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Blunderov
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Big up, USA !
« on: 2006-07-18 02:59:07 »
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[Blunderov] The Politburo has just returned from a holiday in the USA * where, she says, she has never been treated so well in her life before. She acclaims the politeness and help she received everywhere she went, even from cops.

Her conclusion is that the USA looks very different from the inside than it does from out.

Big up USA !

*Seattle chiefly. I've seen the pics and I think I'm in love - snowy peaks, waterways, lots of dogs, interesting architecture and charming people. Plots are afoot to send me there apparently. I'm game.
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Casey
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #1 on: 2006-07-18 08:30:17 »
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Yeah, we're not all bad.    Just like the French weren't all cheese eating surrender monkeys when I was over there with my wife last month.    It's interesting how the talking heads and news reports can have such an effect on people's perceptions. 

Best,
Casey
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #2 on: 2006-07-18 12:48:06 »
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Congratulations Casey.

Hermit

PS There is a story about this phenomena of nice Americans (and Frenchmen).

It is said that the Parisian is the nicest, most gracious and generous person on the planet.

As long as you meet him outside of France.

Americans are completely the opposite.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #3 on: 2006-07-18 13:31:34 »
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Blunderov,

The Soviet Union was a polite place too. Perhaps for similar reasons. Police states don't need to be impolite. They have other methods available. Speaking of police states, it isn't just closer than you think. It is already here. This was brought to my attention in a fairly forcible way courtesy of United Express.

Returning from a trip to Los Angeles I made a number of decisions which, it was to become apparent, were of dubious merit. The first was to fly with United. The second was to route through Denver. Even before I left Los Angeles, my flight to Cedar Rapids was shown on the notice boards as delayed. I let my family know the expected arrival time. When I arrived in Denver, I checked on the departure time and gate and went to eat. When I returned to the previously posted gate after eating, it was as if my scheduled flight had never been. Queries from United Staff sent me to what I initially thought of as the poorly named "Passenger Service" where a person whose sole job was apparently to be pleasant while clutching any useful information to her bosom then directed me to a second "Passenger Service" point on the other end of the concourse. Walking there, I discovered a closed and empty counter. While this was hardly less communicative than the first service representative it wasn't going to get me to Cedar Rapids. Returning to the gate I got sent to yet another Passenger Service point. Clearly I had come to the right place. I took a position at the rear of the vast queue of unhappy victims of United. An hour passed as four overworked agents dealt with passengers at a rate just fast enough to encourage the United Victims to imagine that the queue was moving at a glacial rate. So glacial that there was serious concern that the glaciers might all have evaporated before I got to the front of the ever growing queue.

Two hours later, with two hundred people in a line that now stretched back across the concourse, an elderly southern European walked up to the counter and started complaining. He was not even slightly aggressive, nor did he swear. He simply shouted that the service stank, that they needed more agents, etc.

Moments later four burly, black clothed Gestapo arrived, cuffed the lone protester (doing what any European might have done quite safely at home), and marched him off. To my embarrassment,  nobody in the crowd said anything, despite the fact that his arrest seemed to trigger United fetching another supervisor, some more agents and a slightly faster movement of the queue. My mild objections (I know about US cops' tendency to regard any objections as “interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty”) were met by the polite observation that there were more handcuffs available. As I wanted to get home, I shut the fuck up (blush).



It still didn't help me get home.

When I finally (three hours later) reached the head of the queue, I learned from an agent as useless as he was polite - and he was terribly polite, that the next direct flight was on Monday afternoon. I settled for an indirect connection. An early morning flight from Denver to Minneapolis. Followed by an early afternoon flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. Finally a late afternoon flight from Chicago to Cedar Rapids. With an arrival 18 hours later than planned. And 8 hours driving by my family. I could have driven from Denver to home in the same time period. And probably would have arrived more rested.

As punishment I was put up for the night in a very industrial, smelly, $20 a night kind of dive. United also provided me with "meal vouchers," one to the tune of $9 and another to the tune of $4. The stand-up take-away food I bought at the airport with them cost $ 16 and $14.

The US government gave the airline industry $15 billion last year. More than it has given the railways in all their years of operation. I'm writing to everyone I know to suggest that next year, if they have any money at all, that the government give it to Amtrack. For all that Amtrack is horrible, they could hardly do worse with it than United. And it might actually do the country some good when the cheap-oil runs out.

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Hermit

New Marketing Slogans: “Victims of United, Unite”  and “Fly United, Get Arrested”
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Blunderov
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #4 on: 2006-07-18 17:22:00 »
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Hermit

Yes, I take your point. In fact I had to warn the Politburo very sternly before she departed that it is illegal to even be sarcastic to airport officials in America. The Politburo can be, shall we politely say, impatient, with officialdom. Or anyone actually, but but very especially officialdom. It was of much concern to me that circumstances in which her patience might be tried could arise. Happily this did not occur.

But the people were splendid. As was Seattle.

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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #5 on: 2006-07-18 19:25:28 »
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Oh dear.

I had meant to mention that I eventually figured out why clusters of United agents are called "passenger service points". It has nothing to do with "service" as in "helpful", but is rather related to the fact that when you send a mare to be serviced, you expect her to return in foal.

Like the option to purchase a "comfortable seat" on board the aircraft, vaseline is an extra charge item.

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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #6 on: 2007-10-11 03:49:07 »
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Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

[ Hermit: Remember this?

I recently posted [ Church of Virus BBS, General, Serious Business, Do you feel safer?, Hermit, 2007-09-21 ] about how the fashion Gestapo at Boston Airport have decided that it is critical to have the power to shoot people whose apparel they disapprove of.



And most of the world watched the Tasering of Andrew Meyer at the University of Florida for daring to ask John Kerry the wrong questions. Well, it appears that others are noticing - and speaking up about it too. I'll lead off with an earlier article by Naomi Wolf, whose latest book, "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," on this subject, was released in September not least because this article is referred to in the next.]


From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Source: The Guardian
Authors: Naomi Wolf
Dated: 2007-04-24

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. [ Hermit: I think that Naomi Wolf misses the point. As simple observation proves, and as President Ahmadinejad of Iran reminded Americans, penal statistics support the fact that rather than becoming as "unfree" as many other nations, America is significantly less free than any other industrialized nation.] Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth. [ Hermit: Although professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's book, "The Israel Lobby," as well as the reaction to it, shows that such "myths" can sometimes be founded. ]

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. [ Hermit : And as I have previously noted here, the department of Homeland Insecurity has hired Kalugin and Primakov of the KGB, as well as Markus Wolfe of STASI to run the USA's internal monitoring programs. ]

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.


Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. [/i] [ Hermit: Again I disagree with Naomi Wolf. As I will show in a parallel thread, democracy in America is all but moribund in all but name. ] [/i]

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #7 on: 2007-10-11 04:25:57 »
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The End of America: The Police State is Right Here, Right Now

Source: CarolynBaker.net
Authors: Carolyn Baker (adjunct professor of history, a former psychotherapist, an author, and a student of mythology and ritual)
Dated: 2007-09-20

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air-however slight-lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness. Justice William O. Douglas

In April, 2007 I was pleasantly surprised to find Naomi Wolf's article, "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps" [ Hermit: Supra ] posted in several places online. I have been a fan of Wolf for many years, greatly appreciating her works and especially her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth. I had been looking for a list-or more specifically, an encyclopedia of the losses of civil liberties in the United States that might clarify for my history students the extent to which America has become a fascist empire. Wolf's "10 Easy Steps" was perfect, but her just-published book, The End Of America: Letter Of Warning To A Young Patriot, from which the 10 easy steps was compiled, offers an even fuller picture-a succinct and engaging explanation of how our civil liberties have been hijacked in the past decade. It is the most poignant, powerful, genuinely patriotic piece of literature I have encountered since Thomas Paine's Common Sense. No wonder then, that the book's cover greatly resembles that 46-page tract by Paine written in 1775-as well it should.

One of the most frightening realities of teaching college history is that most students rarely have a clue what fascism is. They know about Hitler and the extermination of Jews, but they see little connection with Nazi rule in the 1930s and 40s and the current political milieu in the United States. Overwhelmingly, they cannot define fascism, nor can they define socialism or democracy. After all, they were pre-occupied during grammar school with becoming standardized human beings by way of taking standardized "No Child's Behind Left" tests, five hours a day, four days a week. So why would they know the definitions of fascism, socialism or democracy?

Refreshingly, Wolf is not shy about using the term fascism and lets the reader know why. "I have made a deliberate choice in using the terms fascist tactics and fascist shift when I describe some events in America now. I stand by my choice. I am not being heated or even rhetorical; I am being technical." (20) She explains that where Americans tend to see the various political "isms" as all-or-nothing, that perception is often inaccurate because of what she calls a "range of authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, and varieties of Fascist states...there are many shades of gray on the spectrum from an open to a closed society." (20)

Wolf also emphasizes that America has flirted with fascism openly in the 1930s when numerous corporations and robber barons helped finance Hitler and when as Edwin Black notes in IBM And The Holocaust, some American corporations assisted the Nazi regime in carrying out its "final solution" to the "Jewish problem." In fact, several of these corporate tycoons [ Hermit: Allegedly including GW Bush's Grandfather ] attempted to stage a coup d' etat to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and restructure the American government under fascist control. A thorough investigation of American politics and society from the end of the Civil War until the present moment reveals, as I have carefully traced in my book U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, that much of recent American history is replete with a preference on the part of corporations and the politicians they own for an economic and political system on the far right end of the spectrum. In fact, resistance to fascism in the United States has been an arduous and daunting struggle for those who have been able to understand and oppose the appeal that fascism has to the corporatocracy, and in fact, take seriously Mussolini's fundamental definition of fascism: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

As an historian who views American history as the complex unfolding of events that it is, I feel invigorated upon hearing someone like Wolf-especially the Wolf of feminist Beauty Myth fame-part company with the presentation of the Founders as "dead white men" inwardly tormented by various hypocrisies, such as the ownership of slaves and the subordination of women. Yes, Jefferson owned slaves and fathered six children by one of them, but what gets lost in that drama and other colorful stories of the Founders is that they were also thinking, speaking, and writing highly subversive thoughts. "You are not taught," says Wolf, that "these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were wiling to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see." (27) I do not wish to romanticize the Founders and their generation living in a milieu replete with racism, misogyny, and classism, but neither will I throw their achievements out with the bathwater of political correctness, nor is Wolf willing to do so in her examination of them.

In the "10 easy steps" outlined by Wolf, countries move from open to closed and repressive societies by devolving past certain markers, and Wolf makes a powerful case for the way in which the United States is following a similar pattern without any significant deviation. In each instance she compares and contrasts how America's adherence to the pattern compares or contrasts with the pattern in pre-World War II Germany. The 10 steps are:
    [1] Invoking an external and internal threat
    [2] Establishing secret prisons
    [3] Developing a paramilitary force
    [4] Surveiling ordinary citizens
    [5] Infiltrating citizens' groups
    [6] Arbitrarily detaining and releasing citizens
    [7] Targeting key individuals
    [8] Restricting the press
    [9] Casting criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"
    [10] Subverting the rule of law

As noted in the quote from Justice Douglas above, the fascist shift is a protracted process; it never happens overnight, and in U.S. History Uncensored, I offer an historical narrative describing exactly how we have arrived where we are-at "the end of America". Some aspects of the process were generated before the U.S. Civil War, but our recent history is nothing less than the story of the acceleration of the fascist agenda and the death of the Republic.

Frequently, books come into our lives with momentous timing. Several weeks ago a friend of mine was traveling through a small town in upstate New York looking for the location of a meeting he was scheduled to attend. Realizing that he was lost, he spotted a police officer in a marked car and waived to the officer to pull over. The officer pulled over, and my friend innocently got out of his car to walk back to the officer's car. Suddenly, the officer's voice came blasting across a loud speaker, "Get back in the car! Stop where you are! Get back in the car!" My friend returned to his vehicle and waited for the officer to approach his driver's side window. The officer, with a hand on his holstered firearm, angrily asked my friend what he wanted. When my friend asked him for directions, he replied with hostility that he didn't know the location of the place for which my friend was searching and once again repeated, "Never get out of your car when you're dealing with a police officer." So much for asking directions from a police officer these days.

On another occasion, two friends of mine returning from Canada were detained at the U.S./Canadian border, and while one of them had a U.S. passport, the other had forgotten to bring his. He produced a variety of identification but was taken aside, questioned, shouted at, and harassed in an extremely hostile manner as if he were an enemy of the state. Fortunately, after over-the-top intimidation from a couple of surly customs officers, he was allowed to enter the U.S.

About three weeks ago I was returning from a routine visit to the dentist in Mexico and had a U.S. passport with me, even though none will be required for returning from Mexico until January, 2008. I was told by a very aggressive female customs agent to pull over to the center where vehicles are detained. I was ordered in a very hostile manner to give her my driver's license and the keys to my vehicle and stay in my vehicle. When I asked what the problem was, I was told to be quiet and again, to stay in my vehicle. Having taught in Mexico for three years, returning to the U.S. every day and rarely having to show any identification whatsoever, I found this procedure to be astonishingly rigid and unnecessary. I have made many trips to Mexico in recent months and have never had any problem when the automatic photos that are taken of every license plate crossing the border appeared on U.S. Customs computer screens.

After what seemed like an eternity the female officer returned and told me that it appeared that I had had an expired vehicle registration four years ago which I had not taken care of and that I needed to do so at once. She gave me the name of the court where the offense was allegedly registered. The very next day I contacted the court and discovered that indeed I had been stopped four years ago for an expired registration for which I was given a warning. Every year since, I have purchased my annual registration well before the deadline, but the offense was never brought to my attention, and I even acquired a new driver's license last year through the motor vehicles division and was not informed of the offense. Not wanting any further hassle regarding the "heinous crime" of having an expired registration four years ago, I agreed to pay the small fine imposed by the court.

Some readers may assume that I was harassed because of who I am and my open delivery of alternative news and opinions on this website daily. I, on the other hand, do not believe that this was "all about me." Whether or not it was, it is blatantly obvious to me that the behavior of law enforcement in the United States has shifted dramatically in recent months. Whether or not I was targeted, which I sincerely doubt, this kind of treatment is becoming standard in law enforcement procedure throughout the United States.

And now fast-forward to Monday, September 17, 2007 (U.S. Constitution Day), at the University of Florida and the tasering of a student questioning John Kerry regarding the 2004 elections and Kerry's membership in Skull and Bones-an incident which has been viewed by millions on the internet and on mainstream TV news broadcasts. Writing of this debacle, Wolf's article "A Shocking Moment For Society" appeared on various internet sites this morning, and in it she states:
    There is a chapter in my new book, The End of America, entitled "Recast Criticism as ‘Espionage' and Dissent as ‘Treason,'" that conveys why this moment is the horrific harbinger it is. I argue that strategists using historical models to close down an open society start by using force on ‘undesirables,' ‘aliens,' ‘enemies of the state,' and those considered by mainstream civil society to be untouchable; in other times they were, of course, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals. Then, once society has been acculturated to that use of force, the ‘blurring of the line' begins and the parameters of criminalized speech are extended - the definition of ‘terrorist' expanded - and the use of force begins to be deployed in HIGHLY VISIBLE, STRATEGIC and VISUALLY SHOCKING WAYS against people that others see and identify with as ordinary citizens [ Hermit : or, as in Boston, as fashion victims ]. The first ‘torture cellars' used by the SA, in Germany between 1931 and 1933 - even before the National Socialists gained control of the state, during the years when Germany was still a parliamentary democracy - were informal and widely publicized in the mainstream media. Few German citizens objected because those abused there were seen as ‘other' - even though the abuse was technically illegal. But then, after this escalation of the use of force was accepted by the population, students, journalists, opposition leaders, and clergy were similarly abused during their own arrests. Within six months dissent was stilled in Germany.

    What is the lesson for us from this and from other closing societies, some of them democracies? You can have a working Congress or Parliament; newspapers; human rights groups; even elections; but when ordinary people start to be hurt by the state for speaking out, dissent closes quickly and the shock chills opposition very, very fast. Once that happens, democracy has been so weakened that major tactical and strategic incursions - greater violations of democratic process - are far more likely. If there is dissent about the vote in Florida in this next presidential election - and the police are tasering voters' rights groups - we will still have an election.

    What we will not have is liberty.

    We have to understand what time it is. When the state starts to hurt people for asking questions, we can no longer operate on the leisurely time of a strong democracy - the ‘Oh gosh how awful!' kind of time. It is time to take to the streets. It is time to confront those committing crimes against the Constitution. The window has now dropped several precipitous inches and once it is closed there is no opening it without great and sorrowful upheaval.


As I read Wolf's latest article, I realized that despite my enormous admiration for her and The End Of America, there are a number of areas where I must disagree with her.

First, the only thing shocking to me about the University of Florida incident is that so many Americans are shocked that it happened. Last night I posted a communication to her mailing list regarding the incident from former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney who says:
    No police officer should be in the business of denying Constitutional rights to anyone; I am particularly chagrined when it appears that a black police officer participated in this attack on an innocent student.

    What is happening to us?  How much more will the people accept??  I was outraged as early as 2000 when Florida was stolen and the Democrats said nothing!!!!  Now, innocent students get tasered just for asking questions.

    What kind of US Senator do we have who can't or won't answer a question about his own election that affects all of us???


Wolf has given us a compendium of civil and Constitutional rights stolen from us during the past eight years of the Bush administration [Hermit : And as I show in a parallel thread, the 2004 election results were even more severely, but more expertly tainted than the 2000 results. Which is what some of the questions asked of Kerry were driving to.] . If one understands this odyssey of oppression, then yesterday's tasering of a questioning student makes perfect sense. I appreciate why Wolf used the word "shocking" in her most recent article, but I'd be willing to bet that she isn't shocked at all-not after the extraordinary documentation she has given us in The End Of America. What I do believe she wishes to clarify is the intentionally traumatizing methodology of law enforcement to maintain social control.

Secondly, I must take issue with Wolf regarding her statement that "...we on the left must snap out of our ‘it's-all-the-WTO-the-two-parties-are-the-same' torpor...We have to reengage in an old-fashioned commitment to democratic action and believe once again in an old-fashioned notion of the Republic. We need to help lead a democracy movement in America like the ones that have toppled repressive regimes overseas." (141)

Again, let's fast forward not to Monday, but today and the headline "Senate bars bill to restore detainee rights"-a decision which supports the Bush administration's denial of habeas corpus to Guantanamo prisoners who want to challenge their imprisonment in court. Need we reiterate one more time that since the 2006 elections, the Democrats have done virtually nothing to end the occupation of Iraq? Need we watch the video one more time of John Kerry standing mute and statue-like on the University of Florida auditorium stage-saying or doing nothing as a student was tasered for asking him why he handed the 2004 election to George W. Bush? Does anyone seriously believe that in a world where fellow students applaud as police remove and taser a questioning student and do nothing to speak up against such an outrage that we will see a viable, effective "democracy movement in America like the ones that have toppled repressive regimes overseas"?

As for Wolf's suggestion in today's article that we "take to the streets", the police state is preparing for that eventuality as well by letting us know that it has developed severely injuring electromagnetic crowd control technology that will dramatically limit how many and how often people can "take to the streets." Welcome to full-spectrum "1984".

I repeat: the police state is right here, right now!

Moreover, some pivotal factors that Wolf has not addressed are global energy depletion, climate change, and global economic meltdown which are exacerbating the fascist shift about which she so brilliantly writes and which will continue to embolden that shift as energy scarcity, [http://logicalscience.blogspot.com/2007/07/pentagon-agw-thread-vastly-eclipses.html]climate chaos[/url], and financial crises add fuel to the fires of terrorism that the ruling elite have so consciously and carefully incited and fanned throughout America. As American society continues to unravel, the fascist shift will escalate, and what is left of our civil liberties will further evaporate.

As for political parties, I prefer the definition offered by Mike Ruppert in "America: From Freedom To Fascism" in which he explains that the two major parties are like two crime families-the Genoveses and the Gambinos. They function like players in a crap game that feign opposition to each other, but when the chips are down, they will always unite to serve their common interests. (If the Iraq occupation is not a case in point, then I don't know what is.) When we vote in presidential elections for corporately-owned candidates or "the lesser evil", we are merely choosing between the two crime families, and even if one candidate were not a crime family member, our votes in the past two presidential elections, as Bev Harris has so astutely demonstrated, have been hacked. In the throes of the current, and I might add, rapidly-accelerating fascist shift, what evidence do we have for assuming that if there is an election in 2008, anything will be different? Tell me again, what's the definition of insanity?

At this moment another Naomi comes to mind-Naomi Klein whose book Shock Doctrine I shall soon review on this site. In that work Klein documents one of the key strategies of fascist empires: shocking their citizens into submission in a variety of ways from widespread societal terrorism to the administering of electroshock therapy to individuals. What we witnessed at the University of Florida yesterday, and what we are likely to see more frequently in America, are deliberate shock tactics applied by law enforcement to citizens for the purpose of achieving massive social control.

Some of my students who are criminal justice majors tell me that the latest strategies now being taught to police officers are "shock doctrine" techniques which terrorize and intimidate civilians in order to control them. Law enforcement officers are no longer encouraged to "keep a cool head" but to "follow their own instincts" (which usually means their own internal, adrenaline-charged state of terror) and react with full force because it's easier to apologize (or encounter a lawsuit) than to ask permission or risk being killed. Terrified people should not be wearing a badge and carrying a gun, and when they are, a fully terrorized society is guaranteed.

In spite of my disagreements with Naomi Wolf's suggested solutions, I cannot recommend The End Of America enthusiastically enough. It is now a permanent part of my U.S. history curriculum and is an ideal tool not only for educators, but for parents who want to teach their children where all those civil liberties we used to have actually came from as well as how and why they are disappearing in the present moment.
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #8 on: 2007-10-11 04:56:35 »
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American Lockdown: Law Enforcement Out Of Control and Beyond The Pale

Source: CarolynBaker.net
Authors: Carolyn Baker (adjunct professor of history living in Southern New Mexico, a former psychotherapist, an author, and a student of mythology and ritual) cbaker@nmsu.edu
Dated: 2007-10-10

In my recent article "The End Of America: The Police State Is Right Here, Right Now" [ Hermit: Supra ] I included experiences of escalating intimidation on the part of law enforcement in the United States within recent months. I must confess that when I cite such incidents, I fear that in a few days or weeks, it will all go away, and everyone else, myself included, will begin to question the validity of the examples, breathing a heavy sigh of relief and rejoicing that the situation isn't nearly as dire as I'm asserting it is.

This time, however, I have nothing to fear because since that article was posted, the ante of out-of-control law enforcement in America appears to have been upped with a rapidity that I could not have imagined just a few weeks ago.

Have we not all heard about the New York woman on her way to rehab who passed through the Phoenix airport, became distraught when she had just missed her flight [ Hermit : It transpires she managed to control herself when she missed her flight by a minute, but became distraught when a passenger on the bnext flight offered her his seat and was told by the gate staff that she couldn't go on the flight due to "security regulations." Her arrest was triggered when she repeatedly shouted, "I am not a terrorist" ] , and was arrested for disorderly conduct by airport police? The suspect, Carol Ann Gotbaum, was handcuffed and then placed in a holding cell and left alone. According to police, when they returned, she was dead. At this writing, Gotbaum's family and officials are awaiting the autopsy report-the "official" cause of death.

Just a few days later, again in Phoenix, a male suspect was handcuffed after an on-foot chase by police, and shortly after being handcuffed, according to police, he lost consciousness. He was then taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.

In today's New York Daily News, the story "Science teacher's brush with police ends in heart attack" relates an incident that happened back in June of this year when an African American Brooklyn high school teacher was mistaken for a perpetrator by police, suffered a heart attack, and was left on his own by the street cops who accused him of "acting."

As outrageous as these incidents may be, the most chilling event appeared on networks across the nation this morning with the story of a twenty year-old Wisconsin sheriff's deputy who shot and killed six young people at a party Saturday night. The most obvious question: How is it that a community of citizens allows a twenty year-old to become a deputy sheriff? Why not give an M-16 to a third-grader? [ Hermit : I disagree with the tenor of this assessment. If it is legitimate to give 18 year olds M16s and then to unleash them on the people of Iraq, then it is surely equitable to do the same in Wisconsin. ]

Nevertheless, all of these stories are connected by a common thread: Law enforcement in the United States, whose duty it is to "protect and serve" have now become not just part of the problem but in fact, predatory devourers of those they are sworn to keep safe. [ Hermit : Indeed, any analysis of the Bush unregime's misrule will reflect that the "forces of law and order" have become a much greater threat to the average American than even the worst that Usoma bin Laden could achieve. The analysis becomes even more devastating when extended to cover the Clinton era as well. Judging by the statistics, the police in the USA serve no significant role other than to terrorize the populace, and they do a much better job of it than the so called "terrorists", that is the ones without badges. ]

Deepening collapse will be attended by manifestations of the unraveling of all institutions, one of the most frightening examples being law enforcement's hysterical repression of citizens.

Although we are seeing more media attention given to private security companies such as Blackwater, we should not assume that the power and funding granted to these firms will dissipate anytime soon. They are an integral part of the Shock Doctrine brilliantly analyzed by Naomi Klein in her new book of the same title. The greater the extent of the empire's collapse, the greater the intensity of the shock applied to those who reside within the belly of the beast. From those shocks flow not only increased terror and social control, but flourishing profits for private security companies.

The U.S. government is making it unmistakably clear that it intends to use every avenue of power at its disposal to lock down the nation. A story sent to my subscribers today from the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) reveals that in its correspondence with the Treasury Department "The Treasury Department was surprisingly candid in that correspondence, asserting the U.S. Government's authority, in declared emergencies, to confiscate precious metals and to restrict ownership of mining shares -- and to confiscate and restrict every other financial asset as well."

Almost daily we hear of increased surveillance of Americans as well as unprecedented restrictions on travel, not only on persons entering the U.S. but on persons traveling within the country and on dissenters who attempt to enter other countries as in the case of two activists, Medea Benjamin and Ann Wright who were denied entrance into Canada on Thursday "because their names appeared on the FBI's National Crime Information Center database."

Another relevant story relinked today pertains to the anti-terrorism Vigilant Shield 2008 exercise of U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) "The series of exercises is mandated by the US government to prepare, prevent and respond to any number of national crises that would call for the use of the military inside the United States. Vigilant Shield 2008 builds a scenario of a domestic disaster in the US (terrorist attack or natural disaster). It posits the domestic use of the US military including a special role for the US Air Force." As we know, a precedent for using the U.S. military inside the U.S. was set in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005.

For those considering expatriation, it will soon be too late to leave. For those who choose to remain within this increasingly locked down nation, it will be necessary to acquire survival skills, a strong community of friends, and a great deal of stealth in order to navigate this empire's exacerbating Orwellian treachery.
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #9 on: 2007-10-26 03:26:14 »
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[Blunderov] Ah "disorderly conduct"; a favourite offence beloved of fascists everywhere."Hooliganism" "and "anti-social behaviour" are some other good ones. Eventually these can mutate into, for instance, "cultural deviancy" and "anti-state activities". Then comes "preventitive detention" and "re-education" with "non-lethal" techniques . Habeus corpus goes without saying...goes out the window that is. Sometimes closely followed by falling bodies. Terrorists are quite often afflicted by a gene which causes them to inexplicably jump out of very high windows. There's another one that causes them to spontaneously shed their finger nails but this less often seen.



http://shadowdemocracy.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/we-need-protesters-like-code-pink-more-than-ever/

We Need Protesters Like Code Pink More Than Ever…
Posted on October 24, 2007 by Matthew J. Podoba

An aggressive protester confronted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at close quarters today as she got set to testify before the House Foreign Relations Committee on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A protester with blood-colored paint on her hands rushed toward Rice as she entered the hearing room, yelling repeatedly that Rice was a “war criminal”, as she waved her blood covered hands in front of Rice. The anti-war protester was later identified as Desiree Anita Ali-Fairooz.

Fairooz is a member of the anti-war group Code Pink, and got within inches of Rice’s face before security officials removed her from the hearing room. Chair Tom Lantos ordered all other members of Code Pink to be removed from the hearing room as well.

Of course conservatives have been bashing Ali-Fairooz on the blogs, labeling her a ‘wierdo’ and another ‘idiot protester.’ Some conservatives are also questioning why the Democrats would allow these people into hearings in the first place. The answer would be REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT. Remember Abe Lincoln talked about it in the Gettysburg Address - government of the people, by the people and for the people? Thank God we have protesters like this that will stand up and confront war criminals like Bush, Rice and Cheney, while fighting to protect the innocent who have no voice at all, and ensure full disclosure, instead of the secretive meetings behind closed doors that have come to define a corrupt Republican party - a party increasingly out of touch with middle America.

If groups like Code Pink, MoveOn.org, and Media Matters don’t keep people like Rice accountable, who will? The main stream media sure as hell won’t do it. Most main stream media outlets just broadcast the latest government propaganda at the behest of their conservative boards of directors, as soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians die by the bushel, while their country is systematically devastated.

In light of this administration’s latest rhetoric regarding Iran, we need to rely on secondary news sources more than ever, as well as grass root protesters who are actually digging up facts and making their voices heard. The media never asks any hard questions or even attempts to expose the insanity behind the Neoconservative movement and their insatiable appetite to wage a bloody campaign with the purpose of forcefully instituting their inherently faulty ideology on the people of Iraq. The media has been utterly useless since 9/11 in my opinion. Couple this with recent hearings as well as a vote on further media consolidation and market monopolization by the FCC, and it becomes brutally clear that organizations like Code Pink need our support.
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #10 on: 2007-11-27 09:52:32 »
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The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act

[Hermit: Why did I have to read about this on a blog? Why is this not considered news? Does the fact that "The Simon Wiesenthal Center" reportedly testified before congress in support of this act, apparently asserting that  "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" is an example of a homegrown terrorist organization have anything to do with why the Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly support this bill (A sorry total of 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats dared to vote against this bill). ]

External References:


Source: huffingtonpost
Authors: Philip Giraldi|
Dated: 2007-11-26

There has been a long tradition of fear-mongering legislation in the United States directed against groups and individuals believed to threaten the established order. The first such measures were the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress in 1798 during the administration of the second president of the United States John Adams. The Acts, consisting of four separate laws, made it more difficult to become a citizen, sought to control real or imagined foreign agents operating in the United States, and also gave the government broad powers to control "sedition." Sedition was defined as "resisting any law of the United States or any act of the President" punishable by a prison sentence of up to two years. It also made illegal "false, scandalous or malicious writing" directed against either the government or government officials. The next President, Thomas Jefferson declared that three out of the four laws were unconstitutional and pardoned everyone who had been convicted under them.

Early in the last century, hysterical fear of anarchists resulted in the conviction and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti 1927 despite clear evidence that the two men were innocent. A few years later, in 1934, a Special Committee on Un-American Activities was set up by Congress to monitor the activities of fascists in the United States. Ironically, the two congressmen who were most instrumental in the establishment of the committee, Samuel Dickstein of New York and Martin Dies of Texas, both Democrats, were themselves tainted by activities that might reasonably be described as Un-American. Dickstein was himself a paid agent of the Soviet NKVD intelligence agency and Dies regularly spoke at Ku Klux Klan rallies. After the Second World War, the committee was renamed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and focused almost exclusively on communists, continuing to do so until it was incorporated into the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. Concurrent with HUAC on the Senate side, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican, became the public face of anti-communism in the early 1950s, with his frequent claims that communists had infiltrated the US government at various levels. Few of the claims could be substantiated, however, and McCarthy eventually fell out of favor and was censured by the Senate.

More recently, there has been the post 9/11 creation of a virtual avalanche of legislation and commissions designed to protect the country at the expense of the Bill of Rights. The two Patriot Acts of 2001 and 2006 and the Military Commission Act or 2006 have collectively limited constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, the right to habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights have all been disregarded in the rush to make it easier to investigate people, put them in jail, and torture them if necessary. A recent executive order of July 17th, 2007 goes even farther, authorizing the President to seize the property of anyone who "Threatens Stabilization Efforts in Iraq." The government's own Justice Department decides what constitutes "threatening stabilization efforts" and the order does not permit a challenge to the information that the seizure is based on.

One would have thought that the systematic dismantling of the Constitution of the United States would have been enough to satisfy even the most Jacobin neoconservative, but there is more on the horizon, and it is coming from people who call themselves Democrats. The mainstream media has made no effort to inform the public of the impending Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. The Act, which was sponsored by Congresswoman Jane Harman of California, was passed in the House by an overwhelming 405 to 6 vote on October 24th and is now awaiting approval by the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which is headed by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. It is believed that approval by the committee will take place shortly, to be followed by passage by the entire Senate.

Harman's bill contends that the United States will soon have to deal with home grown terrorists and that something must be done to anticipate and neutralize the problem. The act deals with the issue through the creation of a congressional commission that will be empowered to hold hearings, conduct investigations, and designate various groups as "homegrown terrorists." The commission will be tasked to propose new legislation that will enable the government to take punitive action against both the groups and the individuals who are affiliated with them. Like Joe McCarthy and HUAC in the past, the commission will travel around the United States and hold hearings to find the terrorists and root them out. Unlike inquiries in the past where the activity was carried out collectively, the act establishing the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Commission will empower all the members on the commission to arrange hearings, obtain testimony, and even to administer oaths to witnesses, meaning that multiple hearings could be running simultaneously in various parts of the country. The ten commission members will be selected for their "expertise," though most will be appointed by Congress itself and will reflect the usual political interests. They will be paid for their duties at the senior executive pay scale level and will have staffs and consultants to assist them. Harman's bill does not spell out terrorist behavior and leaves it up to the Commission itself to identify what is terrorism and what isn't. Language inserted in the act does partially define "homegrown terrorism" as "planning" or "threatening" to use force to promote a political objective, meaning that just thinking about doing something could be enough to merit the terrorist label. The act also describes "violent radicalization" as the promotion of an "extremist belief system" without attempting to define "extremist."

As currently envisioned, the Commission will not operate in perpetuity. After the group has done its work, in eighteen months' time, a Center of Excellence for the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism will be established to study the lessons learned. The center will operate either out of the Department of Homeland Security or out of an appropriate academic institution and will be tasked with continuing to monitor the homegrown terrorism problem and proposing legislation and other measures to counter it.

As should be clear from the vagueness of the definitions, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act could easily be abused to define any group that is pressuring the political system as "terrorist," ranging from polygamists, to second amendment rights supporters, anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, and peace demonstrators. In reality, of course, it will be primarily directed against Muslims and Muslim organizations. Given that, there is the question of who will select which groups will be investigated by the roving commissions. There is no evidence to suggest that there will be any transparent or objective screening process. Through their proven access both to the media and to Congress, the agenda will undoubtedly be shaped by the usual players including David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Steve Emerson, and Frank Gaffney who see a terrorist hiding under every rock, particularly if the rock is concealing a Muslim. They and their associates will undoubtedly find plenty of terrorists and radical groups to investigate. Many of the suspects will inevitably be "anti-American" professors at various universities and also groups of Palestinians organized against the Israeli occupation, but it will be easily to use the commission formula to sweep them all in for examination.

The view that 9/11 has "changed everything" is unfortunately all too true. It has unleashed American paranoia, institutionalized mistrust of foreigners, and created a fantasy universe in which a US beset by enemies must do anything and everything to counter the alien threat. If it were a sane world, it would be difficult to imagine why anyone would believe that a Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act is even necessary. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in strengthening law enforcement and intelligence capabilities against terrorists and has every tool imaginable to investigate and make arrests. It has created a whole new bloated and dysfunctional branch of government in the Department of Homeland Security. What is not needed is groups of congressionally empowered vigilantes roaming the country at will looking for "homegrown terrorism."
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #11 on: 2007-12-13 02:20:00 »
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[Blunderov] America looks more and more like Apartheid South Africa as Bishop Tutu has pointed out.

Reuters Mon Dec 10, 2007 9:40am EST

Totalitarianism is not pretty.
South African apartheid's 'Total Strategy' Posted by Helena Cobban at April 3, 2005 10:32 PM

<snip> You could say that the combination of those two sets of developments, both outside and inside the country, acted as a kind of "9/11" for the leaders of the apartheid government. They described what they saw happening as a Soviet-orchestrated "Total Onslaught" on the good, White, Christian, pro-western values that the apartheid system sought to uphold. This Total Onslaught had to be met with a "Total Strategy", that would be pursued simultaneously both inside and outside the country and involved many elements of social control, and social and political manipulation, at many different levels-- not just the immediately "military" level, but also including that very prominently indeed.

It does sound a lot like the Bush administration's GWOT already, doesn't it? ...

...Comparing Opposition to Apartheid and Emerging Opposition to American Empire: The Dynamics of Ideological, Military and Political Power.

Here's an excerpt from what Emery wrote there:

South African and American empire share a remarkable degree of similarity in the degree [to] which they were or are imposed through overwhelming force, and in the mechanism of rule through illegitimate or quasi legitimate client states. South Africa&#65533;s Bantustans represented the clearest example of the principle of client state rule. But the principle can be extended to South Africa&#65533;s attempts to control the governments of Frontline states through direct intervention, sanction, or even periodic bombing of ANC buildings in foreign capitals. American Empire has followed a strikingly similar course on a global scale. In Western Europe, the US has ruled indirectly through NATO. In the middle East, through a slew of moderate Arab states, most importantly Egypt and Turkey, but also most of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. When the strategy of rule through client states has proved ineffective, then the US has resorted to more interventionist approaches... Successive American administrations could acquire legitimacy from its allies, and conservative elites in developing countries by invoking the threat of the communist developmental model and state authoritarianism that accompanied it. The end of the cold war has made it possible for the US to ascend to a position of unquestioned hegemony on the world stage. But it has also raised the specter that faced the Apartheid state: assertion of American Empire is being increasingly seen as illegitimate, even by erstwhile allies. In this context, it is worthwhile to see if the struggle against apartheid can illuminate how present and future contestation of American empire might proceed. This is the goal of this paper...

...The National Security Strategy of the USA (NSSUSA) is a most peculiar document.

George W Bush is quoted like a living Lenin at the beginning of each section, and in the entire Introduction.

What he presents is not Marxism, of course, but rather Manichaeism, the eternal struggle of good and evil.

It makes you realise that Clausewitz's understanding of strategy as the definitive overall plan and end, and tactics as the variable means to that end, is still not understood, let alone accepted.

There is no clear distinction between strategy and tactics in the NSSUSA. There is no sense of strategy as progress. The end is simply the preservation of what is presumed already to be. It is "an historic opportunity to preserve the peace". Strategy as forward movement is left unstated. It is "fudged".

The document drives the reader's attention towards frequent bullet-pointed lists, preceded by "We will:" or "The United States will:" and the like. These are means, or in other words tactics, and are the actual content of the documents. But the word "tactics" never appears.

From this point of view the document is a sleight-of-hand, or what South Africans call a "schlenter". The "Total Strategy" was also a schlenter. In fact it was the very same schlenter. It was not a strategy at all, it was an ensemble of tactics in search of a strategy.

There was no actual forward movement in it, only a defence of the status quo. That was its weakness, and that is the NSSUSA's weakness, too.

Posted by: Dominic at April 4, 2005 02:25 PM

[Bl.] Thoughtcrime was a part of South Africa's legal landscape at the time too. Books were banned. Films were banned. It was a crime to "sympathise" with many and various  vaguely defined "undesirable" ideologies.  Persons were banned from having conversations with more than a few people at a time. (Some persons could not legally attend their own birthday parties or weddings.) Anything that wasn't directly sponsored by the government was "communist terrorism" by definition. A person could be sent to jail for having slogan on a coffee cup.

The horrifying thing about these attempts to baldly legislate what persons were permitted to think was the extent to which they were successfull in the mainstream. Subjects such as "communism" and "majority rule" became almost literally unthinkable. Any person who thought differently was either a sharply isolated and exposed individual or a person who hardly ever said anything at all.

OpEd News December 12, 2007 at 12:00:35

There's A Press Blackout on S 1959, the Thought Crime Prevention Bill; Why?

by William Cormier    Page 1 of 3 page(s)

http://www.opednews.com
 


 


As odd as it sounds, it’s true. The Mainstream News Media appears to be in a total news blackout in regard S 1959. At first, I believed it was merely the reluctance of the MSM to discuss this Bill, however, the answer may be much more sinister than that! Below is a reply I found on Ron Paul’s Campaign site which references this Bill, and I double and triple checked for ANY Mainstream News Coverage on this issue - and so far, it appears to almost be non-existent!

The Greatest Obstacle


On December 4th, 2007 hemingway811 says:

is that the MSM has had a total blackout on the House’s passage of HR 1955 on Oct. 23rd. Do a search at any major newspaper & the major television stations, including cable. I have found a few comments in Blogs at a couple of television sites, but that’s about it.

For example, at the Washington Post you get:

“No Results Found”

LATIMES.COM ARTICLES
No matches found on search for: hr 1955

No matches found on search for: violent radicalization

404 members of the House voted for this “thought crime” Bill. The ACLU is working with members of the Senate to amend the language. They specifically refer to the regulation of thoughts. I don’t expect the ACLU to make much headway with the Senate. We have been bombarded with so much fear-mongering 24/7 for so long, members of Congress are too afraid of being labeled unpatriotic if they don’t vote for legislation like this.

RP did not cast a vote on HR 1955.

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/32886prs20071128.html

It is time to flood Keith Olbermann, Lou Dobbs, Jack Cafferty, and anyone else speaking out of the real issues the rest of the MSM ignores, with e-mails urging them to speak out about this Legislation. I already have.

KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Lou Dobbs:

http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?9

Unfortunately, writing Lou Dobbs or Jack Cafferty is futile, as CNN refuses to publish any information in regard this assault on our Constitution, and that’s after they have received hundreds, maybe even thousands of requests to editorialize on the subject. Has the government issued “signing letters” or other orders that prevent ALL of America’s Mainstream News Media from reporting on this vital issue? Jack Cafferty is attempting to promote his so-called “Blog” on CNN, however, if you even mention S 1959 in your comment, it probably won’t be published. CNN is stonewalling their viewer-ship, and on an issue where the public is demanding that this Bill be discussed in a public forum; CNN, along with the rest of the MSM, have turned their backs on America and have shown, despite increasing public outrage that they don’t give a damn about public opinion!

If you fine-tune your Internet searches, and Google S 1959, there are pages and pages of results, almost all of them Blogs and Discussion forums in the US who are discussing this matter and urging their subscribers to call, email, and write to Congress to defeat this Bill, yet it appears we are screaming into a void - and no one in the MSM has the courage to bring this odious Bill to the publics attention. In fact, there is little or nothing mentioned in the foreign press as well, and in this writer’s opinion, we must break the silence of the Mainstream News Media to bring about enough awareness where the people can protest in enough numbers to kill this Bill before free speech in America is nothing more than a fleeting memory.

To anyone that is aware of Naomi Wolf’s writing, the Guardian Unlimited published her recent essay, Fascist America, in 10 easy steps. One chilling part of that essay is published below, and we all need to take note that a Fascist America appears to be on our doorstep, and only by making the MSM report upon this attempt to silence free speech in America will we have any chance of stopping the steady march toward total fascism and dictatorship in America:

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalize certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.MORE

Based on all of the Blogs which are standing in solidarity against this issue, I’d bet my last dollar (If I had one to spare…) the Congress has received hundreds of thousands of phone calls and emails, yet they still remain mute and refuse to offer the public anything at all - not even an assurance they will look into our concern and outrage; instead, it appears The United States Congress is betraying their constituents, this time in an assault that could change the face of America! Based on the refusal of the MSM to publicize the issue, and Congress remaining deaf and dumb in the performance of their duties, we can only ascertain that Congress is attempting to pass this Bill while the bulk of the population isn’t even aware of its existence, and to me, that speaks of treason!

We have only one chance of defeating this Bill before it gets out of Committee, and that’s to make enough calls and send enough emails to effectively jam-up the phone systems in Congress, and only by acting in unison will we be able to save free speech in America. As an alternative, I’m calling upon the foreign press to publicize this matter, especially those in England, Germany, France, and all of the countries that America gave so many lives in World War I and II to help them throw off the yolk of oppression. America was there for them when Nazi Germany was attempting to enslave all of Europe, and I believe they have a debt of honor to repay -to stand tall and write about this critical issue that affects all of America. We were there for them, and now it seems that we need their help, if it’s nothing more than embarrassing the American Mainstream News Media into covering an issue that affects each and every American alive, here and abroad, and to lend their assistance in helping to insure that the United States will remain a free and democratic nation.

FootNote: This morning, I noted that NBC is quietly refunding money to advertisers because their ratings have been so low. LINK NBC, if you want to jump-start your ratings and be a top network again, maybe you might try reporting the news - all of it, and if you would break this press blackout and show some courage, I’m guessing, based on the interest of the public in regard S 1959, your ratings would soar and rather than giving refunds for poor ratings, you’d see your viewer-ship increase dramatically.

http://justanothercoverup.com/

I am nothing more than a patriotic American that is doing whatever I can to further the cause of democracy, the rule of law, and am absolutely outraged on how the Bush administration is defying our Congress, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights! Footnote: I write in a style that I believe is appropriate in today’s world where we can’t trust the Mainstream News Media, and rather than concentrating on one article alone, which may or may not receive the exposure and emphasis it should, I prefer to meld several relevant stories together, that each taken alone may not expose the entire situation, but when taken-in as a whole, tend to give the reader a better understanding of the subject. One article or story alone does not represent the “Big Picture” - but when several are effectively tied-together it often reveals a trend or broader view of the subject matter that is important to completely understand any given situation. http://justanothercoverup.com/


[Bl.] In closing: down with that hideous war-hag torturer Nancy Pelosi. Vote for Cindy Sheehan.










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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #12 on: 2008-02-17 06:42:27 »
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[Blunderov] I'm afraid there is going to have to be a revolution in America. Yup. I said it right out loud.

Not long ago I saw an "offended" FOX news plainting that some websites were "actually" calling for violent revolution in the USA. He said "that's not very nice is it?" to the viewers. He spoke not angrily but in a quizzical tone as if advocating violent revolution was SO obviously childish and over-the-top given the (so called) "open society" and the opportunity for political expression that it so abundantly affords. What a poser.

"When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken."

--Guerilla Warfare, Che Guevara.

The Existentialist Cowboy advocates a non-violent revolution by means of a national strike. An admirable attempt to explore every avenue before resorting to violence I suppose. Maybe Mahatma Ghandi could have pulled it off but without him or someone of his stature it will never fly IMO. The fact is that the fascist USA state has resorted to systematic violence against it's own citizens, often for the most trivial of reasons. Alea jacta est.

(the site is lavishly hyperlinked for those who wish to peruse these matters in more detail.)

http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2008/02/bush-wages-war-on-americans.html

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Bush Wages War on Americans

When George W. Bush said of our "Constitution that it is "... just a Goddamn piece of paper!", he declared himself an outlaw at war with the American people. The Bush administration's culture of fear, hate and contempt for law inspires an epidemic of police lawlessness and thuggery that now terrorizes law-abiding Americans all over America. You can be thrown in jail upon a whim. You don't get to make a phone call. You don't get to call your lawyer. You don't get to call your wife or husband. And you don't get visitors. It is a state of treasonous war, a capital crime for which these war mongers must answer to the peoople.

Che Guevara said:
Of these three propositions the first two contradict the defeatist attitude of revolutionaries or pseudo-revolutionaries who remain inactive and take refuge in the pretext that against a professional army nothing can be done, who sit down to wait until in some mechanical way all necessary objective and subjective conditions are given without working to accelerate them. As these problems were formerly a subject of discussion in Cuba, until facts settled the question, they are probably still much discussed in America. Naturally, it is not to be thought that all conditions for revolution are going to be created through the impulse given to them by guerrilla activity. It must always be kept in mind that there is a necessary minimum without which the establishment and consolidation of the first center is not practicable. People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.
--Guerilla Warfare, Che Guevara

Bush has already assumed the power to wage war on the American people, claiming and aggressively exercising, the "right to use any and all war powers against American citizens within the United States. Like any other tin-horn dictator he insists that he is above all restraints by Congress and the courts. See: Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Fight Begins - Strategies for Moving Forward

When Bush says that the "Constitution is just a Goddamned piece of paper", he aligns himself with Hitler, Mussolini, Mao -- "state absolutists", fascists, and radical communists. Simply, he has declared war on the American people, our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Democracy and freedom. The peace is already broken. The war has begun. It is time to evaluate the situation.

Criminals and traitors have seized power illegitimately and operate outside the law i.e, the Constitution so hated by Bush. So far, this gang of crooks have had nothing to fear from the impeachment process though there is probable cause to try Bush himself for capital crimes. As Bush jokes about remaining in power past his term, Americans as well as Iraqis are brutalized without charges, trial or representation. Under Bush, jackbooted thugs may not bother accusing you of a crime. They need only 'define' you as a terrorist. You will not get a phone call, a lawyer, a trial. You are a terrorist because Bush says you are and he has decreed that he does not have to make a case against you.

See: Police Atrocities Define the Bush Police State

Tasers, Torture and Terror Tactics: America Becomes a Police State

Bush continues to justify his assault upon the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, indeed, the rule of law itself with one word: terrorism. But, in fact, his "War on Terror" is as big a lie as was the official 911 conspiracy theory and the uncountable lies that were told to the United Nations about Iraq: The proposition that terrorism is the inevitable result of imperial aggressions explains Bush incompetent economic policies as well as America's fascist tilt. That terrorism is always worse under GOP regimes is a demonstrable, statistical fact.

The CIA creates terrorism two ways by indulging it as a tactic and by inspiring it with its excesses. The legacy of Blackwater USA, an international terrorist organization, will have inspired generations of "terrorists" resorting to a tactic against which top down fascist regimes are impotent.

Bush has abrogated or violated every provision of the US Bill of Rights, arguably the most important document standing between you and tyrannous dictatorship! Well, under Bush, it no longer stands between you and dictatorship. [See: Bush's War on the Bill of Rights]

Bush has put himself above the rule of law even as he denied you the benefit and the protections that are your under the law! There is a name for this. Dictatorship!
The Bush administration has been frightening in the way it has nullified lawsuits against its actions. The Justice Department simply laughed at attempts of the ACLU to get lists of detained suspects through lawsuits in early 2002.6 Ellen Mariani’s lawsuit against the Bush administration, accusing it of foreknowledge of, and failure to act on, September 11, may seem to many like the material of a conspiracy theory, but we can be fairly sure that the question will never go to a jury. Quite recently, an ACLU legal challenge against the Patriot Act became news after being silenced for three weeks by the Patriot Act.
--Anthony Gregory, Bush’s War on the Bill of Rights

In fact, a majority of Americans Support a 911 Investigation of Bush/Cheney
An investigation of 911 should have begun the very day it happened. Instead, Bush quashed all attempts to get to the truth of 911, saying that it would interfere with the war on terrorism. What had he to fear? Had 911 been properly investigated the disastrous and counter-productive "war on terrorism" might have been avoided, a real enemy might have been identified. Perhaps Bush had planned such a war all along. Certainly, Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' was carving up Iraq's oil fields long before 911. Bush knew that Saddam did not have WMD. All were lies.

The time has come for Americans to fight back! I don't see a resolution of these issues in an the election process. None of the major candidates of either party have dealt with these issues honestly. The elections themselves could be postponed or cancelled outright in the case of a new "national emergency about which Bush warned recently that 911 might pale 'by comparison'. What is he planning? [See: How a Second Terrorist Attack Will Benefit George W. Bush] Americans must not wait "...while dangers gather". [Bush: Remarks to UN] It's time to act.
I was just reading a post about how Americans need another civil war. This got me to thinking about there being a better way. American's need to go on strike. Quit your jobs. The corporations and government make money from us working. They depend on it. If we are slaves like some have said then just stop. Stop working, stop consuming. Just stop. Of course it won't work if just a handful participate. We have to beat them at their own game. In fact, lets ALL go on welfare. Let's take money from them. (Them being the gov't and corporate scabs that continue to work.)
I think I have said this before with little response but I would like to put it in it's own thread so I can get more minds chipping away at it. Please help me tinker with this idea. How can we make it work? Or tell me how it is doomed to fail so I can get over this and move on to something else. ***Please put some thought into your posts. I really don't want people just posting how stupid I am and how this will never work without an explanation of why.*** Okay, I'm putting on my turtle shell now to protect myself from the hurtful words that I'm probably going to have to endure.... here goes. Post comments here or go to original thread here.

--stellawayten Americans Need To Go On Strike!

AMERICA, GO ON STRIKE!

Updates:

FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'

The FBI has a new set of eyes and ears, and they're being told to protect their infrastructure at any cost. They can even kill without repercussion.

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does -- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law. InfraGard is "a child of the FBI," says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

New Bill To Allow Police Misconduct Be Hidden From Public

A new bill proposed at the legislature would allow for police to withhold misconduct reports from the public. Supporters of the bill believe that police misconduct should be kept secret from the public so to not discredit police testimony. Others say that a forthright police unit is essential to the community.

In September, Jared Massey was zapped with a taser by Trooper John Gardner. A video of the incident was recorded from Gardner’s patrol car. Gardner can be seen shocking Massey until he hits the ground while Massey’s wife screams from the side of their SUV.

More than a million people watched the video on “YouTube.” Massey was shocked to see his new found fame. The footage may have never been seen had Massey not made a records request to obtain the tape. ...

http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2008/02/police-atrocities-define-bush-police.html

Police Atrocities Define the Bush Police State
16 February 2008, 00:35:48 | Len Hart

Jack booted thugs can now arrest you without a warrant, without “probable cause” or evidence that you might have committed a crime. Law abiding Americans are victimized by cops gone wild, sadistic hot dogs, mental midgets and Nazi wannabes. They are inspired by the atmosphere of fear and hate. Police atrocities are to be expected.

The real criminals are in the White House and, so far, they have escaped charges and justice. There is probable cause to try Bush himself for capital crimes --but he is free while millions are brutalized without charges, trial or representation. Now under Bush, jackbooted thugs don't even bother accusing you of a crime. You can be throw in jail upon whim. You don't get to make a phone call. You don't get to call your lawyer. You don't get to call your wife or husband. And you don't get visitors.

These days –who cares if you are innocent? Bush has assumed the power to 'define' you as a terrorist. Conceivably, you could be locked up in one of Bush's hell-holes for the rest of your life. You may never get your day in court. But if you dare to protest that you are an American citizen, you risk getting kicked in the balls, tasered, strip searched and beaten. In Houston, in the seventies, a young Hispanic male was accused of being rowdy in a bar. He was never charged. Rather, Houston cops took him to a secluded part of Buffalo Bayou, beat the crap out of him, and thew him into Buffalo Bayou where he drowned.

Big Brother Bush spies on you. As early as 2002, Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor, intercept, and keep records on international phone calls and emails. They have simply declared they don't need court orders, they don't need probable cause, they don't need authorization, they don't even need 'reasonable suspicion', Gen. Michael Hayden's fictitious, delusional and non-existent standard. The Constitution requires 'probable cause' but you can forget about that in Bush's dictatorship. As Bush himself put it: “Stop throwing up the Constitution to me. It's just a Goddamned piece of paper” [See: A Goddamned Piece of Paper!]

THE REAL CRIMINALS ARE IN THE WHITE HOUSE

If you've ever publicly opposed Bush's war of naked aggression in Iraq, you can bet you're in NSA's database, called, typically of these mentally constipated authoritarians, TALON! How cute! This practice most certainly goes far beyond Nixon's 'enemies list', a sophomoric exercise typical of idiots who take themselves entirely too seriously. No –Bush's database, methods, scope and ruthlessness plops us in Orwellian territory without a Junior Wood Chucks guidebook. In the vernacular, we're fucked! The government has declared war upon us. In the words of Che Guevara “...the peace is already considered to be broken.” Let's put it another way. The revolution was begun when George W. Bush declared war upon the people of the United States.

War protesters, naturally, were the first to wind up in Big Bro's TALON, or database, or, to use the lingo of Bush and Bush-head: al Qaeda, literally, 'the base'. There you have it. Bush can merely define you as an 'enemy combatant' and your name winds up on his list of 'terrorists'. A 'terrorist' is anyone who opposes George W. Bush, tyrant for whom the Constitution is just a “...Goddamned piece of paper!”

Playlist Includes Michael Moore, a Brutal Strip Search and
Houston Cops Running Down and 'Running Over' a Civilian!

Don't call him "dude" or he may "kill you"

Is it a man? Is it a dude? No, it's officer Rivieri of the Baltimore Police Department who is the latest small membered thug cop to believe that it is his duty to go around bullying and wrestling discipline into innocent children. Unfortunately for this PC podge, he is also the latest cop caught on camera and made famous by Youtube.

On the video, the officer, Salvatore Rivieri, puts the boy in a headlock, pushes him to the ground, questions his upbringing, threatens to "smack" him and repeatedly accuses the youngster of showing disrespect because the youth refers to the officer as "man" and "dude." reports the Baltimore Sun.
Egomaniac Thug Cop Assaults 14 Year Old Kid

In free societies, police serve and protect; they do not demand obeisance and they most certainly are accorded respect when it is rightfully earned by service and duty. The four stages of the evolution of a police state are in evidence in the US, where the police have gotten it the wrong way 'round.

Shut down media coverage after they steal an election

Serve the central government instead of serving the citizens
Enforce the policies of the central government instead of responding primarily to criminal misdeeds
Spy on and intimidate citizens

Survival hints that might help keep you alive in the Bush/GOP society of fear and thuggery:
Never go out at night alone; always bring a witness!
Never go out in the daytime alone!
Never go anywhere unless you have back-up following you at 20 paces or so with a camcorder so that when you are assaulted or murdered, there will be a record of it!
When COPS are near, try your best to look like a Republican i.e, look stupid!
Don't look 'black' even if you are white; don't ever say 'bro!
Carry a copy of the Wall St Journal or the Washington Times but don't use it to wrap a cod. It could be mistaken for a .357 with gills.
Alas, it was Bertrand Russell who foresaw so many issues that now shape our lives, issues contributing to the growing feeling that we, as individuals, now count for very little in the Bush/Neocon/GOP vision of global domination and endless world wars. Whenever the idea that individuals count for little takes hold, brutality against the individual is to be expected.
"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."

"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called 'education.' Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment."

"Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
--Bertrand Russell, "The Impact of Science on Society", Life under the World State 1953

.Also see: Gestapo Watch - Arrested at Gunpoint for using MP3 Player






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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #13 on: 2008-02-17 16:56:55 »
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Noting that this thread began with feedback from [Blunderov]<snip>The Politburo</snip> .... and out sourcing is still all the rage in America.
Rather then letting the great unwashed NEOcons in DC continue to mess it up, lets contract the subjugation of US citizens out to an organization with the proven track record. Vladimir Putin will be looking for alternate work soon, so , hey we can get this done.


PS

These seemed like they would be useful to Dennison's of COV :

Scientific American Minds    February/March Issue
Article: Getting Duped    by: Yvonne Raley & Robert Talisse
References:

http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~robert.talisse/StrawMan_argumentation.pdf

http://65.109.167.118/pipa/pdf/oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf


Now even less likely to go 'cross boarder' shopping in the land of milk and honey

Fritz :'(
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #14 on: 2008-02-18 08:12:13 »
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[Blunderov] Noam Chomsky on the illusion of "democracy". A strange beast indeed. Apparently when we elect our officials we give them carte blanche to know better than we do about why we elected them. It's no different here in South Africa. A huge percentage of the population is in favour of the death penalty but it is never going to happen. This conflicts me no little. On the one hand I am opposed to the death penalty and on the other my understanding of democracy is that elected officials are supposed to carry out the wishes of the electorate.



The editor at Crimes and Corruption of the New World Order is of the opinion that Chomsky is "Zionist lite". Perhaps he is. Realistically though, a multi-cultural Israeli state is just not going to happen. Some sort of compromise seems necessary but it does not look as if that is going to happen either.


Vector: http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/2008/02/chomsky-it-is-important-for-attention.html

Sunday, February 17, 2008
Chomsky: 'It is important for the attention of the herd to be diverted elsewhere'
"Good News," Iraq and Beyond

February 16, 2008

By Noam Chomsky

Not long ago, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the presidential campaign, as it was in the mid-term election of 2006. But it has virtually disappeared, eliciting some puzzlement. There should be none.

Iraq remains a significant concern for the population, but that is a matter of little moment in a modern democracy. The important work of the world is the domain of the "responsible men," who must "live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd," the general public, "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" whose "function" is to be "spectators," not "participants." And spectators are not supposed to bother their heads with issues. The Wall Street Journal came close to the point in a major front-page article on super-Tuesday, under the heading "Issues Recede in '08 Contest As Voters Focus on Character." To put it more accurately, issues recede as candidates, party managers, and their PR agencies focus on character (qualities, etc.). As usual. And for sound reasons. Apart from the irrelevance of the population, they can be dangerous. The participants in action are surely aware that on a host of major issues, both political parties are well to the right of the general population, and that their positions that are quite consistent over time, a matter reviewed in a useful study by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Divide; the same is true on domestic policy (see my Failed States, on both domains). It is important, then, for the attention of the herd to be diverted elsewhere.

The quoted admonitions, taken from highly regarded essays by the leading public intellectual of the 20th century (Walter Lippmann), capture well the perceptions of progressive intellectual opinion, largely shared across the narrow elite spectrum. The common understanding is revealed more in practice than in words, though some, like Lippmann, do articulate it: President Wilson, for example, who held that an elite of gentlemen with "elevated ideals" must be empowered to preserve "stability and righteousness," essentially the perspective of the Founding Fathers. In more recent years the gentlemen are transmuted into the "technocratic elite" and "action intellectuals" of Camelot, "Straussian" neocons, or other configurations. But throughout, one or another variant of Leninist doctrine prevails.

For the vanguard who uphold the elevated ideals and are charged with managing the society and the world, the reasons for Iraq's drift off the radar screen should not be obscure. They were cogently explained by the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, articulating the position of the doves 40 years ago when the US invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and Washington was preparing to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already tearing South Vietnam to shreds. By then the invasion launched by Kennedy was facing difficulties and imposing difficult costs on the United States, so Schlesinger and other Kennedy liberals were reluctantly beginning to shift from hawks to doves. That even included Robert Kennedy, who a year earlier, after the vast intensification of the bombing and combat operations in the South and the first regular bombing of the North, had condemned withdrawal as "a repudiation of commitments undertaken and confirmed by three administrations" which would "gravely -- perhaps irreparably -- weaken the democratic position in Asia." But by the time that Schlesinger was writing in 1966, RFK and other Camelot hawks began to call for a negotiated settlement -- though not withdrawal, never an option, just as withdrawal without victory was never an option for JFK, contrary to many illusions.

Schlesinger wrote that of course "we all pray" that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of the day will be able to "suppress the resistance," and if it does, "we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government" in winning victory while leaving "the tragic country gutted and devastated by bombs, burned by napalm, turned into a wasteland by chemical defoliation, a land of ruin and wreck," with its "political and institutional fabric" pulverized. But escalation probably won't succeed, and will prove to be too costly for ourselves, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.

Attitudes towards the war at the liberal extreme were well illustrated by the concerns of the Massachusetts branch of Americans for Democratic Action, in Cambridge, the liberal stronghold. In late 1967, the ADA leadership undertook considerable (and quite comical) efforts to prevent applications for membership from people they feared would speak in favor of an anti-war resolution sponsored by a local chapter that had fallen out of control (Howard Zinn and I were the terrifying applicants). A few months later came the Tet offensive, leading the business world to turn against the war because of its costs to us, while the more perceptive were coming to realize that Washington had already achieved its major war aims. It soon turned out that everyone had always been a strong opponent of the war (in deep silence). The Kennedy memoirists revised their accounts to fit the new requirement that JFK was a secret dove, consigning the rich documentary record (including their own version of events at the time) to the dustbin of history, where the wrong facts wither away. Others preferred silence, assuming correctly that the truth would disappear. The preferred version soon took hold: the radical and self-indulgent anti-war movement had disrupted the sober efforts of the responsible "early opponents of the war" to bring it to an end.

At the war's end, in 1975, the position of the extreme doves was expressed by Anthony Lewis, the most critical voice in the New York Times. He observed that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good" - which is close to tautology within the doctrinal system -- though by 1969 it had become "clear to most of the world -- and most Americans -- that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake." The argument against the war, Lewis explained, "was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina -- that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself."

By 1969, "most Americans" had a radically different view. Some 70% regarded the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a mistake." But they are just "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," whose voices can be dismissed - or on the rare occasions when they are noticed, explained away without evidence by attributing to them self-serving motives lacking any moral basis.

Elite reasoning, and the accompanying attitudes, carry over with little change to critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today. And although criticism of the Iraq war is far greater and far-reaching than in the case of Vietnam at any comparable stage, nevertheless the principles that Schlesinger articulated remain in force in media and commentary.

It is of some interest that Schlesinger himself took a very different position on the Iraq invasion, virtually alone in his circles. When the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, he wrote that Bush's policies are "alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy." It would be instructive to determine how Schlesinger's principled objection to US war crimes fared in the tributes to him that appeared when he died, and in the many reviews of his journals (which do not mention Vietnam until the Johnson years, consistent with the early version of his memoirs of Camelot).

That Iraq is "a land of ruin and wreck" is not in question.. There is no need to review the facts in any detail. The British polling agency Oxford Research Bureau recently updated its estimate of extra deaths resulting from the war to 1.3 million - that's excluding Karbala and Anbar provinces, two of the worst regions. Whether that is correct, or the true numbers are much lower as some claim, there is no doubt that the toll is horrendous. There are several million internally deplaced. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees fleeing the wreckage of Iraq, including most of the professional classes, have not been simply wiped out. But that welcome is fading, for one reason because Jordan and Syria receive no meaningful support from the perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London; the idea that they might admit these victims, beyond a trickle, is too outlandish to consider. Sectarian warfare has devastated the country. Baghdad and other areas have been subjected to brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias, the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy developed by General Petraeus, who won his fame by pacifying Mosul, now the scene of some of the most extreme violence.

One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in the shocking tragedy, Nir Rosen, recently published an epitaph entitled "The Death of Iraq," in Current History. He writes that "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century" - a common perception of Iraqis as well. "Only fools talk of `solutions' now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."

Though the wreckage of Iraq today is too visible to try to conceal, the assault of the new barbarians is carefully circumscribed in the doctrinal system so as to exclude the horrendous effects of the Clinton sanctions - including their crucial role in preventing the threat that Iraqis would send Saddam to the same fate as Ceasescu, Marcos, Suharto, Chun, and many other monsters supported by the US and UK until they could no longer be maintained. Information about the effect of the sanctions is hardly lacking, in particular about the humanitarian phase of the sanctions regime, the oil-for-peace program initiated when the early impact became so shocking that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had to mumble on TV that the price was right whatever the parents of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children might think. The humanitarian program, which graciously permitted Iraq to use some of its oil revenues for the devastated population, was administered by highly respected and experienced UN diplomats, who had teams of investigators all over the country and surely knew more about the situation in Iraq than any other Westerners. The first, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest because the policies were "genocidal." His successor, Hans von Sponeck, resigned two years later when he concluded that the sanctions violated the Genocide Convention. The Clinton administration barred him from providing information about the impact to the Security Council, which was technically responsible. As Albright's spokesperson James Rubin explained, "this man in Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak."

Von Sponeck does, however, speak; in extensive detail in his muted but horrifying book A Different Kind of War. But the State Department ruling prevails. One will have to search diligently to find even a mention of these revelations or what they imply. Knowing too much, Halliday and von Sponeck were also barred from the media during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq.

It is true, however, that Iraq is now a marginal issue in the presidential campaign. That is natural, given the spectrum of hawk-dove elite opinion. The liberal doves adhere to their traditional reasoning and attitudes, praying that the hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in the land of ruin and wreck, establishing "stability," a code word for subordination to Washington's will. By and large hawks are encouraged, and doves silenced, by the good news about Iraq.



And there is good news. The US occupying army in Iraq (euphemistically called the Multi-National Force-Iraq) carries out regular studies of popular attitudes, a crucial component of population control measures. In December 2007, it released a study of focus groups, which was uncharacteristically upbeat. The survey "provides very strong evidence" that national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to prevailing voices of hopelessness and despair. The survey found that a sense of "optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups . . . and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis." This discovery of "shared beliefs" among Iraqis throughout the country is "good news, according to a military analysis of the results," Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post (Dec. 19).

The "shared beliefs" were identified in the report. To quote de Young, "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of `occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation." So according to Iraqis, there is hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis.

The conclusions are credible, consistent with earlier polls, and also with the apparent reduction in violence when the British finally withdrew from Basra a few months ago, having "decisively lost the south - which produces over 90 per cent of government revenues and 70 per cent of Iraq's proven oil reserves" by 2005, according to Anthony Cordesman, the most prominent US specialist on military affairs in the Middle East.

The December 2007 report did not mention other good news: Iraqis appear to accept the highest values of Americans, which should be highly gratifying. Specifically, they accept the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal that sentenced Nazi war criminals to hanging for such crimes as supporting aggression and preemptive war - the main charge against Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, whose position in the Nazi regime corresponded to that of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. The Tribunal defined aggression clearly enough: "invasion of its armed forces" by one state "of the territory of another state." The invasion of Iran and Afghanistan are textbook examples, if words have meaning. The Tribunal went on to define aggression as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole": in the case of Iraq, the murderous sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing, the destruction of the national culture and the irreplaceable treasures of the origins of Western civilization under the eyes of "stuff happens" Rumsfeld and his associates, and every other crime and atrocity as the inheritors of the Mongols have followed the path of imperial Japan.

Since Iraqis attribute the accumulated evil of the whole primarily to the invasion, it follows that they accept the core principle of Nuremberg. Presumably, they were not asked whether their acceptance of American values extended to the conclusion of the chief prosecutor for the United States, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who forcefully insisted that the Tribunal would be mere farce if we do not apply its principles to ourselves.

Needless to say, US elite opinion, shared with the West generally, flatly rejects the lofty American values professed at Nuremberg, indeed regards them as bordering on obscene. All of this provides an instructive illustration of some of the reality that lies behind the famous "clash of civilizations."

A January poll by World Learning/Aspen Institute found that "75 percent of Americans believe U.S. foreign policy is driving dissatisfaction with America abroad and more than 60 percent believe that dislike of American values (39 percent) and of the American people (26 percent) is also to blame." The perception is inaccurate, fed by propaganda. There is little dislike of Americans, and dissatisfaction abroad does not derive from "dislike of American values," but rather from acceptance of these values, and recognition that they are rejected by the US government and elite opinion.

Other "good news" had been reported by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during the extravaganza staged on 9/11. Perhaps we should call the commander "Lord Petraeus," in the light of the reverence displayed by the media and commentators on this occasion. Parenthetically, only a cynic might imagine that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so that by committing the "supreme international crime" they were defending the world against terror - which increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to an analysis by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, using data of the government-linked Rand corporation.

Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to show that the Iraqi government had greatly accelerated spending on reconstruction, reaching a quarter of the funding set aside for that purpose. Good news indeed -- until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth what Petraeus and Crocker reported, a 50 percent decline from the preceding year.

More good news is the decline in sectarian violence, attributable in part to the success of the ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion; there are simply fewer people to kill in the cleansed areas. But it is also attributable to Washington's decision to support the tribal groups that had organized to drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in US troops, and to the decision of the Mahdi army to stand down and consolidate its gains - what the press calls "halting aggression." By definition, only Iraqis can commit aggression in Iraq (or Iranians, of course).

It is not impossible that Petraeus's strategy might approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya, where fighting is now "limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom" after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack, C.J. Chivers reports in the New York Times, also on September 11. Perhaps some day Baghdad and Falluja too will enjoy "electricity restored in many neighborhoods, new businesses opening and the city's main streets repaved," as in booming Grozny. Possible, but dubious, in the light of the likely consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater sectarian violence, adding to the "accumulated evil" of the aggression.



If Russians rise to the moral level of liberal intellectuals in the West, they must be saluting Putin's "wisdom and statesmanship" for his achievements in Chechnya.

A few weeks after the Pentagon's "good news" from Iraq, New York Times military-Iraq expert Michael Gordon wrote a reasoned and comprehensive review of the options on Iraq policy facing the candidates for the presidential election. One voice is missing: Iraqis. Their preference is not rejected. Rather, it is not worthy of mention. And it seems that there was no notice of the fact. That makes sense on the usual tacit assumption of almost all discourse on international affairs: we own the world, so what does it matter what others think? They are "unpeople," to borrow the term used by British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis in his work on Britain's crimes of empire - very illuminating work, therefore deeply hidden. Routinely, Americans join Iraqis in un-peoplehood. Their preferences too provide no options.



To cite another instructive example, consider Gerald Seib's reflections in the Wall Street Journal on "Time to Look Ahead in Iraq." Seib is impressed that debate over Iraq is finally beginning to go beyond the "cartoon-like characteristics" of what has come before and is now beginning to confront "the right issue," the "more profound questions":

The more profound questions are the long-term ones. Regardless of how things evolve in a new president's first year, the U.S. needs to decide what its lasting role should be in Iraq. Is Iraq to be a permanent American military outpost, and will American troops need to be on hand in some fashion to help defend Iraq's borders for a decade or more, as some Iraqi officials themselves have suggested? Will the U.S. see Iraq more broadly as a base for exerting American political and diplomatic influence in the broader Middle East, or is that a mistake? Is it better to have American troops just over the horizon, in Kuwait or ships in the Persian Gulf? Driving these military considerations is the political question of what kind of government the U.S. can accept in Iraq….

No soft-headed nonsense here about Iraqis having a voice on the lasting role of the US in Iraq or on the kind of government they would prefer.

Seib should not be confused with the columnists in the Journal's "opinion pages." He is a rational centrist analyst, who could easily be writing in the liberal media or journals of the Democratic Party like The New Republic. And he grasps quite accurately the fundamental principles guiding the political class.

Such reflections of the imperial mentality are deeply rooted. To pick examples almost at random, in December 2007 Panama declared a Day of Mourning to commemorate the US invasion of 1989, which killed thousands of poor people, so Panamanian human rights groups concluded, when Bush I bombed the El Chorillo slums and other civilian targets. The Day of Mourning of the unpeople scarcely merited a flicker of an eyelid here. It is also of no interest that Bush's invasion of Panama, another textbook example of aggression, appears to have been more deadly than Saddam's invasion of Kuwait a few months later. An unfair comparison of course; after all, we own the world, and he didn't. It is also of no interest that Washington's greatest fear was that Saddam would imitate its behavior in Panama, installing a client government and then leaving, the main reason why Washington blocked diplomacy with almost complete media cooperation; the sole serious exception I know of was Knut Royce in Long Island Newsday. Though the December Day of Mourning passed with little notice, there was a lead story when the Panamanian National Assembly was opened by president Pedro Gonzalez, who is charged by Washington with killing American soldiers during a protest against President Bush's visit two years after his invasion, charges dismissed by Panamanian courts but still upheld by the owner of the world.

To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that "Iran's intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions." The rest of the world happens to exclude the large majority of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran's right to enrich Uranium, in accord with the Non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since they do not reflexively accept US orders.

We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the US-Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here is one idea: (1) Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the NPT. (2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran, Israel, and US forces deployed there. (3) The US should accept the NPT. (4) The US should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.

The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls were released a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed "the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian people, [who] seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find common sense solutions to some of the most crucial questions" facing the two nations, favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results suggest that if the US and Iran were functioning democratic societies, this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

The opinions of Americans on this issue too are not regarded as worthy of consideration; they are not options for candidates or commentators. They were apparently not even reported, perhaps considered too dangerous because of what they reveal about the "democratic deficit" in the United States, and about the extremism of the political class across the spectrum. If public opinion were to be mentioned as an option, it would be ridiculed as "politically impossible"; or perhaps offered as another reason why "The public must be put in its place," as Lippmann sternly admonished.

There is more to say about the preference of Americans on Iran. Point (1) above, as noted, happens to accord with the stand of the large majority of the world. With regard to point (2), the US and its allies have accepted it, formally at least. UN Security Council Resolution 687 commits them to "the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons" (Article 14). The US and UK have a particularly strong commitment to this principle, since it was this Resolution that they appealed to in their efforts to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of Iraq, claiming that Iraq had not lived up to the conditions in 687 on disarmament. As for point (3), 80 percent of Americans feel that Washington should live up to its commitment under the NPT to undertake "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely, a legal commitment as the World Court determined, explictly rejected by the Bush administration. Turning to point (4), Americans are calling on the government to adhere to international law, under which the threats of violence that are voiced by all current candidates are a crime, in violation of the UN Charter. The call for negotiations and diplomacy on the part of the American unpeople extends to Cuba, and has for decades, but is again dismissed by both political parties.

The likelihood that functioning democracy might alleviate severe dangers is regularly illustrated. To take another current example, of great importance, there is now justified concern about Russian reactions to US aggressive militarism. That includes the extension of NATO to the East by Clinton in violation of solemn pledges to Gorbachev, but particularly the vast expansion of offensive military capacity under Bush, and more recently, the plans to place "missile defense" installations in Eastern Europe. Putin is ridiculed for claiming that they are a threat to Russia. But US strategic analysts recognize that he has a point. The programs are designed in a way that Russian planners would have to regard as a threat to the Russian deterrent, hence calling for more advanced and lethal offensive military capacity to neutralize them (see George Lewis and Theodore Postol, "European Missile Defense: The Technological Basis of Russian Concerns," Arms Control Today, Oct. 2007). A new arms race is feared.

Recent polls under the direction of strategic analysts John Steinbrunner and Nancy Gallagher "reveal a striking disparity between what U.S. and Russian leaders are doing and what their publics desire," and again indicate that if these countries were functioning democracies, in which the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders had a voice, the increasingly fragile US-Russian strategic relationship could be repaired, a matter of species survival in this case.

In a free press, all of these matters, and many more like them, would merit regular prominent headlines and in-depth analysis.



Having brought up Iran, we might as well turn briefly to the third member of the famous Axis of Evil, North Korea. The official story right now is that after having been forced to accept an agreement on dismantling its nuclear weapons facilities, North Korea is again trying to evade its commitments in its usual devious way - "good news" for superhawks like John Bolton, who have held all along that they understand only the mailed fist and will exploit negotiations only to trick us. A New York Times headline reads: "U.S. Sees Stalling by North Korea on Nuclear Pact" (January 19); the article by Helene Cooper details the charges. In the last paragraph we discover that the US has not fulfilled its pledges. North Korea has received only 15% of the fuel that was promised by the US and others, and the US has not undertaken steps to improve diplomatic relations, as promised. Several weeks later (Feb. 6), in the McClatchey press Kevin Hall reported that the chief US negotiator with North Korea, Christopher Hill, confirmed in Senate Hearings that "North Korea has slowed the dismantling of its nuclear reactor because it hasn't received the amount of fuel oil it was promised."

As we learn from the specialist literature, and asides here and there, this is a consistent pattern. North Korea may have the worst government in the world, but they have been pursuing a pragmatic tit-for-tat policy on negotiations with the United States. When the US takes an aggressive and threatening stance, they react accordingly. When the US moves towards some form of accommodation, so do they. When Bush came into office, both North Korea and the US were bound by the Framework Agreement of 1994. Neither was fully in accord with its commitments, but the agreement was largely being observed. North Korea had stopped testing long-range missiles. It had perhaps 1-2 bombs worth of plutonium, and was verifiably not making more. After 7 Bush years of confrontation, North Korea has 8-10 bombs and long-range missiles, and it is developing plutonium. The Clinton administration, Korea specialist Bruce Cumings reports, "had also worked out a plan to buy out, indirectly, the North's medium and long-range missiles; it was ready to be signed in 2000 but Bush let it fall by the wayside and today the North retains all its formidable missile capability."

The reasons for Bush's achievements are well understood. The Axis of Evil speech, a serious blow to Iranian democrats and reformers as they have stressed, also put North Korea on notice that the US is returning to its threatening stance. Washington released intelligence reports about North Korean clandestine program; these were conceded to be dubious or baseless when the latest negotiations began in 2007, probably, commentators speculated, because it was feared that weapons inspectors might enter North Korea and the Iraq story would be repeated. North Korea responded by ratcheting up missile and weapons development.

In September 2005, under international pressure Washington agreed to turn to negotiations, within the six-power framework. They achieved substantial success. North Korea agreed to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs" and allow international inspections, in return for international aid and a non-aggression pledge from the U.S., with an agreement that the two sides would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations." The ink was barely dry on the agreement when the Bush administration renewed the threat of force, also freezing North Korean funds in foreign banks and disbanding the consortium that was to provide North Korea with a light-water reactor consortium. Cumings alleges that "the sanctions were specifically designed to destroy the September pledges [and] to head off an accommodation between Washington and Pyongyang."

After Washington scuttled the promising September 2005 agreements, North Korea returned to weapons and missile development and carried out a test of a nuclear weapon. Again under international pressure, and with its foreign policy in tatters, Washington returned to negotiations, leading to an agreement, though it is now dragging its feet on fulfilling its commitments.



Writing in Le Monde diplomatique last October, Cumings concludes that "Bush had presided over the most asinine Korea policy in history. These last years, relations between Washington and Seoul have deteriorated drastically. By commission and omission, Bush trampled on the norms of the historic US relationship with Seoul while creating a dangerous situation with Pyongyang."

Charges against North Korea escalated in September 2007, when Israel bombed an obscure site in northern Syria, an "act of war," as at least one American correspondent recognized (Seymour Hersh). Charges at once surfaced that Israel attacked a nuclear installation being developed with the help of North Korea, an attack compared with Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981 - which, according to available evidence, convinced Saddam Hussein to initiate his nuclear weapons program. The September 2007 charges are dubious. Hersh's tentative conclusion after detailed investigation is that the Israeli actions may have been intended as another threat against Iran: the US-Israel have you in their bombsights. However this may be, there is some important background that should be recalled.

In 1993, Israel and North Korea were on the verge of an agreement: Israel would recognize North Korea, and in return, North Korea would end any weapons-related involvement in the Middle East. The significance for Israeli security is clear. Clinton ordered the deal terminated, and Israel had no choice but to obey. Ever since its fateful decision in 1971 and the years that followed to reject peace and security in favor of expansion, Israel has been compelled rely on the US for protection, hence to obey Washington's commands.

Whether or not there is any truth to current charges about North Korea and Syria, it appears that the threat to the security of Israel, and the region, could have been avoided by peaceful means, had security been a high priority.

Let us return to first member of Axis of Evil, Iraq. Washington's expectations are outlined in a Declaration of Principles between the US and the US-backed Iraqi government last November. The Declaration allows US forces to remain indefinitely to "deter foreign aggression" and for internal security. The only aggression in sight is from the United States, but that is not aggression, by definition. And only the most naïve will entertain the thought that the US would sustain the government by force if it moved towards independence, going too far in strengthening relations with Iran, for example. The Declaration also committed Iraq to facilitate and encourage "the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments."

The unusually brazen expression of imperial will was underscored when Bush quietly issued yet another signing statement, declaring that he will reject crucial provisions of congressional legislation that he had just signed, including the provision that forbids spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq." Shortly before, the New York Times had reported that Washington "insists that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations," a demand that "faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its…deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state." More third world irrationality.

In brief, Iraq must agree to allow permanent US military installations (called "enduring" in the preferred Orwellism), grant the US the right to conduct combat operations freely, and ensure US control over oil resources of Iraq while privileging US investors. It is of some interest that these reports did not influence discussion about the reasons for the US invasion of Iraq. These were never obscure, but any effort to spell them out was dismissed with falsification and ridicule. Now the reasons are openly conceded, eliciting no retraction or even reflection.

Iraqis are not alone in believing that national reconciliation is possible. A Canadian-run poll found that Afghans are hopeful about the future and favor the presence of Canadian and other foreign troops - the "good news," that made the headlines. The small print suggests some qualifications. Only 20% "think the Taliban will prevail once foreign troops leave." Three-fourths support negotiations between the US-backed Karzai government and the Taliban, and more than half favor a coalition government. The great majority therefore strongly disagree with US-Canadian stance, and believe that peace is possible with a turn towards peaceful means.

Though the question was not asked, it is reasonable to surmise that the foreign presence is favored for aid and reconstruction. More evidence in support of this conjecture is provided by reports about the progress of reconstruction in Afghanistan six years after the US invasion. Six percent of the population now have electricity, AP reports, primarily in Kabul, which is artificially wealthy because of the huge foreign presence. There, "the rich, powerful, and well connected" have electricity, but few others, in contrast to the 1980s under Russian occupation, when "the city had plentiful power" - and women in Kabul were relatively free under the occupation and the Russian-backed Najibullah government that followed, probably more so than now, though they did have to worry about attacks from Reagan's favorites, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who got his kicks from throwing acid in the faces of young women he thought were improperly dressed.

These matters were discussed at the time by Rasil Basu, UN Development Program senior advisor to the Afghan government for women's development (1986-88). She reported "enormous strides" for women under the Russian occupation: "illiteracy declined from 98% to 75%, and they were granted equal rights with men in civil law, and in the Constitution... Unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family with women occupying lower level sex-type jobs. But the strides [women] took in education and employment were very impressive....In Kabul I saw great advances in women's education and employment. Women were in evidence in industry, factories, government offices, professions and the media. With large numbers of men killed or disabled, women shouldered the responsibility of both family and country. I met a woman who specialized in war medicine which dealt with trauma and reconstructive surgery for the war-wounded. This represented empowerment to her. Another woman was a road engineer. Roads represented freedom - an escape from the oppressive patriarchal structures."

By 1988, however, Basu "could see the early warning signs" as Russian troops departed and the fundamentalist Islamist extremists favored by the Reagan administration took over, brushing aside the more moderate mujahideen groups. "Saudi Arabian and American arms and ammunition gave the fundamentalists a vital edge over the moderates," providing them with military hardware used, "according to Amnesty International, to target unarmed civilians, most of them women and children." Then followed much worse horrors as the US-Saudi favorites overthrew the Najibullah government. The suffering of the population was so extreme that the Taliban were welcomed when they drove out Reagan's freedom fighters. Another chapter in the triumph of Reaganite reactionary ultra-nationalism, worshipped today by those dedicated to defaming the honorable term "conservative."

Basu is a distinguished advocate for women's rights, including a long career with the UN during which she drafted the World Plan of Action for Women and the draft Programme for the Women's Decade, 1975-85, adopted at the Mexico City Conference (1975) and Copenhagen Conference (1980). But her words were not welcome in the US. Her 1988 report was submitted to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Ms. magazine. But rejected. Also rejected were Basu's recommendation of practical steps that the West, particularly the US, could take to protect women's rights.

Highly relevant in this connection are the important investigations by Nikolai Lanine, a former soldier in the Russian army in Afghanistan, bringing out the striking comparisons between Russian commentary during the occupation and that of their NATO successors today.

These and further considerations suggest that Afghans really would welcome a foreign presence devoted to aid and reconstruction, as we can read between the lines in the polls.

There are, of course, numerous questions about polls in countries under foreign military occupation, particularly in places like southern Afghanistan. But the results of the Iraq and Afghan studies conform to earlier ones, and should not be dismissed.

Recent polls in Pakistan also provide "good news" for Washington. Fully 5% favor allowing US or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan "to pursue or capture al Qaeda fighters." 9% favor allowing US forces "to pursue and capture Taliban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan." Almost half favor allowing Pakistani troops to do so. And only a little over 80% regard the US military presence in Asia and Afghanistan as a threat to Pakistan, while an overwhelming majority believe that the US is trying to harm the Islamic world.

The good news is that these results are a considerable improvement over October 2001, when a Newsweek poll found that "Eighty-three percent of Pakistanis surveyed say they side with the Taliban, with a mere 3 percent expressing support for the United States," while over 80 percent described Osama bin Laden as a guerrilla and 6 percent a terrorist.

Events elsewhere in early 2008 might also turn out to be "good news" for Washington. In January, in a remarkable act of courageous civil disobedience, tens of thousands of the tortured people of Gaza broke out of the prison to which they had been confined by the US-Israel alliance, with the usual timid European support, as punishment for the crime of voting the wrong way in a free election in January 2006. It was instructive to see the front-pages with stories reporting the brutal US response to a genuinely free election alongside others lauding the Bush administration for its noble dedication to "democracy promotion," or sometimes gently chiding it because it was going too far in its idealism, failing to recognize that the unpeople of the Middle East are too backward to appreciate democracy - another principle that traces back to "Wilsonian idealism."

This glaring illustration of elite hatred and contempt for democracy is routinely reported, apparently with no awareness of what it signifies. To pick an illustration almost at random, Cam Simpson reports in the Wall St Journal (Feb. that despite the harsh US-Israeli punishment of Gaza, and "flooding the West Bank's Western-backed Fatah-led government with diplomatic and economic support [to] persuade Palestinians in both territories to embrace Fatah and isolate Hamas," the opposite is happening: Hamas's popularity is increasing in the West Bank. As Simpson casually explains, "Hamas won Palestinian elections in January 2006, prompting the Israeli government and the Bush administration to lead a world-wide boycott of the Palestinian Authority," along with much more severe measures. The goal, unconcealed, is to punish the miscreants who fail to grasp the essential principle of democracy: "Do what we say, or else."

The US-backed Israel punishment increased through early 2006, and escalated sharply after the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in June. That act was bitterly denounced in the West. Israel's vicious response was regarded as understandable if perhaps excessive. These thoughts were untroubled by the dramatic demonstration that they were sheer hypocrisy. The day before the capture of Corporal Shalit on the front lines of the army attacking Gaza, Israeli forces entered Gaza City and kidnapped two civilians, the Muammar brothers, taking them to Israel (in violation of the Geneva Conventions), where they disappeared into Israel's prison population, including almost 1000 held without charge, often for long periods. The kidnapping, a far more serious crime than the capture of Shalit, received a few scattered lines of comment, but no noticeable criticism. That is perhaps understandable, because it is not news. US-backed Israeli forces have been engaged in such practices, and far more brutal ones, for decades. And in any event, as a client state Israel inherits the right of criminality from its master.

The US-Israel attempted to organize a military coup to install their favored faction. That was also reported frankly, considered entirely legitimate, if not praiseworthy. The coup was preempted by Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip. Israeli savagery reached new heights, while in the West Bank, US-backed Israeli operations carried forrward the steady process of taking over valuable territory and resources, breaking up the fragments remaining to Palestinians by settlements and huge infrastructure projects, imprisoning the whole by takeover of the Jordan Valley, and expanding settlement and development in Jerusalem in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years to ensure that there will be no more than a token Palestinian presence in the historic center of Palestinian cultural, commercial, and social life. Non-violent reactions by Palestinians and solidarity groups are viciously crushed with rare exceptions. And scarcely any notice. Even when Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire was shot and gassed by Israeli troops while participating in a vigil protesting the Separation Wall - now better termed an annexation wall - there was apparently not a word in the English-language press, outside of Ireland.

Israel's settlement and development programs on the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, are flagrantly illegal, in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions and the authoritative jugment by the International Court of Justice on the Separation Wall, with the agreement of US Justice Buergenthal in a separate declaration.

Criminal actions by Palestinians, such as Qassam rockets fired from Gaza, are angrily condemned in the West. The far more violent and destructive Israeli actions sometimes elicit polite clucking of tongues if they exceed approved levels of state terror. Invariably Israel's actions - for which of course the US shares direct responsibility - are portrayed as retaliation, perhaps excessive. Another way of looking at the cycle of violence is that Qassam rockets are retaliation for Israel's unceasing crimes in the West Bank, which is not separable from Gaza except by US-Israeli fiat. But standard racist-ultranationalist assumptions exclude that interpretation.

International humanitarian law is quite explicit on these matters. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1950 states that "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited…Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited." Gazans are unambigously "protected persons" under Israeli military occupation. The Hague Convention of 1907 also declares that "No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, can be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of individuals for which it cannot be regarded as collectively responsible" (Article 50). Furthermore, High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention are bound to "respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances," including of course the Israel and the US, which is obligated to prevent, or to punish, the serious breaches of the Convention by its own leaders and its client. When the media report, as they regularly do, that "Israel hopes [reducing supplies of fuel and electricity to the Gaza Strip] will create popular pressure to force the Hamas rulers of Gaza and other militant groups to stop the rocket fire" (Stephen Erlanger, NYT, Jan. 31), they are calmly informing us that Israel is in grave breach of international humanitarian law, as is the US for not ensuring respect for law on the part of its client. When the Israeli High Court grants legitimacy to these measures, as it has, it is adding another page to its ugly record of subordination to state power. Israel's leading legal journalist, Moshe Negbi, knew what he was doing when he entitled his despairing review of the record of the courts We were like Sodom (Kisdom Hayyinu).

International law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by their own populations. That is always a difficult task, particularly so when articulate opinion and the Courts declare crime to be legitimate.

In January, the Hamas-led prison break allowed Gazans for the first time in years to go shopping in nearby Egyptian towns, plainly a serious criminal act because it slightly undermines US-Israeli strangulation of these unpeople. But the powerful quickly recognized that these events too could turn into "good news." Israeli deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai "said openly what some senior Israeli officials would only say anonymously," Stephen Erlanger reported in the New York Times: the prison-break might allow Israel to rid itself of any responsibility for Gaza after having reduced it to devastation and misery in 40 years of brutal occupation, keeping it only for target practice, and of course under full military occupation, its borders sealed by Israeli forces on land, sea and air, apart from an opening to Egypt (in the unlikely event that Egypt would agree).

That appealing prospect would complement Israel's ongoing criminal actions in the West Bank, carefully designed along the lines already outlined to ensure that there will be no viable future for Palestinians there. At the same time Israel can turn to solving its internal "demographic problem," the presence of non-Jews in a Jewish state. The ultra-nationalist Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman was harshly condemned as a racist in Israel when he advanced the idea of forcing Arab citizens of Israel into a derisory "Palestinian state," presenting this to the world as a "land swap." His proposal is slowly being incorporated into the mainstream. Israel National News reported in April that Knesset member Otniel Schneller of the governing party Kadima, "considered to be one of the people closest and most loyal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert," proposed a plan that "appears very similar to one touted by Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman," though Schneller says his plan would be "more gradual," and the Arabs affected "will remain citizens of Israel even though their territory will belong to the [Palestinian Authority and] they will not be allowed to resettle in other areas of Israel." Of course the unpeople are not consulted.

In December, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the last hope of many Israeli doves, adopted the same position. An eventual Palestinian state, she suggested, would "be the national answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different refugee camps or in Israel." With Israeli Arabs dispatched to their natural place, Israel would then achieve the long-sought goal of freeing itself from the Arab taint, a stand that is familiar enough in US history, for example in Thomas Jefferson's hope, never achieved, that the rising empire of liberty would be free of "blot or mixture," red or black.

For Israel, this is no small matter. Despite heroic efforts by its apologists, it is not easy to conceal the fact that a "democratic Jewish state" is no more acceptable to liberal opinion than a "democratic Christian state" or a "democratic white state," as long as the blot or mixture is not removed. Such notions could be tolerated if the religious/ethnic identification were mostly symbolic, like selecting an official day of rest. But in the case of Israel, it goes far beyond that. The most extreme departure from minimal democratic principles is the complex array of laws and bureaucratic arrangements designed to vest control of over 90 percent of the land in the hands of the Jewish National Fund, an organization committed to using charitable funds in ways that are "directly or indirectly beneficial to persons of Jewish religion, race or origin," so its documents explain: "a public institution recognized by the Government of Israel and the World Zionist Organization as the exclusive instrument for the development of Israel's lands," restricted to Jewish use, in perpetuity (with marginal exceptions), and barred to non-Jewish labor (though the principle is often ignored for imported cheap labor). This radical violation of elementary civil rights, funded by all American citizens thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF, finally reached Israel's High Court in 2000, in a case brought by an Arab couple who had been barred from the town of Katzir. The Court ruled in their favor, in a narrow decision, which seems to have been barely implemented. Seven years later, a young Arab couple was barred from the town of Rakefet, on state land, on grounds of "social incompatibility" (Scott Peterson, Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2007), a very rare report. Again, none of this is unfamiliar in the US. After all, it took a century before the 14th amendment was even formally recognized by the courts, and it still is far from implemented.

For Palestinians, there are now two options. One is that the US and Israel will abandon their unilateral rejectionism of the past 30 years and accept the international consensus on a two-state settlement, in accord with international law - and, incidentally, in accord with the wishes of a large majority of Americans. That is not impossible, though the two rejectionist states are working hard to render it so. A settlement along these lines came close in negotiations in Taba Egypt in January 2001, and might have been reached, participants reported, had Israeli Prime Minister Barak not called off the negotiations prematurely. The framework for these negotiations was Clinton's "parameters" of December 2000, issued after he recognized that the Camp David proposals earlier that year were unacceptable. It is commonly claimed that Arafat rejected the parameters. However, as Clinton made clear and explicit, both sides had accepted the parameters, in both caes with reservations, which they sought to reconcile in Taba a few weeks later, and apparently almost succeeded. There have been unofficial negotiations since that have produced similar proposals. Though possibilities diminish as US-Israeli settlement and infrastructure programs proceed, they have not been eliminated. By now the international consensus is near universal, supported by the Arab League, Iran, Hamas, in fact every relevant actor apart from the US and Israel.

A second possibility is the one that the US-Israel are actually implementing, along the lines just described. Palestinians will then be consigned to their Gaza prison and to West Bank cantons, perhaps joined by Israeli Arab citizens as well if the Lieberman-Schneller-Livni plans are implemented. For the occupied territories, that will realize the intentions expressed by Moshe Dayan to his Labor Party cabinet colleagues in the early years of the occupation: Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the territories that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads." The general conception was articulated by Labor Party leader Haim Herzog, later President, in 1972: "I do not deny the Palestinians a place or stand or opinion on every matter...But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner."

A third possibility would be a binational state. That was a feasible option in the early years of the occupation, perhaps a federal arrangement leading to eventual closer integration as circumstances permit. There was even some support for similar ideas within Israeli military intelligence, but the grant of any political rights to Palestinians was shot down by the governing Labor Party. Proposals to that effect were made (by me in particular), but elicited only hysteria. The opportunity was lost by the mid-1970s, when Palestinian national rights reached the international agenda, and the two-state consensus took shape. The first US veto of a two-state resolution at the Security Council, advanced by the major Arab states, was in 1976. Washingon's rejectionist stance continues to the present, with the exception of Clinton's last month in office. Some form of unitary state remains a distant possibility through agreement among the parties, as a later stage in a process that begins with a two-state settlement. There is no other form of advocacy of such an outcome, if we understand advocacy to include a process leading from here to there; mere proposal, in contrast, is free for the asking.

It is of some interest, perhaps, that when advocacy of a unitary binational state perhaps had some prospects, it was anathema, while today, when it is completely unfeasible, it is greeted with respect and is advocated in leading journals. The reason, perhaps, is that it serves to undermine the prospect of a two-state settlement.

Advocates of a binational (one-state) settlement argue that on its present course, Israel will become a pariah state like apartheid South Africa, with a large Palestinian population deprived of rights, laying the basis for an civil rights struggle leading to a unitary democratic state There is no reason to believe that the US, Israel, or any other Western state would allow anything like that to happen. Rather, they will proceed exactly as they are now doing in the territories today, taking no responsibility for Palestinians who are left to rot in the various prisons and cantons that may dot the landscape, far from the eyes of Israelis travelling on their segregated superhighways to their well-subsidized West Bank towns and suburbs, controlling the crucial water resources of the region, and benefiting from their ties with US and other international corporations that are evidently pleased to see a loyal military power at the periphery of the crucial Middle East region, with an advanced high tech economy and close links to Washington.

Turning elsewhere, major polls are not such good news for conventional Western doctrine. Few theses are upheld with such passion and unanimity as the doctrine that Hugo Chavez is a tyrant bent on destroying freedom and democracy in Venezuela, and beyond. The annual polls on Latin American opinion by the respected Chilean polling agency Latinobarometro therefore are "bad news." The most recent (November 2007) had the same irritating results as before. Venezuela ranks second, close behind first-place Uruguay, in satisfaction with democracy, and third in satisfaction with leaders. It ranks first in assessment of the current and future economic situation, equality and justice, and education standards. True, it ranks only 11th in favoring a market economy, but even with this flaw, overall it ranks highest in Latin America on matters of democracy, justice, and optimism, far above US favorites Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Chile.

Latin America analyst Mark Turner writes that he "found an almost total English speaking blackout about the results of this important snapshot of [Latin American] views and opinions." That has also been true in the past. Turner also found the usual exception: there were reports of the finding that Chavez is about as unpopular as Bush in Latin America, something that will come as little surprise to those who have seen some of the bitterly hostile coverage to which Chavez is subjected, in the Venezuelan press as well, an oddity in this looming dictatorship. Editorial offices have been well aware of the polls, but evidently understand what may pass through doctrinal filters.

Also receiving scant notice was a declaration of President Chavez on Dec. 31, 2007, granting amnesty to leaders of the U.S.-backed military coup that kidnapped the president, disbanded parliament and the Supreme Court and all other democratic institutions, but was soon overturned by a popular uprising. That the West would have followed Chavez's model in a comparable case is, to put it mildly, rather unlikely.

Perhaps all of this provides some further insight into the "clash of civilizations" - a question that should be prominent in our minds, I think.

---
Ed. note: The clash of civilizations is being deliberatley created by the neocons, zionists. Let's remember Noam is zionist-lite.




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