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American Legendary Hero Eustace Mullins 1923-2010

2009-09-30T00:28:00.004Z

American political writer, author, biographer, historian and the last surviving protege of the 20th century intellectual giant poet and writer, Ezra Pound, Eustace Mullins died Tuesday, Feb. 2, at the home of his caretaker in a small town in Texas.

In 1949, Mr Eustace Mullins saw first hand the injustice of Jewish Gulagism inside America when he visited Ezra Pound during his period of incarceration in 'St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Mentally Ill' in Washington, D.C. between 1946 and 1959. Ezra Pound was being held as a political prisoner on the behest of Jewish cabal President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Ezra Pound, famed poet and PATRIOT, was convicted of treason by the U.S. of America for his calls for peace during WW2. He was well aware who was behind the manufactured conflict. His consciousness compelled him to act and when he attempted to alert the warring nations that JEW central-bankers and their pimps were responsible for the new Bankster war, he was arrested.

If you ask anyone these days who Ezra Pound was, 99.9 % would answer "poet" Sure, Ezra Pound was a poet, and his poetry was censored... but in reality more than his poetry, his whole person was censored, quarantined from the outside world, by the Rothschilds et al.... Ezra Pound became the most dangerous person on the planet. The Antichrist Freemasonic elite 'legal system' gave him but one choice either play insane or die by hanging... Had his message been propagated, the world would be very a very different place today... Eustace Mullins in his book This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound touches on this subject while he was alive. Now gone and may God bless his soul, we can only hope that unpublished notes may surface. (More on Ezra Pound in a future post)

Initially Ezra Pound was not allowed any visitor either in Europe where he was caged like an animal (Much worse than Saddam Hussein) once back in America's madhouse he was found insane by eight 'certified federal psychiatrists', confined in a straight-jacket in a hospital for the Insane, overlooking Washington, DC, to rot for the rest of his life.

In 1949, EUSTACE MULLINS was introduced to EZRA POUND, who was then a librarian at the Library of Congress. He often visited Pound at the madhouse called 'St. Elizabeth Hospital' where Pound guided Mullins, urging him to research the global JEW conspiracy. He started his research that same year he met Ezra Pound, and spent three years going through 2000 books at the Library of Congress to get the material for the "SECRETS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE"

Mullins' most notable work, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, the only book burned in Germany since Hitler, was written in consultation with George Stimpson, founder of the National Press Club. Mullins himself says that at the time he was writing his first book, he was on the staff of the Library of Congress, but that shortly after it came out in 1952, he was fired. This is repeated by Boller and George (They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. and John George, published by Oxford University Press (1989), p. 15. The word "discharged" is used, rather than fired.)

According to Eustace Mullins, based upon his research combined with the research and experience of Dr. Ezra Pound, there exists only ONE Conspiracy, that being, the Rothschild Central Bank Conspiracy.

All else are simply lower level spin offs conspiracies. They are dependent upon the major conspiracy. Eustace says...

"what isn't a conspiracy?"

All the same people at the top of the corporations, one way or the other, are Sabbatean/Freemasonic Rothschild agents, who would take their secrets to the graves.

When Eustace published his ground breaking documentation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1952, he brought the story out into daylight for the first time. In order to counter what he did, Rothschild agents came up with the concept and called Eustace a "conspiracy theorist (i.e. nut)."

There is nothing more to the story. All else is distraction I'm afraid. The problem isn't in any way political, it's strictly economic. The simplicity of the problem and the solution alludes most all people on the planet. That's why the problem persists in plain sight.

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Eustace Mullins' last interview: by Gnostic Media

Eustace Mullins Pt. 1 Download

Eustice Mullins Pt. 2Download

The man who has all of the pieces to the global conspiracy puzzle - considered the greatest conspiracy theorist alive. But did he create these conspiracy theories? Or did he discover real conspiracies?

In honor of free speech and critical thinking I present you with the most powerful interview I've done to date with one of the most controversial - and yet respected - people in the entire world, Eustace Mullins, the last living protégé of Ezra Pound. Eustace joins me for this explosive two part series on the history of the Federal Reserve, WWI, WWII, the Rothschilds, JP Morgan, the New World Order, banking, Zionism, farming, G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island, Ron Paul, the gold standard, and the state of world affairs. He'll be joining me with his only protégé, Jesse Lee, who will help guide our discussion through the many rabbit holes of history, uncovering some of the most startling information many of you have ever heard."

A MUST WATCH: Eustace Mullins in Canada

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Adolf Hitler alive: weird conspiracy theories

2009-09-29T22:20:00.005Z

The discovery that the skull believed to be Adolf Hitler's was actually a woman's has reignited conspiracy theories

Rumours of Hitler’s survival have been widespread for years, with some even claiming he is alive today.

While that is unlikely – the Nazi leader would celebrate his 121st birthday in April – the possibility that he made it out of the Berlin bunker has been seriously put forward on several occasions. Here are four of the strangest theories.

Hitler fled on a 'ghost convoy' to Argentina

Several prominent Nazis – including 'architect of the Holocaust' Adolf Eichmann and Dr Josef Mengele, the 'Angel of Death' – certainly did flee to Argentina.

And the arrival of two U-Boats in the South American country in the weeks after the war led to more speculation that Hitler joined his former underlings there. But Heinz Schäffer, one of the officers on the U-Boats, has alwas strenuously denied being part of a 'ghost convoy'.

The two U-Boats, U-530 and U-977, surrendered at Mar del Plata in Argentina in July and August 1945 respectively.

Hitler 'fled to Antarctica in a U-Boat'

Among the theories of Hitler's whereabouts after the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945 was that he was smuggled out of Germany and onto a U-Boat.

From there, the story goes, the Nazi leader was taken to a secret military base in Antarctic. In the late 1950s British and American forces found the base and destroyed it with atomic weapons.

The theory falls down on three major points. One, there was never a German military presence in Antarctica, despite a pre-war mission there to see whether a whaling base would be feasible.

Two, while the two U-Boats mentioned above did arrive in Argentina after the war, they could not possibly have made it to Antarctica. The sea ice in the winter blocks all access to the land where any base would have been.

Three, while atomic bombs were detonated in the southern hemisphere in 1958, they were atmospheric tests, hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth. All three took place between 1400 and 2150 miles north of Antarctica.

Using secret rocket technology, Hitler fled to a Nazi base on the moon

The point when Hitler conspiracy theories lose touch with reality altogether. The Nazis' development late in the war of high-technology weapons – including the V2, an early ballistic missile, and the Me 262 jet fighter – inspired some to believe that Germany had secretly won the space race.

It was also suggested that the Nazis had made contact with UFOs and that they had made it to the Moon as early as 1942. Furthermore, Russian and American astronauts actually made it there in the 1950s, and stayed at a Nazi lunar base.

For added measure, it is claimed that the Moon is perfectly habitable for humans, but that NASA claims it is barren and airless in order to stop Third World countries visiting it.

Hitler is alive and well and staying in San Diego

Well, not really. This one is a joke – but there is a structure, visible on Google Maps, that might make you think otherwise. A barracks building in the US Navy base in San Diego's Coronado island, known as the 'Seal's Lair', is very definitely in the shape of a swastika.

In 2007, the US Navy said it was going to redesign the 1960s-built edifice, spending around $600,000 (£375,000) to make it less master-racy. They admitted they noticed the shape when it was built, but didn't think anyone would spot it from the ground.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/6242144/Adolf-Hitler-alive-weird-conspiracy-theories.html

So you thought you knew Hitler?

The Real Reasons Behind Fed Secrecy

2009-09-29T20:47:00.000Z

By Ron Paul

Last week I was very pleased that the Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207. The bill has 295 cosponsors and there is also strong support for the companion bill in the Senate. This hearing was a major step forward in getting the bill passed.

I was pleased that the hearing was well-attended, especially considering that it was held on a Friday at nine o’clock in the morning! I have been talking about the immense, unchecked power of the Federal Reserve for many years, while the attention of Congress was always on other things. It was gratifying to see my colleagues asking probing questions and demonstrating genuine concern about this important issue as well.

The witness testifying in favor of HR 1207 made some very strong points, which was no surprise considering the bill is simply common sense. It was also no surprise that the witness testifying against the bill had no good arguments as to why a full audit should not be conducted promptly. He attempted to make the case that the fed is already sufficiently accountable to Congress and that the current auditing policy is adequate. The fact is that the Fed comes to Congress and talks about only what it wants to talk about, and the GAO audits only what the current laws allow to be audited. The really important things however, are off limits. There are no convincing arguments that it is in the best interests of the American people for anything the Fed does to be off limits.

It has been argued that full disclosure of details of funding facilities like TALF and PDCF that enabled massive bailouts of Wall Street would damage the financial position of those firms and destabilize the economy. In other words, if the American people knew how rotten the books were at those banks and how terribly they messed up, they would never willingly invest in them, and they would fail. Failure is not an option for friends of the Fed. Therefore, the funds must be stolen from the people in the dark of night. This is not how a free country works. This is not how free markets work. That is crony corporatism and instead of being a force for economic stabilization, it totally undermines it.

If the Fed gave its actual arguments against a full audit, they would not have mentioned anything about political independence or economic stability. Instead they would admit they don’t want to be audited because they enjoy their current situation too much. Under the guise of currency control, they are able to help out powerful allies on Wall Street, in exchange for lucrative jobs or who-knows-what favors later on. An audit would expose the Fed as a massive fraud perpetrated on this country, enriching a privileged few bankers at the top of our economic food chain, and leaving the rest of us with massively devalued dollars which we are forced to use by law. An audit would make people realize that, while Bernie Madoff defrauded a lot of investors for a lot of money, the Fed has defrauded every one of us by destroying the value of our money. An honest and full accounting of how the money system really works in this country would mean there is not much of a chance the American people would stand for it anymore.

Iran Is Still NOT The Problem

2009-09-28T02:21:00.000Z

By Karl Schwarz | rense.com

Americans need to wake up to the fact that the Israelis, US, UK and France continue to try to manipulate world media and world opinion regarding Iran. They are knowingly lying to achieve that end.

I met Dr. ElBaradei and his wife one Saturday morning in Vienna and we had a long talk. He is the Director General of the IAEA, the non-proliferation watch dog of the UN. The IAEA is based in Vienna Austria.

Fact: Iran has absolutely no nuclear weapons program. The CIA has known that all along, but lies are the operative word of the day, every day, at the CIA, DoD and our federal government.

Fact: It is the CIA that is waging a covert war of terrorism, provocation and attempts at internal disruption. That is happening right now in the Baluchistan province of Iran where the IPI Pipeline it being built connecting Iran oil and natural gas supplies to Pakistan and India.

Fact: There are greedy interests in the UK and US that want to be the ones selling oil and natural gas to Pakistan and India, via their yet to be achieved 'pipeline dream' of Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the ocean.

Fact: The easiest route from Turkmenistan to the ocean is across IRAN, but then the US and UK would have to eat crow and change their policies.

Fact: The IAEA has inspected the Iran facilities on multiple occasions, even surprise inspections, and no evidence whatsoever has been found of any nuclear weapons program.

Fact: Iran has the world's second largest known reserves of uranium. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the absolute right to build nuclear generation plants to make electricity to power their economy. Problem is Israel does not want any nation in the Middle East to be prosperous and have modern infrastructure and economies.

This is why Iraq had to be destroyed according to Zionist Jew Neocon Edward Luttwak, stated in 1991 before Desert Storm:

"Saddam is not like the Saudi Princes who spend the bulk of their lives outside of their country, and who fritter away the Kingdom's oil profits on prostitutes and bottles of champagne in Paris. No, Saddam is building railways! Creating electrical networks! Highways and other important elements of a serious State infrastructure! After eights years of war against the Iranian regime of Khomeini, he desperately needs to demobilize his Republican Guard, which incorporates so many of this technical elite, in order to rebuild the war-devastated country. These people are his technicians, his engineers. If they are put to work in the way Saddam wishes, they will rapidly make Iraq the most advanced power in the region, and we cannot allow this to happen."

That was in my email update December 5, 2005 titled 'Enemies Within Our Gates' and was also cited in the book "Neoconned".

Fact: They even have the absolute right to enrich and use their own uranium for peaceful purposes.

Fact: Certain parties in the US and UK do not want Iran to process uranium and sell it to India and other nations to power their nuclear electrical plants. That would cut into the monopoly (and profits generated by same) that the US and UK have on the enrichment and sale of enriched uranium to generate electricity.

It is all about control, profiteering, not a non-existent Iran nuclear weapons program.

Fact: Now we have Robert Gates pushing a lie that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. Never, not once, has the DoD admitted that on one side they are planning for war and on the other side the CIA is trying to create the excuse through lies just like they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1253820685869&pagename=JPost%2FJP Article%2FShowFull

I find such media manipulation from the French to be quite disgusting, since it was that nation that aided Israel with nuclear technology so it could become a rogue nuclear weapon possessing nation. Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and actually uses its possession of nuclear warheads to extort other nations, including the US.

What Israel could not get from the French, they stole nuclear weapons technology from the US with insider help within our government and certain US DOE labs.

I find Secretary of Defense Robert Gates knowingly lying about the matter to be equally despicable.

Fact: The US lied about Afghanistan and they lied about Iraq. Now they are lying about Iran but the greedy elite thugs of the UK and US do not control or profit from the vast oil, natural gas and uranium reserves that Iran has. That is the problem.

Fact: Certain greedy elite want to be the ones to profit from the sale of those Iranian assets, just like they are trying to do in their grand fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is their objective with their latest wave of lies.

Fact: If you have never read about such, the Rense website has had a US Air Force paper posted for years so people can read the ugly truth about Israel. If you have never read it, take to time to learn how a 'shitty little nation' is actually a nuclear terrorist and blackmail artist to get their way in the Middle East.

http://www.rense.com/general35/isrnuk.htm

Fact: During the Bush Administration the CIA intentionally, willfully, and with intent to entrap, tried to sneak fake NUCLEAR WEAPON PLANS TO IRAN.

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jan/04/world/fg-intel4

Start Insert

CIA Gave Iran Bomb Plans, Book Says

By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer| January 04, 2006

WASHINGTON - In a clumsy effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, the CIA in 2004 intentionally handed Tehran some top-secret bomb designs laced with a hidden flaw that U.S. officials hoped would doom any weapon made from them, according to a new book about the U.S. intelligence agency. But the Iranians were tipped to the scheme by the Russian defector hired by the CIA to deliver the plans and may have gleaned scientific information useful for designing a bomb, writes New York Times reporter James Risen in "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."

End Insert

http://www.gulfnews.com/region/Iraq/10225290.html

Start Insert

'CIA ignored facts on nuclear weapon plans'

By Joby Warrick Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

Published: July 02, 2008, 00:08

Washington -- A former CIA operative, who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programmes, now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb. The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late on Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time. The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East.

End Insert

Fact: Anyone in the CIA that dares to report that IRAN DOES NOT HAVE ANY NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM are drummed out of the CIA and then attacked to discredit them.

Fact: The US government thinks nothing at all about such things a 'baiting', lying, manipulation of intelligence and the truth and even ENTRAPMENT. Even many of the 'terrorists' that have been arrested since 9-11-2001 were instances that the CIA or FBI were literally the sellers of bomb making equipment and then trumpeting about what a great job they are doing defending America.

If one follows the media regarding Iran, the lies, the constant misstatement of facts, just like Afghanistan and Iraq, it is apparent that they are trying to manipulate and stage another armed robbery of the Iranian people just like they have done to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Wake up America. These idiots in DC think America can afford endless wars and no, we as a nation cannot.

“A Whole Lot Like Déjà Vu”
Congressman Paul presents a balanced view of the Iranian nuclear program while pointing out who really benefits from the administration’s more-of-the-same foreign policy.

Iran: US, UK, France deceiving world on their nukes

2009-09-28T01:48:00.003Z

Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency has accused the US, Britain, and France of deceiving the international community over their nuclear programs.

In an exclusive interview with Press TV, Ali Asghar Soltaniyeh rejected remarks by President Barack Obama of US, British Premier Gordon Brown, and Nicolas Sarkozy of France over Iran's nuclear program.

The three leaders earlier attacked the Islamic Republic over its second under-construction enrichment facility, located 100 kilometers south of Tehran, calling it a "deception."

"I categorically reject that there have been any concealment or any deception," Soltaniyeh said on Saturday.

IAEA Safeguards Agreements declared that Iran is only obliged to inform the UN nuclear watchdog of the existence of enrichment plants 180 days before the introduction of nuclear materials into the facility.

The Iranian envoy noted that he gave a letter to the agency on September 21 and informed the deputy general, elaborating that its new plant would be operational in about 540 days.

He added that there were no obligations to inform the IAEA sooner, according to the agency's document 153.

"It is a pity that none of these three leaders have legal advisers to inform them that according to comprehensive safeguards we are only obliged to inform six months before we put nuclear material."

"This site does not have any nuclear material at all now," according to Iran's representative to the IAEA.

"The problem is that we are the victim of negligence of those who claim that they know in fact the international law. They are talking in the UN but they are not aware of the very principles of the Statue of the IAEA."

Soltaniyeh also clarified that Washington, London, and Paris deceive the people around the world by violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty articles.

"Those three countries in fact have violated for the last 40 years NPT articles."

"The United Kingdom has under secret program of the nuclear submarines so-called trident with over 30 billion pounds and the people of the world and even the British people are not well aware of that. This is a real deception that Mr. Brown has to answer the international community because this is a shocking threat to the international peace and security.

"France is also working on the nuclear weapon programs continuously."

"Americans are working hard on the nuclear weapon posture review. These are all deceptions and concealment."

The western countries have a "long-term strategy" and a "hidden agenda" to "destroy and jeopardize the spirit of cooperation between Iran and the IAEA in order to find an excuse and pretext for sanctions and other measures," Soltaniyeh concluded. PressTV

Obama, Sarkozy and Brown's Iran Nuclear Speech at G-20 Summit :

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good morning. We are here to announce that yesterday in Vienna, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France presented detailed evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom for several years.

Earlier this week, the Iranian government presented a letter to the IAEA that made reference to a new enrichment facility, years after they had started its construction. The existence of this facility underscores Iran’s continuing unwillingness to meet its obligations under U.N. Security Council resolutions and IAEA requirements. We expect the IAEA to immediately investigate this disturbing information, and to report to the IAEA Board of Governors.

Now, Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA represents a direct challenge to the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime. These rules are clear: All nations have the right to peaceful nuclear energy; those nations with nuclear weapons must move towards disarmament; those nations without nuclear weapons must forsake them. That compact has largely held for decades, keeping the world far safer and more secure. And that compact depends on all nations living up to their responsibilities.

This site deepens a growing concern that Iran is refusing to live up to those international responsibilities, including specifically revealing all nuclear-related activities. As the international community knows, this is not the first time that Iran has concealed information about its nuclear program. Iran has a right to peaceful nuclear power that meets the energy needs of its people. But the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program. Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow — endangering the global non-proliferation regime, denying its own people access to the opportunity they deserve, and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world.

It is time for Iran to act immediately to restore the confidence of the international community by fulfilling its international obligations. We remain committed to serious, meaningful engagement with Iran to address the nuclear issue through the P5-plus-1 negotiations. Through this dialogue, we are committed to demonstrating that international law is not an empty promise; that obligations must be kept; and that treaties will be enforced.

And that’s why there’s a sense of urgency about the upcoming meeting on October 1st between Iran, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Germany. At that meeting, Iran must be prepared to cooperate fully and comprehensively with the IAEA to take concrete steps to create confidence and transparency in its nuclear program and to demonstrate that it is committed to establishing its peaceful intentions through meaningful dialogue and concrete actions.

To put it simply: Iran must comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions and make clear it is willing to meet its responsibilities as a member of the community of nations. We have offered Iran a clear path toward greater international integration if it lives up to its obligations, and that offer stands. But the Iranian government must now demonstrate through deeds its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law.

I should point out that although the United Kingdom, France, and the United States made the presentation to Vienna, that Germany, a member of the P5-plus-1, and Chancellor Merkel in particular, who could not be here this morning, wished to associate herself with these remarks.

I would now like to turn to President Sarkozy of France for a brief statement.

PRESIDENT SARKOZY: (As translated.) Ladies and gentlemen, we have met yesterday for a meeting — a summit meeting of the Security Council on disarmament and nuclear disarmament. I repeated my conviction that Iran was taking the international community on a dangerous path. I have recalled all the attempts that we have made to offer a negotiated solution to the Iranian leaders without any success, which what has been revealed today is exceptional. Following the enriching plant of Natanz in 2002, it is now the Qom one which is revealed. It was designed and built over the past several years in direct violation of resolutions from the Security Council and from the IAEA. I am expecting from the IAEA an exhaustive, strict, and rigorous investigation, as President Obama just said.

We were already in a very severe confidence crisis. We are now faced with a challenge, a challenge made to the entire international communities. The six will meet with the Iranian representatives in Geneva. Everything — everything must be put on the table now.

We cannot let the Iranian leaders gain time while the motors are running. If by December there is not an in-depth change by the Iranian leaders, sanctions will have to be taken. This is for the peace and stability. Thank you.

PRIME MINISTER BROWN: America, the United Kingdom, and France are at one. Iran’s nuclear program is the most urgent proliferation challenge that the world faces today.

As President Obama and President Sarkozy have just said, the level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the whole international community, and it will harden our resolve.

Confronted by the serial deception of many years, the international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand. On October the 1st, Iran must now engage with the international community and join the international community as a partner. If it does not do so, it will be further isolated.

And I say on behalf of the United Kingdom today, we will not let this matter rest. And we are prepared to implement further and more stringent sanctions.

Let the message that goes out to the world be absolutely clear: that Iran must abandon any military ambitions for its nuclear program. Thank you.

.

Goldstone: Holocaust shaped view on war crimes

2009-09-28T01:42:00.001Z

Judge Richard Goldstone, the head of a United Nations commission that this week charged Israel with committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip during its offensive there last winter, believes bringing war criminals to justice stems from the lessons of the Holocaust, according to a lecture he delivered in Israel in 2000.

Goldstone spoke about the subject at Jerusalem's Yakar: Center for Tradition and Creativity, at a lecture attended by former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak. The Israeli jurist introduced Goldstone as "a dear friend" with "very deep ties to Israel." Goldstone, in turn, said Barak was his hero and inspiration.

In the lecture, concerning international efforts to bring war criminals to justice, Goldstone said the Holocaust has shaped legal protocol on war, adding that it was "the worst war crime in the world."

He also said the perception of war crimes against humanity should resonate differently to Jewish ears, in light of how the Holocaust shaped conventions relevant to the subject.

Goldstone added that as a jurist, he viewed the Holocaust as a unique occurrence because of how it affected judicial protocol on war, as well as international and humanitarian judicial approaches.

The laws that had been in place before the Holocaust were not equipped to deal with crimes of the Holocaust's scale and therefore sought to define a new crime, which they labeled a crime against humanity, he said.

These crimes were so great, he explained, they went beyond their direct victims or the countries in which they were perpetrated, to harm humanity as a whole. This definition, he said, meant that perpetrators were to be prosecuted anywhere, by any country.

This rational, he went on to say, constituted the basis for the concept of universal jurisdiction, which is being applied by some countries where Israel Defense Forces officers are charged for alleged violations during their command in the West Bank and Gaza.

The formative event of the universal jurisdiction concept, Goldstone told listeners, was the trial that Israel gave the high-ranking Nazi officer Adolf Eichman in 1961.

The international tribunals that judged Serbian war criminals for their actions in Bosnia, and the establishment of tribunals to review the actions of perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide - in which South Africa-born Goldstone served as chief prosecutor - also relied on lessons drawn from the Holocaust, he said at the lecture.

He noted that no similar courts were set up to look into the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the '70s or Saddam Hussein's acts against Iraqi Kurds.

The first time such tribunals were set up were for Bosnia, Goldtone said, because this was the first time after the Holocaust that such occurrences happened in "Europe's backyard." The war in Bosnia led to the formation of tribunals on crimes against humanity, he said, because European men with "blue eyes and light skin" again carried out actions similar to those observed in the Holocaust.

Israel, he added, was one of the first countries to support the formation of permanent court of law for crimes against humanity - a proposal that came up following the successful performance of the special tribunals on Bosnia.

However, that changed, he said, after Egypt insisted at the Rome conference that the mandate of this permanent court include occupied territories. This prompted Israel to join the six other countries that voted against the formation of the International Court of Justice, including the United States, China and Libya.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1115581.html

The perils of an Israeli airstrike on Iran

2009-09-27T23:14:00.001Z

Israel Crosses the Threshold

American and Israeli military planners have been examining options for an attack on Iran for almost three decades. There is no shortage of possible targets: Iran has dozens of nuclear-related sites that are known to western officials.

Yet military experts in Washington and Tel Aviv acknowledge that a surprise airstrike would be likely to succeed only in delaying Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. It would also present daunting logistical and political challenges with no guarantee that even a sustained assault on known facilities would eradicate Tehran’s nuclear threat.

With President Barack Obama committed to diplomatic pressure, the most likely military scenarios involve Israeli airstrikes that would require mid-air refuelling and long flights through potentially hostile Arab air space. “Anyone who meets regularly with senior Israeli officials knows that Israel is considering military options ... with an understanding that they pose serious problems and risks,” said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon planner.

The three likeliest targets for an Israeli attack are reactors at Bushehr and Arak and a centrifuge production facility at Natanz. All are 1,000 miles or more from Israel, at the outer operating margins of Israeli air force bombers.

The Bushehr light water reactor is being built and fuelled by Russia and is not yet operational. Any attack on it would be certain to infuriate Moscow and might provoke the Russians into supplying Iran with more advanced anti-aircraft defences.

The heavy water reactor at Arak has been at least partially sheltered from air attack and is not expected to be completed for several years.

The Natanz facilities have also been sheltered underground and are defended by short-range Russian TOR-M surfaceto-air missiles.

The Israeli air force is equipped with US-supplied GBU-28 earth-penetrating bombs designed to destroy underground targets. Israel may also have developed its own variant of a nuclear-tipped bunker-busting bomb.

Yet the real problem for military planners is that no outside agency has a clear idea of where else Iran may have hidden its weapons-related technologies, notably the long-range missiles that might one day deliver nuclear warheads.

“It is doubtful that even the US knows all the potential targets,” said Cordesman. “They may now be in too many places for an Israeli strike to destroy Iran’s capabilities.”

US experts believe that while Israel unquestionably has the military capability — and may have the political will — to mount a long-range attack, it could not sustain the kind of long-term barrage that Washington launched against Baghdad in the early phases of two Gulf wars.

The diplomatic uproar that would be certain to follow any Israeli attack might limit Tel Aviv to a one-off operation that it could never hope to repeat. “That would not be on the scale required to do more than delay parts of the Iranian programme,” said Cordesman.

Only if America joined in would Iran have reason to worry. There is no immediate likelihood of a US military strike; but there are still some in Tel Aviv who believe that an Israeli raid might force Obama’s hand and persuade the Pentagon to join the attack.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6850890.ece

Tests on skull fragment cast doubt on Adolf Hitler suicide story

2009-09-27T22:23:00.002Z

The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009

Bone with bullet hole found by Russians in 1946 came from an unknown woman, not the German leader

A general view of what Russian officials claim to be a fragment of Adolf Hitler's skull, at an exhibition in Moscow, Wed April 26, 2000. Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AP

In countless biographies of Adolf Hitler the story of his final hours is recounted in the traditional version: committing suicide with Eva Braun, he took a cyanide pill and then shot himself on 30 April 1945, as the Russians bombarded Berlin.

Some historians expressed doubt that the Führer had shot himself, speculating that accounts of Hitler's death had been embellished to present his suicide in a suitably heroic light. But a fragment of skull, complete with bullet hole, which was taken from the bunker by the Russians and displayed in Moscow in 2000, appeared to settle the argument.

Until now. In the wake of new revelations, the histories of Hitler's death may need to be rewritten – and left open-ended. American researchers claim to have demonstrated that the skull fragment, secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence, belonged to a woman under 40, whose identity is unknown. DNA analyses performed on the bone, now held by the Russian State Archive in Moscow, have been processed at the genetics lab of the University of Connecticut. The results, broadcast in the US by a History Channel documentary, Hitler's Escape, astonished scientists.

According to Connecticut archaeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni, it was clear from the outset that something was amiss. "The bone seemed very thin; male bone tends to be more robust," he said. "And the sutures where the skull plates come together seemed to correspond to someone under 40." In April 1945 Hitler turned 56.

Bellantoni had flown to Moscow to inspect the gruesome Hitler trophies at the State Archive, which included the skull fragment as well as bloodstains from the bunker sofa on which Hitler and Braun were believed to have committed suicide. He was allowed only one hour with the Hitler trove, during which time he applied cotton swabs and took DNA samples. "I had the reference photos the Soviets took of the sofa in 1945 and I was seeing the exact same stains on the fragments of wood and fabric in front of me, so I knew I was working with the real thing."

The samples were then flown back to Connecticut. At the university's centre for applied genetics, Linda Strausbaugh closed her lab for three days to work exclusively on the Hitler project. "We used the same routines and controls that would have been used in a crime lab," she said. To her surprise, a small amount of viable DNA was extracted. She then replicated this through a process known as molecular copying to provide enough material for analysis. "We were very lucky to get a reading, despite the limited amount of genetic information," she said.

The result was extraordinary. According to witnesses, the bodies of Hitler and Braun had been wrapped in blankets and carried to the garden just outside the Berlin bunker, placed in a bomb crater, doused with petrol and set ablaze.

But the skull fragment the Russians dug up outside the Führerbunker in 1946 could never have belonged to Hitler. The skull DNA was incontestably female. The only positive physical proof that Hitler had shot himself had suddenly been rendered worthless. The result is a mystery reopened and, for conspiracy theorists the tantalising possibility that Hitler did not die in the bunker.

For decades after the war the fate of Hitler's corpse was shrouded in secrecy. No picture or film was made public. As the Soviet Army secured control of Berlin in May 1945, Russian forensic specialists under the command of the counterintelligence unit Smersh (an acronym for "Death to Spies") dug up what was presumed to be the dictator's body outside the bunker and performed a post-mortem examination behind closed doors. A part of the skull was absent, presumably blown away by Hitler's suicide shot, but what remained of his jaw coincided with his dental records, a fact reportedly confirmed when the Russians showed his surviving dental work to the captured assistants of Hitler's dentist. The autopsy also reported that Hitler, as had been rumoured, had only one testicle.

But Stalin remained suspicious. In 1946 a second secret mission was dispatched to Berlin. In the same crater from which Hitler's body had been recovered, the new team found what it believed was the missing skull fragment with a bullet exit wound through it. The Russians also took fragments of Hitler's bloodstained sofa.

Even this failed to satisfy Stalin, who clamped a secrecy order on all matters related to Hitler's death. Unknown to the world, Hitler's corpse was interred at a Smersh centre in Magdeburg, East Germany. There it remained long after Stalin's death in 1953. Finally, in 1970, the KGB dug up the corpse, cremated it and secretly scattered the ashes in a river. Only the jawbone, the skull fragment and the bloodstained sofa segments were preserved in the deep archives of Soviet intelligence. The bunker was destroyed in 1947 and eventually paved over. Then, in 2000, the Russian State Archive in Moscow staged an exhibition, The Agony of the Third Reich. The skull fragment was displayed, but only photographs of Hitler's jawbone were on view. The head of the archive, Sergei Mironenko, said he had no doubt the skull fragment was authentic. "It is not just some bone we found in the street, but a fragment of a skull that was found in a hole where Hitler's body had been buried," he said.

In the wake of Bellantoni and Strausbaugh's findings, Mironenko's confidence was clearly misplaced. But could the fragment of skull belong to Eva Braun, who died at 33 and was laid alongside her beloved Führer in the same crater? "We know the skull corresponds to a woman between the ages of 20 and 40," said Bellantoni, but he is sceptical about the Braun thesis. "There is no report of Eva Braun having shot herself or having been shot afterwards. It could be anyone. Many people were killed around the bunker area."

Sixty-four years later, the world is still in the dark about what really happened in Hitler's bunker on 30 April 1945.

Uki Goñi is author of The Real Odessa (Granta), about the escape of Nazi war criminals from Europe

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/27/adolf-hitler-suicide-skull-fragment

The Great Escape?

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BILDERBERGERS WANT GLOBAL CURRENCY NOW

2009-09-27T07:11:00.002Z

By James P. Tucker, Jr. | American Free Press

But nationalists and populists around the world ready to fight to retain financial sovereignty

Bilderberg has had front-men call anew for creating a global currency and establishing major European Union-style regions for the administrative convenience of a planned world government. Both steps were taken in September, one by the new Bilderberg-crowned prime minister of Japan and one separately by the UN.

The Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) called for a global currency in a report made public on September 7. UN countries should agree on a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members, UNCTAD said. The dollar’s role in international trade should be reduced to protect emerging markets from the “confidence game” of financial speculation, it said.

Heiner Flassbeck, a former German deputy finance minister, is co-author of the report calling for a global currency. He worked with then U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in 1997-98 to contain the Asian financial crisis. Summers is a longtime Bilderberg luminary and has been photographed by AFP at annual secret Bilderberg confabs.

Eliminating national currencies has long been a goal of Bilderberg as a crucial step in its plan to establish a world government. A nation’s currency is a symbol of sovereignty, so Bilderberg wants to divide the world into three giant regions, each with its regional currency, for the administrative convenience of its world government bureaucrats.

Bilderberg used its immense power to get Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan elected over the Liberal Democratic Party, which had led the nation for 64 years. Hatoyama obediently called for an Asian economic bloc, similar to the EU, complete with a regional currency.

Bilderberg’s goal is an “Asian-Pacific Union” and an “American Union,” both modeled after the EU. The EU has its common currency, the euro, and a European Parliament that can impose laws on the once sovereign nations of Europe and a European Court superior to the highest courts of member states. The EU is effectively a single super-state.

The “American Union” is to evolve from the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, as it extends throughout the Western Hemisphere. The common currency is to be the “amero.” Fortunately, Bilderberg’s efforts in the Western Hemisphere have been stalled but the campaign continues using “free trade” propaganda.

Ultimately, the UN is to function as a world government with the General Assembly serving as a world parliament. Bilderberg, a secret organization of international financiers and political leaders, will serve as a world shadow government that dictates to the UN.

AFP correspondent James P. Tucker Jr. is a veteran journalist who spent many years as a member of the “elite” media in Washington. Tucker is the author of Jim Tucker’s Bilderberg Diary. Bound in an attractive full-color softcover and containing 272 pages—loaded with photos—the book recounts Tucker’s experiences over the last quarter century at Bilderberg meetings. $25 from AFP. No charge for S&H in U.S.

Keeping Iran honest

2009-09-27T00:14:00.001Z

Iran's secret nuclear plant will spark a new round of IAEA inspections and lead to a period of even greater transparency

By Scott Ritter

It was very much a moment of high drama. Barack Obama, fresh from his history-making stint hosting the UN security council, took a break from his duties at the G20 economic summit in Pittsburgh to announce the existence of a secret, undeclared nuclear facility in Iran which was inconsistent with a peaceful nuclear programme, underscoring the president's conclusion that "Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow".

Obama, backed by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, threatened tough sanctions against Iran if it did not fully comply with its obligations concerning the international monitoring of its nuclear programme, which at the present time is being defined by the US, Britain and France as requiring an immediate suspension of all nuclear-enrichment activity.

The facility in question, said to be located on a secret Iranian military installation outside of the holy city of Qom and capable of housing up to 3,000 centrifuges used to enrich uranium, had been monitored by the intelligence services of the US and other nations for some time. But it wasn't until Monday that the IAEA found out about its existence, based not on any intelligence "scoop" provided by the US, but rather Iran's own voluntary declaration. Iran's actions forced the hand of the US, leading to Obama's hurried press conference Friday morning.

Beware politically motivated hype. While on the surface, Obama's dramatic intervention seemed sound, the devil is always in the details. The "rules" Iran is accused of breaking are not vague, but rather spelled out in clear terms. In accordance with Article 42 of Iran's Safeguards Agreement, and Code 3.1 of the General Part of the Subsidiary Arrangements (also known as the "additional protocol") to that agreement, Iran is obliged to inform the IAEA of any decision to construct a facility which would house operational centrifuges, and to provide preliminary design information about that facility, even if nuclear material had not been introduced. This would initiate a process of complementary access and design verification inspections by the IAEA.

This agreement was signed by Iran in December 2004. However, since the "additional protocol" has not been ratified by the Iranian parliament, and as such is not legally binding, Iran had viewed its implementation as being voluntary, and as such agreed to comply with these new measures as a confidence building measure more so than a mandated obligation.

In March 2007, Iran suspended the implementation of the modified text of Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements General Part concerning the early provisions of design information. As such, Iran was reverting back to its legally-binding requirements of the original safeguards agreement, which did not require early declaration of nuclear-capable facilities prior to the introduction of nuclear material.

While this action is understandably vexing for the IAEA and those member states who are desirous of full transparency on the part of Iran, one cannot speak in absolute terms about Iran violating its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. So when Obama announced that "Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow", he is technically and legally wrong.

There are many ways to interpret Iran's decision of March 2007, especially in light of today's revelations. It should be underscored that what the Qom facility Obama is referring to is not a nuclear weapons plant, but simply a nuclear enrichment plant similar to that found at the declared (and inspected) facility in Natanz.

The Qom plant, if current descriptions are accurate, cannot manufacture the basic feed-stock (uranium hexaflouride, or UF6) used in the centrifuge-based enrichment process. It is simply another plant in which the UF6 can be enriched.

Why is this distinction important? Because the IAEA has underscored, again and again, that it has a full accounting of Iran's nuclear material stockpile. There has been no diversion of nuclear material to the Qom plant (since it is under construction). The existence of the alleged enrichment plant at Qom in no way changes the nuclear material balance inside Iran today.

Simply put, Iran is no closer to producing a hypothetical nuclear weapon today than it was prior to Obama's announcement concerning the Qom facility.

One could make the argument that the existence of this new plant provides Iran with a "breakout" capability to produce highly-enriched uranium that could be used in the manufacture of a nuclear bomb at some later date. The size of the Qom facility, alleged to be capable of housing 3,000 centrifuges, is not ideal for large-scale enrichment activity needed to produce the significant quantities of low-enriched uranium Iran would need to power its planned nuclear power reactors. As such, one could claim that its only real purpose is to rapidly cycle low-enriched uranium stocks into highly-enriched uranium usable in a nuclear weapon. The fact that the Qom facility is said to be located on an Iranian military installation only reinforces this type of thinking.

But this interpretation would still require the diversion of significant nuclear material away from the oversight of IAEA inspectors, something that would be almost immediately evident. Any meaningful diversion of nuclear material would be an immediate cause for alarm, and would trigger robust international reaction, most probably inclusive of military action against the totality of Iran's known nuclear infrastructure.

Likewise, the 3,000 centrifuges at the Qom facility, even when starting with 5% enriched uranium stocks, would have to operate for months before being able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a single nuclear device. Frankly speaking, this does not constitute a viable "breakout" capability.

Iran has, in its declaration of the Qom enrichment facility to the IAEA on 21 September, described it as a "pilot plant". Given that Iran already has a "pilot enrichment plant" in operation at its declared facility in Natanz, this obvious duplication of effort points to either a parallel military-run nuclear enrichment programme intended for more nefarious purposes, or more likely, an attempt on the part of Iran to provide for strategic depth and survivability of its nuclear programme in the face of repeated threats on the part of the US and Israel to bomb its nuclear infrastructure.

Never forget that sports odds makers were laying 2:1 odds that either Israel or the US would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities by March 2007. Since leaving office, former vice-president Dick Cheney has acknowledged that he was pushing heavily for a military attack against Iran during the time of the Bush administration. And the level of rhetoric coming from Israel concerning its plans to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran have been alarming.

While Obama may have sent conciliatory signals to Iran concerning the possibility of rapprochement in the aftermath of his election in November 2008, this was not the environment faced by Iran when it made the decision to withdraw from its commitment to declare any new nuclear facility under construction. The need to create a mechanism of economic survival in the face of the real threat of either US or Israeli military action is probably the most likely explanation behind the Qom facility. Iran's declaration of this facility to the IAEA, which predates Obama's announcement by several days, is probably a recognition on the part of Iran that this duplication of effort is no longer representative of sound policy on its part.

In any event, the facility is now out of the shadows, and will soon be subjected to a vast range of IAEA inspections, making any speculation about Iran's nuclear intentions moot. Moreover, Iran, in declaring this facility, has to know that because it has allegedly placed operational centrifuges in the Qom plant (even if no nuclear material has been introduced), there will be a need to provide the IAEA with full access to Iran's centrifuge manufacturing capability, so that a material balance can be acquired for these items as well.

Rather than representing the tip of the iceberg in terms of uncovering a covert nuclear weapons capability, the emergence of the existence of the Qom enrichment facility could very well mark the initiation of a period of even greater transparency on the part of Iran, leading to its full adoption and implementation of the IAEA additional protocol. This, more than anything, should be the desired outcome of the "Qom declaration".

Calls for "crippling" sanctions on Iran by Obama and Brown are certainly not the most productive policy options available to these two world leaders. Both have indicated a desire to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Iran's action, in declaring the existence of the Qom facility, has created a window of opportunity for doing just that, and should be fully exploited within the framework of IAEA negotiations and inspections, and not more bluster and threats form the leaders of the western world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/25/iran-secret-nuclear-plant-inspections

Obama to Usher In New World Order at G-20

2009-09-25T07:05:00.000Z

President will announce Friday morning a significant expansion of the consortium of countries that tackles global economic and climate change issues.

In a surprising late-night twist on the eve of the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, FOX News has learned President Obama will announce Friday morning a significant expansion of the consortium of countries that tackles global economic and climate change issues.

Obama will tell reporters that the G-20, comprised of 19 industrial and emerging-market countries plus the European Union, will supplant the smaller Group of Eight nations, G-8, as the go-to group for solving the world's economic ills.

"This decision brings to the table the countries needed to build a stronger, more balanced global economy, reform the financial system, and lift the lives of the poorest," the White House said in a statement.

The G8 will retain its national security focus, but be replaced by the broader G-20 on the issues of climate change, financial regulatory reform and global imbalances.

President Obama pressed for the change at the last G-8 Summit in Italy, expressing his displeasure at the unwieldy array of G-8 meeting variations.

Obama said, "There is no doubt that we have to update and refresh and renew the international institutions that were set up in a different time and place. What I've noticed is everybody wants the smallest possible group, the smallest possible organization, that includes them. So, if they're the 21st largest nation in the world, they want the G-21, and think it's highly unfair if they have been cut out."

Though the news itself was an unexpected turn, the reasoning behind it was written in the tea leaves Thursday when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner sang the praises of broadened global cooperation; making special note of the strides China, a non-G-8 country, has made in financial reforms.

The more inclusive approach will allow countries such as Brazil, China, and India, who have griped about not being part of the G-8, to now have a bigger stake in strengthening global cooperation and economic stability. President Obama also supported their inclusion, noting fewer meetings would be more effective.

The G-20 started ten years ago as a group of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors from industrialized and developing economies, but has involved Heads of State Summits, such as the one taking place Friday.

The G-8's members are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The European Commission attends as well.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/25/obama-announce-expansion-global-cooperation/

What they said at the UN

2009-09-24T01:26:00.000Z

Wednesday, 23 September 2009

Morning Session (9:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.)

Secretary-General of the United Nations
H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon
President of the General Assembly
H.E. Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki
Brazil
H.E. Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President
United States of America
H.E. Mr. Barack Obama, President
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
H.E. Colonel Muammar Al-Qadhafi, Leader of the Revolution
Uganda
H.E. Mr. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, President
Qatar
His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Amir
Turkmenistan
H.E. Mr. Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, President
Chile
H.E. Mrs. Michelle Bachelet Jeria, President
Uruguay
H.E. Mr. Tabaré Vázquez, President
Algeria
H.E. Mr. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, President
Republic of Korea
H.E. Mr. Lee Myung-bak, President
France
H.E. Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, President
Sweden
H.E. Mr. Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister
Italy
H.E. Mr. Silvio Berlusconi, President of the Council of Ministers
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
H.E. Mr. Gordon Brown, Prime Minister

Afternoon Session (3:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.)

Argentina
H.E. Mrs. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, President
Tajikistan
H.E. Mr. Emomali Rahmon, President
China
H.E. Mr. Hu Jintao, President
Monaco
His Serene Highness Prince Albert II
Colombia
H.E. Mr. Álvaro Uribe Vélez, President
Russian Federation
H.E. Mr. Dmitry Medvedev, President
South Africa
H.E. Mr. Jacob Zuma, President
Czech Republic
H.E. Mr. Václav Klaus, President
El Salvador
H.E. Mr. Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena, President
Equatorial Guinea
H.E. Mr. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President
Dominican Republic
H.E. Mr. Leonel Fernández Reyna, President
Iran (Islamic Republic of)
H.E. Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President
Bolivia (Plurinational State of)
H.E. Mr. Evo Morales Ayma, President
Ukraine
H.E. Mr. Victor Yushchenko, President
Poland
H.E. Mr. Lech Kaczyński, President
Australia
H.E. Mr. Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister

The BBC is part of the conspiracy

2009-09-23T04:47:00.002Z

By Brian Wheeler, political reporter, BBC News

The BBC is part of a "conspiracy" preventing the "radical changes" needed to UK democracy, the corporation's former director general has said.

Greg Dyke told a Lib Dem conference meeting he wanted a commission to look into the "whole political system".

But he said: "I fear it will never happen because I fear the political class will stop it."

The BBC said its political coverage was taken extremely seriously and was highly regarded by the public.

Mr Dyke said major changes he had wanted to make to the BBC's coverage of politics had been blocked.

He told the Liberal Vision fringe meeting about the expenses scandal and how it had changed voters' attitudes: "The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system - the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one - are the groups most in denial about what is really happening to our democracy."

'Westminster conspiracy'

Mr Dyke, who was forced to stand down as director general in 2004 after the Hutton report into the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly, said there had never been a greater separation between the "political class" and the public.

We want more influence over our lives and we are not just prepared to hand it over to this strange bunch of people who stand for Parliament
Greg Dyke

"I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors, one of whom was married to the man who claimed for cleaning his moat, the cabinet interestingly - the Labour cabinet - who decided to have a meeting, only about what we were trying to discuss, and the political journalists at the BBC.

"Why? Because, collectively, they are all part of the problem. They are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don't want anything to change. It's not in their interests."

He said the expenses scandal had been "British democracy's Berlin Wall moment" but he feared the opportunity to change the system was fading away.

He called for an end to "pathetic jeering, shouting and childish behaviour" and the "pomp and ceremony" in Parliament.

'Scared'

An independent commission should look at ideas such as moving the seat of democracy out of Westminster, a fully elected upper chamber with no whipping system, proportional representation, cutting the number of MPs by half, and reforming their pay and expenses, he added.

"It's time to be radical. Our current model was designed for the 18th Century. It doesn't fit 21st Century Britain," he told the meeting.

And he added: "We want more influence over our lives and we are not just prepared to hand it over to this strange bunch of people who stand for Parliament because they have been knocking on people's doors for 10 years."

Speaking afterwards, he referred to an internal review of the BBC's political coverage carried out at the beginning of the decade, to which all political parties were asked to contribute.

He said "there was a lot of pressure from the government of the day not to change anything", adding: "If you are in power what you want is you want to be covered and you don't want anybody else to be covered and they were scared that we were going to stop covering them."

He denied the BBC had caved in to pressure from the government but added: "A lot of the governors were what I call semi-politicians and they liked the present system and.... maybe they were right - it's not the job of the BBC to change the political system and to start questioning the political system.

"I happen to not agree with that but, you know, we didn't get anywhere."

Asked what specific changes he would like to see in the BBC's coverage, he said: "Most of the politicians didn't want a different way of covering politics.

"They wanted their mugs on the telly basically and we might have moved away from that."

He denied his comments were meant as a criticism of BBC journalists in particular, but added: "In the end political journalists live in the same narrow world as politicians do and they don't see a need to change because they think it's the world. They just don't understand that out there it's very different."

In a statement, the BBC said Mr Dyke was "entitled to his views".

It added: "Our news is highly regarded by the public. Anyone looking at the depth and range of our political coverage will know how seriously we take the reporting of politics and political institutions."

BBC Anchor Who Reported on WTC7 23 minutes before collapse Agrees There May Be a 'Conspiracy'

The BBC is part of the conspiracy:

CIA Torturers Running Scared

2009-09-20T20:28:00.002Z

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News

For the CIA supervisors and operatives responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost; that is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder mean it when they say no one is above the law – and if they don’t fall victim to brazen intimidation.

Unable to prevent Holder from starting an investigation of torture and other war crimes that implicate CIA officials past and present, those same CIA officials, together with what those in the intelligence trade call “agents of influence” in the media, are pulling out all the stops to quash the Justice Department’s preliminary investigation.

In what should be seen as a bizarre twist, seven CIA directors — including three who are themselves implicated in planning and conducting torture and assassination — have asked the President to call off Holder.

Please, tell me how could the whole thing be more transparent?

The most vulnerable of the Gang of Seven, George Tenet, is not the brightest star in the heavens, but even he was able to figure out years ago that he and his accomplices might end up having to pay a heavy price for violating international and U.S. criminal law.

In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet notes that what the CIA needed were “the right authorities” and policy determination to do the bidding of President George W. Bush:

“Sure, it was a risky proposition when you looked at it from a policy maker’s point of view. We were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as CIA had ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to act.” (p. 178)

Tenet and his masters assumed, correctly, that given the mood of the times and the lack of spine among lawmakers, congressional “overseers” would relax into their accustomed role as congressional overlookers.

Unfortunately for him, Tenet seems to have confined his concern at the time to the invertebrates in Congress, not anticipating a rejuvenated Justice Department that might take its role in enforcing the law seriously.

Tenet proudly quotes his former counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black (now a senior official at Blackwater): “As Cofer Black later told Congress, ‘The gloves came off that day.’” That day was Sept. 17, 2001, when “the president approved our recommendations and provided us broad authorities to engage al-Qa’ida.” (p. 208)

Presumably, it was not lost on Tenet that no lawmaker dared ask exactly what Cofer Black meant when he said “the gloves came off.” Had they thought to ask Richard Clarke, former director of the counterterrorist operation at the White House, he could have told them what he wrote in his book, Against All Enemies.

Clarke describes a meeting in which he took part with President George W. Bush in the White House bunker just minutes after Bush’s TV address to the nation on the evening of 9/11.

When the subject of international law was raised, Clarke writes that the president responded vehemently: “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” [p. 24]

It only took Bush six days to grant the CIA the “broad authorities” the agency had recommended.

It then took White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, Vice President Dick Cheney’s lawyer David Addington, and William J. Haynes II, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s lawyer, four more months to advise the president formally that, by fiat, he could ignore the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war.

This gang of lawyers so advised at the turn of 2001-2002, beating down objections by William Howard Taft IV, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s lawyer. Bush chose to follow the dubious advice of imaginative lawyers in his and Dick Cheney’s employ; namely, that 9/11 ushered in a “new paradigm” rendering the Geneva protections “quaint” and “obsolete.”

Prosecutorial Warning

Addington and Gonzales did take care to warn the president, by memorandum of Jan. 25, 2002, of the risk of criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 2441, the War Crimes Act of 1996. Their memo said:

“That statute, enacted in 1996, prohibits the commission of a ‘war crime’ by or against a U.S. person, including U.S. officials. ‘War crime’…is defined to include any grave breach of the GPW [Geneva] or any violation of Article 3 thereof (such as outrages against personal dignity)…Punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty….

“…it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors or independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination [that Geneva does not apply] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”

With that kind of pre-ordered reassurance, President Bush issued a two-page executive directive in which he states, “I accept the legal conclusion of the Department of Justice and determine that common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees…”

This is the smoking gun on Bush’s key role in the subsequent torture of “war on terror” prisoners. The Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report last December stating that that Feb. 7 memorandum “opened the door” to abusive interrogation practices.

Unhappily for Bush and those who carried out his instructions, on June 29, 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Geneva DOES apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

One senior Bush administration official is reported to have gone quite pale at the time, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy raised the ante, warning that "violations of Common Article 3 are considered 'war crimes,' punishable as federal offenses."

What about U.S. criminal law? Despite the almost laughable attempts by lawyers like Addington and John Yoo to get around the War Crimes Act by advising that only the kind of pain accompanying major organ failure or death can be considered torture, those involved are now in a cold sweat — the more so, since those dubious opinions have now been publicly released.

Evidence of Torture

In releasing the sordid, torture-approving memoranda written by Justice Department lawyers and a critical “Special Review” by the CIA’s own horse’s-mouth Inspector General, Obama and Holder had to face down very strong pressure from those with the most to lose — former CIA directors and the functionaries (some of them in senior CIA positions to this very day) who were responsible for seeing to it that “the gloves came off.”

Now, out in the public domain is all the evidence needed to show that war crimes were committed — “authorized” as legal by Justice Department Mafia-type lawyers recruited for that express purpose — but war crimes nonetheless.

Torture, kidnapping, illegal detention — not to mention blatant violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) outlawing eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant.

The stakes are incredibly high. No wonder the CIA and its “agents of influence” (see Saturday’s lead story in the Washington Post) are going all out.

According to the story, seven former CIA directors wrote a letter to Obama on Sept. 18 asking him to “reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11.”

This is the saddest commentary on CIA covert action operatives’ disdain for the law since their predecessors loudly applauded former Director Richard Helms for lying to Congress about the CIA role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende on 9/11/73.

The largest CIA cafeteria was bulging with welcoming supporters of Helms, when the court got finished with him. They then took up a collection on the spot to pay the fine the court had imposed after he was allowed to plead nolo contendere.

Among the most transparent parts of the letter from the Gang of Seven is their corporate worry that “there is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused.”

Their worry is all too real. Evidence already on the public record shows that the first three listed – Michael Hayden, Porter Goss and George Tenet – could readily be indicted for crimes under U.S. and international law, including:

--Illegal eavesdropping by the National Security Agency (Hayden was NSA director when he ordered his employees to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires warrants from a special court before wiretaps are undertaken.)

--assassination planning without notification to Congress (Goss, whose uncommonly abrupt departure in May 2006 was never looked into by the Fawning Corporate Media [FCM]); and Tenet (who turned out to be right about at least one thing — that “things could blow up.”)

The other “distinguished signatories” were:

John Deutch, arrogant to the point of criminality, Deutch disregarded the most elementary rules governing protection of classified information, and had to be given a last-minute pardon by President Bill Clinton.

R. James Woolsey, the man who outdid himself in trying to tie Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and in pushing into the limelight spurious intelligence from the fabricator known as “Curveball.” (Remember those fictitious biological weapons labs for which Colin Powell displayed “artist renderings” to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003?)

William Webster, known mostly at Langley for his handsome face and his devotion to his late-afternoon matches with socialite tennis partners. (Folks like Webster should recognize that, once they have reached what my lawyer father used to call “the age of statutory senility,” they should be more careful regarding what they let themselves be dragged into.)

James R. Schlesinger, “Big Jim” launched his brief stint as CIA director by warning us CIA employees that his instructions were “to ensure that you guys do not screw Richard Nixon.” To give substance to this assertion, he told us that the White House had said he was to report to political henchman Bob Haldeman — not Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor. More recently, Schlesinger led one of the see-no-evil Defense Department “investigations” of the abuses of Abu Ghraib.

Quite a group, this Gang of Seven.

Their letter also is condescending toward President Obama: “As President you have the authority to make decisions restricting substantive interrogation… But the administration must be mindful that public disclosure about past intelligence operations can only help al-Qaeda elude US intelligence and plan future operations.”

The seven then proceed to repeat the canard alleging that such collection “have saved lives and helped protect America from further attacks.”

It reads as though Dick Cheney did their first draft. Actually, that would not be all that surprising, given his record of doing quite a lot of CIA’s drafting for eight long years.

Hold firm Holder.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, working under nine CIA directors and seven presidents, he now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Nuclear Agency Demanding Iranian Missile Blueprints

2009-09-20T03:19:00.000Z

Iran stopped meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency last year over Western allegations of covert Iranian nuclear weapons work because the nuclear agency was demanding access to the designs for its Shahab-3 missile and other secret military data, according to both Iranian and IAEA officials.

The United States and other Western states have cited Iran's refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on resolving issues related to intelligence documents on a purported covert nuclear weapons programme as further evidence of its guilt.

"They've been asking for Shahab-3 drawings for about a year," Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview. "We found out a year ago and that's when we stopped the meetings with IAEA."

A senior official of the IAEA familiar with the Iran investigation, who insisted on anonymity as a condition for being interviewed, confirmed to IPS that the agency had requested not only that Iranian officials discuss the details of the Shahab-3's reentry system, but access to the actual engineering designs for the missile.

"We want them to explain to us that the design studies are not for nuclear weapons," said the official. "We're saying, you say you've done reentry vehicle reengineering [on Shahab-3], so show us some documentation."

The latest IAEA report, dated Aug. 28, notes that the agency "has been unable to engage Iran in any substantive discussions about these outstanding issues for over a year", but it does not link the Iranian disengagement to the demand for military secrets.

The Sep. 15, 2008 report said, however, that in a Sep. 5 letter Iran had "expressed concern that the resolution of some of these issues would require Agency access to sensitive information related to its conventional military and missile related activities."

Asked whether this request would not compromise Iran's national security secrets, the official conceded to IPS, "Yes there will have to be some compromise on their part, because the charges are serious. If someone is accused of nefarious crimes, it is in their interest to share a little of their security to show they are baseless."

Defending the IAEA's request, the official said, "All verification is a compromise of national security. Natanz [the Iranian uranium enrichment facility] is the most heavily verified enrichment plan in the world. It's a compromise of national sovereignty."

Soltanieh said he had protested the demand for such conventional military secrets at meetings of the IAEA Governing Board in 2008 and 2009. "They denied they asked for this information," said Soltanieh.

The Iranian ambassador first expressed concern about being asked to give the IAEA access to national security secrets about its missiles and other conventional military technology in a letter to ElBaradei Sep. 5, 2008.

The September 2008 IAEA report strongly implied without saying so explicitly that the agency was seeking access to actual plans for the missile. It said the IAEA had "proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports examining in detail modeling studies related to the effects of various physical parameters on the reentry body from the time of the missile launch to payload detonation."

The most recent report of the IAEA, dated Aug. 28, 2009, referred to "the need to hold discussions with Iran on the engineering and modeling studies associated with the re-design of the payload chamber referred to in the alleged studies documentation to exclude the possibility that they were for a nuclear payload."

In a letter to IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei Sep. 4, 2009, Soltanieh complained that the report which had just been released had "reflected the unjustified previous requests by your staff in Tehran [for] discussing with Iranian military staff the issue of missiles and explosives!"

He noted that the director general had on several occasions "emphasised that the Agency is not intending to enter into the domain of the national security of Member States".

The agency also requested "additional information and documentation, and access to individuals, in support of [Iran's] statement about the civil and conventional military applications of its work in the area of EBW detonators," according to the September 2008 IAEA report.

The IAEA further asked to meet individual scientists named in one of the intelligence documents as being part of the purported Iranian nuclear weapons research programme. The senior IAEA official acknowledged in the interview with IPS, however, that it would be relatively easy for an outside agency to identify individuals who belonged to an organisation.

"It's not difficult to cook up such a document," the official said.

In his letter to ElBaradei, Soltanieh said these IAEA requests represented "interference in confidential conventional military activities of a Member State, related to its national security..."

The IAEA has offered to "discuss modalities that could enable Iran to demonstrate credibly that the activities referred to in the documentation are not nuclear related, as Iran asserts, while protecting sensitive information related to its conventional military activities."

But the senior IAEA official interviewed by IPS made it clear that such modalities would not preclude access to the documentation on the Shahab design.

Iran's enemies, especially the United States and Israel, are eager for intelligence on the design of the Shahab-3's reentry vehicle.

According to a detailed analysis by the Armed Combat Information Group (ACIG), the upgraded version of the Shahab-3 has an improved guidance system and warhead, as well as completely new re-entry vehicle with a different guidance system based on rocket-nozzle steering rather than a spin-stabilised re-entry vehicle.

The new reentry vehicle is smaller than the previous version, according to the former head of Israel's Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation. That gives the improved version greater precision.

But the most significant feature of the new variant, according to the ACIG analysis, is the capability for changing trajectory repeatedly during re-entry and in the missile's terminal phase. That capability allows the Shahab-3 to evade the radar systems associated with Israel's Arrow 2 missile.

If Israeli and the United States were able to get more information on the design of the reentry vehicle, they would be able to make adjustments in the Arrow 2 system to increase its effectiveness against the Iranian missile.

The IAEA secretariat is well-known to be major source of intelligence on Iran for the United States and Israel. In the 1990s, 10 of the 35 members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Vienna were Central Intelligence Agency personnel, according to the 2007 book "The Italian Letter", by journalists Peter Eisner and Knute Royce.

Ambassador Soltanieh told IPS that the IAEA safeguards department, to which the Iranians pass much sensitive information, has repeatedly leaked that information – usually out of context - to journalists for stories portraying the Iranian nuclear programme in a menacing light.

"Leakage of confidential information is a matter of serious concern," said Soltanieh. "In many cases, we give information to inspectors and soon it is in the media."

A Western diplomatic source in Vienna who insisted on not being identified said, "I don't think it would help a lot to get the specific plans of Shahab-3." For one thing, he observed, "They could be working on other studies and we wouldn't know about it."

The official admitted that it was "always difficult to prove that something is nonexistent".

Nevertheless, it would be "much safer for Iran to compromise on these issues than to keep its present attitude," the official said.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48509

Superpowers Do Not Die

2009-09-20T02:00:00.001Z

They commit suicide.

Though it’s a perennial favorite among left-wing enclaves, any (serious) talk of the demise of the US as the world’s sole superpower is so out of whack with reality that it’s normally not worth engaging your brain. When you’ve heard how the story goes once, you’ve heard it a thousand times.

Particularly when it’s Deepak Chopra (apologies, linked to a slightly aged piece in the Huff Po), who does nothing more than slightly re-heat all the tepid and vapid arguments of yesteryear about why a multi-polar world would be so, so nice.

Except, genius, that we’ve already had a multi-polar world on many previous occasions. And it resulted in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World II (and, less directly, the Cold War), to name the biggies of the last two centuries alone.

Is even recent history that forgettable, now?

Significant state power, once gained, dissipates very slowly: few countries have lost their status as a superpower. Spain, Portugal and Holland are examples of this in the modern age, but, despite their deep problems, the United Kingdom, France and Russia still cling to their superpower standing, at least for now.

There has, however, never before been a power like the United States.

The (former) empires of France, Britain, Persia, Russia, China and Rome do not even come close to the military might of the US. Short of the entire world teaming up against America, none could take her down - and even then, my money would be on the US. It’d be like Hulk Hogan fighting a room full of toddlers: unpleasant, to be sure, but more irritating than anything else (for the Hulkster, anyway).

Not that the US’ authority comprises only military means. Combined with the twin allures of its (usually) dynamic economy and open society, the US towers over the rest of the world.

The real stake in the heart of this soft-intellectualism, however, is the most basic point: who would take over?

For as much as the Left loves to imagine it, there would be no orderly division of labor between America and the wannabees. There never has been and there never will be, until (God forbid) we have some kind of global governance rule.

That aside, intense (and violent) competition will emerge among those nation-states covetous of American influence. Historically, the world is at its most dangerous when states seek to change the prevailing order.

Which is precisely what is happening today. The ascension of a young and inexperienced president has afforded nefarious regimes the world over another opportunity to see how far they can push America back and expand their own influence. China is challenging the US Navy in the South China Sea. Latent Russian hostility is on the rise, as they achieve feats such as ousting the US from its only Central Asian air base in Kyrgyzstan. Iran is as belligerent as usual and closer than ever to obtaining nuclear weapons. North Korea, behaving true to form despite Kim Jong-il’s incapacity, is conducting nuclear tests without a care in the world. Serial basket-case Pakistan is nowhere nearer becoming the theoretical stable democracy that some analysts think not only possible, but also a panacea for their many problems. Finally, the mini-me Castros of Latin America are still nipping at America’s heels, but let’s leave them to their own plots and schemes while we focus on the big boys.

Within the last week alone – not that you’d know it from a domestic media that has focused exclusively on the riveting spectacle of Democrats blanketly defaming tens of millions of conservatives as racists – Russia has concluded pacts with the Georgian regions of Abkhazian and South Ossetia, allowing it to maintain military bases in both places for nearly a half-century to come. Everyone, please welcome back the Russian Empire. That, of course, is in addition to Russian warnings that it will seize (Georgian) ships in the Black Sea. Iran, meanwhile, is delirious with self-satisfaction now that its pure intransigence has led to its being dropped from the agenda for a September 24th meeting of the UNSC chaired by President Obama, a moratorium on further UNSC sanctions and the grand prize, bi-lateral negotiations with the United States. The DPRK, ever desperate to ensure that the world takes note of its pitiful existence, has been similarly rewarded with one-on-one talks, after it decided to renounce the 1953 armistice with South Korea.

More so even than acts of great strength, acts of weakness on this scale are never forgotten.

It is so dangerously naive to believe that we can all just get along, as Chopra and so many other left-wing flyweights unquestioningly do (with not the least among them being President Obama), that it defies comprehension.

Can they truly believe that China or Russia would be content with sharing global predominance with the US and do not harbor ambitions of usurping the US entirely? That they wouldn’t subsequently transpose their oppression from the domestic to the international level?

And do they really want to see that happen?

I’m not sure that I want to know the answer.

Hotair

The Story of My Shoe

2009-09-19T05:20:00.001Z

By the Shoe Thrower himself, MUTADHAR al-ZAIDI

Mutadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi who threw his shoe at George Bush gave this speech on his recent release.

In the name of God, the most gracious and most merciful.

Here I am, free. But my country is still a prisoner of war.

Firstly, I give my thanks and my regards to everyone who stood beside me, whether inside my country, in the Islamic world, in the free world. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act.

But, simply, I answer: What compelled me to confront is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

And how it wanted to crush the skulls of (the homeland's) sons under its boots, whether sheikhs, women, children or men. And during the past few years, more than a million martyrs fell by the bullets of the occupation and the country is now filled with more than 5 million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. And many millions of homeless because of displacement inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shiite would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ, may peace be upon him. And despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than 10 years, for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. Until we were invaded by the illusion of liberation that some had. (The occupation) divided one brother from another, one neighbor from another, and the son from his uncle. It turned our homes into never-ending funeral tents. And our graveyards spread into parks and roadsides. It is a plague. It is the occupation that is killing us, that is violating the houses of worship and the sanctity of our homes and that is throwing thousands daily into makeshift prisons.

I am not a hero, and I admit that. But I have a point of view and I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated. And to see my Baghdad burned. And my people being killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, and this weighs on me every day and pushes me toward the righteous path, the path of confrontation, the path of rejecting injustice, deceit and duplicity. It deprived me of a good night's sleep.

Dozens, no, hundreds, of images of massacres that would turn the hair of a newborn white used to bring tears to my eyes and wound me. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Fallujah, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. In the past years, I traveled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and hear with my own ears the screams of the bereaved and the orphans. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

And as soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies of the Iraqis, and while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the traces of the blood of victims that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: Do you know how many broken homes that shoe that I threw had entered because of the occupation? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? And how many times it had entered homes in which free Iraqi women and their sanctity had been violated? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

After six years of humiliation, of indignity, of killing and violations of sanctity, and desecration of houses of worship, the killer comes, boasting, bragging about victory and democracy. He came to say goodbye to his victims and wanted flowers in response.

Put simply, that was my flower to the occupier, and to all who are in league with him, whether by spreading lies or taking action, before the occupation or after.

I wanted to defend the honor of my profession and suppressed patriotism on the day the country was violated and its high honor lost. Some say: Why didn't he ask Bush an embarrassing question at the press conference, to shame him? And now I will answer you, journalists. How can I ask Bush when we were ordered to ask no questions before the press conference began, but only to cover the event. It was prohibited for any person to question Bush.

And in regard to professionalism: The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism were to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I take this opportunity: If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I wish to apologize to you for any embarrassment I may have caused those establishments. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day.

History mentions many stories where professionalism was also compromised at the hands of American policymakers, whether in the assassination attempt against Fidel Castro by booby-trapping a TV camera that CIA agents posing as journalists from Cuban TV were carrying, or what they did in the Iraqi war by deceiving the general public about what was happening. And there are many other examples that I won't get into here.

But what I would like to call your attention to is that these suspicious agencies -- the American intelligence and its other agencies and those that follow them -- will not spare any effort to track me down (because I am) a rebel opposed to their occupation. They will try to kill me or neutralize me, and I call the attention of those who are close to me to the traps that these agencies will set up to capture or kill me in various ways, physically, socially or professionally.

And at the time that the Iraqi prime minister came out on satellite channels to say that he didn't sleep until he had checked in on my safety, and that I had found a bed and a blanket, even as he spoke I was being tortured with the most horrific methods: electric shocks, getting hit with cables, getting hit with metal rods, and all this in the backyard of the place where the press conference was held. And the conference was still going on and I could hear the voices of the people in it. And maybe they, too, could hear my screams and moans.

In the morning, I was left in the cold of winter, tied up after they soaked me in water at dawn. And I apologize for Mr. Maliki for keeping the truth from the people. I will speak later, giving names of the people who were involved in torturing me, and some of them were high-ranking officials in the government and in the army.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country, and that is a legitimate cause confirmed by international laws and divine rights. I wanted to defend a country, an ancient civilization that has been desecrated, and I am sure that history -- especially in America -- will state how the American occupation was able to subjugate Iraq and Iraqis, until its submission.

They will boast about the deceit and the means they used in order to gain their objective. It is not strange, not much different from what happened to the Native Americans at the hands of colonialists. Here I say to them (the occupiers) and to all who follow their steps, and all those who support them and spoke up for their cause: Never.

Because we are a people who would rather die than face humiliation.

And, lastly, I say that I am independent. I am not a member of any politicalparty, something that was said during torture -- one time that I'm far-right, another that I'm a leftist. I am independent of any political party, and my future efforts will be in civil service to my people and to any who need it, without waging any political wars, as some said that I would.
My efforts will be toward providing care for widows and orphans, and all those whose lives were damaged by the occupation. I pray for mercy upon the souls of the martyrs who fell in wounded Iraq, and for shame upon those who occupied Iraq and everyone who assisted them in their abominable acts. And I pray for peace upon those who are in their graves, and those who are oppressed with the chains of imprisonment. And peace be upon you who are patient and looking to God for release.

And to my beloved country I say: If the night of injustice is prolonged, it will not stop the rising of a sun and it will be the sun of freedom.

One last word. I say to the government: It is a trust that I carry from my fellow detainees. They said, 'Muntadhar, if you get out, tell of our plight to the omnipotent powers' -- I know that only God is omnipotent and I pray to Him -- 'remind them that there are dozens, hundreds, of victims rotting in prisons because of an informant's word.'

They have been there for years, they have not been charged or tried.

They've only been snatched up from the streets and put into these prisons. And now, in front of you, and in the presence of God, I hope they can hear me or see me. I have now made good on my promise of reminding the government and the officials and the politicians to look into what's happening inside the prisons. The injustice that's caused by the delay in the judicial system.

Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you

The translation is by McClatchy’s special correspondent, Sahar Issa.

http://www.counterpunch.org/zaidi09152009.html

'New intel changed Europe missile plan'

2009-09-19T03:21:00.003Z

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that the new missile defense system planned for Europe has the flexibility to adapt to changes in Iranian missile capabilities even if US intelligence about Teheran's slower-than-expected pace proves wrong.

US President Barack Obama's decision to scrap a Bush-era missile intercept system in Europe was based largely on a new US intelligence assessment that Iran's effort to build a nuclear-capable long-range missile would take three years to five years longer than originally thought, officials said earlier.

Gates, a former CIA director, said that even if Iran should move more quickly on its long-range missile program, the revised program will have the flexibility to deal more quickly and effectively with the change.

"We actually are better able to deal with a changed situation, in which the intelligence assessments are wrong, with the new architecture than we were with the old one," Gates told reporters.

The new assessment asserts Iran is unlikely to have a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile until 2015 to 2020, a US government official familiar with the report told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains classified.

It is the second time in two years US intelligence has revised downward the threat posed by Iran's weapons programs.

Obama abruptly canceled on Thursday a long-planned missile shield for Eastern Europe, replacing the Bush-era project that was strongly opposed by Russia with a plan the president contended would defend better against a growing threat of Iranian missiles.

The United States no longer will seek to erect a missile base and radar site in Poland and the Czech Republic, virtually on Russia's doorstep. President George W. Bush contended that the missile base was needed to shoot down any Iranian missile if it ever developed one with adequate range to threaten the United States or Europe. The United States already has a similar missile site and radar in Alaska.

Previous intelligence assessed that Iran would have an ICBM capable of menacing Europe and the United States between 2012 and 2015, another US government official said.

The assessment changed because Iran has not been conducting the kind of observable development and testing that would be expected to accompany a robust long-range missile program, the second official said.

The new assessment is contained in a classified May 2009 National Intelligence Estimate. The secret report is called "Foreign Ballistic Missile Development and Threat Through 2020." National Intelligence Estimates contain the consensus judgment of all 16 American intelligence agencies about critical national security issues.

Thomas Fingar, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said Iran's progress, or lack thereof, on its ballistic missile program can be observed easily.

"There's been a lot of testing. They learned from the tests and we learned from the tests," Fingar said.

Fingar, who spearheaded the controversial 2007 national intelligence estimate that disclosed Iran had halted its nuclear weapon design work in 2003, was not privy to the new intelligence. But he said Iran may be working on short-range missiles because they are easier to build than large, long-range missiles, and lessons learned in their development can be applied to larger missiles.

He also said Iran may not be aggressively pursuing an ICBM because it has discerned its most likely adversaries are in the region, so shorter missiles have more immediate utility for offensive attacks or deterrence.

The new Obama plan would deploy systems designed to shoot down short- and medium-range missiles, with construction in phases to begin around 2011. Systems to counter longer-range missiles would be in place around 2020.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1253198156759&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

US moves missile system to Israel: proof of plan to attack Iran
The $5 Trillion Cold War Hoax

For Britons, the Party Game Is Over

2009-09-19T02:02:00.001Z

by John Pilger | Antiwar

On the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his "major policy speech" on Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River.

NATO fighter planes had blown the poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had rushed to siphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with water buckets and cooking pots. "At least" 90 were killed, although NATO prefers not to count its civilian enemy. "It was a scene from hell," said Mohammed Daud, a witness. "Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere." No parade for them along a Wiltshire high street.

I saw something similar in southeast Asia. An incendiary bomb had razed most of a thatched village, and bits of charred people were hanging on upended fishing nets. Those intact lay splayed and black, like large spiders. I have never believed you need witness such a hell to comprehend the crime. A standard-issue conscience is enough for all but the morally corrupt and powerful.

Fresh from another dysfunctional photo opportunity with troops in Afghanistan – a contrivance far from the impoverished suffering of that country – Brown "authorized" the Rambo-style rescue of Stephen Farrell, a journalist of British and Irish nationality, at the site of the NATO attack. It was a stunt that went wrong. A British soldier was killed and Farrell’s guide, Sultan Munadi, an Afghan journalist, was abandoned and killed. Munadi’s family now fully appreciates the different worth of British and Afghan lives.

During the 1914-18 slaughter, Prime Minister Lloyd George confided: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know." Have we not yet advanced over a century’s corpses to a point where the likes of Brown are denied their mendacious subterfuge? The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this was rejected.

The establishment of a permanent US/NATO presence in a resource-rich, strategic region is the principal reason for the war. The British are there because that is what Washington wants. Preventing the Taliban from storming our streets is reminiscent of President Lyndon B Johnson’s plaint: "We have to stop the communists over there [Vietnam] or we’ll soon be fighting them in California."

There is one difference. By refusing to bring the troops home, Brown is likely to provoke an atrocity by young British Muslims who view the war as a western crusade; the recent Old Bailey trial made that clear. He has been told as much by British intelligence and security services. Brown’s own security adviser has said as much publicly. As with Tony Blair and the bombs of 7 July 2005, he will bear ultimate responsibility for bringing violence and grief to his own people.

More than MPs’ fake expenses, it is this corrupting and trivializing of life and death that mark a fitting end to the "modernized" Labour Party, the party of criminal war. Do the delegates preparing for the party’s annual rituals in Brighton comprehend this? It says enough that most Labour MPs never demanded a vote on Blair’s bloodshed in Iraq and gave him a standing ovation when he departed. One timid motion proposed by the "grass roots" at Brighton might be allowed. This concludes that "a majority of the public believe that the war [in Afghanistan] is unwinnable." There is no suggestion that it is wrong, immoral and based on lies similar to those that led to the extinction of a million Iraqis, "an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide," according to one scholarly estimate.

This is largely why the game of parliamentary politics is over for so many Britons, especially the young. In 2005, a bent system allowed Blair to win with fewer popular votes than the Tories in their electoral catastrophe of 1997. New Labour’s greatest achievement is the lowest turnouts since universal voting began. Today, voters watch Brown give billions of public money to casino banks while demanding nothing in return, having once hailed their practices as an inspiration "for the whole economy." At the recent meeting of G20 leaders in London, Brown distinguished himself by opposing, and killing, a modest Franco-German proposal for a limit on bonuses and penalties for companies that broke it. The gap between rich and poor in Britain is now the widest since 1968.

New Labour’s causes and effect extend from the one in five young people denied employment, education and hope to the £12m that Blair coins in a year, "advising" the rich and lecturing to them at £157,000 a time. For the more extreme among Blair’s and Brown’s mentors and courtiers, such as the twice disgraced Peter Mandelson, this represents the most sought after achievement of all: the positioning of Labour to the right of the Tories, though it is probably correct to say the two main parties have converged, now competing feverishly with each other to threaten cuts in public services in order to pay for the bailing out of the banks and for the druglords of Kabul. There is no mention of cutting the billions to be spent on replacing Trident nuclear submarines designed for the defunct cold war.

The game is over. Corporatism and a reinvigorated militarism have finally appropriated parliamentary democracy, a historic shift. For those Afghan villagers blown to pieces in our name, one craven motion at Labour’s conference is too late. At the very least, the party’s "grass roots" might ask themselves why.

America's failed model for the world

2009-09-19T01:08:00.000Z

By Steven Hill

Europeans are shaking their heads over their American friends again. Whether talking to people in the street, in the cafés or to journalists or political leaders, everyone here asks me the same question: Has America lost its mind? Town halls filled with angry citizens, shouting at their elected leaders, some of them armed with guns and threatening signs? Besides the media spectacle of these neo-1776 revolutionaries, what is doubly perplexing to Europeans is the focus of the protests: healthcare.

What's strange to a European is that everyone here already has healthcare. The place that Donald Rumsdfeld once sneeringly called "old Europe" long ago solved this dilemma, producing quality healthcare for a fraction of the price that Americans pay. Many Europeans are astonished when they find out that 47 million Americans – larger than the populations of most European nations – don't have any healthcare at all except a hospital emergency room.

Contrary to stereotype, most of Europe doesn't use single payer, with France, Germany and others having evolved a "third way" that combines individual choice with private, nonprofit insurance companies and Medicare-like cost controls. Even countries like Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia, with per capita incomes only a fraction of that in the United States, have healthcare for all their people. Europeans simply don't understand how a wealthy United States could remain the last advanced nation that does not have universal healthcare.

Lounging one evening in one of Budapest's elegant thermal baths larger than an Olympic swimming pool, with Europeans of all ages and nationalities soaking their limbs in relaxed leisure, I was treated to a dose of the common wisdom that is taking hold here. Introducing myself as an American evinced a swift reaction from one sweating sauna companion:

"I don't understand you Americans. You blow billions on a useless war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and billions more to bail out banks that nearly bankrupted the world economy, but you don't ensure healthcare for your own people. Even Obama can't make a difference. It's as if your democracy doesn't work anymore."

He was Austrian but spoke in a near-perfect English that was as good grammatically as that spoken by some of my relatives.

And his reaction was typical. As Europeans watch the United States flailing about over something as basic as healthcare, they are reminded once again of the impotent US response following Hurricane Katrina. TV images of stranded, poor, black people in New Orleans have been melded to those of this new healthcare insurgency with pitch forks, leaving an indelible impression. The last remaining superpower is not looking so super anymore, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, healthcare, the economy – not anywhere.

The global economic collapse, largely blamed on out-of-control Wall Street capitalism, is stinging here as well, though in most regions Europe has not suffered as much as America has. In my informal polling of small business and shop owners, they said the downtown had hurt, but only a little bit. Since the crisis, Europe has employed clever strategies – some of them since copied by the Obama administration, such as the popular "cash for clunkers" auto rebate programme – that have prevented it from suffering the doubling of unemployment that the US is enduring.

Indeed, Europe, once looked down upon by American pundits as the land of double-digit unemployment, currently has lower unemployment than the United States. Contrary to Europe's reputation as having a sick, sclerotic economy, its per capita economic growth rate actually was slightly higher than America's in the 10 years leading up to the economic crisis.

Still, a number of people fear that the worst is yet to come. And so Europeans appear both angry and perplexed by America's deregulated capitalism run amok, which has further served to undermine the American brand. As one Slovenian acquaintance, a representative of a consortium of small businesses said to me: "The US used to lecture us in Europe about just about everything, but what does America have to teach now? Maybe America should learn something from Europe."

Indeed, with Germany and France becoming the first major western economies to emerge from recession into positive growth, perhaps the US should learn something from our transatlantic cousins. But what might we learn?

Here's a clue, say some Europeans. German chancellor Angela Merkel once was asked by then-British prime minister Tony Blair what the secret was of her country's economic success, which includes being the world's largest exporter nation and running substantial trade surpluses. She famously replied: "Mr Blair, we still make things."

Werner Abelshauser, an economic historian at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, says the European way of running the economy "is fundamentally about firms that emphasise high-quality products and long-term relationships between suppliers and customers". Company managers set long-term policies, while market pressures for short-term profits are held in check. Gunter Verheugen, vice-president of the European Commission, echoed the virtues of Europe's strong, competitive industrial base, succinctly stating Europe's recipe for success: "Don't try to be cheaper. Try to be better."

But in the United States, for decades under the sway of the Reagan revolution's economic philosophy, which favoured corporate finance over manufacturing, the economy has seen a stark decline in manufacturing. Since the second world war, the financial sector in the United States has tripled in size as a percentage of the overall economy and of corporate profits. That increase accelerated during the eight years of the Bush administration, even as the US lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs.

European capitalism for the most part didn't succumb to the financialisation that swept the United States in the 1980s, and which paved the way for the speculative bubbles that have now caused economic collapses in both 2001 and in 2008 (with notable exceptions in Britain, Spain and Ireland, similarly plagued by a collapsed housing bubble).

So from the other side of the pond, the city on the hill is looking pretty average these days. America is still a leader, but not the leader. That's a post-post-cold war concept that the world is still getting used to, and that Americans don't want to admit. But the evidence is everywhere, and especially obvious when you step outside the American bubble.

As one Viennese politician told me: "If the American model no longer is the blueprint for the world, what comes next?" Some Europeans think they have the answer, and much of the world is paying attention, even if most Americans still are not.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/15/europe-us-healthcare-economy

Lehman collapse: Dubai and Gulf give a glimpse of a new world order

2009-09-16T03:02:00.001Z

The unfolding of the West's debt crisis left Dubai with a half-finished skyline. A year on the region is reassessing its place in the world.

Nowhere did the financial crisis expose dreams as fantasy more starkly than Dubai and the Gulf. But perhaps nowhere, not even China, is the new world order that might result more clearly visible.

In the early months of the credit crisis, before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Gulf states seemed immune.

Energy giants such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi saw their sovereign wealth funds swell from the upwards surge of the oil price.

Dubai real estate, leaping skywards both physically and financially, enjoyed a final blowout in early 2008. It seemed an exciting alternative to wobbly stock markets for what investors' cash remained in the system.

But after September, it all turned out to have been a Ponzi scheme in disguise. Dubai's trademark developers had been encouraged to sell off-plan sites low to create a feeding frenzy of "flippers" who sold unfinished properties to each other at ever higher prices.

Prices collapsed – down 47.3pc to the second quarter of 2009, more than anywhere else in the world, according to Knight Frank. Some of Dubai's most celebrated companies – Nakheel, who built houses on sand, on the reclaimed Palm and World islands, and Tatweer, which wanted to out-Disney Disneyland in the middle of the desert – teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.

State-owned, they contributed to a total debt estimated officially at $80bn, and unofficially as anything up to twice that.

According to one analyst, $300bn of development work was put on hold or cancelled outright. According to another, the city was set to lose up to a fifth of its population as expatriates, who outnumber locals by nine to one, lost their jobs and left.

Dubai was not alone. In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, debt exposure suddenly cast a new light on inward-looking, clannish business structures.

Two of the former's biggest conglomerates, family-run Al Gosaibi and Maan al Sanea’s Saad Group, related by both marriage and mutual investments, are involved in a bitter falling out with each other and their creditors.

Newspaper columnists discuss how to deal with beggars in Riyadh. Oil tankers float at sea, full up but with nowhere to go.

As with the rest of the world, the situation, and the price of oil, may have stabilised – for now. The federal United Arab Emirates government is buying Dubai’s bonds and is still aiming for a nationwide growth rate of 3pc for 2009.

That has allowed the region, smarting at criticism of its materialistic excess and its treatment of the people who live there, some breathing space to look at fundamentals.

Dubai may choose to refocus on its regional role. Western migrants may have flown home, but there are still plenty of well-educated Lebanese, Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis for whom a relatively liberal, politically stable Muslim city that is welcoming to foreigners holds many attractions.

Iranians remain, as they always were, the most numerous national group in the city.

And if the world's economy does take another plunge, those who already have cash in the bank are well-placed to expand their influence. Abu Dhabi's ruling family have already helped Barclays and bought Manchester City.

It was China’s role in the rescue of Canary Wharf that caught the headline-writers' attention. But it was Qatar (population 1.4 million) that ended up with by far the biggest stake.

Qatar is now known for its huge supplies of natural gas. But it is Iran’s closest friend in the Arab world, and home to Al-Jazeera television. As with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, its politics may soon start as attracting as much attention as its finances.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/6183937/Lehman-collapse-Dubai-and-Gulf-give-a-glimpse-of-a-new-world-order.html

Obama Peace Plan

2009-09-15T03:53:00.004Z

By Haitham Sabbah

A draft of the Obama peace plan, which is expected to be released at the UN Assembly meeting in New York, or at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, has surfaced.

The International Middle East Media Center's website leaked the alleged draft of Obama's peace plan given to them by Palestinian Legislator Hasan Khreisha. Khreisha added that the draft has been widely distributed among Palestinian and Arab leaders and the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, recently discussed the plan during his visit to the White House.

According to Khreisha, the draft includes ten main points detailed as follows:

1. International presence in the Jordan Valley, Palestinian Plains area, and other areas in the West Bank.

2. Annexing some parts of East Jerusalem to remain under Israeli control, while Muslim holy site would be under Arab control.

3. All Palestinian factions would be dissolved and transformed into political parties.

4. Large settlement blocs in the West Bank would remain under Israeli control, while negotiations would be conducted within three months of the plan agreement?, to discuss the future of smaller settlements.

5. Several areas in the West Bank would be disarmed, and Israeli would maintain aerial control.

6. Intensifying the Palestinian-Israeli security coordination.

7. The Palestinian Authority would not be allowed to have military alliances with regional countries.

8. The United States would guarantee the establishment of a Palestinian State in the summer of 2011.

9. Allowing an agreed upon number of refugees to return, and to be settled in the Plains area and other areas in the West Bank, particularly in the cities of Ramallah and Nablus. A special fund for supporting the refugees would also be established.

10. Israel starts releasing the Palestinian political detainees immediately after the peace deal is signed. Three years would be allocated for the release of the detainees.

No one can be sure this is the final draft of the Obama peace plan, but it has the resonance of credibility.

Besides its many flaws, the peace plan should have begun with ending the US/Israel siege of Gaza. That would have been a signal that the US and Israel are really serious about peace in the Holy Land. The plan fails to address boarders, water, trade and the apartheid wall.

The 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel will be released over a period of "three years", longer than Guantanamo Bay. The question we want to ask is: will Marwan Barghoutti be released in time to partake in the negotiations? The answer to this is obviously, no.

US expect Israel to accept these terms on the premise that the Obama Administration adopts a stronger position towards halting Iran's nuclear ambitions. The same nuclear program that US chief of intelligence has confirmed in his findings in a 2007 report, did not exist.

Even if Abbas and Arab administration accept this plan (which will not be accepted by majority of Palestinian people and millions of their supporters around the world), Israel will again fool US Administration to fulfill their part toward Iran but in return Israel will not move one step towards peace.

Another four to eight years – the age of Obama Administration in office – will pass, nothing will change on ground more than more Palestinian lands will be stolen by Israel and more Palestinians and innocents in both sides will be killed.

http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2009/09/05/obama-peace-plan/

The Israeli Occupation of America:

2009-09-15T01:53:00.004Z

How Israel Gained Control of American Foreign Policy and Public Opinion

By Hesham Tillawi, PhD

”Israel need not apologize for the assassination or destruction of those who seek to destroy it. The first order of business for any country is the protection of its people.”Washington Jewish Week, October 9, 1997

I came from a country occupied militarily by Israel to the land of “the free and the brave” only to find out it too was occupied politically by Israel.

The Palestinian people, holding on to whatever shred of hope they can, are counting on the day Americans see the error of their ways and change their opinion of the whole Middle East situation and understand it for what it truly is–A conquered, oppressed people living a hellish existence under a maniacal, occupying power and who will then contact their representatives in Congress and have them put the heat on Israel in fulfilling the agreements she made years ago with the PLO such as Oslo, Taba, Camp David, Wye River, the Road Map, or even Annapolis.

The sad fact however is that the Americans–as much as they champion themselves as a “free people”–are in no better shape than the Palestinians. On the contrary, the American position is worse than that of the Palestinians. The Palestinians can identify the enemy–he is the one with the gun and blowing away their loved ones. They KNOW they are occupied and oppressed. They KNOW how Israel occupied Palestine, killed its inhabitants and forced the majority of those who survived the carnage out of their homes and lands to then live as strangers in refugee camps.

The Americans however, have no idea. Like a drug addict who thinks he feels great after shooting up, he does not realize he is a slave, to his substance and to his pusher. The history of how the Zionists’ controlled England is not shrouded in mystery. Through Jewish control of the British government the Balfour Declaration was drafted that “gave” the land of Palestine to the Jews after WWI, a land they did not own or possess.

But how in the world did they occupy the United States politically? There is no real “Balfour Declaration” we can point to as proof.

Or can we?

Jewish influence in American politics–while there from the earliest days and certainly apparent during the Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman administrations–did not become the force it is today until the Kennedy era, or, rather, AFTER the Kennedy era.

As all know, in 1961 John Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States, a presidency cut short as a result of his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Robert Kennedy, the president’s younger brother was Attorney General of the United States and therefore the head of the Department of Justice.

What is little-known is that the Kennedy’s realized early on that indeed the country was in trouble and that something needed to be done about it. The trouble in this case was the influence slithering its way into American political life from a far-away state only about 12 years old known as Israel. Both Kennedy brothers, learning politics at their father Joseph’s knee, understood the dynamic of this thing known as “Jewish interests”, how it would play out and what the repercussions would be for America.

Of the many issues revolving around Israel and the Zionist question the two more important as pertains the Jewish state were (A) Israel’s nuclear program, and (B) the issue of an organization known as the American Zionist Council.

According to Pulitzer Prize winning author Seymour Hersh, President Kennedy was profoundly committed to nuclear nonproliferation and was categorically opposed to nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which meant opposing Israel’s nuclear program. Hersh states that JFK exerted heavy pressure on Israel to stop the program and was serious about it. At the time Kennedy was in the middle of crises mode with the Russians in trying to arrange a nonproliferation treaty with them and therefore Israel’s nuclear program would be a big embarrassment. In addition to being an embarrassment it would open up the possibility of a nuclear conflict with Russia, given her allies in the Middle East, something made all the more believable in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis that almost resulted in a nuclear war between the two giants. John Kennedy had nightmares about the prospect of nuclear proliferation, saying “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, 15 to 20…. I see the possibility in the 1970s of the president of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 25 nations may have these weapons. I regard this as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”

Secret letters and secret meetings between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion give a clear picture of the difficulty Kennedy faced in negotiating with the Israeli Prime Minister who stated many times that nothing will save Israel but nuclear power. According to author Michael Collins Piper in his book Final Judgment Ben Gurion wrote Kennedy saying: “Mr. President, my people have the right to exist, and this existence is in danger.”

It does not take a skilled translater to figure out what Ben Gurion was saying, namely that Kennedy’s opposition to nuclear weapons in the Middle East was seen as an existential threat to the Jewish people and their newly-formed state. Going further, Kennedy insisted on inspections of Israel’s program as evidenced in a secret letter sent to then-Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol that stated that American support of Israel “could be jeopardized” if the Americans were not allowed to inspect the Israeli nuclear facilities.

As if the aforementioned were not enough, there was another front in this private war between Kennedy and the “Jewish state” equally important in its scope if we are to understand what kinds of forces were at play here that led to America’s change of policy with regards to Israel. It involves the issue of spying, bribery and the direct controlling of American politicians by a foreign power and the one creature at the center of all of it was something known as the American Zionist Council and the Kennedys’ insistence it register as a foreign agent under the provisos of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act passed by Congress back in 1938 to prevent German agents in the U.S. from buying their way into the American system of government and public opinion. The purpose of FARA was “to insure that American public and its law makers know the source of information- propaganda intended to sway public opinion, policy, and laws.”

In other words the Kennedy’s understood the danger of the Zionist Movement on the United States of America and treated it just like Germany was treated during the Hitler years. The Kennedy’s understood the reality of the situation as it existed during their days in government, that the AZC was an agent of a foreign government, Israel, which would prevent it from buying American politicians and exerting the kind of influence over public opinion making that for all intents and purposes is now is a fait accompli.

Negotiations went back and forth between the Department of Justice headed by the President’s brother Robert and the American Zionist Council. The council refused to register and the DOJ tried to exert pressure on them, even going so far in one instance as giving them 72 hours to register, but at no avail. Examining the newly-de-classified documents containing the minutes of those meetings between the DOJ and the AZC one can see the language of gangsters being used. In one of those documents dated May 2, 1963 the head legal counsel Simon H. Rifkind for the AZC explained to the representatives of the DOJ the nature of the AZC, saying “The council is composed of representatives of the various Zionist organizations in the United States” and thereby, in effect, it represented “the vast majority of organized Jewry within this country.” The message was clear here–As far as organizations go it is big and powerful. Judge Rifkind obviously wanted to make sure the Kennedy’s knew they were picking a fight with a gorilla and not some small mouse.

He did not stop there but went further by stating that the vast number of Jews who adhered to the principles of Zionism could not understand how “our administration” could “do such harm to the Zionist movement and impair the effectiveness of the council by insistence on registration.”

Here Judge Rifkind made sure he used the phrase “our administration” instead of “our government” to make a specific point, namely that he was talking about Kennedy personally, that it was the Jews responsible for him getting elected and that if he continued with his agenda he was in effect entering into a war with organized Jewry.

Another meeting very much worth noting was held on October 17, 1963 between DOJ and AZC. In this meeting Judge Rifkind insisted on non registering, citing that fact that “It was the opinion of most of the persons affiliated with the Council that such registration…would eventually destroy the Zionist movement” and adding that he did not believe his clients would “file any papers or sign any papers indicating that the organization was an agent of a foreign principal”. In other words, “Screw You America and your laws, we’ll do what we want” as well as threatening the administration and telling them who really ruled the country, not the Kennedy brothers but rather the persons “affiliated” with AZC. Once translated from Gangsterese into understandable political language, this statement was in effect a direct warning/threat to the Administration that the war was on. It is up for grabs whether or not the Kennedys understood this to be the real threat it was, but nevertheless the Administration decided to continue with its position.

On November 22, 1963 President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. As the AZC went away into the sunset, AIPAC came riding in, born and led by the same persons who created and managed AZC for the same purpose. This time however, the message went out clearly for all on Capitol Hill to hear and understand–“Do not stand in our way of influencing public opinion, policy, or laws.”

Obviously, the message has been effective, as all American leaders save a few such as James Traficant have done as instructed. According to the former Congressman, Israel receives $15 Billion worth of aid from the American Taxpayers without a single discussion or a single argument on the floor of either the house of Representatives or the Senate. Why? Because no one dares to question it. Why is it that most of our politicians make pilgrimage to Tel Aviv and the “wailing wall” in Jerusalem to get the blessing of Israel before they are even approved by their own political parties here in the United States? Why is it our Congress is always split down the middle on all other issues presented to them except when it deals with Israel? We all still remember the comment made by former Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon to his Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October 2001: “Don’t worry about American pressure, we the Jewish people control America.” When people with eyes to see state that fact they are called anti-Semites, despite the fact that what is being said is the truth.

The “control” Sharon spoke about has been there for a long time now. Consider what the late Senator Fulbright (who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and who held hearings back in 1963 regarding the AZC and the fact it should be registered as a Foreign Agent registration) said when speaking on the CBS television program “Face the Nation” had to say–
“I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews…Terrific control the Jews have over the news media and the barrage the Jews have built up on Congress… the Jewish influence here is completely dominating the scene and making it almost impossible to get Congress to do anything they (the Jews) don’t approve of.”

These words were not spoken by a researcher or a reporter but by a brave American hero who actually lived through and experienced the Jewish influence over our political system and media.
This Israeli political occupation of the United States should not go on unchallenged, and American Jewry should understand that secrets cannot be hidden from the people forever. Nothing less than a revolution will correct this situation. The corrective action should be taken at the ballot boxes by electing people who are not afraid to challenge AIPAC and the likes and make America’s Foreign Policy truly American and not Israeli.

As a first step in this process, let us keep the words of our dear martyred President John F Kennedy in mind– “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.

Hesham Tillawi, PhD International Relations is a Palestinian American writer, Political Analyst and a TV and Radio Talk Show Host. His program Current issues with Hesham Tillawi can be viewed Live every Thursday evening at 6:30PM Central Standard Time on Cox Cable system Channel 15 in Louisiana, Nationwide on Bridges TV, and Worldwide on Amazonas Satellite, as well as Live on the Internet at http://www.currentissues.tv and can be contacted at tillawi@currentissues.tv Interviews then archived for on demand viewing at www.currentissues.tv Radio show broadcast on RBN www.republicbroadcasting.org every Saturday at 4-6 PM Central Time

History Unfolding

2009-09-15T01:18:00.003Z

I am a student of history. Professionally, I have written 15 books on history that have been published in six languages, and I have studied history all my life. I have come to think there is something monumentally large afoot, and I do not believe it is simply a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis. Yes these exist, but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus.

Something of historic proportions is happening. I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes, a perfect storm may be brewing, but there is something happening within our country that has been evolving for about ten to fifteen years. The pace has dramatically quickened in the past two.

We demand and then codify into law the requirement that our banks make massive loans to people we know they can never pay back? Why?

We learned just days ago that the Federal Reserve, which has little or no real oversight by anyone, has "loaned" two trillion dollars (that is $2,000,000,000,000) over the past few months, but will not tell us to whom or why or disclose the terms. That is our money. Yours and mine. And that is three times the $700 billion we all argued about so strenuously just this past September. Who has this money? Why do they have it? Why are the terms unavailable to us? Who asked for it? Who authorized it? I thought this was a government of "we the people," who loaned our powers to our elected leaders. Apparently not.

We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our economy.. Why?

We have intentionally dumbed down our schools, ignored our history, and no longer teach our founding documents, why we are exceptional, and why we are worth preserving. Students by and large cannot write, think critically, read, or articulate. Parents are not revolting, teachers are not picketing, school boards continue to back mediocrity. Why?

We have now established the precedent of protesting every close election (violently inCalifornia over a proposition that is so controversial that it simply wants marriage to remain defined as between one man and one woman. Did you ever think such a thing possible just a decade ago?) We have corrupted our sacred political process by allowing unelected judges to write laws that radically change our way of life, and then mainstream Marxist groups like ACORN and others to turn our voting system into a banana republic. To what purpose?

Now our mortgage industry is collapsing, housing prices are in free fall, major industries are failing, our banking system is on the verge of collapse, social security is nearly bankrupt, as is Medicare and our entire government. Our education system is worse than a joke (I teach college and I know precisely what I am talking about) - the list is staggering in its length, breadth, and depth.. It is potentially 1929 x ten...And we are at war with an enemy we cannot even name for fear of offending people of the same religion, who, in turn, cannot wait to slit the throats of your children if they have the opportunity to do so.

And finally, we have elected a man that no one really knows anything about, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, let alone a town as big as Wasilla , Alaska .. All of his associations and alliances are with real radicals in their chosen fields of employment, and everything we learn about him, drip by drip, is unsettling if not downright scary (Surely you have heard him speak about his idea to create and fund a mandatory civilian defense force stronger than our military for use inside our borders? No? Oh, of course. The media would never play that for you over and over and then demand he answer it. Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter and $150,000 wardrobe are more important.)

Mr. Obama's winning platform can be boiled down to one word: Change. Why?

I have never been so afraid for my country and for my children as I am now.

This man campaigned on bringing people together, something he has never, ever done in his professional life. In my assessment, Obama will divide us along philosophical lines, push us apart, and then try to realign the pieces into a new and different power structure. Change is indeed coming. And when it comes, you will never see the same nation again.

And that is only the beginning..

As a serious student of history, I thought I would never come to experience what the ordinary, moral German must have felt in the mid-1930s In those times, the "savior" was a former smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the streets, about whom the average German knew next to nothing. What they should have known was that he was associated with groups that shouted, shoved, and pushed around people with whom they disagreed; he edged his way onto the political stage through great oratory. Conservative "losers" read it right now.

And there were the promises. Economic times were tough, people were losing jobs, and he was a great speaker. And he smiled and frowned and waved a lot. And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear that his "brown shirts" would bully and beat them into submission. Which they did - regularly. And then, he was duly elected to office, while a full-throttled economic crisis bloomed at hand - the Great Depression. Slowly, but surely he seized the controls of government power, person by person, department by department, bureaucracy by bureaucracy. The children of German citizens were at first, encouraged to join a Youth Movement in his name where they were taught exactly what to think. Later, they were required to do so. No Jews of course,

How did he get people on his side? He did it by promising jobs to the jobless, money to the money-less, and rewards for the military-industrial complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, across Europe , and across the world. He did it with a compliant media - did you know that? And he did this all in the name of justice and .... . .. change. And the people surely got what they voted for.

If you think I am exaggerating, look it up. It's all there in the history books.

So read your history books. Many people of conscience objected in 1933 and were shouted down, called names, laughed at, and ridiculed. When Winston Churchill pointed out the obvious in the late 1930s while seated in the House of Lords in England (he was not yet Prime Minister), he was booed into his seat and called a crazy troublemaker. He was right, though. And the world came to regret that he was not listened to.

Do not forget that Germany was the most educated, the most cultured country in Europe. It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories, and universities. And yet, in less than six years (a shorter time span than just two terms of the U. S. presidency) it was rounding up its own citizens, killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and neighbors against neighbors.. All with the best of intentions, of course. The road to Hell is paved with them.

As a practical thinker, one not overly prone to emotional decisions, I have a choice: I can either believe what the objective pieces of evidence tell me (even if they make me cringe with disgust); I can believe what history is shouting to me from across the chasm of seven decades; or I can hope I am wrong by closing my eyes, having another latte, and ignoring what is transpiring around me..

I choose to believe the evidence. No doubt some people will scoff at me, others laugh, or think I am foolish, naive, or both. To some degree, perhaps I am. But I have never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them exactly what I believe-and why I believe it.

I pray I am wrong. I do not think I am. Perhaps the only hope is our vote in the next elections.

http://www.survival-training.info/articles14/PoliticsHistory%20UnfoldingDavidKaiser.pdf

Ireland’s 100 Reasons to Vote ‘No’ to the Lisbon treaty

2009-09-13T02:59:00.002Z

Ireland’s 100 Reasons to Vote ‘No’ to the Lisbon treaty

1. The European Union has already created massive pockets of unemployment, with countries such as Spain – who have ratified Lisbon – suffering with unemployment rates of 18%. Why should Ireland sign up to a failing European Union?

2. About 450,000 people are unemployed, crushed by cuts, taxes, mortgage payments, on top of public bank-bail-outs and yet, the politicians who brought this upon Ireland are also asking for trust over the Lisbon treaty.

3. MEPs claim up to €1,000,000 in expenses each term, while massive job losses continue on an everyday basis.

4. Ireland remains a full member of the EU without the Lisbon treaty, and is in fact economically and politically better off without the treaty.

5. If Ireland votes No, she will continue to have access to Europe’s single market – the Lisbon treaty is concerned more with intensifying European government, using a constitutional document, which will crush trade, jobs and industry in Ireland .

6. Foreign investment has actually increased since Ireland voted No last year.

7. Under the Lisbon treaty, the EU can levy taxes on Ireland for the first time.

8. 150,000 Irish jobs, at least, are under threat through direct employment in multinational companies. Since Lisbon will interfere in taxation and the low corporate tax rate, those multinationals will simply leave for lands with lower corporate tax rates.

9. Lisbon will not aid the recession – to the contrary, it will make it worse.

10. The Lisbon treaty allows big business to import cheap labour and undercut Irish workers, in much the same way as it has done in labour disputes in the UK and the Nordic countries.

11. The EU has created a programme for Ireland to cut public spending, enforcing tough cuts on ordinary people who are trying to make a living wage in difficult times.

12. As Minister Brian Lenihan has said, massive and uncontrolled immigration of EU labour into Ireland helped to c au se the crash. Overseas workers now make up almost 20% of Ireland ’s unemployed.

13. Lisbon hands full control over immigration and asylum policy to the EU, under Article 79, for workers inside and outside the EU – from England to India .

14. EU politicians have falsely assured people that on Lisbon, they are protected from EU changes to the law on abortion, taxation and defence, but those assurances are not part of the Lisbon treaty (Judge Frank Clark, Chairman of the Referendum Commission) and are not EU law – so Lisbon would in fact lead to changes on abortion, taxation and defence.

15. Under the Charter of Fundamental Rights, attached to the treaty, the EU Court will decide on laws relating to abortion, raising children, marriage and euthanasia. It removes the voice of the Irish people on those issues.

16. Lisbon weakens Ireland in the European Union: while countries such as Germany double their voting power to 17%, Ireland ’s voting power will be reduced from 2% to 0.8%. It means Ireland will have no say over key issues.

17. Lisbon would drastically reduce Ireland ’s place in the European Union. It would reduce Ireland ’s representation leaving her completely isolated. There are new provisions to put EU law-making on a pure population size basis, just as in any unitary or federal state. At present, big states have 29 votes each in making EU laws and Ireland has 7 – a ratio of 4 to 1. Under Lisbon , EU laws would be made by a majority of the EU member states as long as they have 65% of the total EU population between them. Instead of the big states having 4 times Ireland’s voting weight, as it is now, this change to a pure population basis would give Germany 20 times Ireland’s weight and France, Britain and Italy 15 times each.

18. Lisbon means that Ireland loses the right to veto harmful measures in over 60 areas. If a proposal comes up that Ireland cannot abide by, it will not have the power to block it, as she will have given up her veto.

19. The treaty is a new European Constitution, which by law, will have superiority over the Irish Constitution. If it is accepted, the Irish people will give up their constitutional rights under the Irish Constitution and be subject to very different constitutional arrangements under the European Constitution.

20. Under Lisbon, Europe assumes a new position over Irish national security: Article 61F pushes for the development of Super-Union cooperative arrangements, under which, the drive towards federalist cooperation is first supported actively by the Union for measures going beyond EU law, and second that such super-Union cooperative agreements will in turn become EU law.

21. Ireland will abandon its traditional criminal justice procedures, since the Lisbon treaty will establish a massive and “fundamental change” to the structure of the European Union: it will abolish the pillar structure and move police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters to the EC treaty, thus enabling Ireland’s police and justice system to be fully subject to Union interference. This will have serious implications bec au se decision-making on police and judicial cooperation would no longer be intergovernmental and it will be subjected to European decisions.

22. European Commission proposals on inheritance law would prevent farmers passing on family farms as a single working unit. If the Lisbon treaty is ratified, that will come into effect.

23. The loss of the state’s veto on trade and services such as health and education in the Lisbon treaty would lead to a significant weakening of the protection for public services.

24. Ireland ’s EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy claimed that that 95% of EU member states would have voted No like Ireland did, had the treaty been put to a vote in other countries.

25. A Yes vote would not only jeopardise farm succession rights but would also lead to a massive influx of Turkish farmers into the European Union.

26. The Lisbon vote is also a vote on Turkish accession. It allows for a country of 75 million people to enter the EU, which would in fact double the number of farmers Ireland has, while also retaining the Common Agricultural Policy budget at existing levels.

27. The Secretary-General of the Commission, who is an Irishwoman, Catherine Day, was instrumental in concealing from the general public the intention of the European Commission to harmonise inheritance and succession law.

28. The European Commission interfered directly throughout Irelands’ referendum process and even through the use of a web-site, particularly with critical comments on the ‘Farmers for No’, a group breaking away from the Irish Farmers’ Association, which is backing a Yes vote.

29. Is a Yes vote not merely a reflection of big finance from companies such as US multinational, Intel, spending several hundred thousand euros backing the Yes campaign?

30. Irish fishermen will continue to having to struggle to survive financially while being forced to dump their catches at sea bec au se of fishing quotas, and have higher operating costs bec au se of the rules under the Common Fisheries Policy.

31. Brussels ’ fishery policies blatantly favour non-EU imports and fleets of larger EU member states.

32. The Lisbon vote is not about being at the heart of Europe or about being good Europeans. It is about the kind of Europe that Ireland wants.

33. Lisbon will be implemented to limit Ireland ’s right to encourage Foreign Direct Investment, interfering in both tax advantages offered to foreign companies as well as conditions on state aid. Given the substantial number of Irish people employed by foreign companies in Ireland , handing over all this power to the EU is a dangerous step for Ireland .

34. Declaration 17 on Primacy, attached to the Lisbon treaty, makes transparent that EU law succeeds Irish law in all existing and new areas covered by the Treaties, giving away and transferring Ireland ’s historic and democratic constitutional rights and freedoms.

35. The increased militarisation of Europe is of great concern to many people who would prefer to see Ireland retain neutrality. In the referendums on Nice , Ireland was assured that a European Army would never happen, but now the basis for a common defence policy and EU battlegroups are in place. Lisbon looks toward a ‘progressive framing of a common Union defence policy’.

36. Pro-life laws will be overruled if Lisbon is passed, as it will only take one court case (such as the D case, funded by the Irish Family Planning Association) to come before the European Court of Justice. The ECJ will overrule on this. The Irish Government will have its hands tied since there would be absolutely nothing it could do to reverse the European decision, or indeed reverse Lisbon .

37. Ireland already has the the Maastricht protocol, drafted to protect Ireland’s pro-life amendment (Article 40.3.3), but this would be knocked down in the European Court, whose heightened powers under the Lisbon treaty would rule over that, or other, protocols, once the Charter of Rights attached to Lisbon came into effect.

38. Lisbon threatens the freedom of conscience, expression and worship. The Bishops of England, Wales and Scotland have already denounced the European Commission’s planned Equal Treatment Directive as “wholly unacceptable” bec au se they said it would force Christians to act against their consciences. The Catholic Bishops say the Directive will result in sharply curtailing the rights of religious liberty and freedom of expression.

39. Voters should reaffirm the decision they had made in the first referendum in June last year bec au se “nothing had changed” in the treaty. People voted for a better deal for Ireland and Europe . Almost 1,000,000 people or 53% of the electorate rejected the Lisbon treaty on June 12th 2008. The Treaty was itself already abandoned by Europe, as the EU Constitution, in 2005, when both France and the Netherlands rejected it in referendums. It is entirely undemocratic.

40. Lisbon expands the range of political situations in which European military forces can intervene. Under Article 28B, Lisbon will represent another grave step towards the federalist vision of a European fighting force.

41. The European Commission’s trade agenda promotes free trade, yet irrespective of the costs to European family farms and rural communities, or the world poorest communities and countries. Lisbon gives the EU exclusive competence over commercial policy, including the negotiating of international trade agreements.

42. Ryanair Chief, Michael O’Leary, provided comments in support of the Lisbon treaty, but Irish voters need to ask themselves, does Ireland really want a Ryanair Europe?

43. A second No vote would strengthen the hand of any Irish government seeking to negotiate a better deal for Ireland and the EU.

44. The Lisbon treaty is the work of Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy, along with Silvio Berlusconi, Jose Manuel Barroso and Nicolas Sarkozy.

45. What would happen to employees of companies such as Waterford Glass or SR Technics, given that the Lisbon treaty imposes restrictions on state aid which might supposedly ‘distort’ the market?

46. Since concerns over Irish neutrality and European militarisation were a key reason for voting No in the first referendum, according to the Irish Times and TNS surveys in May and June 2008, why should the Irish people accept the Lisbon treaty take two?

47. Ireland is voting, in reality, on behalf of 500 million Europeans. Ireland is the only state, out of the 27 EU member states, to have a referendum.

48. The reason why Ireland has a referendum is important: if the treaty is ratified it would transfer powers from the Irish Constitution to the EU and Irish law requires that any changes to the Constitution must be subject to a referendum. The Irish people gained this right bec au se an ordinary Irish citizen, Raymond Crotty, took his case to the Supreme Court in 1986 to guarantee this right, in the case of EU treaties.

49. The Charter rolls back workers’ rights by failing to include a cl au se requiring the recognitions of trade unions.

50. Ordinary Irish people would be denied their basic rights in the workplace. The ECJ, basing its judgements on the Charter, has recently ruled against Swedish workers’ rights. In the Vaxholm case, the Latvian company Laval wanted to use Latvian workers in Sweden but would not agree to Swedish pay and conditions. Swedish unions opposed this treatment. The Euoprean Court ruled that the union could only act to ensure the Swedish minimum wage was paid and go no further. Other Swedish employment agreements could not be imposed. It puts pressure on Irish workers to move towards minimum wage levels or risk losing their jobs. A No vote to Lisbon can be used to obtain a social Protocol which would outlaw these unjust verdicts of the EU Court .

51. Under the terms of Lisbon , the European judicial body, Eurojust has now had its remits and powers hugely increased, affecting Ireland ’s own power over judicial investigations. The Lisbon treaty introduces an Article which increases Eurojust’s remit and powers. The body’s mandate is also extended into the types of crime it can investigate.

52. Lisbon expressly provides that the European judicial body, Eurojust may have the power and the responsibility to initiate criminal investigations and also the power to initiate prosecutions, even though the prosecution would be conducted by the Irish national au thorities, under the supervision of the European Public Prosecutor.

53. The Lisbon treaty provides for the creation of a super-prosecutor, a European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), to combat crimes affecting the financial interests of the Union . It will have the power to order national police forces to initiate investigations. It will assemble all the evidence in favour or against the accused and will be responsible for conducting and coordinating prosecutions. It will have jurisdiction over the Irish enforcement au thorities.

54. The treaty stresses that national parliaments will be under a definite European legal obligation to ensure that they comply with proposals and legislative initiatives in judicial cooperation in criminal policy and police. Is this the future of Irish justice?

55. A new Article under Lisbon proves that whilst the European Union is willing to freely pass on the personal crime-related data of Irish citizens around the 27 member states, it will not allow for sufficient data protection safeguards.

56. A new provision allows the Union to establish super cooperation involving all the member states’ competent au thorities, including police, customs and other specialised law enforcement services in relation to the prevention, detection and investigation of criminal offences (Article 69f), above and beyond Irish control over law enforcement.

57. Lisbon confirms the EU commitment to the development of common asylum policy expressly stating on Article 63 that “The Union shall develop a common policy on asylum …”. Since there is no veto power and the measures are adopted through the co-decision procedure, the Irish suffer a reduced influence in not only having a say in the development of an EU common asylum policy, but in being barred from developing its own independent asylum procedures.

58. Lisbon weakens Parliament as it formalises the fact that Irish legislators will be unable to act in a particular area once the European Union has already acted. Since that is the case, Irish parliamentarians will not be able to legislate under key areas specified under Article 2C, such as internal market practices, social policy, economic, social and territorial cohesion, agriculture and fisheries, environment, consumer protection, transport, trans-European networks, energy, areas of freedom, security and justice, common safety concerns in public health matters, research & technological development, international development cooperation and humanitarian aid. What voice will Ireland have to change those polices after Lisbon ? A vast range of activity, which should be under the remit of the Irish Government, will be handed over to EU control.

59. Lisbon threatens higher energy bills, since the basic control of national energy policy is actively transferred from member states to the EU. The new Article 176A specifies the European Union’s massive push toward a harmonised common energy policy. Such a move is bad for Ireland and bad for Europe , and the global marketplace of energy resources. It does nothing to serve in the interests of further liberalisation of the energy market – in fact, anti-competitive measures have been shown to have an obvious effect on increased business costs and consumer bills.

60. Lisbon will threaten Ireland ’s energy security given that Lisbon will have a huge impact on the ability for Ireland to determine its own competitive energy policy. This will prevent it from being able to guarantee flexibility to US contracts and interests in the UK , as it will for any other member state. This will lead to huge instability in (rather than guaranteeing) the security of supply and also insecurities in the foreign policies of both the EU and the US in terms of their cooperation and agreements with oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

61. The detailed entitlement of rights – embodied in the Articles of the Lisbon treaty and the new Charter of Fundamental Rights – will represent a massive change in the way in which the Irish people are governed and who they are governed by.

62. There is a new definition of European citizenship in the Lisbon treaty which will provide each citizen with a real dual citizenship: Union citizens and citizens of their national states. However, Irish citizens do not trust the European institutions, there is no European demos, nor could the Irish people have loyalty to it, or identify with the creation of a European-wide demos. A Yes vote is a vote against democracy.

63. Irish policy on Iraq , Afghanistan and Kosovo will be transferred to a new European foreign minister. Ireland will not have a say on key foreign policy issues. The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy represents a severe danger to an independent Irish foreign policy. He or she will be appointed by the European Council, acting by a qualified majority vote and with the agreement of the President of the Commission. It is an immense threat to the independence of Ireland in determining its own foreign policy, since this treaty essentially creates a European Foreign Minister, claiming to work on Ireland ’s behalf throughout the European Union. Negotations on behalf of the Irish people will be held on the other side of Europe without the slightest involvement of an Irish representative or official.

64. The major role played by the Union itself in the international arena has now been consolidated with the Lisbon treaty, in contrast to Ireland and other member states, whose power on foreign policy is now reduced to a secondary au thority of a subsidiary province.

65. The Lisbon treaty establishes the post of a new EU Foreign Minister, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The new post changes the nature of the relationship between Ireland , the other member states and the EU. Heads of State and Government will no longer represent their countries on the international stage.

66. There will be a new President of Europe, sitting in the European Council – such a substantial transfer of more political power to EU level, through the new President of the European Council eliminates the ability of member states to conduct their own independent foreign policy.

67. Lisbon places an obligation on member states that they uphold EU “common positions” in UN forums. Ireland will be obliged to present the common foreign policy position as its own position, when attending the UN Security Council. Ireland would be on the UN Security Council primarily to represent the EU’s position, not its own interests.

68. The intention of the European Union to develop a common European army is obvious.

69. Lisbon turns the EU into a global political actor in its own right. It transfers Ireland ’s powers to sign treaties with other states over to the Union . It will allow the Union to increase the role it plays on the international stage and to promote its interests above Ireland ’s values. The Union acquires the right to conclude international agreements. The Union will gain the rights to conclude treaties, to submit claims or to act before an international court, to become a member of an international organisation, and to enjoy certain immunities.

70. Ireland will in fact sign a blank cheque if it gives the go-ahead to the treaty. Lisbon introduces “simplified revision procedures”, meaning that the treaty is self-amending. Ireland will no longer have referendums bec au se amendments will be made without any further need for treaties or ratification procedures. Article 48 (6) has been called the “ratchet cl au se” and allows treaty amendments to be made without the necessity of a new, amending treaty and ratification. The supposed intention of this provision is to simplify the revision of the treaties. It will completely remove the Irish people from their say over Europe . The simplified but wholly undemocratic revision procedures represent a significant increase in the power of the Union, at the expense of Ireland .

71. The Union will further interfere with Irish employment and social policies. It is not a surprise that Ireland records low (and stagnated) growth, since Europe already coordinates a number of economic and employment policies. The agreement to certain provisions in this treaty is to put the opportunities and jobs (now and in the long term) of the Irish people at great risk.

72. The EU will gain powers over controlling Irish industry, health, education, sport, culture, civil protection and tourism. This is an intolerable state of affairs for the Irish people, which will cost the Irish economy billions.

73. Lisbon reduces the meaning of a green passport to a mere symbol. Under the EU’s freedom of movement legislation, Lisbon provides the right for Ireland to adopt provisions concerning passports, identity cards, residence permits and other documents applying to the movement of EU citizens.

74. Lisbon is entirely contrary to Ireland ’s wishes, given that in economic turmoil, when Ireland may have difficulty implementing one-size-fits-all EU legislation, the European Commission now gains the power to immediately impose penalty payments. The European Court of Justice will impose a lump sum on Ireland when she has not implemented a Directive.

75. If Ireland does sign up to Lisbon , it will not then be able to opt-out of super-Union policies which have been developed between a select number of member states. Lisbon demands that a number of member states can work ever-closer in “enhanced cooperation” on a particular policy (based largely on existing Article 10 TEU). If Ireland is not involved in the enhanced cooperation, she will be compelled to adopt the measures as if they were normal Union measures – Ireland will have had no say in the binding nature or the content of the measure.

76. Lisbon really is a blank cheque in more ways than one – one provision allows the Union to create its own powers (beyond the Treaties) in order to pursue Union objectives, under Article 308, so that if the Treaties have not provided the necessary powers for a certain action, the Council, acting on a proposal from the Commission can adopt any appropriate measures it feels necessary. Quiet often, they will not be in Ireland ’s interest. Lisbon states that the Commission only has “to draw national Parliaments’ attention to proposals based on this Article”, rather than requiring any form of proper national agreement or consent. Ireland will be writing a blank cheque on policies, it can ill afford to sign up to.

77. How can Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Foreign Minister Brian Cowen have agreed to such a bad deal when they signed up to the EU Constitution in 2004, now repackaged as the Lisbon treaty?

78. Instead of the Irish Government deciding who Ireland ’s Commissioner is, under Lisbon , it will be Germany , France and the United Kingdom deciding. Lisbon results in a shift from a bottom-up process for appointing EU Commissioners to a top-down one that benefits other and larger EU states. The Irish Government’s White Paper ignored that fact. The promise of EU Prime Minister’s or Presidents that every member state will continue to have its own national Commissioner after Lisbon is false.

79. Lisbon , by law, would give the European Union a Constitution in the order of a supranational European federal state. It would be superior to the Irish Constitution and laws in all the areas covered by the Treaties.

80. Lisbon puts the competition rules of the EU market above the right of Irish trade unions to enforce pay standards higher than the minimum for migrant workers – so whilst it reduces the power of Irish labour, it reinforces the power of migrant workers.

81. Those who vote Yes for Lisbon often warn of Ireland ’s isolation in Europe . This is false on every count. The political reality is that if Ireland votes No, the Czech Republic and Poland will, in turn, halt ratification of the treaty, since they are waiting to see what Ireland does. Given the status of legal challenges, Germany may not have ratified the treaty either. The next UK Government, which must be elected by next May, will also introduce a Bill on its first day in office to hold a referendum on Lisbon in the UK and recommend a No vote to it. That will give Ireland ’s fellow neighbours in Northern Ireland the chance to vote on Lisbon too.

82. A No vote on Lisbon would open to a new and genuinely more democratic EU, to be embodied in a new set of arrangements which would repatriate powers back to the member states, as Europe ’s original 2003 Laeken Declaration envisaged, along democratic lines.

83. A No vote would stop the march towards an EU federal superstate that would be run on most undemocratic lines, under the total dominance of the elites of the larger EU states, namely Germany , in tandem with their officials in the Brussels Commission.

84. The European Commission is spending some 1.5 million euros on a spurious information campaign in Ireland , supposedly aimed at giving Irish people more information on the EU, but in fact swaying their votes in the Lisbon referendum re-run on Friday 2 October toward a Yes vote.

85. The European Commission has created a massive bill-board advertising campaign across Ireland, cinema advertising that is directed especially at Irish women and young voters, the holding of meetings and seminars and the use of web-sites. Does Ireland , a free county, support the indoctrination of its youth with political messages?

86. The European Commission’s supposed “information campaign” is programmed to go on into 2010, as if it were an everyday exercise, but its l au nch in Ireland recently was set up to taint and influence the outcome of the Lisbon referendum in Ireland .

87. Those involved in the Yes campaign, such as the Commission itself and Irish Foreign Minister Michael Martin writing in the Irish Independent, seem to have given advice under the mistaken impression that a “double majority” of number of member states plus a qualified majority of votes does not exist already for making EC/EU laws, when it actually does. Their statements have thereby concealed the reduction of Ireland ’s voting weight.

88. The European Commission, in supporting the Yes campaign in Ireland, has been wrong to suggest that human rights matters such as inheritance rights for Irish farmers would or could not be affected in a European Union, after it signed up to Lisbon. Farmers’ inheritance rights would be affected.

89. On human rights in general, the Irish people will have their rights set out in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which along with the treaty, will be made legally binding for EU citizens. This means that all human rights issues would in principle fall within the remit of the European Court of Justice in the immediate future.

90. Ireland ’s ratification of the Lisbon treaty would give the 27 judges of the EU Court of Justice the power to decide sensitive matters over human rights, property rights and inheritance rights for the first time, as a consequence of new EU citizenship, entailing EU citizens’ rights and duties within the new European Union after Lisbon .

91. Czech President Vaclav Kl au s has stated that the treaty would undermine Czech sovereignty, and so refuses to sign it. The same is true of Irish sovereignty. Kl au s later said, in respect of the Irish people, “… the Lisbon treaty is dead, bec au se it was rejected in a referendum in one of the member states.” Irish democracy and sovereignty are paramount. Are the Irish people prepared to give it away?

92. Ireland would have great support if it does say No. For example, Poland ’s President Lech Kaczynski says he will not sign the treaty until it is passed in Ireland .

93. The Government has wrongly claimed it has assurances on important Irish concerns – they are not assured at all and will be pushed through in the distant future without any treaty ratification now. The Irish Government is claiming that the Decision of the European Council on 19 June 2009 and the promised Protocol incorporating that Decision which is to be attached at some future date, will significantly limit the effect of the treaty of Lisbon on certain provisions of the Irish Constitution and will define what the effects of that treaty are on future Union competence in relation to key Irish assurances. The Decision does not change the Lisbon treaty, as it stands, and it imposes such a restriction on the European Court of Justice in the future without proper treaty ratification now.

94. The Irish Decision of the European Council on 19 June 2009 states that the future Protocol “will clarify but not change either the content or the application of the treaty of Lisbon” , but the Lisbon treaty is not yet in force and if the treaty of Lisbon does comes into force, the European Court of Justice would be free to interpret the Irish Decision in the opposite sense – for example, it would insist that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights can affect the articles relating to the right to life, the rights of the family and rights in respect of education set out in the Irish Constitution. A Protocol, even if it is to be attached to some future treaty, indicates that a substantive treaty change is intended (in contrast to say a Declaration, which does not). This dishonesty must be met with a No vote.

95. The Irish Decision of the European Council on 19 June 2009 is not a real or legal assurance as the European Court of Justice will rule over the terms of this Decision, that the treaty makes no changes on taxation, for example, unless the member states have agreed to that by a normal treaty ratification process. The Irish Decision is a substantive treaty change requiring re-ratification of the Lisbon treaty.

96. The Irish Decision of the European Council on 19 June 2009 falsely claims to be in Ireland ’s interest by limiting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in relation to specific aspects of the Lisbon treaty, even though the Court is the only legal body competent to decide on the interpretation and application of the Treaties. The Irish people have been deceived on this and should vote No on the basis of this disturbing but substantial confusion.

97. Despite Ireland ’s economic turmoil, the Irish people will be subject to changes and notable increases in direct and indirect taxation, even though false assurances have been made to the contrary. Under Lisbon , Article 311 TFEU would allow the EU to impose its own taxes by unanimous agreement. Article 113 TFEU requires harmonisation of legislation on indirect taxation for a new purpose, “to avoid distortion of competition”, and would enable the European Court of Justice to rule on tax matters accordingly. Any assurances made by the Irish Government on taxation are false and have no legal effect.

98. The Irish Government will be limited in its power over tax measures in difficult economic times bec au se of Lisbon . The treaty asserts, under Protocol No 27 (On the Internal Market and Competition), that the EU could vote down national tax measures if they can be regarded as c au sing distortion of competition on the internal market.

99. Ireland needs obvious constitutional safeguards from Lisbon and cannot sign up until it has achieved them. For example, on 30 June, the German Constitutional Court in judging concerns over the Lisbon treaty has forbidden the German President from signing the treaty until the German Parliament adopted a law which would safeguard the involvement of their Parliament in future EU decision-making. Other EU countries have sought constitutional safeguards. Should Ireland not also reject Lisbon until it can insist upon the protection of its own Parliament, the voice of the Irish people?

100. Democracy.

.

American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts

2009-09-13T00:29:00.004Z

By Daniel Ellsberg

Editor’s note: This is the first installment of Daniel Ellsberg’s personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.” The online book will recount highlights of his six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of his preoccupation with the Vietnam War. Subsequent installments also will appear on Truthdig. The author is a senior fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts

One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.

What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes Only.”

The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle, it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top Secret—Sensitive” document.

Later, working in the Pentagon as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, I often found myself reading copies of cables and memos marked “Eyes Only” for someone, though I was not that addressee, nor for that matter was my boss. And already by the time I read this one, as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, it was routine for me to read “Top Secret” documents. But I had never before seen one marked “For the President’s Eyes Only,” and I never did again.

The deputy assistant to the president for national security, my friend and colleague Bob Komer, showed it to me. A cover sheet identified it as the answer to a question President John F. Kennedy had addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a week earlier. Komer showed it to me because I had drafted the question, which Komer had sent in the president’s name.

The question to the JCS was: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”

Their answer was in the form of a graph (see representation below). The vertical axis was the number of deaths, in millions. The horizontal axis was time, indicated in months. The graph was a straight line, starting at time zero on the horizontal—on the vertical axis, the number of immediate deaths expected within hours of our attack—and slanting upward to a maximum at six months, an arbitrary cutoff for the deaths that would accumulate over time from initial injuries and from fallout radiation.

The lowest number, at the left of the graph, was 275 million deaths. The number at the right-hand side, at six months, was 325 million.

That same morning, with Komer’s approval, I drafted another question to be sent to the Joint Chiefs over the president’s signature, asking for a total breakdown of global deaths from our own attacks, to include not only the whole Sino-Soviet bloc but all other countries that would be affected by fallout. Again their answer was prompt. Komer showed it to me about a week later, this time in the form of a table with explanatory footnotes.

In sum, 100 million more deaths, roughly, were predicted in East Europe. There might be an additional 100 million from fallout in West Europe, depending on which way the wind blew (a matter, largely, of the season). Regardless of season, still another 100 million deaths, at least, were predicted from fallout in the mostly neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet bloc or China: Finland, Austria, Afghanistan, India, Japan and others. Finland, for example, would be wiped out by fallout from U.S. ground-burst explosions on the Soviet submarine pens at Leningrad. (The total number of “casualties”—injured as well as killed—had not been requested and was not estimated; nor were casualties from any Soviet retaliatory strikes.)

The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to.

But I knew what it dealt with was all too real. I had seen some of the smaller bombs myself, H-bombs with an explosive yield of 1.1 megatons each—equivalent to 1.1 million tons of high explosive, each bomb half the total explosive power of all the bombs of World War II combined. I saw them slung under single-pilot F-100 fighter-bombers on alert at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, ready to take off on 10 minutes’ notice. On one occasion I had laid my hand on one of these, not yet loaded on a plane. On a cool day, the smooth metallic surface of the bomb was warm from the radiation within: a bodylike warmth.

I was in Okinawa in the fall of 1959 as part of a task force organized by the Office of Naval Research, which was there to study and improve nuclear command and control for the commander in chief of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC), Adm. Harry D. Felt. I was on loan from the RAND Corp., which I had joined as a full-time employee in June 1959 after a previous summer there as a consultant. This particular study took us to every command post in the Pacific that year and the next—from Oahu to Guam, Tokyo, Taiwan and the command ship of the Seventh Fleet—with license from Adm. Felt to “talk to anyone, see anything” in the field of nuclear command and control.

At Kadena, the pilots weren’t in the planes on alert or in the hut on the alert strip; they were allowed to be elsewhere, at the post exchange or in their quarters, because each was accompanied at all times by his individual jeep and driver to return him in minutes to the strip when an alert was sounded. They practiced the alert at least once a day. The officer in charge told our research group that we could choose the time for that day’s rehearsal. When our leader said “OK, now,” the klaxons sounded all over the area and jeeps appeared almost instantly on all the roads leading to the strip, rushing around curves, pilots leaping out as they reached the strip and scrambling into the cockpits, still tightening their helmets and gear. Engines started in 10 planes, almost simultaneously. Ten minutes.

These were tactical fighter-bombers, with limited range. There were more than a thousand of them, armed with H-bombs, in range of Russia and China on strips like this or on aircraft carriers surrounding the Sino-Soviet bloc (as we still thought of it in 1961, though China and the Soviets had actually split apart a couple of years before that). Each of them could devastate a large city with one bomb. For a larger metropolitan area, it might take two. Yet the Strategic Air Command (SAC), which did not command these planes (they were under the control of theater commanders), regarded these tactical theater forces as so vulnerable, unreliable and insignificant as a factor in all-out nuclear war that SAC planners had not even included them in their calculations of the outcome of attacks in a general war until that year.

Before 1961, planners at SAC headquarters took into consideration only attacks by the heavy bombers, intermediate-range ballistic missiles and ICBMs commanded by SAC, along with Polaris submarine-launched missiles. In the bomb bays of the SAC planes were thermonuclear bombs much larger than those I saw in Okinawa. Many were from five to 20 megatons in yield. Each 20-megaton bomb—1,000 times the yield of the fission bomb that destroyed Nagasaki—was the equivalent of 20 million tons of TNT, or 10 times the total tonnage the U.S. dropped in World War II. Some 500 bombs in the arsenal each had the explosive power of 25 megatons. Each of these warheads had more power than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history.

These intercontinental bombers and missiles had come to be stationed almost entirely in the continental U.S., though they might be deployed to forward bases outside it in a crisis. A small force of B-52s was constantly airborne. Many of the rest were on alert. I had seen a classified film of an incredible maneuver in which a column of B-58s—smaller than B-52s but still intercontinental heavy bombers—taxied down a runway and then took off simultaneously, rather than one at a time. The point—as at Kadena and elsewhere—was to get in the air and away from the field as fast as possible, on warning of an imminent attack, before an enemy missile might arrive. In the time it would normally have taken for a single plane to take off, a squadron of planes would be airborne, on its way to assigned targets.

In the film these heavy bombers, each as big as an airliner, sped up in tandem as they raced down the airstrip, one behind the other so close that if one had slackened its pace for an instant the plane behind, with its full fuel load and its multiple thermonuclear weapons, would have rammed into its tail. Then they lifted together, like a flock of birds startled by a gunshot. It was an astonishing sight; it was beautiful.

The planned targets for the whole force included, along with military sites, every city in the Soviet Union and China.

On carriers, smaller, tactical bombers would be boosted on takeoff by a catapult, a kind of large slingshot. But since the general nuclear war plan, as I knew, called for takeoff around the world of as many U.S. planes and missiles as were ready at the time of the execute order—as near-simultaneously as possible—to attack targets that were all assigned in prior planning, the preparations contemplated one overall, inflexible global attack as if all the vehicles, with more than 3,000 warheads, were launched by a single catapult. A sling made for Goliath.

The rigidity of the single, coordinated plan—which by 1961 included tactical bombers—in what was termed the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, meant that its underlying “strategy” amounted to nothing more than a vast trucking operation to transport thermonuclear warheads to Soviet and Chinese cities and military sites. The latter were the great majority of targets, since all the cities could be destroyed by a small fraction of the attacking vehicles.

One of the principal expected effects of this plan—partly intended, partly (in allied, neutral and “satellite” countries) unavoidable “collateral damage”—was summarized on the piece of paper I held that day in the spring of 1961: the extermination of over half a billion people.

(In fact, this was certainly a vast underestimate of the fatalities. Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, has revealed in “Whole World on Fire” (Cornell, 2004) the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs have—throughout the nuclear era, to the present day—deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based. Yet the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons are known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war! Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks would surely have been double the figure on the summary I held in my hand—a billion people or more.)

The declared intent of this planning deployment and rehearsal was to deter Soviet aggression. I knew by this time something that was rarely made clear to the American public, that what was to be deterred by all this was not only nuclear attacks by the Soviets but conventional, non-nuclear Soviet aggression, in Europe in particular. In both cases, the story went, it was all designed to prevent such Soviet attacks from ever taking place. This global machine had been constructed in hopes that it would never be set in motion: or, as it was often put, so that it would never be used. The official motto of SAC, on display at all its bases, was “Peace Is Our Profession.”

Is America Coming Apart?

2009-09-11T22:05:00.000Z

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.

At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?

Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother—and then do assignments on his sermon.

The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.

Yet Byron York of The Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it. [When Bush spoke to students, Democrats investigated, held hearings, September 9, 2009]

"The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," railed The Washington Post. [TV Technique 101 With George Bush; Private Company Produces Coverage of D.C. School Visit, By John E. Yang and Lynda Richardson, The Washington Post, October 2, 1991|]Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate.

Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs.

Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.

We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats.

We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.

We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.

One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.

But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.

We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.

Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.

Now it is death panels, global warming, "birthers" and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?

The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.

"E pluribus unum"—out of many, one—was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Is America, too, breaking up?

http://vdare.com/buchanan/090910_coming_apart.htm

Obama Follows Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong, Building Death Camps in USA

2009-09-11T01:44:00.001Z

The new academic year in the United States, which began on September 8, was marred with a massive verbal attack against President Barack Obama.

As usual, the attack was conducted by ultrareactionary radio hosts, who compared Obama to Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong, claiming that Obama wanted to infect American schoolchildren with ideas of fascism, socialism and communism. Rush Limbaugh added Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il on the list and said that Obama wanted to turn the US youth into Hitler Jugend and Komsomol Organization. Sean Hannity of Fox News called Obama a political pedophile.

All of those remarks were made after Obama’s 20-minute back-to-school speech.

Republican leaders in Florida and Utah urged parents not to let their children go to school on the first day of the new academic year, when the president’s speech was going to be broadcast.

"If you're concerned, keep your kids home for the day,” David Bradley, a Republican and member of the Texas State Board of Education told the USA Today.

Fox TV channel urged its viewers not to let Obama turn US schools into Gulags, Nazi death camps and Chinese concentration camps.

The White House was caught on the hop with such a storm of insanity.

In his speech, Obama urged children to follow their dreams, to respect teachers, to study well and make conclusions from past mistakes. Anything communist there?

“At the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world — and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

“So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?” Obama said.

Does it sound like Mein Kampf?

Obama delivered his speech on September 8 at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. There are 15,000 schools in the United States, where 50 million students study. It is hard to say how many of them were listening to the president’s speech. Each school provided an alternative hour for those students, whose parents did not want them to listen to Obama’s speech.

Obama delivered a brilliant speech, as he normally does. However, when it was time for questions and answers after the speech, he became a totally different person. The president was making long pauses between phrases; one could see that he was taking a great effort to choose words for answers, as if he did not want to say something that he must not say.

A word spoken is past recalling. If Obama had said “Learn, learn and once again learn” then Rush Limbaugh and others would have had a good reason to say that Obama was quoting Lenin to 50 million of American students. Obama said nothing of the kind. All the accusations and comparisons do not make any sense. At all.

Moskovsky Komsomolets

USA Sick and Ready to Collapse for Three Reasons

2009-09-09T11:41:00.001Z

The map of the collapse of the United States in 2010, made by Russian scientist of politics Igor Panarin, has received millions of views in the United States over one day only.

The Wall Street Journal published the map on its front page at the end of 2008. Alaska is pictured on the map as a part of Russia. Hawaii were shown as a territory of Japan, whereas four new states were pictured on the territory of the USA: the Californian Republic, the Central North American Republic, the Texas Republic and the Atlantic America, which included the traditional states.

In spite of the fact that the map was published many months ago, it attracted public attention only a while ago. Will the United States break up like the USSR did?

Anatoly Vasserman, a political advisor, believes that Igor Panarin created the map on the base of several important arguments.

First and foremost, the US state debt has skyrocketed from $2 trillion to $11 trillion within a decade. The USA will never be able to pay off the debt.

Secondly, the political structure of the nation is vulnerable. There is neither universal legislation in the country, nor common traffic rules. The US Army does not execute its major function – defense – anymore since many foreign nationals prefer to serve in the army to obtain the US citizenship.

Thirdly, the split of elites, which was especially visible under the conditions of the crisis.

The problems, which Panarin named, are absolutely real. However, there is only one thing that is real: America will not be able to cope with these problems.

The USA is sick, but the illness began a long time ago and had a number of exacerbations. However, none of those illnesses has ever resulted in the collapse of the nation. The USA survived several immigration and economic crises. There was the split of elites before – it once resulted in the civil war between the North and the South.

Winston Churchill once said that Americans will find a way out of a difficult situation only after they try all other ways. It goes without saying that the map of the United States will remain unchanged in 2010. Igor Panarin made his map in 1998, although it did not produce any attention on either the Russians or the Americans.

Any American knows that the economy is based on a large market. The larger the market can be, the faster the nation can overcome economic difficulties. America has never suffered from any crisis after WWII, that is why they perceive the current crisis so painfully. However, the interest, which so many Americans have shown to the research of the Russian professor, proves they treat the imminent threat seriously.

The USA will not take a risk of triggering a global war. If it does, the nation will suffer from much greater damage than it did during WWII. There were no intercontinental ballistic missiles 70 years ago. However, the nation can provoke smaller, local wars, for example a conflict between China and India. If it happens, the USA will not try to have Russia involved in any regional conflict because Russia, for the time being, is the only state that is technically capable of destroying America.

http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/08-09-2009/109155-usa_collapse-0

U.S. Hypocrisy Astonishes the World

2009-09-09T01:22:00.000Z

By Paul Craig Roberts

Americans have lost their ability for introspection, thereby revealing their astounding hypocrisy to the world.

US War Secretary Robert Gates has condemned the Associated Press and a reporter, Julie Jacobson, embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, for taking and releasing a photo of a US Marine who was wounded in action and died from his injury.

The photographer was on patrol with the Marines when they came under fire. She found the courage and presence of mind to do her job. Her reward is to be condemned by the warmonger Gates as “insensitive.” Gates says her employer, the Associated Press, lacks “judgment and common decency.”

The American Legion jumped in and denounced the Associated Press for a stunning “lack of compassion and common decency.”

To stem opposition to its wars, the War Department hides signs of American casualties from the public. Angry that evidence escaped the censor, the War Secretary and the American Legion attacked with politically correct jargon: “insensitive,” “offended,” and the “anguish,” “pain and suffering” inflicted upon the Marine’s family. The War Department sounds like it is preparing a harassment tort.

Isn’t this passing the buck? The Marine lost his life not because of the Associated Press and a photographer, but because of the war criminals—Gates, Bush, Cheney, Obama, and the US Congress that supports wars of naked aggression that serve no American purpose, but which keeps campaign coffers filled with contributions from the armaments companies.

Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard is dead because the US government and a significant percentage of the US population believe that the US has the right to invade, bomb, and occupy other peoples who have raised no hand against us but are demonized with lies and propaganda.

For the American War Secretary it is a photo that is insensitive, not America’s assertion of the right to determine the fate of Afghanistan with bombs and soldiers.

The exceptional “virtuous nation” does not think it is insensitive for America’s bombs to blow innocent villagers to pieces.

On September 4, the day before Gates’ outburst over the “insensitive” photo, Agence France Presse reported from Afghanistan that a US/Nato air strike had killed large numbers of villagers who had come to get fuel from two tankers that had been hijacked from negligent and inattentive occupation forces:

“Nobody was in one piece. Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere. Those who were away from the fuel tanker were badly burnt,’ said 32-year-old Mohammad Daud, depicting a scene from hell. The burned-out shells of the tankers, still smoking in marooned wrecks on the riverbank, were surrounded by the charred-meat remains of villagers from Chahar Dara district in Kunduz province, near the Tajik border. Dr. Farid Rahid, a spokesperson in Kabul for the ministry of health, said up to 250 villagers had been near the tankers when the air strike was called in.”

What does the world think of the United States? The American War Secretary and a US military veterans association think a photo of an injured and dying American soldier is insensitive, but not the wipeout of an Afghan village that came to get needed fuel.

The US government is like a criminal who accuses the police of his crime when he is arrested or a sociopathic abuser who blames the victim.

It is a known fact that the CIA has violated US law and international law with its assassinations, kidnappings and torture. But it is not this criminal agency that will be held accountable. Instead, those who will be punished will be those moral beings who, appalled at the illegality and inhumanity of the CIA, leaked the evidence of the agency’s crimes. The CIA has asked the US Justice (sic) Department to investigate what the CIA alleges is the “criminal disclosure” of its secret program to murder suspected foreign terrorist leaders abroad. As we learned from Gitmo, those suspected by America are overwhelmingly innocent.

The CIA program is so indefensible that when CIA director Leon Panetta found out about it six months after being in office, he cancelled the program (assuming those running the program obeyed) and informed Congress.

Yet, the CIA wants the person who revealed its crime to be punished for revealing secret information. A secret agency this unmoored from moral and legal standards is a greater threat to our country than are terrorists. Who knows what false flag operation it will pull off in order to provide justification and support for its agenda. An agency that is more liability than benefit should be abolished.

The agency’s program of assassinating terrorist leaders is itself fraught with contradictions and dangers. The hatred created by the US and Israel is independent of any leader. If one is killed, others take his place. The most likely outcome of the CIA assassination program is that the agency will be manipulated by rivals, just as the FBI was used by one mafia family to eliminate another. In order to establish credibility with groups that they are attempting to penetrate, CIA agents will be drawn into participating in violent acts against the US and its allies.

Accusing the truth-teller instead of the evil-doer is the position that the neoconservatives took against the New York Times when after one year’s delay, which gave George W. Bush time to get re-elected, the Times published the NSA leak that revealed that the Bush administration was committing felonies by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The neocons, especially those associated with Commentary magazine, wanted the New York Times indicted for treason. To the evil neocon mind, anything that interferes with their diabolical agenda is treason.

This is the way many Americans think. America uber alles! No one counts but us (and Israel). The deaths we inflict and the pain and suffering we bring to others are merely collateral damage on the bloody path to American hegemony.

The attitude of the “freedom and democracy” US government is that anyone who complains of illegality or immorality or inhumanity is a traitor. The Republican Senator Christopher S. Bond is a recent example. Bond got on his high horse about “irreparable damage”to the CIA from the disclosures of its criminal activities. Bond wants those “back stabbers” who revealed the CIA’s wrongdoings to be held accountable. Bond is unable to grasp that it is the criminal activities, not their disclosure, that is the source of the problem. Obviously, the whistleblower protection act has no support from Senator Bond, who sees it as just another law to plough under.

This is where the US government stands today: Ignoring and covering up government crimes is the patriotic thing to do. To reveal the government’s crimes is an act of treason. Many Americans on both sides of the aisle agree.

Yet, they still think that they are The Virtuous Nation, the exceptional nation, the salt of the earth.

http://www.infowars.com/u-s-hypocrisy-astonishes-the-world/

Murder Inc Training in Philippines

2009-09-09T00:40:00.001Z

The notorious US private ~~security~~ mercenary contractor, formerly known as Blackwater, uses a Philippines location to train mercenaries for Iraq and Afghanistan operations.

The company has been lent a former US naval base, northwest of the Manila Bay, “where they can train up to one thousand private military contractors,” Washington-based journalist Wayne Madsen told Russia Today on Friday.

They train people from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Fiji and the Philippines for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other location where they operate, according to Madsen.

The company was denied lease of the base three years ago and was reportedly operating there via a proxy. “We have also been told about a Blackwater subsidiary called Satelles Solutions,” the investigative journalist added.

The group’s stated mission is to provide security for US diplomats and diplomatic facilities as part of the State Department’s Worldwide Personal Protection Program.

The company, which has changed its name to Xe Services, LLC, however, is notorious for misusing its State Department-issued gun license as an excuse for trigger-ready atrocities, namely the killing of 17 civilians in Iraq in 2007. The Department, however, has refused to waive its permission to carry arms in Iraq.

The company also continues to be extensively involved in Afghanistan where 70,000 US-commissioned contractors almost doubly outnumber the US troops.

One of the licentiate’s staff workers has recently filed a sworn testimony in a US federal court against the security firm that may lead to new revelations and scandals. The employee has reportedly alleged that Blackwater’s president, Eric Prince, may have murdered or commissioned the murder of the telltales on the company.

The Pentagon is, meanwhile, accused of trusting avoidable deeds with the contractors.

The private firms “are far removed from inspectors general, from the general Government Accountability Office and other people who look into their functions. Because they can claim, off course, that their information is proprietary . . . they are a private company,” Madsen concluded.

“It is a way to get around a lot of the oversight regulations in the government. So we find them training border patrol agents, we find them training US military special forces and what not.”

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2009/sept/08/yehey/opinion/20090908opi7.html

Pentagon Chief Pushes Mideast Arms Buildup Against Iran

2009-09-08T23:59:00.000Z

Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged US allies in the Arab world to strengthen their military capabilities and defense cooperation with Washington as a means of pressuring Iran to back off its nuclear program.

In an interview with Al Jazeera that was to be aired Monday, Gates said the United States still favored diplomatic and economic approaches to the challenges posed by Iran and its nuclear program.

But, according to a transcript of the interview, Gates said "one of the pathways to get the Iranians to change their approach on the nuclear issue is to persuade them that moving down that path will actually jeopardize their security, not enhance it.

"So the more that our Arab friends and allies can strengthen their security capabilities, the more they can strengthen their co-operation, both with each other and with us, I think sends the signal to the Iranians that this path they're on is not going to advance Iranian security but in fact could weaken it," he said.

Gates said he did not know how much US arms sales to the region now totalled, but disputed a 100 billion figure cited by Al-Jazeera as sounding "very high to me."

The defense secretary also questioned whether Iran had gained lasting clout in Iraq, and by extension in the region, as a result of the 2003 US invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and brought the country's Shiite majority to power.

"I think that a strong and democratic Iraq, particularly one with a multi-sectarian government, becomes a barrier to Iranian influence and not a bridge for it," he said.

"So I think, in the short term, perhaps Iran's position was strengthened somewhat but I think if you look to the longer term, and the role that Iraq can play in the region going forward, I think that Iran's position may well be diminished," he said.

He said Iraq's leaders were "first and foremost Iraqis."

"After all none of them have forgotten the eight years of war that they fought with Saddam Hussein and they haven't forgotten that Saddam Hussein started that war," he said.

His comments appeared the same day the outgoing chief of International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, complained of an "impasse" with Iran over its nuclear program.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad earlier said Iran was preparing a package of proposals for resumed talks with six major powers -- Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

But he said Iran would not negotiate on its "undeniable" nuclear rights.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Iran had not communicated with the White House about its plans to resume talks.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5htTdBzcGSVUp-sbhOQWlEqWPE-uA

Think tank: Be warned, Big Brother, I’ve got my eye on you

2009-09-06T23:06:00.000Z

Matthew Elliott begins a campaign against our surveillance state

In June, Stewart Smith, who suffers from arthritis, was handed a £50 fixed penalty notice after dropping a £10 note in the street. Last year Gareth Corkhill, a father of four, had to pay £225 and got a criminal record when magistrates found him guilty of leaving the lid of his wheelie bin open by a mere four inches. Last month Stephen White’s sister Helen was rung several times and visited at her house by police officers wanting to know the whereabouts of her trainspotter brother, who had been using her car while taking pictures of trains in Pembrokeshire.

What is going on? Over the past 10 years our government has become increasingly overbearing, creating a nation of criminals out of good British citizens. We are subject to ever more officious laws and intrusive means of surveillance. Britain has 1% of the world’s population but about 20% of its CCTV cameras; it has one camera for every 14 people in the country. Last year local authorities, the police and the intelligence services made 504,073 requests to access private e-mail and telephone data — that is nearly 10,000 requests every week.

Documents leaked earlier this year revealed that GCHQ, the government’s spy centre, had already awarded £200m to suppliers as part of Mastering the Internet, a mass surveillance project designed to enable the monitoring of all internet use and phone calls in Britain.

An Englishman’s home is no longer his castle: some 266 laws now grant the state the right to enter private homes. And if they can’t get you on tape, online or in your home, in recent months a slew of websites has appeared encouraging citizens to shop people dropping litter or acting suspiciously. Just as in Orwell’s dystopia, Britain is being turned into a nation of narks.

It is time to fight back. The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) has already led the field in exposing the outrageous waste of taxpayers’ money and malpractice throughout all levels of government. Our campaigns on MPs’ expenses, the growth of the quango state and the rise of public sector fat cats have helped to shape public opinion and the policies of both the government and opposition. Now we are launching Big Brother Watch as a check on the surveillance state.

The campaign will be headed by Alex Deane, a barrister and David Cameron’s first chief of staff, supported by Dylan Sharpe, Boris Johnson’s press officer for his London mayoral campaign.

Big Brother Watch plans to produce regular investigative research papers on the erosion of civil liberties in the UK, beginning with a detailed investigation of the ways in which individual local authorities have encroached upon the lives of the ordinary British citizen, whether it be placing microchips in rubbish bins or snooping on your private telephone records. We will name and shame the local authorities most prone to authoritarian abuses.

We will also champion individual cases. We want to use the legal system to help the man in the street fight injustice and regain his personal freedom. We are building up a legal fund to back cases in which we feel a key principle is at stake.

Not many people realise they can use the Freedom of Information Act to demand to see data held about themselves by the authorities. The Human Rights Act, which came into force in 2000, makes it unlawful for any public body to act in a way that is incompatible with the European convention on human rights. The convention includes the right of access to documents and we want to help people to use this and other provisions to extend our right to government information.

In the same way that the TPA has pioneered the use of the Freedom of Information Act to bring transparency to government spending and expose the full horrors of the wastage, wages and expenses of our public representatives, we intend to unearth the reality of the Big Brother state.

Last year the TPA produced a report that put the total cost of Big Brother government at about £20 billion — or almost £800 per household. We want Big Brother Watch to become the central hub for the latest on personal freedom and civil liberty — a forum for information and discussion on something that directly affects British citizens in their everyday lives.

Big Brother Watch also aims to expose the extent to which the web has become the first line in state surveillance. Recent examples of web companies being leant on to release personal data have opened the floodgates for the co-opting of internet activity into the state’s control. Safeguards are needed before it’s too late.

We hope Big Brother Watch will become the gadfly of the ruling class, a champion for civil liberties and personal freedom — and a force to help a future government roll back a decade of state interference in our lives.

Matthew Elliott is chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and founder of Big Brother Watch (www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6823212.ece

Divide and Conquer - The Rothschilds' Gypsy Strategy

2009-09-05T23:39:00.000Z

Hungarian Harbinger?

by Henry Makow Ph.D.

Apart from Freemasons, and other agents of imperialism, the Rothschilds use their fellow Jews to realize their world government tyranny. And when anti-Semitism results, as it has in Hungary, their strategy is to manufacture an enemy to combat the "anti-Semites", in other words, divide-and-conquer.

In Hungary, Rothschild agents are inflaming the one-to-two million-strong Gypsy minority against Hungarians. It is a strategy that patriotic Americans, Canadians and Europeans should be aware of. In the future, Illegal immigrants might play the role of Gypsies.

Rothschild-controlled media in Hungary and worldwide is headlining "a wave of violence" against the Gypsies (or "Roma.") There have been six murders in nine attacks over the past year. These have been blamed on the Nationalist "Jobbik" Party who vehemently deny involvement. They maintain that a foreign-based secret police organization is using the violence to turn Gypsies against Hungarians.

Hungarians point to Gypsy violence against Hungarians. A teacher was beaten to death in front of his two children by a group of Gypsies- he was dragged out of his car and kicked in the head 22 times; an eighty-year old lady was raped, mutilated and her body thrown into the sewer; a 14-year old girl raped and murdered; her friend robbed; a teacher beaten up at class.

The Hungarians say the Gypsies have organized powerful criminal gangs indirectly supported by the Rothschild-owned European Union. The police and the courts are not allowed to prosecute these gangs which don`t even exist officially. They not only control prostitution and the drug markets but also constantly rob and murder even poor Hungarians. The police have their hands tied by politicians who take their orders from the EU.

Nationalists believe Rothschild globalists recently murdered Gypsy children in order to convince Gypsies they are in constant danger from the locals. Ironically, these kinds of organized false flag attacks (pogroms) is how the Illuminati bankers got Jews to work for them in the first place.

HIDDEN AGENDA

Nationalists believe globalists have another motive: to recruit Gypsies into a NATO army.

There are 15 million Gypsies in total in Europe. In order to make them join the big army, they must see the international political organizations (EU, UN, NATO) and the various Rockefeller and Soros-like globalist civil organizations as their friends.

Any Hungarian patriotic writing, speech, blog or organization is used by the globalists to trigger fear and hate amongst the Gypsies.

Hungarian prison populations are 90% Gypsy but they don`t care since they are released quickly. Jail is a proof of manhood for them, Hungarians say.

Hungary is a country where almost everything (politics, economy, media, entertainment, several hundred religious sects and private foundations of every sort) are in the hands of the Rothschild globalists and what is left, in the hands of Israeli Zionists.

BANKRUPT

Hungary is bankrupt and the only thing that still works is taxation. The situation in the Hungarian countryside is similar to South Africa: no public security, no jobs, penniless local governments, very low wages for those who still have a job, Swiss-level consumer prices and one of the most unrealistically high taxation systems in the world, while state services (security, health, education, etc.) are close to nil. Some Nationalists say that a civil war could break out in the coming months.

Although Hungary is a country of only 10 million people, 14 cities have been selected for "logistical NATO bases." These bases follow the internal administrative limits of the country instead of occupying geo-strategical positions as did Soviet bases. They will be used to train new NATO soldiers, including several hundred thousand young jobless Hungarian Gypsies, the only group which the NATO can enlist in Hungary.

With all Central-European Gypsies, NATO can count on cannon-fodder of at least one million and in 2012-2013, it may be ready to attack Russia.

CONCLUSION

Closer to home, we see this divide-and-conquer strategy at work in feminism (divide women against men); diversity (promotion of homosexuality, affirmative action) and multiculturalism (immigration, mass migrations, illegals.) If resistance to world government grows, look for violent attacks against these minorities to inflame divisions and distract attention from the real enemy.

The same applies on a global scale. I believe the Illuminati bankers control Russia, China and Iran. They organize and finance the Taliban and the war on terror. You need good guys and bad guys to distract, divide, persecute and control, the unenlightened.

http://www.henrymakow.com/hungary-_rothschild_strategy_o.html

'Afghanisation' of Afghanistan

2009-09-05T20:33:00.002Z

Gordon Brown yesterday issued his strongest hint that British troops will start to quit Afghanistan by the end of next year.

'Afghanisation of Afghanistan'

In a major shift of strategy, the Prime Minister said a target to train up 134,000 Afghan soldiers will be brought forward by a year to December 2010.

He announced that cutting troop numbers was now 'the basis of our strategy'.

Mr Brown spoke as two more soldiers' bodies were flown home for burial. So far 212 soldiers have died in the conflict.

He described his strategy as ' Afghanisation' - a grim echo of how Richard Nixon described the policy in Vietnam when that conflict was turning into a quagmire that ended in humiliating defeat.

Mr Brown used the word four times in his speech to the International Institute of Strategic Studies think-tank in London.

He said: 'Ours is a four-pronged strategy for accelerating the Afghanisation of the campaign. First we will partner a growing Afghan army presence in central Helmand. Second we will strengthen the civilian-military partnership, including on policing.

'Third, we will support the governor of Helmand by strengthening district government and a more effective, cleaner government in Kabul. And fourth we will build on the success of the "wheat not heroin" initiative to wean farmers from drugs crops.'

He added: 'People ask what success in Afghanistan would look like. The answer is that we will have succeeded when our troops are coming home because the Afghans are doing the job themselves.

'The issue is how fast you can move on this. What we are saying today is that we are going to move faster. As the number of Afghans taking responsibility grows and the quality of their leadership grows, we can reduce the numbers of our forces.'

The importance of his speech was thrown into sharp relief as the bodies of two more soldiers killed there in recent days were flown back to Britain.

As Mr Brown was speaking in London, their coffins were driven from RAF Lyneham through Wootton Bassett which once again paid a silent, sombre tribute.

One of two soldiers to die on Wednesday was also named today as Lance Corporal Richard Brandon, 24, from Kidderminster.

He died in an explosion in the Babaji district in Helmand. A second soldier, from 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment, who died after a foot patrol has yet to be identified.

Their deaths took the number of British troops killed in the war to 212, including 41 in July and August this year.

The Prime Minister spoke out the day after Eric Joyce, a parliamentary aide to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, quit saying the Government could no longer claim the conflict was a fight to combat terrorism.

Downing Street officials fear Mr Joyce's intervention may be the start of an autumn campaign to destabilise Mr Brown's leadership.

But the Prime Minister responded by insisting the war is necessary to prevent Al Qaeda terrorists from using the country as a safe haven.

He claimed 'a safe Afghanistan means a safe Britain'.

The Prime Minister also boasted that his Government had increased helicopter hours, bought armoured vehicles and sent 200 specialist forces to counter roadside bombs, 1,000 of which have now been defused by the British in Helmand.

He took to task his critics by insisting: 'We cannot walk away. At times like this we must strengthen not weaken our resolve.

The Prime Minister acknowledged that he is discussing 'proper level of our troop numbers for the next stage of the exercise' with the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Jock Stirrup and the new head of the Army, General Sir David Richards.

But he said nothing about whether the 900 extra troops sent for the Afghan election period will remain, whether Britain will send more or whether they will insist that other Nato countries do more.

And despite his hint of an early pull-out, he refused to put a formal timetable on a withdrawal.

Mr Brown's speech was criticised by Professor Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute - Britain's leading military thinktank - who said Afghanistan is only an 'indirect' terrorist threat to British soil.

'The fact is the terroristswho threaten us are not in Afghanistan. If we left they would return but they are already beginning to infiltrate in the Yemen.'

Colonel Richard Kemp, who led British troops in Afghanistan in 2003, said speeding up training can only be done with more troops.

'That can only be done to an increased timetable if you increase the number of boots on the ground and with a significant increase in resources,' he said.

An American jet blasted two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, killing 90 people, including dozens of civilians who had rushed to the scene to collect fuel.
German commanders ordered the pre-dawn air strike after the vehicles were seized close to their base.
Officials said a drone flew over the scene 40 minutes before the attack and determined no civilians were in the area.

Brown defends Afghan war

Rhetoric vs reality - what the PM didn't say

Yesterday's speech was billed as a major effort by the Prime Minister to shore up support for the Afghanistan war. Here, Tim Shipman looks behind the rhetoric.

What he said:

Our aim in 2009 is the same as in 2001. We are in Afghanistan as a result of a hard-headed assessment of the terrorist threat facing Britain.

The reality:

The Government's position on the war has changed repeatedly. Initially it focused on nation-building operations to build a centralised state with a functioning democratic government. Now ministers admit that was too optimistic and the weak and corrupt Afghan government is forced to deal with warlords. The need to combat the drugs trade has also been regularly cited as another justification for war.

What he said:

If the insurgency succeeds in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups will once again be able to use it as a sanctuary to train, plan and launch attacks on Britain and the rest of the world.

The reality:

Mr Brown admitted yesterday that most of the terrorists are in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Other experts point out that Al Qaeda is regrouping in Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries.

What he said:

Since 2006 we have spent over £1billion from the reserve on new vehicles for Afghanistan, including 280 Mastiffs which offer world-leading protection against IEDs.

The reality:

Ministers failed to prepare for a switch in Taliban tactics from massed battles to roadside bombs. Mastiffs are sitting idle in Britain because the units currently serving in Afghanistan have not been trained on the new vehicles.

What he said:

Between November 2006 and April this year we increased the number of helicopter hours by 84 per cent.

The reality:
Just 23 out of Britain's 500-strong helicopter fleet are in Afghanistan because most are unsuitable for the heat and altitude there. Commanders were forced to go public to complain about a lack of helicopters to increase the urgency to get more to the front line.

What he said:
Already this year we have deployed 200 specialist counter-IED troops. We are increasing our surveillance to track the Taliban and target their bomb-makers.

The reality:
Specialists were sent only after General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the Army, publicly said more troops and equipment to combat roadside bombs were on a 'shopping list' of demands he passed to Mr Brown.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1211026/New-blow-Brown-Defence-Secretarys-aide-resigns-Afghanistan-campaign.html

UN chief visits 'doomsday' seed vault in Arctic

2009-09-03T23:53:00.002Z

UN chief Ban Ki-moon visited Wednesday a vault carved into the Arctic permafrost, filled with samples of the world's most important seeds in case food crops are wiped out by a catastrophe.

"The world faces many daunting challenges today, one of the greatest of which is how to feed a growing population in the context of climate change," a bundled-up Ban told reporters after he toured the site in the Svalbard archipelago some 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from the North Pole.

"The seeds stored here in Svalbard will help us do just that. Sustainable food production may not begin in this cold Arctic environment, but it does begin by conserving crop diversity," he said.

Aimed at safeguarding biodiversity in the face of climate change, wars and other natural and man-made disasters, the seed bank has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds, or twice the number of crop varieties believed to exist in the world today.

The vault was inaugurated in February 2008, and so far some 25 international and national institutes from 22 countries have deposited some 400,000 batches, according to the Norwegian government.

Overlooking a fjord, the vault forms a long trident-shaped tunnel bored deep into the Svalbard sandstone and limestone.

Metal shelves lining three cold chambers will eventually be stacked with airtight bags filled with seed samples.

After passing through an airlock designed to keep temperatures inside the main vault at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit), Ban looked on with interest as he was shown plastic boxes filled with samples.

"This site, collated by all the countries, is really creative. I'm inspired by this vision to sustain the world in the future," he said.

He seemed also taken with the chilly temperature in the vault.

"It's very cold, even colder than the Arctic. My lips are frozen."

The UN secretary general is visiting the Arctic to see first-hand the effects of global warming ahead of key international climate talks in Copenhagen in December.

On Tuesday, he visited the Ny-Aalesund climate change research station in Svalbard and saw the polar ice rim aboard a Norwegian coast guard vessel, saying he was "very much alarmed" by the rapid rate of melting ice.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.d9df1fd18d712649438ca21294ae49fe.5c1&show_article=1

Congressman Warns US Becoming A Totalitarian State

2009-09-03T23:42:00.003Z

Says Obama has three key primers to suppress freedom of American people

Republican Congressman Paul Broun has once again warned that the US is being slowly transformed into a police state dictatorship.

Broun, R-Athens, Georgia, told over a thousand people at town hall events Wednesday in Madison and Greene County that elites under Obama are “developing a shadow government that (does not) answer to the American people.”

“He has the three things that are necessary to establish an authoritarian government,” Broun said, citing a national federalized police force, gun control and control over the press.

“And so we need to be ever-vigilant, because freedom is precious.” Broun added.

The Congressman effectively repeated the warning he first made vocal last November when he spoke out against Obama’s plan to create a “national civilian security force,” warning that the program sounded like a 21st century Gestapo and that it was part of a move towards a Marxist dictatorship.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said at the time. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

“We can’t be lulled into complacency,” Broun said. “You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential of going down that road.”

A report on Broun’s comments in the Athens Banner-Herald states that in the July 2008 speech Obama was actually referring to a proposed expansion of the Americorps volunteer program, not a national security force. However, back in November, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor told the Associated Press that Obama was referring to a proposal for a civilian reserve corps that could handle postwar reconstruction.

This was set in motion in January of this year when The Defense Department announced the establishment of a “civilian expeditionary workforce” that will see American civilians trained and equipped to deploy overseas in support of worldwide military missions.

We have also highlighted the ongoing push to merge the Army Reserves and the National Guard into the “Total Force” of the US military, and to deploy 40,000 troops inside the US under NORTHCOM, to deal with “domestic catastrophe” and “civil unrest and crowd control”.

Last month Congressman Broun also warned attendees of a town hall event that the Obama administration was planning to use a pandemic or a natural disaster to implement martial law in the United States.

Speaking at the North Georgia Technical College auditorium, Broun said that the “socialistic elite,” as well as Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, were planning to exploit a crisis to create a favorable climate for their stalling political agenda.

“They’re trying to develop an environment where they can take over,” he said. “We’ve seen that historically.”

http://www.prisonplanet.com/congressman-warns-us-becoming-a-totalitarian-state.html

Utah Principal Apologizes for Showing Pro-Obama ‘I Pledge’ Video to Students

Arrest of Egyptian Citizen in Swiss jails is a violation of the Geneva Conventions

2009-09-02T23:31:00.000Z

The Sawasya Center for Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination condemned the ongoing detention of the Egyptian officer Mohammed Ghanem in the Swiss jails. He has been detained since March 2007 without being charged.

"The Egyptian officer Muhammad Ghanem holds a PhD in law granted from the Rome University and wrote many pamphlets concerning legal subjects forming the basis of much of the current Egyptian legislation", the center said.

He was arrested on a report issued accusing Switzerland as part of an "international pact of the cross". The report claims that "Under the pact, the Swiss government was playing a significant role in penetrating the Muslim society to collect intelligence relating to national security". He is presently held in the Champ-Dollon prison in Geneva, where he was transferred to by the Accusation Chamber of Geneva on March 12, 2007. He remains detained there to this day under no apparent charges.

The Sawasya Center asserts that the arrest of the Egyptian officer in Switzerland is in fact a violation of international laws which prohibits the arbitrary arrest and detention carried by states and governments against the public according to the provisions of Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile".

In accordance with the principles proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations and Article No 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights “Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law. Anyone who is arrested shall be informed, at the time of arrest, of the reasons for his arrest and shall be promptly informed of any charges against him. Furthermore, anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be entitled to proceedings before a court, in which the court may decide without delay on the legality of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful.

The Center indicated that the Swiss government had committed infractions with the arrest of the Egyptian citizen; firstly, “a gross infringement of human rights and its basic principles which is supposed to be protected in non-Western countries by the ruling regimes in Europe. Secondly, the freedom of opinion and expression are guaranteed under the constitution and the international law".

It calls upon the Swiss Embassy in Cairo to act promptly and intervene to release the Egyptian citizen since there is no indication that he committed any violations of the law punishable under Swiss law. The Swiss government must provide a fair trial of the Egyptian citizen like any other Swiss citizen. Any violations of this right demonstrate defiance to all international norms and laws.

The Center also urges the Egyptian Foreign Ministry to intervene in investigating what took place in regards to the Egyptian citizen Mohamed Ghanem and to prove whether he was guilty or not, and to demand the immediate release if he is innocent. It is imperative that there be a follow up especially as Jurists have written numerous publications on this subject.

Finally, Sawasya Center calls on the United Nations and the international and human rights organizations to urge the Swiss government to end the injustice against the Egyptian citizen who was arrested simply for voicing his opinion in an article without having committed any crime punishable by law.

Intervening is crucial, to indicate that the detaining of individuals must not be a pretext for the ruling regimes both in Arab and Western countries where the arrests take place solely for the expressing of opinions of anti-discrimination and anti-racism.

http://www.ikhwanweb.com/Article.asp?ID=21167&LevelID=1&SectionID=0

How to lose in Afghanistan

2009-09-02T22:45:00.001Z

There are no easy paths to victory for the US in Afghanistan but there are several easy ways for it to go down to defeat

The United States cannot win the war in Afghanistan in the next three months – any form of even limited victory will take years of further effort. It can, however, easily lose the war. I did not see any simple paths to victory while serving on the assessment group that advised the new US commander, General Stanley McChrystal, on strategy, but I did see all too clearly why the war is being lost.

The most critical reason has been resources. Between 2002 and 2008 the US never provided the forces, money or leadership necessary to win, effectively wasting more than half a decade. Our country left a power vacuum in most of Afghanistan that the Taliban and other jihadist insurgents could exploit and occupy, and Washington did not respond when the US embassy team in Kabul requested more resources.

The Bush administration gave priority to sending forces to Iraq, it blustered about the successes of civilian aid efforts in Afghanistan that were grossly undermanned and underresourced, and it did not react to the growing corruption of Hamid Karzai's government or the major problems created by national caveats and restrictions on the use of allied forces and aid. It treated Pakistan as an ally when it was clear to US experts on the scene that the Pakistani military and intelligence service did (and do) tolerate al-Qaida and Afghan sanctuaries and still try to manipulate Afghan Pashtuns to Pakistan's advantage.

Further, it never developed an integrated civil-military plan or operational effort even within the US team in Afghanistan; left far too much of the aid effort focused on failed development programmes; and denied the reality of insurgent successes in ways that gave insurgents the initiative well into 2009.

The appointments this summer of Karl Eikenberry as ambassador to Afghanistan and McChrystal as commander of US and allied forces have created a team that can reverse this situation. In fact, given the rising unpopularity of the war and Taliban successes, they are our last hope of victory. Yet they can win only if they are allowed to manage both the civil and military sides of the conflict without constant micromanagement from Washington or traveling envoys. They must be given both the time to act and the resources and authority they feel they need. No other path offers a chance of a secure and stable Afghanistan free of terrorist and jihadist control and sanctuaries.

I do not know what resources Eikenberry or McChrystal would seek if given the chance. Eikenberry has indicated that funding of the civil side of the US embassy effort in Afghanistan is about half of what is necessary: Some $2.1bn more may be sought to meet a $4.8bn total need. He will almost certainly need far more civilians than the token "surge" that is planned (and that will not produce its full results until the spring or summer of 2010).

McChrystal has not announced a need for more US troops, but almost every expert on the scene has talked about figures equivalent to three to eight more brigade combat teams – with nominal manning levels that could range from 2,300 to 5,000 personnel each – although much of that manpower will go to developing Afghan forces that must nearly double in size, become full partners rather than tools, and slowly take over from US and Nato forces. Similarly, a significant number of such US reinforcements will have to assist in providing a mix of capabilities in security, governance, rule of law and aid. US forces need to "hold" and keep the Afghan population secure, and "build" enough secure local governance and economic activity to give Afghans reason to trust their government and allied forces. They must build the provincial, district and local government capabilities that the Kabul government cannot and will not build for them. No outcome of the recent presidential election can make up for the critical flaws in a grossly overcentralized government that is corrupt, is often a tool of power brokers and narco-traffickers, and lacks basic capacity in virtually every ministry.

Unfortunately, strong elements in the White House, State Department and other agencies seem determined to ignore these realities. They are pressuring the president to direct Eikenberry and McChrystal to come to Washington to present a broad set of strategic concepts rather than specific requests for troops, more civilians, money and an integrated civil-military plan for action. They are pushing to prevent a fully integrated civil-military effort, and to avoid giving Eikenberry and McChrystal all the authority they need to try to force more unity of effort from allied forces and the U.N.-led aid effort.

If these elements succeed, President Obama will be as much a failed wartime president as George Bush. He may succeed in lowering the political, military and financial profile of the war for up to a year, but in the process he will squander our last hope of winning. This would only trade one set of political problems for a far worse set in the future and leave us with an enduring regional mess and sanctuary for extremism. We have a reasonable chance of victory if we properly outfit and empower our new team in Afghanistan, we face certain defeat if we do not.

This article first appeared in the Washington Post

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/31/afghanistan-report-mcchrystal-obama

Russian Professor: Collapse Of America Could Begin In Two Months

2009-09-01T21:23:00.001Z

Doomsday author says Obama is doing nothing to forestall disintegration

Russian Professor Igor Panarin says that events are continuing to confirm his doomsday prediction first made over 10 years ago, that the United States will completely collapse like the Soviet Union before the end of 2010, and warns that the chaos could begin to unfold in as little as two months.

Panarin, doctor of political sciences and professor of the Russian Diplomatic Academy Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told journalists during the unveiling of his new book yesterday that President Obama has done nothing to forestall the fast approaching crisis and that it could begin to properly unfold in November.

“Obama is “the president of hope”, but in a year there won’t be any hope,” said Panarin. “He’s practically another Gorbachev – he likes to talk but hasn’t really managed to do anything. Gorbachev at least had been a secretary of a regional communist party administration, whereas Obama was just a social worker. His mentality is totally different. He’s a nice person and talks nicely – but he’s not a leader and will take America to a crash. When Americans understand that – it will be like a bomb explosion.”

Since 1998, Panarin has been warning of a future disintegration of the United States and the collapse of the dollar. The recent election victory for Japan’s Democratic Party is another sign that the economic collapse of the U.S. is imminent, according to Panarin.

“Today I received another confirmation that the collapse of the dollar and the US is inevitable. Japan’s Democratic Party won the election, and I’d like to remind you that its leader [Yukio Hatoyama] has the snubbing of the dollar among his economic plans. In plainer words, he plans to transfer Japan’s monetary reserves from US dollars into another currency. The move will seriously accelerate the dollar’s exchange slump as early as this November. Disintegration will follow shortly,” he said, adding that next year China would also begin to massively dump the dollar and that Russia would begin to sell oil and gas for roubles.

Panarin previously stated that the dollar would eventually be replaced with “a common Amero currency as a new monetary unit”, referring to the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

He foresees the U.S. breaking up into six different parts, roughly along lines similar to those of 1865 during the Civil War, “The Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong,” according to Panarin.

Longer term, Panarin predicts that the breakaway states will eventually be taken over by the European Union, Canada, China, Mexico, Japan and Russia and America will cease to exist altogether, as depicted in the illustration above.

Panarin blames the collapse on a “political elite that implements an absurd and aggressive policy that aims to create conflicts around the planet” and warns that increasing firearms sales in the U.S. are a sign that people are preparing for “chaos” in the aftermath of a total financial meltdown.

“In my opinion, the probability of the US ceasing to exist by June, 2010 exceeds 50%. At this point, the mission of all major international powers is to prevent chaos in the US,” Panarin concluded.

Watch a clip from Russia Today below.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/russian-professor-collapse-of-america-could-begin-in-two-months.html