Zombie America

The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families

2011-06-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

(Part one of a four-part series)

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

One important repository for the wealth of the global oligarchy that owns these bank holding companies is US Trust Corporation – founded in 1853 and now owned by Bank of America. A recent US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee was Walter Rothschild. Other directors included Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley. [2]

J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York Federal Reserve Bank- by far the most powerful Fed branch- by just eight families, four of which reside in the US. They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.

CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches. He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York. Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. [3] The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.

Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he displays charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of Rothschild, Warburg, Rockefeller and the others. [4]

The control that these banking families exert over the global economy cannot be overstated and is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy. Their corporate media arm is quick to discredit any information exposing this private central banking cartel as “conspiracy theory”. Yet the facts remain.

The House of Morgan

The Federal Reserve Bank was born in 1913, the same year US banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan died and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed. The House of Morgan presided over American finance from the corner of Wall Street and Broad, acting as quasi-US central bank since 1838, when George Peabody founded it in London.

Peabody was a business associate of the Rothschilds. In 1952 Fed researcher Eustace Mullins put forth the supposition that the Morgans were nothing more than Rothschild agents. Mullins wrote that the Rothschilds, “…preferred to operate anonymously in the US behind the facade of J.P. Morgan & Company”. [5]

Author Gabriel Kolko stated, “Morgan’s activities in 1895-1896 in selling US gold bonds in Europe were based on an alliance with the House of Rothschild.” [6]

The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled Paris. The Rothschild’s Lambert cousins set up Drexel & Company in Philadelphia.

The House of Morgan catered to the Astors, DuPonts, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. It financed the launch of AT&T, General Motors, General Electric and DuPont. Like the London-based Rothschild and Barings banks, Morgan became part of the power structure in many countries.

By 1890 the House of Morgan was lending to Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian railroads, floating Brazilian provincial government bonds and funding Argentine public works projects. A recession in 1893 enhanced Morgan’s power. That year Morgan saved the US government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate to prop up government reserves with a shipment of $62 million worth of Rothschild gold. [7]

Morgan was the driving force behind Western expansion in the US, financing and controlling West-bound railroads through voting trusts. In 1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship.

The House of Morgan now fell under Rothschild and Rockefeller family control. A New York Herald headline read, “Railroad Kings Form Gigantic Trust”. J. Pierpont Morgan, who once stated, “Competition is a sin”, now opined gleefully, “Think of it. All competing railroad traffic west of St. Louis placed in the control of about thirty men.”[8]

Morgan and Edward Harriman’s banker Kuhn Loeb held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base. [9]

In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight Families. Benjamin Strong of Banker’s Trust was the first Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The 1913 creation of the Fed fused the power of the Eight Families to the military and diplomatic might of the US government. If their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts. Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate.

The House of Morgan was cozy with the British House of Windsor and the Italian House of Savoy. The Kuhn Loebs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Lazards, Israel Moses Seifs and Goldman Sachs also had close ties to European royalty. By 1895 Morgan controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US. The first American wave of mergers was in its infancy and was being promoted by the bankers. In 1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers. By 1899 there were twelve-hundred. In 1904 John Moody – founder of Moody’s Investor Services – said it was impossible to talk of Rockefeller and Morgan interests as separate. [10]

Public distrust of the combine spread. Many considered them traitors working for European old money. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie’s US Steel and Edward Harriman’s railroads were all financed by banker Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb, who worked closely with the European Rothschilds.

Several Western states banned the bankers. Populist preacher William Jennings Bryan was thrice the Democratic nominee for President from 1896 -1908. The central theme of his anti-imperialist campaign was that America was falling into a trap of “financial servitude to British capital”. Teddy Roosevelt defeated Bryan in 1908, but was forced by this spreading populist wildfire to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He then went after the Standard Oil Trust.

In 1912 the Pujo hearings were held, addressing concentration of power on Wall Street. That same year Mrs. Edward Harriman sold her substantial shares in New York’s Guaranty Trust Bank to J.P. Morgan, creating Morgan Guaranty Trust. Judge Louis Brandeis convinced President Woodrow Wilson to call for an end to interlocking board directorates. In 1914 the Clayton Anti-Trust Act was passed.

Jack Morgan – J. Pierpont’s son and successor – responded by calling on Morgan clients Remington and Winchester to increase arms production. He argued that the US needed to enter WWI. Goaded by the Carnegie Foundation and other oligarchy fronts, Wilson accommodated. As Charles Tansill wrote in America Goes to War, “Even before the clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild Freres cabled to Morgan & Company in New York suggesting the flotation of a loan of $100 million, a substantial part of which was to be left in the US to pay for French purchases of American goods.”

The House of Morgan financed half the US war effort, while receiving commissions for lining up contractors like GE, Du Pont, US Steel, Kennecott and ASARCO. All were Morgan clients. Morgan also financed the British Boer War in South Africa and the Franco-Prussian War. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was presided over by Morgan, which led both German and Allied reconstruction efforts. [11]

In the 1930’s populism resurfaced in America after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bank and others profited from the Crash of 1929. [12] House Banking Committee Chairman Louis McFadden (D-NY) said of the Great Depression, “It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurrence…The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all”.

Sen. Gerald Nye (D-ND) chaired a munitions investigation in 1936. Nye concluded that the House of Morgan had plunged the US into WWI to protect loans and create a booming arms industry. Nye later produced a document titled The Next War, which cynically referred to “the old goddess of democracy trick”, through which Japan could be used to lure the US into WWII.

In 1937 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned of the influence of “America’s 60 Families”. Historian Ferdinand Lundberg later penned a book of the exact same title. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas decried, “Morgan influence…the most pernicious one in industry and finance today.”

Jack Morgan responded by nudging the US towards WWII. Morgan had close relations with the Iwasaki and Dan families – Japan’s two wealthiest clans – who have owned Mitsubishi and Mitsui, respectively, since the companies emerged from 17th Century shogunates. When Japan invaded Manchuria, slaughtering Chinese peasants at Nanking, Morgan downplayed the incident. Morgan also had close relations with Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, while German Nazi Dr. Hjalmer Schacht was a Morgan Bank liaison during WWII. After the war Morgan representatives met with Schacht at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. [13]

The House of Rockefeller

BIS is the most powerful bank in the world, a global central bank for the Eight Families who control the private central banks of almost all Western and developing nations. The first President of BIS was Rockefeller banker Gates McGarrah- an official at Chase Manhattan and the Federal Reserve. McGarrah was the grandfather of former CIA director Richard Helms. The Rockefellers- like the Morgans- had close ties to London. David Icke writes in Children of the Matrix, that the Rockefellers and Morgans were just “gofers” for the European Rothschilds. [14]

BIS is owned by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of Italy, Bank of Canada, Swiss National Bank, Nederlandsche Bank, Bundesbank and Bank of France.

Historian Carroll Quigley wrote in his epic book Tragedy and Hope that BIS was part of a plan, “to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements.”

The US government had a historical distrust of BIS, lobbying unsuccessfully for its demise at the 1944 post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference. Instead the Eight Families’ power was exacerbated, with the Bretton Woods creation of the IMF and the World Bank. The US Federal Reserve only took shares in BIS in September 1994. [15]

BIS holds at least 10% of monetary reserves for at least 80 of the world’s central banks, the IMF and other multilateral institutions. It serves as financial agent for international agreements, collects information on the global economy and serves as lender of last resort to prevent global financial collapse.

BIS promotes an agenda of monopoly capitalist fascism. It gave a bridge loan to Hungary in the 1990’s to ensure privatization of that country’s economy. It served as conduit for Eight Families funding of Adolf Hitler- led by the Warburg’s J. Henry Schroeder and Mendelsohn Bank of Amsterdam. Many researchers assert that BIS is at the nadir of global drug money laundering. [16]

It is no coincidence that BIS is headquartered in Switzerland, favorite hiding place for the wealth of the global aristocracy and headquarters for the P-2 Italian Freemason’s Alpina Lodge and Nazi International. Other institutions which the Eight Families control include the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference and the World Trade Organization.

Bretton Woods was a boon to the Eight Families. The IMF and World Bank were central to this “new world order”. In 1944 the first World Bank bonds were floated by Morgan Stanley and First Boston. The French Lazard family became more involved in House of Morgan interests. Lazard Freres- France’s biggest investment bank- is owned by the Lazard and David-Weill families- old Genoese banking scions represented by Michelle Davive. A recent Chairman and CEO of Citigroup was Sanford Weill.

In 1968 Morgan Guaranty launched Euro-Clear, a Brussels-based bank clearing system for Eurodollar securities. It was the first such automated endeavor. Some took to calling Euro-Clear “The Beast”. Brussels serves as headquarters for the new European Central Bank and for NATO. In 1973 Morgan officials met secretly in Bermuda to illegally resurrect the old House of Morgan, twenty years before Glass Steagal Act was repealed. Morgan and the Rockefellers provided the financial backing for Merrill Lynch, boosting it into the Big 5 of US investment banking. Merrill is now part of Bank of America.

John D. Rockefeller used his oil wealth to acquire Equitable Trust, which had gobbled up several large banks and corporations by the 1920’s. The Great Depression helped consolidate Rockefeller’s power. His Chase Bank merged with Kuhn Loeb’s Manhattan Bank to form Chase Manhattan, cementing a long-time family relationship. The Kuhn-Loeb’s had financed – along with Rothschilds – Rockefeller’s quest to become king of the oil patch. National City Bank of Cleveland provided John D. with the money needed to embark upon his monopolization of the US oil industry. The bank was identified in Congressional hearings as being one of three Rothschild-owned banks in the US during the 1870’s, when Rockefeller first incorporated as Standard Oil of Ohio. [17]

One Rockefeller Standard Oil partner was Edward Harkness, whose family came to control Chemical Bank. Another was James Stillman, whose family controlled Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Both banks have merged under the JP Morgan Chase umbrella. Two of James Stillman’s daughters married two of William Rockefeller’s sons. The two families control a big chunk of Citigroup as well. [18]

In the insurance business, the Rockefellers control Metropolitan Life, Equitable Life, Prudential and New York Life. Rockefeller banks control 25% of all assets of the 50 largest US commercial banks and 30% of all assets of the 50 largest insurance companies. [19] Insurance companies- the first in the US was launched by Freemasons through their Woodman’s of America- play a key role in the Bermuda drug money shuffle.

Companies under Rockefeller control include Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco, Marathon Oil, Freeport McMoran, Quaker Oats, ASARCO, United, Delta, Northwest, ITT, International Harvester, Xerox, Boeing, Westinghouse, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Paper, Pfizer, Motorola, Monsanto, Union Carbide and General Foods.

The Rockefeller Foundation has close financial ties to both Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Other family philanthropic endeavors include Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, General Education Board, Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago- which churns out a steady stream of far right economists as apologists for international capital, including Milton Friedman.

The family owns 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the national Christmas tree is lighted every year, and Rockefeller Center. David Rockefeller was instrumental in the construction of the World Trade Center towers. The main Rockefeller family home is a hulking complex in upstate New York known as Pocantico Hills. They also own a 32-room 5th Avenue duplex in Manhattan, a mansion in Washington, DC, Monte Sacro Ranch in Venezuela, coffee plantations in Ecuador, several farms in Brazil, an estate at Seal Harbor, Maine and resorts in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. [20]

The Dulles and Rockefeller families are cousins. Allen Dulles created the CIA, assisted the Nazis, covered up the Kennedy hit from his Warren Commission perch and struck a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to create mind-controlled assassins. [21]

Brother John Foster Dulles presided over the phony Goldman Sachs trusts before the 1929 stock market crash and helped his brother overthrow governments in Iran and Guatemala. Both were Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) insiders and 33rd Degree Masons. [22]

The Rockefellers were instrumental in forming the depopulation-oriented Club of Rome at their family estate in Bellagio, Italy. Their Pocantico Hills estate gave birth to the Trilateral Commission. The family is a major funder of the eugenics movement which spawned Hitler, human cloning and the current DNA obsession in US scientific circles.

John Rockefeller Jr. headed the Population Council until his death. [23] His namesake son is a Senator from West Virginia. Brother Winthrop Rockefeller was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas and remains the most powerful man in that state. In an October 1975 interview with Playboy magazine, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller- who was also Governor of New York- articulated his family’s patronizing worldview, “I am a great believer in planning- economic, social, political, military, total world planning.”

But of all the Rockefeller brothers, it is Trilateral Commission (TC) founder and Chase Manhattan Chairman David who has spearheaded the family’s fascist agenda on a global scale. He defended the Shah of Iran, the South African apartheid regime and the Chilean Pinochet junta. He was the biggest financier of the CFR, the TC and (during the Vietnam War) the Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia- a contract bonanza for those who made their living off the conflict.

Nixon asked him to be Secretary of Treasury, but Rockefeller declined the job, knowing his power was much greater at the helm of the Chase. Author Gary Allen writes in The Rockefeller File that in 1973, “David Rockefeller met with twenty-seven heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China.”

Following the 1975 Nugan Hand Bank/CIA coup against Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, his British Crown-appointed successor Malcolm Fraser sped to the US, where he met with President Gerald Ford after conferring with David Rockefeller. [24]

Next Week: Part II: Freemasons & The Bank of the United States

[1] 10K Filings of Fortune 500 Corporations to SEC. 3-91

[2] 10K Filing of US Trust Corporation to SEC. 6-28-95

[3] “The Federal Reserve ‘Fed Up’. Thomas Schauf. www.davidicke.com 1-02

[4] The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Eustace Mullins. Bankers Research Institute. Staunton, VA. 1983. p.179

[5] Ibid. p.53

[6] The Triumph of Conservatism. Gabriel Kolko. MacMillan and Company New York. 1963. p.142

[7] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.57

[8] The House of Morgan. Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly Press NewYork 1990

[9] Marrs. p.57

[10] Democracy for the Few. Michael Parenti. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1977. p.178

[11] Chernow

[12] The Great Crash of 1929. John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton, Mifflin Company. Boston. 1979. p.148

[13] Chernow

[14] Children of the Matrix. David Icke. Bridge of Love. Scottsdale, AZ. 2000

[15] The Confidence Game: How Un-Elected Central Bankers are Governing the Changed World Economy. Steven Solomon. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1995. p.112

[16] Marrs. p.180

[17] Ibid. p.45

[18] The Money Lenders: The People and Politics of the World Banking Crisis. Anthony Sampson. Penguin Books. New York. 1981

[19] The Rockefeller File. Gary Allen. ’76 Press. Seal Beach, CA. 1977

[20] Ibid

[21] Dope Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992

[22] Marrs.

[23] The Rockefeller Syndrome. Ferdinand Lundberg. Lyle Stuart Inc. Secaucus, NJ. 1975. p.296

[24] Marrs. p.53

Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network and The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries. His Left Hook blog is at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Source

TSA Tactics Find Ominous Parallel in Nazi Germany

2011-05-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

The TSA is part of a larger effort to implement a slow motion surveillance and high-tech police state control grid in America. It is an element of the “alternative geography” of the military-corporate-intelligence establishment, an aspect specifically designed to acclimate Americans to the prospect of an ever encroaching police state. The tight integration of the corporate-government aspect of this alternative geography is demonstrated by the relationship the government has with the Chertoff Group, a public relations firm pushing naked body scanners founded by Michael Chertoff, the former boss of the Department of Homeland Security.

The new procedures defended over the weekend by Barry Obama from a NATO summit in Portugal are not about finding the next underwear bomber and protecting the American people from al-Qaeda. The latest procedures are designed to get the American people accustomed to the idea that the police, the alternative geography of the military-corporate-intelligence network, and the government will micro-manage and control the public and eventually all aspects of our private lives. Events reveal that the government is not interested in preventing an al-Qaeda attack, but keeping tabs on and when possible subverting opposition to its power.

Child subjected to TSA strip search.

It took Hitler and the Nazis nearly a decade to impose a murderous police state on the German people. In the wake of the staged burning of the Reichstag in February of 1933, the Nazis suspended the civil liberties of the German people and began a concerted effort to eliminate all opposition to their fascist regime. The Nazis would later stage a false flag incident known as the Gleiwitz incident in order to provide and excuse to invade Poland and start the Second World War.

Left unchallenged, government invariably evolves into a tyrannical force at odds with the interest of the people. Minus effective opposition, the people of Germany had little choice but to support Hitler and his ill-fated war.

Women stripped and then made to wait for their turn.

It has taken the federal government and its Department of Homeland Security – an agency on the drawing board well before September 11, 2001 – to implement police state tactics in regard to travel that far surpass anything devised by the Nazis.

Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government planned to create and impose a police state control grid on the American people. For instance, the Bill of Rights crushing Patriot Act was devised well before the attack and its predecessor, the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, was rushed into law following the first suspicious attack on the World Trade Center and the equally suspicious attack in Oklahoma City. Habeas corpus law was forever changed by the law touted by then president Bill Clinton.

Armed with its new and draconian palette of laws and mandates, the federal government, including the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon, have exploited the September 11 attacks to go after the real enemy – the American people.

Coming soon to an airport near you — strip searches.

The Pentagon has surveilled the antiwar movement and the Department of Homeland Security with its state level partners in Missouri and elsewhere around the country have profiled entirely legal “rightwing” political organizations and individuals as potential terrorists. The corporate media, acting as the establishment’s ministry of propaganda, has amplified this absurd terrorist myth.

As the founders realized, government left to its own devices and unrestrained by the people invariably turns into a tyrannical leviathan. Groping TSA screeners and dangerous radiation naked body scanners are the public visage of the state as it slowly morphs into a high-tech tyranny.

Just as in Nazi Germany, the authorities-that-be are forcing women, children and men to strip search. Now it is happening in the United States of America, a supposedly free country.

President Barry Obama, DHS boss Janet Napolitano, and TSA director John Pistole have said naked body scanners will remain and the sexual molestation at America’s airports will continue.

“I understand how difficult it is, and how offensive it must be for the people who are going through it,” said Secretary of State Clinton today. Clinton said the government is “trying to do the right thing” by expanding the intrusive nature of the police state.

“Clinton has likely rarely, if ever, dealt with metal detectors, explosives swabs, full-body backscatter scanners or pat-downs as an air traveler since she began receiving Secret Service protection with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in 1992,” reports the Christian Science Monitor.

But then the police state and its ever growing manifestations of surveillance and control are not for the likes of Hillary Clinton and other leaders, officials, and minions of government power.

The growing police state grid is for the American people because since time immemorial government has been an enemy of the people.

Source

How US-UK Create ‘Terrorist’ States: Yemen as a Case Study

2011-04-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

By Tim Coles
Redress, Al-Jazeerah, CCUN

How to create your very own terrorist state

Tim Coles takes us through 11 steps necessary to create a “terrorist state”. Using Yemen as a case study, he argues that these steps precisely match US and British policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran as well as Yemen to grow “very poisonous seeds”, some which have ripened while others are ripening.

So, you want to create your own terrorist state, do you? Follow these simple instructions and you will be able to grow “very poisonous seeds. These seeds are growing now. Some have ripened and others are ripening,” as Eqbal Ahmad explained.

In 2002, the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) made it clear that America, with Britain’s help, intends to increase terrorism by chasing terrorists around the world instead of capturing them, or, better still, addressing their grievances – this is the real world, after all, which is dominated by financial interests, so there’s no time for rational solutions here.

The NSS reads: “The United States and countries cooperating with us must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases. Together, we will seek to deny them sanctuary at every turn.”

The policy of giving terrorists no “haven”, rather than working to end terrorism, gives the US and Britain the excuse to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars” by chasing terrorists around the globe and, more worryingly, to actually cause terrorism.

When terrorism occurs, Britain and America then have the perfect excuse to invade, isolate, impose sanctions on and/or corrupt the given country, as we see in Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere. Under Obama, this horrendous pretext to achieve “full spectrum dominance” was expanded.

So, here is how to create your own terrorist State, using Yemen as an example. This will come in handy as a pretext to invade or impose sanctions on the country of your choosing later on as a continuation of your plans for “full spectrum dominance”.

Step 1:

Make sure you have a media and an education system sophisticated enough to omit what your country does to others, but emphasize what other countries do to you.

This will enable your domestic population to hate the people of the other country, allowing you to pursue your agenda without the risk of being overthrown by your own population. In 2002-03, unprecedented numbers of protestors demonstrated in London against the Iraq war. This could be dangerous for future wars because the public might one day try to overthrow you. Therefore, domestic subversion is also a good tactic if you can do it.

Step 2:

Select a country that has suffered under your colonial rule in the past. Aden, now Yemen, was occupied by the British in 1839. In 1947, the Amir of Dhala’s son, Haidan, led an uprising which was crushed with overwhelming firepower from Britain’s Royal Air Force. In a study for the RAND Corporation, Bruce Hoffman explained:

“No sooner than the threat from Haidan been neutralized than trouble erupted from another tribe, in the nearby village of Al Husein... Once again punishment was applied from the air. Four Mosquitoes and three Tempests from No. 8 Squadron were ordered to destroy the village. The rocket and cannon air strike, the after-action report stated, “was most impressive and awe-inspiring, and the attack undoubtedly made an impression not easily forgotten.”

Step 3:

Make sure that your selected country has a neighbour across the sea, or on its border, which has also suffered under your colonial rule. You will need to do this for Step 7 later on. In 1925, the colonial administrator, Douglas Jardine, not to be confused with the cricketer, explained the geostrategic importance of Aden and British Somaliland, now Somalia:

“Berbera, the capital [of Somaliland], is but 160 miles across the Gulf from Aden, and is, therefore, but 12 days distance from London and six from Bombay. It cannot be said that this proximity to our main imperial trade route has been of much benefit to the protectorate in the past; but it might prove at any time to be of incalculable value.”

Indeed, it turned out “to be of incalculable value”. Another colonialist, H.B. Kittermaster, explained: “The dry coastal climate makes the [Somaliland] Protectorate as good as Aden for the production of salt. This is already being done in a primitive way by the natives, and negotiations are now in progress with a British syndicate to develop the industry scientifically.”

Today, the countries are more generally used along the oil trading routes.

Step 4:

Now that you have chosen a country, in close proximity to its exploited neighbor, you’ll want to ensure that the suffering inflicted upon it had continued throughout the course of, say, one hundred years. This is long enough to foster intergenerational resentment and hatred of your own country. Britain’s “establishment of the Middle East Command (MEC) headquarters in Aden in 1960 helped fuel the fires of revolution”, Stephen Dorril explained in his history of MI6.

“The 1962 Defence White Paper, “The Next Five Years”, stated that Britain would continue to back the local sultans in South Yemen and the Gulf, and that the Aden base would be the permanent headquarters of this strategy... Aden was to be one of the three key points in Britain’s global military deployment... Fifty thousand Lee Enfield rifles were shipped from the UK to Yemeni royalists. According to the 21st SAS Volunteers Commander Richard Pirie, the mercenaries deployed in Yemen were paid GBP 250 per month from the Foreign Office and from the MoD [Ministry of Defence].”

British and Scottish mercenaries were paid GBP 100,000 a year to launch a chemical war against the population which resulted in the slaughter of 200,000 Yemenis, largely in defense of what was then an oil refinery run by the British.

Step 5:

Now that you have fostered enough resentment and ruined a country’s chance of socio-economic recovery, you might want to try betraying even the mercenary elements of that country attempting to side with you. In 1979, America and Britain began funding, arming and training the Afghan mujahideen in order “to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap”, to quote US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

This worked. Russia and the mujahideen ruined Afghanistan – and out of the ashes rose the Taliban, whom Britain and America supported almost up to 9/11. Britain’s leading independent terror specialist, Jason Burke, documented how many of the more fascistic elements of the mujahideen were Yemenis who “had distinguished themselves at the battle of Jalalabad in 1989”. By 1992, however, the US had not supported those factions who were outraged by the intricacies of the unification of the Yemen Arab Republic and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.

Step 6:

Capture and torture people from all over the world in a prison such as Guantanamo Bay. Deny them habeas corpus: no charge; no trial; no representation; no right to a lawyer; no right to visits from friends, relatives or the Red Cross; and do so for an indefinite period.

Select people whose religion is the same as those in the terrorist state you are looking to create (in this case Islam). This will create a sense a kinship among those you are turning into enemies. This will make the enemies seem more closely knit, yet from varying countries, giving your country the excuse to invade country after country. Also, use your media to dehumanize the captives, making them seem guilty without evidence.

Once you have traumatized those prisoners of the same religion – which your education system regards as incompatible with modernity – release them to the country you wish to turn into a terrorist state. They may all get together and plot revenge which you can then use to justify attacking the country. In 2009, Barack Obama began releasing former Guantanamo Bay hostages to Yemen.

Step 7:

Destroy the stabilizing government of the neighbouring country. In 2006, Britain and America supported Somali warlords, such as Abdullah Yusuf, who invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the emerging government (the Union of Islamic Courts) and replace them with a fascist government nobody wanted (the Transitional Federal Government, or TFG). The TFG then launched a campaign of famine, torture and violence so extreme that hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled across the sea to seek refuge in Yemen, with tens of thousands fleeing each year.

Once you have ruined the neighbouring country, poor, displaced, oppressed, Muslim refugees will flock to the country you are trying to turn into a terrorist state (Yemen). Here, clerics in madrassas [religious schools] will have a constituency of desperate people whom they can radicalize and turn into future terrorists, as happened in Pakistan in the 1980s when millions of Afghans fled from Soviet troops and the mujahideen (as we saw in Step 5), many of whom became the Taliban in the early 1990s.

Step 8:

Murder people without charge or trial in both countries with new, super-weaponry, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones). This will terrorize and radicalize the population of the country you are trying to turn into a terrorist state. Hopefully, your media will attempt to vindicate the drone attacks by either not reporting them or else uncritically quoting officials who claim that the drones target terrorists. Without journalists challenging these official statements, the public may assume that they are correct. (This is happening in more and more countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Somalia and possibly even Haiti).

Step 9:

Omit as much of the previous steps as you can from public knowledge via the media and education system of your own country. This will make any action from the country you are trying to turn into a terrorist state seem unprovoked, giving you the chance to invade as an act of self-defense. It will also allow you to carry on without your public overthrowing you (as mentioned in Step 1). Also, get your media to make meaningless statements about the country you are trying to turn into a terrorist state, such as “Osama Bin Laden’s grandfather was born there”, or “the failed Christmas underpants bomber (Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab) was radicalized there by the cleric Anwar Al-Awlaqi” - even though Abdulmuttallab’s father informed the FBI of his son’s radicalization months before, which the FBI ignored – or, “Nidal Malik Hasan, the major who killed several of his colleagues at a US base, was radicalized there” – even though this was not terrorism because they were military targets.

Step 10:

Wait for a terrorist attack to occur, in the country itself, against a British national stationed there, such as an ambassador who had previously worked in another country you helped to destroy.

When the British ambassador to Yemen, Tim Torlot (who had worked for the British government in Iraq) was attacked in April 2010, the “left” and “right” media leapt at the chance to emphasize how dangerous Yemen is to Britain (for which we planned in Step 1).

Careful reading shows that few newspapers actually revealed their sources. The Independent revealed a source, namely that the Yemeni Interior Ministry said the attack “bore all the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda”, but as Britain and America are training and funding the Yemeni government and secret services, any information provided by them is biased. The Independent also revealed that the primary sources for the incident are “Yemeni newspapers [which] cite anonymous security sources” to name the bomber as Osman Ali Noman Asaloi. In other words, it could be a total fabrication.

The Guardian alleged that some Al-Qaeda members fled Yemen to Somalia via Aden. Perhaps they bumped into the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing from the Western-backed Transitional Federal Government?

The Times reported that “no group claimed responsibility for the attack”, yet the press, basing their information on the Yemeni government, blamed Al-Qaeda. The Times also admitted that “terrorism is merely a symptom of Yemen’s overwhelming problems”, but did not mention that they began in 1839, when Britain invaded, and continue up to the present. This emphasizes the importance of Step 2.

The Telegraph reported: “The Interior Ministry later stated: “This operation reflects the state of despair which has hit the terrorists after the painful pre-emptive strikes which they received in their hideouts at the hands of security services”, which are being trained and funded by the US and Britain, one might add, but this offers no evidence that the victims are “terrorists”.

Step 11:

Now sit back and wait for the country to boil over into extreme violence, making sure you poke the bear with sticks, such as increased drone attacks and security raids by the puppet government being armed and trained by your own.

After a few years, you will have yourself a nice terrorist state. Later, academics can refer to the country as a “failed state”, perhaps even invoking your “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), omitting, of course, exactly why it has become a “failed state” and why one needs to exercise R2P. While your domestic population assumes that you are either incompetent or out there to combat terrorism, you can secure energy routes or raw resources. As Liam Fox, the defence secretary of the 2010 Liberal Democrat-Conservative “coalition” government, explained:

“In the years ahead energy security, economic security and national security will be inextricably linked. If we want to ensure that we can keep the lights on in Britain then we need to develop a comprehensive energy strategy. It is simply a matter of risk management. Such a strategy will need to have three components: diversity in the type of fuels we use; diversity in the geographical sources of those fuels; and the security structures that will guarantee the safe transport of these fuels.”

Source

Neocon Imperialism, 9/11, and the Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq

2011-04-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

By David Ray Griffin

02/27/07 "ICH" -- - -One way to understand the effect of 9/11, in most general terms, is to see that it allowed the agenda developed in the 1990s by neoconservatives—-often called simply “neocons”---to be implemented. There is agreement on this point across the political spectrum. From the right, for example, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke say that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”¹ Stephen Sniegoski, writing from the left, says that “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda of the neocons to become the policy of the United States of America.”²

What was this agenda? It was, in essence, that the United States should use its military supremacy to establish an empire that includes the whole world--a global Pax Americana. Three major means to this end were suggested. One of these was to make U.S. military supremacy over other nations even greater, so that it would be completely beyond challenge. This goal was to be achieved by increasing the money devoted to military purposes, then using this money to complete the “revolution in military affairs” made possible by the emergence of the information age. The second major way to achieve a global Pax Americana was to announce and implement a doctrine of preventive-preemptive war, usually for the sake of bringing about “regime change” in countries regarded as hostile to U.S. interests and values. The third means toward the goal of universal empire was to use this new doctrine to gain control of the world’s oil, especially in the Middle East, most immediately Iraq.

In discussing these ideas, I will include recognitions by some commentators that without 9/11, the various dimensions of this agenda could not have been implemented. My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.

1. Neoconservatives and Global Empire

The “neo” in the term “neo-conservative” is a remnant of the fact that the first generation neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, had moved to the right after having been members of the left. Kristol, often called “the godfather of neoconservatism,” famously defined neoconservatives as liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” No such move, however, has characterized most of the second-generation neocons, who came to dominate the movement in the 1990s. As Gary Dorrien says in Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana, “the new neocons had never been progressives of any kind.”³ The term “neoconservatism” is, in any case, used here to refer strictly to an ideology, not to any biographical facts about those who hold this ideology.

I mean “biographical facts” to include ethnicity. Although many of the prominent neoconservatives have been Jewish, leading some people to think that Jewishness is a necessary condition for being a neo-conservative, this is not so. As Dorrien points out, “a significant number of prominent neocons were not Jews.”⁴

This discussion has its primary importance in relation to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. If neoconservatism is understood to be entirely a matter of ideology, not also partly a matter of biography, then there is no reason not to think of Cheney and Rumsfeld as neocons. As former neocon Michael Lind, says: “[N]eoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick . . . Cheney are full-fledged neocons, . . . even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists.”⁵

Neoconservatism in its early decades was a multi-faceted phenomenon, but the focus here is on its foreign policy. Neoconservative foreign policy was originally oriented around opposition to Communism. This fact meant that the end of the Cold War produced a crisis for neocons. In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, Podhoretz said that he was not sure what “America’s purpose should be now that the threat of Communism . . . had been decisively eliminated.” Five years later, he even published a eulogy to the movement, declaring it dead.⁶

Unipolarity

Other neocons, however, believed that they had a new cause to champion. Already in 1986, Irving Kristol argued that the United States needed to move toward a foreign policy of “global unilateralism.” But that would be difficult, he pointed out, as long as America is “an imperial power with no imperial self-definition.”⁷ The new cause was to shape this new self-definition, thereby getting Americans ready to accept a policy of global unilateralism.

As soon as the Cold War ended, this cause was taken up by others. At the close of 1989, Charles Krauthammer, one of the best-known neocon columnists, published a piece entitled “Universal Dominion,” in which he argued that America should work for “a qualitatively new outcome--a unipolar world.”⁸ In 1990, he argued that unipolarity has already arrived and that the United States, being the “unchallenged superpower,” should act unilaterally. Saying that “[t]he alternative to unipolarity is chaos,” Krauthammer explained what unipolarity requires of the United States: “unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”⁹ The following year, in an argument for a “robust interventionism,” he said of this unipolar world: “We Americans should like it---and exploit it.”¹⁰

The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance

The first effort to turn such thinking into official policy came in 1992, which was the last year of the presidency of George H. W. Bush and hence also the end of Dick Cheney’s tenure as secretary of defense. Before leaving office, Cheney had Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepare---with the help of his top assistant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby---a draft of the Pentagon’s “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG).¹¹ Stating that America’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” this DPG draft was, in Andrew Bacevich’s appraisal, “in effect a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.”¹²

This draft produced, after portions of a leaked copy were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post,¹³ an outpouring of criticism. The ideas did get some support, especially from neoconservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal, which praised the draft’s plan for a “Pax Americana.”¹⁴ But most of the reaction was critical. Senator Alan Cranston complained that the Bush administration was seeking to make the United States “the one, the only main honcho on the world block, the global Big Enchilada.”¹⁵ Senator Robert Byrd said that the document’s stance seemed to be: “We love being the sole remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and well-being of our people to do so.”¹⁶

Seeking to calm the waters, especially because it was an election year, the administration of George H. W. Bush distanced itself from this draft, depicting it, in Bacevich’s words, “as the musings of an insignificant lower-tier appointee acting without official sanction.”¹⁷ Although Wolfowitz would refer to it as “my 1992 memorandum” many years later,¹⁸ he claimed at the time that he had not seen it.¹⁹ Cheney also claimed not to have seen it, even though one long section began by acknowledging “definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense.” This latter fact has, incidentally, been pointed out by David Armstrong, who calls this draft an early version of Cheney’s “Plan . . . to rule the world.”²⁰ Although this draft came to be known as “the Wolfowitz plan,” it is important to recognize that it was Cheney who, in Dorrien’s words, “hatched the original unipolarist blueprint in 1992.”²¹ Indeed, as Nicholas Lemann has reported in the New Yorker, the DPG draft resulted from a secret team that Cheney had set up in the Pentagon “to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War.”²²

The recognition that this unipolarist blueprint was inspired by Cheney is important in light of the unprecedented power that he would exercise in the second Bush administration. As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley would say in 2002: “Cheney is unique in American history. . . . He is the vortex in the White House on foreign policymaking. Everything comes through him.”²³

In any case, Cheney, under pressure from the White House, had the document significantly rewritten by Libby, in language more acceptable at the time. For example, whereas the first draft spoke of spurning collective action through the United Nations, this new version spoke of strengthening the U.N.²⁴ Cheney put an end to this brief public debate about the wisdom of a unipolarist foreign policy by having this softer version, which was later published,²⁵ leaked to the press.²⁶

The 1990s and PNAC

This rewriting did not mean, however, that the ideas were dropped by Cheney and other neoconservatives. Indeed, after the election was over, Cheney, before leaving office, put out another revision, in which some of the neo-imperial language was restored.²⁷ Then Zalmay Khalilzad, who had joined Cheney’s team in 1991, put out a book early in 1995 entitled From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World after the Cold War, which expresses quite forthrightly the idea of preventing, by military force if necessary, the rise of any rival power.²⁸ In 1996, Robert Kagan, “who emerged in the 1990s as perhaps the most influential neocon foreign policy analyst,”²⁹ argued that the United States should use its military strength “actively to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony.”³⁰ In 1998, Kagan and William Kristol, who in 1995 had founded the Weekly Standard (which quickly became the main organ of neocon thinking), wrote that unless America takes charge, we will have “world chaos, and a dangerous twenty-first century.”³¹ In January of 2001, as the Bush-Cheney administration was ready to come to power, Kagan criticized “Clinton and his advisers” for “having the stomach only to be halfway imperialists.”³²

It is important to understand the development of this neoconservative ideology, given the fact that after 9/11, the neocon agenda became the agenda of the United States. As Halper and Clarke said in 2004, “if one wishes to understand the direction of American foreign policy today, one must read what neo-conservatives were writing ten years or more ago.”³³

The most important development within the neocon movement in the 1990s was William Kristol’s founding, in 1997, of a unipolarist think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).³⁴ Closely related to the American Enterprise Institute ideologically and even physically and financially, PNAC differed primarily in focusing entirely on foreign policy.³⁵ In its “Statement of Principles,” PNAC called for “American global leadership,” asking whether the United States has “the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.”³⁶

In September of 2000, just three months before the Bush-Cheney administration took office, PNAC published a 76-page document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (RAD). Saying that “[a]t present the United States faces no global rival,” RAD declared that “America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position” and thereby “to preserve and enhance [the] ‘American peace.’” To “enhance” the “American peace” means, of course, to increase the size of the American empire. Explicitly referring back to the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992, RAD said that “the basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound.” The continuity between the two documents is no surprise, partly because Libby and Wolfowitz are listed as participants in the production of this 2000 document.³⁷

What is said in the PNAC’s documents is highly important because many of PNAC’s early members, including Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Eliot Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, James Woolsey, and---most significantly---Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, became central members of the new Bush administration. PNAC neocons thereby took key positions in the Vice President’s Office, the Pentagon, and the (only semi-independent) Defense Policy Board. They did so well primarily because of Cheney, who was put in charge of the transition team, and secondarily because of Rumsfeld, after Cheney chose him to head the Pentagon.³⁸

9/11 and Empire Talk

With the new administration in place, neocon commentators such as Krauthammer became even more explicit and exuberant about the use of America’s power for imperial ends. Mocking Clinton for being concerned to be “a good international citizen” and praising Bush for understanding that “the U.S. can reshape, indeed remake, reality on its own,” Krauthammer said: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms . . . and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”³⁹

However, it was not until after 9/11, and especially after the devastating assault on Afghanistan, that the neocon effort to get Americans to accept an imperial self-definition started showing widespread success. Early in 2002, Krauthammer, having noticed the difference, said: “People are coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’” Driving home his main message, Krauthammer added that Americans needed to face up to the responsibilities entailed by the fact that they are now “undisputed masters of the world.”⁴⁰

A year later, this unilateralist idea was voiced in the Atlantic Monthly by neocon Robert Kaplan, who argued that America should use its power unilaterally to “manage an unruly world,” leaving behind “the so-called international community,” especially the United Nations, with its “antiquated power arrangement.”⁴¹

9/11 and the 9/11 wars---meaning those that have been justified by appeal to the attacks of 9/11⁴²---resulted in empire talk beyond the circles of neocons. Early in 2002, after the American assault on Afghanistan, Paul Kennedy, who had 15 years earlier been predicting America’s decline as a great power,⁴³ declared: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power.” Describing America’s empire as the greatest of all time, he said: “Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”⁴⁴

A very important development that same year was the publication of Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, which closes by saying that the question before Americans is “not whether the United States has become an imperial power” but only “what sort of empire they intend theirs to be.”⁴⁵ Bacevich himself, while a conservative, strongly distanced himself from the imperial agenda of the neocons.⁴⁶

But it was their agenda, not Bacevich’s cautionary critique, that would determine the “sort of empire” that the United States would seek to become during the Bush-Cheney administration. And it was 9/11 that allowed this agenda to be implemented. As Claes Ryn said, the neoconservatives “have taken full advantage of the nation’s outrage over 9/11 to advance their already fully formed drive for empire.”⁴⁷

2. Military Omnipotence

The tool for fulfilling this drive for empire, neocons have always held, is military power. To a great extent, in fact, the neoconservative movement began in reaction to the widespread view after the Vietnam war that American military power should never again be used for imperialistic purposes. In the early 1980s, rejecting the left’s conclusion that force had become “obsolete as an instrument of American political purposes,” Norman Podhoretz argued that military power constitutes “the indispensable foundation of U.S. foreign policy,” adding that “without it, nothing else we do will be effective.”⁴⁸

The Cheney-Wolfowitz DPG of 1992, having said that “[o]ur first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” added that “we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a regional or global role.” These “mechanisms” referred, of course, to various kinds of military power.
Space and Full Spectrum Dominance

The U.S. military in the 1990s developed concepts to attain the kind of military superiority envisaged in this document. One of these concepts was “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which, says Bacevich, is the attempt “to achieve something approaching omnipotence.”⁴⁹ He is here referring to a document entitled “Joint Vision 2010,” which was first published by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1996. Defining “Full Spectrum Dominance” as “the capability to dominate an opponent across the range of military operations,” this document says that it “will be the key characteristic we seek for our Armed Forces in the 21st century.”⁵⁰ Given the fact that the U.S. military was already dominant on the land and the water and in the air, the new component needed was dominance in space.

Space dominance was described in a 1997 document entitled “Vision for 2020,” published by the U.S. Space Command, a division of the Air Force. The unique mission of the Space Command is to “dominat[e] the space dimension of military operations.” By merging this “space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority,” the U.S. military will have Full Spectrum Dominance.⁵¹

This notion was further developed in the Pentagon’s “Joint Vision 2020,” which first appeared in 2000.⁵² It speaks of full spectrum dominance as involving not just four but five dimensions: “space, sea, land, air, and information.” In addition, this document says, “given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.” This statement gives support to Bacevich’s observation that after the end of the Cold War, “the Department of Defense completed its transformation into a Department of Power Projection.”⁵³

PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses appeared in September of that same year. Written to influence the next administration, RAD’s main point was that “the next president of the United States . . . must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership.”⁵⁴

Besides arguing for increased spending across the board, RAD argued in particular for increased funding for the U.S. Space Command. Saying that “the ability to have access to, operate in, and dominate the aerospace environment has become the key to military success in modern, high-technology warfare,” it advocated not only “missile defense” but also “placing . . . weapons in space.” The weapons, moreover, are not simply for defensive purposes, but also for “the ability to conduct strikes from space,” which will give the U.S. military a “global first-strike force.”⁵⁵

The Revolution in Military Affairs

This development of space-based weapons was presented as simply one part, albeit probably the most important part, of a more general transformation of the military that exploits the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), which has been made possible by information technologies.⁵⁶ This RMA transformation of the military was said to be “sufficiently important to consider it a separate mission.”⁵⁷

In spite of this importance, however, the authors of RAD, ever mindful of budgetary constraints and widespread commitment to more traditional ways, warned that the needed transformation would not occur quickly, at least if the present climate continued. In a statement that has been widely quoted in the 9/11 truth movement, they wrote that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor.”⁵⁸

The emphasis in RAD on exploiting the RMA to transform the Pentagon’s approach is no surprise, since one of the participants in the project to produce this document was Wolfowitz, who had long before fallen under the spell of Albert Wohlstetter (one of the models for “Dr. Strangelove”⁵⁹). Wohlstetter had been the main early proponent of the ideas that came to be dubbed the “revolution in military affairs” by Andrew Marshall, who later became the main proponent.⁶⁰ Marshall, who at this writing was still serving as the RMA guru in the Pentagon, numbers Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld among his disciples.⁶¹

Rumsfeld, in fact, was at the same time heading up a special commission to make recommendations about the military use of space. This “Rumsfeld Commission,” endorsing the idea of military transformation, including the weaponization of space, said that the United States should “[e]mploy space systems to help speed the transformation of the U.S. military into a modern force able to deter and defend against evolving threats directed at . . . [our] forward deployed forces.”⁶² (In other words, although the language of “defense” and “deterrence” is used, part of the purpose of the space weapons is to prevent attacks on America’s offensive operations.) This report, interestingly, also used the Pearl Harbor analogy. Warning against the tendency to consider an attack on U.S. space satellites as too improbable to worry about, the report of the Rumsfeld Commission said:

History is replete with instances in which warning signs were ignored and change resisted until an external, “improbable” event forced resistant bureaucracies to take action. The question is whether the U.S. will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce U.S. space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—-a “Space Pearl Harbor”—-will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.⁶³

9/11 as the New Pearl Harbor

The attacks of 9/11 were widely referred to as a new Pearl Harbor. President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary on the night of 9/11: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.”⁶⁴ Immediately after the attacks, many people, from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time magazine, said that America should respond to the attacks of 9/11 in the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor.⁶⁵

Moreover, just as the attack on Pearl Harbor gave the United States the opportunity to enter World War II, which in turn allowed it to replace Great Britain as the leading imperial power, the attacks of 9/11 were widely regarded as an opportunity. Donald Rumsfeld stated that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.”⁶⁶ Condoleezza Rice reportedly told senior members of the National Security Council to “think about ‘how do you capitalize on these opportunities’ to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th.”⁶⁷ In a public address, she said that “if the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 bookend a major shift in international politics, then this is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity.”⁶⁸ According to Bob Woodward, the president himself said that the attacks provided “a great opportunity.”⁶⁹ Only two days after 9/11, in fact, Bush said in a telephone conversation with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki of New York: “[T]hrough the tears of sadness I see an opportunity.” The next day, he reportedly used exactly the same words while talking to the press.⁷⁰

Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, dealing with this response to 9/11 as an opportunity, reports that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration (who insisted on anonymity) that, in Lemann’s paraphrase, “the reason September 11th appears to have been ‘a transformative moment’ is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas.”⁷¹ We did not, of course, hear that stated publicly by any member of the Bush-Cheney administration.

The attacks of 9/11 also reduced Congressional resistance to providing increased funding for Pentagon programs. On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing on the Pentagon attack. At this briefing, Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked: “Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending?”⁷² Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later, with few questions asked.

The attacks of 9/11, moreover, aided those who favored a transformation of the military along RMA lines. In the weeks before September 11, Bacevich reports, “military transformation appeared to be dead in the water,” because the military brass were “wedded to existing weapons systems, troop structure, and strategy.”⁷³ But, Bacevich continues:

President Bush’s decision after September 11 to wage a global war against terror boosted the RMA’s stock. After 9/11, the Pentagon shifted from the business of theorizing about war to the business of actually waging it. This created an opening for RMA advocates to make their case. War plans . . . became the means for demonstrating once for all the efficacy of the ideas advanced by Wohlstetter and Marshall and now supported by . . . Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.⁷⁴

After the removal of Saddam Hussein, Richard Perle, who had long shared Wolfowitz’s enthusiasm for Wohlstetter’s ideas, said: “This is the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert’s vision of future wars.”⁷⁵

These ideas for achieving military omnipotence became official policy with the publication, one year after 9/11, of the Bush-Cheney administration’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS 2002), which said: “We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge” so that we can “dissuade future military competition.”⁷⁶

The conviction that 9/11 provided an opportunity was also reflected in NSS 2002, which said: “The events of September 11, 2001, . . . opened vast, new opportunities.”⁷⁷ One of the things for which it most clearly provided an opportunity was the doctrine of preemptive-preventive war.

3. Preemptive-Preventive War

This hyphenated term is used here for clarity. The doctrine in question, which involves attacking another country even though it poses no immediate threat, is technically called “preventive war.” This doctrine, which violates international law as reflected in the charter of the United Nations, is to be distinguished from what is technically called “preemptive war,” which occurs when Country A attacks Country B after learning that an attack from Country B is imminent---too imminent to allow time for the U.N. to intervene. These technical terms, however, are problematic, because although preventive war, being illegal, is worse than preemptive war, to most ears “preemption” sounds worse than “prevention.” As a result, many people speak of “preemptive war” when they mean preventive war. The term “preemptive-preventive war,” while somewhat cumbersome, solves this problem.⁷⁸

Historical Emergence of the Doctrine

This doctrine of preemptive-preventive war had been advocated by neocons long before 9/11. It was contained already in the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, which said that the United States should use force to “preempt” and “preclude threats.”⁷⁹

In 1996, Richard Perle and other neocons prepared a strategy paper entitled “A Clean Break” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had recently been elected prime minister of Israel. This paper recommended that Israel, in making a clean break from previous strategies, establish “the principle of preemption.”⁸⁰

In 1997, PNAC’s “Statement of Principles” argued that to exert “global leadership,” America needs to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.”⁸¹

In 1998, a letter from PNAC, signed by Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and 15 other members, urged President Clinton to “undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.”⁸²

The Doctrine of Preemptive-Preventive War after 9/11

Although these neocons were anxious to have their doctrine of preemptive-preventive war accepted as national policy, this did not occur during the Clinton presidency or even during the first eight months of the Bush-Cheney administration. After 9/11, however, it did. “The events of 9/11,” observes Bacevich, “provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.”⁸³

The idea of preemptive-preventive war, which came to be known as the “Bush doctrine,” was first clearly expressed in the president’s address at West Point in June 2002 (when the administration started preparing the American people psychologically for the attack on Iraq). Having stated that, in relation to the “new threats,” deterrence “means nothing” and containment is “not possible,” Bush even took aim at the traditional understanding of preemption, saying: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Then, using the language of preemption while really meaning preemptive-prevention, he said that America’s security “will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action.”⁸⁴
NSS 2002

However, although the West Point speech provided a first statement of this new doctrine, it was in NSS 2002, published that September, that the new doctrine was laid out at some length. The covering letter, signed by the president, says that with regard to “our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies,” America will, in self-defense, “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”⁸⁵ The document itself, saying that “our best defense is a good offense,” also states:

Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.⁸⁶

To justify this doctrine, NSS 2002 argues that the United States must “adapt” the traditional doctrine of preemption, long recognized as a right, to the new situation, thereby turning it into a right of anticipatory (preventive) preemption:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. . . . The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, . . . the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.⁸⁷

With this argument, the authors of NSS 2002 tried to suggest that, since this doctrine of anticipatory preemption simply involves adapting a traditionally recognized right to a new situation, it involves no great change. But it does. According to the traditional doctrine, one needed certain evidence that the other country was going to launch an immediate attack. According to the Bush Doctrine, by contrast, the United States can attack another country “even if uncertainty remains” and even, more flagrantly, if the United States knows that the threat from the other country is not yet “fully formed.”

The novelty here, to be sure, involves doctrine more than practice. The United States has in practice attacked several countries that presented no imminent military threat. But it always portrayed these attacks in such a way that they could appear to comport with international law. The attack on North Vietnam after the alleged incident in the Tonkin Gulf provides an example. But “[n]ever before,” point out Halper and Clarke, “had any president set out a formal national strategy doctrine that included [preventive] preemption.”⁸⁸ This is a step of great significance, because it involves an explicit statement by the United States that the basic principle of international law, as embodied in the United Nations, does not apply to its own behavior.

Zelikow as Primary Drafter of NSS 2002

Max Boot, a neocon who has become well known through his newspaper columns, has described NSS 2002 as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.”⁸⁹ Now that the basic ideas of this document have been laid out, we can see the accuracy of his observation.

We can also see the importance of a still little-known fact: that Philip Zelikow, who would later become the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was chosen by Condoleezza Rice to be the primary drafter of NSS 2002.⁹⁰

According to James Mann in The Rise of the Vulcans, after Rice saw the first draft of this document (which had been prepared by Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in Colin Powell’s State Department), she “ordered the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder. . . . Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, . . . Philip Zelikow.”⁹¹ (Rice and Zelikow had worked together in the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush; when the Republicans were out of power during the Clinton presidency, they wrote a book together; and then when she was appointed National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, she brought on Zelikow to help with the transition to the new National Security Council.) Given the content and tone of the document, one might assume that Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz had been involved in the process of creating it. According to Mann, however, “the hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office hadn’t been closely involved, even though the document incorporated many of their key ideas. They had left the details and the drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow, along with Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley.”⁹²

Some insight into Zelikow’s views before coming to this task might be garnered from an essay he co-authored in 1998 on “catastrophic terrorism.” In this essay, which suggests that he had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/1, Zelikow and his co-authors say:

If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.⁹³

In any case, in light of Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush administration and especially his authorship of NSS 2002, we cannot take seriously the claim of the 9/11 Commission that it sought to be “independent.”⁹⁴ As executive director, he had tremendous power to shape the work of the Commission, deciding which issues it would investigate and which not, and he was primarily responsible for the final form of The 9/11 Commission Report.⁹⁵ The Family Steering Committee, which represented families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, vigorously protested his appointment, calling for “Dr. Zelikow’s immediate resignation” and for the “Commission to apologize to the 9/11 families and America for this massive appearance of impropriety.”⁹⁶ But these calls were dismissed.

Given Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush-Cheney administration and his own authorship of NSS 2002, it is certainly no surprise that, as I reported in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,⁹⁷ there is no mention of imperial interests that might have served as motives for the Bush-Cheney administration to have orchestrated or at least permitted the attacks of 9/11. The Zelikow-led Commission did not, for example, mention that PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses had suggested that the transformation of the military, through which unipolarity could be enforced more effectively, could occur more quickly if there were to be “a new Pearl Harbor”; it did not mention that the administration had had plans, to be discussed below, to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq prior to 9/11; and it did not mention that 9/11 had been described as presenting “opportunities” by Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and, in fact, NSS 2002. Once we know of Zelikow’s authorship of that document, moreover, it is also no surprise to see that The 9/11 Commission Report contains a chapter---“What to Do? A Global Strategy”---that provides propaganda for the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy.

I return now to the discussion of possible imperial motives for 9/11 within the Bush-Cheney administration.

4. The Attack on Afghanistan

Many times since the formal enunciation of the doctrine of preemptive-preventive warfare, the Bush-Cheney administration has defended it as necessitated by 9/11. In an address to the nation in 2004, for example, Bush said that the two lessons of 9/11 are that this country “must deal with gathering threats” and that it “must go on the offense and stay on the offense.”⁹⁸ The first victim of this claimed right to “go on the offense” was Afghanistan.

Although the attacks of 9/11 were, according to the official story, planned and carried out by a non-state organization, al-Qaeda, rather than by some state, the Bush-Cheney administration used the attacks as a pretext to launch attacks on states---attacks that had been planned before 9/11. The justification for this switch was provided by Bush’s address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, in which he declared: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”⁹⁹ The attack on Afghanistan was then justified on the grounds that the Taliban was “harboring” Osama bin Laden, the evil genius behind the 9/11 attacks, whom Bush on September 17 said he wanted “dead or alive” (after Cheney had said that he would willingly accept bin Laden’s “head on a platter”).¹⁰⁰

But this was a pretext rather than the real reason for attacking Afghanistan---as illustrated by the fact that when the Bush administration had an opportunity to take bin Laden alive, it showed no interest. A week after 9/11, the Taliban said that it would hand OBL over---if the United States presented proof of his involvement in 9/11. But Bush refused to provide any such evidence, saying that there would be no negotiations or even discussion.¹⁰¹ Again, four weeks after the U.S. attack on Afghanistan began, a Taliban spokesman said: "We will negotiate. But . . . [w]e are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?"¹⁰²

There are probably two answers to this question. First, there is much evidence that the Bush administration did not want bin Laden, either dead or alive. One part of this evidence consists of several reports that the U.S. military in Afghanistan deliberately let bin Laden escape more than once.¹⁰³ A second reason is that the Bush administration, besides knowing that bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, evidently decided that it could not even marshal convincing (albeit false) case that he was (as suggested by the fact that, after a White Paper presenting this proof was promised, it was never produced¹⁰⁴). More recently, the FBI, in response to a query as to why does not list 9/11 as one of the crimes for which bin Laden is wanted, has said: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”¹⁰⁵(a rather astounding admission that, one might think, should have been reported on the nightly news and in The New York Times).

To understand the real reasons for the attack on Afghanistan, one needs to look at some developments prior to 9/11. One such development was the publication in 1997 of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. As the subtitle shows, Brzezinski, while not a neoconservative, shared the neocons’ concern to maintain and enhance U.S. “primacy.” Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power, Brzezinski argued that America, to ensure its continued primacy, must get control of this region, which would mean establishing several military bases there.

However, Brzezinski added, American democracy posed an obstacle:

America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. . . . The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.¹⁰⁶

Brzezinski, however, then suggested a way in which this obstacle could be overcome. Having said that in the United States “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion,” he then added: “except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well being.”¹⁰⁷ The American people would be willing to make the economic and human sacrifices needed for “imperial mobilization,” he suggested, if there were “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”¹⁰⁸ The kind of threat he had in mind was suggested by his statement, earlier in the book, that the public was willing to support “America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”¹⁰⁹

It is possible that Brzezinski’s discussion here inspired the statement about a “new Pearl Harbor” in PNAC’s 2000 document, which can be read as a call for a false-flag operation that would provide a pretext for turning PNAC’s agenda into official policy. The plausibility of this reading was increased, moreover, by a statement made by Brzezinski’s during his warning, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1, 2007, that a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large” was the likely outcome of the US frustration in Iraq. “A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran,” Brzezinski suggested, involves “a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran.” Adding that a “mythical historical narrative” for an expanded attack on Islamic countries “is already being articulated,” Brzezinski said that “9/11 [is being presented] as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack.”¹¹⁰

Be that as it may, a more specific motivation for the post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan was provided by the “pipeline war” that was going on.¹¹¹ The Bush-Cheney administration supported--as had the Clinton-Gore administration until 1999--UNOCAL’s plan to build an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan, which was in competition with plans from oil companies based in other countries. What happened in 1999 was that UNOCAL, having become convinced that Afghanistan under the Taliban would never have the peace and stability needed for the pipeline project, decided to withdraw. Ahmed Rashid, finishing his book on the Taliban in mid-1999, wrote that the Clinton administration had shifted its support to the pipeline route from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, adding that “by now nobody wanted to touch Afghanistan and the Taliban.”¹¹²

When the Bush administration came to power, however, it decided to give the Taliban one last chance. This last chance occurred at a four-day meeting in Berlin in July 2001. Representatives of the Bush-Cheney administration, trying to persuade the Taliban to share power with US-friendly factions in a “unity government,” reportedly gave the Taliban an ultimatum: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”¹¹³ When the Taliban refused, the Americans reportedly said that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”¹¹⁴

Given the fact that the attacks on New York and Washington occurred on September 11, the U.S. military had time to get ready, logistically, to begin its war in Afghanistan on October 7. By October 10, the U.S. Department of State had informed the Pakistani Minister of Oil that “in view of recent geopolitical developments,” UNOCAL was ready to go ahead with the pipeline project.¹¹⁵

The contention that at least one of the purposes of the war was to support this project is suggested by the fact that the post-Taliban Prime Minister, Hamid Karzai, had previously been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as had been PNAC member Zalmay Khalilzad, who in 2001 was appointed Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan and then in 2003 became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. As Chalmers Johnson said in 2004: “The continued collaboration of Khalilzad and Karzai in post-9/11 Afghanistan strongly suggests that the Bush administration was and remains . . . interested in oil.”¹¹⁶ (In March of 2005, Khalilzad would become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.¹¹⁷)

Still more evidence is provided by the placement of the military bases in Afghanistan. As one Israeli writer put it: “If one looks at the map of the big American bases created, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.”¹¹⁸

The concern to enable an American oil company to build this pipeline should not, however, be considered the only or even the primary motivation. The larger concern, suggests Chalmers Johnson, was “to establish an American presence in Central Asia.” Evidence for this view is provided by the fact that the United States, besides establishing long-term bases in Afghanistan, had within a month after 9/11 arranged for long-term bases in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.¹¹⁹

The new Pearl Harbor that occurred on 9/11, therefore, allowed the United States to support UNOCAL’s pipeline project and, more generally, to fulfill the program, suggested by Brzezinski, of taking control of this region of the world.

The fact that 9/11 provided the necessary condition for the war in Afghanistan was stated by both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. In 2004, Wolfowitz told the 9/11 Commission that if the Department of Defense had asked Congress for permission to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11, this request would not have been taken seriously. Rumsfeld, telling the Commission that “it can take a tragedy like September 11th to awaken the world to new threats and to the need for action,” said that prior to 9/11 the president could not have convinced Congress that the United States needed to “invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban.”¹²⁰

Afghanistan and the surrounding region was not, however, the primary target in the sights of the Bush-Cheney administration. That target was Iraq.
5. The Attack on Iraq

Several neocons, including some who became central members of the Bush-Cheney administration, had been wanting to bring about regime change in Iraq ever since Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Leading voices for this policy included Cheney and Wolfowitz, who were then secretary and under-secretary of defense, respectively, and also Richard Perle, who chaired a committee set up by neocons called Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf. But this idea was opposed by President Bush along with General Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander, so it was not carried out.¹²¹

In 1992, Albert Wohlstetter, who had inspired Perle and Wolfowitz and other neocons, expressed exasperation that nothing had been done about “a dictatorship sitting on the world’s second largest pool of low-cost oil and ambitious to dominate the Gulf.”¹²² (Wohlstetter’s statement reflected his conviction, expressed back in 1981, that America needs to establish forces, bases, and infrastructure so as to enjoy unquestioned primacy in the region.¹²³)

In 1996, the “Clean Break” paper, written for Israel by Perle and other neocons, proposed that Israel remove from power all of its enemies in the region, beginning with Saddam Hussein. This 1996 document, in the opinion of Arnaud de Borchgrave, president of United Press International, “provided the strategic underpinnings for Operation Iraqi Freedom seven years later.”¹²⁴

In 1997, Wolfowitz and Khalilzad published a statement arguing that “Saddam Must Go.”¹²⁵

In 1998, Kristol and Kagan, in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,” called for “finishing the job left undone in 1991.”¹²⁶ Wolfowitz told the House National Security Committee that it had been a mistake in 1991 to leave Saddam in power. Also, writing in the New Republic, he said: “Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region.”¹²⁷ And the afore-mentioned letter to President Clinton from PNAC---signed by Cheney, Kristol, Perle, and Wolfowitz, among others---urged him to “take the necessary steps, including military steps,” to “remov[e] Saddam’s regime from power.” Then, getting no agreement from Clinton, PNAC wrote a similar letter to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, then the leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively.¹²⁸

In 2000, PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, pointing out that “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” added: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”¹²⁹

Given the fact that Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons were given central positions in the new Bush administration, it is not surprising to learn, from two former members of this administration, that it came into office intent on attacking Iraq. Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the treasury and hence a member of the National Security Council, has said that within days of the inauguration, the main topic was going after Saddam, with the question being not “Why Saddam?” or “Why Now?” but merely “finding a way to do it.”¹³⁰ Richard Clarke, who had been the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, confirmed O’Neill’s charge, saying: “The administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on its agenda.”¹³¹

Until the attacks of 9/11, however, no one had found “a way to do it.” As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: “At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn’t doable. . . . That changed with September 11.”¹³² Bob Woodward makes the same observation in Bush at War, saying: “The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave the U.S. a new window to go after Hussein.”¹³³

However, even 9/11, by itself, was not a sufficient basis for getting the American people’s support for an attack on Iraq. Not for lack of effort by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. On the afternoon of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld said in a note to General Richard Myers—-the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--that he wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]."¹³⁴ In the following days, both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz argued that Saddam's Iraq should be, in Woodward’s paraphrase, “a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism.”¹³⁵

Colin Powell, however, argued that both the American people and other countries would at that time support an attack on Afghanistan, to do something about al-Qaeda, but not an attack on Iraq, since there was no evidence that it had anything to do with 9/11. He added, however, that after a successful campaign in Afghanistan, a war on Iraq would become more feasible. Bush accepted this argument.¹³⁶ In doing so, he was not rejecting the proposal to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq, merely postponing its implementation: A plan for going to war in Afghanistan that Bush signed on September 17 also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.¹³⁷

Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why the attack on Iraq could not be launched immediately, says: “[A]lthough the 9/11 atrocities psychologically prepared the American people for the war on Iraq, those horrific events were not sufficient by themselves to thrust America immediately into an attack on Iraq.” A “lengthy propaganda offensive” would also be needed.¹³⁸

This propaganda offensive involved convincing a majority of the American people of the truth of two false claims: that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11 and that he possessed, or soon would possess, weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, with which he could attack America. This part of the story is too well known to need much rehearsal. The point to emphasize here is that although this later propaganda was necessary, its success depended on 9/11. Halper and Clarke say that “it was 9/11 that provided the political context in which the thinking of neo-conservatives could be turned into operational policy.”¹³⁹ Sniegoski, spelling out the point more fully, says:

The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren’t exactly sure who that enemy was. . . . Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration’s propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States. . . . It wasn’t that difficult to channel American fear and anger into war against Iraq.¹⁴⁰

Much of this channeling was done by the Bush-Cheney administration, especially Bush and Cheney themselves. In August of 2002, for example, Cheney declared that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction . . . [and] is amassing them to use . . . against us.”¹⁴¹ In October, Bush said that, having “experienced the horror of September the 11th, . . . America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”¹⁴²

The administration was greatly aided in this propaganda offensive by neoconservatives outside the government, who “linked their preexisting agenda (an attack on Iraq) to a separate event (9/11).”¹⁴³ Through their incessant propaganda---most widely spread in Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol’s The War over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission---“Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were morphed into the same enemy” and “the war on terror and war in Iraq were joined at the hip.”¹⁴⁴

This propaganda campaign was enormously successful. Shortly before the war on Iraq was launched, the two key ideas in the campaign---that Saddam Hussein had played a direct role in the attacks of 9/11 and that he was a threat because he had weapons of mass destruction---were accepted by 70 percent of the American people.¹⁴⁵ As a result, point out Halper and Clarke, the Bush-Cheney administration was “able to build the environment surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 2001 into a wide moral platform from which to launch a preemptive strike.”¹⁴⁶

That this propaganda campaign would be successful would have been predictable. As Hermann Göring, one of the top Nazi officials, said: “[I]t is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.”¹⁴⁷

Accordingly, the fact that there were no Iraqis among the alleged hijackers does not mean that the desire for a pretext to attack Iraq could not have been one of the imperial motives behind the attacks of 9/11. The crucial precondition for the war in Iraq was a psychological state of mind in the American public---one of fear and anxiety combined with a desire for revenge---that would countenance the new doctrine of preemptive-preventive war. This state of mind was abundantly created by 9/11. Then, just as the ensuing propaganda offensive against Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban created almost unanimous acceptance of the war in Afghanistan, the propaganda offensive directed at Saddam Hussein was rather easily able to channel this fear, anxiety, and desire for revenge into a widespread feeling that a war to bring about regime change in Iraq was justified.
Conclusion

The attacks of 9/11 allowed the imperialist agenda of leading neoconservatives to be implemented. Can we infer from this effect that the hope to have this agenda fulfilled was one of the motives for the 9/11 attacks? Of course not. One of the basic principles of criminal investigations, however, is the question: Who benefits? Those who most benefit from the crime are usually the most likely suspects. But an answer to that question cannot by itself be used as proof of the suspects’ guilt. The prosecution must also show that the suspects had the means and the opportunity to commit the crime. It must also present evidence that the suspects actually committed the crime---at least indirect evidence, perhaps by showing that they were the only ones who could have done it.

I have elsewhere presented evidence---what I first called prima facie evidence but now call overwhelming evidence¹⁴⁸---that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by leading members of the Bush-Cheney administration. This evidence includes many reasons to conclude that the official accounts of the World Trade Center collapses, the attack on the Pentagon, the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, and the failure of the U.S. military to intercept the other flights cannot be true. This evidence also includes many reasons to conclude that The 9/11 Commission Report involved a systematic cover-up of dozens of facts that conflict with the official conspiracy theory about 9/11, according to which the attacks were conceived and carried out entirely by al-Qaeda---evidence that instead points to official complicity. One example of this evidence is the fact that the Commission changed by about 45 minutes the time at which Vice President Cheney went down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House, thereby indicating that he could not have been responsible, as evidence suggests, for allowing the strike on the Pentagon and ordering the downing of UA 93.¹⁴⁹

Many people, to be sure, feel that there is no need to examine the evidence that the attacks were arranged by members of the Bush administration because they feel certain, on a priori grounds, that it simply would not have done such a thing. Having addressed most of those grounds elsewhere,¹⁵⁰ I have here dealt with only one of them, which is often phrased as a rhetorical question: What motive could they possibly have had for arranging attacks on their own citizens?

Having suggested that the motive was to have a pretext to turn the neocon agenda into national policy, I should add that it is probably only the neocons in office, and even only some of them, who should be suspected of involvement in the planning for 9/11. To say that 9/11 allowed the agenda of the neocons in general to be implemented does not imply that many or even any neocons outside the government were involved in the planning for, or even had advance knowledge of, the attacks of 9/11. About eight months after 9/11, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote pieces urging the Bush-Cheney administration to undertake an investigation to see if the attacks might have been prevented. Gary Dorrien, reporting that this call “earned a sharp rebuke from Cheney,” adds that “the Bush administration had no intention of allowing an investigation on that subject.”¹⁵¹

No genuine investigation has been carried out to this day. If Congress would authorize such an investigation, the American people, I am convinced, would see that the grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney are even stronger than those that have been part of the public discussion thus far. They would also see that the reasons for opposing the war in Iraq are even stronger than those publicly discussed thus far, because it was from the start an imperialistic war based on a false-flag operation (as well as additional lies). They would even see that, although many critics of the administration have said that we should pull our troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, our attack on that country was no more legitimate.

This essay is a revised version of “Imperial Motives for a ‘New Pearl Harbor,’” chap. 6 of David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 : A Call to Reflection and Action (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006). Griffin is professor emeritus at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. His most recent books are Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy and Debunking 9/11 Debunking.

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Notes

1. Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. Halper and Clarke, identifying with the Reagan presidency, criticize the ideological agenda of the neocons from what they call a “center-right” perspective (5-7).

2. Stephen J. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11: The Origins of the U.S. War on Iraq.” In D. L. O’Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005), 81-109, at 81-82.

3. Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16.

4. Dorrien’s examples are “William Bennett, Peter Berger, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ernest Lefever, James Nuechterlein, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and James Q. Wilson” (Imperial Designs, 15).

5. Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors,” The Nation, February 23, 2004, online; quoted in Justin Raimondo, “A Real Hijacking: The Neoconservative Fifth Column and the War in Iraq,” in O’Huallachain and Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again, 112-24, at 123.

6. Norman Podhoretz, “After the Cold War,” Commentary 92 (July 1991), and “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Commentary 101 (March 1996); both cited in Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 80.

7. Irving Kristol, Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1986; quoted in Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 117.

8. Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World,” National Interest, Winter 1989: 47-49.

9. Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, 1990.

10. Krauthammer, “Bless Our Pax Americana,” Washington Post, March 22, 1991.

11. Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidance,” February 18, 1992. Although Libby is usually considered the person who wrote this draft, Gary Dorrien says that it was actually written by Wolfowitz’s aide Zalmay Khalilzad, who had been briefed on what it should say by Wolfowitz and Libby---with additional input from Andrew Marshall, Richard Perle, and Albert Wohlstetter (Imperial Designs, 39).

12. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.

13. Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop: A One Superpower World,” New York Times, March 8, 1992 (http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm); Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower,” Washington Post, March 11, 1992 (http://www.yale.edu/strattech/92dpg.html).

14. Wall Street Journal, March 16, 1992.

15. Quoted in Barton Gellman, “Aim of Defense Plan Supported by Bush,” Washington Post, March 12, 1992.

16. Quoted in Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower.”

17. Bacevich, American Empire, 45.

18. Paul Wolfowitz, “Remembering the Future,” National Interest, Spring 2000 (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_2000_Spring/ai_61299040).

19. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 39.

20. David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harper’s, October, 2002.

21. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 142.

22. Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1). Lemann further reported that the first major product of this new thinking was a brief prepared by Wolfowitz to be presented to Cheney on May 21, 1990, at which time Cheney was also supposed to hear Colin Powell’s proposal for revising U.S. foreign policy but did not. Cheney then, on the basis of Wolfowitz’s proposal, briefed President Bush, who delivered a major foreign policy address on August 2 (the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait).

23. Brinkley’s statement is quoted in “Cheney Is Power Hitter in White House Lineup,” USA Today, August 28, 2002, which is quoted in Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 120.

24. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 42.

25. “Defense Strategy of the 1990s,” Department of Defense, 1992.

26. Lemann, “The Next World Order.”

27. “Defense Strategy for the 1990s,” Department of Defense, January, 1993. Lemann, in “The Next World Order,” reported that although this was an unclassified and hence “scrubbed” version of the official document, “it contained the essential ideas of ‘shaping,’ rather than reacting to, the rest of the world, and of preventing the rise of other superpowers.”

28. Zalmay Khalilzad, From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World after the Cold War (Rand Corporation, 1995).

29. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 81.

30. Robert Kagan, “American Power: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Commentary 101 (April 1996).

31. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Foreign Policy and the Republican Future,” Weekly Standard, October 12, 1998.

32. Robert Kagan, “The Clinton Legacy Abroad,” Weekly Standard, January 15, 2001; quoted in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 85.

33. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 110.

34. Ibid., 126.

35. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 68, 130.

36. Project for the New American Century, “Statement of Principles,” June 3, 1997 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm).

37. Project for the New American Century (henceforth PNAC), Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org).

38. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 142-43; Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 911,” 94-95.

39. Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Time, March 5, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2001/03/05/doctrine.html).

40. Krauthammer’s statements, originally published in Emily Eakin, “All Roads Lead To D.C.,” New York Times, Week In Review, March 31, 2002, are quoted in Jonathan Freedland, “Is America the New Rome?” Guardian, September 18, 2002.

41. Robert Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003.

42. See John McMurtry, “9/11 and the 9/11 Wars: Understanding the Supreme Crimes,” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006).

43. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1987).

44. Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times, February 22, 2002.

45. Bacevich, American Empire, 244.

46. This distancing is especially evident in Bacevich’s later book, The New American Militarism.

47. Claes Ryn, “The Ideology of American Empire,” in O’Huallachain and Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again, 63-79, at 65.

48. Norman Podhoretz, “The Reagan Road to Détente,” Foreign Affairs 63 (1984), 452; “The Neo-Conservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1982; both quoted in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 74.

49. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 133.

50. “Joint Vision 2010” (http://www.dtic.mil/jv2010/jvpub.htm).

51. General Howell M. Estes III, USAF, United States Space Command, “Vision for 2020,” February 1997 (http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usspac/visbook.pdf).

52. “Joint Vision 2020” (http://www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm).

53. Bacevich, American Empire, 127.

54. PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 4.

55. Ibid., 38, 54, 30.

56. Ibid., iv, 6, 50, 51, 59.

57. Ibid., 62.

58. Ibid., 51.

59. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 45.

60. Ibid., 44-46; Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 152-64, 167-73. Richard Perle, who also became a Wohlstetter disciple at a young age, said of Wolfowitz: “Paul thinks the way Albert thinks” (Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 46).

61. “Andrew Marshall,” Source Watch, Center for Media & Democracy (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Andrew_Marshall).

62. Report of the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management and Organization (http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/spaceabout.html), 7.

63. Ibid., 15.

64. This according to the Washington Post, January 27, 2002.

65. Robert Kagan, “We Must Fight This War,” Washington Post, September 12, 2001; Henry Kissinger, “Destroy the Network,” Washington Post, September 11, 2001 (http://washingtonpost.com); Lance Morrow, “The Case for Rage and Retribution,” Time, September 11, 2001.

66. “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” New York Times, October 12, 2001.

67. Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1). The phrase in the inside quotation marks is a direct quote from Rice; the rest of the statement is Lemann’s paraphrase.

68. “Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy,” April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov).

69. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.

70. “September 11, 2001: Attack on America: Remarks by the President in Telephone Conversation with New York Mayor Giuliani and New York Governor Pataki 11:00 A.M. EDT; September 13, 2001,” available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/president_009.htm; “Bush Vows to ‘Whip Terrorism,’” Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001.

71. Lemann, “The Next World Order.”

72. Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack, 6:42 PM, September 11, 2001 (available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/dod_brief02.htm). According to the transcript, the question was asked by Secretary Rumsfeld. But the flow of the discussion suggests that it came from a reporter. In either case, the 9/11 attacks were interpreted to mean that greater military spending was needed, “especially for missile defense.”

73. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 173 (the second phrase in quotation marks was taken by Bacevich from Thomas E. Ricks, “For Rumsfeld, Many Roadblocks,” Washington Post, August 7, 2001).

74. Ibid., 173.

75. Perle’s statement is quoted by Bacevich (ibid., 173-74) from Neil Swidey, “The Mind of the Administration,” Boston Globe, May 18, 2003.

76. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, henceforth NSS 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html), 29-30.

77. NSS 2002, 28.

78. In using this hyphenated term, I follow the precedent of Catherine Keller in “Omnipotence and Preemption,” in David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., Richard Falk, and Catherine Keller, The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

79. Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower”; cited in Halper and Clark, America Alone, 141.

80. Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” June 1996 (http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm).

81. PNAC, “Statement of Principles,” 1997 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm)

82. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, May 29, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).

83. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 91.

84. “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point,” June 1, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html).

85. NSS 2002, cover letter.

86. NSS 2002, 6, 15.

87. Ibid., 15.

88. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 142.

89. Max Boot, “Think Again: Neocons,” Foreign Policy, January/February 2004 (http://www.cfr.org/publication/7592/think_again.html), 18.

90. The fact that Zelikow was “involved in the drafting” of this document was revealed on PBS in Frontline’s “Interview with Barton Gellman” on January 29, 2003, shortly after Zelikow had become executive director of the 9/11 Commission. According to Gellman, a staff writer for the Washington Post, Zelikow had told him this during a telephone conversation the previous day. The fact that Zelikow was the primary drafter of NSS 2002 was revealed in James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 316, 331.

91. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 316.

92. Ibid., 331.

93. Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow, “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 1998, 80-94 (available at http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/ct-tnd.htm).

94. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission, say in their preface to The 9/11 Commission Report that they had “sought to be independent, impartial, . . . and nonpartisan” (xv). In their later book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), they reaffirm that they had been determined to be “nonpartisan and independent” (29).

95. According to Kean and Hamilton themselves, Zelikow provided the “overarching vision” for the report and, with the aid of his former coauthor Ernest May, prepared the outline, which he presented to the staff, assigning “different sections and subsections of it to individual staff members” (Without Precedent, 273). Finally, although various members of the Commission’s staff wrote the first drafts of the various chapters, we learn from May, revised drafts were then produced by the “front office,” which was headed by Zelikow (Ernest May, “When Government Writes History: A Memoir of the 9/11 Commission,” New Republic, May 23, 2005).

96. Statement of the Family Steering Committee for The 9/11 Independent Commission, March 20, 2004 (www.911independentcommission.org/mar202004.html).

97. David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2005), chap. 10, “Possible Motives of the Bush Administration.”

98. “President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference,” April 13, 2004 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-20.html).

99. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation,” September 11, 2001 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html).

100. “Bin Laden Is Wanted: Dead or Alive, Says Bush,” Telegraph, September 18, 2001 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/18/wbush18.xml).

101. “White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You’” (CNN.com, September 21, 2001).

102. Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, “Taliban Willing To Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect” (http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/1001/w01taliban.html).

103. For the various kinds of evidence, see David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, chap. 8, or The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, chap. 6.

104. Francis Boyle, “No Proof, No Investigation, No Accountability, No Law” (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fab051702.html). Boyle points out that a White Paper, entitled “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States,” was provided by British Prime Minister Tony Blair on October 4, 2001. But it began with the disclaimer that it ”does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a court of law.”

105. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Most Wanted Terrorists (http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm); the statement, made by Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI, is quoted in Ed Haas, “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’” Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006 (http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html).

106. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36.

107. Ibid., 36.

108. Ibid., 212.

109. Ibid., 212, 24-25.

110. “Senate Foreign Relations Committee Testimony—-Zbigniew Brzezinski, February 1, 2007,” Information Clearing House (http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/258/52).

111. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), chaps. 12 and 13, entitled “Romancing the Taliban: The Battle for Pipelines.”

112. Ibid., 75-79, 175.

113. Julio Godoy, “U.S. Taliban Policy Influenced by Oil,” Inter Press Service, November 16, 2001.

114. This according to Niaz Naik, the highly respected Pakistani representative at the meeting, as reported in George Arney, “U.S. ‘Planned Attack on Taleban,’” BBC News, Sept. 18, 2001. In a story in the Guardian entitled “Threat of U.S. Strikes Passed to Taliban Weeks Before NY Attack” (September 22, 2001), one of the American representatives was quoted as confirming that this discussion of military action did occur.

115. The Frontier Post, October 10, 2001, cited in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree, Calif.: Tree of Life, 2002), 227.

116. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 178-79.

117. On his career, see “Zalmay Khalilzad,” Source Watch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Zalmay_Khalilzad).

118. Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2002, quoting from the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv.

119. Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 182-83.

120. That Wolfowitz made this comment in a statement to the Commission was reported by Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. The statements by Gorelick and Rumsfeld are quoted in “Day One Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearing,” Washington Post, March 23, 2004 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17798-2004Mar23.html).

121. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 86-87, citing Arnold Beichman, “How the Divide over Iraq Strategies Began,” Washington Times, November 27, 2002.

122. Albert Wohlstetter, “Help Iraqi Dissidents Oust Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 1992.

123. Wohlstetter, “Meeting the Threat in the Persian Gulf,” Survey 25 (Spring 1981): 128-88; discussed in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 191.

124. Arnaud de Borchgrave, “All in the Family,” Washington Times, September 13, 2004, online.

125. Paul D. Wolfowitz and Zalmay M. Khalilzad, “Saddam Must Go,” Weekly Standard, December 1997.

126. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,” New York Times, January 30, 1998.

127. “Prepared Testimony of Paul D. Wolfowitz,” House National Security Committee, U.S. Congress, September 16, 1998; Wolfowitz, “Iraqi Rebels with a Cause,” New Republic, December 7, 1998.

128. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm). PNAC, Letter to Gingrich and Lott on Iraq, May 29, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm).

129. PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 14.

130. O’Neill is quoted to this effect in Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). O’Neill repeated this point in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in January of 2004. Susskind, whose book also draws on interviews with other officials, said that in its first weeks the Bush administration was discussing the occupation of Iraq and the question of how to divide up its oil (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml).

131. Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 264.

132. Quoted in Elizabeth Drew, “The Neocons in Power,” New York Review of Books, 50/10 (June 12, 2003)

133. Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 83.

134. Reported by CBS News, September 4, 2002. This note, written by Rumsfeld’s top aide, Stephen Cambone (who participated in PNAC’s project to produce Rebuilding America’s Defenses), is now available online (http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/dod-staffers-notes-from-911-obtained.html).

135. Bob Woodward, Bush at War, 48-49.

136. Ibid., 49, 83-85.

137. Glenn Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past," Washington Post, January 12, 2003 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43909- 2003Jan11.html).

138. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 101.

139. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 230.

140. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 108-09.

141. “Remarks by the Vice President to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention,” August 26, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html).

142. “Remarks by the President on Iraq,” October 7, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html).

143. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 203; see also the entirety of their chap. 7, “The False Pretences.”

144. Ibid., 210, 209.

145. Ibid., 201, 214.

146. Ibid., 218.

147. Quoted in Gustave Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Co, 1947), 278. Gilbert was reporting a conversation he had with Hermann Göring on the evening of April 18, 1946, while the Nuremberg trials were going on.

148. I called it prima facie evidence in my first book on the subject, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2004), xxiii. I call the evidence “overwhelming” in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Olive Branch, April 2007). This latter book is now my most complete case against the official theory and hence my most complete argument that 9/11 was an inside job.

149. David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2005), 241-44.

150. See the introduction to Debunking 9/11 Debunking.

151. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 168, citing Kristol and Kagan, “Time for an Investigation,” Weekly Standard, May 27, 2002: 9-10, and Kagan and Kristol, “Still Time for an Investigation,” Weekly Standard, June 10, 2002: 9-10.

Source

CNN: Opposition to Government, Bankers is Criminal

2010-08-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

CNN’s Rick Sanchez and the tireless propaganda minister of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mark Potok, have teamed up to demonize the Sovereign Citizen movement. In the intro to the piece below, Sanchez displays an overt disgust for the growing movement.

The FBI and Ministry of Homeland Security consider the movement a form of domestic terrorism. “The agency has already outlined two separate domestic terror threats — eco-terrorists/animal rights extremists and lone offenders — and its latest addition is a discussion of the Sovereign Citizen Movement,” the Homeland Security Newswire reported in April. “Members of the Sovereign Citizen Movement are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States. As a result, they believe they do not have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement.”

Naturally, because they refuse to obey the government, these folks are terrorists and the government is eager to have citizens who reflexively obey the government — and buy into what Sanchez and Potok say about the movement — rat them out. “You can help,” says the FBI. “First, ‘be crime smart’: don’t fall for the bogus claims and scams of sovereign citizens. And second, if you have information on any suspicious activities or crimes, please contact us.”

In May, the corporate media had a field day with the sovereign citizen philosophy when Joseph Kane and his 16 year old son were gunned down by cops. According to police, Kane handed sovereign citizens paperwork to Arkansas police after he was pulled over. It is said Kane’s son then pulled out an AK 47 and killed two police officers. “West Memphis police recently finished training on how to identify the groups by peculiar license plates or bumper stickers. They were also taught how to best approach them during a traffic stop,” Fox News reported.

The Missouri Information Analysis Center document leaked to Alex Jones last year specifically instructs police to be on the look-out for patriot bump stickers. Dangerous terrorists, according to MIAC, include Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin supporters. The Department of Homeland Security produced a similar document at approximately the same time warning officialdom and police of the threat posed by constitutionalists, advocates of the Second Amendment and returning veterans.

In the above clip, Potok is so eager to demonize the movement he claims it began as the progeny of white supremacists. The FBI does not go that far, but instead creates its own fallacious mythology.

The “FBI lists this extremist movement as a domestic terrorist threat, saying some ‘sovereign citizens’ murder, threaten judges, use fake currency and engineer various mortgage fraud scams. Many don’t pay taxes,” reports the Memphis Fox affiliate.

A cursory Google search of the claim sovereign citizens murder judges produces zero results, but there are plenty of instances of sovereign citizens eschewing federal and state paperwork, not paying taxes, ignoring laws and even going up against banksters in foreclosure cases — all terrorism, of course, according to the state.

Bankster minion Timothy Geithner didn’t pay taxes either, so I guess he is also a terrorist who secretly desires to kill judges and squat expensive condos.

Sarcasm aside, the sovereign citizen movement is considered a direct and dangerous threat by the government because it rejects out of hand its authority. That’s way Sanchez and the propagandist Potok talked about the movement in such strident terms.

Source

4th Amendment Violating Mobile X-Ray Scanners Hit The Streets

2010-08-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

As we warned at the beginning of the year, X-ray body scanners currently being used and abused in airports across the world are set to hit the streets as American Science & Engineering reveals that “more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents” have been sold to government agencies.

In January, we divulged how the ultimate end use of the body scanners would not be limited to airports, and that they were going to be rolled out on the streets as mobile units that would scan vehicles at checkpoints as well as individuals and crowds attending public events.

Dutch police announced that they were developing a mobile scanner that would “see through people’s clothing and look for concealed weapons” and that it would be used “as an alternative to random body searches in high risk areas”.

The device would also be used from a distance on groups of people “and mass scans on crowds at events such as football matches.”

The plans mirrored leaked documents out of the UK Home Office three years prior, which revealed that authorities in the UK were working on proposals to fit lamp posts with CCTV cameras that would X-ray scan passers-by and “undress them” in order to “trap terror suspects”.

Now, according to a Forbes report, backscatter x-ray vision devices mounted on trucks are already being deployed inside the United States to scan passing individuals and vehicles in complete violation of the Fourth Amendment.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold many of the devices to U.S. law enforcement agencies, who are already using them on the streets for “security” purposes.

“Without a warrant, the government doesn’t have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,” points out Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “Even airport scans are typically used only as a secondary security measure. If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.”

Watch a video demonstration of the device below.

“The TSA’s official policy dictates that full-body scans must be viewed in a separate room from any guards dealing directly with subjects of the scans, and that the scanners won’t save any images,” states the report. “Just what sort of safeguards might be in place for AS&E’s scanning vans isn’t clear, given that the company won’t reveal just which law enforcement agencies, organizations within the DHS, or foreign governments have purchased the equipment.”

However, as we reported right from the start and as was confirmed earlier this month, federal authorities have been storing checkpoint body scan images all along, proving that their claim that no images could be stored or transmitted was an act of mass public deception in order to grease the skids for the rapid introduction of the devices after the botched and highly suspicious underwear bomber incident.

As we have constantly reiterated, everything that we see unfolding in the airports is eventually designed to be used on the streets. People who had a blasé attitude about the privacy-busting body scanners, behavioral interrogations, and intrusive pat-downs occurring in airports on the basis that they could avoid them by not flying face a rude awakening once all this is in their face on a daily basis.

Body and vehicle scanners are just one tool authorities plan to implement on a widespread basis as part of our deepening decline into a hi-tech militarized police state.

Homeland Security is already implementing technology to be enforced at “security events” which purportedly reads “malintent” on behalf of an individual who passes through a checkpoint. The video below explains how “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST) checkpoints will conduct “physiological” and “behavioral” tests in order to weed out suspected terrorists and criminals.

The clip shows individuals who attend “security events” being led into trailers before they are interrogated as to whether they are terrorists while lie detector-style computer programs analyze their physiological responses. The subjects are asked about their whereabouts, and if they are attempting to smuggle bombs or recording devices into the “expo,” proving that the technology is intended to be used at public events and not just airports. Individuals who do not satisfy the first lie detector-style test are then asked “additional questions”.

The use of such technology is not only a complete violation of the Fourth Amendment, it also eviscerates the notion of innocent until proven guilty, and therefore totally undermines everything America stands for. Given the widespread abuse witnessed in the first eight months alone after the roll out of airport body scanners, Americans need to boycott the companies producing these systems and also resist their deployment at every turn.

Fourth Amendment lawsuits such as the one filed by EPIC against the naked body scanners should be used as a tool with which to ensure that such systems are never allowed to become commonplace, unless we wish to see supposedly free countries turned into high-tech prison grids ruled over by corrupt government enforcers who treat citizens as slaves.

Source

Megalomaniacs Push For Orwellian “Safe” City, Controlled Internet

2010-08-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. recently unveiled a plan to place iris scanners and other tracking devices in what they toted as the “most secure” city in the world. Leon, Mexico was the city chosen to unleash the privacy-infringing technology upon. The city is creating a database of irises in order to create a colossal database that can be used to identify and track citizens. Ex-criminals will be specifically targeted. Those who have been charged with shoplifting will have trouble entering stores without being constantly observed, and others will not be allowed to board planes.

Biometrics Taken To A Whole New Level

The mandatory iris scanning in order to enter certain buildings is haunting enough, but the larger endgame of this technological grid is much more disturbing and protrusive. GRI went on to state their plan for an Orwellian future.

“In the future, whether it’s entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris,” said the company’s chief business developer an interview.

The megalomaniacs in charge of setting up this “safe” city are very similar to those who setup the biometric system here in the United States. In the same interview it is mentioned that the CIA uses similar tactics to spy on United States citizens. In order to play this off as another measure to keep us “safe”, the company’s representative insists that it is only done to capture members of Al-Qaeda.

“Voice biometrics are also huge. It’s how the CIA monitors communication across the globe. They sift through cell phones and create voice biometrics to find Al-Qaeda members, for instance, and hit them in their car later with a missile. That is not going away either.” he said.

Seizing The Internet

Coinciding with such a gloomy blueprint for civilization, Google’s CEO echoed similar statements in an article that appeared in the Telegraph. Not only does Schmidt say with certainty that in the future the current generation will have to change their names to escape their internet past, but he also goes on to say that Google will eventually become much more than a search engine. Schmidt says that people do not want Google to answer their questions, but that they want Google to “tell them what they should be doing next.”

Google is notorious for spying on its users, but Schmidt takes it to another level. Schmidt says that Google will know “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are” in the near future. That is certainly taking Google to a whole new level of technological spying. Google is rather open about the fact that your information is being recorded, however. Last year Schmidt said that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Such sentiments from the CEO of a company that operates 2 of the top 5 sites in the world is quite troubling. Google has immense power over the direction of the internet in terms of trends and fads, and have been caught censoring oppositional terms such as “Google spies”.

Beta Testing

In reality, this “safe” city is simply a beta test before iris scanners and other outlandish tracking systems are installed in major U.S. cities. Technology is neither good or evil, but it can be used by good or evil people. The citizens of the United States and elsewhere will be told that these systems are only being put in place for increased convenience, and defense against terrorists.

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This is the same tired excuse that has brought upon body scanners that have been linked to cancer, and illegal searches of all kinds. Do not allow corrupt officials to bend the rules of the Constitution under the guide of convenience and false safety. Is the “safest” city really all that safe for the average person?

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Pre-Crime Technology To Be Used In Washington D.C.

2010-08-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

Law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C. have begun to use technology that they say can predict when crimes will be committed and who will commit them, before they actually happen.

The Minority Report like pre-crime software has been developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Previous incarnations of the software, already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia were limited to predictions of murders by and among parolees and offenders on probation.

According to a report by ABC News, however, the latest version, to be implemented in Washington D.C., can predict other future crimes as well.

“When a person goes on probation or parole they are supervised by an officer. The question that officer has to answer is ‘what level of supervision do you provide?’” Berk told ABC News, intimating that the program could have a bearing on the length of sentences and/or bail amounts.

The technology sifts through a database of thousands of crimes and uses algorithms and different variables, such as geographical location, criminal records and ages of previous offenders, to come up with predictions of where, when, and how a crime could possibly be committed and by who.

The program operates without any direct evidence that a crime will be committed, it simply takes datasets and computes possibilities.

“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk also states, “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”

Critics have urged that the program encourages categorizing individuals on a risk scale via computer mathematics, rather than on real life, and that monitoring those people based on such a premise is antithetic to a justice system founded on the premise of the presumption of innocence.

Other police departments and law agencies across the country have begun to look into and use similar predictive technologies. The Memphis Police Department, for example uses a program called Operation Blue CRUSH, which uses predictive analytics developed by IBM.

Other forms of pre-crime technology in use or under development include surveillance cameras that can predict when a crime is about to occur and alert police, and even neurological brain scanners that can read people’s intentions before they act, thus

detecting whether or not a person has “hostile intent”.

It is not too far fetched to imagine all these forms of the technology being used together in the future by law enforcement bodies.

The British government has previously debated introducing pre-crime laws in the name of fighting terrorism. The idea was that suspects would be put on trial using MI5 or MI6 intelligence of an expected terror attack. This would be enough to convict if found to be true “on the balance of probabilities”, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.

The government even has plans to collect lifelong records on all residents starting at the age of five, in order to screen for those who might be more likely to commit crimes in the future.

Another disturbing possibility for such technology comes in the form of a financial alliance of sorts between Internet search engine giant Google and the investment arm of the CIA and the wider U.S. intelligence network.

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Google and In-Q-Tel have recently injected a sum of up to $10 million each into a company called Recorded Future, which uses analytics to scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, which is used to “assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

The company describes its analytics as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence” and says it can also “predict the future”.

Recorded Future takes in vast amounts of personal information such as employment changes, personal education and family relations. Promotional material also shows categories covering pretty much everything else, including entertainment, music and movie releases, as well as other innocuous things like patent filings and product recalls.

Those detached from any kind of moral reality will say “If you’ve got nothing to hide then what is the problem with being scanned for pre-crime? If it keeps us all safe from murderers, rapists and terrorists I’m all for it”.

How far towards a literal technological big brother police state will we slip before people wake up to the fact?

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Ehrlich and Holdren: Death “Reasonable Price to Pay” for Well-being of Society

2010-08-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

In a 1995 article written by Gretchen Daily and Ecoscience co-author Paul R. Ehrlich, the authors put forward the proposition that physicians should no longer concentrate on improving the health of their individual patients, or treat occurring infections in order to save the patients life, but rather look to the well-being of society as a whole. In doing so, say Daily and Ehrlich, “a small net increase in deaths” is “a reasonable price to pay”. Here’s the quote in its entirety (page 25):

“Physicians by instinct and training focus on the health of individuals; they must learn to pay more attention to the health of whole societies and to deal with the difficult conflicts of interest that often arise between the two. One physician, Jeffrey Fisher (1994), recommends that physicians be required to take periodic recertification exams in which they are tested on antibiotic knowledge. If antibiotics had been used more judiciously over the past few decades, there doubtless would have been more deaths from bacterial infections misdiagnosed as viral, and fewer deaths from allergic reactions to antibiotics. But a small net increase in deaths would probably have been a reasonable price to pay to avoid the present situation, which portends a return to the pre-antibiotic era and much higher death rates.”

The fact that humans reproduce, Daily and Ehrlich argue, means diseases have an opportunity to thrive and reek havoc amongst them. This is the snake biting its own tail. Less humans means less diseases. The logic is infallible. The same argument can of course be applied to car accidents, plane crashes and other calamities, sure to occur with those darned humans roaming about. In order to reduce the possibility of diseases occurring, the authors list some proposals, including:

“1. Redoubling efforts to halt the growth of the human population and eventually reduce it (Daily et al., 1994). This is a very basic step, because overpopulation makes substantial, diverse contributions to the degradation of the epidemiological environment, in addition to degrading other aspects of Earth’s carrying capacity (Daily and Ehrlich, 1992).”

Another proposal reads as follows:

“7. Instituting worldwide campaigns to emphasize limiting the number of sexual partners, and to increase the use of condoms and spermicides. Such changes would both lower the incidence of STDs and encourage the evolution of reduced virulence in them (Ewald, 1994). Special attention should be paid to methods that can be adopted by women (e.g., Rosenberg and Gollub, 1992; Rosenberg et al., 1992, 1993), which would tie in neatly to related methods of improving the epidemiological environment by limiting human population growth (Ehrlich et al., 1995).

From Ehrlich we switch gears to John P. Holdren, who authored (also with Paul Ehrlich) an article called “The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects” in the World Bank document Defining and Measuring Sustainability. In the article, the diabolical duo propose a stark reduction in the percentage of humans on earth:

“No form of material growth (including population growth) other than asymptotic growth, is sustainable; Many of the practices inadequately supporting today’s population of 5.5 billion people are sustainable; and at the sustainability limit, there will be a trade-off between population and energy-matter throughput per person, hence, ultimately, between economic activity per person and well-being per person.”

“This”, Holdren and Ehrlich continue, “is enough to say quite a lot about what needs to be faced up to eventually (a world of zero net physical growth), what should be done now (change unsustainable practices, reduce excessive material consumption, slow down population growth),and what the penalty will be for postponing attention to population limitation (lower well-being per person.”

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The most gruesome and interesting part of their elucidation is buried in the notes (page 15). In speaking about all kinds of intolerable “harms” that counteract sustainability, Holdren and Ehrlich are willing to make an exception for pollution, if it will cut some time of the average life expectancy:

“Harm that would qualify as tolerable, in this context, could not be cumulative, else continuing additions to it would necessarily add up to unsustainable damage eventually. Thus, for example, a form and level of pollution that subtract a month from the life expectancy of the average member of the human population, or that reduce the net primary productivity of forests on the planet by 1 percent, might be deemed tolerable in exchange for very large benefits and would certainly be sustainable as long as the loss of life expectancy or reduction in productivity did not grow with time. Two of us have coined the term “maximum sustainable abuse” in the course of grappling with such ideas (Daily and Ehrlich 1992).”

In the horrible euphemistic way these proposals disguised as “possibilities” are usually being presented lies hidden a horrible truth. These head-hunters of the scientific dictatorship are not simply powerless psychopaths exchanging abstract ideas. They are powerful sociopaths rather, occupying key positions within the marble halls of academia and government. In the final equation, they are after you and your children.

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Constitution “Silly Stuff,” Says Illinois Congressman

2010-08-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

Democratic Congressman Phil Hare, who caused outrage earlier this year when he told constituents who asked him about the legality of the health care bill, “I don’t worry about the constitution,” has sparked fresh consternation after he was caught on camera in an Illinois hotel labeling the founding document of America “silly stuff”.

Video confrontations with arrogant and dismissive Congress members uploaded to You Tube have come to represent the angst of the Tea Party movement, as elected representatives betray disdain and sometimes even open hostility to the rule of law that they are supposed to uphold on behalf of their constituents.

The latest example was provided by Illinois Congressman Phil Hare, who was asked on camera about his previous response to a question about Obamacare during a meeting with constituents, in which he told the audience “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this to be honest.”

The new clip shows a citizen asking Hare, “Where in the constitution does it say that you can force people to buy health care?” to which Hare responds, “Oh boy, we’re not going there again are we?”

Watch the clip below.

“I think it’s a legitimate question,” states the constituent, as Hare ignores him and talks to other citizens.

However, Hare is soon confronted again as another man asks him, “How come you’re a member of the Socialist Party?” Hare denies the charge, despite the fact that his name appears on a list of Democrats who are in the ranks of the Socialist Party of America, which was released by the Socialist Party itself last year.

Hare’s entourage then try to get in the face of the original questioner, before demanding he identify himself.

Hare continues to refuse to answer the question about the constitutionality of the health care bill, dismissing it as “silly stuff”.

Phil Hare has been constantly harassed and harangued by citizens for his support of Obamacare and other issues. Back in June, a clip was released showing Hare being confronted by residents who accuse him of being a draft-dodger. Hare embarrassingly attempts to joke with the people filming him, asking “which side is my best?” before being pulled away by a member of his entourage.

Watch the clip below.

Hare embarrassed himself during the aforementioned confrontation back in April when he was corrected after claiming that language concerning the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness appeared within the Constitution , when in fact it appears in the Declaration of Independence.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Hare responded. “Either one.”

Hare was then quizzed “Where in the Constitution does it give you the authority…?”

“I don’t know.” Hare angrily interrupted, refusing to allow the constituent to even finish the question.

The attitude of Hare and his colleagues on Capitol Hill towards their constituents and their open disdain towards the Constitution is one of the primary reasons why Tea Party members are having so much success in ousting establishment candidates.

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After October, Hare won’t have to worry about what’s contained in the Constitution, nor will he have to be concerned about reading bills that are thousands of pages in length, because he will be kicked out of office. Polls show Hare trailing his opponent by a healthy and growing margin as his snobbish and arrogant behavior comes back to bite him where it hurts.

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We Got One That Can See: Former Obamanoid Reveals Truth on Fox News

2010-08-30T16:05:00.000-07:00

It was a remarkable moment in the annals of corporate media television. During a Fox News segment on the staggering unemployment rate among the young, a former Obamanoid manages to sneak in the truth — there is no difference between Clinton, Bush and Obama, they are all puppets for elite bankers.

“Obama is an illusion of change,” said the former supporter. “He is a lot like Bush in many ways. It is a fallacy to believe he really cares about unemployment when he hired an economic team comprised of Volcker, Geithner… these men were in the last three administrations and they don’t really care for the poor and working class of this nation.”

Obama’s administration, of course, is packed like a sardine can with globalists from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg group. Following Obama’s election win, he named 14 top cabinet selections and nine of them were affiliated with the Bilderberg group, ten were affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations and five hailed from the Trilateral Commission.

Geithner, in addition to working for the Federal Reserve, is associated with the CFR, Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers. Ditto the former Fed boss Volcker.

Indeed, Obama, Geithner, Volcker, and the rest don’t care about the poor and working class. The CFR, Trilateralists, and members of the once secretive Bilderberg cabal are working stealthily toward a one-world government that will require a large serf class of impoverished slaves.

In 1980, Holly Sklar wrote in her book Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, that according to bankster David Rockefeller’s Trilateralists “the people, governments, and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations” and the “owners and managers of global corporations view the entire world as their factory, farm, supermarket, and playground. The Trilateral Commission is seeking to strengthen and rationalize the world economy in their interest,” not in the interest of the workers or anybody else.

“If you wish to establish national monopolies, you must control national governments,” writes Gary Allen. “If you wish to establish international monopolies or cartels, you must control a world government.”

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Obama’s task was to sell the globalist snake oil under the misleading label “change.” Fortunately, the young lady above seems to understand this, at least on a rudimentary level. It is heartening that people — especially former Obamanoids — are coming around to the reality of the situation.

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Divide and Rule

2010-08-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

Webster Tarpley, author, journalist, lecturer, and critic of US foreign and domestic policy, appeared on the Alex Jones radio show today and discussed the wedge issues currently exploited in the “corporate media” to divide the American people in order for the Global Power Structure to maintain control. The concept of “divide and rule” as a means to control the people is not a new idea.

According to Wikipedia, “divide and rule (derived from Latin divide et impera) (also known as divide and conquer) is a combination of political, military and economic strategy of gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into chunks that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy. In reality, it often refers to a strategy where small power groups are prevented from linking up and becoming more powerful, since it is difficult to break up existing power structures”. It is said that the British used the strategy to gain control of the large territory of India by keeping its people divided along lines of religion, language, or caste, taking control of petty princely states in India piecemeal.

The use of this technique is meant to empower the sovereign to control subjects, populations, or factions of different interests, who collectively might be able to oppose his rule. Machiavelli identifies a similar application to military strategy, advising in Book VI of The Art of War [3] (Dell’arte della guerra [4]), that a Captain should endeavor with every art to divide the forces of the enemy, either by making him suspicious of his men in whom he trusted, or by giving him cause that he has to separate his forces, and, because of this, become weaker.

Of course, Wikipedia’s descriptions focus primarily on the use of “divide and rule” by a sovereign ruler or nation. Today, we are facing a much more sinister oppressor in the form of Global Government; the long sought after establishment of a Global Scientific Dictatorship by a very few extremely powerful and wealthy families.

The use of “wedge issues” are frequently employed in order to gain a foothold politically which allows a political entity to implement otherwise unacceptable policies. A wedge issue is a social or political issue, often of a divisive or otherwise controversial nature, which splits apart or creates a “wedge” in the support base of one political group. Wedge issues can be advertised, publicly aired, and otherwise emphasized by an opposing political group, in an attempt to weaken the unity of the divided group, or to entice voters in the divided group to give their support to the opposing group. The use of wedge issues gives rise to wedge politics.

In a recent article, Wedge Issues Divide Politicians from Independents, Ed Hornick (CNN) reports:

The current ruckus over building an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, calls to change the 14th Amendment and other so-called “wedge” issues are roiling up each party’s base, but they’re turning off independents, analysts say.

The article goes on to report that Jacqueline Salit, president of independentvoting.org, a national strategy and organizing center for independents says

“I think there’s more and more of a steady recognition that these kind of wedge issues and political manipulation, sensationalism and opportunism is exactly what is degrading the American political process and our democracy.”

What we are witnessing in America today with the Ground Zero Mosque, Shirley Sherrod, Immigration, Same Sex Marriage, etc. is a deliberate modern day attempt by the Global Elites to, at minimum, divert attention away from the global economic crises and the criminal activities of Wall Street, the “Federal Reserve” and more specifically, the Central Banking Cartel.

Upon examining the financial backing for the Ground Zero Mosque, for example, we find the Council on Foreign Relations and Fox News as major contributors. (see Steve Watson’s recent article, Ground Zero Mosque Imam is Globalist Stooge and Today on the Alex Jones Show featuring Webster Tarpley)

The constant barrage of propaganda streaming out of the corporate media is nothing more than a veiled attempt to divide the people into factions while the “False Dichotomy” of the Republicans and Democrats offer “solutions” that only serve to inflame an already manic display of bigotry and hatred. Does the two-party system really offer the people a choice? No. They are currently controlled by the Global Elites who are financing their campaigns and directing their policies.

What has either party done in recent history to help the people of this country? Nothing….Absolutely Nothing! That is, nothing positive. They have managed to usher in a era of global economic collapse, racial, ethnic, and socio-economic division; and the destruction of civil liberties.

I would also argue that the deliberate division of the populace along the aforementioned lines, allows the advancement of the police state; with increased unrest, we are very likely to see riots and violence which will allow the Global Elites to fully implement military rule in America, thus leading us to the “perceived need” for Global Government.

We can only pray for their ultimate failure and demise while also refusing to contribute to the social, political, religious, and economic “unrest” which they seek to foment. Does this mean that you should do nothing? On the contrary, do more…examine the new slate of leaders who are presenting the truth about the “Establishment”, share the “truth” with your family, friends, and neighbors; Most importantly, educate yourself about the issues that matter.

It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the “Global Political Awakening”!

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Study Confirms Genetically Modified Crops Threaten Human Fertility and Health Safety

2010-06-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

Austrian Government Study Confirms Genetically Modified (GM) Crops
Threaten Human Fertility and Health Safety

Advocates Call for Immediate Ban of All GM Foods and GM Crops

IMMEDIATE RELEASE (November 13, 2008)

(Los Angeles, CA.) - A long-term feeding study commissioned by the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety, managed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Health, Family and Youth, and carried out by Veterinary University Vienna, confirms genetically modified (GM) corn seriously affects reproductive health in mice. Non-GMO advocates, who have warned about this infertility link along with other health risks, now seek an immediate ban of all GM foods and GM crops to protect the health of humankind and the fertility of women around the world.

Feeding mice with genetically modified corn developed by the US-based Monsanto Corporation led to lower fertility and body weight, according to the study conducted by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Lead author of the study Professor Zentek said, there was a direct link between the decrease in fertility and the GM diet, and that mice fed with non-GE corn reproduced more efficiently.

In the study, Austrian scientists performed several long-term feeding trials over 20 weeks with laboratory mice fed a diet containing 33% of a GM variety (NK 603 x MON 810), or a closely related non-GE variety used in many countries. Statistically significant litter size and pup weight decreases were found in the third and fourth litters in the GM-fed mice, compared to the control group.

The corn is genetically modified with genes that produce a pesticidal toxin, as well as genes that allow it to survive applications of Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup.

A book by author Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette, distributed to members of congress last year, documents 65 serious health risks of GM products, including similar fertility problems with GM soy and GM corn: Offspring of rats fed GM soy showed a five-fold increase in mortality, lower birth weights, and the inability to reproduce. Male mice fed GM soy had damaged young sperm cells. The embryo offspring of GM soy-fed mice had altered DNA functioning. Several US farmers reported sterility or fertility problems among pigs and cows fed on GM corn varieties. Additionally, over the last two months, investigators in India have documented fertility problems, abortions, premature births, and other serious health issues, including deaths, among buffaloes fed GM cottonseed products.

The principle GM crops are soy, corn, cottonseed and canola. GM sugar from sugar beets will also be introduced before year’s end.

Mr. Smith, who is also the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology says, “GM foods are likely responsible for several negative health trends in the US. The government must impose an immediate ban on these dangerous crops.” He says, “Consumers don’t need to wait for governmental action. They can download a free Non-GMO Shopping Guide at www.HealthierEating.org.”

Monsanto press offices in the UK and USA were unable to provide a comment on the findings for journalists yesterday.

The Institute for Responsible Technology’s Campaign for Healthier Eating in America mobilizes citizens, organizations, businesses, and the media, to achieve the tipping point of consumer rejection of genetically modified foods.

The Institute educates people about the documented health risks of GMOs and provides them with healthier non-GMO product choices.

The Institute also informs policy makers and the public around the world about the impacts of GMOs on health, environment, the economy, and agriculture, and the problems associated with current research, regulation, corporate practices, and reporting.

Source

The Internet Must Remain Free

2010-06-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

The Internet is abuzz with news that a US Senate committee has approved a bill that apparently gives the President authority to shut down the Internet. According to TechWorld.com, “A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the US president the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.”

The report continues by saying, “The bill, introduced earlier this month [by Senators Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Thomas Carper, D-Delaware], would establish a White House Office for Cyberspace Policy and a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, which would work with private US companies to create cybersecurity requirements for the electric grid, telecommunications networks and other critical infrastructure.”

See the report at:

http://tinyurl.com/obama-can-kill-web1

A PrisonPlanet.com report says this about the bill: “President Obama will be handed the power to shut down the Internet for at least four months without Congressional oversight if the Senate votes for the infamous Internet ‘kill switch’ bill, which was approved by a key Senate committee yesterday [June 24] and now moves to the floor.

“The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which is being pushed hard by Senator Joe Lieberman, would hand absolute power to the federal government to close down networks, and block incoming Internet traffic from certain countries under a declared national emergency.

“Despite the Center for Democracy and Technology and 23 other privacy and technology organizations sending letters to Lieberman and other backers of the bill expressing concerns that the legislation could be used to stifle free speech, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed the bill in advance of a vote on the Senate floor.”

The report continued by saying, “Fears that the legislation is aimed at bringing the Internet under the regulatory power of the U.S. government in an offensive against free speech were heightened further on Sunday, when Lieberman revealed that the plan was to mimic [communist] China’s policies of policing the web with censorship and coercion.

“‘Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,’ Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley.

“While media and public attention is overwhelmingly focused on the BP oil spill, the establishment is quietly preparing the framework that will allow Obama, or indeed any President who follows him, to bring down a technological iron curtain that will give the government a foot in the door on seizing complete control over the Internet.”

See the report at:

http://tinyurl.com/obama-can-kill-web2

Of course, pro-family groups have long lobbied Washington lawmakers to pass regulations restricting objectionable material on the Internet. But Senator Lieberman’s bill does more than restrict content on the Internet; it gives the federal government the power to completely shut it down.

My friends, if you have any love for liberty left in your heart, one thing is critical: the Internet must remain free–absolutely, totally unrestricted and free.

I realize that many upstanding, well-intentioned people believe that the federal government should restrict the content of the Internet. But Lieberman’s bill should provide ample warning for anyone who believes that the federal government can be trusted with ANY authority it is granted beyond that which is rightly ascribed to it via the US Constitution. Plus, given the propensities of the federal government these days, how long before the definition of “objectionable content” includes your freedom of speech and mine? In plain language, the federal government has no business restricting anything that the Constitution does not permit it to. If we cede the authority to restrict and regulate the content of the Internet to the federal government, we are also ceding to it the power to completely shut down the Internet. And this is exactly what Lieberman’s bill does.

The fact is, the Internet is the last bastion of free and unfiltered news and information. And, yes, I understand that there is much misinformation on the Internet. But that is the price of freedom. The individual must be given the liberty to discern right from wrong for himself. As a Christian, I believe this is why God provided the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Spirit. And I for one do not need the federal government to try and replace either. And as far as objectionable material being available to children is concerned, this is what parents are for! Good grief! It is bad enough that the federal government has turned into Big Brother; are we going to allow it to become Big Momma and Big Daddy as well?

Ladies and gentlemen, it is essential that the free flow of information be allowed to continue over the Internet. The major news media is a finely filtered, tightly controlled medium that works harder at blocking news and information than it does at delivering it. Virtually every major television and radio network, along with the nation’s major newspapers, is an equal opportunity news-suppressor.

Just ask yourself, what would you have known regarding the MIAC report in Missouri had it not been for the Internet? What would you have known about the fiasco in Hardin, Montana, had it not been for the Internet? What would you know about the NAFTA superhighway without the Internet? If not for the Internet, would you ever have learned about the CFR’s plans for a North American Community? Where would the Tea Parties be today without the Internet? Where would Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008 have been without the Internet? Virtually everything you’ve learned regarding the State sovereignty momentum that continues to build across this country you’ve learned from the Internet. Except for a few courageous independent radio talk show hosts, and newspaper and magazine publishers, the vast majority of extremely relevant and critical information relative to freedom is gleaned from the Internet–not to mention the speed with which news and information is able to travel, thanks to the Internet.

It is no hyperbole to suggest that the Internet is the modern patriots’ version of the colonists’ Committees of Correspondence that sounded the clarion call for liberty and independence at the time of America’s founding. And now, power-mad elitists in Washington, D.C., are attempting to provide the federal government with the power and authority to shut it down at will.

What is even more disturbing is the way that private companies and special interest groups are willing to prostitute themselves before the federal government in order to get their own “piece of the pie.” Think of it: just about every freedom-grabbing, Big-Government action taken by these modern Machiavellians in Washington, D.C., is facilitated by willing CEOs from Big Business. They gladly assist Big Brother when he wants to spy on us, read our emails, listen to our phone calls, etc. They happily help Big Brother when he wants to eavesdrop inside our homes, examine our financial records, or snoop on our private lives. When Big Brother says, “Jump!” they ask, “How high?” Then–like these hypocrites in Washington, D.C.–they have the audacity to wave the flag on Independence Day and shout, “America: the land of the free!” As if they are blameless in freedom’s demise.

Mark it down: if the federal government ever shuts down the Internet, it will be business as usual for Washington, D.C., and its fellow travelers in Big Business; but We the People will be out of business, and so will freedom. Regardless of what side of any issue you and I may come from, it is critical that the Internet remains absolutely and totally free.

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48% See Government Today As A Threat to Individual Rights

2010-06-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

(Ramussen)

Nearly half of American Adults see the government today as a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Adults see the government today as a threat to rights. Thirty-seven percent (37%) hold the opposite view. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.

Most Republicans (74%) and unaffiliateds (51%) consider the government to be a threat to individual rights. Most Democrats (64%) regard the government as a protector of rights.

Additionally, most Americans (52%) say it is more important for the government to protect individual rights than to promote economic growth. Just 31% say promoting economic growth is more important. But again a sizable number (17%) of Adults aren’t sure which is more important.

This nationwide survey of 1,000 Adults was conducted on June 18-19, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Men strongly believe it is more important for the government to protect individual rights, while women are almost evenly divided on the question.

Fifty-five percent (55%) of whites feel the emphasis should be on protecting individual rights. African-Americans are closely divided over which is more important.

There is little partisan disagreement when it comes to individual rights versus economic growth.

Data released earlier this week shows that 62% believe politicians want the government to have more power and money. At the same time, 58% think most voters want less power and money for the government.

This gap helps explain why just 21% believe that government today has the consent of the governed.

The Declaration of Independence asserts that governments are instituted among men to protect certain inalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Gun Rights Must Be Honored by States, Cities, High Court Rules in 5-4 Vote

2010-06-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

A divided U.S. Supreme Court said the constitutional right to bear arms binds states and cities, as well as the federal government, in a decision that raises questions about gun laws around the country.

The ruling, while not creating an unlimited right for individuals to carry weapons, restricts the power of cities and states to regulate firearms. A 5-4 majority said Chicago went too far by banning handguns even for self-defense in the home. The Chicago ordinance is now unenforceable, its mayor said, though the law stays in effect pending lower court proceedings.

The ruling said states and cities can ban possession by convicted felons and mentally ill people and enforce laws against bringing guns into schools or government buildings.

Chicago is the only major city with a blanket handgun ban, after a 2008 Supreme Court decision struck down a similar ban in Washington, D.C., a federal enclave. Jurisdictions with narrower weapons restrictions, including New York City, may now face new legal challenges.

The right to bear arms “is fully binding on the states and thus limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court.

Right to Bear Arms

The justices said a constitutional amendment approved after the Civil War protects the right to bear arms as a key freedom, shielding it from state and local interference.

“It is clear that the framers and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” Alito wrote.

Today’s ruling broadens the sweep of the court’s 2008 ruling interpreting the Constitution’s Second Amendment as protecting the rights of individuals, rather than just those of state-run militias. It’s a victory for the National Rifle Association, which joined a group of Chicago residents in challenging the city’s laws.

The ruling “is a vindication for the great majority of American citizens who have always believed the Second Amendment was an individual right and freedom worth defending,” Wayne LaPierre, the group’s executive vice president, said in a statement.

Gun Control Advocates

Gun control advocates said the ruling isn’t likely to lead to the widespread invalidation of gun laws.

“The gun lobby and gun criminals will use it to try to strike down gun laws, and those legal challenges will continue to fail,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center and Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said he was “disappointed but not surprised.” He said the ruling made his city’s 28-year- old ban “unenforceable.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement that the two high court rulings mean that “we can work to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists while at the same time respecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.” The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

Today’s decision, which came on the last day of the court’s nine-month term, divided the justices along lines that have become commonplace. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined Alito in the majority.

Breyer’s Dissent

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer faulted the majority for “transferring ultimate regulatory authority over the private uses of firearms from democratically elected legislatures to courts or from the states to the federal government.”

Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor also dissented.

The high court’s 2008 decision said the right to bear arms had limits. Alito wrote that today’s decision reaffirmed those limits, saying the ruling “does not imperil every law regulating firearms.”

Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was originally aimed only at the federal government. The Supreme Court in the 19th century refused to apply the Second Amendment to the states.

More recently, the court has said that some, though not all, of the rights in the first eight amendments are so fundamental that they are “incorporated” into the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, which binds the states.

‘Fundamental Rights’

“Given that other fundamental rights - the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and so on - limit both state and national governments, it would have been strange for the court to rule otherwise here,” said Rick Garnett, associate dean and constitutional law professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

In saying that the Second Amendment is incorporated as well, the court declined to usher in a major doctrinal shift, as some litigants had sought. Advocates across the ideological spectrum urged the justices to rely on the privileges-or- immunities clause, a long dormant provision in the 14th Amendment.

Such a step might have reinforced established constitutional rights including abortion and opened the door to broader protection of other guarantees, including property rights.

The case “is likely the last great incorporation battle,” said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “In one sense, this is the last battle of the Civil War. The 14th Amendment was designed to ensure that all Americans enjoyed the same fundamental rights, including the right to bear arms. Now the Second Amendment applies to everyone.”

The Chicago ban was challenged by four residents, including Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old homeowner in the Morgan Park neighborhood on the city’s South Side.

McDonald, who says his home has been broken into at least three times, says he wants to keep a handgun by his bed for protection.

The case is McDonald v. City of Chicago, 08-1521.

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Kagan: Pro-State Shill

2010-06-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

As noted in the N.Y. Times piece Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror, the Supreme Court’s “conservatives,”

In a case pitting free speech against national security, … on Monday upheld a federal law that makes it a crime to provide “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, even if the help takes the form of training for peacefully resolving conflicts.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 decision, said the law’s prohibition of providing some types of intangible assistance to groups the State Department says engage in terrorism did not violate the First Amendment.

In dissent, Justice Breyer said the majority had drawn a false analogy between the two kinds of assistance.

“Money given for a charitable purpose might free up other money used to buy arms,” Justice Breyer said from the bench. But the same cannot be said, he continued, “where teaching human rights law is involved.”

But even though the decision is disturbing, even the conservative majority did not go as far as Solicitor General—and now Supreme Court nominee—Elena Kagan, wanted:

Chief Justice Roberts said the government had advanced a position that was too extreme and did not take adequate account of the free-speech interests at stake.

“The government is wrong,” the chief justice wrote, “that the only thing actually at issue in this litigation is conduct” and not speech protected by the First Amendment. But he went on to say that the government’s interest in combating terrorism was enough to overcome that protection.

In his written dissent, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Breyer said the majority had been too credulous in accepting the government’s argument that national security concerns required restrictions on the challengers’ speech and had “failed to insist upon specific evidence, rather than general assertion.”

The common assertion by democrats, and even by some libertarians who buy into the left-right paradigm, that liberals are better on civil liberties is obviously mistaken. (For more: see Liberals on Free Speech and Finance Campaign Laws; Slate Liberals: ‘Let’s see your scrotum if you want to get on an airplane,’ ha ha; Re: War and Civil Liberties Under Obama.)

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We are Change Plans End the Fed protest on Independence Day

2010-06-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

We Are Change groups from MD, VA and DC have joined together to hold an End The Fed protest in Washington DC in honor of Independence Day. The event will be on Saturday, July 3rd and the permits are already in. We Are Change groups have been putting up banners in the local area for the coming event. It is important not to lose momentum and to continue the energy that has sprung up around the notion of abolishing the Federal Reserve. With more and more public awareness as to what the Federal Reserve Bank is and how it operates, common people from the left or right have been getting behind this revolutionary idea.

Please come and join We Are Change in Washington D.C. this July 3, 2010 to take a stand for liberty. If you cannot make it to D.C. and would like to organize your own Federal Reserve protest, contact your local End the Fed group in your area by going to http://endthefedusa.ning.com/ or your local Campaign for Liberty chapter at http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Don’t let up, don’t back down, don’t allow the children of the future to wake up homeless on the continent their forefathers conquered. If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. For more information visit http://www.wearechangedc.org/.

The Federal Reserve is a cartel of private banking corporations which lend money to the United States. It is touted as if it were a Government Agency. IT IS NOT. The Federal Reserve Bank, through its inflation of the money supply and the distortion of free markets resulting from its intervention, is responsible for the current financial and economic crisis. The current round of “bailouts” and federal government nationalization of large segments of the financial sector further inflates the US dollar and disrupts the proper functioning of the markets and will ultimately serve to plunge the nation into an even more severe crisis, quite possibly even into a serious depression. Our goal is to educate Americans so we can have a sound monetary system in this country, and not be held at gunpoint by a private banking cartel who pretends to be a government entity.

Donovan Hubbard WAC-VA
Heidi Humphrey WAC-MD

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Palin Goes Rogue Against Tea Party Candidates

2010-06-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

Pop quiz: Which of the following Republican primary candidates is Sarah Palin most likely to endorse?

(A) A solid conservative with the backing of local Tea Party groups and a track record of supporting limited government and lower taxes;
(B) A pro-life woman;
(C) Anyone remotely connected to John McCain.

If you answered "A," you haven't been keeping up with Palin's recent rash of endorsements. Despite her image as the maverick queen of the Tea Party movement, Palin has passed on a number of conservative standard-bearers in favor of candidates with better connections to either McCain, the Republican Party or the Susan B. Anthony List.

Her willingness to choose individuals over issues hasn't gone unnoticed by the Tea Party faithful.

"The bloom's off the rose," said Shelby Blakely, a member of the national leadership council of Tea Party Patriots, the nation's largest such group. "She's a company girl. She's a Republican, and not in a good way."

The expectation among many Tea Partiers was that Palin would use her star power to ignite the campaigns of principled but lesser-known conservatives. Even after she endorsed John McCain in his contested primary bid against Tea Party favorite J.D. Hayworth, few were worried, given that she owed McCain for making her his vice-presidential pick in 2008.

Tougher to justify was her May 6 endorsement of Carly Fiorina in the California Republican Senate primary. The race has a proven conservative in state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who lacks money and name recognition but has the backing of local Tea Party organizations and Republican Sen. Jim DeMint.

Too bad. Fiorina has the credentials that matter to Palin: She's a pro-life woman and she served as an advisor to the McCain presidential campaign. Fiorina may have waffled in the past on whether she was a Republican, and did not have voted for most of her adult life, but she says she's a conservative now, and that's good enough for Palin. DeVore, meanwhile, spent years in the trenches doing battle with the Democratic legislative majority.

In her announcement, Palin added another caveat: She called Fiorina the "conservative who has the potential to beat California's liberal senator Barbara Boxer in November." The implication was that Fiorina, with her millions, has a better shot than DeVore of winning the general election against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. And it's probably true--but that's the sort of calculation that matters to the professional election-watchers of National Republican Senatorial Committee, not the political rogues who make up the Tea Party.

Palin veered back into the Tea Party's corner with her backing of Rand Paul in the Kentucky Republican Senate primary over GOP establishment candidate Trey Grayson. She threw her support behind Nikki Haley, a Tea Party pick who's also one of Palin's pro-life "mama grizzlies," in the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial contest. She's backing former Washington Redskin and Tea Partisan Clint Didier in the Washington Senate primary, although her endorsement came before GOP favorite Dino Rossi entered the race.

But she found herself at odds with Idaho Tea Partiers when she endorsed Vaughn Ward, the GOP establishment pick, over Raul Labrador in the 1st Congressional District primary. A state legislator with a staunchly conservative voting record, Labrador had the backing of Tea Party Boise--but Ward was Nevada state director of the McCain 2008 campaign. Again, Palin's debt to McCain trumped all other considerations. Labrador went on to defeat Ward in the May 25 primary.

In some ways, Palin remains a political maverick, only now it's because nobody can predict which candidate she'll endorse next. The more she strays from her base, however, the less valuable her support becomes.

As Blakely puts it, "If you keep endorsing the wrong people, after a while nobody's going to pay attention."

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U.S. government panel now pushing "vaccinations for all!" No exceptions

2010-06-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that every person be vaccinated for the seasonal flu yearly, except in a few cases where the vaccine is known to be unsafe.

"Now no one should say 'Should I or shouldn't I?'" said CDC flu specialist Anthony Fiore.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 11-0 with one abstention to recommend yearly flu vaccination for everyone except for children under the age of six months, whose immune systems have not yet developed enough for vaccination to be safe, and people with egg allergies or other health conditions that are known to make flu vaccines hazardous. If accepted by the CDC, this recommendation will then be publicized to doctors and other health workers.

The CDC nearly always accepts the advisory committee's recommendations.

Current CDC recommendations call for the yearly vaccination of all children over the age of six months, all adults over the age of 49, health care workers, people with chronic health problems and anyone who cares for a person in one of these groups. These recommendations cover 85 percent of the US population.

Excluded are adults between the ages of 19 and 49 who do not come into close contact with people in high-risk groups. The new recommendation, if adopted, would close that gap, bringing an end to a 10-year campaign by supporters of universal vaccination. In the past, the advisory committee has been reluctant to recommend universal vaccination for fear that it might produce vaccine shortages that place members of higher risk groups in danger. Yet even with current recommendations, only 33 percent of the public gets vaccinated every year, leaving millions of doses to be disposed of.

The H1N1 swine flu scare of the past year played a major role in the committee's about face, both because the disease killed many people falling outside the current recommended vaccine demographic and because it raised public awareness of and demand for vaccines.

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FDA Proposes Dangerous Vaccine Rule Change 6-21-2010

2010-06-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

Surveillance Cameras Installed at the Georgia Guidestones

2010-06-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

When I stopped by the Georgia Guidestones on Monday June 7th 2010 I noticed signs and surveillance cameras had been installed at the Georgia Guidestones. This is probably due to numerous acts of vandalism on the Guidestones. Americans don’t like the fact there’s a big stone monument on American soil that promotes eugenics, one world religion and language, and an overall reduction of humanity down to 500,000,000.

In this photo facing the south you can see one to the southwest with a warning sign.

you can see the stones do promote killing off over 80% of the human population. This photo is just my response to the Ted Turner style eugenics these stones promote.

In this photo facing the south you can see one to the southwest with a warning sign.

To learn more about the elites plan to kill off over 80% check out: http://www.endgamethemovie.com/

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What’s More Important: Liberty Or The Entity That Protects It?

2010-04-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

Let me ask readers a question. What’s more important: freedom and its undergirding principles, or the entity meant to protect it? A word of caution: be careful how you answer that question, because the way you answer marks your understanding (or lack thereof) of both freedom and the purpose of government.

Thomas Jefferson–and the rest of America’s founders–believed that freedom was the principal possession, because liberty is a divine–not human–gift. Listen to Jefferson:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” (Declaration of Independence)

Jefferson could not be clearer: America’s founders desired a land in which men might live in liberty. By declaring independence from the government of Great Britain (and instituting new government), Jefferson, et al., did not intend to erect an idol (government) that men would worship. They created a mechanism designed to protect that which they considered to be their most precious possession: liberty. In other words, the government they created by the Constitution of 1787 was not the object; freedom’s protection was the object.

Again, listen to Jefferson: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” In other words, government is not the end; it is the means. Government is not the goal; it is the vehicle used to reach the goal. Nowhere did Jefferson (and the rest of America’s founders) express the sentiment that government, itself, was the objective. Listen to Jefferson once more:

“That whenever ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Declaration) (Emphasis added.)

Jefferson is clear: people have a right to alter or abolish ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT that becomes destructive to liberty. To America’s founders, there was no such thing as a sacred cow when it came to government. Government had but one purpose: “to secure these rights.” When ANY FORM of government stops protecting sacred, God-given liberties, it is the right and duty of people to do whatever they deem appropriate to secure their liberties–even to abolishing the government.

To America’s founders, patriotism had everything to do with the love of liberty, not the love of government!

Today’s brand of patriotism (at least as expressed by many) is totally foreign to the fundamental principles of liberty upon which America was built. I’m talking about the idea that government is an end and aim in itself; the idea that government must be protected from the people; the idea that bigger government equals better government; the idea that criticism of the government makes one unpatriotic; the idea that government is a panacea for all our ills; and the idea that loyalty to the nation equals loyalty to the government. All of this is a bunch of bull manure!

When government–ANY GOVERNMENT–stops protecting the liberties of its citizens, and especially when it begins trampling those liberties, it has become a “destructive” power, and needs to be altered or abolished. Period.

Can any honest, objective citizen not readily recognize that the current central government in Washington, D.C., long ago stopped protecting the God-given rights of free men, and has become a usurper of those rights? Is there the slightest doubt in the heart of any lover of liberty that the biggest threat to our liberties is not to be found in any foreign capital, but in that putrid province by the Potomac?

Therefore, we must cast off this phony idea that we owe some kind of devotion to the “system.” Away with the notion that vowing to protect and prolong the “powers that be” makes us “good” Americans. The truth is, there is very little in Washington, D.C., that is worthy of protecting or prolonging. The “system” is a ravenous BEAST that is gorging itself on our liberties!

Patriotism has nothing to do with supporting a President, or being loyal to a political party, or anything of the sort.

Is it patriotic to support our country (which almost always means our government), “right or wrong”? This is one of the most misquoted clichés in American history, by the way. Big Government zealots (on both the right and the left) use this phrase often to try to stifle opposition by making people who would fight for smaller government appear “unpatriotic.”

The cliché, “My country, right or wrong,” comes from a short address delivered on the floor of the US Senate by Missouri Senator Carl Schurz. Taking a strong anti-imperialist position and having his patriotism questioned because of it (what’s new, right?), Schurz, on February 29, 1872, said, “The senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ In one sense I say so, too. My country–and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” (Source: The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287)

Schurz then later expanded on this short statement in a speech delivered at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference in Chicago, Illinois, on October 17, 1899. He said, “I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves . . . too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of TRUE patriotism: ‘Our country–when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’” (Source: Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 6, 1913, p. 119) (Emphasis in original.)

Amen! In a free society, genuine patriotism demands that our country be RIGHT, as our nation’s policies and practices reflect the values and principles of its citizens. To feign some kind of robotic devotion to a nation without regard to sacred principle or constitutional fidelity is to become a mindless creature: at best, to be manipulated by any and every Machiavellian that comes along, or, at worst, to be a willing participant in tyranny.

As to loyalty to a President merely because he is President, Theodore Roosevelt may have said it best:

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth–whether about the President or anyone else.”

Hence, freedom-loving Americans cannot afford to become infatuated with Washington, D.C. We cannot allow these propagandists on network television to distort the meaning of true patriotism in our hearts.

Patriotism means we love freedom. It means we understand that freedom is a gift of God. It means we understand that government has only one legitimate function: to protect freedom. It means that our love of liberty demands that we oppose, alter, or even abolish ANY FORM of government that becomes destructive to these ends. And it means that we will never allow government to steal liberty from our hearts.

As I asked at the beginning of this column, What’s more important: freedom and its undergirding principles, or the entity meant to protect it? The right answer is, freedom and its undergirding principles. If you understand that, then you rightly understand that the current government we find ourselves under is in desperate need of replacement. And whatever, however, and whenever that replacement reveals itself is not nearly as important as that liberty is preserved.

On the other hand, if you mistakenly believe that government (the entity meant to protect liberty) is more important than liberty, you are both tragically deceived and pathetically impotent to preserving freedom. You may also have identified yourself as an enemy of freedom.

As for me and my house, we will stand with Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence–in whatever form it may present itself in a modern world bent on dismantling our liberties. In other words, I pledge no loyalty to any government that seeks to destroy our freedom–including the current one!

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Oklahoma Passes Bill Outlawing Militia Recruitment

2010-04-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

Last week the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a bill that equates recruiting militia members to recruiting gang members.

“Recruiting membership in an unauthorized militia or the Ku Klux Klan would be a crime if legislation approved Thursday by the House of Representatives becomes law. ‘This is making unauthorized militias illegal,’ said Rep. Mike Shelton, the amendment’s author,” News OK reported on Thursday.

Shelton wants to send people to prison who do not ask the state for permission to form a militia. If the bill becomes law, it will likely be challenged as unconstitutional. However, the bill and its passage in the Oklahoma House reveals there is support on the part of lawmakers to deny citizens their rights under the First Amendment (specifically, the right to peaceably assemble).

A news report video on the law can be viewed here.

Shelton exploited the government attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City fifteen years ago in order to rationalize the law. “In Oklahoma, we have seen the damage done by militia fanatics,” he said. “The Ku Klux Klan has a long history of violence and domestic terrorism.”

It sounds like Mr. Shelton has read too much Southern Poverty Law Center literature. The Ku Klux Klan is not only almost entirely dormant — with the exception of a few FBI-run stragglers kept around just in case the race card needs to be played — but the throwback organization has nothing to do with state militia movements.

Even the ADL admits that Timothy McVeigh was not associated with a militia group.

“Involvement in those types of organizations should be treated no differently than participation in an urban gang,” said Shelton, a Democrat.

“Shelton’s amendment was filed about a week after news reports indicated some in Oklahoma tea party groups supported a volunteer militia to help defend the state’s sovereignty against federal government infringement. Several tea party leaders later said they had been talking about reinstituting a state guard, which would help with emergencies and would be under the direction of the governor and Legislature,” News OK adds.

Rep. Mike Reynolds, R-Oklahoma City, asked Shelton if he characterized the Black Panthers as an unauthorized militia.

“Are they going around terrorizing communities, doing drive-by shootings, using ammonium nitrate to blow up buildings?” Shelton asked. “When they start doing that, they would be considered (that).”

Militia groups have never been accused or prosecuted for using ammonium nitrate to blow up buildings.

Shelton’s bill has moved to the Oklahoma Senate.

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U.S. Army Trains to Take On Tea Party

2010-04-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

On April 17, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, reported on a military exercise dubbed “Mangudai,” named after the special forces of Genghis Khan’s Mongol army who could fight for days without food or sleep. The Kentucky newspaper portrayed the exercise as an effort to train soldiers to battle the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“Designed to test the limits of officers’ physical, mental and emotional endurance, the emerging Army exercise offered a revealing window onto modern combat training in the era of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Chris Kenning wrote for the newspaper. “Over three days last week, participants had to crawl on their bellies under real machine-gun fire, shimmy commando-style over a single rope high in the air and march for more than 22 miles through forests.”

But according to information received by The Patriot Post blog, there is another aspect to the military exercises not reported by local media.

“This week, I was contacted by a number of military personnel, enlisted and officer ranks, who expressed concern about a military exercise underway at Ft. Knox, the U.S. Bullion Depository. As with most such exercises, the Ft. Knox alert occurred in stages, as if real time intelligence was being provided at various intervals,” writes Mark Alexander.

Alexander cites an intel advisory issued on Friday, April 23, 2010, that identifies terrorist threat adversaries as “Local Militia Groups / Anti-Government Protesters / TEA Party” (see image below).

In short, the military was training in Kentucky to take on mythical militias — no word if they were of the FBI-created variety — and remarkably the non-violent Tea Party movement.

“Anti-Government – Health Care Protesters have stated that they would join the TEA Party as a sign of solidarity” during a protest at Fort Knox. The Tea Party “groups are armed, have combative training and some are former Military Snipers. Some may have explosives training / experience,” according to the intel report.

An intel report update, dated Monday, 26 April 2010, noted that a “rally at the Militia compound occurred,” and “Viable threats … have been made… Many members were extremely agitated at what they referred to as Government intervention and over taxation in their lives. Alcohol use ‘fanned the flames.’ Many military grade firearms were openly carried. An ad hoc ’shoot the government agent’ event was held with prizes (alcohol) given for the best shot placement.”

In addition to being drunkards, the report describes the Tea Party as bomb-throwers. “Components of bomb making are reported to have been on the site. Some members have criminal records relating to explosive and weapons violations.”

In response to the this “immediate threat,” the military established concentration camps for “mass arrests.”

QRF, short for the Quick Reaction Force of the 16th Cavalry Regiment and the 194th Armored Brigade were placed on two hour recall. “The 26 April order gives specific instructions for the 5-15 CAV (a 16th Cavalry battalion) to have weapons, ammo, vehicles and communications at ready, and it places the other 2,200 members of the units on two-hour recall. In other words, these orders are to gear up for defending Ft. Knox against Tea Party folks and their co-conspirators who oppose nationalization of our health care sector,” writes Alexander.

Military officers and enlisted personnel told Alexander about their concerns:

In fact, we can assume this “exercise” was orchestrated at the highest levels in the Pentagon. Lieutenant Colonels merely carry out orders.

An Army document entitled “Army Continuity of Operations Program (COOP)” spells out the militarization of the U.S. “Homeland” under Northcom.

In July, 2009, Infowars reported on a Missouri National Guard unit out of Camp Crowder engaged in a training exercise designed to take on a fictitious militant group. An earlier exercise in the Black Hills of South Dakota trained soldiers to confront an “insurgent group” with “a reputation for harassing convoys with ambushes and improvised explosive devices.”

In September, 2008, the Pentagon announced the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team would be deployed in the United States under the control of Northcom. “They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack,” the Army Times reported. (Emphasis added.)

Since the end of the Civil War deployment of the U.S. military inside the U.S. has been prohibited under The Posse Comitatus Act.

In early 2006, the 109th Congress passed a bill containing controversial provisions granting the president the ability to use federal troops inside the United States in emergency situations. These changes (in Section 1076) were included in the John Warner Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2007. In 2008, Congress restored many of the earlier limitations on the president’s ability to deploy troops within the United States, but Bush issued a signing statement indicating he was not bound by the changes. Obama has taken up with signing statements where Bush left off.

A report issued in 2008 by the U.S. Army War College discussed the use of American troops to quell civil unrest brought about by a worsening economic crisis. The report from the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute warned that the U.S. military must prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” that could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.”

For more than a decade the Pentagon has endeavored to acclimate Americans to the presence of troops on the streets. Instances of the Pentagon putting troops on the streets are numerous and have increased in frequency over the last few years.

In March of 2009, Infowars reported on U.S. Army soldiers dispatched in Samson, Alabama, supposedly in response to a rampaging gunman.

In December, 2008, the Marine Corps Air and Ground Combat Center and the local California Highway Patrol worked together “in a joint effort to reduce accidents and drinking and driving” in San Bernardino County, a blatant violation of Posse Comitatus.

The Iowa National Guard planned an exercise in the small town of Arcadia but rolled back the invasion after citizens complained about soldiers patrolling the streets of an American town.

Military police were positioned at the 2009 Kentucky Derby and in April of the same year 400 National Guard Combat Support Battalion troops were dispatched to “maintain public order” at the Boston Marathon.

In April of 2009, an Infowars reader sent a page taken from the Hardeman County, Tennessee, Bulletin Times announcing a seat belt checkpoint to be conducted on April 4 “in conjunction with a Homeland Security training exercise by the 251st Military Police in Bolivar who recently returned from Iraq.”

On April 15, 2009, Paul Joseph Watson reported on the Maryland National Guard put on alert in anticipation of Tax Day nationwide Tea Party protests. A Force Protection Advisory issued on April 11 instructed the National Guard to be on alert during the Tea Party protests because Guardsmen and Guard facilities might become “targets of opportunity.” It was later learned that the Department of Homeland Security had put the protesters under surveillance.

Alex Jones documents military exercises against the American people in Police State 2000. See the rest here.

Adding the Tea Party to the list of “insurgents” is a new and especially surreal development, but hardly an unexpected one considering the fear of the establishment to this growing political movement.

A poll conducted earlier this month found supporters of the Tea Party to be primarily white, male, married and older than 45.

“Of the 18 percent of Americans who identified themselves as supporters, 20 percent, or 4 percent of the general public, said they had given money or attended a Tea Party event, or both. These activists were more likely than supporters generally to describe themselves as very conservative and had more negative views about the economy and Mr. Obama. They were more angry with Washington and intense in their desires for a smaller federal government and deficit,” the New York Times reported.

They are not, as the DHS and the Southern Poverty Law Center would have it, disgruntled returning veterans, white supremacists, and violent militia members who hate Obama because of his skin color.

Over the last several months the government and corporate media have endeavored to portray this demographic as potentially violent and has fallaciously connected it to white supremacists and a mythical militia movement that is supposedly gearing up to attack the government.

If we are to believe the above report, the U.S. military is preparing to attack Tea Party supporters. All that will be required is an appropriate false flag event to set this act in motion.

Source

Sheridan Police harass gun rights activist, terrorize his family during swat style confrontation

2010-04-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

The Sheridan police are either unable to make proper judgment calls, or they believe in extreme authority opposite of constitutionally protected rights, you decide…

It was Sunday after spending the weekend in Sheridan for the local Tea Party, we were leaving the hotel to head back home, while driving only 100 yards away, there were two police officers coming up the hill on foot carrying AR-15 rifles.

As we approached them they stopped my vehicle and the officers yelled “put up your hands” to myself, wife and my little girl, then I was ordered to step out of my vehicle. (while armed of course)

The officer demanded my I.D. to which I responded “you aren’t getting anything, I didn’t break any law”.

The part that really sticks in my head is this- in one of his hands (Sgt. Kody Lamb) was an AR-15 Rifle and his other free hand shuttered like he was on an extreme adrenaline rush, I thought to myself he better keep his finger off the trigger.

I told Lamb “he had a duty to protect my rights and not act on the whim of a tourist that doesn’t know it’s legal to have firearms here”. I also asked him if he "read our Constitution”, Lamb said he was aware of what it said” then I said to him “didn’t you take an oath to uphold it?”

Then there's this- when the officer Sgt. Kody Lamb realizes he doesn’t have a beef, he threatens me with “disturbing the peace”. To which I responded “I was on private property with the owner’s consent”, and then Sgt. Kody Lamb stated it was a place frequented by the public.

This has become the norm, for police to twist things around when they want to bully someone.

I told Lamb “I want to speak to your supervisor”, Lamb responded with “I am the supervisor”, It was at this point that I knew the Peter Principle was in play, a philosophy that in a Hierarchy “Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence”.

Why would officers respond in this manner to a “man with gun call” when their own report states about me- “is not seeming to be a threat just standing there”.

Why didn’t they ask more questions BEFORE ARRIVING, like this simple one- Has he threatened anyone?

Hell no, let’s just storm in there because we have a badge, guns and adrenaline.

Maybe this is a response to my speech at the Sheridan Tea Party, by the way when we were setting up for the event, a police officer questioned me about the way I was carrying my firearm. (holstered, cocked and locked and in plain view) I told him I always carry this way. he responded to me with "That's not what I asked you" citing this “he had a duty to protect the public”. I later asked him how he felt about “concealed carry without a permit” like Arizona just passed into law, he said no one should be allowed to carry without a permit. Are you seeing the anti-gun police union agenda? You know the "only ones" mentality.

The next day after the incident the police refused to let me have the dispatch recordings unless, I "have a subpoena", also I was told that the police report wouldn’t be available for a week, but apparently they handed their reports over to the local newspaper within hours of telling me otherwise. Does any of this sound suspect?
I also contacted Evidence Technician Stephen Johnson inquiring about exactly what statute they are using to deny the dispatch recordings, he has refused to return my call.

Wyoming statute states that “the person in interest” is allowed to have access to the recordings, but the the City of Sheridan would rather flex their power. The City Attorney Mia Mikesell said "she didn’t have to cite statute" to me and "it was their policy" to ask for a Subpoena, she then hung up on me.

It is these lawless Bureaucrats, Police and Attorneys that are nipping away at the Republic on a daily basis.

The question is- are we going to be silent and just let it happen?

The City of Sheridan web-site says: they have been voted #1 Western Town of the Year for its truly special qualities…“Enjoy a frontier spirit that values friendship – and independence”, really? NOT SO MUCH!

Area Citizens should call and tell them you don’t appreciate this kind of treatment and expect more from the police officers that work for “we the people”.

Tourists- call them and tell them you will skip Sheridan, tourism dollars will be spent elsewhere.

Sheridan City Hall (307) 674-6483

Gun owners planning on visiting Wyoming-
Call the Governor’s office and tell him in this tight economy you don’t have to visit Wyoming.
Tell him Wyoming is the last place you expect to be harassed about firearms!
His number is: (307) 777-7434

Source

European Central Bank President Calls for Corrupt BIS to Boss Global Government in CFR Speech

2010-04-29T21:35:00.001-07:00

In a speech before the elitist Council On Foreign Relations organization in New York earlier this week, President of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet called for the imposition of global governance to be bossed by the G20 and the corrupt Bank of International Settlements in the name of safeguarding the global economy.

In an address entitled “Global Governance Today,” Trichet proclaims how the elite need to impose “A set of rules, institutions, informal groupings and cooperation mechanisms that we call “global governance”.

During the course of the speech, Trichet uses the term “global governance” well over a dozen times, outlining how “global governance is of the essence” to avoid another financial crisis.

Section one of Trichet’s speech is entitled, “Why we need global governance,” and from then on he constantly invokes the economic downturn as a justification for empowering secretive, undemocratic and corrupt global institutions with the power to rule the world.

Highlights of Trichet’s speech can be viewed below via the official Council on Foreign Relations You Tube channel.

A full transcript of the speech was also carried by the Bank for International Settlements, an international organization of central banks that has constantly lobbied for a centralized global currency to replace that of nation states. Trichet praises the BIS as being “ahead of the curve” in dealing with the financial crisis during the speech.

The primary outfit that will boss the institutions of global governance, according to Trichet, is the Global Economy Meeting (GEM), which regularly meets at the BIS headquarters in Basel. This group, states Trichet, “has become the prime group for global governance among central banks”. The GEM is basically a policy steering committee under the umbrella of the Bank for International Settlements.

The BIS is a branch of the of the Bretton-Woods International Financial architecture and closely allied with the Bilderberg Group. It is controlled by an inner elite that represents all the world’s major central banking institutions. John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most influential economist of all time, wanted it closed down as it was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II.

Financial website Investors Insight describe the BIS as “the most powerful bank you’ve never heard of,” labeling it “the most powerful financial institution on earth”.

The bank wields power through its control of vast amounts of global currencies. The BIS controls no less than 7% of the world’s available foreign exchange funds, as well as owning 712 tons of gold bullion.

“By controlling foreign exchange currency, plus gold, the BIS can go a long way toward determining the economic conditions in any given country,” writes Doug Casey. “Remember that the next time Ben Bernanke or European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet announces an interest rate hike. You can bet it didn’t happen without the concurrence of the BIS Board.”

The BIS is basically a huge slush fund for global government through which secret transfers of wealth from citizens are surreptitiously handed to the IMF.

“For example, U.S. taxpayer monies can be passed through BIS to the IMF and from there anywhere. In essence, the BIS launders the money, since there is no specific accounting of where particular deposits came from and where they went,” writes Casey.

“The bank was a major player promoting the adoption of the euro as Europe’s common currency. There are rumors that its next project is persuading the U.S., Canada and Mexico to switch to a similar regional money, perhaps to be called the “amero,” and it’s logical to assume the bank’s ultimate goal is a single world currency. That would simplify transactions and really solidify the bank’s control of the planetary economy,” adds Casey.

The Bank of International Settlements is responsible to no national government whatsoever. Trichet’s acknowledgment that an offshoot of the corrupt BIS will boss the main engine global government is a startling revelation, and emphasizes once again that world government is inherently undemocratic and dictatorial in nature.

The fact that Trichet unveiled this new approach in the march towards global governance before an audience of CFR insiders is fully appropriate.

The Council On Foreign Relations comprises of influential elitists and powerbrokers from all sectors of government, business, academia and the media. It is the public face of the more secretive Bilderberg Group. The CFR only recruits members sympathetic to its agenda for global government and the elimination of U.S. sovereignty.

The scope of the CFR’s mission was best encapsulated by former Deputy Secretary of State under Clinton and CFR luminary Strobe Talbott, who told Time Magazine in July 1992, “In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

As we have emphasized, the global elite have already announced the birth of world government and who will run it. People expecting the UN to be at the helm have been distracted as the G20, alongside the BIS, was being empowered with the tools through which global governance is being coordinated.

In his speech, Trichet acknowledges the role of the G20 in using the financial crisis to mandate developing countries’ “full integration into the institutions of global governance.”

“The G20 has been effective in addressing the global crisis. We are now at the stage where this forum is making the transition from acting in a crisis resolution mode to contributing to crisis prevention,” said Trichet. In other words, the elite exploited the financial crisis in order to allow the G20 to pose as saviors and consequently empower itself to impose global governance regulations on nation states in the name of avoiding another economic crisis.

As EU President Herman Van Rompuy stated during his speech in Brussels, 2009 marked the first official year of world government powers being directly exercised to control the economies of nation states.

“2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet,” said Van Rompuy.

Source

Possible Supreme Court pick had ties with Goldman Sachs

2010-04-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON — A top prospect for the Supreme Court was a paid member of an advisory panel for the embattled investment firm Goldman Sachs, federal financial disclosures show.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan was a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to the financial disclosures she filed when President Obama appointed her last year to her current post. Kagan served on the Goldman panel from 2005 through 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School, and received a $10,000 stipend for her service in 2008, her disclosure forms show.

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

The advisory panel met once a year to discuss public policy issues and was not involved in any investment decisions, Justice Department spokesman Tracy Schmaler said.

Kagan, the administration's top lawyer before the high court, has been named in news reports as a possible replacement for retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. Last year, Obama interviewed her for the high court seat now held by Sonia Sotomayor.

If Kagan is nominated to replace Stevens, senators will scrutinize those ties to Goldman Sachs, said Northwestern University law professor Lee Epstein.

"One side will pick apart anything a nominee has done," said Epstein, who co-wrote a book on the politics of judicial nominations. "Here, Goldman Sachs doesn't have a lot of fans. It may make things more complicated for her."

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs earlier this month, accusing the financial giant of failing to disclose important information about an investment it sold in 2007 that was tied to subprime mortgages. The SEC lawsuit alleges investors lost $1 billion and that Goldman Sachs didn't tell them it had packaged the mortgages at the request of a hedge fund manager who bet the housing bubble would burst.

Goldman Sachs insists it did nothing wrong. CEO Lloyd Blankfein will testify today before a Senate panel that the company did not bet against its clients.

The Global Markets Institute, Goldman Sachs' public policy research unit, was not involved in the conduct being challenged by the SEC. The council Kagan served on is a group of outside experts called on to organize discussions and examine public policy issues. The institute provides analysis and advice to Goldman Sachs and its clients.

Although Goldman's executives have been generous political donors, particularly to Democrats, some lawmakers are trying to distance themselves from that link. One example: Republican Rep. Mark Kirk, who is running for the Senate in Illinois, announced he will return more than $20,000 in campaign contributions linked to Goldman Sachs.

Source

More Scary Militia Propaganda

2010-04-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

(Reuters) - Three times a week, Mike Lackomar climbs into his truck and drives the same delivery route through the suburbs of Detroit.

Lackomar is an independent contractor for a private parcel company. If you live northwest of this battered city and you recently purchased something from a home shopping network, there's a good chance the 36-year-old handled your package.

But there is one small item that never leaves his truck: a green nylon satchel Lackomar jokingly calls "the football," a reference to the briefcase with codes for a nuclear strike kept close to the U.S. president. Inside, along with a pocket knife and a small first aid kit, is a sealed envelope containing codes, rallying points and detailed plans that Lackomar would use to mobilize his squad of armed citizen-soldiers in an emergency.

Lackomar is a team leader in the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia (SMVM), the largest and most visible of this state's many small private armies. He is a husband, a father and a musician. But his favorite picture on his Facebook page shows him standing in front of a snowmobile trailer packed with rifles, clips and ammunition boxes, a picture he laughingly admits looks "like an evidence photo from the 6 O'clock News."

The SMVM is one of 200 armed militias in the United States, a number that has quadrupled since 2008, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights watchdog, which says they may have 6,000 members and many other adherents.

MILITIAS: HARMLESS UNTIL THEY ARE NOT

The United States is one of the few Western democratic countries that permit independent militias.

Their rapid growth coincides with a sharp rise in partisan rhetoric as the November U.S. congressional elections draw nearer. Depending on your perspective, they are either patriots or paranoid. Experts in law enforcement and academia are divided as to how big an actual threat they may pose. But they all agree on one thing: the groups are very well armed.

"Most (militia groups) are merely in the rhetorical and defensive stage," said Brian Levin, professor of criminal justice at California State University and an expert on militias and domestic terrorism. "But we don't know which groups are going to be benign and which are going to be small incubators for radicalism."

His point was underscored by the arrest in late March of nine members of anti-government extremist group called the Hutaree, whose website says its name means "Christian Warrior." They were charged with planning a cop-killing spree intended to spark a broad insurrection.

And in February, a computer engineer angry with the government crashed a small aircraft into an office building in Austin, Texas, housing the federal Internal Revenue Service. In a rambling six-page statement, the man said he hoped his act would help make "American zombies wake up and revolt."

Until their arrest, the Hutaree were considered brothers-in-arms by other Michigan militia groups, including the SMVM. At least two of the men indicted by the government in the case briefly trained with Lackomar's group.

Before the group hatched its plot, the only rap against it in militia circles was that its training practices -- like run-and-gun target shooting -- were not the safest.

"I knew a couple of the guys that are sitting in jail right now. They were nice people," said Lackomar.

That is not to say he condoned the group's plan. One Hutaree member who evaded the police dragnet asked a member of Lackomar's group for help retrieving weapons and other supplies he had hidden at the group's safe house.

Instead, he got some unexpected advice: Turn yourself in. The suspect ignored the SMVM member, who went to the police.

Far from joining a rebellion, Lackomar's group and other militia members denounced the alleged plot and applauded the way the FBI and state police handled the raids.

"Nobody got hurt," Lackomar said. "There weren't any shots fired. They got everyone needed. They stopped the plan."

For that stance, Lackomar and other group members took some heat from what he calls "ultra-right ideologues" who consider the Hutaree victims of political persecution.

"TOYS"

Lackomar's group claims to have about 150 regular members and another 150 informal affiliates. At its annual field day and picnic recently, held not far from where the Hutaree are alleged to have hatched their plot, fewer than 100 people showed up.

All self-respecting militias pack what they call "toys" and the SMVM is no exception. Lackomar, who never served in the armed forces, favors an AK-74 assault rifle, an updated version of the iconic Soviet AK-47. Others in the group with army or marine experience prefer the AR-15, a copy of the M16 they used in their military days.

One member, a vice president of a financial services firm who prefers to be identified only by his radio call name, uses a Spanish version of the Heckler & Koch G3, a gun with a terrific report that Lackomar says "will rattle your fillings." Hence the man's call name: Thumper.

"When he's laying on the ground firing, the muzzle blast will dig trenches in front of him," Lackomar says with a hint of envy.

The lack of standardized weapons reflects both the ad hoc, volunteer nature of the SMVM and its egalitarianism.

There are no ranks, only positions like team leader and unit coordinator -- all decided by the group on a democratic basis. To become a voting member of the SMVM requires only two things, Lackomar says: possession of basic gear and a demonstrated competency with a weapon at 100 yards -- a hurdle that Lackomar says took him six months to clear.

Those two requirements aside, the SMVM insists it's open to anyone, regardless of race, color, religion or national origin. Lackomar nonetheless acknowledges the group's actual makeup is overwhelmingly white. "We're probably a little lopsided into the white end of the spectrum," he said.

THE MAD HATTER'S FOOTBALL

The SMVM trains once a month in a state park about 45 minutes outside of Detroit. The training, which includes a winter survival course, is designed to keep the unit in a state of readiness for an emergency.

For Lackomar, whose radio call name is "Mad Hatter," the emergency that triggers a militia response and tearing into "the football" might be a replay of a massive power outage in 2003 that paralyzed parts of the United States.

He ticks off other "tripwires" that might "drive our unit into action," including the imposition of martial law, a possibility many in the militia movement deem an imminent threat.

"The longtime discussion between militias has always been, 'What is the final straw?'" Lackomar said. "Freedom of speech has to be the final line. If we find ourselves in a situation ... where our freedom of assembly is suspended, demonstrations are outlawed or restricted, that's going to be the tripwire that sets everything off."

An assault on another militia group, like the Hutaree, could be a tripwire, too, Lackomar and others say. All it would have taken were for a few facts to be different.

"If what happened ... was a true crackdown on militias by a government run amok," he said, "not only would you have had the other units in Michigan say, 'Stop,' but it would have gone on all over the nation."

Lackomar provided two instances where he said the Michigan militia had activated -- at least on a small scale. Both involved standoffs between the police and a property owner who Lackomar said was being "crapped upon." The militia showed up, cradling but not pointing their weapons, as a show of solidarity with the property owner. In one case, Lackomar said the cops backed down. In another the property owner relented. No shots were fired or verbal threats exchanged.

Mike Vanderboegh, a militia veteran in Alabama who runs the influential blog called Sipsey Street Irregulars, adopts a more provocative tone in discussing what might trigger armed conflict.

"I can't see this (tension between federal authorities and the people) ending in any other way other than conflict," he said in an interview. "They (the government) truly believe that when they issue an order they think it will be obeyed. I don't see how that can end other than civil war."

PROTECTING THE CONSTITUTION

The militia movement has no single national leader and it contains wildly divergent strains of thought, according to militia members and experts. These include white supremacists and neo-Nazis; "Millenarians," who say major social transformation is imminent; and believers in "Christian Identity," a pro-white version of Christianity.

But the vast majority seem to be "constitutional" militias, fans of low taxes and small government -- values similar to those of many conservatives and the Tea Party movement.

They also see the possession of firearms as not only a right protected by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution but a patriotic duty, a symbol of the citizen's equal standing with the government.

At the heart of the movement is a fierce allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and a belief that its rights and freedoms are threatened by the government.

One leading light is Robert Schulz, founder and chairman of We The People Foundation, a non-profit that organized two national gatherings last year. The meetings popularized a check list of alleged constitutional violations cited by elements of the conservative Tea Party movement and militias, according to "Midwifing the Militias", a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit which tracks hate groups.

Such violations included undeclared foreign wars, gifting and lending money and credit to private corporations, unconstitutional tax levying and unenforced immigration laws.

"What we have is government ignoring the Constitution," Schulz told Reuters in interview.

"TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY"

Militia members like Lackomar, who is rare in his willingness to talk to the media, say that the movement is a healthy, democratic phenomenon with a real public benefit: providing an armed civilian alternative to the police and military. Although they don't quote Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century French observer of the United States, the militia members definitely see themselves as a deterrent to the "tyranny of the majority" that Tocqueville and others warned was a risk to the republic.

But the recent 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing served as a chilling reminder of the danger posed by so-called lone wolves: individuals fired-up by the movement's rhetoric -- and trained in militia warcraft -- who go on to stage attacks without the wider group's blessing.

Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted of the bombing, briefly associated with militia in Michigan in the 1990s before breaking away. When he resurfaced, in 1995, he murdered 168 people.

Private armies have a long history in America. In the 1850s, in the run-up to the American Civil War, anti-slavery and pro-slavery militias clashed in Kansas and Missouri, for example.

The modern militia movement was stirred into action in large part by George H.W. Bush's "New World Order" speech in 1990. The president's rhetoric fed into longstanding fears among far right groups like the John Birch Society about internationalism and the United Nations.

The resurgence then was also boosted by deadly sieges involving federal law enforcement officers in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas -- events militia members viewed as examples of oppressive government force used against citizens.

Today, militia members and experts say a number of factors are driving the new surge:

* The 9/11 attacks, which revived the notion that citizens should defend the United States against threats.

* The 2001 Patriot Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, which stirred fears that the government would use enhanced powers against ordinary citizens.

* Anger at government failure to stop mass illegal immigration from Latin America.

* The recent recession, the worst since the 1930s.

* The election in 2008 of President Barack Obama. Many see Obama as a Socialist bent on growing government, raising taxes and confiscating guns; his status as the country's first African American president exacerbated fears about him, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

* Healthcare reform, seen as exemplifying oppressive government power and intrusion -- the contemporary version of a 1994 ban on assault weapons that enraged the right wing.

The extent to which healthcare reform is galvanizing the militia movement cannot be overstated. In more than a dozen conversations with militia members in recent weeks, the topic came up over and over again without prompting.

Even Lackomar, who has no insurance and admits "I'm one paycheck away from disaster -- and I have been for years," says: "I hate the reform." What infuriates him, he says, is that it was enacted despite widespread opposition.

The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors militia websites, said anti-government extremists were widely citing healthcare reform as a justification for violence.

"Many militia members and other extremists believe that the recently passed health care legislation will be followed by the mass legalization of illegal immigrants, postponement or elimination of democratic elections, martial law and gun confiscation," it said.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Allegations of infringed liberties are amplified in some sections of the media and online where false stories flagging government plans to build internment camps to detain U.S. citizens in the event of unrest or to install a New World Order can find a willing audience.

"The Internet has really facilitated a lot of communications between the militias," Lackomar said. "It's also given a voice to a lot of the wacko element. So you have got to take the good with the bad."

Most law enforcement agencies see the bulk of militia members as law abiding citizens exercising their rights to associate, bear arms and speak freely.

But one factor separates the mainstream "anti-government right" from those on the fringe, said Mark Pitcavage, ADL director of investigative research -- conspiracy theories.

"If your conspiracy theories are pretty limited and mild, like Obama is not really a citizen, or if they're generic, like Obama is a Socialist and he wants to turn this into a Socialist country, that's one thing," he said.

"But if you have specific conspiracy theories about the New World Order, the unholy trinity, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) concentration camps, martial law or door-to-door gun confiscation, then you have crossed the line," he said.

Some say the partisan polarization of the country's news media, typified by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, has also contributed to the militia's resurgence.

Robert Churchill, author of "To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face", a book about militias in U.S. politics, credits popular Fox News presenter Glenn Beck with bringing some ideas espoused by militias to a wider audience.

"You are beginning to get a spillover from far right discourse into main stream Republican discourse," he said.

SEND MONEY, GUNS AND TEA

In the early 1990s the militias were politically isolated. Today, they appear to be an armed point along a much bigger popular continuum that includes the Tea Party and the Oath Keepers, both gaining momentum fast.

Lackomar and other militia members, while certainly sympathetic to the Tea Party's goals, insist the two groups are unconnected -- even informally. "What we've tried to do is to make it so our group does not take political positions, except for constitutional versus unconstitutional, and the necessary focus on the Second Amendment," Lackomar said.

Still, in conversations with Reuters, SMVM members expressed admiration for the Tea Party's rapid growth in the past year and its ability to draw big crowds and mainstream politicians like Sarah Palin.

The online invitation to the SMVM's picnic this year encouraged guests to "show, shoot, shout then sip some tea with us." Lackomar says the reference was designed to appeal "to people who might be put off by the pure militia aspect."

The picnic culminated with a shooting competition. Among the promised targets: Copies of the U.S. tax form known as the 1040.

The Tea Party movement has sought to distance itself from the militia phenomenon, but the Oath Keeper movement seems closer to it in many ways while also sharing some common ground with the Tea Party.

Founded just a year ago by a Yale-educated lawyer and former paratrooper named Stewart Rhodes, it actively recruits serving and former military personal and law enforcement and asks them to pledge to defend the constitution -- even if it means disobeying orders. One of their slogans is "Not on Our Watch. At the top of its home page -- oathkeepers.org -- is a painting showing a rag-tag group of colonial militia men fighting British regulars.

On a recent warm, windy evening, a new central Texas branch of the Oath Keepers had its first official meeting at a community center annex in a residential housing complex at Fort Hood military base -- site of last November's mass shooting by a Muslim officer who killed 13 people.

Children rode bikes in the parking lot while Erik McKinster, a 39-year-old sergeant in the 1st Cavalry Division, introduced the Oath Keepers and their mission to four acting and former soldiers aged from their mid-20s to around 40.

"We don't care if an unlawful order comes from a Republican or a Democrat or is bipartisan," he said. "We don't need to follow orders from the president if they are unlawful, the oath is to the constitution."

The Oath Keepers are not a militia, but they share some Constitutional militia values and echo their call to action under certain circumstances.

Among orders they pledge to ignore are "any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps" and any order to "support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people."

The Anti-Defamation League sees them as prey to far right conspiracies. "They are not any orders that anyone (in government) would actually give," said Pitcavage. "They're only orders that you think someone might give if you believe in incredibly elaborate conspiracy theories."

McKinster, who was raised Catholic and is now an evangelical Christian and father of four, said he doesn't "believe for a second that there are currently secret plans to impose martial law ... but there are cases from the recent past where this has happened."

The central Texas group has over 30 members, he said, but none among law enforcement yet.

LONE WOLF

Few people have spent as much time tracking militia groups and domestic terrorism as James Cavanaugh, who spent 36 years as a lead investigator with the U.S. bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Cavanaugh was a senior commander on investigations into the "Unabomber" case, the bombing by Eric Rudolph of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, the 2002 Washington, D.C. sniper case and a rash of racially-motivated church fires in Alabama.

To cap it all, he led negotiations during the 1993 Waco siege at which around 80 people died. He talked by telephone with Branch Davidian leader David Koresh throughout the group's gun battle with federal agents in an attempt to secure the release and rescue of wounded agents and children.

He is concerned that even if most militia members are law-abiding, web-fueled paranoia and wild theories can tip an individual or a splinter group toward criminality.

"They (militias) all sit around the campfires, rattling sabers and looking into the woods believing that somebody's coming. To make sure they come, they plan an attack," he said.

"The reason they are dangerous is they live on the edge of the abyss," he said. "Sure, there are groups who dress in camouflage, stockpile guns legally, talk incessantly about crackpot conspiracy theories, that don't fall into the abyss.

"The problem is there is always ... (someone) who attaches themselves, and if the group doesn't go over the rails the individual does," he said.

While security authorities say the majority of militia groups operate within the law, law enforcement is watching. Quietly.

Lackomar says that on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, four SMVM leaders were simultaneously visited by the FBI agents, who wanted to know if the group had heard any chatter about possible violence if Obama was elected.

And the swiftness with which the Hutaree were infiltrated and brought down shows the Feds are not asleep at the wheel.

That is in part because digital tools work both ways, allowing authorities to infiltrate the groups more easily.

IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR

Back at the Michigan picnic near Detroit, Lee Miracle would do anything for a taste of baklava.

To the extent that the SMVM has a leader, it is Miracle, a 43-year-old, pony-tailed postal worker who has been a member of the movement for two decades.

For Miracle, as for a handful of other SMVM members, the militia is a family affair and all eight of his children, who are aged 6 to 18, have either trained with it or received weapons instruction. At the picnic in early April, Miracle's wife Katrina, a gracious Greek-American, came too, bearing not a weapon, but an enormous tray of baklava.

One of the group's more ominous looking pamphlets features Lee Miracle on the cover, standing on the front steps of a house, decked out in camouflage battle gear with a machine pistol resting on his hip. In the bottom left, a small child looks up at the armed, defiant figure in awe. "Defending your home is homeland defense," it reads.

In person, Miracle turns out to be a self-deprecating man with a fondness for jokes. What he seemed most frustrated about at the picnic was Katrina's refusal to give him any baklava.

"He has diabetes," she explained to a reporter.

Lackomar is also a family man. His sun visor has a kid's playing card attached depicting Loudred, a Rumplestiltskin-like Pokemon character, who spends much of his time stamping his feet on the ground and shouting. "My daughter says it fits me because I'm always yelling at other drivers," Lackomar said with a chuckle.

Yet he turns serious as he imagines scenarios under which the militia might mobilize, such as the day "it comes crashing down and the world ends" or the day "the communist Chinese or the Venezuelans or whoever come marching across the border."

His unit has been busy learning survival skills, such as making a bow from a sapling or fashioning a rock into a razor sharp knife.

"I carry, as part of my battle gear, a rifle and 290 rounds of ammo," Lackomar said. "If I can use a knife, and fashion a bow, and use that to feed my family, I can save the ammo for dropping bad guys."

Source

Poll: Most support Arizona immigration law

2010-04-29T21:01:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK, April 29 (UPI) -- Seven in 10 U.S. adults support arresting people who can't prove they're in the United States legally, a poll about Arizona's new immigration law indicated.

The Angus Reid Public Opinion poll of 1,002 American adults asked respondents if they'd want four guidelines in Arizona's immigration law enacted in their own state.

The law, the nation's toughest, seeks to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants and gives police broad powers to stop people on suspicion of being in the United States illegally.

Seventy-one percent of poll respondents said they'd support requiring their own police to determine people's U.S. status if there was "reasonable suspicion" the people were illegal immigrants, the poll found.

An equal percentage supported arresting those people if they couldn't prove they were legally in the United States.

Almost two-thirds, or 64 percent, said they believed immigration hurt the United States, with nearly six in 10, or 58 percent, saying illegal immigrants took jobs away from American workers, the poll found.

When asked about solving the status of illegal immigrants, 45 percent said undocumented workers should be required to leave their jobs and be deported, the poll found.

Sixteen percent said those people should be allowed to continue working on a temporary basis and 28 percent supported letting them to stay and apply for U.S. citizenship.

Respondents in the U.S. Midwest were more likely than those in other areas to express a desire to deport illegal immigrants, the poll found

The online poll, taken April 22-23, has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.

Source

Obama’s Shadow Government

2010-04-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

How many of these names do you recognize?

Adolfo Carrion, Aneesh Chopra, Ear; Devamey, Kenneth Feinberg, Carol Browner, Ed Montgomery, Todd Stern, Cass Sunstein, Ron Bloom, and John Brennan. If none of them ring a bell, it is because they and others are all part of a shadow government of some thirty “czars”; advisers to President Obama who did not submit to the Senate confirmation process and are exempt from Congressional oversight.

Article 2, Section 2, U.S. Constitution, an excerpt: He (the President) shall have power, by and with the advice and Consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not herein provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or the heads of departments.”

The Constitution creates two types of positions in the executive branch: principal officers and inferior officers. The first of these are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The latter are not subject to this process.

The Obama administration began with a series of nominations that were found to be tax cheats and forced to withdraw before Senate confirmation. One of them, Van Jones, put in charge of “green jobs” was forced to resign when it became known that he was a self-identified communist. Carol Browner, responsible for environmental and energy issues, was on the board of the Commission for a Sustainable Society, the action arm of the Socialist International.

In the case of “special envoys” George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke, and Dennis Ross, they all engage in ambassadorial duties, representing the nation to foreign entities and are responsible only to the president. Key elements of the nation’s foreign policy, particularly as regards the Middle East, remain hidden from the public, except in terms of the president’s public pronouncements.

All of the president’s cabinet secretaries in charge of various departments and agencies of the government are vested with administrative powers and all must be confirmed by the Senate. By virtue of the Administrative Procedure Act, these offices must hold public hearings and maintain records when decisions are made, thus creating a paper trail. All of these offices must have separate lines in Congress’s annual appropriations bills.

The bulk of the president’s czars are exempt from such oversight. They advise and answer directly to the president and a number of them exercise control over the decisions made by cabinet secretaries and agency directors, most of whom have been reduced to a role of carrying out their decisions, their agenda.

The U.S. government is being run out of the White House by a cohort of czars/advisers who do not answer to the American people and operate in the dark. This is part of the warning issued in “The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.” The authors, Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski, are both attorneys with extensive knowledge of the Constitution. Blackwell has been an ambassador.

These czars are essentially unconstitutional and illegal.

All presidents have had advisers, but none prior to Obama have had so many and none have been delegated vast powers. They represent a violation of the separation of powers essential to a democratic republic and all violate the need and expectation of transparency and accountability.

Some have demonstrated in their past publications and present statements that they are wholly incompetent to hold such power. The regulations czar, Cass Sunstein, has said that animals should have the same legal rights as humans. The science adviser, John Holdren, has advocated putting chemicals in the drinking water or requiring devices that would neutralize fertility, including compulsory abortion.

John Brennan, the terrorism czar, responsible for homeland security, downplayed the near disaster of the Christmas “underpants bomber” and claimed that all possible intelligence that could be secured from him had been in less than an hour after his arrest!

All these czars function in direct contradiction of the long history of such advisers to presidents and in contradiction to the framework of the U.S. Constitution designed to ensure that the executive branch is answerable to Congress.

The function (or lack of it) of elected senators and representatives is ugly enough as seen in the failure of Congress to exercise caution in the passage of bills that affect the economy and the lives of all Americans. The U.S. debt has increased to levels not seen since World War Two. Obamacare was an ugly process of bribery and closed-door deals that resulted in a straight party line vote that was a repudiation of the will of the people.

No one knows what these unelected and unsupervised czars are doing, but you can be sure they all are loyal advocates and agents of the socialist transformation of America.

Source

Obama Administration admits rationing panels exist in ObamaCare

2010-04-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin was right! Of course, when she mentioned it liberals went nuts claiming that she was fear-mongering. Now, President Obama’s Budget Director is heralding the cost cutting measure.

Just a reminder from the Governor:

“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

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What's behind the anti-tea party hate stories?

2010-04-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

There's a new narrative taking hold in the wake of the recent tea party protests and the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing: The tea partiers' intense opposition to the Obama administration has led to overheated political rhetoric, which could in turn lead to violence.

Former President Clinton has emerged as a leading voice of this new narrative. In interviews, Clinton said it's "legitimate" to draw "parallels to the time running up to Oklahoma City and a lot of the political discord that exists in our country today."

"Watch your words," warned ABC News, reporting that Clinton "weighed in on the angry anti-government rhetoric, ringing out from talk radio to tea party rallies."

The reports dovetailed with earlier media that stories also depicted tea party gatherings as angry mobs, accusing protesters of throwing racial epithets at black lawmakers and of making threats of violence. The implication is that all this could be part of a nationwide trend.

"Just this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that it had tracked an explosion in extremist anti-government patriot groups fueled, in large part, by anger over the economy and Barack Obama's presidency," NBC's David Gregory said in early April.

"In this highly charged political atmosphere, where you've got so much passion, so much disagreement, this takes it, of course, to a different level."

How did this story line grow?

Many of the claims that extremism is on the rise in America originate in research by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based group that for nearly 40 years has tracked what it says is the growing threat of intolerance in the United States. These days, the SPLC is issuing new warnings of new threats. But today's warnings sound an awful lot like those of the past

In 1989, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of skinheads, saying, "Not since the height of Klan activity during the civil-rights era has there been a white supremacist group so obsessed with violence."

In 1995, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of right-wing militias.

In 1998, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of Internet-based hate groups.

In 2002, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of post-Sept. 11 hate groups.

And just a few weeks ago, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of "patriot" groups.

But in the world of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the threat is always growing. Ronald Reagan's policies led to a growing threat. The election of Bill Clinton led to a growing threat. Is it any wonder that Obama's presidency has, in the SPLC's estimation, led to a growing threat?

Hate groups exist across the political spectrum, and have for a long time. But they have nothing to do with the frustration over deficits, taxes and Obamacare that we have heard at tea party gatherings. That frustration, felt by Republicans, independents and even some Democrats, is a mainstream reaction to the activist course the president and Congress have taken.

It's important to distinguish between a political threat and a physical one.

Source

Iceland Crisis Report: Banks' Owners Owed the Most

2010-04-14T00:59:00.000-07:00

The majority owners of the three largest Icelandic banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir, and of the investment bank Straumur-Burdarás, were also their largest debtors, as the Special Investigative Commission’s crisis report, which was made public yesterday, has revealed.

According to dv.is, the following statements can be found in the report.

“At Glitnir Bank the largest loan recipients were Baugur Group and companies related to Baugur. The increase in Glitnir’s granting of loans to this group after mid-2007 is especially noteworthy.”

“A change in executives had then occurred, with parties connected to Baugur and FL Group significantly increasing their shares in the bank.” In April 2007, Lárus Welding took over as CEO of Glitnir from Bjarni Ármannsson.

“When Glitnir collapsed, Baugur and related companies owed the bank almost ISK 250 billion [USD 2 billion, EUR 1.5 billion]. That amount equals approximately 70 percent of the bank’s equity basis.”

“The largest shareholder of Kaupthing, Exista, was also its second-largest debtor. The largest debtor was Robert Tchenguiz, shareholder and chairman of Exista. At the collapse of the bank, Exista owed Kaupthing more than ISK 200 billion [USD 1.6 billion, EUR 1.2 billion].”

“At the collapse of Landsbanki, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson and companies related to him were the bank’s largest debtors. Björgólfur Gudmundsson was the bank’s third largest debtor. In total, their commitments to the banks were well over ISK 200 billion. That was more than the entire equity of the Landsbanki conglomerate.”

“Björgóflur Thor was also the largest shareholder of Straumur-Burdarás and he was chairman of that bank. Björgólfur Thor and Björgólfur Gudmundsson were both, along with related parties, among the bank’s largest debtors and together they formed its largest group of loan recipients.”

The report also states that the employees of banks are generally not in a good position to evaluate whether the banks’ owners are suitable loan recipients.

Source

What do your IRS taxes really pay for?

2010-04-14T00:54:00.000-07:00

Most taxpayers have no idea what their federal income taxes actually provide. When I ask folks if they know where their IRS check goes I get answers from, “…it pays for the operation of the Federal Government.” to, “… hummm, I really don’t know.” Actually both answers are partially true. Why were the IRS and the Federal Reserve created by the same act of Congress — what is their relationship to the Federal Government?

About a year ago, I made the assertion that the Federal Reserve through the IRS has the power to tax directly by congressional action and indirectly by inflation. It is very easy to see when you understand the “not quite governmental, not quite private” structure of the Federal Reserve System and its taxing arm the IRS.

Here is how it works. Congress passes a law, the House appropriates the funds. The Federal Treasury Department prints the notes for the appropriation. Then the Federal Reserve purchases these notes/paper at the cost of printing, about 4 cents note. A $1bill, $100 bill, or $1000 bond, costs the same 4 cents. The Federal Reserve then loans this money back to the Federal Government at interest based on face value. This interest rate may fluctuate. The cash is then distributed to the regional Federal Reserve banks from which the appropriations are disseminated as per the Congressional mandate.

Now, as the interest climbs with each appropriation, this debt requires payment your taxes – and occasionally the taxes must be increased to keep up with the “can never be paid off by design, debt”. The Federal Reserve profits greatly on this value created out of thin air paid by IRS collected taxes, and OUR REAL ASSET collateral on loans that go into foreclosure/confiscation.

Periodically, the Federal Reserve will ask Congress for an increase in money supply. This indirectly taxes folks by pumping cash into the economy which decreases the buying power of the dollar. This makes it seem as though prices have risen – not the case, the money added causes the value of the dollar to drop. This is the inflation tax. A tax that causes big problems for people with savings or on fixed incomes. The frightening thing is, the FED-IRS has NEVER had it’s books opened to Congressional scrutiny.

On 2/26/09, Representative Ron Paul rose before the House to introduce his “Federal Reserve Transparency Act” HR-1207. In his speech, he said…

“…Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar. Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95% of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy. How long will we as a Congress stand idly by while hard-working Americans see their savings eaten away by inflation? [...] Whenever you question the Fed about the strength of the dollar, they will refer you to the Treasury, and vice versa. The Federal Reserve has, on the one hand, many of the privileges of government agencies, while retaining benefits of private organizations, such as being insulated from Freedom of Information Act requests. [...] The Federal Reserve can enter into agreements with foreign central banks and foreign governments, and the GAO is prohibited from auditing or even seeing these agreements. Why should a government-established agency, whose police force has federal law enforcement powers, and whose notes have legal tender status in this country, be allowed to enter into agreements with foreign powers and foreign banking institutions with no oversight?”

In this unique Federal Reserve/Federal Government relationship the IRS works as the “Taxing Arm For The FED” – NOT the Federal Government which is prohibited from direct taxing at Article 1 section 9 clause 4 of the Constitution! Now you know. Those sneaky-rascal bankers anyway.

Source

Nevadans are free to don their arms in the open

2010-04-14T00:49:00.000-07:00

Even though it’s legal, not everyone comfortable with gun-wearing citizens, especially some police

Just about everybody on the Metro Police force has heard of Tim Farrell, and he sometimes gets mistaken for a law enforcement officer.

Farrell is simply a 29-year-old wireless Internet engineer — and a gun rights crusader. He is one of what appears to be a growing number of people taking up the “open-carry” cause, advocating a constitutional right to openly carry firearms.

“The open-carry movement has gained momentum over the last four or five years because people are waking up to their rights,” Farrell says. “I don’t need a permit to exercise free speech. I don’t need a permit to be tried by a jury if I’m accused of a crime, so why do I need a permit to carry a gun if I have a constitutional right to carry a gun?”

Nevada is a better place than most for Farrell because it is "an open--carry state." Nevada reiterates the right to bear arms in its constitution and does not have blanket restrictions on law-abiding citizens’ open carrying of firearms.

That’s why a dozen or so people who attended the March 27 Tea Party rally in Searchlight were able to openly carry firearms.

One was Dave Stilwell, a 44-year-old truck driver from Las Vegas who always carries a gun for self-defense.

He says he was jogging back from a garage sale near his house one morning last May with his .45-caliber pistol on his hip. Around Jones Boulevard and Cheyenne Avenue, a Metro patrol car rolled up slowly behind him.

A shopkeeper had called police after seeing the gun, said the officer, who took the pistol from Stilwell, removed the magazine and the bullet in the chamber, checked the ID number on the gun and then returned the weapon and ammunition to Stilwell before driving away.

“I just told the officer I was exercising my body and my rights,” he said. “In retrospect, I didn’t think that was such a big deal.

“I knew I would have contact with police at some point. Even though it’s my legal right to carry a gun, there’s a lot of propaganda out there, a lot of inaccurate information. When I started to open carry a couple years ago, I would have guessed that 90 out of 100 people didn’t think it was legal.”

So have open-carry advocates latched onto the Tea Party movement? Stilwell said that although he attended with gun in holster, his reason for going was to join others who care about their rights.

“Rights are becoming more prevalent because people feel like their backs are against the wall because of the government,” he says.

Farrell is not a Tea Partyer. He describes himself as libertarian and pro-choice on abortion. He and Stilwell are on the same page when it comes to guns, however.

Like Stilwell, Farrell says he carries his handgun wherever he goes, for self-defense. He says he has never been kicked out of a casino or other place of business but finds himself educating business owners who question why he is so brazenly armed.

Farrell says he has worn his gun many times into his neighborhood restaurant and bar near the U.S. 95-Summerlin Parkway interchange. But as he walks in one recent afternoon, a bartender who spots the gun is taken aback. She says the only pistol-packing customers she has served are undercover cops.

“So what I should have done is asked to see your concealed weapons permit because that is something that’s mandatory,” she tells Farrell.

“I don’t have a concealed gun on me,” he replies. “I do have a concealed-weapons permit but you do not need a concealed-weapons permit for a nonconcealed gun.”

“I mean, a regular permit just to carry the gun around,” she says.

“There is no permit in this state for that,” he tells her.

“It used to be years ago you would have to give your weapons to the bartender,” she says.

“This bar is private property, obviously,” Farrell says. “You can set whatever rules you want.”

“You can pull that out on me and shoot,” she tells him. “You see what I’m saying?”

“Well, of course. And that’s one of the reasons to carry openly, is for self-defense but it’s also to educate others as well that, one, it’s not against the law and, two, that not everyone with a gun is a bad guy. Certainly if there was a bad guy coming to rob you, he wouldn’t let you see the gun until it was too late.”

With that, the bartender goes about her business.

It undoubtedly helps that Farrell is not one of those guys who wears head-to-toe camouflage gear. He wears polo shirts and bluejeans.

He doesn’t have a gun collection. “I have a handgun and a shotgun, that’s all, just to keep me and my wife safe.”

When Farrell read Stilwell’s blog post about how he had been stopped by police, Farrell researched state and local laws, as well as police regulations and then conducted an experiment.

On the night of June 24, he holstered up his loaded 40-caliber Glock 23 pistol and proceeded to a sidewalk on Las Vegas Boulevard, just south of Charleston Boulevard, where he was certain he would be noticed by police. He was.

It wasn’t his first encounter with the law. While vacationing in Nashua, N.H., early last year, he was stopped on foot on the way to a bank by police who asked about his gun. Minutes later he was allowed to go about his business with gun in tow. Such is life in the “live free or die” state, apparently.

The Las Vegas Strip encounter was far more intense, with police arriving in squad cars and on motorcycles in a show of force, guns drawn. Farrell was handcuffed and his gun was confiscated, its bullets removed. Over the course of the next 23 minutes, Farrell invoked his right to talk to an attorney, told police not to touch his gun, and that he hadn’t consented to being searched and detained. He refused to answer questions about whether he possessed a registration card for the weapon, and invoked his right to remain silent.

Bottom line: He hadn’t committed any crime. After police ran a background check on Farrell, confirming his gun was properly registered, and finding that he also has a concealed-weapons permit and is not a dangerous criminal, he was uncuffed. He was handed back his gun but the bullets were dropped down one of his pants pockets and the empty magazine was placed on an irrigation box 100 feet away. He was ordered not to move until police drove away.

“I understand the need for officer safety,” Farrell said. “These guys have a tough job. But officer safety does not trump my rights. To stop me there has to be something other than the fact I have a gun. They shouldn’t have even taken my gun.”

Based on complaints from Farrell, Metro’s Citizen Review Board and internal affairs division each launched investigations into his case last summer. Although the officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing, Metro’s force had to take a refresher course on how to handle individuals who openly carry firearms.

Last month, a five-member panel of the Citizen Review Board found that police had complied with department policy related to the incident but that neither the policy nor police training at the time Farrell was stopped was specific enough on “open carry” stops. The board concluded that the police action was “the result of ambiguity among officers on how to handle an individual asserting his Second Amendment right to openly carry a gun in public.”

While cadets are trained in Metro’s police academy on how to handle constitutional rights, including those involving gun possession, the agency’s thick policy and procedure manual is silent on open-carry issues.

Andrea Beckman, the Citizen Review Board’s executive director, says Farrell’s case “brought to light the significance of how to train police officers on open carry.” Farrell’s case, in fact, was the first open-carry dispute heard by the board, and his name is now familiar throughout Metro.

A little more than a month after “the Farrell incident,” Metro’s 3,000 officers took their refresher course.

“When we don’t respond to something the way we should have, we’re quick to correct ourselves,” Metro Patrol Division Deputy Chief Kathleen O’Connor says.

The review board noted, however, that one police sergeant who confronted Farrell needed more training because it was clear from the sergeant’s testimony that if he had been given a test after the refresher, he would have failed.

The open-carry issue is tricky for police, O’Connor says, because officers are caught between preserving an individual’s open-carry rights and protecting the public from potential harm.

Of course, some police officers are not the only ones uncomfortable with the idea of lots of citizens walking around with guns on their hips. Opponents say the more guns that are being toted around, the greater the possibility that a bystander could be hit by a stray bullet, the more likely it is that a criminal will get a citizen’s gun and use it for no good. Even some Second Amendment advocates acknowledge that an individual who openly wears a gun in a crowded public area might result in the same reaction that a false warning of fire can in a crowded theater.

There are exceptions to Nevada’s open-carry rights. Among them is a state law that prohibits average citizens from carrying firearms on college campuses, at public or private schools and at day care centers without written permission from the heads of those facilities. An individual also cannot legally possess a firearm while intoxicated.

Local laws prohibit possession of guns in Clark County parks or in vehicles within North Las Vegas city limits.

Violation of the North Las Vegas “deadly weapons” ordinance, on the books since 1978, is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. The ordinance provides exceptions to the weapons ban as it pertains to “ordinary tools or equipment carried in good faith for uses of honest work, trade or business, or for the purpose of legitimate sport or recreation.” The ordinance has only been enforced in conjunction with traffic stops for other violations, such as speeding or suspicion of criminal activity, police say.

It also appears to violate the state law that gives the Legislature, not local governments, the power to regulate firearms, UNLV Boyd School of Law professor Thomas McAffee says.

“The state statute does permit some older local registration requirements, but the city ordinance here is a complete ban on possession in a motor vehicle, which seems to clearly fall within the scope of the state reservation of authority,” McAffee says.

Michael Davidson, North Las Vegas’ chief criminal attorney, said his interpretation is that the ordinance is legal because when the state law was last revised in 2007, the intent was to preserve pre-1989 local gun laws that had nothing to do with firearm registration. He said there have been dozens of cases in recent years where convictions that included violation of that ordinance have been upheld in North Las Vegas Municipal Court without a single appeal of the weapons ban made to District Court in Clark County.

“The intent was to go after gangbangers, not mom and pop in the RV,” Davidson says.

Farrell and other local open-carry advocates counter that North Las Vegas’ law is unconstitutional on its face, no matter the intent.

These advocates staged peaceful protests in North Las Vegas last year — picking up litter “to show we’re just regular guys” — and in January in front of Bally’s on the Strip, where numerous tourists had their pictures taken with Farrell and roughly 20 of his fellow gun-toters.

Farrell had given a Metro watch commander a courtesy heads-up before his armed group headed down to the Strip. The police commander thanked him for the warning, acknowledged the group’s right to assemble, but also pleaded with Farrell to cancel his plans.

The tourists who took pictures, however, encouraged Farrell and his posse to keep standing up for the Constitution, he says, and that’s what he intends to do.

Source

We blundered over swine flu, admit health chiefs

2010-04-14T00:45:00.000-07:00

Global health chiefs have finally admitted that they may have overreacted to the swine flu 'pandemic' - landing governments with millions of unused vaccines.

The World Health Organisation has conceded that it may have been guilty of failing to communicate 'uncertainties' about how virulent the new virus was.

Critics say the UN agency was too quick to designate the influenza a pandemic in June after it spread from Mexico.

Keiji Fukuda, its top influenza expert, yesterday admitted a six-phase system for declaring this was confusing and the bug was not actually as deadly as bird flu.

'The reality is there is a huge amount of uncertainty (in a pandemic),' he said.

'I think we did not convey the uncertainty. That was interpreted by many as a non-transparent process.'

He admitted the scale may be flawed as it takes into account the geographic spread of a virus but not its severity.

'Confusion about phases and level of severity remains a very vexing issue,' added Mr Fukuda.

He was addressing a meeting of experts reviewing the WHO's handling of the first influenza pandemic in 40 years.

Last week it emerged Britain wasted up to £300million on vaccines that will never be used.

H1N1 has killed 17,770 people in 213 countries, the WHO says.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1265530/We-blundered-swine-flu-admit-health-chiefs.html#ixzz0l3grZYLx

Source

H1N1 Spread Linked to Seasonal Flu Shots

2010-04-14T00:42:00.000-07:00

The four new studies conducted by Canadian researchers conclude that the traditional seasonal flu vaccine seems to have boosted the risk of infection with pandemic H1N1 swine flu by almost double.

In one study, the researchers revealed to use ongoing sentinel monitoring system in order to assess the frequency of prior vaccination with the seasonal flu vaccine in people suffering from H1N1 swine flu in 2009 compared to people without swine flu.

The study discovered that seasonal flu vaccination was linked with a 68 percent boosted risk of falling in prey to swine flu.

“I do think that they did the best they could with the data they had”, said Dr. Mark Loeb, an infectious diseases expert at McMaster University in Hamilton who was not part of the study and who seems to be sceptical about the study’s conclusion.

The studies, published April 6 in the online journal PLoS Medicine, attributed to the combined of over 40 researchers including many of Canada’s top influenza experts. The data is reported to be fetched from four studies that draw cases from British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.

However, the studies failed to show the presence of a true cause-and-effect link between seasonal flu vaccination and subsequent swine flu illness, or it is due to presence of a common factor among the people in the study.

Source

Healthcare overhaul won't stop premium increases

2010-04-14T00:34:00.000-07:00

Public outrage over double-digit rate hikes for health insurance may have helped push President Obama's healthcare overhaul across the finish line, but the new law does not give regulators the power to block similar increases in the future.

And now, with some major companies already moving to boost premiums and others poised to follow suit, millions of Americans may feel an unexpected jolt in the pocketbook.

Although Democrats promised greater consumer protection, the overhaul does not give the federal government broad regulatory power to prevent increases.

Many state governments -- which traditionally had responsibility for regulating insurance companies -- also do not have such authority. And several that do are now being sued by insurance companies.

"It is a very big loophole in health reform," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said. Feinstein and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) are pushing legislation to expand federal and state authority to prevent insurance companies from boosting rates excessively.

At least in the short term, regulators will be able to do little more than require insurers to publicly explain why they want to raise rates. Consumer advocates think that will not be an effective deterrent against premium increases such as the 39% hike that Anthem Blue Cross sent some California customers last year.

"The irony here is that it was the Anthem rate increase that breathed new life into the healthcare bill," said Jerry Flanagan, medical policy director of Consumer Watchdog, a longtime supporter of tougher premium regulation. "But there is nothing in this bill to guarantee that it doesn't happen again."

The lack of muscle is stoking concerns that more rate jumps -- and an angry backlash from ratepayers -- could undermine support for implementing the healthcare overhaul.

Insurance industry officials say that talk of more regulation is misguided and have urged federal officials to focus instead on containing rising medical costs, which help drive up premiums.

"Politicians are much more comfortable looking at healthcare premiums," said Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's Washington-based lobbying arm.

Ignagni, as well as some independent healthcare experts, said policymakers should look at ways to control what hospitals and other providers charge, although few elected officials have shown much appetite for doing so.

Obama endorsed Feinstein's insurance proposal this year, including it in the healthcare blueprint he unveiled in February as Democrats were struggling to revive their proposals. But congressional rules prevented Democratic leaders from including the rate control provision in the final healthcare package.

Many consumer advocates think this enhanced regulation -- known in the industry as "prior approval" authority -- is the only real way to protect ratepayers from insurers, particularly for-profit companies under pressure to generate returns that satisfy Wall Street investors.

Prior approval requires insurers to submit proposed rate increases to regulators, who can then comb through companies' financial and actuarial data to see if the proposals are justified.

Insurers cannot raise premiums without explicit permission from the regulator.

Some states have given prior approval authority to their insurance commissions and have used it to force down premiums.

In New York, the state insurance department reduced nearly a quarter of the proposed premium increases between 1990 and 1995, according to a recent department analysis.

More recently, state regulators in Kansas successfully pushed Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas to reduce a proposed premium increase for some of its elderly customers, according to state Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger.

California, which does not have the power to block health plan increases, has been using similar authority to control property and auto insurance premiums for more than 20 years, said Dwight M. Jaffee, a real estate and finance professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "It has been very successful," said Jaffee, who studied the state's experience.

Health insurance, however, is more complicated than property and auto coverage. And even the most active state regulators typically cannot investigate every proposed change in every segment of the insurance market.

In Maine, where an aggressive Bureau of Insurance reviewed 186 rate filings in 2009, regulators focus on the so-called individual market, where people buy coverage if it is not available through their jobs.

Maine is battling Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which regulators last year blocked from raising premiums an average of 18.5% on its individual customers.

Many states do far less, often requiring insurers only to file their proposed rate increases with the state insurance commissioner before passing them along to consumers. New York switched to that approach in 1996, a move that state regulators say resulted in "excessive rate increases."

A handful of states, such as Missouri, do not even require insurers to publicly disclose rate hikes.

The new federal healthcare law would step up oversight of health insurers in states with such limited regulation.

The bill directs the secretary of Health and Human Services to work with state regulators to develop a process for reviewing proposed premium increases to determine if they are unreasonable.

Insurers that propose such hikes would be required to post justifications on their websites.

For the first time, all insurance companies would have to dedicate at least 75% of their premiums to paying medical claims; this would reduce the proportion of companies' revenue that could go to administrative expenses, such as executive salaries and stockholder dividends. Some analysts think that requirement could restrain premium growth.

"These provisions are powerful forces that will help end sky-high premium hikes," said Nick Papas, a spokesman for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

On Monday, the department announced it would accelerate the development of new regulations.

But more intensive oversight would not begin until 2014, when states set up new regulated insurance markets, or exchanges, where consumers who do not get insurance at work would shop for coverage.

The healthcare bill allows regulators to ban insurers from the exchanges if their rates are deemed unjustified.

Even some regulators wary of greater Washington control over state affairs say that more federal protections may be needed before then.

"Some consistency there is probably warranted," said Praeger, a Republican and former head of the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners. Praeger criticized Obama's original proposal to give the federal government authority to block rate increases.

But she said last week that the insurance commissioners association was now talking with the administration about how the federal government could set a stronger minimum national standard for regulating medical insurance companies.

That could encourage more states to require insurers to get state approval before raising premiums.

On Capitol Hill, Feinstein said she was looking at ways to move her premium regulation bill forward, perhaps by attaching it to other legislation with bipartisan support.

Stepping up regulation doesn't promise to be easy. Insurance companies in Maine and Massachusetts have sued state regulators who tried to block rate increases.

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Key Fed, Treasury Actions Shrouded in Government Secrecy

2010-04-14T00:25:00.000-07:00

Some crucial financial functions by the Treasury and Federal Reserve reportedly have been shrouded in secrecy by the U.S. government.

The prices of gold and silver have been allegedly suppressed by the Fed through JPMorgan Chase and HSBC, according to a London whistleblower.

Meanwhile, an analysis by a primary dealer in the U.S. Treasuries market shows that domestic banks could account for a large increase in direct bidders for government debt.

The reports come in the wake of economist Robert Reich's claim that the secretiveness of the Federal Reserve means it has no place in a democracy.

"The Fed is not part of the legislative branch," Reich recently wrote in his blog. "Its secret deals … violate the democratic process, if not the Constitution itself."

JPMorgan Chase and HSBC, which do the Federal Reserve's bidding in the precious-metals markets, reportedly have long been the government's lead actors in keeping down the prices of gold and silver.

Andrew Maguire explained to the New York Post JPMorgan's role in the metals pits in both London and here, and how they can generate a profit either way the market moves.

"JPMorgan acts as an agent for the Federal Reserve; they act to halt the rise of gold and silver against the U.S. dollar. JPMorgan is insulated from potential losses [on their short positions] by the Fed and/or the US taxpayer," Maguire, a 40-year veteran of the metal pits, told the Post.

"HSBC conducts an ongoing manipulative concentrated naked short position in gold. Silver is much easier to manipulate due to its much smaller [market] size," said Maguire, a former Goldman Sachs trader working at the London Bullion Market Association.

Maguire was scheduled to testify last week before the Commodities Futures Trade Commission, which is looking into the activities of large banks in the metals market, but was knocked off the list at the last moment.

However, "No one at JPMorgan is familiar with Andrew Maguire," said Brian Marchiony, a company spokesman. HSBC declined to comment.

Meanwhile, domestic banks could account for a large increase in direct bidders for government debt, Reuters reported.

The presence of direct bidders, one of three main categories of participants at Treasury auctions, has increased during recent auctions of securities.

Primary dealers, the banks and investment firms authorized to deal directly with the government and help the Federal Reserve carry out monetary policy, have fretted over the unpredictability of the direct bid, as well as the paucity of information on the identity of the bidders.

A report from Nomura Securities analyzing the Treasury Department's investor allotments and auction data theorizes that domestic banks account for part of the increase in direct bidders.

"With banks still reluctant to lend and the saving rate on the rise, bank assets have been shifting from loans to securities, benefiting from the steep curve," wrote George Goncalves, a fixed income strategist at Nomura.

Treasury data show banks increased their purchases of longer-dated Treasuries just as the percentage of direct bidders began to increase.

The department, which is aware of the identities of bidders but doesn't disseminate the information, welcomes the added participation in auctions as the government continues to issue new debt at a breakneck pace.

"At the March 10-year (note) auction, banks purchased $2.6 billion 10s (the highest on record)," Goncalves wrote. "Meanwhile banks purchased over $3 billion in (30-year bonds) in March too. This is noteworthy as in the past banks rarely went beyond the five-year point in this sort of size."

Nomura's analysis follows a hypothesis by Barclays Capital earlier this year that an increase in the direct bid was driven mainly by domestic money managers and mutual funds attempting to keep their purchases secret from the rest of Wall Street

For his part, Reich says that “Thomas Jefferson put a stop to Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a powerful central bank out of fear it would be unaccountable to the public. The Fed has just proven Jefferson’s point.”

As long as it's merely setting interest rates, Fed secrecy and political independence can be justified, says Reich, who served in three national administrations and was a secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton.

But once it departs from that role and begins putting billions of dollars of taxpayer money at risk — choosing winners and losers in the capitalist system — its legitimacy is questionable, says Reich, now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

The Fed now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns — taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank's bad loans — in order to smooth Bear Stearns' takeover by JPMorgan Chase, Reich notes.

“The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed,” he points out.

“The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout.”

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Don’t Be Fooled: Republicans Love Government Enforced Healthcare

2010-03-28T23:42:00.000-07:00

Forget all the self-serving diatribes by Republicans about Obamacare. They are for government enforced health care. “Republicans were for President Barack Obama’s requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it,” the Associated Press reports this morning.

Republicans trumpeted the “obligation” (at gunpoint) that Americans buy health care insurance from large monopolistic corporations for decades, long before Hill and Bill attempted to foist their version on the plebs.

Republican statists view health care at gunpoint as a “free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans — the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare.”

Of course Republicans don’t support Medicare. It does not fit the narrow confines of their partisan political ideology. Medicare was included as part of the Social Security Act of 1965, signed into law by president Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat.

Republicans are miffed because Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. Republicans are not opposed to totalitarian care, they are simply opposed to the Democrat version.

If you believe Republicans are serious about controlling costs, look no further than Bush’s $3 trillion budget proposal in 2008 (a record at the time). When Bush took office, the national debt was $5.73 trillion. When he left, it was $10.7 trillion.

Mitt Romney — who was billed as the man who would save us from Obama and the “socialists” during the selection, er election — forced the residents of Massachusetts to buy health insurance. Lord Romney said government mandated health care is “a personal responsibility principle.”

Government invariably demands “personal responsibility” on the part of the plebs while it engages in corruption, starts wars under false pretense and kills millions of people, and enslaves future generations to bankster debt.

Romney’s health care at gunpoint was backed by Scott Brown, the Republican that had Democrats and the usual suspects at MSNBC and CNN chattering about a fascist rightwing takeover of Congress.

Brown replaced the late Democrat Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. It was said his appointment would almost certainly lead to the collapse of Obamacare. Brown says his opposition to the new shakedown for large insurance corporations is over tax increases, Medicare cuts and federal “over-reach” — because Democrats are doing the reaching — on a matter that should be left up to states. It was a different story when his buddy Mitt was forcing gunpoint healthcare down the throats of Massachusettans.

In the case of states’ rights, Brown might want to look at the example set by the former leader of his party, George W. Bush. The Bush administration violated the Tenth Amendment by repeatedly meddling in the states in regard to medical marijuana, the federalization of education, and state control of the National Guard.

“The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea,” health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School told the Associated Press. In 1991, Pauly published a paper explaining how a “mandate” (government coercion) could be combined with tax credits to force the commoners into compliance. Pauly’s paper was embraced by the George H.W. Bush administration.

Republicans like to tell you they are opposed to taxation. Instead, they use taxes as a carrot and a stick to force government mandates down your throat.

Nixon before Bush backed the idea of a mandate that employers provide insurance. Even the Heritage Foundation back in the day supported this government imposed “individual requirement.”

Later today in Nevada, the Republican Tea Party will gather and demand the ouster of Democrat Sen. Harry Reid and the Democrats for passing Obamacare. The event will be led by the darling of the establishment Tea Party, former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin. On Friday, Tea Party Sarah threw her support behind the establishment stalwart John McCain.

McCain’s latest authoritarian outrage is the “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010″ that, if passed, would turn the country into a military dictatorship. It was introduced with the participation of the notorious warmonger Joe Lieberman. Apparently the legislation is backed by Tea Party Sarah.

The Nevada event was organized by the Tea Party Express, an organization in bed with Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which is closely affiliated with the Republican-affiliated consulting firm Russo Marsh & Associates. In other words, the event in Nevada will be strictly an establishment Republican affair. The objective is not to get rid of government enforced health care, but to get of rid of Reid and put in a Republican. It is another example of the false right-left paradigm in action.

In January, the Tea Party Express supported Scott Brown. As noted above, Brown supported Romney’s version of Obamacare in Massachusetts.

Republicans will shamelessly exploit the compromised Tea Party and the efforts of the states to repeal Obamacare in order to win seats in Congress during the mid-term elections. If they manage to overturn the Democrat majority in Congress, they will not work to repeal Obamacare. They may nibble around the edges of the bill but will leave it largely intact. Republicans have no problem with the government forcing you to shell over your money to large insurance companies. Republicans are enforcers for the global elite and transnational corporations.

Both Republicans and Democrats need to be trounced in November. Obamacare needs to be challenged on Constitutional grounds. The establishment controlled Supreme Court, however, cannot be counted on to repeal the bill. It may take civil disobedience on the part of millions of Americans before this bill ends up in the dust bin of history where it belongs.

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Bill Murphy of GATA Reveals Whistle-Blower in Gold Price Suppression

2010-03-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

Bill Murphy, Chairman of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee delivers his testimony about a whistle-blower in the gold price suppression scheme to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on 3/25/10.

Whistleblower Speaks Out On J. P. Morgan’s Market Manipulation

2010-03-28T23:38:00.001-07:00

Do we have another Harry Markopolos here, describing in detail the manipulation of the silver markets by J.P. Morgan to the CFTC? How does this square with the testimony today from the CFTC Commissioners, who seem to indicate that the markets are functioning extremely well, and that investor can have full confidence in them?

I am led to understand that Mr. McGuire had offered to testify before the CFTC today, and that he was refused admittance. I do not know him, or the position he is in within the trading community. I cannot therefore assess his credibility or the validity of any evidence which he may present or possess. But I have the feeling that nothing will come of this.

Remember, there was no action on the Madoff scandal until AFTER his fraud collapsed, and the government was forced to acknowledge Markopolos’ existence. He had been ignored and dismissed by the bureaucrats at the SEC for years because of Madoff’s power and standing with the trading establishment. And of course by those who had an interest in hiding Madoff’s scheme, if nothing else, to promote ‘confidence’ in the markets.

What seems particularly twisted about this is that JPM is the custodian of the largest silver ETF (SLV). Is anyone auditing that ETF, and watching any conflicts of interest and self-trading? Multiple counterparty claims on the same bullion?

If you ever wanted to see a good reason for the Volcker rule, this is it. These jokers are one of the US’ largest banks, with trillions of dollars in unaudited derivatives exposure, and they seem to be engaging in trading practices like Enron did before it collapsed.

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The McCain-Lieberman Police State Act

2010-03-28T23:32:00.000-07:00

The McCain-Lieberman Police State Act - by Stephen Lendman

If enacted, it will advance what this writer addressed in a December 2007 article titled, "Police State America - A Look Back and Ahead," covering numerous Bush administration laws, Executive Orders (EOs), National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, edicts, and various illegal acts targeting designated domestic and foreign adversaries, dissent, civil liberties, human rights, and other democratic freedoms.

Straightaway post-9/11, George Bush signed a secret finding empowering the CIA to "Capture, Kill or Interrogate Al-Qaeda Leaders." He also authorized establishing a covert global gulag to detain and interrogate them without guidelines on proper treatment.

Other presidential directives ordered abductions, torture and indefinite detentions. In November 2001, Military Order Number 1 empowered the Executive to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest non-citizens (and later citizens) anywhere in the world for any reason and hold them indefinitely without charge, evidence, due process or judicial fairness protections of law.

The 2006 Military Commissions Act authorized torture and sweeping unconstitutional powers to detain, interrogate and prosecute alleged suspects and collaborators (including US citizens), hold them (without evidence) indefinitely in military prisons, and deny them habeas and other legal protections.

Section 1031 of the FY 2010 Defense Authorization Act contained the 2009 Military Commissions Act, listing changes that include discarding the phrase "unlawful enemy combatant" for "unprivileged enemy belligerent." More on that below.

Seamlessly, Obama continues Bush administration practices and added others, including:

-- greater than ever surveillance;

-- ruthless political persecutions;

-- preventively detaining individuals ordered released - "who cannot be prosecuted," he said, "yet who pose a clear danger to the American people;"

-- a secret "hit list" authorizing CIA and Pentagon operatives to kill US citizens abroad based on unsubstantiated evidence they're involved in alleged plots against America or US interests;

-- weaker whisleblower protections;

-- state secrets privilege to block lawsuits by victims of rendition, torture, abuse or warrantless wiretapping; and

-- other anti-democratic measures.

Now, the March 4 S. 3081: Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 to interrogate and detain "enemy belligerents who commit hostile acts against the United States to establish certain limitations on the prosecution of such belligerents, and for other purposes."

On the Senate floor, John McCain explained it, saying "we still don't have a clear mechanism, legal structure, and implementing policy for dealing with terrorists who we capture in the (alleged) act of trying to bring about attacks on the United States and our national security interests at home and abroad."

These suspects have no right to "Miranda warnings and defense lawyers. Instead, the priority and focus must be on isolating and neutralizing the immediate threat and collecting intelligence to prevent" any attacks.

"I (also) believe we must establish a system for long-term detention of terrorists who are too dangerous to release, but who cannot be tried in a civilian court" because no evidence exists to convict them.

At a March 4 press conference, Senator Joe Lieberman told reporters:

"These are not common criminals. They are war criminals. Anyone we capture in this war should be treated as a prisoner of war, held by the military, interrogated for information that will protect Americans and help us win this war and then where appropriate, tried not in a normal federal court where criminals are tried but before a military commission."

S. 3081 Provisions

The bill imposes harsh police state measures, including:

-- targeting anyone worldwide, including US citizens, "suspected of engaging in (or materially supporting) hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means...;"

-- placing such individuals "in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act;"

-- transporting them to intelligence officials for more interrogation;

-- determining who may be a "high-value detainee (HVD);"

-- further interrogating those individuals by a "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HVIG)....utiliz(ing) military and intelligence personnel, and Federal, State, and local law enforcement personnel....;"

-- having HVIGs submit their determination to the Defense Secretary and Attorney General after consulting with the Directors of National Intelligence, FBI, and CIA. "The Secretary of Defense and Attorney General (will then) make a final determination and report (it) to the President and the appropriate committees of Congress. In the case of any disagreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, the President will make the determination;"

-- designating seized individuals "unprivileged enemy belligerent(s);"

-- denying them Miranda rights:

-- deciding on a "Final (status) Determination" within 48 hours, "to the extent practicable;"

-- letting the President establish HVD interrogation group operations and activities, including whether detainees "meet the criteria for treatment as a high-value detainee for purposes of interrogation....," including the potential threat held individuals pose:

(1) for an attack against America, its citizens, US military personnel or facilities;

(2) their potential intelligence value;

(3) membership in or affiliation with Al Qaeda; and

(4) "such other matters as the President considers appropriate."

Pending final determination, detainees "shall be treated as unprivileged enemy belligerent(s)," defined as:

"An individual, including a citizen of the United States (to) be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities."

An "unprivileged enemy belligerent" means anyone (with or without evidence) suspected of "engag(ing) in (or materially supporting) hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," including alleged Al Qaeda members.

Raised Concerns

Designating individuals "unlawful enemy combatants" or "unprivileged enemy belligerents" places them in legal limbo, contrary to international law, the Constitution, and three recent Supreme Court decisions:

-- Rasul v. Bush (2004) establishing US court system jurisdiction to decide if Guantanamo-held non-US citizens were wrongfully imprisoned;

-- Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) granting US citizen Yaser Hamdi and other Guantanamo detainees habeas rights to challenge their detentions in federal courts; and

-- Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) denying Guantanamo military commissions "the power to proceed because (their) structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949."

Obama-ordered preventive detentions (against uncharged persons) and S. 3081 violate international law, the Constitution, and the above Supreme Court decisions.

Writing for the Jurist Legal News & Research, University of Utah Law Professor, Amos Guiora, calls the proposed bill "the latest example of panic-based legislation" in the wake of the (false flag) December airplane bombing and whether alleged 9/11 suspects will be tried in federal or military courts - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others falsely charged based on tortured-extracted confessions.

Holding detainees through "end of hostilities in the terrorism paradigm is a euphemism for indefinite detention....subject(ing) an extraordinarily broad group of persons" to cruel and inhumane treatment based on unsubstantiated charges, and denying them due process and judicial fairness.

Guiora calls the proposed law:

"a fundamental miscarriage of justice created by the unconstitutional denial of the right to counsel, the right to remain silent, the right to be free from arbitrary, let alone indefinite detention, and the right to a day in court." Unfortunately, too often "legitimacy and justification take a back seat" to expediency and the political climate of the times.

As a result, innocent victims are unjustly arrested, called terrorists, interrogated, tortured, indefinitely detained and denied all rights despite constitutional and international law protections.

"Republicans and Democrats alike have failed to articulate, create and implement a lawful interrogation, detention and trial regime for post-9/11 detainees. That is shameful and reflects negatively on two Presidents, the Congress and the Supreme Court."

The major media also. Their reports hype the threat, pre-determine guilt, and influence public opinion to believe government-charged individuals are dangerous, guilty, and should be confined to deter "terrorism."

Yet the Constitution's Fifth Amendment states:

"No person shall....be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law....;" and

The 14th Amendment reads:

No "State (may) deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Yet in a climate of fear and intimidation, everyone is potentially vulnerable to legislative lawlessness if congressional timidity lets S. 3081 pass in an election year.

According to Guiora, it comes down to "the rule of law or the rule of fear." Protecting American citizens and national security is one thing. Discarding core legal principles to do it reflects the worst elements of police state justice.

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The Shadow Government’s Healthcare Bill Rules

2010-03-28T23:28:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote what I had hoped was a satirical article, poking fun at the fact President Obama could not feasibly have read all the legislation he has signed into law, centering on the on the mammoth 2,700 page Healthcare Reform Bill. And although some people appreciated the article, a couple of readers did not.

One lady reader condemned the piece as being negative, with no discernible point; while, she invested no more of her own thought in it than that. A male reader (who showed some thought) bought the truth that while Obama probably didn’t read the Healthcare bill – due to time constraints – he was certainly briefed with a detailed summary of it, highlighting the bill’s major points.

This gentleman, like many others, does not see the absurdity of legislation that is so long it could take weeks or months to read; after all, our Constitution was handwritten on about four or five pages.

Our Declaration of Independence was handwritten on one sheet of paper.

Our lawmakers and president should not be briefed on proposed laws, they should scrutinize every line, of every proposed law, as it is that important to the American people. And the American public should be given the opportunity to do the same, as President Obama promised.

Our presidents should veto any bill they cannot comfortably read and understand in one sitting. In fact, if there are legislative passages the average, literate Americans cannot understand, those too should be vetoed. Convoluted, long passages in legislation is simply an effort to hide tyrannical intentions. And with “voice votes” becoming popular, in congress, we are even denied the knowledge of knowing just who supports tyranny.

All points of legislation should be debated in Congress, by senators and representatives, not given “talking points” by unseen agents of the International Monetary/Banking Cartel, to memorize and parrot to the corporate media.

In response, I asked the gentleman, above, who seemed to think a briefing was adequate, to consider what a colossal briefing Mr. Obama would have to have had to cover all 2,700 pages of just that one bill – the mislabeled Healthcare “Reform” Act.

If Mr. Obama was briefed in detail on the steady stream of hundreds of thousands of legislation pages proposed in congress, he’d be spending every waking moment being briefed, without doing any of it real justice.

Divinity students spend years in college studying the detailed summaries that highlight the major points in the 1,300 page Bible, and still not cover it all. Does the gentleman really think Obama can be briefed on something the size of ten novels, or two Bibles, in a month or so, especially considering all the other thousands of pages of Executive Orders (written for him) that he signs, or the thousands of pages of regulations that are annually issued by Executive Branch agencies?

Sadly, Mr. Obama – and our lawmakers – do no more than read (from teleprompters) or repeat “talking points” given to them by shadowy sources -the minions of the Shadow Government, that are beholden to the International Monetary/Banking Cartel.

Mr. Obama, and most all other politicians, avoid the subjects of who reads or writes the thousands of pages of legislation, regulations, directives, and executives orders that pour out of Washington annually, as they do not know who writes it all, and do not want to have to admit they don’t read much of any of it in any case. With one exception.

That exception, that was probably read by Obama, et al, was written into the Healthcare Reform Act as a loophole for the privileged: The president, his staff and family, Joe Biden’s staff and family, Nancy Pelosi’s staff, Harry Reid’s staff, and many other insiders are all exempted from the mandates of Obamacare. How nice, they’ve given it all to us taxpaying Americans to have, to hold, and to pay for.

It would seem to me that if most of the tenets of the world-wide Christian religion are contained within 1,300 pages of the Holy Bible, America does not need 900,000 to millions of pages of legislation, orders, directives, and regulations to be governed. How can we obey those laws if we don’t even know what they are?

But, the critical questions all thinking Americans will ask themselves run along the lines of who wrote the hundreds of thousands of pages of US legislation, orders, directives, and regulations that so severely affect our lives. That Madame and Sir was the point of my satirical piece, and is the important point of this article.

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