Secret US-Israeli meeting to focus on Iran

Amid reports that Israel is preparing to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, political heavyweights in Washington and Tel Aviv make plans for a secret get-together.

Ria Novosti reported on Friday that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is planning to visit Tel Aviv within the next two weeks to discuss a whole range of international issues, including Tehran's nuclear case, in secret meetings with the Netanyahu government.

US Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, will reportedly accompany Gates.

The secret meetings come at a time when two Israeli warships, the Hanit and the Eliat, sailed through the Suez Canal within cruise-missile range of Iran earlier in the week.

A senior Israeli defense official, in a Thursday interview with the Times, said the move should be seen as serious preparations for a long-expected Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

"This is preparation that should be taken seriously. Israel is investing time in preparing itself for the complexity of an attack on Iran," said the Israeli defense official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity.

"These maneuvers are a message to Iran that Israel will follow up on its threats," he added.

The move came ten days after a submarine -- believed to be nuclear-armed -- made a similar crossing and headed from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brought Israel closer to war with Iran, ever-since he made his politiical comeback in February.

Tel Aviv, the possessor of the sole nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, accuses Iran of secretly enriching weapons-grade uranium to attack Israel. Tehran has asserted that its uranium enrichment is a peaceful drive to produce electricity.

Washington has so far remained undecided in its response to speculations that Israel is gearing up for go-it-alone air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Vice President Joe Biden, in a recent interview, openly suggested that Washington would not stand in the way of an Israeli attack on Iran.

"Israel can determine for itself... what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else," Biden said. "We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination -- if they make a determination -- that they're existentially threatened."

The remarks were widely interpreted as a long-sought green light for Israel to go ahead and take out Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

US President Barack Obama was quick to make an attempt to correct the impression, saying that he opposed military action against Iran and instead wanted a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=100941&sectionid=351020104

Socialist America Sinking

by Patrick J. Buchanan

After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published The People's Pottage. A year later, in 1954, he died. The People's Pottage opens thus:

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."

Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.

Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When "Silent Cal" Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.

And today? Obama's first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.

The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole economy. Obama is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon emissions that will impose huge costs on energy production, spike consumer prices and drive production offshore to China, which is opting out of Kyoto II. The Chinese are not fools.

Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take the income tax rate to near 40 percent. Combined state and local income tax rates can run to 10 percent. For the self-employed, payroll taxes add up to 15.2 percent on the first $106,800 for all wages of all workers. Medicare takes 2.9 percent of all wages above that. Then there are the state sales taxes that can run to 8 percent, property taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes, and "sin taxes" on booze, cigarettes and, soon, hot dogs and soft drinks.

Comes now national health insurance from Nancy Pelosi's House. A surtax that runs to 5.4 percent of all earnings of the top 1 percent of Americans, who already pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, has been sent to the Senate. Included also is an 8 percent tax on the entire payroll of small businesses that fail to provide health insurance for employees.

Other ideas on the table include taxing the health benefits that businesses provide their employees.

The D.C.-based Tax Foundation says New Yorkers could face a combined income tax rate of near 60 percent.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?

While the hardest working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.

Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.

Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.

As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans

All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America – as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution – "for ourselves and our posterity."

China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and a money supply that's swollen to double its size in a year. The 20th century may have been the American Century. The 21st shows another pattern.

"The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event," writes Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. "Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious."

Even the establishment is starting to get the message.



Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and A Republic Not An Empire. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.

Copyright © 2009 Creators Syndicate

The Afghanistan industry

For ordinary Afghans, the west is part of the machinery of corruption that thrives on the conflict


When the Taliban arrived in a village in Farah in May, the village elders approached them and asked them to leave. They told the Taliban that if the fighters stayed, the foreigners would bomb their village. The Taliban said: "We are fighting and dying for Islam and so should you. Why should you be spared death? Is your blood redder than ours?"

And so the foreign planes came, dropped their bombs and, according to locals, killed more than 100 civilians. "What could we do?" said a local man to the BBC's Afghan service. "The Talibs were young men with guns and grenades. We had no weapons to protect ourselves and no young men to help us."

But the western intervention in Afghanistan has long ceased to be about improving the lives of civilians. It has become a separate entity, with its own economy, creating lucrative jobs – for those who knew how to exploit the situation. Not all Afghans have come out of this war poor and destitute; not all foreigners are dying there. Unemployed expatriate Afghans from the west have returned to the country, setting up NGOs and flying around their relatives – who have become their employees – in helicopters with foreign aid money. After all, 80% of foreign aid is channelled through NGOs. Reckless Afghans with expertise for violence have been recruited to provide security for foreign special forces.

A cabal of discredited Afghan warlords accused of war crimes and ousted by the Taliban allied themselves with the foreign troops against the Taliban, and were co-opted into the system, becoming ministers, MPs and governors. To Afghans they remained just that – warlords – albeit warlords with new "democratic" titles and western friends. The 2001 intervention was a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 done on the cheap. As local wisdom has it, there are three types of people in Afghanistan today: al-Qaida (the fighters), al-faida (the enriched) and al-gaida (the fucked). Most Afghans belong to the third category.

From the perspective of Afghans on the ground, the west is part of this machinery of corruption which thrives on the continuation of the current situation. If the Afghan leadership is corrupt and incompetent, so is the western leadership involved in Afghanistan. If Afghan warlords ignore international standards of warfare and engage in torture, so does the US in Bagram and Guantánamo. If the Taliban endanger civilian lives by suicide attacks, so do the foreign troops by carrying out reckless air strikes. The lines between the bad and the good, the problem and the problem-solvers, have become blurred. Moreover, the problem-solvers have themselves become part of the problem; they are costly but ineffective. Every little project, from digging a well to conducting a research project, involves hiring an entourage of armed security guards.

Far from disarming the many Afghan militia gangs, the current intervention has created a new set of armed men who are highly trained and well-equipped. Their daytime job is to protect foreign problem-solvers. But in their spare time, they run their own criminal businesses, robbing and intimidating locals and recently, even killing a government official.

The local population are capable of doing many of the projects for a fraction of the cost (and without a single bodyguard) but they are not being employed. The civilian and military problem-solvers are cut off from the population they are supposed to help. They talk to each other but not to Afghans, unless the Afghans in question are part of the English-speaking elite. In the words of an MEP who I met recently, "We have good ideas; the only thing missing is the Afghans themselves."

From a local perspective, Afghanistan has become a laboratory where a disparate set of international military and civilian problem-solvers and their Afghan colleagues are trying out and dropping various ideas and making a comfortable living out of it. Not everyone is starving in Afghanistan. The al-faida are doing well.

It took Afghans many years to openly criticise western involvement in the country. The fear that criticism might dishearten the international well-wishers was a powerful incentive to remain silent, and those who spoke out, like presidential candidate Ramazan Bashardost, were punished for daring to antagonise westerners.

So the conspiracy to whitewash problems carried on until the truth came home in coffins. The Afghan population shares the British people's anger and bewilderment at the situation. With every dead foreign soldier, the chances increase of the west abandoning Afghanistan. Afghans are aware of this but what can they do? After all, beggars have no choice.

When foreign troops arrived in Afghanistan, there was little concern for Afghan public opinion. Since then, they've had seven years to win a war against a once-discredited Taliban. Seven years to repair the Kajaki hydroelectric dam and win the hearts and minds of the restive, opium-producing south. Seven years to disarm the militias and bring war criminals to justice, as promised in 2001. Now that the seven-year itch has set in, they might decide to leave just as they arrived, in a hurry and with no more concern for Afghan opinion than they came with.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/16/afghanistan-west-corruption-conflict

The Corpse Factory

By Bruce E. Jones | Extract from book, Kill War, Save Vets. Via AfterDowningStreet

“The Corpse Factory” was the title of a military expose written by Lord Arthur Ponsonby after WWI.

The corpse factory is war, but mostly it is the mindset that causes war.

To put that final nail in the coffin of the war mindset, to lock down that corpse factory, think about the “drums and guns and drums and guns, hurroo” … and the flags and the parades and the bands, and the bunting and the Support The Troops stickers, the uniformed men and women marching in spit-polish patriotism. The young men and women, heads held high, hearts beating like the drums before them, as they loyally follow orders aiming them into the darkness of the corpse factory.

Who built this corpse factory? Who did it this time? Who are these mother fuckers, these molesters of a generation’s children? Why did they, you know, really do it? Have they been arrested? Have they been water boarded? Or did they get presidential medals and honors and book deals?

And only the brave few ask: Was this war—the one today and the ones yesterday and those next to come—manufactured on behalf of corporations and capitalism (that is, oil)? Was it propagated by the cowardice of the media that cannot get too close to killing grounds, that cannot question the motives of government? Was it ordered by fat old men with a political agenda build on dreams of nationalistic grandeur and “American Exceptionalism”?

Did anyone think about the dead men walking?

If they talk about dying for principles that are bigger than life you say mister you're a liar. Nothing is bigger than life. There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about lying in the ground and rotting? What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead? Because when you're dead mister it's all over. It's the end. You're less than a dog less than a rat less than a bee or an ant less than a maggot crawling around on a dungheap. You're dead mister and you died for nothing. You're dead mister. Dead. -- Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

When Johnny comes marching home again the old church bells will “peal with joy” and the village lads and lassies “with roses they will strew the way” and the “laurel wreath is ready now to place upon his loyal brow...”

When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We'll give him a hearty welcome then
Hurrah! Hurrah!
The men will cheer and the boys will shout
The ladies they will all turn out
And we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home...

Hurrah! Hurrah!

But Johnny can’t come marching home again. Johnny is bits and pieces of rotted gore hidden in a shiny coffin with an American flag spread across the top that cannot be opened for viewing. He’s in one of those secret coffins that during the Cheney/Bush years were not to seen, not to be discussed, not to be mourned by a nation.

Or Johnny is lost in the agony of his empty mind after an IED, “improvised explosive device” – a roadside fucking bomb – shook his brain into bloody short circuits. Johnny can’t come marching home again, because Johnny is in a fucking wheel chair with no legs or a severed spine.

Johnny may come marching home again, but he will be bitter, in pain, unemployed, maybe homeless. He will in time be forgotten, he will get only minimal or sporadic care from a government that makes promises. He will cling to a remembered pledge of honor and duty and country...because it is all he has left.

Oh, Johnny, we hardly knew ya’ ...

...With your drums and guns and drums and guns, hurroo, hurroo

With your drums and guns and drums and guns, hurroo, hurroo

With your drums and guns and drums and guns

The enemy nearly slew ye

Oh my darling dear, Ye look so queer

Johnny I hardly knew ye.

Where are your eyes that were so mild, hurroo, hurroo

Where are your eyes that were so mild, hurroo, hurroo

Where are your eyes that were so mild

When my heart you so beguiled

Why did ye run from me and the child

Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo

Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo

Where are your legs that used to run

When you went for to carry a gun

Indeed your dancing days are done

Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

… Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo

Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo

Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg

Ye're an armless, boneless, chickenless egg

Ye'll have to put with a bowl out to beg

Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.

They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo

They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo

They're rolling out the guns again

But they never will take our sons again

No they never will take our sons again

Johnny I'm swearing to ye.

Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye, -- Irish ballad, early 19th century

The builders of corpse factories must be held accountable. We must kill war.

“Green” Global Government Agenda Becoming More Evident

By Daniel Taylor

“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth [environment] comes from the actions of the rich countries?… So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about? This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse.” – Maurice Strong, May, 1990 interview with West Magazine describing a “novel” that he would like to write

These candid comments from Maurice Strong, the first director of the United Nations Environmental Program, carry an especially eerie tone in the context of recent events.

Daniel Estulin, who has been chasing Bilderberg for many years, covered the 2006 meeting held in Ottawa Canada. Bilderberg attendees have included Heads of State, Mayors, business leaders, and members of the press. Investigative journalist Jim Tucker confirmed that Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner attended the 2009 meeting in Athens, Greece.

Estulin’s sources within Bilderberg 2006 told him that “…what they [Bilderberg] are going to do over the next year, year and a half is to bring the market back up to its 1998, 1999 levels, they’re going to get all the suckers to invest what little money they have left over, and that’s when they’re going to make the economy’s bottom drop out…” Indeed, this scenario did play out in the year that followed as Estulin’s Bilderberg sources told him.

Out of the economic and [supposed] environmental catastrophes that we face, global governance is being presented as a solution. Whether or not the global elite did in fact engineer the current economic crisis, which evidence does point toward, it is being used as a catalyst to launch a host of globalist initiatives. In March of 2007, Old-Thinker News reported on the desire of globalist foundations and interests to construct a system of global governance to fight global warming. Since then, the interests pushing the theory of man made global warming and the radical solutions that accompany it have provided more insight on exactly what is being planned.

In 2006 Richard Haass, the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, stated in his article “State sovereignty must be altered in globalized era,” that a system of world government must be created and sovereignty eliminated in order to fight global warming. “Moreover, states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function,” says Haass. “Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker. States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves…” Economic instability and terrorism are also cited by Haass as reasons for weakened national sovereignty.

Al Gore, who has been positioned as a main figurehead in the global warming movement, recently commented that the Waxman-Markey climate bill – which is set to dramatically increase consumer costs and taxes – is a positive step towards “global governance.”

Simon Linnett, Executive Vice-Chairman of Rothschild Bank, has also called for the creation of a “new international body” that would regulate and tax CO2. Linnett writes for the Telegraph, mirroring Richard Haass’s comments,

“A key implication of creating a legal yet global system of trading, is the loss of sovereignty it implies. Governments must be prepared to allow some subordination of national interests to this world initiative, on the issue of emissions. This need not mean a new system of government, above individual nations.

The European nations already do this, on certain issues, yielding sovereignty to the EU. And in time, the EU itself will eventually have to yield to a larger body – one which includes the economic powerhouses of India and China.”

As President Obama himself has admitted, cap and trade systems and carbon taxes will pass on costs to consumers. Linnet threatens that, “When an individual receives an electricity bill, they will come to know what the cost of turning on the gas or a light was to the environment.”

Linnet proposes that carbon trading could become the “…reserve currency of the world…”, and concludes by saying that “…emissions trading could establish a new world order for a sustainable planet…”

That a Rothschild Bank Vice-Chairman would be proposing such measures might be surprising to some, but could well meaning environmentalists be in for a shock to find that a seemingly “grass roots” movement has been initiated from the top down?

In early 2009, Exxon Mobil announced its support of carbon taxes. As the Calgary Herald reports, “Exxonmobil corp., the world’s largest crude oil refiner, supports taxing carbon dioxide as the most efficient way of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, its chief executive said.” The announcement came from Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, which has served as a platform for discussing various globalist initiatives for many years.

A May 2008 article from the International Herald Tribune painted a glowing picture of the Rockefeller family – who built the Standard Oil empire, later to emerge as Exxon – in their quest to “press for change at Exxon”. As reported, “David Rockefeller, retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and patriarch of the family, issued a statement saying, “I support my family’s efforts to sharpen Exxon Mobil’s focus on the environmental crisis facing all of us.”

Ultimately, the world faces an unprecedented transfer of power and wealth to new global bodies. The economic destruction taking place in the United States is draining the wealth creating capacity that we once had. Political commentator Pat Buchanan recently stated on MSNBC,

“…more and more scientists are coming forward to say this [man-made global warming] is a hoax and a scam which is designed to transfer wealth and power from the private sector to the government sector and from the government of the United States to a world government.”

Old-thinker News

The nuclear option

America, as much of the world knows, is out of energy. Despite importing a quarter of the world's oil, it is out of energy and being now a Leftist nation, it is in the gravity well of the black hole of "clean energy". What this of course means is, fake renewable energy. Of course there is no such thing as the cost in input energy to create the wind

America is also bankrupt.

The only hope that America has is to recreate its industry and to do that it needs cheap energy, something wind turbines will never give you. They might be great for crushing wheat kernels but not for generating electricity.

Enter stage right, Russia.

You want to set the reset button? You want to cut nuclear weapons? You want an electrical grid low in carbon dioxide (not that it really matters in the real world but we'll pretend it does)? You want industry to grow and jobs for your people?

Well welcome Mr. Civilian Nuclear Power or Mr CiNP or rather Mr. Russian CiNP. Russia is an expert on building nuclear power plant. Yes, before you start, Chernobyl happened and it was a freak accurance (unless you buy into the theory it was staged and knowing the CIA/MI6 it just may have been) but a lot of lessons were learned from it. Furthermore, unlike the US, which has not built a nuclear station in over thirty years, Russia has vast experience in both this and in turning nuclear weapons material into safe nuclear rods for nuclear power plants...no giant explosion guaranteed or your money back.

The advantages are many. Unlike wind turbines or solar cells, a nuclear power station will last over fifty years and provide not only hundreds of jobs in construction but hundreds of jobs in running it. It also takes up a much smaller foot print, both on the ground and visually than hundreds of rusting metal poles, sticking hundreds of meters in the air. But best of all, nuclear power costs a mere 2 rubles an hour, or about 6 American cents, compare that to wind, which runs closer to 20 rubles.

So, from 2,100 to 1,500 each, that is a yield of 1,200 nuclear decommissioned warheads, more than enough fuel to power most of the United States and Russia for decades to come. Remember, this is enriched Plutonium, not low grade Uranium.

So here is the deal: send Russia the nuclear warheads, and your inspectors. We will reprocess them for a fee. We will build your reactors and ship them to you, while you build the controls and housing. We will install them and get it up and running, and as Prime Minister Putin, early last year offered, we will, for another fee, take your spent fuel rods and dispose of them also, down some very deep hole in our Siberian mountains...do not worry, thanks to the Soviets, we have plenty.

This will help our economy, this will help your economy, this will help the poor little eagles being turned into stir fry by the giant turbines. Best of all, the Watermelons will hate it and despise it, while sitting in their air conditioned houses (or heated) behind their electricity eating computers.

Stanislav Mishin
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/15-07-2009/108147-nuclear_option-0

US State Sponsored Assassinations: Congress Objects to CIA Lies but not to Torture and Murder

by Sherwood Ross

Why are some members of Congress suddenly upset the CIA lied to them when the Agency has been guilty of innumerable crimes that are far worse?

Is Congress saying, “It’s okay to do what you’re doing, just don’t lie to us about it?” When accused of a crime in the newspapers, Jesse James used to write reporters, “I wasn’t there.” Yet it was not lying that he was hunted down for but bank robbery and murder.

Back in 1967, the CIA’s own Inspector General produced a 133-page internal report that implicated “every living CIA officer who has served as chief of the clandestine service----Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald---in conspiracies to commit murder,” writes investigative journalist Tim Weiner in his book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”(Anchor Books). That was 40 years ago, and the CIA’s path has been downhill ever since.

Now House Intelligence committee Democrats have revealed CIA Director Leon Panetta’s comments that “top CIA officials have concealed significant actions…and misled” Congress since 2001. Actually, the Agency’s been misleading Congress since President Truman authorized it in 1947. CIA lying isn’t news, it’s tradition. So is murder.

After Truman departed, the CIA often took its orders to “terminate” foreign leaders directly from the White House, as when President Kennedy authorized it to kill Castro.

Now it turns out Vice President Cheney is charged with directing his very own Murder Inc. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said the Joint Special Operations Command(JSOC) “is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody except in the Bush-Cheney days they reported directly to the Cheney office…Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.”

So what do you call a country if not a “tyranny” when its top officials dispatch their henchmen around the world to murder their enemies? That’s how the Soviet Union’s Joe Stalin worked. In 1940, his assassin murdered Stalin rival the exiled Leon Trotsky near Mexico City. “Death solves all problems,” Stalin is said to have remarked. “No man, no problem.” Stalin was no believer in respecting the sovereignty of other countries or bothering with their courts. Just go in and kill the guy. Apparently, Cheney worked the same way. And like Stalin, he authorized torture. This totalitarian streak runs deep both in the White House and the CIA. Indeed, President Clinton authorized the first CIA renditions. What he began as a trickle of kidnappings turned into a torrent under Bush-Cheney.

Less than a week after 9/11, “President Bush issued a 14-page top secret directive to (George) Tenet and the CIA, ordering the agency to hunt, capture, imprison, and interrogate suspects around the world,” writes Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered intelligence for The New York Times. “It set no limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officials and contractors used techniques that included torture.”

“One CIA contractor was convicted of beating an Afghan prisoner to death,” Weiner continued. “This was not the role of a civilian intelligence service in a democratic society. But it is clearly what the White House wanted the CIA to do,” Weiner observed. (By some counts, hundreds may have been murdered, none of whom ever saw a judge.)

The crimes of our presidents and the CIA today represent everything America’s Founders despised when they looked aghast at the excesses of the French Revolution. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1794: “If there be anything solid in virtue---the time must come when it will have been a disgrace to have advocated the Revolution of France in its late stages.”

Yet, according to William Blum in “Rogue State”(Common Courage), as of 2005, the U.S. had been involved in the assassination or attempted assassination of 37 world leaders, ranging from France’s Charles de Gaulle to Panama’s Omar Torrijos and from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeni to India’s Jawaharlal Nehru. Reporter Blum also cites more than 50 U.S. foreign interventions, mostly by the CIA, ranging from blackmail to armed overthrow.

Blum also cites evidence of CIA meddling in 30 foreign elections, including Australia, Bolivia, British Guiana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Laos, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua, Panama, Portugal, the Philippines, and Viet Nam,. “On many occasions, U.S. interventions resulted in free, or any, elections being done away with completely for large stretches of time, as in Brazil, Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Chile, and Greece,” Blum writes.

Elections are sacred moments in the life of a democracy and for the U.S. to bribe voters, as the CIA has often done overseas, (Brazil is a sordid example) is to repudiate the democratic ideal. The judicial process and human life also are held sacrosanct, yet apparently these never counted for much with Cheney or past CIA directors. Like Stalin, Cheney felt responsible to no one; he was bent on extending his power globally by force and violence.

And now we have a President seemingly with no intention of prosecuting Cheney or CIA brass guilty of crimes against humanity. What would Alexander Hamilton have said?

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based media consultant who formerly reported for major dailies and wire services. To reach him or contribute to his Anti-War News Service email sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Sherwood Ross