Irreligious troubles

Remember the troubles in Ireland? They were religious wars is what we were told. The Catholics against the Protestants. Been going on for centuries. Indeed.

England has occupied Ireland for centuries, that much is true. And the English lackeys who settled the land for the British king and played landlord to the Irish were Protestant indeed. And the native Irish who have been fighting to regain their sovereignty are the religion of St Stephen who drove the pagan snakes from Ireland and converted everyone to Christianity before there was such a thing as Protestantism. The English were Catholic until Henry VIII was refused an annulment from the pope and so created his own Church of England. British subjects had to follow their king into Protestantism, and the enemy freedom fighters in Ireland would, of course, not.

And so the battle between the Irish and their English occupiers waged on, cleverly repackaged by the empire, the British Empire and ours, as religious troubles. Who sympathizes with an opponent’s foreign religion? The plight the dispossessed is another matter.

Likewise in Palestine. Are we to believe that Muslims are fighting Jews over the fate of their religious differences in Palestine? Oh, it’s been going on for thousands of years. Really?

Israel’s pretext for entitlement to the Holy Land dates back two thousand years, that’s true enough, when Jews last ruled Judea. There probably can be no end to land disputes when you argue claims that far back. Courts decided long ago to simplify disputes with statutes of limitation. In war however, every conqueror likes to assert they are reclaiming what lands were theirs by predestiny.

Palestinians are fighting the Israelis for their homeland. Israel occupies Palestine and keeps building settlements unto more of it, displacing and killing the original occupants. Israel’s motives might be religious, but the conflict is not. The fighting is occupation versus resistance, er, insurrection. The internecine strife amongst Palestinians and amongst Lebanese are no more sectarian than it is about who is collaborating with the occupiers.

Sectarian differences in Iraq, as throughout the Middle East, have similarly less to do with religion than the struggle against colonial occupiers. Right now we are demonizing the Shia, the fundamentalist hard ballers out of Iran, who threaten the Sunnis. They do, but hardly for religious reasons. The Sunni are and have been our agents, the administrative class for the West’s domination of the Middle East. When you hear Egypt opine, that’s us. Saudi Ariabia, that’s us. All the feudal sheiks, sultans and monarchs? Ours. In our pocket and we in theirs. They don’t like the Shias because they’re as irreligious as alpha males in a harem. Once more the occupiers have their religious or counter-religious pretext. The oppressed are fighting for their land and their freedom.

Bush and the former mayor of Tehran

Revolutionaries escorting CIA from US embassyThis is just RICH! Another headline! Bush and his Iranian nemisis to address the U.N. on the same day. Bush determined to avoid Ahmadinejad in the hallway! AND HOW!
 
Bush’s people don’t want to make an issue of the two meeting, although if Ahmadinejad approaches, “nobody’s going to body-block” him. Talk about giving diplomacy a chance.

Of the man who leads Iran, the nation which has been the demon of Bush’s preoccupation and the focus of Bush’s address to the General Assembly, Bush aids don’t want to accord Ahmadinejad so much importance. “We’re talking about the former mayor of Tehran here.”

Really. And Bush is what? A former what?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the former Revolutionary Guard student leaders who seized the American embassy in Tehran and precipitated the fall of the Shah and the end of US influence in Persia.

Bush was what? What? Oil man? Sports team owner? Alcoholic until he was 40? Maybe drinks still? Draft dodger of the blue-blood sort, dodged even his Reservist duty? Cocaine dealer in college, busted and sentenced to community service when others served long prison sentences? What? He won’t deign to meet with a former mayor of Tehran?

Ahmadinejad may be mouthing off too much for everyone’s comfort, but he has also singlehandedly brought the question of Israel’s legitimacy in the Middle East back to the discussion of a resolution in Palestine.

Ahmadinejad made minced meat of Mike Wallace in his CBS interview, in spite of the fact that 60-Minutes had control of the editing. I’m reluctant to mention Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein in the same sentence, but the Iranian president’s interview reminded me of Saddam’s talk with Dan Rather. The soon to be toppled dictator ran circles around our boy Dan. One rarely sees presidents measured up against journalists. Both are bright, but the brilliance required of a self-made statesman becomes pretty self evidence.

Now let’s talk about George Bush. Bush can’t even be interviewed by an informal commission without being accompanied by Dick Cheney. The vice-president’s nickname in CIA circles is “Edgar.” The best guess is that Edgar is a reference to Edgar Bergen, father of Candice Bergen and beloved ventriloquist to his wooden chum Charley McCarthy. Would Bush be the dummy “Charley?” Is that too much of a stretch?

Bush can’t handle a debate without an electronic prompter, nor a speech without someone feeding him his lines. That’s why he pauses between phrases. We know the routine from weddings: repeat after me: to have and to hold, to have and to hold, till death do us part, till death do us part, amen, amen. Bush can’t even handle an audience that isn’t vetted of just the hardcore ditto-heads.

White house officials are saying it is Ahmadinejad who is eager to avoid coming face to face with Bush. He’d come out at a disadvantage they say “because he’s shorter than Bush.” Really now? Shorter than Bush? I don’t even believe that.

The Path to 9 11

In defense of ABC’s docudrama The Path to 9/11. Near the beginning, when the terrorists were taking responsibility for the 1993 WTC bombing, “Ramzi Youssef – Palestinian Terrorist” explained why they had done it: because of America’s military and economic support of Israel.

The subject of Israel and Palestine never came up again, and never came up at all on Ted Koppel’s counter-ABC-straw-man The Price of Security.

We’ve got our boot on Palestine’s windpipe, they’re flailing their arms hoping to dislodge us, and we declare a war on arm flailing. Our media runs through what options America has to be safe from arm-flailing without looking at our boots to let American citizens consider how we might tread the earth with more humanity.

The US and Israel, it’s hard to say who is the master of whom, are actively killing Palestinians in a genocidal program every bit as calculated as the Holocaust or the extermination of the Native Americans. The US supported the recent slaughter of Lebanese peoples, also considered by the international community as genocide.

The US accuses Syria or Iran of backing Hizb’Allah. Those links are sketchy compared to our sending weapons and aid to Israel and other false authorities in the Middle East. When Israel was stepping up its bombing Lebanon in advance of the nearing ceasefire, we had to speed our resupply of Cluster Bombs lest Israel run out of time to use them. The US arms and defends the self-proclaimed kings and sultans who amass great wealth from the sale of their countries’ oil while at the same time subjecting their peoples to abject poverty. Bin Laden opposed our propping up of the Saudis. Youssef decried our support of Israel in Palestine. Arabs have cause to reject US strong arm policies in Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and of course Iraq. Muslims have very good reasons to reject US policy in Afghanistan, Indoneasia and the Philippines.

The least ABC could do in its mockudrama was to set the scene with the Muslim extremists’ motives, and that was it. Even though the rest of the program was re-edited because of the criticism, there followed closely law enforcement characters endlessly lamenting they needed authority for warrantless searches, domestic eavesdropping and inter-departmental information sharing. Filipino police were depicted heroically for not waiting for warrants, female border agents were lauded for using their intuitive -read racial- profiling, suggestions were made of an FBI coverup, even that Clinton’s people were helping Osama.

The irrationality-mongering was so egregious it would take forever to enumerate. The good news is that the Stephen Bochco style shaky camera, the endlessly tight closeups, the jump cuts unto incongruous details lacking context, and the frenetic action going every direction, serve really like an alarm bell going off next to your ear. It’s not conducive to critical thinking, but it’s also painfully and obviously contrived.

I draw one fundamental conclusion. The 9/11 truth seekers have been right all along. We must diffuse the 9/11 lie because the establishment yahoos, both Republican and Democrats, plan to ride this vile deception as long as they can.

By comparison, Ted Koppel’s sombre contemplative piece was full of verbal obfuscation. Koppel began his report with “by now every adult in America knows what happened on 9/11.” What an innocuous way to brush aside the fact that what happened is known, yes, and disputed! His language got no clearer as the program progressed. Lots of “clearly” this, when of course it very clearly could be unclear.

Koppel asked critical questions of such criminals as the author of the latest definition of torture and the commander of Gitmo who declined to admit that detainees had ever been tortured, but Koppel let Bush cabinet officials off with softballs and setups. Koppel let Tom Ridge appear thoughtful as to hold a mirror to himself asking what America is about, he let effete Senator Hays tell everyone that nuclear bombs can be made from items purchased at Home Depot, and Koppel let an NSA software developer appear pro-civil liberties by rejecting racial-profiling. His solution? Eavesdrop on everybody.

By assuming the role of white knight, Ted Koppel is really an effective mouthpiece for the Time-Warner machine, a major player in upholding corporate dominance. What do you think of his “point well taken” technique? As if his smilingly elusive subjects have just trumped him with something other than a quacking canard!

The good news about Koppel on Discovery is that we got a close look at the Bush operatives. They are in charge, yes, and they benefit from being presented by a charming, deep voiced newsman, but didn’t you recognize Larry, Moe and Curly right down to the haircuts? These guys are dopes! In morals, self-reflection and speech. It makes me giddy to contemplate because it’s not going to take much thinking power to take them down. Call me gullible, call me idealistic. It’ll take effort, determination and sacrifice, but it won’t take nucular-chemical-rocket science.

Old Testament cheerleaders

Rooting for Armagedon
They think the end is coming. They’re even smiling about it. Are these the people we want to have in charge when we discuss matters of global stewardship or keeping the peace in the Middle East?

In fact there are probably FCC regulations which would forbid these types from broadcasting their hate-mongering over the public airwaves. Something like pulling the fire alarm, or yelling fire in the theater or inciting a riot or encouraging the commission of a crime.

A security buffer for Israel

The Bush administration is content to postpone urging a ceasefire in Lebanon until Israel has completed clearing the brush. Israel will be requiring a security buffer between itself and Lebanon, and apparently it has the right to use Lebanese land to make it.

If a man was having trouble with his neighbors, refusing to make some kind of peace with them, and decided his only option was to clear a large area around his house to buffer himself, I doubt the rest of the community would abide his trying to make the no-man’s-land out of his neighbors’ property.

On top of all that, he’s expecting the community to supply the peace keepers. How juvenile a sense of entitlement is that?

Israel has been attempting the same security strategy with the Palestinians. They call it a security fence. It is in reality a colossal wall made to separate white Jews from the darker skinned Arabs. The Apartheid Wall is universally condemned by international judicial bodies and betrays precisely the irrationality of the Zionists’ land claim in the Middle East.

The Apartheid Wall demonstrates that Israel can only sustain itself as a walled colony, supported militarily by the nation from whence came the colonists. US.
 
Israelis are western settlers determined to occupy a foreign land until the last indigenous outcry is silenced.
 
Now they want more of Lebanon for their apartheid buffer zone.
  See more of the Apartheid Wall

Israelites go home

Baja JudeaAdmittedly this is a picture of Tel Aviv residents protesting their nation’s militant actions against Lebanon and gathering to offer a prayer for peace.
 
On another level, is it also a picture of fair-skinned westerners on a Middle Eastern beach who’ve overstayed their welcome?
 
Maybe it’s time to close Club Med Judea.

Americans descend upon Baja Mexico all the time, we don’t try to annex it. Or Costa Rica, or Belize. There’s nothing wrong with vacationing in the tropics, but is it fair to emigrate there, declare it your own, and ask the world to protect you from the anger of the people who you sent packing?

Let American and European Jews have their promised land, as promised vacation land. Visit and sunbathe all you want, then go home. This idea that white man should colonize Arabia is so 19th century. Colonization doesn’t work, and we have no right.

Nowhere was this more obvious than South Africa, where white colonizers held themselves as superior to the natives, imposing apartheid to force the indigenous populations to keep to their own neighborhoods.

Can there ever be peace in the Holy Land? Of course there can. Return Israel to its rightful owners. Let Jew, Muslim and Christian live together in a secular state. Will there always be sectarian violence? Perhaps, we’re seeing it elsewhere between Muslims. Sectarian problems will have to be worked out between neighbors. It’s clear the answer was not to give the whole ball of wax to one religion. Especially not the white one.

Middle East sibling rivalry no holds barred

OverkillCan I explain the current cataclysm in Lebanon? The media doesn’t want to do it. Unfortunately for them, it’s becoming a simpler story at each denouement.

Here’s an interesting overview: Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land. And here’s a chronology of the recent escalation.

Here goes: Both Hamas and Hizb’Allah are always negotiating secret prisoner exchanges with Israel. Israel holds thousands of prisoners of both Hamas and Hizb’Allah. On June 25, Hamas captured an Israeli soldier which it hoped to use in an exchange. Similarly, Hizb’Allah captured two Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.

In Palestine, instead of negotiating with Hamas, Israel decided to escalate its attacks on the Occupied Territories. Israel had already been refusing to recognize Hamas as Palestine’s ruling party, it had been withholding all Palestinian Authority funding, and it was bombing the suspected houses and cars of the democratically-elected Hamas leaders. In its escalation, Israel bombed Palestine’s only power plant and sent tanks into the Gaza Strip to force an immediate release of their “kidnapped” soldier.

Out of solidarity for the defenseless population of Palestine, the military branch of the Hizb’Allah hiding in Syria decided to launch indiscriminate rocket attacks upon Israel, across the Israeli border from southern Lebanon. When Israel sent troops to Lebanon to attack those sites, Hizb’Allah captured two Israeli soldiers. With the precedent set: a-kidnapped-soldier- justifies-massive-air-strikes and M0Fo Bolton in the U.N. to stifle international pressure, Israel now had an identical pretext for attacking Lebanon.

So, Israel is clearing the population out of southern Lebanon, just as it has been displacing the original occupants of Palestine. The world wants an immediate cease-fire, but the US won’t let the U.N. take action. The US says it doesn’t want to interrupt because Israel isn’t finished. Finished what? Retaliating or house-cleaning?

Secretary of State Rice calls Israel’s bombardments “birth pangs” of the new Middle East, as if Israel’s actions have been part of the U.S. remake for the region all along. A recently interviewed Israeli soldier, asked what he thought his unit was doing in Lebanon, smiled and said “purification I guess.”

This is like a household where one of the children, already in the headlock of a stronger sibling, is acting up. Under the pretext of disciplinary action, the bullying sibling decides to convert its headlock into a strangulation, simultaneously pushing that child right out of its room, in fact clear out of the house. The mother decries the disproportionate severity of the reaction, but the father, an abusive lout in his own right, refuses to intervene, and instead sides with the offspring so much his likeness.

Shit hits fan writ in Hebrew

US bombs to replenish IsraelIsrael is delivering a lot of shit into the fan, and the US is shoveling to resupply them as fast as we can. The world wants an immediate cease-fire but the US objects because we say Hizb’Allah [Hezbollah] will not honor a cease-fire. In reality Israel says it won’t stop until it has meted out at least another week of punishing air strikes. Secretary Rice objected that to stop Israel now would be to accept the status quo.

The US not only supports Israel’s offensive goals, we acknowledge that her incursions into Palestine and Lebanon are part of our plan for the transformation of the Middle East, of which the democratically elected Hamas and Hizb’Allah parties are to play no part.

Imagine if Cuba started shelling Miami under the pretext of trying to assassinate the anti-cuban terrorists which we harbor there.

Israel is committing the war crimes of disproportionate use of force, collective punishment, destroying civilian infrastructure, and of course, genocide. The UN is calling these clear violations of humanitarian law. Our media is playing this down by quoting only Lebanese officials as protesting these crimes as breaches of international law.

That’s like reporting “bank robbery may have been crime.” “Man on street says money not theirs.”

The US is using its veto to keep the UN from condemning Israel. Our country is a party to Israel’s war crimes and expansionist aims.

The cat’s out of this bag. Americans are in the Middle East for Israel.

Sept 11 – America Reaps What It Sows!

By Black Liberation Army prisoner of war Jalil Muntaqim.

U.S. International Warfare Initiates World War III Human Rights During Wartime
By Jalil A. Muntaqim

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Americans have displayed their true colors of jingoism, a militaristic spirit of nationalism. Similarly, it was witnessed how the people of Iraq rallied in support of their President, Saddam Hussein, after the U.S. bombed to death 250,000 Iraqis, and continued devastation of that country with collateral damage of 1 million dead women and children. Hence, people rallying in support of their government and representatives is a common phenomenon when a country is attacked by an outsider. The U.S. has been foremost in the world extending foreign policy of free-market economy, to the extent of undermining other countries cultures and ideologies expressed as their way of life. Such conflicts inevitably positions the U.S. as the centerpiece, the bulls-eye for international political dissent, as indicated by demonstrations against the U.S. controlled IMF, WTO and World Bank conferences. The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not occur in a vacuum. The people that carried out the attacks were not blind followers or robots with an irrational hatred of the U.S. peoples. Rather, this attack was part of an overall blowback to U.S. imperialist policy in support of zionist Israel and opposition to fundamentalist Islam.

There are essentially three primary world ideologies or world views: the capitalist free-market economy/democracy; the socialist production economy; and Islamic theocratic government, of which has been in competition for many decades. However, in the last 20 years the socialist economies has been severely subverted and co-opted by free-market economies, the ideals of American style democracy. This isolated, for the most part, Islamic theocratic ideology and system of government as the principle target of the U.S. in its quest for world hegemony. This reality of competing world views and economies is further complicated due to religious underpinning of beliefs that motivates actions, especially as they are expressed by U.S. and Western European christianity and Israel zionist judaism in opposition to Islam. From the struggles of the Crusades to the present confrontation, the struggle for ideological supremacy reigns, as the faithful continue to proselytize in the name of the Supreme Being.

When geopolitics are combined with religious fervor in the character of nationalist identity and patriotism, rational and logical thinking is shoved aside as matters of the moment takes historical precedents. It has often been said that “Truth Crush to the Earth Will Rise Again”. Since truth is relative to ones belief, can it be safely said that America has reaped what it has sowed? The American truth of capitalist christian democracy and its imperialist hegemonic aspirations has crushed both socialist and Islamic world views. It has extended its avaricious tentacles as the world police and economic harbinger of all that is beneficent, in stark denial of its history as a purveyor of genocides, slavery and colonial violence.

The U.S. was the first to use biological-germ warfare on people when it distributed blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans; it has refused to apologize for Afrikan slavery acknowledging it engaged in a crime against humanity requiring reparations; it is the first and only country to use the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and intern thousands of Japanese and Italians in this country; it used carpet bombing and defoliates against the peoples of Vietnam; it has initiated embargoes, coup d’etats and assassinations against those it opposes, while propping-up right-wing military dictators; as well as continued military bombing of Vieques. In essence, the U.S. governments hegemonic goals has created the ire of millions of people throughout the world. While domestically, racial profiling, police killing and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people has eroded patriotic sentiments in opposition to white supremacy.

As America weeps and laments its loss, the public find itself joining the torn ranks of those whose heartaches beat opposing U.S. greed and international profiteering. The American public acquiesce to U.S. international folly has cause them to feel the economic pains of those who live daily in poverty. Indeed, Americans should brace for years of economic uncertainty, where the American ideal of freedom and liberty will resemble plight of those who live under the right-wing dictatorships the U.S. has supported. The tyranny suffered by others in the world as a result of U.S. imperialism, has come full circle to visit this country with the wrath of the U.S. own mechanization. Since the U.S. taught and trained right-wing military dictators in the School of the Americas, including the CIA training of Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan proxy war against the Russians, it will be this same kind of terrorist activist that will be unleashed on American soil, as El-Hajj Malik Shabazz stated after the assassination of John Kennedy, a matter of the chicken coming home to roost. Therefore, American civil liberties and human rights are being garrotted by the yoke of the right-wing in the name of national security. The legalization of U.S. fascism was initiated with the war against political dissent (Cointelpro); the war against organized crime (RICO laws); the war against illegal drugs (plethora of drug laws) and now culminating in the war against terrorism with the American Joint Anti-Terrorist Taskforce and Office of Home Security, further extending police, FBI and CIA powers to undermine domestic civil liberties and human rights.

The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently stated that the U.S. need to create a new language in defining how to combat terrorism. This Orwellian propaganda in the media espouses the U.S. is venturing in a new type of warfare to defend the American way of life. However, what this double-speak propagates as a long-term and sustained initiative against terrorism is essentially a way of embellishing and enlarging U.S. counter-insurgency activity it has been engaged in since the advent of the Green Berets, Rangers, Delta Force and Navy Seals. The U.S. has been involved in counter-insurgency activity in Afrika, Latin America and Asia for decades. But due to the September 11, 2001, attack on U.S. soil, the government has seized the opportunity to offensively pursue left-wing revolutionaries and Muslim insurgents throughout the world. This U.S. military action extends and substantiates its position as the international police.

Since the establishment of the Trilateral Commission that initiated the process for the development of one world government, the U.S. has broaden its capacity to impose and enforce its will on oppressed peoples globally. The FBI and CIA has been operating in Europe, Afrika, Asia and Latin America establishing the long arm of U.S. law and order. Its bases of operations have conducted surveillance, investigations to arrest, prosecute or neutralize left-wing revolutionaries or Muslim insurgents. As the U.S. consolidates its political and economic influence throughout the world, it will seek to protect its overall hegemonic imperialist goals. After the Gulf War, and the air (bombing) campaign in Yugoslavia, the U.S. has employed its military might to ensure its foreign policy are achieved.

Because NATO has evolved into a European military entity that Russia is seeking to join, today, the U.S. has positioned itself beyond the mission of NATO. The U.S. now concentrates its military might in opposing Islamic countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Philippines, etc.) and those the U.S. deem as rogue nations (North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). The new military initiatives will be directed to towards Southeast Asia as the secondary target, as it continues to direct the Middle East conflict to preserve its oil investments and zionist interest. As the U.S. expand its imperialist military mission, as seen with committing military troops in Uzbekistan to also protect oil interest in the Caspian Sea, it has sought to redefine itself by targeting what it identify as the terrorist thereat wherever in the world it might exist. Hence, with the employment of conventional warfare combined with counter-insurgency tactical activities, the U.S. has pronounced itself as the military guardian of the world.

Although, the U.S. states its actions are in its self-interest, in terms of what is euphemistically defined as defending the free world, the truth of the matter is this action is a prelude to evolving one world government with the U.S. as its governing authority. Once the Peoples Republic of China becomes a full member of the WTO, and North Korea and Vietnam has been compromised, with Russia becoming an ally of NATO, the U.S. political-military influence in the world will be consolidated. The U.S. geopolitical strategy is not confined to the present crisis in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack and targeting Osama bin Laden as the world’s nemesis. Rather, the U.S. strategy is to preserve its capacity to establish one world government as originally envisioned by the Trilateral Commission.

Nonetheless, there are some serious obstacles to this hegemonic goal, of which the world of fundamentalist Islam has become the principle target. Here, it should be noted that Islam condemns suicide or the mass killings of women, children and non-combatant males. Yet, the U.S., Israel, western Europe, Russia, India and China all view Islam as the enemy. Although, there are over 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, the current alliance of economic interest headed by the U.S., are united to vanquish what they consider the growing menace of fundamentalist Islam. It is with this understanding of U.S. geopolitics one is able to comprehend why the U.S. has redefine its military mission, as opposition to globalization and U.S. imperialism metamorph into a political struggle without borders or territorial imperatives.

The ideological struggle between capitalist free-market economy and Islamic theocratic determinates has exploded into an international conflagration of insurgency with the potential of initiating World War III. The Islamic fundamentalist movements throughout the world has the potential to test the U.S. military, political and economic resolve as the world’s leader and authority of an one world government. With over 1.2 billion adherents, Islam has become a formidable foe to contend with for ideological supremacy in the world’s geopolitics. Even without discussing the religious (moral and ethics) aspects that motivates the geopolitics of Islam in opposition to U.S. imperialist hegemony, the call for Jihad/Holy War against the U.S. presents a serious threat that could precipitate WW-III. Therefore, the U.S. find it necessary to redefine its military mission, develop new language to codify warfare and legitimize its international political and economic purpose. Yet, many of the world’s oppressed peoples’ have already experienced U.S. military counter-insurgency tactics (Ethiopia, Somalia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Congo, etc.), including parts of the Islamic world. No matter how or why the U.S. attempts to persuade Americans that it is entering a new type of warfare, in reality it is more of the same, only extending the military arena to further protect its authority to establish one world government.

However, the U.S. is not the homogeneous country that people are deluded into believing exist. Rather, the U.S. has been held together due its ability to exploit the world’s resources and distribute (unequally) the profits amongst its citizens with its culture of conspicuous consumption. But, the recent attack on the U.S., and its aftermath may very well lead to the untangling and unraveling of the U.S. fabric as has been witnessed with the USSR and Yugoslavia. In understanding this true history of U.S. imperialism, outside and within its borders, essentially tells a story of why U.S. imperialism has been and will continue to be attacked.

Ultimately, the U.S. will eventually find itself at war with itself, as the ideology of a free democratic society will be found to be a big lie. This is especially disconcerting as greater restrictions on civil and human rights are made into law eroding the First and Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As during the Vietnam conflict, internal contradictions of racism, poverty and inequality will be exacerbated as a result of the U.S. military campaign and domestic undermining of civil and human rights. It is expected that strife in America will eventually become violent dissolving any semblance of the illusion of America the Beautiful. In anticipation of U.S. progressive activist opposing this claimed war against terrorism, the federal government will pass new laws to severely restrict protest, demonstrations and dissent. In the ’60s, U.S. progressive activists evolved the slogan “Bring the War Home!” – the question is what will be the slogan this time, now that the war has been brought home?

Free the Land!!

Taking it to the streets

Protests in Nepal
This picture was taken in Nepal shortly before soldiers began swinging their sticks and firing into the crowd. Recent events have wrought inumerable protests such as this. Except for the Ukraine, Haiti and Bolivia, few have ended favorably. Protestors in western nations have thus far faced only tear gas, rubber bullets and trunchons, nothing like the massacres in Uzbekistan and China.

Look hard at this picture. Do you think the American People could ever see themselves brave enough to face this moment?

Americans have seen their elections stolen, their treasury looted, their sons and daughters killed to enrich war profiteers. They’ve seen a president lie to take them into war, try to steal their Social Security, stack the Judicial Branch to a marked imbalance, hold himself above the law against invasion of privacy, exempt himself from new laws with “signing statements,” imprison people without due process, insist on being able to torture, limit free speech to “free speech zones,” declare a war on terror but refuse to acknowledge prisoners of war, weaken pollution standards and call it a “Clear Skies Initiative, ” sell protected public lands, promote the outsourcing of jobs overseas, seek to legalize the payment of poverty waves to illegal immigrants, inhibit states and foreign nations from taking action to avert global warming, double the U.S. deficit in order to give a tax break to the super rich, launch the thoroughly illegal war against Iraq and supervise the killing of now upwards of 250, 000 Iraqi lives, more than half of them children.

Feel free to add to this list if I’ve missed something.

Most recently we’ve learned that the president considers it his right to intimidate political opponents like Ambassador Joe Wilson by “declassifying” the CIA status of Wilson’s wife, thereby endangering the life her colleagues, her contacts, her friends, and all of their contacts and friends, everyone who foreign governments now suspect might have been CIA informers.

More Americans are coming to see that our president might have conspired, abetted or at the very least permitted the mass murder of 2,986 Americans on September 11th, 2001, to create the rallying cry of “9/11” not dissimilar to Remember the Main, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin before it. Each as dubious as the Reichstag fire.

Is it time as well to consider that the fate of the world rests in the hands of a man who believes in the end times as foretold in the Book of Revelations? Is it possible that our president does not care if Armageddon is hastened in the Middle East because anyhoo it has been prophesied?

If President Bush attacks Iran, this time using nuclear weapons, will it finally occur to the American people to do something to stop him? Are they up to the task?

Spika’s sledgehammer

Tonight was Gwyn Coleman’s Art Wars III at the historic City Auditorium, a great success as usual, everyone on the youthful side of the Colorado Springs art community was there. Spika had a performance piece in the show, and here’s what Spika did, the big goof.

Early in the evening Spika and an assistant painted a huge mural on stage of the United States in neon red against a black background. At the center of the red map was a yellow circle with a blue outer ring, over which was a green hazmat symbol.

Just before his performance piece which he called Metaxis, Spika led a robed figure [his wife dressed in burlap and darkened skin] resembling a Middle Eastern Muslim of irrelevant gender. She sat before the symbol at the middle of the America mural. Spika stood centerstage before a blacklight clad only in a pair of black shorts.

To a recording of Bob Dylan singing Masters of War, Spika rolled up his shorts into the sides of the waistband so that his attire resembled that of Jesus or Tarzan or Captain Underpants. Then Spika began to rub fluorescent red paint all over his legs and bare feet.

Spika wiped his hands on the front of his shorts, a repetitive move which looked uncomfortably indulgent until we saw that he was cleaning his hands for the next color. Then Spika covered the upper half of his body with blue paint. By this time the soundtrack had progressed to Jimmy Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner. Spika rubbed the blue into his face and poured what remained of the blue paint over his hair.

Now Spika wrapped a skirt of white stripes around his waist. These were strips of white paper suspended on a wire waistband. Then he draped a similar shawl of white paper stars over his shoulders. Having made a living flag of himself, Spika donned a yellow crown of spikes, whatever it is that the Statue of Liberty wears, greatly amplified and struck a pose. Once the applause subsided, Spika walked over to the robed figure at the center of the America mural.

We were not sure as he turned his back to her, if he wasn’t bending to take a crap on the Muslim, but instead he sat between her legs. Then Spika slowly reclined into the arms of his robed non-westerner to create …a pieta, and the crowd went wild.

Neverland vs. Disneyland

Michael Jackson kid collectionOf course Michael Jackson is closing Neverland, his kid-themed estate in Southern California, he doesn’t need it, he’s gone to Disneyland!
 
(Caution: this article may get a little gross.)
 
The California Disneyland where children run around unattended? The Florida Disney world
with its similar kid-sized attractions? No, it’s just an expression. Jocko’s gone to the proverbial ne-plus-ultra destination for those who’ve hit the jackpot. Well you be the judge.

Michael Jackson got off charges of child molestation, statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of minors, kidnapping, unlawful detainment, all now curiously summarized as “child abuse.” After which he immediately scooted out of the country! Despite the most unbecoming of evidence, Michael Jackson got away without being declared a sex offender. Maybe he knows something we don’t because he decided he didn’t want to stay within reach of U.S. law enforcement, and he obsconded to… Bahrain.

Where’s Bahrain? What’s Bahrain? Michael Jackson says he has friends there who he feels are more simpathetic to his inner whatever he is. His friend is a sheikh in Bahrain with oil to pay for harems.

Bahrain is like the United Arab Emirates, which are small sultanates set up by the British in such a way that the oil wealth would not have to be shared by national populations but rather by simply the occupiers of each particular stretch of desert. The Dutch did the same thing in Brunei, carved out of Indonesia. These are artificial borders meant to exclude the actual indigenous inhabitants who might require the traditional colonial investments in infrastructure and social welfare.

Imagine if instead of launching the California gold rush, Sutter had walled up his Mill, declared it an autonomous Sultanate, and all the gold wealth had gone only to fund vast automobile collections, Manhattan real estate investments, decadent harems and orgies, ad vomitum, leaving the rest of Californians to a tribal existance outside the flow of the gold largess.

What do Middle East sultans do with themselves which Michael Jackson finds so simpatico? It’s probably not to do with subjugating their populations with poverty and repressive religious dogma. Maybe it’s speedboat racing, who knows? More likely it has to do with the secretive harems, collections of captive sex partners lured and trafficked from all parts of the globe, reputedly the “white slave trade” which what do you wanna bet includes children?

To recap, how did the various pedophelia behaviors so graphically documented by Jackson’s prosecutors, from the Jesus Juice to the predatory grooming, come to be summarized as “child abuse?” Mere balcony-baby-dangling by comparison. This mirrors the current media subversion of the word rape, and all the horror it conjures, by using the more ambiguous term “sexual assault.”

Ahmadinejad and Hamas not denying Holocaust

Iranian president
No one is suggesting that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that six million Jews weren’t killed by the Nazis. The mythology surrounding the Holocaust has to do with its aftermath: how the murder of six million Jews became justification for the creation of a Jewish state on land which belonged altogether to someone else.
 
That is the mythology about the Holocaust which natives of the Middle East would like the rest of us to contemplate.

Western media seems intent on perpetuating a distortion of the Muslim position. So intent are they to avoid questioning the legitimacy of Zionism that anyone who does is painted as a “Holocaust denier.”

No one is denying the Holocaust! And no one is calling for killing any more Jews! “Wiping Israel off the map” is a truncated translation of what the Muslim voices have expressed. It does not mean “off the face of the earth” or “eradicate” or “exterminate.”

Right to exist
Hamas is often described as not believing in Israel’s right to exist. It sounds so unreasonable. Everyone has a right to exist. But Israel is not a person, it’s an entity. Try this on for size. Does Jewish occupied Palestine have a right to exist? Did French occupied Algeria have a “right to exist?”

Algeria had a right to exist, and the French there had every right to exist, as a minority. And as we’ve seen with all former colonies, the majority population has an inclination to rise against its upper class oppressors. The west has of course the inclination to try to prop up those embattled regimes.

Israel was a nation created in 1949, carved out of the land of the Palestinians to make a home for European Jews. Israel is regarded by many as a last example of colonialism. White settlers laying claim to the lands of another people.

Now the Israelis are erecting a wall to separate themselves from the darker skinned Arabs. It’s an apartheid wall, and we’ve seen apartheid before. The Boers of Dutch ancestry no longer rule South Africa because the world wouldn’t stand for it.

Israelis have as much right to exist as anyone, as the Boers for example, but they don’t have a divine right to exist on the backs of their native brothers.

Apartheir wall   Israelis call it a “fence.” To construct it required demolishing entire Palestinian neighborhoods, often separating Palestinian farmers from their fields and orchards.
 
 

Off the map
When the Iranian president says he would like to wipe Israel off the map, he’s not saying he wishes to kill anyone. He didn’t say he wants to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth, he’s saying he’d like to see Israel off the map OF THE MIDDLE EAST!

Ahmadinejad even suggested that Israel relocate itself to Europe. If Europeans feel so bad about the Holocaust which they inflicted upon the Jews, why shouldn’t it fall to Europe to offer up some of its real estate for a Jewish homeland?

Ahmadinejad, like many Muslims, doesn’t see that it was Europe or America’s place to bequeath Ancient Judea to the present day Jews, a land which for the last two thousand years has belonged to non-Jews and went by the name of Palestine.

We all came from Africa. Does that give us a right to resettle it without regard to who’s already living there? Should someone resurrect Babylon, Alexander’s Greater Macedonia, or the Holy Roman Empire?

Hamas, and the PLO before it, speak of driving this foreign intruder from Palestinian land. The Muslims scattered the Israelites into Europe two thousand years ago. Now interlopers have brought them back and Hamas has pledged to drive them out again.

Imagine if America chose to return its Puritans whence they came, to England, where they weren’t terribly popular the first time. Perhaps the English would vow to expel the kill-joys once again to the New World.

As unreasonable as it was to redraw international borders to recreate a Promised Land, so too might it be unreasonable to undo the land grab of 1949. Perhaps the most pragmatic course of action would be to insist the Israelis and the Palestinians cohabit the promised land. They can govern themselves democratically and the chips will fall where they may. This age of enlightened democracy should have little patience for dogmatic racism and religious prejudice, from either side.

The world should be able to look upon these religious squabbles with impartiality. Although it seems Israelis are plenty worried that the secular west may not always grant Jewish fundamentalism more deference than its Islamic rivals. Therein lies the importance in not denying the Holocaust.

Holocaust myth
What peoples, among victims of genocide, have ever been granted their own ancient Promised Land as a redress for the genocide? None. Is this because the Holocaust was such a unique genocide? Indeed, to be labeled a Holocaust denier you merely have to be denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

When Iran president Ahmadinejad says that he wants to examine the myth of the Holocaust, he is threatening to challenge the prevailing Zionist interpretation.

Ward Churchill got in trouble with the Zionists because he wanted to compare the genocide of Native Americans to the Holocaust. He makes the case mainly because the policy of extermination conducted against the original inhabitants of the Americas is still denied, and as a result extensions of the policies persist.

I think the argument to prove Churchill’s point leads in an altogether different direction. This is because the Jewish extermination was not an act of imperialism against an weaker people.

The genocide against the Native Americans was like the systematic extermination of indigenous peoples everywhere: Australia’s aborigines, Indonesia’s Ache and Timorese. It is also the age-old mechanics of one people conquering another, like the genocide by the Turkish of the Armenians, and the recent actions of the Sudanese Arabs against their blacks.

The genocide against the Jews was class warfare upward. It belonged in a category like the Soviet and Chinese against their bourgeois and intellectuals, like the Khmer Rouge genocide of the urban Cambodians most of whom were ethnic Chinese, like the Hutu slaughtering of the Tutsies, like the traditional and recurring pogroms against Jews. It’s hard to say that even the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t after the usury profits of the Jews.

Thus antisemitism is less unique than its name implies, and resembles very much Marx’s class warfare where the proletariat is trying to come out from under its oppressors, or perceived oppressors.

The Holocaust is touted as religious genocide, hence the rationale for redress which honors their biggest religious wish: return to their Promised Land.

The Zionist count on the west’s continued support of that religious goal. They need an independent Israel with a homogeneous Jewish religion. They know that if they were to be integrated with the region’s present-day peoples, as a Jewish minority among Palestinians, they stand a good chance of being voted off the island.

So here are America and modern Europe, standing in support of a dogmatic religious group. It does not play well with others, and it insists in fact that it be segregated from everyone else, even as it usurps the land of others, and occupies adjacent lands under the pretext of its national security.

I have no doubt that victims of the Holocaust would themselves be shocked and shamed at the crimes that Israel is committing in their name against the peoples of Palestine.

Why America and Europe should side in religious solidarity with Jewish fundamentalists without sympathy for the Islamic fundamentalists is the consequence of believing a myth.

Who’s afraid of the Christian Peacemaker Team?

Motley crew
Lock up your daughters, it’s the Christian Peacemaker Team delegation!
 
By now the story is out about our visit to Senator Allard’s office today, particularly the effort we encountered to thwart our visit.

I’ll recap. After holding our daily noon vigil for the four CPT hostages being held in Iraq, a delegation of vigil keepers went downtown to visit the offices of three local congress members as part of the national SHINE THE LIGHT campaign. We walked with three yard signs and another sign of similar size held aloft. One among us wore a black hood over his head, to remind onlookers of the Abu Ghraib captives.

After a pleasant walk down Tejon Street, we first visited Congressman Hefley’s office where we received a warm reception. They’d seen the TV news report the night before. They also confirmed having received our emailed press releases.

When we tried to find Senator Allard’s office, our reception was quite a different matter. We nearly didn’t make it to his office.

Senator Allard’s office is located in the Plaza of the Rockies, a mid-sized office building with a large atrium. The building is home to many financial service companies such as Morgan Stanley, RBC Dain Rauscher, Booz Allan and Hamilton, Stewart Title, and Vectra Bank among others.

Finding ourself on the second floor of the atrium, unable to get to the floor above, our group fanned out to find a stairwell or alternative elevator. We were no longer parading with our poster boards, carrying them instead under our arms. But our identity as war malcontents was probably apparent enough and we could tell that a couple of the occupants of those glass offices appeared to grab their phones on seeing us walk by.

After my own fruitless search for Suite 300, I returned to find our group being confronted by two men in suits. We were being asked to leave the building. This was private property they explained and we were not permitted to protest on their property.

We answered that we were not protesting, but were merely trying to reach Senator Allard’s office. Could they tell us which way to Suite 300? They would not, “he’s not there.” They insisted instead that we leave. Private property and all that.

We countered that Senator Allard’s office was a public space, and certainly the conveyance to his office must be considered public. They did not agree. When we asked with whom we were speaking, the first identified himself as “Larry,” the chief security officer, the other was the property manager.

Finally we offered to relinquish the offending signs and take them outside the building. I ran the signs down to Pat and Esther who were waiting outside the front door.

I got back in time to hear the property manager arguing “if you knew your bible, you’d know why we have to be in the Middle East!” I learned afterward that I had missed him accusing the leader of our delegation, CPT member Bill Durland, of being “Taliban.”

Eventually the two building representatives agreed to conduct us to the Senator’s office, but only on the condition that Peter remove his hood. Though again we made our case that the Abu Ghraib hood represented an important message we were trying to communicate, in the end Peter agreed to take it off. He would be able to put it back on in the Senator’s office.

In the Senator’s office we were greeted by his assistant who offered to talk with us. But she insisted that the security official remain in the room, and she insisted that Peter remove his hood.

There followed a polite exchange whereupon members of our group spoke from their hearts about the illegality of the war in Iraq, the immorality of torture and other crimes related to the taking of captives without just cause, etc. Senator Allard’s assistant pulled out an old chestnut that Allard is still using at fund raising speeches. Apparently 9-11 caused more casualties that our fighting in Iraq, and that if we hadn’t fought the war in Iraq, the war would have come to us here.

Throughout this discussion, police officers were arriving. The first two arrived at the heels of another Allard staffer. They walked in the door without saying a thing, walked through the reception area where we were having our exchange, and went to stand in the office just inside the reception area.

The odd thing was that no one was addressing these officers, they were merely shown the inside office where they could hear our discussion and interrupt presumably if they were needed. A third officer arrived shortly, and then a fourth. We could see them waiting unsupervisez in the other room. One of the police officers wore the typical tight black gloves and left them on.

When asked who had called for the police officers, Allard’s assistant repeatedly declared that she did not. Although she also did not question any of the officers as to what was the purpose of their visit, and why there came another and another. Instead she proffered that the police were merely a routine measure of building security.

In the end, our visit felt more fruitless than constructive. I don’t know what we would have expected to communicate to one of the few senators who voted against the anti-torture bill. Allard’s assistant defended her boss by telling us that his opposition to the anti-torture bill was because he wanted a stranger one. We interjected that simultaneously Allard had expressed his approval of President Bush’s signing exemption.

In the end we saw the soft underbelly of the beast. and should have taken greater advantage of it. The Neocons may be formidable adversaries, but their supporters, the underbelly, are about as soft as they come.

Senator Allard’s office help kept insisting that they welcomed our visit, yet they seemed quite in step with the actions taken on the part of building security, actions which were not welcoming in the least.

Had our confidence not been boosted by the knowledge that our lead negotiator was an ACLU lawyer, we might not have been persistent enough to reach Allard’s office.

The routine scrambling of police officers certainly surprised us. Afterward I longed to have questioned one of the police officers in the next room. What was the nature of the disturbance described to them? What trouble were they fearing might errupt from a christian(!) peacemaker(!) team visiting their senator’s office?

What authoritarian rule looks like

Several recent events have lead me to some dots that need connecting. The dots may seem wildly disparate: the kidnapping of peace workers in Iraq and Palestine, the recent NYT revelations of counter-protest tactics employed be the NYPD, and a French film about heavy-handed manipulation of political prisoners.

Part One: Les Yeux des Oiseaux
I saw a movie two decades ago called EYES OF THE BIRDS. It depicted a prison in Uruguay for enemies of the state. They were making preparations for an inspection by the Red Cross. The story told of repercussions suffered by the political prisoners as a result of the long anticipated visit.

A couple of recent news items made me recall the film. In an early scene the prison warden ordered one of his men to do something irrational. Without provocation the warden ordered a guard to begin shooting at the prisoners who were assembled in the yard. At the same time, the warden filmed how the prisoners reacted.

That night the prison staff studied the footage to determine who among the political prisoners were the troublemakers. They weren’t looking at who was the more provoked, who was the quickest to run for cover, or even who was the most defiant. They weren’t looking for the strongmen or cellblock Kapos, they were looking for the leaders. They noted who shielded the others with their own bodies, who shepherded fellow prisoners to cover, and who sought to defuse the chaos by urging everyone to remain calm.

Those persons were then sequestered from the rest of the population, kept from contact with the Red Cross inspectors, and promptly dispatched with bags over their heads and buried. The film was fictional, but based on many corroborated accounts from Uruguay’s long years of repressive rule and disparados.

Part Two: NYC undercover cops
A recent New York Times article describes how NYPD officers infiltrated a number of peaceful street protests to incite the crowds to react. Tactics like this are nothing new for union-busters. The Pinkerton Security Agency for example got its start by hiring thugs to disrupt early efforts to organize strikes.

But do we expect such behavior from our men in blue? They’ve sworn to protect and serve us “with honor!” It used to be against the law for law enforcement to infiltrate political organizations.

Here’s what the NYPD was doing. Perhaps so as not to risk charges of false arrest, the police would plant, not drugs, but arrestees! The police would confront a crowd of protesters and arrest their own undercover officers. Immediately one of the arrestees would reveal himself as being under cover. This would divert suspicion from the ones still playing the victims and serve to incite the crowd to anger. They were angry for having been infiltrated, and then for seeing several among them arrested without apparent provocation.

With the crowd sufficiently distracted from its non-violent mantras, uniformed officers could move in from the sidelines and make their selective arrests.

Three fake protestorsFrom video taken by an IndyMedia reporter.
Number 36 cried out
“I’m under cover.”
The two behind him
pretended to be arrested,
only to be spotted later
at another protest site.
Real arrests followed.

Does this authoritarian maneuver resemble the M. O. used in Uruguay? To work, the perpetrators count on two things. First, that the heat of the moment will wrong-foot even the most defensive strategist. The tactic is after all nothing new.

That the targets feel the heat counts on a second, very cynical, assumption: that peace activists, like political dissidents, like freedom fighters, have a not easily repressed sense of humanity. They’ll betray their own goodness sooner than bear witness to injustice.

Probably you can see where I’m going with this.

Part Three: CPT Peace activists in the Middle East
When we hold vigils for the Christian Peacemaker Team members still held hostage in Iraq, we wonder how can those nasty insurgents threaten the lives of people who are so plainly on the side of the Iraqi people? It does seem particularly godless of those rebels doesn’t it? And absurd. I offer four thoughts.

A. Peace workers held in high regard
A friend of mine went to Iraq before the first Gulf War as a human shield to try to prevent the U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq. He wore a t-shirt which proclaimed his purpose there.

He told me that after a while, his journalist friends were begging to buy his t-shirt from him. So revered were the peace activists, they could walk into the worst areas in the middle of the night, and fear nothing. The few reporters and photographers who remained in Baghdad were so jealous of the access the peace workers had to ordinary Iraqis as a result of the deference shown to them.

B. Iraqi treatment of captured U. S. soldiers
Without exception, American soldiers captured by Iraqi forces have been returned to us safe and sound, neither hooded, tormented, tortured, nor humiliated. The extent of the “interrogation” of the captured supply line crew was to ask them to put truth to a lie: “had they been greeted with flowers and candy?”

Americans captured by IraqisFootage banned in the US: Iraqis ask them “were you greeted with flowers and candy?”

Not far from there, Iraqi doctors were already trying to return the captured Jessica Lynch to the American lines, but American soldiers kept shooting at their ambulance, forcing them to turn back. (Later American doctors would accuse the dumb-founded Iraqis of having raped Jessica’s limp body. In fact Lynch had earlier been forceably sodomized by a fellow U.S. soldier.)

Indeed Iraqis have shown a greater sense of compassion and humanity than our feeble representatives have ever shown them. From cluster bombs to DU to acceptable collateral damage to Free-Fire Zones to Kill Boxes to indiscriminate savagery to dehumanizing protocol. Americans have proven to be as barbaric as the Iraqis are cultured and forgiving.

What about the suicide bombers and the beheadings? The Iraqis are a divided people, and they have been driven to desperation. Execution by beheading, so horrifying to us, is more commonplace in their traditions. And then again, all may not be what it appears…

C. The mysterious beheading of Nick Berg
Nick Berg was a young do-gooder who traveled to Iraq on his own dime to try to take part in the reconstruction. He supported the war apparently, but it would be hard to paint him as an opportunist or profiteer. Nick Berg went to Iraq without a contract, nor much prospect for getting one. He went there to help.

The last people to see Nick Berg alive were CIA, a fact they denied at first. Nick was being detained by the U.S. military before his disappearance into the hands of his executioners. Though he was horribly decapitated on a video distributed all over the world, no reporter is quite ready to say who did it. Behind Nick Berg in the video, the figures under the robes did not look quite right.

The U.S. military immediately said the voice on the tape was that of AL-ZARQAWI. Robert Fisk, one of the most respected and senior reporters of Middle East affairs is not prepared to say that he even believes there exists such a person as Al-Zarqawi.

The timing of Nick Berg’s beheading was also very strange. World outrage was at an all time high from the photos just out of Abu Ghraib prison. Nick Berg’s gristly death seemed to provide a counterpoint to Lindy England’s sorry pose.

If I were suggesting that U. S. Forces were behind the Nick Berg execution, the case has been made by many already, I would be going off track. It certainly reflected poorly on the insurgents. But making the other side look bad is no clever trick. We trained Central Americans to do it all the time. Take off your uniform, dress up like rebels, and make it look like they massacred the village and not you.

When the Iraqi police in Basra apprehended two British black-ops this summer and then refused to release to them to British custody, the British forces immediately organized a prison break by driving a tank into the police station. They rescued the captured brits before they would be made to explain why they were dressed up like insurgents and what they were planning to do with a carload of live Improvised Explosive Devices!

It is suggested that those who killed Nick Berg took Abu Ghraib off the front page. I would suggest that the abduction of westerners serves a motive more closely related to the Uruguayan – NYPD gambit.

Why aren’t these hostages taken from the ranks of American soldiers? Some of the hostages have been contractors, and I’m sure many of their abductors have been criminals. Large ransoms are being paid for these hostages, it stands to reason that organized crime wants a piece of it. And whether these abductions are sanctioned or renegade, they achieve the same result, for whomever.

For the most part, the highest visibility hostages have always been people sympathetic to the cause of righteousness. It makes the insurgent/resistance fighters look bad, but more importantly I bet it makes them feel bad. Whichever it is, the Iraqi people probably scramble as desperately as we do to save the lives of the hostages.

D. British aid workers kidnapped in Gaza
Peace workers go to Palestine for one purpose, to save Palestinian lives. Palestinians are being shot left and right by Israeli soldiers, it is only when they are accompanied by western volunteers that the Israelis are deterred from shooting them and that Palestinians have a chance of being permitted through checkpoints so that they can reach medical care, or so that their children can reach school unmolested.

Activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall died putting themselves between Palestinian civilians and Israeli rifles. Activists brave tough Israeli travel restrictions to get into the occupied territories so that they can try to save innocent lives.

Certainly only the most heartless of Palestinians could be threatening the lives of these altruist activists. Maybe the Israeli military is counting on the fact that most Palestinians will not be heartless enough to sit idly by.

If there are Palestinians who believe the kidnap scenario, perhaps they are trying to contact resistance members whom they believe might have some influence. Perhaps resistance members themselves are hurriedly trying to ferret out possible miscreants in their ranks.

Regardless of who is in possession of the captives, the Israeli military is no doubt studying everyone’s movements very carefully. Normally a resistance network has to communicate between cells very sparingly. But with the clock ticking, with international pressure, and the life of a selfless non-combatant at stake, resistance fighters might eshew the risks of disclosing their activities in their effort to facilitate the search for an unjustly jeopardized fellow human being.

What does Palestine have to do with Iraq?
More on that another time. It is fashionable to argue that the liberation of Iraq was less about democracy and more about oil. What are you now paying for gas? This war is even less about oil than it is about global dominance. In the Middle East our colonial presence is called Zionism.

Could the Americans be orchestrating the kidnapping of sympathetic westerners in an Uruguayan style provocation of the Iraqi resistance? Have our other military actions been any less dastardly?

Let’s pause for a moment of silence for the hostages. May both sides unite to save the lives of the captive Christian Peacemaker Team, and of Kate Burton and her parents in Palestine. And please Lord, may too many Iraqis not jeopardize their own lives trying to help save a handful of ours.

911 crackpot theory

Not hot enough to melt steel
Call me a crackpot, but I have to say it. I believe 9-11 was a setup.
 
There’s no denying that a band of Saudi gentlemen flew those planes into the World Trade Center. There’s no denying that the Saudi Muslims were upset about US military bases in their holy land. There’s no denying that the third world has cause to attack the first world. For all intents and purposes that is what happened, or should have happened even.
 
It is nearly irrelevant to suggest otherwise. Except to suggest that it needn’t have happened, or certainly needn’t have succeeded.

I would suggest, and I am not alone, that 9-11 was orchestrated maybe, facilitated certainly, and permitted without a doubt by the U.S. government.

Evidence abounds, and let me say that plenty of false evidence is being circulated to support deliberate crackpot theories. Efforts to reconstruct what happened on 911 are being thwarted not just by stone-walling but by disinformation campaigns as well to marginalize those who won’t drink the kool-aid.

If there is one thing that is very easy to prove, it’s that this administration has fought every effort to shed light on the subject.

The black boxes were never found. The Air Traffic Control voice recordings were immediately destroyed. Video surveillance cameras were out of order. Other surveillance tapes were confiscated. Survivors or their relations were offered unprecedented financial compensation in exchange for forfeiture of their right to investigate liabilities. The scope of the official investigation was kept very limited.

In practically every airline crash since the beginning of black boxes the black boxes have been found. They may be nearly destroyed, their tapes may be unusable, but the boxes were always there. They didn’t vaporize.

Just because an American TV audience was awed by the calamity of the falling towers does not mean mean that the gods of physics were likewise so struck that they relaxed the natural laws. Steel doesn’t melt at 1/5 the required temperature any more than you’d expect to make a horseshoe over a bonfire. A building doesn’t vaporize into its own footprint without well placed charges. Demolition companies would be out of work if all it took to fell two of the world’s tallest buildings was jet fuel.

A curious bit of evidence points to the hijackers having been assisted in their Florida flight training by the CIA. The flight school, even their rental car, was tied to the CIA. This detail makes for a very unique conspiracy theory indeed because it doesn’t suggest that everybody was in on it.

Why would the aspiring hijackers have needed the help of CIA? To evade the watchful eyes of the FBI. In fact the evidence became public that at several points the FBI had to be told to back off.

These days, even pre-911, you couldn’t buy a cup of coffee without somebody knowing about it. We saw with the quick apprehension of Timothy McVey that ATM transactions, credit card activities and car rentals are very easily sniffed out by the FBI. Where else could 19 single middle eastern men with Interpol profiles have rented a car but from an rental agency not listed in the phone book, not affiliated with national chains, and owned by someone with ties to the CIA?

Not everybody wanted to see the US attacked.

Believe what you want. Dismiss any of the 911 eleven theories which to you sound extreme. But you’ll probably also have to dismiss the theory that every last one of this nation’s defense systems failed that day, and that it’s alright that all the evidence is missing too.

It took over an hour for the planes to reach their destinations, we didn’t know they had diverted from their flight plans, we didn’t scramble jets to intercept, then we destroy all the Air Traffic Controller audio tapes of the ordeal?

The conclusion is horrific yes.

What if you were a friend of Valerie Plame?

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for the moment.

Let’s say you are the wife of a mid-management engineer employed at a manufacturing facility in the Middle East, or Africa, or anywhere in the world.

Say you were known to frequent parties thrown by the wife of the American Embassador. Or you attended monthly luncheons perhaps, or any of the multitude of fund raisers and NGO activities which she attended.

Say you still kept in touch, or exchanged Christmas cards. Perhaps she called you even after she’d moved away. Perhaps she has asked you to welcome friends of hers who will be visiting your country.

Say that wife’s name was Valerie Plame, wife of Embassador Joe Wilson. Say perhaps that you were one of many social contacts that Valerie Plame kept to talk about social issues, especially about weapons proliferation. Perhaps you shared a concern for illegal weapons development or manufacture.

Now say you suddenly read in the newspaper that it has been revealed that Valerie Plame was not just an embassador’s wife, but a CIA operative.

Who saw you with her? Who has access to the telephone records which could implicate you? And what about everyone else in danger of being suspected of revealing secrets to the US CIA? Your diplomat, ex-pat friends and fellow nationals, all around the world, members of other social groups, peace societies.

Depending on where you live, on how paranoid is your governement, or on how corrupt are you industrialists, you are now a marked person. Among countless others. You may be viewed as a current threat. Or you may be a target for kiling merely for nationalist honor.

Bob Novak was the conservative columnist who outed Valerie Plame. He was tipped off by two senior white house sources who wanted to intimidate Embassador Wilson from speaking out against the war. Bob Novak refuses to name the sources, many believe one of them to be Karl Rove.

Shouldn’t Bob Novak be held liable none the less? He knew that outing a CIA agent was a federal crime. Blowing Valerie Plame’s cover was the least of the repercussions. Think of the thousands of her friends and contacts all over the world who may or may not have been helping the cause of reducing nuclear proliferation.