The Benefits of Cut-And-Run

Why Iraq Withdrawal Makes Sense

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:17:20 -0600

Don't let the door hit ya...
By Norman Solomon

What do Iraqis want? Does anyone care?

President Bush just told reporters that he has no intention of setting any timetable for withdrawal. “Our troops will come home when raq is capable of defending herself,” he said. Powerful pundits keep telling us that a swift pullout of U.S. troops would be irresponsible. And plenty of people have bought into that idea—including quite a few progressives. Such acceptance is part of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.”

Sometimes, an unspoken assumption among progressive activists is that the occupation of Iraq must be tolerated for tactical reasons—while other issues, notably domestic ones, are more winnable on Capitol Hill. But this acceptance means going along with many of the devastating effects of a militarized society: from ravaged budgets for social programs to more authoritarian attitudes and violence in communities across the country.

“The bombs in Vietnam,” King said in 1967, “explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.” He rejected the insistent claims that it would be more prudent to avoid clear opposition to the war in order to concentrate on domestic issues. “I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted,” he said. “I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

As spring 2005 begins, many who like to praise Martin Luther King are going out of their way to evade the fundamental destructiveness of this war.

Of course, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, a prevailing argument was that removing U.S. troops would be a betrayal of U.S. responsibility to the people of South Vietnam. Today, likewise, opposition to a swift U.S. pullout from Iraq is often based on the idea that the American military must stay because of a responsibility to the people of Iraq.

But most Iraqis want the U.S. military out of their country—pronto.

As Newsweek reported in its Jan. 31 edition: “Now every major poll shows an ever-larger majority of Iraqis want the Americans to leave.” Yet we hear that U.S. troops must stay for the good of the Iraqi people—even though most of those people clearly want U.S. troops to leave. (Are we supposed to believe that Americans know better than Iraqis whether American troops should stay in Iraq?)

To paper over such illogic, a media-stoked myth tells us that getting out of Iraq is a notion remaining outside the boundaries of what the U.S. public could take seriously. Most politicians and pundits insist that it’s off the table. But polls are telling a different story.

“According to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken after the Iraq elections, 59 percent of the public believes the United States should pull its troops out of Iraq in the next year,” Amy Quinn of the Institute for Policy Studies wrote in early March. “Yet the ranks of those actively demanding that the president produce an exit strategy from Iraq are slim.”

In mid-March, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that a large proportion of the U.S. population has a negative view of the war. For instance, the poll asked: “All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war with Iraq was worth fighting or not?” Only 45 percent said “worth fighting,” while 53 percent said “not worth fighting.”

Such nationwide poll numbers hardly indicate a country where few people are interested in proposals for extricating U.S. troops from Iraq. But the point is not only that political space exists in the United States for a grassroots movement to effectively organize for a swift pullout. It’s also the best alternative for Iraq.

Consider the perspective of David Enders, a brave American journalist who has been in Iraq most of the time since the invasion. While writing for such outlets as MotherJones.com, the Nation magazine, and the British daily Independent (he keeps a personal blog on GNN.tv), he actually covers Iraqi society firsthand rather than staying behind American lines. Days ago, responding to my questions via email from Iraq, Enders provided some of the reasons for his assessment that American troops should leave rather than stay. For instance:

“It is the will of the Iraqi people.” Enders cites a recent survey by Iraqi pollster Saadun Al-Dulaimie, who found that 85 percent of Iraqi people want U.S. troops out of their country as soon as possible.

“The U.S. does not provide security for the average Iraqi, and it never has.”

“The U.S. has not prevented a civil war from taking place. If anything, it has exacerbated it.”

“It is not morally derelict to pull out; it’s morally derelict to stay. Returning real control and sovereignty to Iraqis is the most effective way to prevent the country from breaking apart. U.S. troops complain Iraqis don’t want to stand up and fight for themselves, and a big part of the reason is the occupiers’ presence.”

Meanwhile, Enders voices enthusiasm for the resolution sponsored by more than two dozen members of the House of Representatives “expressing the sense of Congress that the President should develop and implement a plan to begin the immediate withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq” (House Concurrent Resolution 35).

This spring, as U.S. activists work to build a strong movement against the war, the need to pressure Congress is clear. What’s less apparent is the need to also push—and, if necessary, confront—hesitant progressive organizations that are taking the easy way out by refusing to challenge the ongoing war.

Fortunately, some national organizations are providing forthright leadership to pursue the goal of getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. Those groups—including United for Peace & Justice, Progressive Democrats of America, Military Families Speak Out, TrueMajority, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Code Pink, Campus Antiwar Network, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Pledge of Resistance, American Friends Service Committee, Democracy Rising and U.S. Labor Against the War, to name just a dozen—inspire as they organize.

Only clear opposition to the war can change the terms of the national debate. Taking the paths of least resistance won’t get us very far.

Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, will be published in early summer. His columns and other writings can be found at: www.normansolomon.com.


Posted by anthony
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times, Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked as a producer for MTV, Fuse and WTN. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and the producer of their Iraq doc,...

Engineering Democracy

The new Gladio in action?
Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template
By Jonathan Mowat
Online Journal Contributing Writer

"Gene Sharp started out the seminar by saying 'Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power.' And I thought, 'Boy is this guy speaking my language,' that is what armed struggle is about."—Col. Robert Helvey

WASHINGTON, March 19, 2005—The U.S. government and allied forces' year-end installation of Victor Yushchenko as president of Ukraine have completed the field-testing of the "Postmodern Coup." Employing and fine-tuning the same sophisticated techniques used in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003 (and unsuccessfully in Belarus in 2001), it is widely expected that the United States will attempt to apply the same methods throughout the former Soviet Union.

"We have to confront those forces that are committed to reproduce a Georgian or Ukrainian scenario," Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev stated on December 26, the day of the coup, "we'll not allow the import of Rose [Georgian] and Orange [Ukrainian] revolutions in our country." One day later, the Kazakh government launched a criminal case against the Soros Foundation for tax evasion, one of the coups' financiers. And last spring, Uzbek President Islam Karimov accused Soros of overseeing the revolution in Georgia, and condemning his efforts to "fool and brainwash" young intelligentsia in his own country, banned the group. The same networks are also increasingly active in South America, Africa, and Asia. Top targets include Venezuela, Mozambique, and Iran, among others.

The method employed is usefully described by The Guardian's Ian Traynor in a November 26, 2004, article entitled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," during the first phase of the coup.

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory—whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

[T]he campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections

Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel's "Velvet revolution" in Czechoslavakia in 1989. As in these early operations, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly what the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one its legislative drafters, Allen Weinstein. The Cold War propaganda and operations center, Freedom House, now chaired by former CIA director James Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros' foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED.

What is new about the template bears on the use of the Internet (in particular chat rooms, instant messaging, and blogs) and cell phones (including text-messaging), to rapidly steer angry and suggestible "Generation X" youth into and out of mass demonstrations and the like—a capability that only emerged in the mid-1990s. "With the crushing ubiquity of cell phones, satellite phones, PCs, modems and the Internet," Laura Rosen emphasized in Salon Magazine on February 3, 2001,"the information age is shifting the advantage from authoritarian leaders to civic groups." She might have mentioned the video games that helped create the deranged mindset of these "civic groups." The repeatedly emphasized role played by so-called "Discoshaman" and his girlfriend "Tulipgirl," in assisting the "Orange Revolution" through their aptly named blog, "Le Sabot Post-Modern," is indicative of the technical and sociological components involved.

A Civilian Revolution in Military Affairs

The emphasis on the use of new communication technologies to rapidly deploy small groups, suggests what we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments "enabled" by "real time" intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of "intelligence helmet" video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine's civilian application.

This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places (for example the RAND Corporation) for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the US military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.

The new techniques of warfare include the use of both lethal (violent) and nonlethal (nonviolent) tactics. Both ways are conducted using the same philosophy, infrastructure, and modus operandi. It is what is known as Cyberwar. For example, the tactic of swarming is a fundamental element in both violent and nonviolent forms of warfare. This new philosophy of war, which is supposed to replicate the strategy of Genghis Khan as enhanced by modern technologies, is intended to aid both military and non-military assaults against targeted states through what are, in effect, "high tech" hordes. In that sense there is no difference, from the standpoint of the plotters, between Iraq or Ukraine, if only that many think the Ukraine-like coup is more effective and easier.

Indicative of the common objective are the comments of the theoreticians of the post modern coup, for example, Dr. Peter Ackerman, the author of "Strategic Nonviolent Conflict" (Praeger 1994). Writing in the "National Catholic Reporter" on April 26, 2002, Dr. Ackerman offered the following corrective to Bush's Axis of Evil speech targeting Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which he otherwise approved: "It is not true that the only way to 'take out' such regimes is through U.S. military action."

Speaking at the "Secretary's Open Forum" at the State Department on June 29, 2004, in a speech entitled, "Between Hard and Soft Power:The Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change," Ackerman elaborated on the concept involved. He proposed that youth movements, such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq—thereby accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military means. And he reported that he has been working with the top US weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are democratizing," he stressed, in reference to their potential use in bringing down China, "they enable decentralized activity. They create, if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly."

Dr. Ackerman is the founding chairman of International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts of Washington, DC, of which former US Air Force officer Jack DuVall is president. Together with former CIA director James Woolsey, DuVall also directs the Arlington Institute of Washington, DC, which was created by former Chief of Naval Operations advisor John L. Peterson in 1989 " to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms" it reports, through introducing "social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation."

"Swarming Adolescents" and "Rebellious Hysteria"

As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth in postmodern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of "swarming adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case, as Dr. Emery reported in "The next thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations,'' in the group's "Human Relations," because the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French President Charles De Gaulle in 1967.

In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the aegis of that university's "Program for Social Innovations in Global Management," began a series of conferences to review progress towards that strategic objective, which was reported on in "Human Relations" in 1991. There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social Architecture'' at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery, stressed that "rock video in Katmandu," was an appropriate image of how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby creating the possibility of a "global civilization." There are two requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations,'' and "creating global events" through "the transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous international implications through mass-media."

(Perlmutter on the origin of the concept of globalization: see quote.)

This brings us to the final ingredient of these new coups—the deployment of polling agencies' "exit polls" broadcast on international television to give the false (or sometimes accurate) impression of massive vote-fraud by the ruling party, to put targeted states on the defensive. Polling operations in the recent coups have been overseen by such outfits as Penn, Schoen and Berland, top advisors to Microsoft and Bill Clinton. Praising their role in subverting Serbia, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (and later Chairman of NDI) , in an October 2000 letter to the firm quoted on its website, stated: "Your work with the National Democratic Institute and the Yugoslav opposition contributed directly and decisively to the recent breakthrough for democracy in that country . . . This may be one of the first instances where polling has played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy objectives." Penn, Schoen, together with the OSCE, also ran the widely televised "exit poll" operations in the Ukrainian elections.

In the aftermath of such youth deployments and media operations, more traditional elements come to the fore. That is, the forceful, if covert, intervention by international institutions and governments threatening the targeted regime, and using well placed operatives within the targeted regime's military and intelligence services to ensure no countermeasures can be effectively deployed. Without these traditional elements, of course, no postmodern coup could ever work. Or, as Jack DuVall put it in Jesse Walker's "Carnival and conspiracy in Ukraine," in Reason Online, November 30, 2004, "You can't simply parachute Karl Rove into a country and manufacture a revolution."

Gladio and James Bond Get a Youth Group

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an offshot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and which specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." Dr. Sharp had been the executive secretary of A.J. Muste, the famous U.S. Trotskyite labor organizer and peacenik. The group is funded by Soros and the NED. Albert Einstein's president is Col. Robert Helvey, a former US Army officer with 30 years of experience in Southeast Asia. He has served as the case officer for youth groups active in the Balkans and Eastern Europe since at least 1999.

Col. Helvey reports, in a January 29, 2001, interview with film producer Steve York in Belgrade, that he first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failure of military approaches to toppling dictators—especially in Myanmar, where he had been stationed as military attaché—and seeing the potential of Sharp's alternative approach. According to B. Raman, the former director of India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, in a December 2001 paper published by his institute entitled, "The USA's National Endowment For Democracy (NED): An Update," Helvey "was an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and, subsequently, as the US Defence Attache in Yangon, Myanmar (1983 to 85), during which he clandestinely organised the Myanmarese students to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya's Karen insurgent group. . . . He also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989" and "is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the religious sect of China, in similar civil disobedience techniques." Col. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with Albert Einstein and Soros long before then.

Reflecting Albert Einstein's patronage, one of its first books was Dr. Sharp's "Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense," published in 1985 with a forward by George Kennan, the famous "Mr. X" 1940's architect of the Cold War who was also a founder of the CIA's Operations division. There, Sharp reports that "civilian-based defense" could counter the Soviet threat through its ability "to deter and defeat attacks by making a society ungovernable by would be oppressors" and "by maintaining a capacity for orderly self-rule even in the face of extreme threats and actual aggression." He illustrates its feasibility by discussing the examples of the Algerian independence in 1961 and the Czechoslovakian resistance to Soviet invasion in 1968-9. In his forward, Kennan praises Sharp for showing the "possibilities of deterrence and resistance by civilians" as a "partial alternative to the traditional, purely military concepts of national defense." The book was promptly translated into German, Norwegian, Italian, Danish, and other NATO country languages. See the link to the Italian translation of the book (Verso un'Europa Inconquistabile. 190 pp. 1989 Introduction by Gianfranco Pasquino) that sports a series of fashionable sociologists and "politologists" prefacing the book and calling for a civil resistance to a possible Soviet invasion of Italy.

Such formulations suggest that Albert Einstein activities were, ironically, coherent (or, possibly updating) the infamous NATO's "Gladio" stay-behind network, whose purpose was to combat possible Soviet occupation through a panoply of military and nonmilitary means. The investigations into Gladio, and those following the 1978 assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, also shed some light (immediately switched off) on a professional apparatus of destabilization that had been invisible for several decades to the public.

It is noteworthy that the former deputy chief of intelligence for the US Army in Europe, Major General Edward Atkeson, first "suggested the name 'civilian based defense' to Sharp," John M. Mecartney, Coordinator of the Nonviolent Action for National Defense Institute, reports in his group's CBD News and Opinion of March 1991. By 1985, Gen. Atkeson, then retired from the US Army, was giving seminars at Harvard entitled "Civilian-based Defense and the Art of War.

The Albert Einstein Institution reports, in its "1994-99 Report on Activities," that Gen. Atkeson also served on Einstein's advisory board in those years. Following his posting as the head of US Army intelligence in Europe, and possibly concurrently with his position at the Albert Einstein Institution, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports that Gen. Atkeson, who also advised CSIS on "international security." served as "national intelligence officer for general purpose forces on the staff of the director of Central Intelligence."

A 1990 variant of Sharp's book, "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System," the Albert Einstein Institution reports, "was used in 1991 and 1992 by the new independent governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in planning their defense against Soviet efforts to regain control."

As we shall see below, with such backing, Col. Helvey and his colleagues have created a series of youth movements including Otpor! in Serbia, Kmara! in Georgia, Pora! in Ukraine, and the like, which are already virally replicating other sects throughout the former Soviet Union, achieving in civilian form what had not been possible militarily in the 1980s. The groups are also spreading to Africa and South America.

And Dope Too?

Col. Helvey's long experience in Myanmar in training insurgent ethnic minorities in a region that is the center of world opium production raises another question of great bearing on "post modern coups." That is: what is the role of narcotic mafias in facilitating "regime change?" Law enforcement agencies from many nations, including the United States, have long reported that the Balkans is the major narcotics pipeline into Western Europe. Ukraine is said to be a top conduit, as is Georgia. Kyrghyzstan, now at the top of the hit list, is another opium conduit. And George Soros "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization," has been the top "private" funder of all the Eastern European and Central Asian insurgent groups, as well as those in Myamar. The spread of such mafias, is, of course, one of the most efficient ways of infiltrating and corrupting government agencies of targeted states.

Col. Helvey is not the only operator with such a background. The head of the OSCE's vote monitoring operation in Ukraine, for example, Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, was German Ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990s, when German secret agent Werner Mauss was arrested for working closely with the narco-terrorist ELN, whose bombings are financed by the cocaine trade. Ahrens was also on the scene in Albania and Macedonia, when the narcotics smuggling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was created with US and German patronage. And Michael Kozak, the US ambassador whose 2001 effort to overthrow Belarus' Lukachenko failed, had been a top handler of the cocaine-smuggling Contras.

The Serbian Virus

The networks and methods used in the Serbian through Ukraine sequence were first publicly revealed in a Washington Post article on Dec. 11, 2000, by Michael Dobbs, entitled. "U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition: Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple Authoritarian Leader." He reports that:

U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan "He's Finished," which became the revolution's catchphrase.

Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were aware of CIA activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever it was, they concluded it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharp, whom he describes as "the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement," referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist.

Peter Ackerman, the above-mentioned coup expert, analyzed and popularized the methods involved in a 2001 PBS documentary-series and book, "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict," together with retired US Airforce officer Jack DuVall. Focusing on youth organizing, they report:

After the NATO bombing, which had helped the regime suppress opposition, Otpor's organizing took hold with a quiet vengeance. It was built in some places around clubhouses where young people could go and hang out, exercise, and party on the weekends, or more often it was run out of dining rooms and bedrooms in activists' homes. These were "boys and girls 18 and 19 years old" who had lived "in absolute poverty compared to other teenagers around the world," according to Stanko Lazendic, an Otpor activist in Novi Sad. "Otpor offered these kids a place to gather, a place where they could express their creative ideas." In a word, it showed them how to empower themselves.

Otpor's leaders knew that they "couldn't use force on someone who . . . had three times more force and weapons than we did," in the words of Lazendic. "We knew what had happened in. Tiananmen, where the army plowed over students with tanks." So violence wouldn't work—and besides, it was the trademark of Milosevic, and Otpor had to stand for something different. Serbia "was a country in which violence was used too many times in daily politics," noted Srdja Popovic, a 27 year-old who called himself Otpor's "ideological commissar." The young activists had to use nonviolent methods "to show how superior, how advanced, how civilized" they were.

This relatively sophisticated knowledge of how to develop nonviolent power was not intuitive. Miljenko Dereta, the director of a private group in Belgrade called Civic Initiatives, got funding from Freedom HouseFreedom House in the U.S. to print and distribute 5,000 copies of Gene Sharp's book, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation." Otpor got hold of Sharp's main three-volume work, "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," freely adapting sections of it into a Serbian-language notebook they dubbed the "Otpor User Manual." Consciously using this "ideology of nonviolent, individual resistance," in Popovic's words, activists also received direct training from Col. Robert Helvey, a colleague of Sharp, at the Budapest Hilton in March 2000.

Helvey emphasized how to break the people's habits of subservience to authority, and also how to subvert: the regime's "pillars of support," including the police and armed forces. Crucially, he warned them against "contaminants to a nonviolent struggle," especially violent action, which would deter ordinary people from joining the movement: and alienate the international community, from which material and financial assistance could be drawn. As Popovic put it: "Stay nonviolent and you will get the support of the third party."

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S. government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most of this financing, was also the source of money that went for materials like t-shirts and stickers.

No Lack of Opportunities for Employment

In the aftermath of the Serbian revolution, the National Endowment for Democracy, Albert Einstein Institution, and related outfits helped establish several Otpor-modeled youth groups in Eastern Europe, notably Zubr in Belarus in January 2001; Kmara in Georgia, in April 2003; and Pora in Ukraine in June 2004. Efforts to overthrow Belarus President Alexsander Luschenko failed in 2001, while the US overthrow of Georgian President Eduard Schevardnadze was successfully accomplished in 2003, using Kmara as part of its operation.

Commenting on that expansion, Albert Einstein staffer Chris Miller, in his report on a 2001 trip to Serbia found on the group's website, reports:

Since the ousting of Milosevic, several members of Otpor have met with members of the Belarusian group Zubr (Bison). In following developments in Belarus since early this year, It is clear that Zubr was developed or at least conceptualized, using Otpor as a model. Also, [Albert Einstein's report] From Dictatorship to Democracy is available in English on the Zubr website at www.zubr-belarus.com. Of course, success will not be achieved in Belarus or anywhere else, simply by mimicking the actions taken in Serbia. However the successful Serbian nonviolent struggle was highly influenced and aided by the availability of knowledge and information on strategic nonviolent struggle and both successful and unsuccessful past cases, which is transferable.

Otpor focused on building their human resources, especially among youth. An Otpor training manual to "train future trainers" was developed, which contained excerpts from The Politics of Nonviolent Action, provided to Otpor by Robert Helvey during his workshop in Budapest for Serbs in early 2000. It may be applicable for other countries.

And with funding provided by Freedom HouseFreedom House and the US government, Otpor established the Center for Nonviolent Resistance, in Budapest, to train these groups. Describing the deployment of this youth movement, Ian Trainor, in the above cited Guardian November 2004 article, reports:

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary—Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US State Department and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom HouseFreedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute.

An Associated Press article by Dusan Stojanovic, on November 2, 2004, entitled "Serbia's export: Peaceful Revolution," elaborates:
"We knew there would be work for us after Milosevic," said Danijela Nenadic, a program coordinator of the Belgrade-based Center for Nonviolent Resistance. The nongovernmental group emerged from Otpor, the pro-democracy movement that helped sweep Milosevic from power by organizing massive and colorful protests that drew crowds who never previously had the courage to oppose the former Yugoslav president. In Ukraine and Belarus, tens of thousands of people have been staging daily protests—carbon copies of the anti-Milosevic rallies—with "training" provided by the Serbian group.

The group says it has "well-trained" followers in Ukraine and Belarus. In Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, anti-government activists "saw what we did in Serbia and they contacted us for professional training," group member Sinisa Sikman said. Last year, Otpor's clenched fist was flying high on white flags again—this time in Georgia, when protesters stormed the parliament in an action that led to the toppling of Shevardnadze.

Last month, Ukrainian border authorities denied entry to Alexandar Maric, a member of Otpor and an adviser with the U.S.-based democracy watchdog Freedom House. A Ukrainian student group called Pora was following the strategies of Otpor.

James Woolsey's Freedom House "expressed concern" over Maric's deportation, in an October 14, 2004, press release which reported that he was traveling to Ukraine as part of "an initiative run by Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute to promote civic participation and oversight during the 2004 presidential and 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine." In a related statement, it added that it hoped the deportation was not a sign of the Ukrainian government's "unwillingness to allow the free flow of information and learning across borders that is an integral and accepted part of programs to encourage democratic progress in diverse societies around the world."

Timeline:

Otpor! founded in Belgrade, Serbia in October 1998. Postmodern Coup overthrows Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000. Subsequently forms Center for Nonviolent Resistance to spead !!! revolutions.

Clinton Administration's Community of Democracies launched in Warsaw, Poland, in June 2000.

Zubr! founded in Minsk, Belarus, on January 14, 2001. Election-Coup efforts fail in September 9, 2001.

Mjaft! founded in Tirana, Albania, on March 15, 2003.

Kmara! founded in Tblisi, Georgia in April 2003. "Rose revolution" overthrows President Eduard Shevardnadze on November 23, 2003.

Pora! founded in Kiev, Ukraine in June 2004. "Orange revolution" installs Victor Yushchenko into power on December 26, 2004.

Kmara! overthrows Abashidze of Ajaria (western Georgian secessionist province) May 5, 2004

Page 2: Who Is Col. Bob Helvey?

Page 3: The Coup Plotters

Pure Filtered Truth

Global Eye
Filter Tips
By Chris Floyd
March 18, 2005

U.S. President George W. Bush often complains about the "media filter" that distorts the true picture of his administration's accomplishments in Iraq. And he's right. For regardless of where you stand on Bush's policies in the region, it's undeniable that the political and commercial biases of the American press have consistently misrepresented the reality of the situation.

Here's an excellent example. Earlier this month, the American media completely ignored an important announcement from an official of the Iraqi government concerning the oft-maligned U.S. operation to clear insurgents from the city of Fallujah last November. Although the press conference of Health Ministry investigator Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli was attended by representatives from The Washington Post, Knight-Ridder and more than 20 other international news outlets, nary a word of his team's thorough investigation into the truth about the battle made it through the filter's dense mesh. Once again, the American public was denied the full story of one of President Bush's remarkable triumphs.


Dr. ash-Shaykhli's findings provided confirmation of earlier reports by many other Iraqis -- reports that were also ignored by the arrogant filterers, who seem more interested in hearing from terrorists or anti-occupation extremists than ordinary Iraqis and those like Dr. ash-Shaykhli, who serve in the U.S.-backed interim government vetted and approved by President Bush. But while the media elite turn up their noses at such riffraff, the testimony of these common folk and diligent public servants gives ample evidence of Bush's innovative method of liberating innocent Iraqis from tyranny: He burns them to death with chemical weapons.

Dr. ash-Shaykhli was sent by the pro-American Baghdad government to assess health conditions in Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that was razed to the ground by a U.S. assault on a few hundred insurgents, most of whom slipped away long before the attack. The ruin of the city was complete: Every single house was either destroyed (from 75 to 80 percent of the total) or heavily damaged.

The city's entire infrastructure -- water, electricity, food, transport, medicine -- was obliterated. Indeed, the city's hospitals were among the first targets, in order to prevent medical workers from spreading "propaganda" about civilian casualties, U.S. officials said at the time.

Eyewitness accounts from the few survivors of the onslaught, which killed an estimated 1,200 noncombatants, have consistently reported the use of "burning chemicals" by American forces: horrible concoctions that roasted people alive with an unquenchable

jellied fire, InterPress reported. They also tell of whole quadrants of the city in which nothing was left alive, not even dogs or goats -- quadrants that were sealed off by the victorious Americans for mysterious scouring operations after the battle. Others told of widespread use of cluster bombs in civilian areas -- a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions, but a standard practice throughout the war.

The few fragments of this information that made it through the ever-vigilant filter were instantly dismissed as anti-American propaganda, although they often came from civilians who had opposed the heavy-handed insurgent presence in the town. Rejected as well were the innumerable horror stories of those who had seen their whole families -- including women, children, the sick and the elderly -- slaughtered in the "liberal rules of engagement" established by Bush's top brass. Most of the city was declared "weapons-free": military jargon meaning that soldiers could shoot "whatever they see -- it's all considered hostile," The New York Times reported, in a story buried deep inside the paper.

Yet the ash-Shaykhli team -- again, appointed by the Bush-backed government -- confirmed the use of "mustard gas, nerve gas and other burning chemicals" by U.S. forces during the battle. Dr. ash-Shaykhli said that survivors -- still living in refugee camps, along with some 200,000 former Fallujah residents who fled before the assault -- are now showing the medical effects of attack by chemical agents and the use of depleted uranium shells. (American officials have admitted raining more than 250,000 pounds of toxin-tipped DU ammunition on Iraqis since the war began.)

The Pentagon has acknowledged using white phosphorus in Fallujah, but only for "illumination purposes." It denied using napalm in the attack -- but, in the course of that denial, it admitted that its earlier denials of using napalm elsewhere in Iraq were in fact false. And individual Marines filing "After Action Reports" on the Internet for military enthusiasts back home have detailed the routine use of white phosphorus shells, propane bombs and "jellied gasoline" (also known as napalm) during direct tactical assaults in Fallujah.

Dr. ash-Shaykhli's findings -- coming from a pro-American government, buttressed by reams of eyewitness testimony from ordinary Iraqi civilians -- appear to be substantial, credible and worthy of further investigation by the U.S. press. Certainly, the findings are more credible than the pre-war lies and fantasies about Saddam's phantom WMD, which the "media filter" lapped up from the Bush regime and amplified across the nation, rousing support for an unnecessary, illegal and immoral war. Yet these serious new atrocity charges have not even been mentioned, much less examined.

Behind the filter -- with its basic story template of "always moral U.S. policies occasionally marred by a few bad apples" -- a relentless degeneration of American society is taking place. Brutality and atrocity are becoming normalized, systemized and rewarded. The noble American ideal of transcendence -- overcoming the beast within, seeking to embrace an ever-broader, ever-deeper, ever-richer vision of universal communion and individual worth -- is dying at the hands of the resurgent barbarity championed and cultivated by the Bush regime. Old-fashioned citizens are being replaced by "Bush Americans": wilfully ignorant, bellicose zealots, cringingly servile toward the powerful, violently hostile to all "outsiders." Despite Bush's artful complaints, the media filter has served his degenerate purposes very well.



Annotations [see original for active links]


Napalm, Chemical Weapons Used at Fallujah: Iraqi Official
ILCA Online, March 7, 2005

Stories From Fallujah
Iraq Dispatch, Feb. 8, 2005

Fallujah, Tent City, Awaits Compensation
Informed Comment, March 13, 2005

Another Sad Day for Our Country
The American Independent, March 7, 2005

Iraqi Health Ministry Confirms Use of Prohibited Weapons in Attacks on al-Fallujah
Mafkarat al-Islam (Iraq), March 2, 2005

U.S. General From Abu Ghraib Scandal Promoted
Stars and Stripes, March 15, 2005

Odd Happenings in Fallujah
Electronic Iraq, Jan. 18, 2005

U.S. Denies Use of Napalm in Fallujah
U.S, International Information Programs Jan. 27, 2005

The Eyewitnesses Must Be Crazy
Antiwar.com, March 15, 2005

Life Under the Bombs in Iraq
TomDispatch, Feb. 2, 2005

TV News Turns Myopic: Profits Come First
Houston Chronicle, March 16, 2005

The Media Lobby
CorpWatch, March 11, 2005

Journalism, Infotainment and the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcasting
Buzzflash, March 17, 2005

Handmaiden of the State: The Role of Media in an Age of Empire
Antiwar.com, March 16, 2005

Extreme Cinema Verite: Soldiers Make Music Videos of Death and Destruction
Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2005

A War Crime in Real Time: Obliterating Fallujah
CounterPunch, Nov. 15, 2004

Inside Fallujah: One Family's Diary of Terror
Scotland Sunday Herald, Nov. 14, 2004

The Marine's Tale: 'I Felt We Were Committing Genocide
The Independent, May 23, 2004

Smoke and Corpses
BBC, Nov. 11, 2004

20 Doctors Killed in Strike on Clinic: Red Crescent
UN Integrated Regional Information Network, Nov. 10, 2004

US Strikes Raze Fallujah Hospital
BBC, Nov. 6, 2004

Ghost City Calls for Help
BBC, Nov. 13, 2004

Let Them Drink Sand: War Crimes in Fallujah
CounterPunch, Nov. 13, 2004

American Heroes
Baghdad Burning, Nov. 16, 2004

Beyond Embattled City, Rebels Roam Free
Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 2004

Administration Rejects Ruling on PR Videos
Washington Post, March 14, 2005

$226 Million in Government Ads Helped Pave the Way to War
Antiwar.com, May 28, 2004

Reports from the Slimy Bush World

"Shallow Throat": Reports from
the Slimy Bush World

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, "The Crisis Papers."
February 22, 2005

"Shallow Throat" had not contacted me since months before the November 2004 election. I figured that the high-level GOP mole, who formerly had worked at the White House before moving to another agency, was bummed out and needed time to reflect.

So receiving ST's coded calls was a good sign. We met in an obscure diner in Rockville, Md. I could tell Shallow Throat was in bad shape, since my conservative informant looked pale and depressed and was back to wearing a wig and wraparound shades.

"I can't describe to you, Bernie, what the atmosphere is like inside the Administration," said a nervous-sounding ST. "Publicly, they are taking their electoral 'victory' as confirmation that they don't have to give an inch, to anyone. It's full speed ahead domestically and abroad. But privately, they are well aware of how tenuous the situation could become for them in some areas, which is why they are coming out of the chute with such full-bore speed and determination. (Observe how they are trying to keep anyone from getting to the truth of that electoral 'victory,' especially in Ohio.)

"They realize that, as is often the case for 're-elected' administrations, there is only a brief window of opportunity in the second term to get things done. So, it's tort and Social Security 'reform' and more Patriot Act laws domestically, and in foreign policy it's on to getting their way with Syria and Iran."

"You look terrible," I said. "We can talk about their plans and policies in a minute. I'm worried about you. How are you holding up?"


INSIDE THE BUSH BUNKER

"Not too well. Like you, I figured that enough voters would have seen through these ruthless, greedy, power-hungry bastards, and they'd be gone by now. It wouldn't have mattered to me, an old-time Republican, if the Democrats were now in power, making their own mistakes. At least, we'd be working to undo the damage Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft and friends did to the country and the world over the past four years.

"Instead, I'm still in the belly of a vicious, determined beast, which is even more paranoid this time out. That's why they've made sure the key players are totally loyal, hunkering down in the political bunker with Bush and Cheney and Rove. Just look at the ruthless, brazen criminals in that bunker: Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz at Defense, Rice and Abrams at State, Gonzales at Justice, Goss at CIA, Chertoff at Homeland Security, Hadley as National Security Adviser, Negroponte the Intel Czar. They're all dirty, perfect candidates someday for criminal prosecution.

"Anyway, I guess I'm answering your question by indirection about how I'm doing. Things are terrible, and disloyalty is simply not permitted. Nor are any concessions to the real world; it's fantasyland, lies told to themselves that bear little relation to reality. Instead, it's pretty much like 'You vill click heels and follow orders, ja? Sieg Heil!' If I were to get caught spilling my guts to you -- and through you, to your liberal associates out there -- God help me."

"I appreciate your courage in contacting me," I said. "So you must have something you really want to talk about."

"You bet. As usual, these Bush guys are over-reaching and, in their arrogance, not covering their tracks very well. Even with the Congress in their hands, most of the mass-media whoring for them, and the courts effectively neutered, the Bushies are vulnerable on several fronts. If the Democrats only can get their act together and, working in tandem with a lot of disaffected Republican moderates, take them on frontally, there might be hope.

"Certainly, Reid and Pelosi and Dean are showing some fighting spirit and seem willing to battle the Bushies' more egregious, extreme policies and judicial appointments. But they can't always bring their troops along with them. Look at the capitulation on Condi Rice; what on earth happened to Leahy, Biden, Obama, Feinstein, Clinton, Feingold and the other so-called "liberals"?

"Look at the shameful Democrat votes on Bush's bill to curtail class-action suits. They just caved. Disgraceful! You're either an Opposition Party or you're not; you don't play patty-cake with these Bush guys -- they'll eat you alive, crush you and grind up your bones. You'd have thought the Dems might have learned that painful lesson by now.

"The Republicans have clear splits inside the party -- especially, for example, on Bush's Social Security plan -- but their public face is one of unity and support for their President. The Democrats need to develop that kind of party discipline behind their leaders. The only thing that ever makes the Bush folks back off is facing a concerted, determined opposition -- especially if it includes a good many moderate Republicans acting in concert with your Democrat friends."


WHERE DEMS SHOULD ATTACK

"Look," I replied, "the Democrats can't battle the Bush Administration on every issue, lest they be attacked as total 'obstructionists.' They have to pick and choose judiciously the issues on which to fight. Which ones would you suggest they make their stands on?"

"Just follow Rove's lead; he's revealed publicly those issues the Administration will push for in these first two years of their second term. Domestically, major 'reform' of Social Security and tort law, and re-nominating the extremist judges who were turned down last time; and, in foreign policy, continuing the neo-con strategy of politically restructuring the Islamic Middle East, by threats and suasion if possible, by military means if necessary. (Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter says Bush already has approved plans for attacking Iran in early-Summer.)

"The Administration is vulnerable in each of those domestic areas. Not even most Republicans agree with the Bush plan on Social Security; they'll mouth the party spin, but they don't want to risk their re-election chances, and many believe this Social Security plan is reckless nonsense. If the Democrats hang firm together, and if they can slice off a few more Republicans from supporting the Bush plan, Rove&Co. will go down to a flaming and embarrassing defeat. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

"Tort reform will be a bit harder, since the public understands Social Security and the dangerous and prohibitively expensive fiddling the Bush Administration wants to do with it. But tort 'reform' -- trying to shield greedy corporations and malpracticing doctors from being awarded big bucks by juries for their crimes -- is much more complex, and so there isn't that Democrat cohesion on the issue, as was the case on the bill restricting the filing of successful class-action suits.

"Tort 'reform' could be made into a major populist campaign against the Bush Administration if the Democrat leadership can frame the debate properly -- ordinary people need these lawsuits and awards to keep the powerful honest -- and maintain party discipline behind them.

"Gonzales will carry on Ashcroft's legacy of expanding central government power over peoples' lives, by trying to push through Patriot Act 2 bills that further shred the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Plus, Gonzales is the same guy who approves of torture and dictatorial rule by the President. The Dems can stand up and fight on these moves; even a good many Republicans, from the right and the center, believe that Patriot Act 1 went too far in certain areas, so maybe a Dem/Libertarian/GOP alliance can be made to fight the worst of the new bills."


RESISTING BUSH'S MIDEAST WARS

"What about the war, or wars, issue?" I asked. "Even though the public still indicates it thinks the war in Iraq isn't worth it, the Bushies have taken heart, asserting that the recent Iraq elections proves it's morally right that U.S. troops should be there. Are you suggesting that the American people might not go along with similar military adventures in Iran and Syria?"

"Given the over-stretched mission of U.S. forces these days, and their inability to keep and recruit enough troops, and the opposition of the country to a military draft, it seems clear that the Bush Administration doesn't want to have to invade another country -- and that they couldn't depend on the American populace to support such action if they did.

"But the Bush neo-cons are not averse to stirring up opposition internally to the Iranian mullahs and to young Assad in Syria, and to inserting covert-ops demolition and assassination squads into those countries, and to bombing key installations from the air -- or, in the case of Iran's nuclear plants, if the political heat in this country gets too intense, the neo-cons would encourage the Israelis to bomb those sites. Bush&Co. are bound and determined to get and protect that oil, to control the geopolitical direction of that region for years to come, and to provide Israel some breathing room from retaliatory attacks.

"But all that will come at a high price in treasure spent and American lives lost, and there is bound to be (and Iraq is the perfect example) constant and unremitting incompetence from Rumsfeld in nation-building -- thus ensuring that more and more terrorists will join the anti-American fight.

"That future scenario can be laid out by the Dems, and they'll find a good many Republicans of similar mind. Bush is spending $300 billion of our tax dollars (that's Billion, with a capital B!) for nation-building in Iraq & Afghanistan -- starving our treasury and social programs of much-needed funds -- and the result may well be an Islamist government more friendly to Iran than to America. Good organizing points for a possible political alliance."


FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL

"Any other areas of Bush Administration vulnerability?" I asked.

"Follow the money. On environmental issues, the greedy polluters have been given permission to pillage and plunder our natural resources, national parks, our air and water. In Iraq and Afghanistan, at least $9 billion (Billion!) has simply disappeared -- no doubt into corrupt corporate pockets -- with nobody in the Administration seeming to care in the slightest. Somebody stole that money; make them, and those crooks in charge, accountable. Those are our taxes, damn it!

"And there's the way our tax monies have been used by the Bushies to buy favorable media coverage -- payola for rightwing pundits and journalists, creating phony "news reports," etc. Follow that cash trail and see where it comes from and where it winds up.

"And then, of course, there's the 'Jeff Gannon' scandal. Someone high up in the Administration, either in Scott McClellan's office or even higher -- and you know who I mean -- moved 'Jeff Gannon' (real name James Guckert) into the White House press corps, fed him scoops, enlisted him in dirty-tricks against Dem candidates, and made sure he was always there to throw puffball questions to McClellan and Bush.

"Apparently, this non-journalist GOP propagandist -- and given his night-job as a paid male escort for gay men, a potential national security risk -- received his credentials without having been vetted by the FBI and Secret Service. He even was given access to the White House press room before Talon News, his ostensible employer, even existed. Who made all that happen for him?

"I'm not sure Guckert was receiving subsidies directly from the White House -- it probably was more subtle, his salary and bonuses coming from cutaway Republican outfits like GOPUSA & Talon News, financed by wealthy Texas GOP operatives. Guckert, a true believer, probably did it for ideological reasons and for the White House press-pass prestige. But I'd try to see if there was a money trail there anyway; there often is. (Who paid Guckert when he was sliming Daschle in South Dakota, for example? Who was Guckert working for when he got involved in the Valerie Plame scandal?)


MOLTO DESTRUCTO POLITICS

"The Bushies aren't averse to playing molto destructo against Democrats; give them a taste of their own medicine. Stick to the high ground, but don't let them get away with a thing. If Pelosi and Reid and Dean want to play politics against this crew, they're going to have to mix it up in the streets; when they win a few victories (Social Security, denying extremist judges, etc.), the playing field will be a bit more level, and more rank-and-file Democrats, and moderate Republicans, will find they can have spines, too."

"But face it. There aren't going to be very many victories at first. These guys are in control and they're going to run their juggernaut over anything and anybody that gets in the way -- a hallmark of their take-the-money-and-power-and-run brand of old-fashioned machine politics. But in their brazen arrogance and greed and thirst for power, they are making, and will continue to make, big mistakes, to leave traceable tracks, to overreach one too many times. At that point, they're ripe for the plucking. Go get 'em."

And with that, Shallow Throat slid out of the booth, adjusted the shades, and headed out of the diner. ST seemed happier on the way out. As did I.


Copyright 2005, by Bernard Weiner

Another Bush Joke: Wolfowitz to Head World Bank

Paul Wolfowitz: Strausscon Banker
Kurt Nimmo
March 16, 2005

Now that warmonger and master Strausscon criminal conspirator Paul Wolfowitz has been selected by our cardboard cutout president Bush to head up the international loan shark operation, the World Bank, is it possible countries that default on their loans will be shocked and awed into submission? Of course, the World Bank does not have a standing army—it simply relies on the U.S. military to do its biding.

“Wolfowitz, seen as a driving neoconservative voice behind Bush’s controversial strategy of pre-emptive military action and spreading democracy in the Muslim world, pledged to serve the bank’s multinational membership and to build consensus,” writes Adam Entous for Reuters.

Ah, yes, “spreading democracy” in much the same way depleted uranium is spread by the wind. As for “consensus,” Wolfowitz will certainly not bring this to the World Bank or its multinational members. If anything, Wolfowitz and the Strausscons are anathema to anything multinational—except of course multinational corporations. It is interesting Bush—or I should say Cheney and the Strausscons—chose Wolfowitz who is about as appropriate as Bolton is for the United Nations.

“Wolfowitz, No. 2 at the Pentagon, is a divisive figure in Europe and the Middle East for helping shape the Iraq war. Some said the U.S. choice, coming on the heels of the appointment of hawk John Bolton as United Nations ambassador, highlighted White House contempt for international diplomacy,” Reuters reports elsewhere.

No, you think?

“If the Bush administration wanted to poke a finger into the eye of every nation on Earth, it couldn’t have made a better choice,” said John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, supposedly a liberal think tank, that is if you consider Faberge cosmetics money liberal.

Well, of course, this is exactly what the Strausscons want to do—but instead of a finger it is the barrel of a 120mm M256 cannon on an M1 Abrams tank.

“He could be a lot better than the initial reaction to the labels that have been attached to him,” said John Stremlau, head of the international relations department at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand. “He could prove over time to be a very important and good leader of the World Bank.”

Labels—for instance international war criminal for plotting the invasion of Iraq, resulting in more than 100,000 people murdered. Indeed, “over time” Wolfowitz will be an ideal president of the World Bank because predatory capitalism is now entering a no-nonsense phase of military belligerence as finite natural resources reach their depletion rates and rich people scramble to make as much money as possible on them.

Strausscon banker is not a stretch because the banks and international financial corporations play an important role in piranha capitalism—and increasingly that role is violent and bloodthirsty as it sets about cashing in what is left of oil, lumber, minerals, water, and human labor.

Meeting Manley

The Man That Would be Consort?

Satellite Canada: The End of a Nation

John Manley, the over-eager quisling of U.S. ambitions to complete their usurpation of our sovereignty, blathers on our need for "Deep Integration" with G.W.'s New World Order. - ape

NotaColony.ca Editorial

February 28, 2005

Deep Integration and the New North American Man.

Isn’t it strange that a prominent political figure often touted as the next Prime Minister is actively and openly participating in a group whose unstated goal amounts to the destruction of the very country he wants to lead?

Stranger yet, this bizarre and frightening fact is ignored by the national media. Instead of front page stories, angry editorials and outraged columnists there's a soothing silence, which enables the man to keep alive his dream of becoming Prime Minister.

Meet John Manley, former deputy Prime Minister and current co-chair on the Task Force for the Future of North America.

And welcome to Canada, where the economic elite quietly debate a future of either Deep or Deeper Integration into the USA, both at odds with the majority of the general population who are concerned about the country's independence.

The exclusion of the general public from this historical debate is not a conspiracy. It's merely a reflection of how the real power lies outside of Canada, in Corporate-Occupied Washington. And the media don't talk much about it because they are part of the same, increasingly borderless corporate system. Why further rile an angry public whose needs and wants are at odds with the goals of Deep Integration, and who clearly want less to do with the New America, not more?

Nor is it John Manley himself who is uniquely important to deliver the goods to Washington. Like Brian Mulroney before him, he merely represents a constituency. And while Manley's group will only make recommendations, it will have the ear of the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States. The Task Force for the Future of North America (TFFNA) cannot be ignored.

The TFFNA is a pet project of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Membership in the CFR is “restricted to U.S. citizens” who come mainly from the corporate or political world, and others who share their view.

According to its website, the CFR’s mandate is to spread its gospel so that interested parties “can better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other governments.”

In other words, they offer free advice on imperial management.

The TFFNA is an ambitious project, and somewhat unique for the CFR in that “unlike other Council-sponsored task forces, which focus primarily on U.S. policy, this initiative includes participants from Canada and Mexico, as well as the United States, and will make policy recommendations for all three countries.”

Policy recommendations that, if implemented, will finally kill-off the meager amount of political sovereignty that remains in Canada after years of corporate-driven, NAFTA-rule.

The push for Deep Integration, a.k.a NAFTA-plus, has so far mainly come from the corporate community in Canada, the think tanks on their payroll, and their cheerleaders in academia. The TTFNA is different. It is the mother-of-all continentalist projects, a who’s who of power and influence, from all three countries, hammering-out a collective vision for a corporate super-state they hope will rival a rising China and a rejuvenated Europe.

A recently leaked but barely-covered (of the so-called national papers, only the Toronto Star ran it) confidential summary of the TFFNA’s first meeting lays out the short and long term “integration” goals for North America. Honest people would call these suggestions what they are: a roadmap for full and formal control of the neighbours and their resources by the United States. To call it “integration” is misleading. It conjures up images of a European-style continental integration with several bigger partners and wiggle-room for smaller powers. North America, however, consists of a superpower and two much weaker neighbours. If there is a comparison to Europe, it’s when Germany and Austria “integrated” in 1938. What is being sought is “anschluss American-style”, and it needs to be exposed for what it is, so that it can be stopped.

In short, Deep Integration is a process aimed at securing and strengthening the economic center of the US Empire, locking-in past gains and cracking-open new opportunities for corporate penetration into areas previously protected for the public good. Here is what the corporate-state leaders want from their immediate neighbours. They want control of everything that they don’t already control through NAFTA, like Canada’s water and Mexico’s oil. They want to further integrate the military command structure of Canada and Mexico into US power. Using “security concerns” due to the never-ending, so-called “War on Terror” as an all-encompassing excuse, they want to harmonize immigration and foreign policy.

Make no mistake about it; Canada's current level of economic integration is unacceptable to a post 9-11 Washington. Another large attack, when it comes, will produce calls for a garrison state that cannot and will not be ignored. So the choice is really between Deep Integration and Deep Independence. If some future attacker has any connection to Canada whatsoever, Canada will be blamed. Border security politics will blot out everything else. And because investors and corporations see it as “extremely costly to all three countries”, the planners are counting on an unwillingness to return to a pre-NAFTA reality.

But wait. Why would regular Canadians and Mexicans want to transfer their remaining autonomy to the USA? And isn’t it a little untimely to be holding discussions about deepening ties when America has spent the last four years descending into something that looks like fascism? Where the citizens re-elect a war criminal President and don’t seem to care about the killing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis in an unjustified and illegal war? Where reports of torture illicit little outrage yet suggestions of same-sex marriage provoke hysteria?

Brand USA is at an all-time global low. And that is why the TFFNA wants to keep the focus on the integration of the North American continent instead of the disintegration of the Canadian State.

Which creates a little dilemma.

There is no such thing as a shared identity in North America like that which exists in Europe and Asia, to counterbalance the loss of national identity that integration inevitably brings. The planners acknowledge this and suggest manufacturing a North American brand, using the mass media and education systems to sell a previously non-existent shared history and identity.

They even suggest a North American passport. This would accomplish the extra goal of harmonizing a mandatory domestic identification program with a single standard for all three countries. This identification would be for internal use only, more like the Soviet Union than Europe.

Task Force members know these things will be a tough sell but they are confident that if they remain patient, and keep pushing, they will prevail. Instead of mentioning public resistance, they refer to “serious obstacles” and concede that “contentious or intractable issues will take more time to ripen politically.”

To be sure, elite sectors of Canada and Mexico have no objection, and will gleefully promote and participate in the annihilation of their own countries. After all, there are plenty of John Manleys around. But there are far more citizens who actually want less America, not more.

The decision to stay out of Iraq was wildly popular in both Mexico and Canada. America might be in a rightward drift, but it is progressive forces to her north and south that are on the march. And other states in the neighbourhood are celebrating a renewed sense of independence and hopefulness. Defiant symbols like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Brazilian President Lula da Silva are energizing other nationalist political forces in the region.

In spite of a clear divergence in values between majorities in Canada and the USA, the Canadian public still makes a clear distinction between its dislike of American policy and its fondness for Americans in general. But just because you like your neighbour does not mean you want to move in with him.

When the TFFNA completes its work, and presents it conclusions, John Manley can count on kid-glove treatment from the media. The “suggestions” he presents will be sold as a cure when they are really just more of the disease. Organized political opposition to the destruction of Canada must emerge and push back.

Clearly, this is much bigger than the political goals of one man, and it is unimportant whether it is Manley or someone else who delivers the goods. Someone will emerge to finish off what Brian Mulroney started, and if he fails, another will surely pop-up. As long as the moment is here, the man will appear. It is up to those who care about Canada's survival to change the moment, to inform and encourage the citizens to awaken and stop the destruction of their national political space and their popular sovereignty. And when the John Manleys can no longer suggest destroying the country in order to save it, without destroying their political careers, we will know that the time for a more independent Canada has arrived.

Copyright © 2005 NotaColony.ca

Two-Way Mirrors: Big Brother Foisted on Own Petard

Surveillance on the Job

Fascists in the Machine
By DAVE LINDORFF
March 14, 2005

There is a delicious irony in the rapid fall from grace and power of Harry Stonecipher, CEO at scandal-plagued Boeing Corp., who was fired by the board of directors after his affair with a junior executive was exposed.

What brought the company's chief executive low was the company's invasive email monitoring program, which allowed security personnel to keep tabs on every employee's email messages. Of course, that monitoring was supposed only to nail low-level workers, but someone got hold of some love notes being exchanged between Stonechipher and his paramour, Debra Peabody, a manager of office operations, and spilled the beans.

Apparently such intra-office liaisons are considered taboo under the company's official "Code of Conduct," and are considered "embarrassing" to the corporation. This was apparently viewed as a much more serious transgression (he was gone in 10 days!), than the overseeing of a massive government contract fraud by Stonecipher's predecessor, Boeing CEO Phil Condit, who hung on for months of truly embarrassing investigation and bad press until finally being forced out in 2003. (One must assume that the company's vaunted Code doesn't say much about defrauding the taxpayer.)

What this latest little incident highlights is the degree to which all American workers have come under the jackboot of a fascist-like corporate culture that wants absolute control over what we say, do and think on, and even off, the job.

The very notion that a relationship between two people who work at the same institution could be "embarrassing" and grounds for dismissal is an outrage. The idea that their harmless private communications on the company's email system would be monitored and then made public is equally outrageous.

And let's face it, this is the environment in which at least 25 percent of American workers reportedly now labor (a percentage that is rising every year). Some 17 percent of American companies report that they dismissed workers last year for "improper" use of the company's internet and email system. Most of these victims were caught by automated spy systems installed to monitor employee email. Even universities are now monitoring employee email--including the mail of professors who are supposed to have academic freedom.

Phones too, are subject to monitoring.

We grow up hearing about the glories of America's Bill of Rights and especially of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and association, but the ugly truth is that those freedoms only apply to that narrow sliver of waking time when we are at home or commuting to or from work. During the most important part of the average person's day--those eight or nine hours when she or he is at work--there is no such freedom at all. What you say, wear, or maybe even think, and whom you choose to hang with, can mean the end of job or career. On most jobs, you have to wear certain things and at some even say certain things (like a company cheer!) on pain of losing your job.

And it gets worse. A new trend in which companies are telling employees that if they smoke, even at home, they can be terminated, heralds a brave new world where corporations will begin setting all kinds of behavioral rules for employees to follow off the job if they want to keep it. How far off are we from a time when going to a demonstration on one's free time can be grounds for firing?

Wait a minute, the San Francisco Chronicle did just that last year to one of its columnists. We're there already!

My question is, why aren't we freedom-loving Americans raising holy hell about this trampling of our rights? Where's the outrage at our being treated like the citizens of China, Saudi Arabia or Burma on the job?

Forget Jesus. What would Thomas Jefferson say about the new corporate rules of behavior and the new monitoring of workers' private communications and private lives?

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

Baghdad Burning M13, '05

Baghdad Burning




... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Chalabi for the Nobel Peace Prize...
We woke up this morning to a huge explosion. I was actually awake and just lying there, staring at the ceiling, trying to decide if today would be a good day to go shopping for some things we need in the house. Suddenly, there was a loud blast and the house shuddered momentarily. In a second I was standing in front of the window in my room, hands pressed to the cool glass. I couldn’t really see anything, but the sky seemed overcast.

I rushed downstairs to find E. and my mother standing in the kitchen doorway, trying to see beyond the houses immediately in front of our own. “Where did it happen?” I asked E. He shrugged his shoulders indicating he couldn’t tell either. We later learned it was a large garbage truck of explosives in front of Sadeer Hotel, a hotel famous for hosting foreign contractors- some of a dubious/mysterious reputation. It’s said that the foreign security contractors stay at the hotel, like former South African mercenaries, etc. Since the hotel is quite far from our home, we assume it was a very large explosion. Immediately afterwards, black plumes of smoke began to drift into the sky.

I got an interesting email today telling me about an internet petition to nominate Sistani, of all people, for the Nobel Peace Prize. That had me laughing and a little bit incredulous. Why should Sistani get the Nobel Peace Prize? Because he urged his followers to vote for a list that wants to implement an Iranian-styled government in Iraq? Is that what the Nobel Peace Prize has come to?

Someone once told me that they thought Sistani was responsible for the fact that civil war didn’t break out in Iraq. That’s garbage. Sistani has no influence over Sunnis and he also has little influence over many Shia. Civil war hasn’t broken out in Iraq because Iraqis are being tolerant and also because we’re very tired. It’s like we spent our lives in conflict with someone or another, and being in conflict with each other is not the most tempting option right now. Sistani is an Iranian cleric quietly pushing a frightening agenda and we're feeling the pressure of it every day.

If ANYONE should get the Nobel Peace Prize, it should be my favorite Puppet- Ahmed Chalabi. No, really- stop laughing. Ahmed Chalabi is the one Iraqi politician we can all agree on. Iraqi political debates were never pretty. Lately, they’ve been worse than ever. I think, to a certain degree, we don’t really know how to debate. Sometimes, a debate will begin over a subject both debating parties actually agree upon and then it will escalate into a full-blown yelling match. It never fails to happen with politics.

A debate will usually begin about two current parties or politicians- say Allawi and Jaffari. Someone will say something like, “Well it’s too bad Allawi didn’t win… Now we’re stuck with that Da’awachi Jaffari…” Someone else will answer with, “Oh please- Allawi is completely American. We’ll never have our independence if he gets power.” A few more words will be exchanged in a ‘debating’ tone of voice. The voices will get sharper and someone will drudge up accusations… In no time it turns into a full-scale political brawl with an underlying religious intonation. No one knows just how it happens- how that frightening thing that is an Iraqi political debate develops and escalates so quickly.

At some point there is silence. This is the point when both sides are convinced that the other one is completely inane and ridiculously intractable. It’s sort of a huffy silence, with rolling eyes and lips drawn into thin slits of scorn.

I’ve learned the best way to mediate these arguments is to let them develop into what they will. Let the yellers yell, the shouters shout and the name-calling and innuendos ensue. The important part is the end- how to allow the debating parties to part friends or relatives, or (at the very least) to make sure they do not part sworn enemies for life. It’s simple, no matter what their stand is, all you have to do is get a couple of words in towards the end. The huffy silence at the end of the debate must be subtly taken advantage of and the following words murmured as if the thought just occurred that moment:

“You know who’s really bad? Ahmed Chalabi. He’s such a lowlife and villain.”

Voila. Like magic the air clears, eyebrows are raised in agreement and all arguing parties suddenly unite to confirm this very valid opinion with nodding heads, somewhat strained laughter and charming anecdotes about his various press appearances and ridiculous sense of fasion. We’re all friends again, and family once more. We’re all lovey-dovey Iraqis who can agree nicely with each other. In short, we are at peace with each other and the world…

And that is why Ahmed Chalabi deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

- posted by river @ 9:01 PM

Gorilla Radio for M14, '05

Gorilla Radio for Monday, M7, '05
5-6pm pacific
CFUV Radio

It’s that time again!

FunDrive!

Once a year we put our hats on the pavement and ask for community support for the station. We’re a “non-commercial” outfit here, which is the nice way to say: “Dirt Poor.” So, consider pitching in to help us continue to bring news, views, and music you CANNOT find anywhere else.

Gorilla Radio and CFUV FunDrive
by ape

If you value alternative sources of information, and why else would you be visiting PEJ.org?,
then please consider helping out CFUV during this year's FunDrive.

As well as my show, Gorillo Radio, CFUV airs Democracy Now! , Alternative Radio ,
and fine local programs like, The Winds of Change, and The Hidden News.

There's also programming focussing on issues that don't get a lot of coverage in traditional media: Gay and Lesbian news; Senior's interests; First Nations concerns; local, national, and international environmental news.

We really are a unique source of information, and entertainment.

PLEASE...HELP US, HELP YOU!!!!!

China V. Taiwan: War Clouds from the East

China V. Taiwan: War Clouds from the East

The Chinese government signed into law today a little piece of legislation that would make Monroe proud. The "Anti-Secession" legislation passed today (M13) grants Red China the "right" to invade Taiwan should it declare statehood.

I've posted on pej.org on this.... -ape

Days of Outrage: Marching Against the Imperium

Peace groups continue to miss the real issue

Day of demonstrations guaranteed to accomplish absolutely nothing
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.— Albert Einstein




I received an e-mail notice the other day informing me of a worldwide day of protests March 19 to focus public attention on America's neverending massacre of innocent Iraqi civilians and the continuing lies that attempt to justify this needless and shameful carnage.The e-mail focused on the agenda of the local social event in Sarasota, Florida, and listed speakers, sponsors, activities, locations, and times. Conspicuously absent from this list were reasons.

Nevertheless, I replied to the notice by inquiring if organizers had been adequately briefed on the latest revelations about 9/11, and if they hadn't, I offered to happily volunteer my services. After all, it doesn't take a genius to realize that if 9/11 hadn't happened, the bogus Iraq invasion wouldn't have happened.

And therefore understanding what really happened on 9/11 would significantly improve anyone's perception of the colossal crimes the United States is committing in Iraq (and in a list of beleaguered countries that is now practically endless) — after all, the USA is now waging war on the entire world, and our so-called leaders are not ashamed to admit it.But I never received a response to my inquiry, because these peace demonstration organizers completely avoid talking about 9/11.

They have accepted the government's fantasy explanation about Arab hijackers and the need to conquer Muslim countries, and yet they still insist they are against the Iraq war. I regard this as a profound psychotic break in the American consciousness. You can't accept the first and advocate the second and still be regarded as either sane or honest.So in order to properly understand what you are protesting, you must understand why it happened in the first place.

But all these trendy yuppies who sport peace buttons only on socially acceptable occasions are in reality confessing their stupidity for all to see if they demonstrate against the Iraq war but don't want to hear anything about 9/11.How does it come to be that people will admit the government lied about Iraq and Afghanistan, but not admit it lied about 9/11?

And that is exactly the situation with this group called International Answer (and even more perfectly pathological with the pathetic Democratic Party organization named moveon.org).

These groups, which have millions of members, are deliberately designed to be appear to be progressive and peace-loving, but really they are cleverly constructed take the well-meaning concerns of average people and divert them into activities that are guaranteed to fail (because ultimately, the people who create these groups are actually working for the people who are committing the crimes they are protesting).

These are the same cynical clowns who got so many honest people worked up about the integrity of John Kerry, or the calm decisiveness of Howard Dean, and used up a zillion hours of brainpower only to take the fall last November and avoid contemplating the obviously tragic fact that with a little chutzpah that they could have overturned the election based on the crimes that were committed in Ohio and Florida.

Only Kerry and Dean convinced them not to even try, further demonstrating why neither should ever have been supported in the first place.Not that overturning the election would have mattered, because there is only one political party of any consequence in this country — the party of the banks.You may have attended one of these peace demonstrations in the past. They are moving experiences. Ineffectual, but moving.

There is no doubting the sincerity or ardor of virtually all the participants. As motivated people, they have my admiration. They rail against the evil powers that be in all manner of creative ways, and when the day is done, they all (or, at least those who have not been pepper sprayed by the local Gestapo and thrown in jail) go home happy, delighted that they have expressed their freedom of speech and schmoozed with thousands of like-minded consciences.Trouble is, as the unprecedented (in size) peace demos immediately prior to Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq so clearly proved, they accomplish exactly nothing.

The powers that be and their pimped media complely ignore them.The true purpose of a peace demonstration is not to have a good time and go home happy. It is to kindle each other’s anger and go home as pissed as possible, ready to follow through with every fiber of your being until the objective of your protest is achieved.It is safe to say that, since Vietnam, the objective of no major protest in America has ever been achieved, especially since Bush the Dumber took office (and I do mean took).

The disintegration of America’s Constitutional protections, the computerized pollution of America’s electoral process, the poisoning by food and drug manufacturers of people all over the world, and the neverending robbery of the American people by repeatedly criminal Congressional fiat are just a few of the focuses that would provide more relevant protests.Those made ill by deliberately poisoned vaccines or depleted uranium ammunition would be two other good reasons.But seriously, maybe you’d rather wait until one of your relatives — perhaps a son or daughter — succumbs to one of these sadistic scams before you decide to get upset about them.

The real focus of all our protests, all our outrage at every public official we can lay our hands on, should be the greatest crime in American history, which has changed the way our country does business, which has changed, perhaps irrevocably, who we are as a people.Americans are now known around the world as the torturers, as the sexual perverts who go out of their way to profane the sacredness of life by raping Muslim children and sexually traumatizing Muslim adults. Who are these troops we say we support as they mow down innocent families in Fallujah while they listen to heavy metal music and take drugs to dull their senses? Who are these alien neighbors of ours who refuse to hear this statement, and say “Support Our Troops!” as they close their eyes and drive off to Wal-mart to save a few pennies and destroy their own way of life.Gee, I wonder in which chapter of Leviticus or Deuteronomy we learned to do that?

Americans are the people who plan on starving the rest the world with this Monsanto seed conspiracy, in which subsistence farmers on every continent will be deprived of their traditional method of survival because the seeds they are now forced to use (in order for their corrupt government functionaries to receive their proper bribes from soulless multinational corporations) cannot reproduce themselves. When their governments are plundered by their own feckless facsimiles of Bush or Clinton, these people will die of starvation. But you won’t hear their moans in Wal-mart, at least not for a little while.

Gee, I wonder which smug rabbinical commentary told us it was OK to ignore the death rattles of dying Gentiles?Americans are the people who didn’t protest when their government refused to investigate what happened on 9/11, despite the 3,000 of their countrymen who were crushed in the rubble of deliberately demolished skyscrapers.Americans accepted the media-spun story that Arabs run by a madman in Afghanistan did it. These fantasy bad guys got the U.S. air defenses to stand down, they got on airplanes without any identification or any record of them getting on, they performed aerobatic maneuvers that could not have been performed by Top Guns, and they defied the laws of physics by knocking down buildings that could not have fallen in ten seconds without the help of considerable explosives. We know that from the building that fell the same way that was not hit by an airliner.

Gee, if we don’t care about our own fellow citizens being suddenly buried in concrete by the pervs in Washington, why should we care about dark-skinned Arabs being turned into puddles of blood thousands of miles away?

Americans accepted the lies their leaders told them, first about 9/11, then about Afghanistan, then about Iraq. Most Americans to this day still don’t know that the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq were planned before 9/11.Most Americans don’t know that the PNAC report, which yearned for “a new Pearl Harbor” to turn American citizens into enraged warmongers, was written by a high American official who was also an Israeli intelligence agent, Dov Zakheim.Most Americans don’t know that their new head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, is an Israeli intelligence agent.

Most Americans don’t know that their new intelligence czar, John Negroponte — he of the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran death squad fiascos — is also Jewish.Most Americans don’t know that all the TV networks are owned by Zionist Jews. Most Americans don’t realize that all the major newspapers, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, are owned by Zionist Jews.

Do you understand that Iraq was no threat to the United States? Do you understand that Iraq was a threat to Israel? Do you understand that American children are killing innocent people and being killed themselves to protect Israel, not the United States?

Or are you one of those lily-livered Yankee dogs so terrified of losing your income or some friends who don’t really care about you anyway that you feel compelled to say, “People aren’t ready to hear this yet. You have to bring them on slowly to tell them about the problem with Israel.

”We’re looking at the end of civilization because of the silence of honest Americans over the most important issues of our day, and you’re telling me that I have to wait til people get used to the idea we are being totally polluted by the demonic influence of Zionist warmongers, who take their authority from a holy book that says it’s OK to kill non-Jews with no penalty because they’re animals?

Take a wild guess as to what I have to say to cowards like that — which are the majority of the American people.The real issue to protest March 19 is not the Iraq war, colossal crime though it is.The real issue to protest is that George W. Bush and John Kerry are accomplices in the same series of crimes. The real issue is to realize that our country has been sold out from under us, and that Israel, thanks to the neocons, now owns us.Have you observed how the Palestinians live? Scrambling in their rubble, constantly avoiding bombs and excuses to murder them on a whim. This is the future of America run by the Zionist monsters who control the White House, and most other aspects of your life, as well.

The real issue to protest is that the entire U.S. Congress is guilty of treason for destroying the Bill of Rights to our own Constitution by participating in this charade that there is some terror threat that justifies these police state measures.The real issue to protest is that al-Qaeda was created by the CIA and the Mossad in a proxy war in Afghanistan and then later at a CIA training camp in the Philippines, and that 9/11 was planned, executed, and then covered up by levels of American society that are actually more powerful than the president, who is only a bobble-head doll fed lies, stimulants and quite possibly little boys (or at least big boys) as a reward for his mindless obedience to his masters with the big money.

But even more than that, the real issue to protest, in the silence of your own ravaged heart, is your own silent complicity in the savage system that kills innocent people every day so that rich Zionist Jew manipulators and their conscienceless Zionist Christian dupes can steal money from YOU.Just to be clear, these people are Americans, British, and Israelis, and they have no real consciences, which makes them dangerous sociopaths — which is why we have a sociopathic culture that feels no guilt when we kill innocent people overseas. It is no coincidence that this attitude perfectly reflects what is written in the Talmud and the Old Testament. Now that would really be something to protest about.

A peace protest without a serious component investigating the lies about 9/11 and the predatory dominance of Israeli influence on a severely crippled America is like a body without a brain, which I suspect is what many of those protesters on March 19 will be like.And as the world continues to burn, they’ll go home happy that they did something for freedom, when in the reality of this new and ugly police-state world, they will have done nothing of consequence, because they still fail to realize what really happened on 9/11, or who is really controlling them.



John Kaminski’s Internet essays can be seen on hundreds of websites around the world. They have been collected into two anthologies, the latest of which is titled “The Perfect Enemy,” about how the Zionist-controlled U.S. government created the terrorist group knowns as al-Qaeda. His booklet “The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the Officlal Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001” was written especially for those who cling to the government’s false explanation of the events of that tragic day. For more information go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/