Tag Archives: Accomplices

Greg Mortenson’s own cup of tea

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In his own words, Greg Mortenson is quite a bit more revealing about his motives in Pakistan. Pax Americana is definitely a subtlety lost on him.
 
Central Asian regions where CAI has financed constructionThis map is from the Central Asia Institute‘s own brochure. It shows the parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Greg Mortenson’s CAI has helped finance community building projects. I thought the shaded area formed an interesting buffer zone along the border to… CHINA! Is that region of greater interest peacewise than the war-torn borders facing Afghanistan or India?!

The current Independent features a cover story on Mortensen, to promote his Jan 15 Colorado College appearance. It turns out he’s as inarticulate as his dictation of Three Cups of Tea suggests. Here’s how Mortenson regards his unwitting Islamic accomplices:

…we bring in mullahs who support girls’ education. We have two ex-Taliban who are now teaching in our girls’ schools and have become some of our biggest proponents. It’s somewhat similar to an ex-smoker or an alcoholic who has changed and becomes very against smoking or drinking.

Here Mortenson describes how his schools convince Muslim communities to enroll their girls:

We even use good old-fashioned Western capitalism. We go and tell a mullah: If I want to marry a girl in your village, how many goats do I owe you? He might say five goats. If she has a fifth-grade education, how many goats would I then have to pay you? And the answer would probably be 15 to 20 goats. A goat is usually $30 to $40 each.

And then we tell the mullah: If all the girls are educated, just think of how much more wealth you’d have. Then you can see his eyes get bigger.

At least Mortenson is up front about the Capitalist invasion for which he plays scout. Evidently the untapped region’s girls are for sale, and once educated they’ll have value-added for mercantilism.

American society tends to glorify education for its own sake. What “education” is CAI providing to the Muslims exactly? Do CAI’s texts teach that secular culture is intent on the eradication of spiritual culture? Is the CAI curriculum simply favoring western indoctrination over an Islamist counterpart? I’ll let Mortenson show his hand:

perhaps the most controversial, is our Islamic studies for about two or three hours every week. It’s very tempered, and we include in that learning the differences between Sunni and Shia. We’ve also added what you might call religion studies, or learning about different faiths or religion.

In a monotheistic society you need that like emperor penguins need tap dancing lessons. Imagine the uproar if we tried to teach New Life Church kids that the faith of their parents was only one extreme of many! A good idea no doubt, but unlikely to provoke a peaceful reaction.

POSTSCRIPT
Our junior high student came home yesterday with three promotional pieces about Three Cups of Tea in advance of Mortenson making an appearance at her school. Do you wonder how he’s getting such press? One of the pamphlets instructs the children about how they can “Help Three Cups of Tea (3CT) surge:” (My emphasis, their slip of the forked tongue)

1. Recommend 3CT to at least one person or place: family, friend, colleague, book club, professor and teacher, student, and places of worship. It also makes a great gift! (You’ve got to be kidding me! 3CT practically screams you’re illiterate.)

2. Visit 3CT website…

3. Recommend 3CT for ‘One Book – One Read’ at http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/one-book.html (please don’t).

4. Recommend 3CT as a University or college-wide… read http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070607/7summer.htm (YGTBFKM)

5. Ask bookstores without 3CT to stock the book, especially airport bookstores. (?)

6. Send 3CT with a personal note to your Senators and/or Representatives (US legislators, why?)

7. Write a ‘letter editor’ [sic] to suggest 3CT and to support education and literacy… to promote peace, economic development and prosperity. (Emphasis mine. Co-opting Muslim girls for Capitalism promotes peace how?)

8. Ask magazines, newspapers, or radio station [sic] to review 3CT (they suggest sending a copy)

9. Learn about the power of girls’ education… in What Works in Girls Education (by Neocon think tank author Barbara Hertz)

10. Learn about grassroots book promotion…

11. Suggest 3CT to Oprah: http://www.oprah.com/email/reach/email_showideas.jhtml

12. Suggest 3CT to C-Span 202-737-0580.

13. Write a book review on Amazon.com, bn.com… (No need, it’s getting slammed! Too bad my Junior High principle isn’t getting a clue. Are our teachers illiterate too?)

14. Start Pennies For Peace in your school, library, or place of worship… http://www.penniesforpeace.org

Billions for war, but apparently we need only pennies for peace.

Hopefully 3CT’s proceeds are going toward peace. (Marie reports their financials say it’s “up to 7%,” so hey, they do mean single-cent figures!) Perhaps Mortenson can earmark some of the Coins for Cultural Sensitivity.

POST-POSTSCRIPT
The Amazon reviews are uproarious! But 3CT trolls are loading the funniest with bad marks where it asks Do you find this review helpful, so you’ll have to look fast. I’ll reprint a couple below.

By the way, Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… was originally released as Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations. It wasn’t selling the mission?

I’ll work up my own slipcover for Mortenson’s speaking engagement, with help from the comments below. Hopefully he’ll be good-natured enough to sign it:
Three Cups of Tedium: One Man’s Mission to be a Dhimmi
-A Condescending Westerner who attempt to “educate” Muslims.

(This is part 2 of 3 pieces: a review of the 3CT book, the promotion around the book tour, and Mortenson’s public appearance.)

A plague on both your houses!

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Capulets versus MontaguesJoseph Kennedy, patriarch of what is often described as America’s royal family, built his fortune by bootlegging whiskey during the Prohibition and rose to power by mob control of the unions.
 
Ill-gotten gains are credited by some for the fate of Joseph’s offspring: the “Kennedy Curse.” Son JFK, elected president, shot; son Bobbie, declaring candidacy, shot; son Ted suffers a car-crash which derails his political aspirations; son of eldest son dies in a 1999 plane crash.

While Christian America ponders whether curse or karma, another constituency retains a dogged skepticism about the official account of both assassinations. That the details are still shrouded in secrecy suggests that whoever gained by killing the Kennedys is still around, and is still powerful enough to intimidate accomplices.

A lesser celebrated 20th Century up and comer is la familia Bush. Prescott Bush made his money in oil and nefarious financial deals with Hitler, and with influential friends formulated the CIA in 1947. His son rose through the CIA to be president. His eldest grandson was appointed to the presidency and to infamy as well.

Deathbed confessions, among other evidence, have tied the CIA to the assassination of JFK. “Conspiracy Theories” link the grassy knoll to ex-Batistas to George H. W. Bush’s little Zapata offshore Anti-Castro operation. (Alex Jones recounts that in the CIA Bay of Pigs Operation, launched without Kennedy’s permission, one of the American ships had been renamed “Barbara II,” its namesake perhaps the Grumman Avenger “Barbara” which H. W. crash-landed in WWII.) In fact, FBI records place G. W. on the first plane to DC (from Dealey Plaza?)

Recent improved photo-analysis show several high-ranking CIA operatives present at the RFK assassination in 1968. I’ll leave Chappaquiddick and John John’s Martha’s Vineyard plane crash to future leaks and investigators.

In the meantime, John Hinckley Jr., attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan while Vice President Bush was next in line, was not just any mentally disturbed highly-suggestible boy, but the son of friend of Bush’s son Neil.

And how about those fixed elections of 2000 and 2004? Never mind whatever it was that happened on 9/11!

Is America more prepared to accept a Kennedy Curse, than the possibility that one family’s and a nation’s bad fortune might really have been blood spilled by Long Knives, one Fascist putsch after the next, until the burning of the Reichstag?

CSPD Officer Erwin Paladino of 2003

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Come to papaHas it been made clear enough in the multitude of retellings of the events of St. Patrick’s Day 2007, that an Officer Erwin Paladino was the chief agitator in the police camp? He directed the arrests and handled most of them with two chief accomplices, guy with taser and guy of choke-hold. (Maybe not coincidentally the three men in blue in our T-shirt advert image at right.) The other of the fourteen policemen on the scene stood in the wings to receive us as we were removed from the parade route.

If the police had been interested in removing us efficiently from the street, the officers could have handled it on one swoop. Instead Paladino was let to do the dirty work, dirtily, throwing me to the ground, yelling at us pell mell, acting over-taxed when in fact the police outnumbered us.

Police misconduct, 2003
Imagine our surprise when Mark Lewis, reviewing the videotapes from the wrongful arrests of peace activists in 2003, discovered that the chief police bully in that case was the same Officer Paladino! You can hear him on the tape telling a woman she could walk to Boulder because he was impounding her car, then handcuffing her before she could even do that. She and friends were standing outside of a Dairy Queen, where they’d parked, after the tear-gassing of the antiwar rally.

The Dairy Queen Dozen won a settlement from the city of Colorado Springs, an admission that the police had acted improperly. And yet four years later, here’s the same wrongdoer, Officer Paladino, pulling the same uncivil behavior, the same abuse of authority, the same escalation of brutality, worse actually, in the midst of children and elders.

We’re told that any admission of wrongdoing on the part of CSPD could never include a reprimand of a particular officer, certainly not one like Paladino who wraps himself in a flag whenever there’s a fallen officer memorial.

To tell you the truth, I got the very strong impression, on St. Patrick’s Day when we were trying to learn his name from the other officers, that they weren’t too proud of his actions either. Most of the police bent over backward to treat us with consideration, as something of an apology for what went wrong on the street. Paladino would not tell us his name when we requested it, and when it came time to record it on most of our arrest forms, the officers filling out our paperwork pretended amnesia it seems, they didn’t want to betray his name either if he wasn’t brave enough to give it himself. That’s a man not likely respected by his colleagues.

Until our trial, until criticism can be brought on police misconduct, who might Paladino be mishandling today? We were fortunate to have cameras focused on us at the parade, and to have a large crowd protecting us with its gaze. What of the hapless vagrant in a dark side street? He bears the brunt of the policemen’s abuse of authority, regularly beaten and harassed by officers with aggressive personality disorders and the means and opportunity to vent them.

World Trade Center vs. Silent Partner

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Christopher Plummer as Bin LadenWORLD TRADE CENTER, Oliver Stone’s sentimental take on 9/11 heroism comes out this summer. I have nothing against a story which describes the travails of two New York City cops and their families caught up in the World Trade Center collapse. But Stone’s timing with the release of this movie is unfortunate. With the upcoming elections, the only rallying cry the Republicans have anymore is 9/11. What a time for Stone to wax patriotic. And I think the absence of his usual political curiosity offers a silent aquiescence to the official line. Too bad.
 
For anyone who feels they absolutely need a jolt of 9/11 heroism, might I suggest the documentary 9/11 aired on CBS and made by the Naudet brothers, the French filmmakers who inadvertantly captured the first tower being hit. Talk about harrowing viewing. They went inside the WTC to witness the second strike and were still inside when the opposite tower collapsed. (That’s why the video of the first plane was so late to emerge. Filmmaker and film were nearly destroyed in the rubble.)

I’d like to recommend an altogether different classic: THE SILENT PARTNER, an unforgettable 1978 sleeper hit starring Elliot Gould and Christopher Plummer. Don’t take my word for it, this thriller shares some striking plot points.

Plummer plays bank robber Harry Reikel who is thwarted in his first attempt to rob the bank at which Gould’s Miles Cullen is a bank teller. Deciding to await a better opportunity, Reikel discards the deposit slip upon which he’d written his directives, this is a robbery, etc. While tidying the lobby, Miles discovers the imprint of Reikel’s message on the deposit slip beneath. He reacts with alarm, but goes home to consider the opportunity knocking and hatches a plan.

(What did the US security advisor do with the memo titled “Bin Laden determined to strike inside the US?”)

The next day at work Miles waylays as much money as he can from the bank vault. When the forecasted robbery occurs, he gives Reikel some of the money, later declaring the entire sum as stolen, and then takes the bulk of the loot home, thus becoming the robber’s silent partner. Of course, when Reikel learns on TV the magnitude of his purported take, he figures out what Miles has done. Now Reikel becomes the partner whom Miles must keep silent.

Does it make sense that someone might be using Guantanamo to keep al Qaida ranks silent, lest anyone find out that Bin Laden had only commandered the planes? Crashing the airliners was forewarned by the now infamous security memo, but the terrorists may have had nothing to do with upping the magnitude of the 9/11 disaster by setting demolition charges at the WTC and the Pentagon. Those may have been more easily planted by cold-blooded accomplices to the terrorists, silent partners who wanted a Pearl Harbor to launch their PNAC authoritarian coup.

Town square Citizens Tribunal

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It tolls for thee
At the prospect of our nation executing Zacarias Moussaoui for perpetrating his unforgivable evil, conspiring and lying, let’s invite the big league lawbreakers to consider turnabout is fair play.

Let’s hold a preliminary trial and sentencing for our current governing criminals, traitors and kleptocrats. In advance of being able to bring them to account officially, let’s give them a vision of what they can expect for their own fate. Remember the revolutionary tribunals of the French Revolution? Something like that, the wrath of the people, without the guillotine.

Plans are to hold a mock tribunal with accused to be tried in absentia and executed in effigy. The evidence has already been presented and tried in multiple tribunals around the world. The first charge is war crime: the crime against peace, and multiple counts of crimes against humanity. These crimes have already been proven. We will enumerate upon each for the sake of onlookers who may not be as familiar.

The other crimes are treason, based on the betrayal of this nation’s founding principles, its constitution and bill of rights. Support of the Patriot Act alone is treason. Likewise is support for illegal detention and torture. And election fraud.

Other capital offenses are war profiteering, influence peddling and selling one’s vote.

The accused are the leaders, accomplices, and all complicit in permitting these crimes. If Zacarias Moussaoui can be convicted, even executed for conspiring to participate in the alleged 9/11 plot, then our local military commanders, politicians, community leaders and corporate executives can be considered guilty of conspiracy to wage a war of aggression against the nation of Iraq, the ultimate war crime. All Republicans have conspired to betray this democracy.

We’ll get a permit from the city to use the park at the center of town. We’ll hire the park for two days. On the first day we’ll begin to build the scaffold and work overnight so to have it finished by the next midday. At night we will have bright work lights to illuminate our activity. If by noon we are still hammering at the scaffold through the first part of the tribunal, all the better.

The tribunal will begin at noon with the reading of the charges. Next we will read the list of accused. We will dispense with the usual suspects in Washington and focus exclusively on the persons within the jurisdiction of our citizen’s tribunal. Our region’s own culprits.

We’ll have a display with the list of national figures to be attended by a national tribunal.

Next a prosecutor will elaborate on the charges of war crimes. Then an attorney will speak in defense of each accused. At this point we will entertain nominations for further culpable parties and consider their defense. After which the verdicts will be read and sentences announced.

The judge might be a kangaroo teleconferencing from Cheyenne Mountain Zoo through video chat on a laptop. This will be entirely for theatrical purposes. As stated, war crimes have already been proved. The accused have continuously refused to repudiate their expressed public support for the illegal war. The charges of treason and racketeering are already self evident.

A mock hanging will be performed for each of the accused, reading their name and dropping the trap door. Executions will be videotaped and streamed online in real time and archived for friends and supporters to see.

Naturally this citizen’s tribunal will act only as a precurser to the veritable tribunals. Justice will eventually catch up with each and every of these greedy buggers.