Predictions, 2013

Year’s end prediction columns are always problematic: my last one wasn’t all that accurate, as it turned out. I was dead wrong on the Big One — war with Iran, to which I assigned a 65 percent probability. This year, however, it looks as if the issue — like a huge, festering boil — is coming to a head. Others seem to agree. One reason I’ve been pushing the nomination of Chuck Hagel to head up the Pentagon is that this trial balloon is clearly a signal of President Obama’s reluctance to start yet another war in the Middle East — one that could easily morph into a regional conflict, or even a world war. The economic consequences of bombing Iran would be a deterrent to any President, especially one trying to dig us out of the economic hole his domestic policies have exacerbated. Related to this is the ongoing civil war in Syria, which is in reality a proxy war between America’s allies in the Gulf and Tehran. Here it looks like Bashar al-Assad’s days are numbered, and it’s only a matter of time — and not much time, at that — before the Ba’athist regime falls. The likely result: the Lebanon-ization of the country, which means the de facto break-up of the Syrian state, with the country’s many ethnic and religious factions each establishing their own enclaves. Which means: continued fighting, and the increased possibility of increased Iranian intervention on behalf of their beleaguered allies. This will set up a tripwire for open conflict between Iran and the West. What’s interesting about this is how the “international community” will respond. My prediction: some kind of international force, under UN auspices, will “police” the remnants of the old Syria, possibly including Turkish, Jordanian, and Qatari forces (no Americans, however). The big change, I believe, will come about in regard to Israel: everyone can see the Israelis are moving rapidly in the direction of an ugly ultra-nationalism, and the Israeli government that comes out of the elections at the end of January will no doubt be the most right-wing to date. Read the entire article

Federal Reserve Christmas Message

Egypt’s New Pharaoh

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran after 14 years in exile on Feb. 1, 1979, he set out to destroy the secular opposition forces, including the Communist Party of Iran, which had been instrumental in bringing down the shah. Khomeini’s declaration of an Islamic government, supported by referendum, saw him rewrite the constitution, close opposition newspapers and ban opposition groups including the National Democratic Front and the Muslim People’s Republican Party. Dissidents who had spent years inside Iran’s notoriously brutal prison system under the shah were incarcerated once again by the new regime. Some returned to their cells to be greeted by their old jailers, who had offered their services to the new regime.

This is what is under way in Egypt. It is the story of most revolutions. The moderates, who are crucial to winning the support of the masses and many outside the country, become an impediment to the consolidation of autocratic power. Liberal democrats, intellectuals, the middle class, secularists and religious minorities including Coptic Christians were always seen by President Mohamed Morsi and his Freedom and Justice Party—Egypt’s de facto political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood—as “useful idiots.” These forces were essential to building a broad movement to topple the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. They permitted Western journalists to paint the opposition in their own image. But now they are a hindrance to single-party rule and are being crushed.

The first of two days of voting on a new constitution was held Saturday. According to reports Sunday, the document is being approved. The second round of voting, next Saturday, includes rural districts that provide much of the Brotherhood’s base of support, and it is expected to end in the constitution being ratified by the required 50 percent or more of Egypt’s 51 million voters. Opposition forces charge that the first round was marred by polling irregularities including bribery, intimidation, erratic polling hours and polling officials who instructed voters how to cast ballots. A large number of the 13,000 polling stations will have had no independent monitors; many judges, in protest over the drafting process, have refused to oversee the voting.

The referendum masks the real center of power, which is in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. The party has no intention of diluting or giving up that power. For example, when it appeared that the Supreme Constitutional Court would dissolve the panel—stacked with party members—that was drafting the new constitution, the Brotherhood locked the judges out of the court building. Three dozen members of the panel, including secularists, Coptic Christians, liberals and journalists, quit in protest. The remaining Islamists, in defiance of the judges, held an all-night session Nov. 29 and officially approved the 63-page document.

The draft constitution is filled with disturbingly vague language about democratic rights, civil liberties, the duties of women and the role of the press. It gives Islamic religious authorities control over the legislative process and many aspects of daily and personal life. One reason the constitution is expected to pass, apart from voting fraud, is because many liberals, secularists and Copts have walked away in disgust from electoral participation.

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Panel Discussion at the 9/11 Revisited Conference in Malaysia

The Fiscal Cliff Is A Diversion: The Derivatives Tsunami and the Dollar Bubble

The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones.

The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress takes no action itself to cut spending and to raise taxes. In other words, the “fiscal cliff” is going to happen either way.

The problem from the standpoint of conventional economics with the fiscal cliff is that it amounts to a double-barrel dose of austerity delivered to a faltering and recessionary economy. Ever since John Maynard Keynes, most economists have understood that austerity is not the answer to recession or depression.

Regardless, the fiscal cliff is about small numbers compared to the Derivatives Tsunami or to bond market and dollar market bubbles.

The fiscal cliff requires that the federal government cut spending by $1.3 trillion over ten years. The Guardian reports that means the federal deficit has to be reduced about $109 billion per year or 3 percent of the current budget. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/27/fiscal-cliff-explained-spending-cuts-tax-hikes More simply, just divide $1.3 trillion by ten and it comes to $130 billion per year. This can be done by simply taking a three month vacation each year from Washington’s wars.

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Collectivist Are Coming for The GUNS!!

Jews Behind ‘Dysfunctional’ US Foreign Policy

SOMEONE FINALLY had the guts to say it…
 
Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman, in an interview with Russia Today, crossed over into ‘Jew-Occupied’ territory on Capitol Hill and blamed the all-powerful, omnipresent, Jewish Lobby, for America’s “dysfunctional” foreign policy.

Just a cursory glance at the Internet site of the all-powerful AIPAC and the vile, LYING propaganda spewed, non-stop on the Jewish neocon Website, Foreign Policy Initiative, tips you off that Congress shills for Jewry’s foreign policy agenda, (which serves JEWISH INTERESTS and NOT America’s), surrendering America’s sovereignty to an alien force.

Those Americans still capable of linear thought often wonder from whom - and from where - Obama gets his orders.

IS IT FROM a well-thought-through foreign policy, created and shaped by highly-motivated, patriotic American planners, analysts and professionals…who resolutely put America’s interests before that of World Jewry’s?

Or…is our nation’s foreign policy more often reflected in the OpEds decorating the pages of the Jew-owned Washington Post and New York Times ….where neocon Jews like Fred Kagan and Dan Senor practically dictate to Obama his skewed, ‘jewed‘ and screwed foreign policy?

How is it that Jewish Neocons Fred and Robert Kagan can be against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan yet their Foreign Policy Initiative ‘think-tank’ promotes Al Qaeda in Syria?

"The TRUTH About The War In Afghanistan"

The True Costs of Empire

Mars? Venus? Earth-like bodies elsewhere in the galaxy? Who knows? But here, at least, no great power, no superpower, no hyperpower, not the Romans, nor imperial China, nor the British, nor the Soviet Union has ever garrisoned the globe quite the way we have: Asia to Latin America, Europe to the Greater Middle East, and increasingly Africa as well.

Build we must. If someday Washington took to the couch for therapy, the shrink would undoubtedly categorize what we’ve done as a compulsion, the base-building equivalent of a hoarding disorder.

And you know what else is unprecedented? Hundreds of thousands of Americans cycle annually through our various global garrisons, ranging from small American towns with all the attendant amenities, including fast-food joints, PXes, and Internet cafes to the most spartan of forward outposts, and yet our “Baseworld,” as the late Chalmers Johnson used to call it, is hardly noticed in this country and seldom considered worthy of attention.

We built, for example, 505 bases at the cost of billions of dollars in Iraq (without a single reporter uncovering anything close to that number until we abandoned all of them in 2011). Over the years, millions of soldiers, private contractors, spies, civilian employees of the U.S. government, special ops types, and who knows who else spent time on them, as undoubtedly did hundreds of reporters, and yet news of those American ziggurats was rare to vanishing. On the whole, reporters on bases so large that one had a 27-mile fortified perimeter, multiple bus lines, and its own electricity grid and water-bottling plant generally looked elsewhere for their “news.”

Our latest base-building mania: Washington’s expanding “empire of bases” for its secret CIA and Special Forces drone wars in the Greater Middle East goes almost unnoticed (except at sites like this). We now, for instance, have a drone base in the Seychelles, an archipelago that evidently needs an infusion of money. Unless you had the dough for a high-end wedding in the middle of the Indian Ocean or a vacation in “paradise,” you’ve probably never heard of the place.

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Too Big To Fail Defense Contractors

End of the World: Hear the 2012 Prophecy … Direct from the Mouths of the Mayan Priests

Many people are talking about the Mayan 2012 prophecy.

But few know what the Mayan priests actually said about 2012. In reality, Mayan elders say something very different from what you might have heard.

For example, Wakatel Utiw – leader of the National Council of Elders Mayas, Xinca and Garifuna (the Xinca and Garifuna are non-Mayan tribes in Central America), Day Keeper of the Mayan Calendar, and 13th generation Quiche Mayan Spiritual Leader - says that the end of the Maya calendar has nothing to do with the end of the world.

He also explains that December 21, 2012 might not even be the end of this cycle of the calendar:

Contrary to popular belief the living elders of the Maya do not agree that December 21, 2012 is the end of their calendar. A new “Sun” represents the beginning of a new Long Count cycle in the calendar system of approximately 5,200 years, which they say may not happen for many years.

And see this.

(A brand new film called “Shift of the Ages” tells the Mayans’ beliefs in detail … and gives their true warnings.)

Similarly, Tz’utujil Mayan elder Tata Pedro Cruz says that the world will not end in 2012:

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Obamacare creator goes to work for Big Pharma

How the Rich Rule

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: I am getting to know the rich.

MARY COLUM: I think you’ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.

Irish literary critic Mary Colum was mistaken. Greater net worth is not the only way the rich differ from the rest of us—at least not in a corporatist economy. More important is influence and access to power, the ability to subordinate regular people to larger-than-human-scale organizations, political and corporate, beyond their control.

To be sure, money can buy that access, but only in certain institutional settings. In a society where state and economy were separate (assuming that’s even conceptually possible), or better yet in a stateless society, wealth would not pose the sort of threat it poses in our corporatist (as opposed to a decentralized free-market) system.

Adam Smith famously wrote in The Wealth of Nations that “[p]eople of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Much less famously, he continued: “It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.”

The fact is, in the corporate state government indeed facilitates “conspiracies” against the public that could not otherwise take place. What’s more, because of this facilitation, it is reasonable to think the disparity in incomes that naturally arises by virtue of differences among human beings is dramatically exaggerated. We can identify several sources of this unnatural wealth accumulation.

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DARPA Exposed

“Legal Imperialism” and International Law: Legal Foundations for War Crimes, Debt Collection and Colonization

By now we are familiar with imperial states using their military power to attack, destroy and occupy independent countries. Boatloads of important studies have documented how imperial countries have seized and pillaged the resources of mineral-rich and agriculturally productive countries, in consort with multi-national corporations.

Financial critics have provided abundant data on the ways in which imperial creditors have extracted onerous rents, royalties and debt payments from indebted countries and their taxpayers, workers, employees and productive sectors.

What has not been examined fully is the over-arching legal architecture which informs, justifies and facilitates imperial wars, pillage and debt collection.

The Centrality of Imperial Law

While force and violence, especially through overt and covert military intervention, have always been an essential part of empire-building, it does not operate in a legal vacuum: Judicial institutions, rulings and legal precedents precede, accompany and follow the process of empire building. The legality of imperial activity is based largely on the imperial state’s judicial system and its own legal experts. Their legal theories and opinions are always presented as over-ruling international law as well as the laws of the countries targeted for imperial intervention. Imperial law supersedes international law simply because imperial law is backed by brute force; it possesses imperial/colonial air, ground and naval armed forces to ensure the supremacy of imperial law. In contrast, international law lacks an effective enforcement mechanism. Moreover, international law, to the extent that it is effective, is applied only to the weaker powers and to regimes designated by the imperial powers as ‘violators’. The very judicial processes, including the appointment of judges and prosecutors who interpret international law, investigate international crime and arrest, sentence and punish ‘guilty’ parties are under to the influence of the reigning imperial powers. In other words, the application and jurisdiction of international law is selective and subject to constraints imposed by the configurations of imperial and national power. International law, at best, can provide a ‘moral’ judgment, a not insignificant basis for strengthening the political claims of countries, regimes and people seeking redress from imperial war crimes and economic pillage. To counter the claims and judgments pertaining to international law, especially in the area of the Geneva protocols such as war crimes and crimes against humanity, imperial legal experts, scholars and judges have elaborated a legal framework to justify or exempt imperial-state activity.

The Uses of Imperial Law

Empire-building throughout history is the result of conquest – the use or threat of superior military force. The US global empire is no exception. Where compliant rulers ‘invite’ or ‘submit’ to imperial domination, such acts of treason on the part of ‘puppet’ or ‘client’ rulers usually precipitate popular rebellions, which are then suppressed by joint imperial and collaborator armies. They cite imperial legal doctrine to justify their intervention to repress a subject people in revolt. While empires arose through the direct or indirect use of unbridled force, the maintenance and consolidation of empires requires a legal framework. Legal doctrines precede, accompany and follow the expansion and consolidation of empire for several reasons.

 

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Russian Paper: "Obama's Fools and Stalin's Fools Share the Same Drink of Illusion"

Stirrings of Secession

"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ..."

So begins the Declaration of Independence of the 13 colonies from the king and country to which they had given allegiance since the settlers first came to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.

The declaration was signed by 56 angry old white guys who had had enough of what the Cousins were doing to them. In seceding from the mother country, these patriots put their lives, fortunes and honor on the line.

Four score and five years later, 11 states invoked the same right "to dissolve the political bands" of the Union and form a new nation. After 620,000 had perished, the issue of a state's right to secede was settled at Appomattox. If that right had existed, it no longer did.

What are we to make, then, of petitions from 25,000 citizens of each of seven Southern states—116,000 from Texas alone—to secede?

While no one takes this movement as seriously as men took secession in 1861, the sentiments behind it ought not to be minimized. For they bespeak a bristling hostility to the federal government and a dislike bordering on detestation of some Americans for other Americans, as deep as it was on the day Beauregard's guns fired on Fort Sumter.

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"Cablegate": the WikiLeaks release that changed the world

The Palestinians’ Only Option

In the final countdown to the UN General Assembly vote on recognition of Palestine as a non-member state, the PLO has indicated that it’s expecting “a pleasant surprise”, it being the number of European countries which will not do Zionism’s bidding on this occasion and will vote for the resolution. Victory for the Palestinians in this forum can be taken for granted, and it will help to further isolate the Israel of Netanyahu as a pariah state, but… It won’t be, can’t be, a substitute for a viable strategy to secure justice for the Palestinians.

In my analysis the Palestinians now have only one option.

For starters it requires the PLO to recognize and declare that the two-state solution is dead (not least because no Israeli prime minister is going to trigger a Jewish civil war in order to end the occupation of the West Bank including East Jerusalem).

Then what?

The next step should be winding up the Palestine Authority and handing total responsibility for the occupation back to Israel.

That would open the door to what I believe to be the only viable strategy for the Palestinians if they are ever to obtain justice.

With the two-state solution not only dead but formally buried, they could then campaign, with growing global support, for equal rights and security for all in one state (all of pre-1967 Israel plus all of the West Bank plus the Gaza Strip).

In one or two decades at the most, because the Palestinians would outnumber the Jews, one state would mean the end of Zionism, but it would also open the door to real security for the one state’s Jews.

 

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9/11 Truth Goes Worldwide (With Your Help)

When Propaganda Masquarades as News

he week-long Israeli onslaught against largely defenseless Palestinians in Gaza that began on November 14 provides a basis for assessing how Western corporate media whitewash the war crimes of America’s foremost ally in the Middle East. There are three often intertwined techniques consciously applied to such news coverage—historical context, sourcing, and objectification of the enemy to be targeted. Such practices can readily transform journalism into propaganda that acts to abet such crimes while at the same time allowing journalistic institutions to still claim the mantle of “objectivity.”

Such methods are on full display in the reportage of Israel’s most recent operation in Gaza. The use of such propaganda fits within a broader campaign of media disinformation that subdues potential outrage—particularly in the US—over Israel’s overwhelming use of force against an oppressed and vulnerable people, most of whom are civilians.

Meaningful historical context for understanding Israel’s aggression is almost entirely absent from most Western news coverage of the event. If present, such context would illuminate Israeli government officials’ true motivations for a military venture that involved 750 airstrikes in four days alone. “’Operation Pillar of Defense,’” Nile Bowie observes,

launched just months away from Israel’s elections, is a calculated component of the Netanyahu government’s strategy to topple Hamas and continue absorbing Palestinian territory. Decades of occupation and apartheid have shaped the current scenario; Israel has dehumanized an entire people by seizing their land and forcing them into prison-like ghettoes. Adherents to political Zionism have shown contempt for a genuine political solution to the Palestinian conflict, and the Netanyahu administration is poised to crush all opposition to the Jewish state.[1]

Major Western media focused instead on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) November 14 assassination of Hamas leader and Palestinian hero Ahmed al-Jabari, while blatantly omitting the fact that he was also a major figure in negotiations for a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel freshly brokered by Egypt. Hours before Hamas strongman Ahmed Jabari was assassinated,” Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported the day following the assassination, “he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the cease-fire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.”[2]

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The International Banking Cartel (II)

Puppet State America ~ Paul Craig Roberts

The United States government and its subject peoples think of the US as “the world’s only superpower.” But how is a country a superpower when its entire government and a majority of the subjects, especially those members of evangelical churches, grovel at the feet of the Israeli Prime Minister? How is a country a superpower when it lacks the power to determine its own foreign policy in the Middle East? Such a country is not a superpower. It is a puppet state.

In the past few days we have witnessed, yet again, the “American superpower” groveling at Netanyahu’s feet. When Netanyahu decided to again murder the Palestinian women and children of Gaza, to further destroy what remains of the social infrastructure of the Gaza Ghetto, and to declare Israeli war crimes and Israeli crimes against humanity to be merely the exercise of “self-defense,” the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, the White House, and the US media all promptly declared their support for Netanyahu’s crimes.

On November 16 the Congress of the “superpower,” both House and Senate, passed overwhelmingly the resolutions written for them by AIPAC, the Israel Lobby known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the only foreign agent that is not required to register as a foreign agent. The Global News Service of the Jewish People reported their power over Washington with pride.

(http://current.com/19su0kc). Both Democrats and Republicans shared the dishonor of serving Israel and evil instead of America and justice for the Palestinians.

The White House quickly obeyed the summons from the Israel Lobby. President Obama announced that he is “fully supportive” of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told the media on November 17 that the White House “wants the same thing as the Israelis want.” This is an overstatement as many Israelis oppose the crimes of the Israeli government, which is not the government of Israel but the government of the “settlers,” that is, the crazed land-hungry immigrants who are illegally, with Netanyahu’s support, stealing the lands of the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s Israel is the equivalent of the Lincoln Republicans 150 years ago. Then there was no international law to protect Southern states, who left the voluntary union, a right under the Constitution, in order to avoid being exploited by Northern business interests. Subsequently, the Union army, after devastating the South, turned on the American Indians, and there was no international law to protect American Indians from being murdered and dispossessed by Washington’s armies.

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Don't Let The Truth Out

Why Gaza?

The Israeli assault on Gaza was triggered Nov. 8 when the IDF crossed the border and murdered Ahmed Younis Khader Abu Daqqa, a 13-year-old boy playing football in his front yard: the official explanation for this action was an alleged weapons cache, supposedly stored nearby, but no credible evidence supporting this contention has come to light. In retaliation, Hamas launched a — generally ineffective — counterattack, and the conflict escalated.

However, there had been rumblings for months of the oncoming Israeli assault, and this incident was merely a pretext: the real reason is that the Israelis were deathly afraid, not of Hamas’s pathetic attempts to make a dent in “Iron Dome,” but of the prospects for a general ceasefire, albeit not a settlement of the outstanding issues, which was in the works well before Netanyahu unleashed the latest blitzkrieg.

According to Gershon Baskin, initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit, Ahmed al-Jabari, leader of the military wing of Hamas, was ready for a peace deal — which was in the works in the days before Jabari was assassinated in a targeted Israeli strike:

“My indirect dealings with Mr. Jabari were handled through my Hamas counterpart, Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, who had received Mr. Jabari’s authorization to deal directly with me….

“Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.”

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Lew Rockwell: It's Time to Take Back The Republic!

Hu hands China's military baton to Xi

The Chinese Communist Party, undergoing a once-in-a-decade change of its top leadership, confirmed on Thursday that Xi Jinping will take over the top party role as general secretary but surprised by announcing that Xi will take over from President Hu Jintao as head of the Central Military Commission (CMC). The appointment of Wang Qishan as top anti-graft official also indicates the new government's sense of priorities.

Xi was officially elected along with other appointments to the core Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, whose own new membership was selected yesterday by the party's 18th National Congress. The PSC was reduced in membership to seven from nine.

Xi, 59, will take over the state presidency from Hu at the National People's Congress (NPC) next March, when he will formally become the country's supreme leader. The other new leaders will also take up their government posts at that time.

The appointment of Xi as head of the CMC means outgoing President Hu has agreed to go into full retirement rather than follow the path of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who stayed on as CMC chairman for couple of years after giving up his party and state posts. After Hu passes his state presidency to Xi at the NPC in March, he will hold no official position.

It is speculated in Beijing that Hu has become tired by the intervention in party and state affairs of retired party elders and wants to use his own full retirement to put an end to such practices in China's political life. Accordingly, approving his request for full retirement, the party has also made a resolution to ban retired leaders from meddling in party and state affairs. If this is the case, then it is truly a mark of progress in Chinese politics.

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When the Music's Over

Fall of the House of Petraeus?

It was in the middle of a breaking news story and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell sounded like she was going to cry. It had to do with CIA Director David Petraeus. She was ticking off his accomplishments one by one, the words “personal tragedy” ringing forebodingly like church bells over the satellite radio airwaves.

For the love of Mike, was he in a coma? Dead? I needed to know. Something bad had certainly happened to David Petraeus, but it took a few more painful moments of this boilerplate obituary and Mitchell’s palpable grief to figure it out: the once “King David” had done something bad — an extra-marital affair! — for which he apparently took responsibility, and immediately resigned his post.

First thought: Oh, snap! The Teflon general/CIA director gets out of another assignment just when it looks like thescheisse is about to hit the fan.

Second thought: The scheisse has already hit —splattering across the folds of the fine green drapery from which a small figure sheepishly emerges. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” someone cries. But for the first time in America’s love affair with Petraeus, that might be asking too much. However prudish it might sound, it’s going to be very difficult for many Americans to reconcile our battle-weary soldiers and failed war with the unwanted visage of Petraeus in his tighty whities, leaping into bed with his biographer in some love nest carved out of the ISAF headquarters in Kabul (okay, so the papers say the affair with Paula Broadwell started aftershe spent a year following him around like Cameron Crowe and Led Zeppelin, but you get the picture).

Like it or not, we are the land of the crooked moral compass: oversee the torture of innocent men, encourage sectarian cleansing and raze villages to get at a few militants — all good. Find out the Howdy Doody general is really a lyin’, cheatin’louse of a husband, well, just stop the presses, let’s give this thing a closer look. That’s not to say Petraeus is finished — not yet — but there’s a lot of confusion where there is normally clarity, at least where his legendary perfection is concerned.

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Benghazi trial, gaurantee it won't be on TV (Petraeus better stay out of small planes.)

Is the GOP Headed for the Boneyard?

After its second defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, under whom unemployment has never been lower than the day George W. Bush left office, the Republican Party has at last awakened to its existential crisis.

Eighteen states have voted Democratic in six straight elections. Among the six are four of our most populous: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. And Obama has now won two of the three remaining mega-states, Ohio and Florida, twice.

Only Texas remains secure—for now.

At the presidential level, the Republican Party is at death's door.

Yet one already sees the same physicians writing prescriptions for the same drugs that have been killing the GOP since W's dad got the smallest share of the vote by a Republican candidate since William Howard Taft in 1912.

In ascertaining the cause of the GOP's critical condition, let us use Occam's razor—the principle that the simplest explanation is often the right one.

Would the GOP wipeout in those heavily Catholic, ethnic, socially conservative, blue-collar bastions of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept, have anything to do with the fact that the United States since 2000 has lost 6 million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories?

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Bibi's Bad Bet: Netanyahu cornered after backing Romney backfires

Johnson, Stein Warn of Growing Police State

Presidential candidates Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party agreed during Monday night's alternative candidates debate that liberty in America is endangered by a growing police state. They were united in their opposition to the Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. They agreed that military interventions have resulted in more, rather than fewer, enemies of the United States in the Middle East. They agreed that the federal war on drugs has been a disaster and that marijuana should be legalized. They even agreed on mandated labeling of genetically modified foods. But they differed sharply on enough issues to prevent an excess of harmony from ruining a good debate.


"I just think that's absolute baloney," Johnson said after Stein reiterated a list of things she believes government should be doing in a 'Green New Deal" to "jump start the green economy." They include employing millions of people in weatherization and conservation programs, providing subsidies for green startup companies, providing universal health care through "Medicare for all," improving public transportation, forgiveness of student loans and free higher education for everyone.

"Between a healthy transportation system and a healthy food system and pollution prevention, we can create the jobs we need, we can put a halt to climate change, and we don't need to go down that desperation road of austerity," Stein said.

"In our own lives, we can't spend more money that we take in," Johnson protested. The former Republican governor warned repeatedly that the continued borrowing of 43 cents out of every dollar the government spends will lead to a monetary collapse.He proposes to balance the budget in one year, cutting federal spending by a whopping $1.4 trillion.

"Nothing is free," Johnson said. "There isn't free health care, there isn't free education, it comes at a cost. That cost is here and now and I think Americans recognize that we can't bury our heads in the sand, that there needs to be mutual sacrifice on the part of all of us or we're going to find ourselves with a collapsed government."

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Election 2012 Countdown to The Puppet of Choice

A ConservativeTimes.org Symposium on the Paleo Vote

We at Conservative Heritage Times have been inspired by the TAC symposium to do one of our own, although one with more of a paleo edge. I’m actually not sure symposium is the best characterization of this. It is a virtual symposium I suppose. But I’m going with it because we are blatantly riffing (not ripping ) off TAC’s effort.

Not all the people here would be best described as paleoconservatives, and some would not claim that label, but the attempt was to try to get people who might be considered part of the paleo/traditionalist sphere. I asked CHT’s own contributors, plus people I know (both actually and virtually) whom I thought would represent a broad cross section of the paleo/traditionalist sphere, plus some of our regular commenters. Other of our regular commenters volunteered their services.

In order to avoid the appearance of favoritism, I have arranged the contributions in alphabetical order by first name. I am still expecting some more to roll in. They will be added in their appropriate alphabetical order as they do. Please check back frequently and please promote this on Facebook, Twitter, with you email contacts, etc. Thanks, enjoy and discuss. The endorsements commence below the fold.

Source

US belongs to Israel!

The Bombs-Away Election

Many Americans are rightly disgusted by the non-choice they are offered in the presidential race every four years. This year is no different despite the serious problems that the United States faces at home and abroad. Mitt Romney has no actual plan to fix the economy, and the record of President Barack Obama over the past four years speaks for itself. Romney is a big-government Republican, while Obama is an even-bigger-government Democrat. Either will increase the deficit to the bankruptcy point; Romney through more spending on arms, soldiers, and wars, Obama with a sorely needed health-care program that will break the bank because it was created in collusion with the health-care and insurance industries and makes no effort to limit costs.

Most other differences are cosmetic, since the Democrats and Republicans in reality represent two nearly identical faces of the Washington policy elite, an elite that inevitably circles the wagons and protects its own first, last, and always. There is, however, one area in which American voters can actually register a preference, and that is foreign policy. The presidential foreign policy debate on Oct. 22 appeared to be a consensus product, with challenger Mitt Romney agreeing to most policies supported by incumbent Barack Obama. As expected, Israel was repeatedly exalted as the most valued U.S. ally, even though it is a strategic liability. Iran was mentioned no less than 47 times, repeatedly described as the greatest international threat to the United States even though it has never actually threatened to harm the American people and has no capability to do so. Obama shifted position somewhat on supporting an Israeli military operation against Iran by indicating that he would do so with U.S. military resources, a position that has been part of Romney’s playbook ever since he began his run. The only real difference between Romney and Obama consisted of Romney’s assertion that Iran should be denied the “capability” to create a nuclear weapon. “Capability” presumably means the ability to enrich uranium and engineer a bomb, which Iran already can do, meaning that Romney for all intents and purposes believes that he already has a casus belli to go to war against the mullahs.

The record of President Barack Obama is, to put it mildly, despicable. The public has learned recently how he has sought to make war a permanent feature of the U.S. landscape while allowing Iraq and Afghanistan to wind down to diminish any popular concern over what is happening in the name of “security.” So there will be fewer boots on the ground while the government moves full-speed ahead on creating an infrastructure in which kill lists will be managed by the White House through the National Counterterrorism Center. The lists will be expanded and will include detailed information on when and how the target might best be identified and killed. Information will be obtained through a massive data-mining operation that will quite plausibly intrude on the privacy of billions of people all around the world, including nearly everyone inside the United States itself.

The White House reportedly sees a continuing decade long struggle against militancy that will require an increasing number of drone strikes and special-operations assassinations in a number of countries with which the United States is not officially at war. A major part of the plan to take out the alleged terrorists identified in the government’s “disposition matrix” will involve killing suspects in areas where drones either cannot or do not operate, which means that teams of Delta and SEAL commandos will do the dirty work. That is what President Obama, who portrayed himself somewhat disingenuously as a peace candidate to win in 2008, has turned into: another all-American monster and war criminal.

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Sibel Edmonds on the US Police State

Israel Lobby Calls for an ‘Iranian Pearl Harbor’

When the Bush-Cheney administration was in power, Dick Cheney tried hard to find an excuse for military attacks on Iran. After all, according to Gen. Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO from 1997 to 2000, Cheney and other hawks had plans for attacking and destroying seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa over five years in order to transform them into U.S. client states, and he wanted to “accomplish” as much as possible before leaving office. Various options were considered. As reported by Seymour Hersh, in late 2007 the Bush-Cheney administration received congressional approval for its request for $400 million to launch major covert operations against Iran, and a presidential finding signed by Bush authorized a secret program for destabilizing Iran by supporting puppet groups purporting to represent the Iranian Arabs living in the oil province of Khuzestan, the Baluchi people, and other separatist “organizations.” Aside from terrorist operations that killed many innocent Iranians, the program failed. Other venues were also tried, ranging from fabrications about Iran’s alleged interference in Iraq to huge shows of force in the Persian Gulf and a campaign of lies and exaggerations.

Another option that was considered was provoking the Iranians to attack the U.S. forces, hence justifying counterattacks by the U.S. Given the long history of the attacks by the U.S. Navy on Iranian ships and offshore oil installations in the Persian Gulf, and the destruction by the U.S. Navy of the Iranian passenger jet in July 1988 that killed 290 people, creating an “incident” in the Persian Gulf to justify the attacks seemed only “natural.” Then, in January 2008 five Iranian patrol boats supposedly made aggressive moves toward three U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz. Bush called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and it appeared momentarily that Cheney’s wish had been realized. But less than a week later the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the threatening radio transmission that the press had initially reported coming from the boats. In fact, it had come from a prankster.

Hersh also revealed that in 2008 some administration officials met in Cheney’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran. As Hersh explained, “There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT [patrol] boats. Put Navy SEALs on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Strait of Hormuz, start a shoot-up …. It was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans.” But, the War Party learned a lesson: To gain public support for attacking Iran, create the “right” incident.

Four years later, the idea is surfacing again, with the War Party and the Israel lobby calling for an “Iran Pearl Harbor.” Although under Yukiya Amano, the politicized International Atomic Energy Agency has been highly critical of Iran, it still reports consistently that it has found no evidence that Iran has diverted its enriched uranium to a non-peaceful purpose and, in fact, Iran has recently diverted it to peaceful purposes — fabricating fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor that produces medical isotopes for 850,000 Iranian patients annually. Senior Obama administration officials have also emphasized over the past several months that Iran is not making nuclear weapons and has not even made the political decision to move forward toward building them. Over the past several years there have been several analyses arguing that the U.S. can live with an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and that such an Iran will even be a stabilizing factor in the Middle East.

Thus, the War Party’s hope for “justification” for war with Iran based on its nuclear program has been quashed, at least for now. It has therefore revived the idea of creating the “right incident” for provoking a war with Iran and gaining the public’s support for it too.

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The Zio Election from Hell!

In Amerika there will never be a real debate

God help them if Obama and Romney ever had to participate in a real debate about a real issue at the Oxford Union. They would be massacred.

The “debates” revealed that not only the candidates but also the entire country is completely tuned out to every real problem and dangerous development. For example, you would never know that US citizens can now be imprisoned and executed without due process. All that is required to terminate the liberty and life of an American citizen by his own government is an unaccountable decision somewhere in the executive branch.

No doubt that Americans, if they think of this at all, believe that it will only happen to terrorists who deserve it. But as no evidence or due process is required, how would we know that it only happens to terrorists? Can we really trust a government that has started wars in 7 countries on the basis of falsehoods? If the US government will lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to invade a country, why won’t it lie about who is a terrorist?

America needs a debate about how we can be made more safe by removing the Constitutional protection of due process. If the power of government is not limited by the Constitution, are we ruled by Caesar? The Founding Fathers did not think we could trust a caesar with our safety. What has changed that we can now trust a caesar?

If we are under such a terrorist threat that the Constitution has to be suspended or replaced by unaccountable executive action, how come all the alleged terrorist cases are sting operations organized by the FBI? In eleven years there has not been a single case in which the “terrorist” had the initiative!

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US Christian Zionists fuel Islamophobia

Ordinary citizens play no role in US electoral process

“The average citizen has absolutely none (no role in the elections). If you just reflect on the immense amount of money that’s being spent on the campaigns, two billion dollars by each candidate, that in and of itself indicates that the common man has no place, no role in the electoral process. I mean, our guest [another guest in the show] said that we don’t have control that we have lost control, well, we never had control,” said Darnell Summers with the Berlin-based Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) in a recent Press TV interview.

Summers stressed that the United states has always been and continues to be a ‘slavocracy’ as the common American has never had the power to influence the country’s political process ever since the establishment of the state.

“We have a situation where the United States started as a ‘slavocracy’. From the very beginning a large section of the people living in the country, the European settlers and the Indians of course, they didn’t have any, the indigenous people they had no say in the workings of the political aspect of the United States government from the very beginning and that pattern has continued.”  

The analyst argued that the majority of Americans are devoid of political power in today’s America as they used to be in the past when the course of US politics was dominated by the slave owners who were also the possessors of the country’s wealth and controllers of its economy.

“The slave owners they had the mass great fortunes, controlled the economy, north and south and everything was based upon that particular foundation, Slavocracy, then to what some people called democracy, however, the situation for the majority of people in the United States has remained the same - They remain politically powerless,” he said.

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OBAMA vs ROMNEY Presidential Debate On Foreign Policy

US Election Concern: What Is There To Vote For?

As Americans prepare to go to the polls, the airwaves are littered with paid advertising of the crassest and most manipulative kind. Political issues packaged by ad agencies are flooding the arena of politics with nasty negative ads.

So far, the two parties and their backers have spent a half billion dollars on political advertising with much of the placements still to come in the next few weeks. CBS reports the “spend” will top a billion dollars —just on ads.

AP warns: “Get ready, presidential swing states. Now the campaign ad crush — and TV spending spree — really begins.”

This is occurring even as the economy and unemployment remain major issues. Millions of Americans are broke and hurting as poverty grows, but there seems to be no shortage of money to grease politics.

It’s being called a “deluge,” leading many Americans, according to USA Today, to wish the election was already over.

The political pros call it “the air war”—ironically, a military metaphor—as the media sells message points the way they sell soft drinks while political personalities and their speechwriters provide buzz words and superficial slogans to define their differences.

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USS Enterprise, False Flag Alert! (Reupload. Banned)

Who Is Responsible for the Mess in Libya?

How many times have you heard the truism that in modern-day America the cover-up is often as troubling as the crime? That is becoming quite apparent in the case of the death of Chris Stevens, the former U.S. ambassador to Libya.

Stevens and three State Department employees were murdered in the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last month, on September 11th. About an hour before the murders, the ambassador, who usually resides in the U.S. embassy in Tripoli but was visiting local officials and staying at the consulate in Benghazi, had just completed dinner there with a colleague, whom he personally walked to the front gate of the compound. In the next three hours, hundreds of persons assaulted the virtually defenseless compound and set it afire.

Around the same time that these crimes took place in Benghazi, a poorly produced, low-grade 15-minute YouTube clip was going viral on the Internet. The clip shows actors in dubbed voices portraying the prophet Mohammed and others in an unflattering light. The Obama administration seized upon the temporary prevalence of this clip to explain the assault on the consulate. Indeed, the administration sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to represent it on five Sunday morning TV talk shows on September 16th, to make the claim that the attack on the consulate was a spontaneous reaction to the YouTube clip, that it could not have been anticipated, and that the perpetrators were ordinary Libyans angry at the freedom moviemakers in America enjoy.

Soon, U.S. intelligence reports were leaked that revealed that the intelligence community knew the attack was not as described by Rice. The intelligence folks on the ground in Libya reported before September 16th that the attack was well organized, utilized military equipment and tactics, and was carried out by local militias with ties to al-Qaida. In response to these leaks, the State Department, for which Rice works, acknowledged that the assault was an organized terrorist attack.
 
The Obama administration has publicly rejected the intelligence leaks and insisted as recently as last week during the vice presidential debate that "we" did not know the assault was an act of terrorism against American personnel and property. The word "we" was uttered by Vice President Biden, whose credibility hit a new low when he insisted that the government did not know what we now know it knew. A day after the debate, the White House claimed that the "we" uttered by Biden referred to the president and the vice president, and not to the federal government or the State Department. This is semantics akin to Bill Clinton's "it depends what the meaning of 'is' is."

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Gary Johnson "Presidential Debate Commission Was Created After Perot To Prevent Another Perot..."

Behind the Benghazi Cover-Up

On Sept. 11, scores of men with automatic weapons and RPGs launched a night assault on the U.S.
 compound in Benghazi, killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, and set the building ablaze. Using mortars, they launched a collateral attack on a safe house, killing two more Americans, as other U.S. agents fled to the airport.

On Sept. 14, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the attack came out of a spontaneous protest caused by an anti-Muslim video on YouTube.

On Sept. 16, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice told the entire nation the attack had not been premeditated or preplanned but emanated from a spontaneous protest of the nasty video.

On Sept. 25, Obama at the United Nations mentioned the video six times.

But when they were pushing this tale, what did the White House actually know?

For we have now learned that the assault was observed in near real time by the State Department’s Charlene Lamb, who was in contact with the security section at the Benghazi compound.

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US budget deficit topped $1 trillion for fourth straight year

Financial Crime in London’s “Parasites Paradise”, Or the Best Sanctuary Money Can Buy

Whenever financial swindlers prosper at the expense of investors or a bank jiggers interest rates to bugger their competitors or tax evaders flee fiscal crises or rent gouging petrol monarchies recycle profits or oligarchs pillage economies and drive millions to drink, drugs and destitution they find a suitable secure sanctuary in London. They are wooed and pursued by big British realtors eager to sell them multi-million dollar estates, trophy properties and landmark mansions.

Pompous and pretentious British academics convince them to send their progeny to six digit private schools, promising them that when they graduate they will be speaking English through their nasal cavities, rolling their r’s and mastering the art of eloquent but vacuous elocution. British governments, Labor, Liberal, and Conservative, in the best and most hypocritical legal traditions, fashion the legal loopholes to attract the biggest and wealthiest parasites of the world.

Crime Wave Sweeps City of London

A veritable crime wave¹ has invaded the City of London, where millionaire investment bankers cook the books for billionaire clients and bilk the Treasury to pay their fines and flout the Law. Courses in business ethics are obligatory at Oxford and Cambridge since it has become standard operating procedure for mega-swindlers to plead guilty, to pay a fine and avoid jail and to solemnly promise to never, ever, flout the law… until the next mega-deal.

London has become the center of global financial capital by engaging in long term large scale active collaboration with multi-billion pound drug, arms, people smuggling and sex-slave cartels. The “Brits” specialize in laundering funds from the Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Nigerian narco-kings. Albanian white slavers have their ‘private bankers’ at prestigious City banks with a preference for graduates of the London School of Economics. Bi-lingual Greek kleptocrats, lifelong billion dollar tax evaders, fleeing from their pillaged homeland have their favorite real estate brokers, who never engage in any sort of naughty ‘due diligence’ which might uncover improper tax returns. The City Boys with verve and positive initiative, aided and abetted by the hyper-kinetic “Tony” Blair’s open door policy to swindlers and saints of all colors and creeds, welcomed each and every Russian gangster-oligarch-democrat, especially those who paid cash for multi-pound ‘Olde English’ landmark estates’.

The London Sanctuary for the world’s richest plunderers and parasites offers unprecedented services, especially protection from extradition and criminal prosecution at the site of their crimes. Impartial British legal and judicial officials are experts in citing constitutional precedents that, in strict regard for the established legal order, uphold the denial of extradition, denying the legal and justice systems of every pillaged country and the cries of justice of the impoverished Irish, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards.

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Pentagon deploys military forces to Jordan-Syria border

Mark Dankof Responds to the ADL Hit Piece on Press TV Iran

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL)has reared its head again in another attack on Press TV Iran and those who appear in that venue. This published projectile out of New York appears as the "ADL Report: Iranian Government’s Press TV Promotes Anti Semitism to Global Audience."

It must be fairly noted that this latest broadside represents an actual improvement in methodsemployed by the American domestic wing of the Israeli Mossad intelligence organization. In this new case, at least the ADL has taken public responsibility for the demonization, innuendo, and ad hominem attacks they periodically launch on their opponents.

Such is not always the case. It is a matter of public record that Rabbi Ariel Tuchman, the Director of the Library and Research Center of the ADL in New York, and an Assistant Director of their Civil Rights Division, was deliberately concealing his identity from the public in a series of anonymous assaults being directed against critics of the Israel Lobby and the government of Israel on an Internet site called JHate. That scam was detected and traced. Other anonymous sites of this ilk have surfaced since.

The ADL is obsessed with what it defines as Hate Speech. The charge of Hate Speech comes into play any time the Zionist enterprise is criticized, or the ADL and its sister organizations in the Israeli Lobby are criticized or challenged. This term and its employment are absolutely Orwellian in scope. What the ADL is truly opposed to is Free Speech and the free exchange of ideas in the national and international public marketplaces of information and analysis. (I understand that my current targeting by their New York headquarters had as much to do this time with my conversations with Fars News Agency of Iran, including my chats with Fars on Israel’s role in anti-Islamic Defamation; the connections of Israel and The Lobby to the MEK Delisting Campaign; and worst of all, Israel’s role in the events of 9-11.)

Why is this so? The reason is simple and obvious. The ADL cannot stand on its own record which includes the Stalinist profiling dossiers their New York office develops on American political dissidents for subsequent distribution and use by their Regional Offices in the United States, the news media, and most ominously of all, both Federal and State governments. In 2002, the San Francisco Superior Court awarded former Congressman Pete McCloskey a $150,000 court judgment against the ADL in a illegal domestic spying case. In March of 2001, a U. S. District Judge upheld a $10.5 million judgment against the ADL in a defamation of character litigation that saw the ADL convicted in April of 2000 by a Federal Jury in Denver.

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Essential Empathy, Sociopathy and Government Programs

Hegemony and Propaganda: The Importance of Trivialisation in Cementing Social Control

Knowledge in modern societies has expanded to the point whereby specialisms and sub-specialisms are the norm. It is just not possible for one person to have in-depth knowledge of every discipline. We must rely on others to convey such knowledge, usually in relatively simplistic terms. Most of us have to take at face value many of the ideas and concepts that we are bombarded with in this age of instant, mass communications and information overload.

People tend to like simplicity. In many instances, not possessing sufficient expertise on matters, they require it. They require easily manageable packages of knowledge, and these packages become taken for granted stocks of ‘common sense’ knowledge that enable them to cope, however faulty or misrepresented that ‘knowledge’ may be.

Politicians and the media also recognise people’s need for simplicity. And here lies the problem, particularly in an increasingly complex and confusing world. In order to rally the masses around certain ideas and to make things ‘simple’ for them, both politicians and the media have to a large extent taken their cue from Edward Bernays, the father of advertising, propaganda and public relations. This is where simplicity morphs into manipulation.

Bernays knew how to manipulate groups of people and get the masses hooked on the products and messages of modern society. We are now all subjected to this type of manipulation each and every day by the incessant bombardment of commercials.

It was the late US academic Rick Roderick who noted the trend towards the banality, simplification and trivialisation that the ad industry excels in is now prolific throughout society. He referred to a rampant phenomenon of important issues and problems being reduced to a fad of some kind through continuous repetition. For example, political debates that are seemingly in deadlock like gay rights and abortion issues, although important, have become almost a pointless debate. The same few points are being thrown around so often that they’ve almost become a fad. This doesn’t mean that the issues themselves aren’t important; it just means that they’ve been reduced to something resembling sound-bite debates.

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False Flag Hack Attacks Being Used to Bring About Control of the Free and Open Internet

Why I Dislike Israel

Even those pundits who seem to want to distance U.S. foreign policy from Tel Aviv’s demands and begin treating Israel like any other country sometimes feel compelled to make excuses and apologies before getting down to the nitty-gritty. The self-lacerating prologues generally describe how much the writer really has a lot of Jewish friends and how he or she thinks Israelis are great people and that Israel is a wonderful country before launching into what is usually a fairly mild critique.

Well, I don’t feel that way. I don’t like Israel very much. Whether or not I have Jewish friends does not define how I see Israel and is irrelevant to the argument. And as for the Israelis, when I was a CIA officer overseas, I certainly encountered many of them. Some were fine people and some were not so fine, just like the general run of people everywhere else in the world. But even the existence of good upstanding Israelis doesn’t alter the fact that the governments that they have elected are essentially part of a long-running criminal enterprise judging by the serial convictions of former presidents and prime ministers. Most recently, former President Moshe Katsav was convicted of rape, while almost every recent head of government, including the current one, has been investigated for corruption. Further, the Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away.

The most recent outrage is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s direct interference in U.S. domestic politics through his appearance in a television ad appearing in Florida that serves as an endorsement of Republican candidate Mitt Romney. The Netanyahu ad and his involvement in the election has been widely reported in the media and has even been condemned by several leading Jewish congressmen, but it has elicited no response from either Obama or Romney. Both should be condemning in the strongest terms the completely unprecedented intervention by a foreign head of government in an American election. That they are saying nothing is a testament to the power that Israel and its friends in Congress and the media have over the U.S. political establishment. Romney might even privately approve of the ads, as he has basically promised to cede to Netanyahu the right to set the limits for U.S. policy in the Middle East.

And why is Benjamin Netanyahu in such a lather? It is because President Barack Obama will not concede to him a “red line”that would automatically trigger a U.S. attack on Iran. Consider for a moment the hubris of Netanyahu in demanding that Washington meet his conditions for going to war with Iran, a nation that for all its frequently described faults has not attacked anyone, has not threatened to attack anyone, and has not made the political decision to acquire a nuclear weapon in spite of what one reads in the U.S. press. At the U.N., Netanyahu’s chart showing a cartoon bomb with a sputtering fuse reminiscent of something that might have been employed by an anarchist in the 1870s failed to pass any credibility test even for the inevitable cheerleaders in the U.S. media. If the U.S. is to go to war based on a Netanyahu cartoon then it deserves everything it gets when the venture turns sour, most likely Iraq Redux, only 10 times worse.

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Iran Is Already Under Attack

Israel’s Hypocrisy on a Nuclear Middle East

When world leaders packed their bags and headed home last week, there was one lingering memory of the General Assembly’s high-level debate: Benjamin Netanyahu’s dramatic presentation of a cartoonish nuclear red line, which hit the front pages of most mainstream newspapers in the United States.

The Israeli prime minister warned Iran against crossing that red line even though the Jewish state itself had crossed it when it went nuclear many moons ago.

As Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Middle East Report, told IPS, “The real absurdity of Netanyahu lecturing the world about nuclear weapons was precisely that — an Israeli leader lecturing the world about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.”

The fact of the matter is that not only is Israel the region’s sole nuclear power, and not only has it on previous occasions all but threatened to use these weapons of mass destruction, but it has since its establishment consistently and steadfastly rejected ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Rabbani said.

“It’s a bit like listening to [Hustler magazine publisher] Larry Flynt denouncing pornography — though to be fair to Flynt, it’s unlikely he will reach the levels of hypocrisy displayed by Netanyahu,” said Rabbani, a Middle East expert who has written extensively on the politics of the volatile region.

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Obama's Army of Czars | by Henry Lamb

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Iran and the Bomb, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Facts

As our Nobel laureate President ascended to the podium on September 25 at the United Nations for his last international speech before the election, we again were the recipients of fine oratory and rhetorical flourish about America’s problems in the world. Focusing on the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa—what’s often misleadingly termed, “the Muslim world”—Obama singled out Iran’s treaty-entitled uranium enrichment activities, saying “make no mistake: a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained.”

Obama’s remarks were dutifully transcribed by our stenographer class, as can be expected, despite intelligence-community conclusions to the contrary and the historical precedent of containment as Cold War policy. This follows the latest media scare concerning Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and the recent tiff between the U.S. and Israel over it. Like Obama’s speech (and because of similarly unchallenged statements by politicians), many media reports are awash in misleading narratives, incomplete histories, and outright fiction about Iran and its nuclear program.

Given how easily the American public and media were manipulated into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, this moment should give us some pause. The disastrous effects of that $3 Trillion Dollar War are still being felt across the world. For those not interested in seeing a much-bloodier, costlier sequel, I offer this introductory course in intellectual self-defense. The only way to rebuff and dismantle propaganda is to be aware of the truth on which it claims to comment.

Lesson #1: Iran is not building nuclear weapons

Lesson #2: Iran is not a threat to the US

Lesson #3: Iran is not an existential threat to Israel

Lesson #4: Iran’s leadership is not fanatical or suicidal

Lesson #5: Politicians and media stenographers have been claiming Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons since the mid-1980’s

Lesson #6: The American and Israeli security establishments are against it

Lesson #7: The American and Israeli people are against it

Lesson #8: An Iranian nuclear weapon will be all-but-assured if the U.S. or Israel attack

Assange to UN: US is trying to build a 'regime of secrecy'

Big Brother Surveillance: House votes to extend Foreign Surveillance Act (FISA) in Derogation of US Constitution

On Wednesday, September 12th, the House of Representatives voted 301-118 to extend the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for another five years, despite continuing secrecy, unanswered questions, and concerns from across the political spectrum about its sweeping invasions of privacy.

When originally passed, FISA was meant to curtail the federal government’s surveillance practices. Over the years, provisions for dragnet surveillance have been expanded, particularly since 2002. During the Bush administration, the National Security Agency began a warrantless wiretapping scheme hatched in secret, and in such clear violation of FISA that Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to authorize it and Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse.

When the program was first revealed to the public in 2005, by New York Times journalists who risked prosecution to reveal state secrets, it caused an earthquake in Washington. However, in 2008, Congress amended FISA to essentially permit what the original statute prohibited. Since then, the program has continued to operate in secret, drawing widespread concerns as the NSA has escalated its war on privacy and the Constitution.

In response to questions from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Director of National Intelligence has even admitted that the NSA’s activities violated the Constitution, and the incredibly permissive limits of FISA, on at least one occasion.

The House’s vote to reauthorize the 2008 FISA amendments is beyond troubling. Many legislators and concerned Americans have called for greater transparency in the interpretation of this law, and how it has been applied. Yet the NSA has continuously denied requests to reveal information about how many Americans have been monitored.

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Jesse Ventura vs. Piers Morgan on CNN Sept.17th, 2012

Obama Against the World

In such a potentially tumultuous situation, the president and his people are committed to a perilous high-wire act without a net. It involves bringing to bear all the power and savvy left to the last superpower on Earth to prevent some part of the world from spinning embarrassingly out of control, lest the president’s opponent be handed a delectable “October surprise.”

Keep in mind that, despite the president’s reputation as a visionary speaker, in global terms his has distinctly been an administration of managers. The visionaries came earlier. They were the first-term Bushites, including George W., Dick, and Donald, each in his own way globally bonkers, and all of them and their associates almost blissfully wrong about the nature of power in our world. (They mistook the destructive power of the U.S. military for global power itself.) As a consequence, they blithely steered the ship of state directly into a field of giant icebergs.

Think of that wrecking crew, in retrospect, as the three stooges of geopolitical dreaming. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, in particular — as well as the hubris that went with the very idea of a “global war on terror” — were acts of take-your-breath-away folly that help explain why the Bush administration was MIA at the recent Republican convention (as was, of course, the Iraq War). In the process, they drove a stake directly through the energy heartlands of the planet, leaving autocratic allies there gasping for breath and wondering what was next. Since 2009, the managers of the Obama administration have been doing what managers do best: fiddling with the order of the deck chairs on our particular Titanic. This might be thought of as managing the Bush legacy.

The problem was that in much of the world an older order, linked to the Cold War scheme of things, was finally coming unglued. A combination of the Bush invasions of the Eurasian mainland and the way the U.S. financial sector stormed the planet with a vast Ponzi scheme of bogus financial derivatives did much to promote the process, especially in what neoconservatives liked to call “the arc of instability” (before they offered a striking demonstration of just what instability was really all about). In a sense, what they dubbed their “democracy agenda” — though it had little enough to do with democracy — played a distinct role in unifying much of the Arab world in opposition to its Washington-backed one-percenters. In this way, the Arab Spring was launched against Ben Ali-ism, and Mubarak-ism, against, that is, an American system of well-armed regional autocrats. (The unraveling of Syria is just a reminder that what we are watching is the disintegration of the full Cold War set-up in the Middle East, including the less significant Soviet part of it.)

Back in 2004, Egyptian diplomat Amr Moussa warned the Bush administration that its invasion of Iraq had opened “the gates of hell.” Of course, Washington paid him no heed. He was neither an autocrat nor a soldier, but the secretary-general of the meaningless Arab League, so what were his credentials to explain reality to them? As it happened, he couldn’t have been more on the mark and they more in the dark. Unfortunately, it took some time, two minority insurgencies, much chaos, millions driven into exile, a bitter sectarian civil war (now being repeated in Syria), and morgues filled with dead bodies before the Arab Spring would be launched. Though that movement was named for a season of renewal, its name was apt in another sense entirely: a whole system that had long held in place a key region of the planet was being sprung loose.

Insane Man Caught on Camera!!!

West Attempts to Trigger Clash of Civilizations

In France where people are sent to jail for "Holocaust denial," considered by law a religious hate crime, it seems strange then that well timed, raunchy cartoons designed solely to insult and inflame hate against and amongst Muslims worldwide would be defended vigorously by French politicians who claim, according to the Christian Science Monitor, that "freedom of the press should not be infringed."

With Neo-Conservative warmongers behind a recent inflammatory film titled, "The Innocence of Muslims," and their counterparts amongst radical sectarian extremists leading violent protests across the Middle East and North Africa, it would almost seem as if the publication of insulting cartoons by a French paper, "Charlie Hebdo," was part of a grander strategy to create a manufactured conflict between Islam and the West, setting the stage for more overt military operations to take over faltering covert operations in Syria and beyond.

France (and the West) Are Playing Both Sides

It is a fact that France itself has provided state sponsorship of terrorism from Libya to Syria, arming, funding, and politically backing the very groups taking to the streets, burning Western consulates, and killing bystanders, diplomats, and security forces alike. France had armed, trained, funded, and provided air support for the UN-listed terrorist outfit, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) last year in Libya, in their bid to overthrow the government of Muammar Qaddafi.

Libyan Mahdi al-Harati of the US State Department, United Nations, and the UK Home Office (page 5, .pdf)-listed terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), addressing fellow terrorists in Syria. Harati is now commanding a Libyan brigade operating inside of Syria attempting to destroy the Syrian government and subjugate the Syrian population. Traditionally, this is known as "foreign invasion." France is one of a handful of nations currently leading state-sponsorship of terrorist groups like LIFG in Syria.

LIFG had merged officially with Al Qaeda, according to a US Army West Point Combating Terrorism Center report in 2007, long before the French knowingly aided and abetted these terrorists in their bid to overthrow and overrun Libya. Currently, the government of France is funding and arming these very same terrorists, who promptly transferred weapons, cash, and fighters to Syria to begin terror operations there.

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WHY THEY HATE U.S.

Kourosh Ziabari and Fars News Agency of Iran: A Conversation with Mark Dankof on Israel and 9-11

Mark Dankof’s recent agreement with Dr. Alan Sobrosky of the U. S. National War College on Press TV/Iran, that 9-11 was a false flag operation conducted by the Israeli Mossad, prompted an invitation to Mr. Dankof from globe-trotting international journalist Kourosh Ziabari to further discuss some of the specifics of the case that have prompted the suspicions and conclusions of the last 11 years.

Kourosh Ziabari: Mark, in your writings and broadcasts about 9/11, you’ve talked about the Israeli foreknowledge of the attacks. Is there compelling evidence to verify this? Do you mean that Israel was somehow involved in the attacks or may have benefited from them in one way or another?

Mark Dankof: I will reiterate what I said on Press TV. I believe Dr. Alan Zabrosky of the U. S. Army War College is correct. The Israeli Mossad pulled off the 9-11 attacks. They had the motive, the means, the opportunity, and the network in the domestic United States to keep their involvement from public exposure. As Dr. Zabrosky puts it, “It is 100% certain that 9-11 was a Mossad operation. Period.”

It was my broadcast colleague, Mark Glenn of The Ugly Truth, who did the initial exclusive interview on the air with Zabrosky, when the Good Doctor finally went public with what he knew. That single broadcast was the pivotal event on the airwaves internationally which began the process of unraveling the essence of what really happened and why, on September 11, 2001.

Consider just a few of the facts discussed by Dr. Robert Sungenis in his two-part series for Dr. E. Michael Jones’ Culture Wars (July/August 2012 edition and the current September 2012 edition available online). The Sungenis series is an extended review of Christopher Bollyn’s book, “Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World.” Many of these facts are also accessible online through Wikispooks through their dossier entitled, “9-11: Israel Did It.”

Road To World War: US Arms Sales Spike To Record Levels, Gulf Leading Buyer

Blowback in Benghazi?

The murder of US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other US diplomats at the hands of rioters probably wasn’t just another case of Islamists-gone-wild. The circumstances surrounding this horrific incident — the riot was in reaction to a “film” supposedly made by a mysterious Israeli-American director under what is probably a pseudonym — point to a carefully staged and well-thought out event. The question is: staged by whom?

Let’s take a look at the film itself, entitled Innocence of Muslims. Media accounts of the movie’s content universally describe it as “crude,” “insulting,” “amateurish” — in short, not exactly a candidate for the Academy Awards. Yet this fails to really capture the spirit of the film, which can only be described as leering: there is an exhibitionistic quality to the “script,” which dwells on matters sexual. The movie, which claims to portray the life and times of the prophet Mohammed, consists of a series of sexualized vignettes interspersed with scenes of violence. News accounts refer to the “wooden” acting, and I think this is literally true: the actors come off like puppets in a Punch & Judy show. There is the same slapstick quality to their actions and particularly the bantering that passes for dialogue. It’s all centered on sex — Mohammed’s alleged pedophilia, how he and his followers raped the villages they conquered, and naturally accusations of homosexuality loom large.

My favorite scene is when two of Mohammed’s followers are having a conversation about “did you know Mohammed is gay?” “Well, I knew about” Mohammed’s alleged sex partner, “but Mohammed? Is he submissive or the dominant one?” Mohammed, who has been sitting there listening to the conversation, leans over and says: “Both!”

Innocence of Muslims is the Grand Guignol of the Islamophobes: viewing it is like reading the comments section of Pam Geller’s blog, or Robert Spencer’s JihadWatch. On a somewhat higher level, the excerpts we have seen resemble nothing so much as a dramatization of the “theories” of one Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who averred in his 1973 book, The Arab Mind, that Arabs are peculiarly susceptible to sexual humiliation. As Seymour Hersh put it in his 2004 investigation into the horrors of Abu Ghraib:

“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. ‘The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,’ Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, ‘or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.’ The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.’ In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged —‘one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.’”