware of the extent of emergency powers, there has never been any notable congressional or public objection made to this state of affairs. Nor have the courts imposed significant limitations … the temporary states of emergency declared in 1938, 1939, 1941, 1950, 1970, and 1971 would become what are now regarded collectively as virtually permanent states of emergency (the 1939 and 1941 emergencies were terminated in 1952). Forty years can, in no way, be defined as a temporary emergency.
‘Forty years can, in no way, be defined as a temporary emergency;’ really? Obviously it can, and it was. Not only that, it actually got worse. Today they don’t even bother adding ‘temporary,’ and leave it out completely. How could you win or lose, and declare the end of the ‘war on terror’? Is it possible to capture and neutralize that one last boogie man, announce that the last of the terrorists has been terminated, and then go about dissolving Homeland Security, Motherland Security, Fatherland Agency, Intelligence Czars, Domestic Eavesdropping…? How about the entire industry, the thriving many trillion dollar industry, with the ‘war on terror’ as their sole reason for existence? Obviously this would not fit the vision put in place by the few who matter, and the many grown dependent on them.
The Mother of all perpetual wars, War on Terror, followed by unjustified and undeclared wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iran… Who are the enemies? Bad Taliban, Semi-bad Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda Supporters, Possible Al-Qaeda, Islamists, Fanatics, semi-fanatics, fanatic-looking dudes, Iran-ists, and with them all the civilians ‘just our collateral damage.’; babies, women, elderly…Kidnapping, torture, assassinations, black sites, black operations, black budgets…
Here at home: airport security check-points, no-fly list, semi-no-fly-list, many secret lists, tapping all phone calls, monitoring all e-mails, billions of secret documents, thousands of secret operations & plans.
For the winners in the Perpetual War, the military-intelligence-surveillance industrial complexes, the empire presidency and its advocates, and the parasitic class who lives beneath and off of them…the state of Perpetual War is a long-held dream coming true.
For the losers, we, the public majority, the mothers losing their sons and daughters to wars, the spouses left to deal with their returning amputated loved ones, many in need of medical care but with no coverage or assistance, the hard-working class dutifully parting with needed dollars and foregoing all expectations, the seekers of liberties…the realities of these made-up emergencies, and the real consequences of these vague wars are either not registering, or are being accepted and paid for silently.
This applicable quote comes to mind: “Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the laws are silent.” And, I feel like extending the line by adding”…for as long as the people wish to remain silent.”
The Makings of a Police State-Part VII
Monday, 15. February 2010
With almost a decade under its belt, our multi-front war on a vaguely defined notion of terrorism targeting never-really-defined enemies across the world and here in the newly rephrased ‘homeland’ has come to define the state of our nation. Even the meager limitations on presidential powers of the last six decades have in effect been nullified and replaced with a newly declared and interpreted authority mirroring those of past emperors and kings, and of any classic authoritarian regimes’ rulers.
One look at the last decade’s successfully won legal arguments on behalf of the executive, the presidency, is enough to establish the common theme that ‘the war on terror is global and indefinite in scope, and that it effectively removes all traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.’
Whether it is illegal domestic eavesdropping or unlawful detention and torture, these newly claimed and boldly practiced presidential entitlements rely on one factor, and that is the extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Here is a perfect example of the new permanent wartime presidency in action; boldly, loudly, and unfortunately thus far successfully:
On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president’s war-making powers in legal briefs as “plenary” — a term defined as “full,” “complete,” and “absolute.”
The current status of our nation’s president’s war-making powers is defined, recognized, and has been practiced as ‘plenary;’ complete and absolute. Now, let’s add to this the fact that our multi-fronted war on terror is global and indefinite, a war open-ended in time and with no national boundaries. What do we have with this equation? A permanent wartime presidency with absolute powers. The Constitution indeed granted the president the power to fight with any resources Congress makes available in wartime, and accordingly the executive is expected to do whatever it takes to protect the nation, even if it leaves some room for abuse of this power. But did our founders factor in the notion of indefinite, open-ended, perpetual wars, and with them, a permanent wartime presidency status? The Constitution gave presidents the freedom to defend the nation, but what about the nation’s need to protect itself against the abuses of this freedom, including the creation of perpetual wars accompanied with indefinite and absolute presidential powers?
The following excerpts are from the Devil’s Advocate, John Yoo:
Critics of presidential war powers exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war, and they also fail to examine the potential costs of congressional participation: delay, inflexibility, and lack of secrecy. Legislative deliberation may breed consensus in the best of cases, but it also may inhibit speed and decisiveness. In the post-Cold War era, the United States confronts several new threats to its national security: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the emergence of rogue nations, and the rise of international terrorism. Each of these threats may require pre-emptive action best undertaken by the president and approved by Congress only afterward.
…
The Constitution creates a presidency that can respond forcefully and independently to pre-empt serious threats to our national security. Instead of demanding a legalistic process to begin war, the framers left war to politics. Presidents can take the initiative and Congress would use their funding power to check him. As we confront terrorism, rogue nations, and WMD proliferation, now is not the time to engage in a radical change in the way our government has waged war for decades.
…
Mr. Yoo considers a thorough congressional review and authorization based on findings and careful review as tending to ‘exaggerate the benefits of declarations or authorizations of war.’ If put in an appropriate context, this exaggeration could probably have prevented a preemptive attack on Iraq based on false and made-up intelligence on nonexistent WMD, and we may have saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives, tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and would have prevented the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians’ lives. Only in John Yoo’s book of ‘cost & benefits analysis’ would this make it to the ‘exaggerated cost column.’
As for ‘Congress would use their funding power to check him,’ his pretend innocence would not get a pass from even the most naïve or ignorant. Considering where the real funding of the inhabitants of our congress comes from, taking into consideration the old adage ‘thou shall not bite the hand that feeds you,’ and understanding the power of ‘bacon sent home,’ who is Mr. Yoo kidding here; really?
Let’s look at it from the other side of the fence. What executive office wouldn’t want to possess this level of power? How many presidents would resist gravitating towards the enormous powers granted to a Commander in Chief in practice? How many of today’s ‘viable’ presidential candidate’s bread is heavily buttered by the war industry? Here is how Richard Norton Smith put it during an interview:
However you define national emergency, whether it’s a foreign war, whether it’s a civil war, whether it’s an economic depression, whether it’s a Cold War or the current war on terror, the fact is power gravitates towards the president…It’s a tug of war, Jim, that’s been going on, a constitutional tug of war between the executive and the legislative branch. And what I was picking up off what Ellen said I think the last 75 years has, if anything, distorted what the founders intended. Because of the Great Depression, because of World War II, because of the Cold War, now the war on terror, the fact is that that tug of war has actually been very one-sided. I don’t think this is the presidency that the founders really envisioned.
…
A Little Bit of History
On November 19, 1973, the Special Committee on the Termination of the National Emergency presented Senate Report 93-549 at the first session of the 93rd Congress. The Introduction to the report, an examination of existing War and Emergency Powers Acts, states:
Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency. In fact, there are now in effect four presidentially-proclaimed states of national emergency: In addition to the national emergency declared by President Roosevelt in 1933, there are also the national emergency proclaimed by President Truman in 1950, during the Korean conflict, and the states of national emergency declared by President Nixon in1970 and 1971.
These proclamations give force to 470 provisions of Federal law. These hundreds of statutes delegate to the President extraordinary powers, ordinarily exercised by the Congress, which affect the lives of American citizens in a host of all-encompassing manners. These vast ranges of powers, taken together, confer enough authority to rule the country without reference to normal Constitutional processes.
Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens.
With the melting of the Cold War-the developing détente, with the Soviet Union and China, the stable truce of over 20 years duration between North and South Korea, and the end of U.S. involvement in the war in Indochina-there is no present need for the United States Government to continue to function under emergency conditions.
As we all know the establishment did not let the ‘melting Cold War’ argument stand. During the Reagan era the Cold War reached new heights, with a massive military buildup in an arms race with the USSR, before it came to an end. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine the panic experienced by the real powers as the Berlin wall and with it the several-decade Cold War came crumbling down. How could the massive Military Industrial Complex, and those feeding upon it, survive this ‘ending,’ and find a way to sustain itself? How about maintaining the role and power of the Executive Intelligence Complex? The creation, existence, and practices of these agencies were based on and justified by the ‘Evil Empire,’ and with it gone, so was the justification sold to the public for the existence of many dependent upon it here in the States.
Sure there were other wars; Gulf War, Kosovo… But those were mini-wars; peanuts. What was needed, that is for the sustainability, survival, and even the fantasy of expansion, was another long-lasting war. Not a dingy little country or two, and certainly not a clear-cut enemy and pinpointable target to hit and be done with. No. In fact, learning from experience, it had to be something that could not end with some darn wall coming down, or a massive regime being taken out. An open ended war; a war with undefined enemies in many colors, with many tongues, and scattered across the world; a war that could be pointed at one place, then at another, and yet another without having to fit any military definition of target or strategy; a war with no boundaries; a war with no possible end. A war that couldn’t even be defined as a war, yet could act as the mother of all wars – a Perpetual War.
If anyone laughed at even the fantasy of such an absurd objective, they certainly weren’t the ones who had the last laugh. All that was needed to make it happen was the creation of a state of emergency. After all, it had been done for a long time, and done so very successfully. People were used to it – living under various degrees of a state of emergency for many decades. Just take it up a notch or two, then sit back and watch the panic take root and spring into full bloom. Jazz it up with a disaster-loving and panic-driving media, and the state of emergency will go into full effect. And from there – hello Perpetual War.
Here is more on the report by the Special Committee on the Termination of the National Emergency:
A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency. The problem of how a constitutional democracy reacts to great crises, however, far antedates the Great Depression. As a philosophical issue, its origins reach back to the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic. And, in the United States, actions taken by the Government in times of great crises have-from, at least, the Civil War-in important ways, shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency.
…
Because Congress and the public are unaware of the extent of emergency powers, there has never been any notable congressional or public objection made to this state of affairs. Nor have the courts imposed significant limitations … the temporary states of emergency declared in 1938, 1939, 1941, 1950, 1970, and 1971 would become what are now regarded collectively as virtually permanent states of emergency (the 1939 and 1941 emergencies were terminated in 1952). Forty years can, in no way, be defined as a temporary emergency.
‘Forty years can, in no way, be defined as a temporary emergency;’ really? Obviously it can, and it was. Not only that, it actually got worse. Today they don’t even bother adding ‘temporary,’ and leave it out completely. How could you win or lose, and declare the end of the ‘war on terror’? Is it possible to capture and neutralize that one last boogie man, announce that the last of the terrorists has been terminated, and then go about dissolving Homeland Security, Motherland Security, Fatherland Agency, Intelligence Czars, Domestic Eavesdropping…? How about the entire industry, the thriving many trillion dollar industry, with the ‘war on terror’ as their sole reason for existence? Obviously this would not fit the vision put in place by the few who matter, and the many grown dependent on them.
The Mother of all perpetual wars, War on Terror, followed by unjustified and undeclared wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iran… Who are the enemies? Bad Taliban, Semi-bad Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda Supporters, Possible Al-Qaeda, Islamists, Fanatics, semi-fanatics, fanatic-looking dudes, Iran-ists, and with them all the civilians ‘just our collateral damage.’; babies, women, elderly…Kidnapping, torture, assassinations, black sites, black operations, black budgets…
Here at home: airport security check-points, no-fly list, semi-no-fly-list, many secret lists, tapping all phone calls, monitoring all e-mails, billions of secret documents, thousands of secret operations & plans.
For the winners in the Perpetual War, the military-intelligence-surveillance industrial complexes, the empire presidency and its advocates, and the parasitic class who lives beneath and off of them…the state of Perpetual War is a long-held dream coming true.
For the losers, we, the public majority, the mothers losing their sons and daughters to wars, the spouses left to deal with their returning amputated loved ones, many in need of medical care but with no coverage or assistance, the hard-working class dutifully parting with needed dollars and foregoing all expectations, the seekers of liberties…the realities of these made-up emergencies, and the real consequences of these vague wars are either not registering, or are being accepted and paid for silently.
This applicable quote comes to mind: “Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the laws are silent.” And, I feel like extending the line by adding”…for as long as the people wish to remain silent.”
American Blitzkrieg
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175208/
February 18, 2010 by TomDispatch.com
Loving the German War Machine to Death
by William J. Astore
"Why do people have a fixation with the German military when they haven't won a war since 1871?" -- Tom Clancy
I've always been interested in the German military, especially the Wehrmacht of World War II. As a young boy, I recall building many models, not just German Panther and Tiger tanks, but famous Luftwaffe planes as well. True, I built American tanks and planes, Shermans and Thunderbolts and Mustangs, but the German models always seemed "cooler," a little more exotic, a little more predatory. And the German military, to my adolescent imagination, seemed admirably tough and aggressive: hard-fighting, thoroughly professional, hanging on against long odds, especially against the same hordes of "godless communists" that I knew we Americans were then facing down in the Cold War.
Later, of course, a little knowledge about the nightmare of Nazism and the Holocaust went a long way toward destroying my admiration for the Wehrmacht, but -- to be completely honest -- a residue of grudging respect still survives: I no longer have my models, but I still have many of the Ballantine illustrated war books I bought as a young boy for a buck or two, and which often celebrated the achievements of the German military, with titles like Panzer Division, or Afrika Korps, or even Waffen SS.
As the Bible says, we are meant to put aside childish things as we grow to adulthood, and an uninformed fascination with the militaria and regalia of the Third Reich was certainly one of these. But when I entered Air Force ROTC in 1981, and later on active duty in 1985, I was surprised, even pleased, to discover that so many members of the U.S. military shared my interest in the German military. To cite just one example, as a cadet at Field Training in 1983 (and later at Squadron Officer School in 1992), I participated in what was known as "Project X." As cadets, we came to know of it in whispers: "Tomorrow we're doing ‘Project X': It's really tough ..."
A problem-solving leadership exercise, Project X consisted of several scenarios and associated tasks. Working in small groups, you were expected to solve these while working against the clock. What made the project exciting and more than busy-work, like the endless marching or shining of shoes or waxing of floors, was that it was based on German methods of developing and instilling small-unit leadership, teamwork, and adaptability. If it worked for the Germans, the "finest soldiers in the world" during World War II, it was good enough for us, or so most of us concluded (including me).
Project X was just one rather routine manifestation of the American military's fascination with German methods and the German military mystique. As I began teaching military history to cadets at the Air Force Academy in 1990, I quickly became familiar with a flourishing "Cult of Clausewitz." So ubiquitous was Carl von Clausewitz and his book On War that it seemed as if we Americans had never produced our own military theorists. I grew familiar with the way Auftragstaktik (the idea of maximizing flexibility and initiative at the lowest tactical levels) was regularly extolled. So prevalent did Clausewitz and Auftragstaktik become that, in the 1980s and 1990s, American military thinking seemed reducible to the idea that "war is a continuation of politics" and a belief that victory went to the side that empowered its "strategic corporals."
War as a Creative Act
The American military's fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking raises many questions. In retrospect, what disturbs me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on events.
In this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive. It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of "creative" warlords who demonstrated their mastery of it by cultivating such qualities as flexibility, adaptability, and quickness. One aimed to get inside the enemy's "decision cycle," the so-called OODA loop -- the Air Force's version of Auftragstaktik -- while at the same time cultivating a "warrior ethos" within a tight-knit professional army that was to stand above, and also separate from, ordinary citizens.
This idolization of the German military was a telling manifestation of a growing militarism within an American society which remained remarkably oblivious to the slow strangulation of its citizen-soldier ideal. At the same time, the American military began to glorify a new generation of warrior-leaders by a selective reading of its past. Old "Blood and Guts" himself, the warrior-leader George S. Patton -- the commander as artist-creator-genius -- was celebrated; Omar N. Bradley -- the bespectacled GI general and reluctant soldier-citizen -- was neglected. Not coincidentally, a new vision of the battlefield emerged in which the U.S. military aimed, without the slightest sense of irony, for "total situational awareness" and "full spectrum dominance," goals that, if attained, promised commanders the almost god-like ability to master the "storm of steel," to calm the waves, to command the air.
In the process, any sense of war as thoroughly unpredictable and enormously wasteful was lost. In this infatuation with German military prowess, which the political scientist John Mearsheimer memorably described as "Wehrmacht penis envy," we celebrated our ability to Blitzkrieg our enemies -- which promised rapid, decisive victories that would be largely bloodless (at least for us). In 1991, a decisively quick victory in the Desert Storm campaign of the first Gulf War was the proof, or so it seemed then, that a successful "revolution in military affairs," or RMA in military parlance, was underway.
Forgotten, however, was this: the German Blitzkrieg of World War II ended with Germany's "third empire" thoroughly thrashed by opponents who continued to fight even when the odds seemed longest.
What a remarkable, not to say bizarre, turnabout! The army and country the U.S. had soundly beaten in two world wars (with a lot of help from allies, including, of course, those godless communists of the Soviet Union in the second one) had become a beacon for the U.S. military after Vietnam. To use a sports analogy, it was as if a Major League Baseball franchise, in seeking to win the World Series, decided to model itself not on the New York Yankees but rather on the Chicago Cubs.
The New Masters of Blitzkrieg
Busts of Clausewitz reside in places of honor today at both the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and the National War College in Washington, D.C. Clausewitz was a complex writer, and his vision of war was both dense and rich, defying easy simplification. But that hasn't stopped the U.S. military from simplifying him. Ask the average officer about Clausewitz, and he'll mention "war as the continuation of politics" and maybe something about "the fog and friction of war" -- and that's about it. What's really meant by this rendition of Clausewitz for Dummies is that, though warfare may seem extreme, it's really a perfectly sensible form of violent political discourse between nation-states.
Such an officer may grudgingly admit that, thanks to fog and friction, "no plan survives contact with the enemy." What he's secretly thinking, however, is that it won't matter at all, not given the U.S. military's "mastery" of Auftragstaktik, achieved in part through next-generation weaponry that provides both "total situational awareness" and a decisive, war-winning edge.
No wonder that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were so eager to go to war in Iraq in 2003. They saw themselves as the new masters of Blitzkrieg, the new warlords (or "Vulcans" to use a term popular back then), the inheritors of the best methods of German military efficiency.
This belief, this faith, in German-style total victory through relentless military proficiency is best captured in Max Boot's gushing tribute to the U.S. military, published soon after Bush's self-congratulatory and self-adulatory "Mission Accomplished" speech in May 2003. For Boot, America's victory in Iraq had to "rank as one of the signal achievements in military history." In his words:
"Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of ‘only' 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."
How likely is it that future military historians will celebrate General Tommy Franks and elevate him above the "incompetent" Rommel and Guderian? Such praise, even then, was more than fatuous. It was absurd.
Throughout our history, many Americans, especially frontline combat veterans, have known the hell of real war. It's one big reason why, historically speaking, we've traditionally been reluctant to keep a large standing military. But the Cold War, containment, and our own fetishizing of the German Wehrmacht changed everything. We began to see war not as a human-made disaster but as a creative science and art. We began to seek "force multipliers" and total victory achieved through an almost Prussian mania for military excellence.
Reeling from a seemingly inexplicable and unimaginable defeat in Vietnam, the officer corps used Clausewitz to crawl out of its collective fog. By reading him selectively and reaffirming our own faith in military professionalism and precision weaponry, we tricked ourselves into believing that we had attained mastery over warfare. We believed we had tamed the dogs of war; we believed we had conquered Bellona , that we could make the goddess of war do our bidding.
We forgot that Clausewitz compared war not only to politics but to a game of cards. Call it the ultimate high-stakes poker match. Even the player with the best cards, the highest stack of chips, doesn't always win. Guile and endurance matter. So too does nerve, even luck. And having a home-table advantage doesn't hurt either.
None of that seemed to matter to a U.S. military that aped the German military, while over-hyping its abilities and successes. The result? A so-called "new American way of war" that was simply a desiccated version of the old German one, which had produced nothing but catastrophic defeat for Germany in both 1918 and 1945 -- and disaster for Europe as well.
Just Ask the Germans
Precisely because that disaster did not befall us, precisely because we emerged triumphant from two world wars, we became both too enamored with the decisiveness of war, and too dismissive of our own unique strength. For our strength was not military élan or cutting-edge weaponry or tactical finesse (these were German "strengths"), but rather the dedication, the generosity, even the occasional ineptitude, of our citizen-soldiers. Their spirit was unbreakable precisely because they -- a truly democratic citizen army -- were dedicated to defeating a repellently evil empire that reveled fanatically in its own combat vigor.
Looking back on my youthful infatuation with the German Wehrmacht, I recognize a boy's misguided enthusiasm for military hardness and toughness. I recognize as well the seductiveness of reducing the chaos of war to "shock and awe" Blitzkrieg and warrior empowerment. What amazes me, however, is how this astonishingly selective and adolescent view of war -- with its fetish for lightning results, achieved by elevating and empowering a new generation of warlords, warriors, and advanced weaponry -- came to dominate mainstream American military thinking after the frustrations of Vietnam.
Unlike a devastated and demoralized Germany after its defeats, we decided not to devalue war as an instrument of policy after our defeat, but rather to embrace it. Clasping Clausewitz to our collective breasts, we marched forward seeking new decisive victories. Yet, like our role models the Germans of World War II, we found victory to be both elusive and illusive.
So, I have a message for my younger self: put aside those menacing models of German tanks and planes. Forget those glowing accounts of Rommel and his Afrika Korps. Dismiss Blitzkrieg from your childish mind. There is no lightning war, America. There never was. And if you won't take my word for it, just ask the Germans.
Copyright 2010 William J. Astore
February 18, 2010 by TomDispatch.com
Loving the German War Machine to Death
by William J. Astore
"Why do people have a fixation with the German military when they haven't won a war since 1871?" -- Tom Clancy
I've always been interested in the German military, especially the Wehrmacht of World War II. As a young boy, I recall building many models, not just German Panther and Tiger tanks, but famous Luftwaffe planes as well. True, I built American tanks and planes, Shermans and Thunderbolts and Mustangs, but the German models always seemed "cooler," a little more exotic, a little more predatory. And the German military, to my adolescent imagination, seemed admirably tough and aggressive: hard-fighting, thoroughly professional, hanging on against long odds, especially against the same hordes of "godless communists" that I knew we Americans were then facing down in the Cold War.
Later, of course, a little knowledge about the nightmare of Nazism and the Holocaust went a long way toward destroying my admiration for the Wehrmacht, but -- to be completely honest -- a residue of grudging respect still survives: I no longer have my models, but I still have many of the Ballantine illustrated war books I bought as a young boy for a buck or two, and which often celebrated the achievements of the German military, with titles like Panzer Division, or Afrika Korps, or even Waffen SS.
As the Bible says, we are meant to put aside childish things as we grow to adulthood, and an uninformed fascination with the militaria and regalia of the Third Reich was certainly one of these. But when I entered Air Force ROTC in 1981, and later on active duty in 1985, I was surprised, even pleased, to discover that so many members of the U.S. military shared my interest in the German military. To cite just one example, as a cadet at Field Training in 1983 (and later at Squadron Officer School in 1992), I participated in what was known as "Project X." As cadets, we came to know of it in whispers: "Tomorrow we're doing ‘Project X': It's really tough ..."
A problem-solving leadership exercise, Project X consisted of several scenarios and associated tasks. Working in small groups, you were expected to solve these while working against the clock. What made the project exciting and more than busy-work, like the endless marching or shining of shoes or waxing of floors, was that it was based on German methods of developing and instilling small-unit leadership, teamwork, and adaptability. If it worked for the Germans, the "finest soldiers in the world" during World War II, it was good enough for us, or so most of us concluded (including me).
Project X was just one rather routine manifestation of the American military's fascination with German methods and the German military mystique. As I began teaching military history to cadets at the Air Force Academy in 1990, I quickly became familiar with a flourishing "Cult of Clausewitz." So ubiquitous was Carl von Clausewitz and his book On War that it seemed as if we Americans had never produced our own military theorists. I grew familiar with the way Auftragstaktik (the idea of maximizing flexibility and initiative at the lowest tactical levels) was regularly extolled. So prevalent did Clausewitz and Auftragstaktik become that, in the 1980s and 1990s, American military thinking seemed reducible to the idea that "war is a continuation of politics" and a belief that victory went to the side that empowered its "strategic corporals."
War as a Creative Act
The American military's fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking raises many questions. In retrospect, what disturbs me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on events.
In this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive. It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of "creative" warlords who demonstrated their mastery of it by cultivating such qualities as flexibility, adaptability, and quickness. One aimed to get inside the enemy's "decision cycle," the so-called OODA loop -- the Air Force's version of Auftragstaktik -- while at the same time cultivating a "warrior ethos" within a tight-knit professional army that was to stand above, and also separate from, ordinary citizens.
This idolization of the German military was a telling manifestation of a growing militarism within an American society which remained remarkably oblivious to the slow strangulation of its citizen-soldier ideal. At the same time, the American military began to glorify a new generation of warrior-leaders by a selective reading of its past. Old "Blood and Guts" himself, the warrior-leader George S. Patton -- the commander as artist-creator-genius -- was celebrated; Omar N. Bradley -- the bespectacled GI general and reluctant soldier-citizen -- was neglected. Not coincidentally, a new vision of the battlefield emerged in which the U.S. military aimed, without the slightest sense of irony, for "total situational awareness" and "full spectrum dominance," goals that, if attained, promised commanders the almost god-like ability to master the "storm of steel," to calm the waves, to command the air.
In the process, any sense of war as thoroughly unpredictable and enormously wasteful was lost. In this infatuation with German military prowess, which the political scientist John Mearsheimer memorably described as "Wehrmacht penis envy," we celebrated our ability to Blitzkrieg our enemies -- which promised rapid, decisive victories that would be largely bloodless (at least for us). In 1991, a decisively quick victory in the Desert Storm campaign of the first Gulf War was the proof, or so it seemed then, that a successful "revolution in military affairs," or RMA in military parlance, was underway.
Forgotten, however, was this: the German Blitzkrieg of World War II ended with Germany's "third empire" thoroughly thrashed by opponents who continued to fight even when the odds seemed longest.
What a remarkable, not to say bizarre, turnabout! The army and country the U.S. had soundly beaten in two world wars (with a lot of help from allies, including, of course, those godless communists of the Soviet Union in the second one) had become a beacon for the U.S. military after Vietnam. To use a sports analogy, it was as if a Major League Baseball franchise, in seeking to win the World Series, decided to model itself not on the New York Yankees but rather on the Chicago Cubs.
The New Masters of Blitzkrieg
Busts of Clausewitz reside in places of honor today at both the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and the National War College in Washington, D.C. Clausewitz was a complex writer, and his vision of war was both dense and rich, defying easy simplification. But that hasn't stopped the U.S. military from simplifying him. Ask the average officer about Clausewitz, and he'll mention "war as the continuation of politics" and maybe something about "the fog and friction of war" -- and that's about it. What's really meant by this rendition of Clausewitz for Dummies is that, though warfare may seem extreme, it's really a perfectly sensible form of violent political discourse between nation-states.
Such an officer may grudgingly admit that, thanks to fog and friction, "no plan survives contact with the enemy." What he's secretly thinking, however, is that it won't matter at all, not given the U.S. military's "mastery" of Auftragstaktik, achieved in part through next-generation weaponry that provides both "total situational awareness" and a decisive, war-winning edge.
No wonder that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were so eager to go to war in Iraq in 2003. They saw themselves as the new masters of Blitzkrieg, the new warlords (or "Vulcans" to use a term popular back then), the inheritors of the best methods of German military efficiency.
This belief, this faith, in German-style total victory through relentless military proficiency is best captured in Max Boot's gushing tribute to the U.S. military, published soon after Bush's self-congratulatory and self-adulatory "Mission Accomplished" speech in May 2003. For Boot, America's victory in Iraq had to "rank as one of the signal achievements in military history." In his words:
"Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of ‘only' 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."
How likely is it that future military historians will celebrate General Tommy Franks and elevate him above the "incompetent" Rommel and Guderian? Such praise, even then, was more than fatuous. It was absurd.
Throughout our history, many Americans, especially frontline combat veterans, have known the hell of real war. It's one big reason why, historically speaking, we've traditionally been reluctant to keep a large standing military. But the Cold War, containment, and our own fetishizing of the German Wehrmacht changed everything. We began to see war not as a human-made disaster but as a creative science and art. We began to seek "force multipliers" and total victory achieved through an almost Prussian mania for military excellence.
Reeling from a seemingly inexplicable and unimaginable defeat in Vietnam, the officer corps used Clausewitz to crawl out of its collective fog. By reading him selectively and reaffirming our own faith in military professionalism and precision weaponry, we tricked ourselves into believing that we had attained mastery over warfare. We believed we had tamed the dogs of war; we believed we had conquered Bellona , that we could make the goddess of war do our bidding.
We forgot that Clausewitz compared war not only to politics but to a game of cards. Call it the ultimate high-stakes poker match. Even the player with the best cards, the highest stack of chips, doesn't always win. Guile and endurance matter. So too does nerve, even luck. And having a home-table advantage doesn't hurt either.
None of that seemed to matter to a U.S. military that aped the German military, while over-hyping its abilities and successes. The result? A so-called "new American way of war" that was simply a desiccated version of the old German one, which had produced nothing but catastrophic defeat for Germany in both 1918 and 1945 -- and disaster for Europe as well.
Just Ask the Germans
Precisely because that disaster did not befall us, precisely because we emerged triumphant from two world wars, we became both too enamored with the decisiveness of war, and too dismissive of our own unique strength. For our strength was not military élan or cutting-edge weaponry or tactical finesse (these were German "strengths"), but rather the dedication, the generosity, even the occasional ineptitude, of our citizen-soldiers. Their spirit was unbreakable precisely because they -- a truly democratic citizen army -- were dedicated to defeating a repellently evil empire that reveled fanatically in its own combat vigor.
Looking back on my youthful infatuation with the German Wehrmacht, I recognize a boy's misguided enthusiasm for military hardness and toughness. I recognize as well the seductiveness of reducing the chaos of war to "shock and awe" Blitzkrieg and warrior empowerment. What amazes me, however, is how this astonishingly selective and adolescent view of war -- with its fetish for lightning results, achieved by elevating and empowering a new generation of warlords, warriors, and advanced weaponry -- came to dominate mainstream American military thinking after the frustrations of Vietnam.
Unlike a devastated and demoralized Germany after its defeats, we decided not to devalue war as an instrument of policy after our defeat, but rather to embrace it. Clasping Clausewitz to our collective breasts, we marched forward seeking new decisive victories. Yet, like our role models the Germans of World War II, we found victory to be both elusive and illusive.
So, I have a message for my younger self: put aside those menacing models of German tanks and planes. Forget those glowing accounts of Rommel and his Afrika Korps. Dismiss Blitzkrieg from your childish mind. There is no lightning war, America. There never was. And if you won't take my word for it, just ask the Germans.
Copyright 2010 William J. Astore
Friday, February 12, 2010
'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2010/02/conspiracies-of-rich-men-to-commit-war.html
FEBRUARY 02, 2010
'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of 'conspiracies'. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'orgnized crime'.
If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secreatary of State! So --I ask you --who is nuts?
The government often cites the specter of 'organized crime' in order to rally voters to a 'right wing' cause like 'law and order', a big issue in the 1960s. In order to fully exploit this 'threat', this 'clear and present danger' to the lives of middle America who seemed to have been cowering in fear, it was necessary to promote all manner of fears --hippies, black people, rock n' rolll, and crime syndicates. Law and order' was, therefore, a big issue among the GOP hoping to exploit the fears of 'hippies' and 'black people' --both of whom were unhappy with increasing poverty, denial of rights, the seemingly endless, mindless and destructive war in Viet Nam. It was a war fought on behalf of a 'conspiracy of rich men' --ITT, Honeywell et al --all of whom hoped to make a killing with defense contracts.
George H. W. Bush, otherwise called Sr now, had hoped to achieve high office by exploiting those fears. It is no stretch to conclude that George H. W. Bush had made a Faustian bargain with the leadership of GOP. George H. W. Bush --by the time I met him --has already sold his soul to what St. Thomas More has already described as a 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodites'.
The Senior Bush won two elections for a seat in the House of Representatives, but lost two bids for a Senate seat. It was in during one of his Senate races that I first met the Senior Bush who was not so well known when I interviewed Bush Sr with regard to this very issue. I was a very young reporter, somewhat naive, learning the ropes and had not yet made it to a major market or a network. Honestly --I did not know what to make of Bush's 'non'-answer. It consisted of slogans, buzzwords, and meaningless gobbledy gook. Little has changed. The Bush family still talks like that!
After Bush's second race for the Senate, President Nixon appointed him U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He later became Republican National Committee chairman. He headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing. It was years later, in Houston, that the Senior Bush would regale me with a story about how he was 'duped' into eating 'dog lips' --apparently a Chinese delicacy --at a formal, diplomatic dinner in the Forbidden City.
Bush would eventually become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, many wondered what, precisely, was it that qualified Bush to head up the CIA, an agency that I have called 'World's Number One Terrorist Organization'. Despite his criticism of Reagan's “voodoo economics" , Bush became Reagan's running mate in 1980; by 1984, Bush had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan's conservative agenda. Thus would espouse an utterly failed policy and one that he himself has opposed. Reagan's 'voodoo economics' caused a two year long recession, the deepest and most severe depression since Hoover's great depression of 1929. But that clearly did not matter to Bush Sr. He would hitch his wagon to whatever star was ascendant and, at the time, it was the ascendant Ronald Reagan who would preside over a 'conspiracy' to sell arms to Iran, which was, at the time, an officially declared enemy of the United States, a sponsor of world wide terrorism. This 'conspiracy' on behalf of rich men would then funnel the proceeds of those sales to the so-called Contras in Nicaragua. There is a word for this: high treason:
The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.
The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.
The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths. --Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL
FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS
No one ever called Sr a 'conspiracy theorist'. That's because he was not a theorist; he was a 'conspirator' for real!
"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Last time I checked the Cornell Univ Law Library and FINDLAW, I found hundreds if not thousands of court decisions, including SCOTUS, having to do with conspiracies large and small, of one sort or another. Someone should inform SCOTUS that conspiracies do not exist, but, I suspect, the very fact that they are recognized by the higher courts, including SCOTUS, creates them if they had not existed prior.
In his 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', William Shirer described what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men' to invade the nations of Europe, steal their resources and divide up the booty.
Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)
The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.
Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."
All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3) --William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34
We are fortunate that no one 'informed' informed Shirer that conspiracies do not exist before he bothered unearthing the mountain of Nazi documents that prove the meeting, the Nazi conspiracy to wage war and genocide for the benefit of global corporations that participated. This meeting of 'industrialists' took place just as surely as did the meeting of Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' which carved up an 'alloted' the oil fields of Iraq long before the events of 911 would give these 'conspiractors' the pre-text they would require to attack Iraq, wage war upon that nation and, in the process, steel its resources for the likes of Dick Cheney's own Halliburton and other members of an energy consortium.
The results were published in a 'National Energy Policy' report in May 2001, several months before 911 would give them the pretext to make the report come true. This is precisely the kind of of conspiracy that had been described so accurately, precisely by St. Thomas More in his "Utopia", a classic of English literature.
I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.
They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth's sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!
Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Another example is Heinrich Heydrich's infamous meeting at Wansee, attended by Nazi bureaucrats, and corporate kiss ups. Over a civilized lunch, this 'conspiracy of rich men' planned the extermination of the jews of Europe.
... within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. These six camps, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland.
Responsibility for the entire project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS.
The Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people--The Wannsee Conference, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
Very little is EVER accomplished by one person working alone unless you happen to be Michelangelo. Conspiracies exist! Our own Supreme Court has said so and, by law, they have defined themselves as 'infallible'. They are, themselves, of late, a conspiracy of Republicans to subvert the Constitution.
Because conspiracy --in fact --exist, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is called the military-industrial complex. It's job is to divide the spoils of war among Dick Cheney's oil buddies and other 'paid thugs' like Blackwater, who conveniently hide behind the monicker --'defense contractor'.
For eons wars have been fought for booty! That's why the US fights them today. Rome invaded Dacia for the gold. The U.S. wages war in the Middle East for oil, the booty du jour! To deny one the right to oppose those wars --as Supreme Court Justice Holmes denied Eugene Debs --is a recipe for military dictatorship. In a text-book example of the false analogy, Holmes likened Debs' opposition to U.S. entry in WWI to yelling 'fire in a crowded theater'. I ask: isn't it more dangerous NOT to shout fire if the theater really is on fire?
Today --the theater is on fire. Our government has repeatedly failed us on almost every front. We are expected to die abroad in order to enrich numerous conspiracies of rich men --oil barons, arm merchants, the very minions of the Military-Industrial Complex. Corporations, we are told, are people and the conspiracy we used to dignify with the term --Supreme Court --has said so! And I ask you: if the MIC is not a 'conspiracy of rich men', then what is? If the Supreme Court has not deteriorated into a conspiracy of right wing ideologues, then why are not the dictionaries re-written and the thousands of pages of case law burned or dumped offshore so that we cannot learn the truth for ourselves. We are expected to buy the lies and die for this wicked, venal conspiracy. Well, I won't and never will!
St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!" [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Justice Holmes were alive, I would tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!
I am yelling FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
FEBRUARY 02, 2010
'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of 'conspiracies'. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'orgnized crime'.
If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secreatary of State! So --I ask you --who is nuts?
The government often cites the specter of 'organized crime' in order to rally voters to a 'right wing' cause like 'law and order', a big issue in the 1960s. In order to fully exploit this 'threat', this 'clear and present danger' to the lives of middle America who seemed to have been cowering in fear, it was necessary to promote all manner of fears --hippies, black people, rock n' rolll, and crime syndicates. Law and order' was, therefore, a big issue among the GOP hoping to exploit the fears of 'hippies' and 'black people' --both of whom were unhappy with increasing poverty, denial of rights, the seemingly endless, mindless and destructive war in Viet Nam. It was a war fought on behalf of a 'conspiracy of rich men' --ITT, Honeywell et al --all of whom hoped to make a killing with defense contracts.
George H. W. Bush, otherwise called Sr now, had hoped to achieve high office by exploiting those fears. It is no stretch to conclude that George H. W. Bush had made a Faustian bargain with the leadership of GOP. George H. W. Bush --by the time I met him --has already sold his soul to what St. Thomas More has already described as a 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodites'.
The Senior Bush won two elections for a seat in the House of Representatives, but lost two bids for a Senate seat. It was in during one of his Senate races that I first met the Senior Bush who was not so well known when I interviewed Bush Sr with regard to this very issue. I was a very young reporter, somewhat naive, learning the ropes and had not yet made it to a major market or a network. Honestly --I did not know what to make of Bush's 'non'-answer. It consisted of slogans, buzzwords, and meaningless gobbledy gook. Little has changed. The Bush family still talks like that!
After Bush's second race for the Senate, President Nixon appointed him U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He later became Republican National Committee chairman. He headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing. It was years later, in Houston, that the Senior Bush would regale me with a story about how he was 'duped' into eating 'dog lips' --apparently a Chinese delicacy --at a formal, diplomatic dinner in the Forbidden City.
Bush would eventually become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, many wondered what, precisely, was it that qualified Bush to head up the CIA, an agency that I have called 'World's Number One Terrorist Organization'. Despite his criticism of Reagan's “voodoo economics" , Bush became Reagan's running mate in 1980; by 1984, Bush had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan's conservative agenda. Thus would espouse an utterly failed policy and one that he himself has opposed. Reagan's 'voodoo economics' caused a two year long recession, the deepest and most severe depression since Hoover's great depression of 1929. But that clearly did not matter to Bush Sr. He would hitch his wagon to whatever star was ascendant and, at the time, it was the ascendant Ronald Reagan who would preside over a 'conspiracy' to sell arms to Iran, which was, at the time, an officially declared enemy of the United States, a sponsor of world wide terrorism. This 'conspiracy' on behalf of rich men would then funnel the proceeds of those sales to the so-called Contras in Nicaragua. There is a word for this: high treason:
The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.
The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.
The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths. --Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL
FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS
No one ever called Sr a 'conspiracy theorist'. That's because he was not a theorist; he was a 'conspirator' for real!
"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Last time I checked the Cornell Univ Law Library and FINDLAW, I found hundreds if not thousands of court decisions, including SCOTUS, having to do with conspiracies large and small, of one sort or another. Someone should inform SCOTUS that conspiracies do not exist, but, I suspect, the very fact that they are recognized by the higher courts, including SCOTUS, creates them if they had not existed prior.
In his 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', William Shirer described what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men' to invade the nations of Europe, steal their resources and divide up the booty.
Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)
The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.
Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."
All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3) --William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34
We are fortunate that no one 'informed' informed Shirer that conspiracies do not exist before he bothered unearthing the mountain of Nazi documents that prove the meeting, the Nazi conspiracy to wage war and genocide for the benefit of global corporations that participated. This meeting of 'industrialists' took place just as surely as did the meeting of Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' which carved up an 'alloted' the oil fields of Iraq long before the events of 911 would give these 'conspiractors' the pre-text they would require to attack Iraq, wage war upon that nation and, in the process, steel its resources for the likes of Dick Cheney's own Halliburton and other members of an energy consortium.
The results were published in a 'National Energy Policy' report in May 2001, several months before 911 would give them the pretext to make the report come true. This is precisely the kind of of conspiracy that had been described so accurately, precisely by St. Thomas More in his "Utopia", a classic of English literature.
I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.
They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth's sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!
Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Another example is Heinrich Heydrich's infamous meeting at Wansee, attended by Nazi bureaucrats, and corporate kiss ups. Over a civilized lunch, this 'conspiracy of rich men' planned the extermination of the jews of Europe.
... within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. These six camps, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland.
Responsibility for the entire project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS.
The Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people--The Wannsee Conference, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
Very little is EVER accomplished by one person working alone unless you happen to be Michelangelo. Conspiracies exist! Our own Supreme Court has said so and, by law, they have defined themselves as 'infallible'. They are, themselves, of late, a conspiracy of Republicans to subvert the Constitution.
Because conspiracy --in fact --exist, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is called the military-industrial complex. It's job is to divide the spoils of war among Dick Cheney's oil buddies and other 'paid thugs' like Blackwater, who conveniently hide behind the monicker --'defense contractor'.
For eons wars have been fought for booty! That's why the US fights them today. Rome invaded Dacia for the gold. The U.S. wages war in the Middle East for oil, the booty du jour! To deny one the right to oppose those wars --as Supreme Court Justice Holmes denied Eugene Debs --is a recipe for military dictatorship. In a text-book example of the false analogy, Holmes likened Debs' opposition to U.S. entry in WWI to yelling 'fire in a crowded theater'. I ask: isn't it more dangerous NOT to shout fire if the theater really is on fire?
Today --the theater is on fire. Our government has repeatedly failed us on almost every front. We are expected to die abroad in order to enrich numerous conspiracies of rich men --oil barons, arm merchants, the very minions of the Military-Industrial Complex. Corporations, we are told, are people and the conspiracy we used to dignify with the term --Supreme Court --has said so! And I ask you: if the MIC is not a 'conspiracy of rich men', then what is? If the Supreme Court has not deteriorated into a conspiracy of right wing ideologues, then why are not the dictionaries re-written and the thousands of pages of case law burned or dumped offshore so that we cannot learn the truth for ourselves. We are expected to buy the lies and die for this wicked, venal conspiracy. Well, I won't and never will!
St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!" [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Justice Holmes were alive, I would tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!
I am yelling FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
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