Top Obama Advisor Has Long Ties To Neocons

GENEVA (IPS) — With the 2008 presidential campaign at its end, pundits have begun to discuss in earnest what expected winner Barack Obama’s administration might look like. An important piece of evidence is Obama’s campaign team, which largely escaped the harsh scrutiny that his opponent’s lobbyist-laden team received.

Because of Obama’s relative inexperience on foreign policy, it is this part of his team that is getting much of the attention, and one adviser in particular — Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton’s Mideast envoy whose record includes supporting the pro-Iraq War advocacy campaigns of the Project for the New American Century and serving as a consultant to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a bastion of Israel-centric policy thinking in Washington. Read more

The New Neo-Con Reality

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

–Bush White House aide explaining the New Reality

The New American Century lasted a decade. Financial crisis and defeated objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia brought the neoconservative project for American world hegemony crashing to a close in the autumn of 2008. Read more

Ron Paul Calls Out the Neocons

Professor Blair: former British PM to take up Yale position

Former British prime minister Tony Blair is to take up a post teaching at Yale, one of the top educational institutions in the United States, the university said Friday.Blair, who stepped down as prime minister last year after 10 years in power, was to lecture on faith and globalization as the Howland Distinguished Fellow, and would start in the next academic year, the university said.

His work at the university would relate to the work of his Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which he is due to launch later this year.

“The appointment of Mr. Blair provides a tremendous opportunity for our students and our community,” Yale President Richard Levin said in a statement.

“As the world continues to become increasingly interdependent, it is essential that we explore how religious values can be channeled toward reconciliation rather than polarization.

“Mr. Blair has demonstrated outstanding leadership in these areas and is especially qualified to bring his perspective to bear. We are honored that he is planning to join the Yale community,” he added.

According to British media reports, Blair would continue in his role as special envoy to the Mideast Quartet working towards Palestinian statehood, a role that reportedly takes up around 10 days of every month.

There has also been speculation that Blair could be made the future EU president, a role enshrined in the European Union’s reforming Lisbon Treaty that the 27 member states hope to ratify by the end of the year.

However, some members are known to oppose his candidacy partly due to his role in supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Former holders of Yale’s Howland fellowship include composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, BBC journalist Alistair Cooke and late Indian leader Indira Gandhi.

Breitbart | March 7, 2008

POLITICS-US: Neo-cons Fine-Tune Iran Angle

A new report published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think-tank purports to show the reach and scope of Iranian influence across the Middle East, but it stops short of drawing conclusions about Tehran’s intentions or grand strategy.Co-written by AEI fellows Fred Kagan and Danielle Pletka with Kagan’s wife, Kimberly, who heads the Institute for the Study of War, the report doesn’t offer much in the way of rhetorical grandstanding, doesn’t discuss Iran’s current nuclear program, and fails to offer recommendations of how to counter Tehran.

But that’s not the point really, said the authors repeatedly during a panel discussion last Tuesday in the think-tank’s conference room.

“We endeavored to take a look at what Iran is doing, not with a view to figuring out whether the regime in Tehran has particular motivations, not with a view to figuring out even necessarily what the regime’s strategy is, rather just to take a ‘clean’ – if you will – look at Iran’s reach,” said Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.

The report, entitled “Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” describes the debate about the aims and the nature of power in Tehran’s regime as “charged.” Hence, drawing firm conclusions about a government that is opaque and rife with internal schism is “almost hopeless.”

Yet, it warns: “Much as America might desire to avoid war with Iran, continued Iranian interventions … might ultimately make that option less repulsive than the alternatives.”

The report relies entirely on open-source material, international and domestic media, non-governmental and government reports, as well as interviews conducted by Fred and Kimberly Kagan, who visited Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively.

AEI has been home base for a long list of influential figures, including several former George W. Bush administration officials such as John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. Having helped lead the effort to push public support for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq – including by creating influential advocacy groups such as the now defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – AEI writers and scholars have turned their attention to Iran.

They have long been advocates for confrontational policy approaches, and until recently, open agitators for military intervention with Tehran. At an event last summer, neoconservative author Michael Ledeen said, “The [Iranian] leadership constantly tells its people, ‘the Iranian people must prepare the rule the world.’”

“Everybody has convinced themselves that they can make a deal with Iran. We have been negotiating for 27 years, as if there have been no negotiations … there is no escape,” he said. “The only question is how best to defeat them.”

In November 2006, AEI fellow Joshua Muravchik began an opinion editorial in the Los Angeles Times with four words: “We must bomb Iran.”

But during the discussion last Tuesday, the report’s authors’ ducked questions about the possibility of air strikes against Iran before President George W. Bush leaves office next January.

“What I would say simply is that whatever your view about when or if air strikes will occur, air strikes are not a strategy, and we need to be thinking more broadly than that,” said Fred Kagan.

Kagan, a member of an influential neoconservative family that includes father Donald and brother Robert, is widely known for his advocacy of the President Bush’s “surge strategy,” the increase of some 30,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq to provide security and breathing space for a political reconciliation between the country’s political parties.

AEI may have had the ear of the White House and Pentagon at one time, but since the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which said that Iran had decided to stop its nuclear weapons program, the drive toward confrontation with Iran seems to have sputtered. The U.S. military remains overstretched, and in the upcoming presidential election, Republican candidate and “surge” advocate Sen. John McCain will face a Democratic candidate eager to remove troops from Iraq and “end the war.”

While President Bush may share AEI’s view on Iranian malfeasance, his influence is waning. In a National Public Radio interview this month, Defense Secretary Bob Gates appeared to contradict his boss’s view that Iran posed a “threat,” instead saying that Tehran posed “significant challenges.”

“When I think of a threat I think of a direct military threat, and while the jury’s out in terms of whether they have eased up on their support to those opposing us in Iraq, I don’t see the Iranians in the near term as a direct military threat,” he said.

It seems the scholars at AEI have caught on, as they have attempted to shift the focus of the debate from Iranian motivations and intentions toward an “empirical study” of Iran’s influence. In the final analysis, it reflects a tactical shift away from openly beating the war drums as do scholars like Ledeen, whose most recent book is entitled The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction, and toward an attempt to highlight the extent of Iranian influence in the region. The conclusion to be drawn is that, even without the nuclear issue at the forefront, Iran continues to exert a negative impact on U.S. interests.

By assembling an empirical study based on open-source information, the intention may be to provide a purportedly unvarnished account of Iran’s ability to compete with the U.S. for hegemony in the region, to challenge the compartmentalized view of the Iran-U.S. conflict, in a debate the authors argue has been “short on facts.”

But perhaps the authors should do some fact-checking of their own. On page three, the incorrectly identify the former President of Syria as “Hafez al-Hassad,” who died in 2006.

Assad died in 2000.

(Inter Press Service)

IPS | Khody Akhavi | Monday, February 25, 2008

McCain says his lobbyists are ‘honorable,’ but they don’t work for ‘legitimate’ causes he picks

Sen. John McCain is defending the private work performed by his campaign staff, many of whom earn healthy livings off the campaign trail as registered federal lobbyists. Although the so-called “maverick” Arizona lawmaker has long fought to minimize the role of special interests in electoral politics, McCain called his senior campaign staff “honorable” for their lobbying work.
“These people have honorable records, and they’re honorable people, and I’m proud to have them as part of my team,” he declared in Indianapolis, blaming the system and not the individuals who work within it for unduly influencing policy-making.

McCain later went on to say, “The right to represent interests or groups of Americans is a constitutional right. There are people that represent firemen, civil servants, retirees, and those people are legitimate representatives of a variety of interests in America.”

Unfortunately for McCain, a review of federal records maintained by the Senate Office of Public Records show that the lobbyists at the top of the senator’s campaign and senatorial staffs do not represent fire fighters, civil servants, or retirees, the legitimate causes he identified in his address on Friday.

According to the SOPR database, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) does its own lobbying, and has also employed Dutko Worldwide, McAllister and Quinn, and Valis and Keelen, LLC.

The American Association of Retired People (AARP) also does much of its own lobbying, and has at times retained Bracewell & Giuliani, CJ Strategies, Davis, Wright Tremaine, LLP, Duberstein Group, Ernst & Young, Fleishman-Hillard Goverment Relations, Innovative Federal Strategies, Mark J. Iwry, Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland, and Stewart, and Reinecke Strategic Solutions.

Finally, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) does much of its own lobby work, too, and has also paid Jefferson Government Relations and Lussier, Gregor, Vienna and Associates. At the federal level, the American Federation of Government Employees is a member of the AFL-CIO, and has been represented by mCapitol Management, and Murphy, Frazer, and Selfridge.

A report in Friday’s Washington Post noted some of the lobbying firms that McCain’s lieutenants are members of: Rick Davis of Davis Manafort; Charles Black at BKSH and Associates; Steve Schmidt of Mercury Public Affairs; Marc McKinnon of Public Strategic, Inc.; Mark Buse of ML Strategies; and, Tom Loeffler of the Loeffler Group.

None of these firms are in the employ of the main representatives of the causes McCain identified as having a legitimate need to lobby government: fire fighters, civil servants, and retirees. Which begs the question: if these causes are honorable, why aren’t McCain’s top advisers lobbying on their behalf?

And why are they instead representing large corporations, including AT&T, Verizon, JP Morgan, Land O’Lakes, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, and Toyota? Does McCain think these interests are on the same plane as fire fighers, civil servants, and retirees?

Ultimately, though, McCain seems unfazed by the revolving door nature of the lobbyists who run his campaign.

“I’m proud of the record of many of my advisers. One small example, Charlie Black. Charlie Black was involved in the first Reagan campaign, and he’s been involved in every national presidential campaign since,” the senator said at the rally.

The Raw Story | Michael Roston | February 22, 2008

House holds Bush confidants in contempt

House Votes to Hold Bush Confidants in Contempt in Prosecutor Purge Inquire

The House voted Thursday to hold two of President Bush’s confidants in contempt for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into whether a purge of federal prosecutors was politically motivated.

Angry Republicans boycotted the vote and staged a walkout.

The vote was 223-32 to hold White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt. The citations charge Miers with failing to testify and accuse her and Bolten of refusing Congress’ demands for documents related to the 2006-2007 firings.

Republicans said Democrats should instead be working on extending a law - set to expire Saturday - allowing the government to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails in the United States in cases of suspected terrorist activity.

“We have space on the calendar today for a politically charged fishing expedition, but no space for a bill that would protect the American people from terrorists who want to kill us,” said Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio.

“Let’s just get up and leave,” he told his colleagues, before storming out of the House chamber with scores of Republicans in tow.

The vote, which Democrats had been threatening for months, was the latest wrinkle in a more than yearlong constitutional clash between Congress and the White House. The administration says the information being sought is off-limits under executive privilege, and argues that Bolten and Miers are immune from prosecution.

Democrats said they were acting to protect Congress’ constitutional prerogatives.

If Congress didn’t enforce the subpoenas, said Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, it would “be giving its tacit consent to the dangerous idea of an imperial presidency, above the law and beyond the reach of checks and balances.”

The White House said the Justice Department would not ask the U.S. attorney to pursue the House contempt charges. However, the measure would allow the House to bring its own lawsuit on the matter.

It is the first time in 25 years that a full chamber of Congress has voted on a contempt of Congress citation, and the White House quickly pointed out that it was the first time that such action had been taken against top White House officials who had been instructed by the president to remain silent to preserve executive privilege.

“This action is unprecedented, and it is outrageous,” Dana Perino, Bush’s spokeswoman, said in a lengthy and harshly worded statement after the vote. “It is astonishing and deeply troubling that after months of delay on passing a bill that will help our intelligence professionals monitor foreign terrorists who want to kill Americans, the House has instead turned its attention to the silly, pointless, and unjust act of approving these contempt resolutions.”

If Democrats bring suit to press the contempt charges, Perino added, “they will be met with opposition at the courthouse door and at every step of the way.”

House Republicans argued that there had been no evidence of wrongdoing in the prosecutors flap, and called the vote a waste of time that would actually damage Congress’ standing.

“We don’t have evidence that we can give to the U.S. attorney. What we’re giving to him is the desire to continue a witch hunt which has produced up to today zero - nothing,” said Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah.

Under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Justice Department officials consulted with the White House, fired at least nine federal prosecutors and kindled a political furor over a hiring process that favored Republican loyalists.

Bush’s former top political adviser, Karl Rove, has also been a target of Congress’ investigation into the purge of prosecutors, although Thursday’s measure was not aimed at him.

Fred Fielding, the current White House counsel, has offered to make officials and documents available behind closed doors to the congressional committees probing the matter - but off the record and not under oath. Lawmakers demanded a transcript of testimony and the negotiations stalled.

The contempt debate sparked an unusually bitter scene even in the fractious House. Democrats accused Republicans of marring the Capitol memorial for their fallen colleague Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., by interrupting it with a protest vote. GOP leaders shot back that it was Democrats who were responsible for dishonoring Lantos, by calling the House into session for the contempt debate before the service had ended.

It’s not clear that contempt of Congress citations must be prosecuted. The law says the U.S. attorney “shall” bring the matter to a grand jury.

In 1982, the House voted 259-105 in 1982 for a contempt citation against Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch, but the Reagan-era Justice Department refused to prosecute the case.

The Justice Department also sued the House of Representatives in that case, but the court threw out the suit and urged negotiation. The Reagan administration eventually agreed to turn over the documents.

The last time a full chamber of Congress voted on a contempt of Congress citation was 1983. The House voted 413-0 to cite former EPA official Rita Lavelle for contempt of Congress for refusing to appear before a House committee. Lavelle was later acquitted in court of the contempt charge, but she was convicted of perjury in a separate trial.

On Thursday, three Republicans joined 220 Democrats to support the contempt resolution, including Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest of Maryland, who was defeated this week in a primary. One Republican, Rep. Jon Porter of Nevada, voted “present.”

AP | JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS | February 14, 2008

Bush Lied to Ensure War

Almost 1,000 neocon falsehoods counted out

One lie in a civil deposition about consensual sex caused the Republicans (with Democratic help) to impeach Bill Clinton. Nine-hundred and thirty-five Bush administration lies leading the nation to a terrible war shattering the lives of millions have not even merited a congressional investigation. Only after seven years has it finally brought a mention from the establishment media and is still mostly suppressed.

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations has found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study was posted on the web site of the Center for Public Integrity on January 22. CPI had worked on the project with the Fund for Independence in Journalism. The report counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them, or had links to al-Qaeda, or both.

The report also breaks down who told how many lies:

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaeda.

The groups concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

When questioned about this at a university speech after the story broke, Powell, still waffling, quickly dismissed the question, stating that it was the intelligence that was wrong-”not us.”

The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel did not comment on the merits of the study when questioned but reiterated the administration’s position that the world community viewed Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, as a threat. No one asked whether the world community views Bush and Cheney as threats.

“The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world,” Stanzel said.

But according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading Smith, staff members of the Fund for Independence in Journalism and instrumental in the writing of the study, the fact that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or had any meaningful ties to al-Qaeda, “is beyond dispute, and in short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated, which then culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”

“The cumulative effect of these false statements-amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts-was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war,” the study concluded.

“Some journalists-indeed, even some entire news organizations-have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, ‘independent’ validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq,” it said.

While the administration plays the lead role in this report, the propaganda machine posing as “news media” is the delivery vehicle of these lies, and they were delivered without any challenge.

It’s time for Congress to ask serious questions to members of the administration-past and present. The sacrificed lives of almost 4,000 soldiers deserve that little bit of sacrifice from our so-called leaders.

More about Pat Shannan can be found at www.patshannan.com.

American Free Press | By Pat Shannan | February 11, 2008

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

From exile to redemption to exile again: a history of the “militaristic idealists” known as neocons.

THEY KNEW THEY WERE RIGHT

The Rise of The Neocons

By Jacob Heilbrunn

Doubleday. 320 p. $26

There was always something a little strange about the neoconservatives, beginning with the oxymoron of their name. The term “neocon” entered the zeitgeist in the months leading up to the Iraq war, when it became clear that a clique of sorts existed, united around the reverse domino principle that democracies would sprout like jimson weeds in the Middle East once Saddam Hussein was toppled. Intriguingly, many of these new rightists were the children of old leftists, and a winding pedigree could be traced to unlikely starting points — the classroom of Leo Strauss, the mid-century political philosopher at the University of Chicago who trained Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq; or even further back in the mists of time, the fantastically loud alcoves of the cafeteria at the City College of New York, where in the 1930s a passionate and incessant debate embroiled young immigrant children, mostly Jewish, over Trotskyism, Leninism and everything in between.

Helpfully, Jacob Heilbrunn has penetrated these thickets to explain how such obscure intellectual movements (not always united) ascended to power under the second President Bush and then suffered a fall as unexpected as their rise. Difficult to place even in their own time, the neocons now seem wholly out-of-date, discredited in the Middle East and at home. In a sense they have come full circle and are back in the exile they originated in.

They Knew They Were Right will fit nicely on the rapidly expanding shelf explaining Iraq. Heilbrunn candidly admits that he is not the first writer to probe the neocons (James Mann, Francis Fukuyama and Sidney Blumenthal, among others, preceded him), but he spends more time than most on the group’s deep history. It is a wise choice, for the formative period remains poorly understood. Like an archaeologist probing Easter Island, Heilbrunn explains what the giant heads once stood for, bringing back obscure names like Max Shachtman, Melvin Lasky and Albert Wohlstetter, and explaining their impact on such intellectuals as Irving Kristol, Irving Howe and their contemporaries, who in the 1940s were just beginning their long swim against the mainstream of American political opinion.

In a way, it is a political tale — for, amazingly, these leftists came to power by finding their way into the right, after a long pilgrimage (Heilbrunn uses the biblical term “exodus”) that brought them from 1950s anti-communism to Scoop Jackson centrism to their “redemption” under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (but pointedly not under George H.W. Bush, who called them the “crazies in the basement”). It is also a religious narrative, as “exodus” and “redemption” suggest, for Heilbrunn shows the intrinsic connection of Judaism to nearly every stage of this journey, and an attachment to Israel that at times bordered on the obsessive. And it is nothing if not an old-fashioned American story, for what could be more familiar than poor immigrants making good, sons trying to impress fathers or a political family torn by internal disputes and infidelities? With a little tweaking, and better hairdos, it could easily be an Aaron Spelling vehicle.

Heilbrunn is well-placed to tell this story, as a former writer for the National Review, the magazine that sustained conservatism in its long wilderness years, and someone who drank the Kool-Aid when the neocons were up and coming. He still relishes their ancient arguments, paying Talmudic reverence to obscure essays from the early days of the Partisan Review and Commentary. Not all readers will share his zeal for this distant past, but his research is thorough and his judgments fair. To his credit, he finds plenty of fault with the neocons, and his book is sprinkled liberally (is there any other word?) with criticisms of their failings and internal contradictions, including his belief that Iraq is the “greatest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam.” He shows what an odd mentor Leo Strauss must have been, counting the numbers in Machiavelli’s writings to see if secret meanings lurked there. And he reminds us that the neocons were as clueless as the rest of the Bush administration about the imminence of the 9/11 attack (the cover story of the National Review that week was an essay by David Brooks probing the cultural significance of “Gilligan’s Island”). Tellingly, he suggests that the older neocons, who developed a cultish admiration for Winston Churchill as the embodiment of anti-totalitarian resistance, were invisible when it mattered, during World War II, a period they squandered writing irrelevant essays about political theory.

At other times, Heilbrunn seems defensive, as if a trace of the virus remains in his bloodstream. He suggests that the United States should have overthrown Egyptian president Gamal Nasser in 1956 to let democracy bloom, an act that would have been illegal and insane. He is very severe on Democratic foreign policy, targeting George McGovern (who inflicted more harm on Nazis than any neocons did), ridiculing Jimmy Carter and launching the usual tired attacks on Bill Clinton, whom he finds both too slow (to combat terrorism) and too eager (to conduct humanitarian interventions). He excoriates Madeleine Albright for daring to express the “hubristic belief” that the United States is indispensable to the world. More hubristic than the neocons?

Heilbrunn tries acrobatically to defend Reagan’s Iran-Contra mess, and Elliott Abrams in particular, while denouncing the specific crime (withholding information from Congress) that Abrams was convicted of, and he argues that El Salvador became a “thriving democracy” as a result of Reagan’s policy, a lofty claim. These neocon thought bubbles can be disorienting inside a book that is generally critical of the movement. A quirky ending imagines George W. Bush looking back with satisfaction on world events in 2016, suggesting that history may redeem the neocons, which seems unlikely at best, and possibly delusional. But when historians gather to render that judgment, this mostly even-handed book will deepen the context of a very strange time. *

Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, was a foreign policy speechwriter for President Clinton. His next book, “Ark of the Liberties: America and the World,” will be out in July.

Washington Post | Jacob Heilbrunn | Sunday, February 3, 2008

New World Order: Unimaginable Intentional Human Suffering

Perhaps one day we shall know the truth about being, and being alive on planet earth, whether life on every living planet is as messed-up as it is here. Earth’s problems must be unique, as they are of man’s own creation, man-made disasters caused by ambitious men who are allowed to rise to the top, where they dominate us for self-gain. We allow our leaders to take the positions of power that they desire, instead of actually choosing who shall lead us. Humans tend to submit to those who claim authority, since it is easier to believe in symbols of power, than it is to personally submit to the tedium of the reasoning process. As a people, we tend to follow the natural order of things along the path of least resistance. By taking the easy way out, we give our blessing to the law of the jungle.

It is natural for societies to become dominated by powerful elites, who gain control of the inner workings of government and commerce, in order to bend them both to their will. “Meritocracy” and other forms of “social Darwinism,” describe the belief that “success” by this definition justifies the survival of the fittest capitalism (globalism) that has decimated the world. The brutal belief system widely promoted as “neoconservatism” is behind the fascist agenda that emerged from the bowels of corporate-owned “think tanks.” These elitist thinkers believe that it is necessary for our government to “cull” the “useless eaters” from the face of the earth, through forced population reduction and perpetual war. They are the true radicals, possessed by “extremist belief systems.” Their plans for us are the end program of a centuries-old class war between the elitist self-proclaimed neo-aristocrats, who would be masters of mankind and the rest of the human race. The neocons are nothing new, just the latest, most-concentrated form of this egotistical brand of pure evil.

If the elitist “one-worlders” were correct about being the “natural leaders” of the world, dedicated to saving the most noble of mankind from the excesses of the dirty masses, then their cold-blooded plans might be justified by the results, by anyone who survived them. The plan is to kill-off a significant portion of the earth’s “dead weight,” keep another segment as a labor force and extend their own lives through genetic and eugenic research. They are not being all that secretive about this research, only about where it all is meant to lead us. If the idea of rich men carrying-out a plot to kill-off billions of poor people isn’t enough to motivate the masses into torch-carrying mobs, I can’t imagine what would be enough.

People with any conscience at all can see the obvious evil inherent in the selective use of genocide as an element of state policy, for the purpose of eliminating entire populations that are in our way, and thereby terrorizing others into submission with our killing power and basic lack of morality. It is unconscionable that a “civilized” nation would seek to force its will upon other nations by terrorizing them into submission under fear of certain death. This is an abomination upon the American spirit, equal to the abomination in which this spirit was founded, when we wiped-out the first Americans, in claiming our parasitic “manifest destiny.”

The fact that genocide is an acceptable form of warfare is testimony about the many evils which we have learned to accept. The collective conscience of the human race and the mind of God demand that we act to make genocide unacceptable, once again. Ideas cannot fight against raw power, unless they become a shared idea, driving a political momentum. We have to make our countrymen see the reality beyond the illusions of the nightly dream-weavers and the patriotic drum-beaters.

The people of the United States must be made to understand that, more than ever, genocide is government policy, before they will rise-up in righteous indignation to it. It is a clear-cut case of “good – vs. – evil,” with the evil being the world’s number one source of state terrorism, the government of the United States of America. The American people can only save themselves if they are made aware of the fact that they are under attack by those who claim to be their trusted leaders. Likewise, all the people of the earth are under attack by their own governments, who serve as American representatives, to help conquer the earth and corrupt all life. The people of every nation must rise-up and become their own governments, the only truly democratic government.

In opposition to the leadership of the elite, which stands leeringly over the dying American corpse, there is another leadership rising-up, the researchers and writers who are exposing and resisting the corrupted power structure. We are those who would dig beneath the official lies to expose the bloody roots of corruption that support all that is hostile to human life. We are the voluntary citizens’ press corps, dedicated to taking up the task of reporting on government deceptions, a job that the mainstream media has forsaken. One day, when freedom prevails, the alternative media will replace the sell-outs and the official lie-passers of the nightly news. But, until that blessed day, researchers like Prof. Michel Chossudovsky will keep turning-up the soil for us, exposing the inner workings of our criminal government. His important research on the roots of the Islamic Militant Network and its CIA origins has blown the lid off the most important story of the Twenty-first Century. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7718

The names and keywords that other researchers have associated with the genocidal plans of the elite are too numerous to list or remember here, yet to do so would weave a sordid tale of interconnections and plots that clearly intersect in complicated patterns. By listing the elements of the octopus, we lay-out the proof of an elitist conspiracy for the few who care enough to open their eyes. But, in order to reach the distracted and pre-occupied majority, we must stick to single key issues like the “Global 2000″ report, to tell the genocidal plans of our government, while secret war plans like “Operation North Woods,” demonstrate just how far they are willing to go to start wars, the key to the war on terror.

The case proving government complicity in the 9/11 attacks which initiated the war on terrorism is becoming stronger every day. In addition to all the forensic evidence from the attacks and the unbelievable string of “coincidences” that made the attacks possible, we now know that Islamist terrorists, “associated with al Qaida” have been key elements of US foreign policy up until, and including, the time of the Trade Center attack. We have begun to understand the depth of US/CIA involvement in the destabilizing of a dozen or more countries with these highly-trained Islamic “insurgencies.” This criminal foreign policy of creating radical Islamic militias for the purpose of starting wars in nations now at peace creates ever-expanding bands of Islamic uprisings throughout the Middle East and southeast Asia, justifying genocidal counter-attacks as “fighting terrorism.”

The US is following the time-tested strategy developed by the Israelis (who first implemented it as a double-edged sword for waging war to thin-out the Muslims, while increasing the number of Islamists gradually) to justify greater and greater waves of ethnic repression. For, if you plan to one day force an entire population out of their ancient homeland, in order to colonize it, you will first need to rationalize a massive wave of state terrorism that will be needed for the task. For this, you will need an army of credibly bloodthirsty Islamists, to justify the monstrous offensives into civilian populations. This is why Israel created Hamas and the US and Israel created al Qaida.

Our government and many of our people have whole-heartedly embraced Israel’s implementation of ethnic cleansing policies in Gaza and Lebanon, seeing them as dress rehearsals for our own genocidal plans against other innocent Muslims around the world.

The barbaric acts committed by Israel against the captive Gaza population are not the acts of moral people. Every act of repression, every secret move to limit the rights of Arabs, is intended to provoke reactions from the mostly defenseless people, in order to justify counter-reactions from the world’s fifth most powerful military force. For Israel to “save face” in its international PR campaign, images of terrorists must be created to defend against. If Palestinians do not attempt to defend themselves with primitive weapons, then the Zionist oppressors will be hard-pressed to justify targeted assassinations and other brutal tactics meant to drive them from their homes. Palestinians, like Americans and all other targeted populations must follow the scripts that have been written for them and rise-up in defiant acts of self-defense, so that all the complainers can be bombed into bloody submission. The only difference between modern American/Israeli fascism and classic Nazism is the modern capability to control all information and suppress the truth.

The scale of the intentional suffering being inflicted by supposedly moral human beings, who consider themselves superior to their victims, is unimaginable. What is even more unimaginable is the international spectacle of other supposedly moral nations fawning over the killers, each nation trying harder than the next to suck-up to those who are starving helpless children, depriving them of medicine, and mowing them down with cannon and machine gun fire, in order to wipe them from their land and erase them from the “pages of time.” The international horror shows of “diplomacy” and “humanitarianism” are shams, meant to seduce the masses into reveling in the bloodlust that is scheduled to head in their direction. “Negotiations” with pseudo-humanitarians like Bush, Olmert and Cheney can be nothing more than discussing terms of surrender. One day soon, the entire earth will rise-up against this axis of evil. Our actions today will determine if the people of America stand with the rest of the world against our own government, or if we will continue in our surrender to the beasts of the modern jungle, who intend to devour everything we hold dear.

The earth is standing at the edge of a dark precipice; on the other side is the greatest epic in mankind’s history, waiting to be written, waiting for those of us who dare to take up the pen and to fight the darkness of the lies. An army of freedom-writers, who are as dedicated to defending life as the enemies of life are dedicated to ending it, can bring forth a new sustaining vision of life. We must first choose to place our own freedom in jeopardy, by stepping forward to stop those who would take us into the void in a vain gamble to crush most of the earth’s life for the sake of greater “profit.”

It is time for all of God’s children to take a stand together. It is time to end the American nightmare (formerly known as the American dream).

 

Global Research | Peter Chamberlin | February 2, 2008

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