Bomb, Bomb Iran: Lessons From Iraq Unlearned

In a New York Times op-ed this week that advocates bombing Iran, the author, Alan J. Kuperman, director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin, begins by suggesting that President Barack Obama should “sigh in relief that Iran has rejected his nuclear deal”.

In fact, Iran has said it is still open to discussion with the U.S. about its nuclear program, but that if meaningful dialogue is to continue, the threats of sanctions and military aggression must first cease.

The U.S., however, continues to threaten yet further sanctions, while also insisting that the threat of force must remain “on the table” — a threat of aggression that itself violates the U.N. Charter, which forbids member nations from threatening the use of force as a tool for leverage in international relations.

Kuperman’s reason for why Obama should be happy is that the deal, under which Iran would export uranium to Russia, which would enrich it to 20 percent (not the 90 percent required for weapons-grade uranium) and return it as fuel rods for use in Tehran’s research reactor, “was ill conceived from the start” since Iran would “thus be rewarded with much-coveted reactor fuel despite violating international law.”

His reference is to U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran halt its uranium enrichment activities. The problem with these resolutions, as Iran is not hesitant to point out, is that they themselves directly violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which clearly states that parties to the treaty have an “inalienable” right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and that the international community may take no action prejudicial towards that right.

The U.N. resolutions, needless to say, prejudice that “inalienable” right, particularly given the fact that there is no credible evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program – as both the U.S. intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have pointed out.

In other words, under U.S. influence, the Security Council in this case has acted as a rogue body itself in violation of relevant treaties constituting international law and the very Charter under which it ostensibly operates.

Iran, on the other hand, remains in compliance with the terms of the NPT and is meeting its obligations in allowing the IAEA to monitor and inspect its nuclear program, despite much talk to the contrary.

Take the most recent example, the charge that Iran’s uranium enrichment facility near Qom, still under construction, was a violation of its obligation to declare any such facility prior to the beginning of construction. We’re told that Iran agreed to an updated version of its safeguards agreement with the IAEA containing a clause specifying that obligation.

What we’re not told is that at that time, Iran had agreed to implement the terms of the Additional Protocol and revised safeguards agreement on a strictly voluntary basis. The voluntary nature of Iran’s implementation of these measures was explicitly, and in writing (see the so-called Paris Agreement), recognized by the IAEA. Iran was under no legal obligation to do so and had done so simply as a “confidence-building measure”.

In return, Iran got nothing but further threats of sanctions and bombing. So it ended its voluntary observance of measures above and beyond that which was legally required of it.

The fact is that Iran has never ratified the revised safeguards agreement, as would be required for the revisions to be legally binding upon Iran. Under the safeguards agreement Iran has formally and legally obligated itself to, it need only declare such facilities six months prior to the introduction of nuclear material (i.e., introduction of uranium into enrichment centrifuges), which is exactly what Iran did in declaring the site several months ago.

In response to meeting its obligations under its safeguards agreement, the West responded by declaring that the “secret” site (an adjective irreconcilable with the fact Iran voluntarily declared it to the IAEA, but obligatorily used in the media anyways) was evidence of Iran’s intentions to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Summarily dismissed was Iran’s quite credible explanation for the site it voluntarily disclosed, which was that it was attempting to diversify its uranium enrichment capabilities under the threat of certain countries to bomb their nuclear facilities.

The demonization and punishment of Iran for its compliance with its obligations under international law is not entirely unlike the charges against Iraq that it was in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding it disarm because it had not disarmed, when in fact it had disarmed, and when in fact there was no credible evidence that it still possessed stockpiles or was still in production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The IAEA, for its part, has continuously and consistently reported that it has verified Iran has diverted no nuclear materials towards a weapons program. Former Director General of the IAEA Mohammed ElBaradei, whose term ended just last month, has repeatedly said that there is no evidence Iran has a nuclear weapons program. His successor, Yukiya Amano, has made the same observation.

Then, of course, there is the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from the U.S. intelligence community that stated Iran today has no nuclear weapons program, which according to Newsweek, is an assessment analysts still stand by. The NIE did claim that Iran once had such a program in the past, but that it ended it in 2003. The IAEA, on the other hand, recently issued a statement saying there is no evidence Iran ever had a weapons program.

Kuperman continues by suggesting that the goal of the international community should be to “compel” Iran “to halt its enrichment program”, which, he claims, the proposal to send its uranium abroad would not have done. It’s worth noting the fact that this is an explicit rejection of the NPT.

He adds, “In addition, the vast surplus of higher-enriched fuel Iran was to get under the deal would have permitted some to be diverted to its bomb program”, claiming that taking uranium from the fuel rods for further enrichment to weapons-grade “is a straightforward engineering task requiring at most a few weeks.”

The truth of the latter assertion aside, which is contrary to most reports on the subject and contrary to the whole supposed point of the deal, what’s notable here is the assumption that Iran has a “bomb program”, despite, as was the case with Iraq, the total lack of credible evidence to support the claim.

It’s enough in the mainstream corporate media simply to take Iran’s “bomb program” as a matter of faith. Evidence is simply not required, and it’s considered perfectly acceptable by the editors of the New York Times and other mainstream sources to print assumptions expressed as statements of fact.

Again, for those who don’t suffer from selective amnesia and aren’t prone to intentional ignorance, the kind of reporting we saw from the Times, et al, prior to the invasion of Iraq might perhaps serve as a lesson about the nature of the role U.S. corporate media play in “manufacturing consent” from the American public for U.S. foreign policies.

Kuperman next begs the question, “if the deal would have aided Iran’s bomb program, why did the United States propose it, and Iran reject it?” Oblivious to the fallacies underlying the question, his own answer is that “The main explanation on both sides is domestic politics.”

Obama simply wanted to “blunt Republican criticism that his multilateral approach was failing” and was seeking a short-term gain.

Iran, for its part, “rejected” the deal that, by Kuperman’s own account, would have helped it towards the presumed goal of achieving the bomb because “such a headlong sprint” towards that goal “is the one step most likely to provoke an international military response that could cripple the bomb program before it reaches fruition.”

In other words, while Israel regularly threatens that it won’t wait much longer for the U.S. to come to some agreement with Iran before it launches an attack against Iran’s nuclear sites that Iran’s possession of the bomb would surely deter, Iran is willing pass up an offer that would constitute “a headlong sprint” towards such a deterrent because doing so could actually jeopardize the possibility of it obtaining the bomb, since if Iran accepted the deal ostensibly designed to prevent it from being able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, Israel would be even more likely to bomb their nuclear sites even sooner than if it Iran just rejects the proposal.

Truly, Kuperman has a dizzying intellect.

“In sum,” writes Kuperman, “the proposal would not have averted proliferation in the short run, because that risk always was low, but instead would have fostered it in the long run – a classic example of domestic politics undermining national security.”

In sum, Iran is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.

Thus, the bombing of Iran is a foreseeable and unavoidable consequence of the present U.S. policy towards Iran. This consequence, admittedly, might very well be disastrous, but the obvious solution – to alter U.S. policy – is simply inconceivable. A change of policy is off the table. The resort to violence is not.

It’s worth noting that Kuperman acknowledges that the “risk” of Iran obtaining the bomb anytime soon (assuming it actually is seeking it) “always was low”. This is an interesting admission given the tendency of Western media to portray Iran as being practically right on the verge of being able to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

Returning to Iran’s “rejection of the deal”, Kuperman suggests the so-called “rejection” was “likewise propelled by domestic politics – including last June’s fraudulent elections and longstanding fears of Western manipulation.”

The “fears of Western manipulation” is a valid enough observation, the fears warranted enough. But again, as with the presumption of an Iranian bomb program, it’s enough in U.S. mainstream media to assert the claim of “fraudulent elections” as fact, despite the spurious nature of the evidence for fraud and many strong indications that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad legitimately won, including polls conducted by Western organizations both prior to the vote and since showing strong support for his presidency.

Like the “rejection” of the deal, Kuperman goes on to repeat what has become another unquestioned part of the official narrative. Suggesting that President Ahmadinejad “initially embraced the deal because he realized it aided Iran’s bomb program”, he adds, “But his domestic political opponents, whom he has tried to label as foreign agents, turned the tables by accusing him of surrendering Iran’s patrimony to the West.”

The possibility that Iran has not accepted the deal because it consists of an implicit rejection of their right to enrich uranium for themselves is, like the thought of changing U.S. policy, simply inconceivable.

The claim that Ahmadinejad “initially embraced the deal”, only to “renege”, has become standard. But the claim, though widely reported, cannot stand up to scrutiny based on the actual facts that have been reported about the talks. Every indication is that Ahmadinejad himself was open to the proposal, which he continues to be, on the condition that the West cease its threatening and aggressive posture towards Iran, and that the Iranian negotiators during the talks agreed with the proposal on principle, in anticipation of further talks, without formally accepting the deal – something, Iran has pointed out, the negotiators were given no authority to do.

This is part of a larger narrative in Western media in which the Iranian leadership is fractured and the regime in a state of crisis due to the enormity of the opposition to Ahmadinejad’s rule (part of the “fraudulent elections” narrative). While there are elements of truth to this story line, it’s chiefly a product of wishful thinking and the willingness of commentators to succumb to their own propaganda.

Take, for example, reporting on the massive gathering of people honoring the influential Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri upon his death just last week. The opposition, we were told, of whom Montazeri was a leader, effectively took over the rally and was able to turn it into a massive anti-regime protest. Evidence for this was given in the form of amateur videos apparently from cell phones posted to opposition websites showing close-up shots of protesters shouting anti-regime slogans and holding up anti-regime banners.

Wider video shots of the actual funeral march, however, showed only an enormous crowd solemnly and respectfully marching along with the casket, holding up only photos of the cleric, not anti-regime banners. (The London Times, a leading outlet for anti-Iran propaganda, acknowledges that, with no journalists in the country due to restrictions on foreign media operations, much of its reporting comes from anti-regime elements, but insists that its sources are trustworthy, essentially a “just trust us” assertion that depends upon the questionable trustworthiness of the Times itself as a source for news on Iran.)

“Under such domestic pressure, Mr. Ahmadinejad reneged”, claims Kuperman, and then “threatened to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 percent level.” Notice how remarks from Iranian leaders that Iran would do what it has an “inalienable” right to do as a party to the NPT is characterized by the verb “threatened”.

The underlying and familiar assumption is that the rules are set by Washington, not by treaties comprising the body of international law. A dubious enough assumption, but unquestionable in the mainstream.

Iran’s “rejection” of the proposal shows that it “cannot make even temporary concessions on its bomb program”, and therefore, “Since peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work,” – (more the stick than the carrot) – “and an invasion would be foolhardy, the United States faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.”

There are numerous and obvious other options: to assume that evidence should be required of an Iranian nuclear program rather than establishing confrontational and aggressive policies based on the assumption that this is so; to cease from violating international law with threats of military aggression; to cease from deliberately isolating and provoking Iran and instead meaningfully engaging the country in a dialogue that actually recognizes Iran’s rights under the NPT; to live up to the additional obligation under the NPT for the U.S. and other nuclear-armed countries to provide member nations with nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, etc.

But it is simply inconceivable that mainstream sources like the Times would actually find “fit to print” such elementary alternatives.

Without reading further, the conclusion Kuperman would like his readers to draw (and here the headline, “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran”, is relevant) is clear: obviously, we cannot acquiesce to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons; therefore the only logical choice is to bomb Iran.

To underscore the unacceptability of Iran obtaining the bomb, Kuperman employs a theme that should not be unfamiliar to Americans: “If Iran acquired a nuclear arsenal,” he writes, “the risks would simply be too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon”.

He draws just short of saying that if we don’t bomb Iran, the consequences could come “in the form of a mushroom cloud”, the familiar official refrain prior to the invasion of Iraq – which had no nuclear program at all, much less a weaponized one (Kuperman states further in the article that this fact “eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion”. U.S. intelligence analysts, we are apparently supposed to believe, never bothered themselves to read IAEA reports noting that the agency had completely dismantled Iraq’s nuclear program by the mid-90s).

And so we must bomb Iran. Now, “admittedly, aerial bombing might not work.” It could “backfire” by “undermining Iran’s political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region.”

All three are credible consequences widely predicted among analysts. Iran may not have a nuclear weapons program now, but if it is bombed, the likelihood that it would withdraw from the NPT, move its nuclear weapons program underground, and begin work towards obtaining a nuclear deterrent to further such attacks would be increased in no inconsiderable measure.

Again, Iraq provides a useful lesson. It was a direct consequence of Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, according to the U.S.’s own intelligence assessments, that prompted Saddam Hussein to begin pursuing his nuclear program clandestinely and also to begin his pursuit to obtain nuclear weapons.

Kuperman actually mentions the Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor to support his assertion that bombing Iran – the very thing he advocates – might actually result in Iran “accelerating” efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon, but he obscures the obvious lesson to be had from it by suggesting an opposite and much more dubious conclusion: that the bombing slowed down, rather than accelerated, Saddam’s efforts to obtain the bomb.

In other words, bombing Iran might predictably and admittedly result in the very thing the bombing would ostensibly be aimed at preventing. The obvious corollary is that the bombing would not really be carried out in order to prevent that end.

Again, further lessons from Iraq are instructive. Consider that the war ostensibly fought to make the world safer from WMD and to fight terrorism resulted in the single most probable situation, had Iraq actually had WMD, under which Saddam Hussein would have provided them to terrorists. Again, that was the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community prior to the invasion.

Fortunately, Iraq didn’t have WMD and so this never occurred. But among the direct consequences of the war that did occur was a considerable increase in the threat of terrorism, again according to the U.S.’s own intelligence assessments. Whereas prior to the invasion, terrorist attacks within Iraq were virtually unknown, since the war began, the Iraq people continue to be plagued by terrorism as a direct consequence of the war.

The war, analysts have observed, served as a virtual billboard for terrorist organizations to recruit individuals willing to commit acts of violence in response to U.S. foreign policy – just as U.S. support for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians was a principle causal factor for the 9/11 attacks, if we are to believe the stated grievances of the originally accused mastermind of those attacks himself.

Again, the corollary is obvious: the official reasons for committing such acts of aggression against foreign nations, if we presume leading policymakers are sane and rational, cannot possibly be the actual rationale for them. That is perfectly elementary, albeit a virtual heresy to actually point out in respectable circles.

The war against Iraq had nothing to do with WMD or terrorism. Equally elementary is the observation that U.S. policy towards Iran has nothing to do with preventing it from obtaining nuclear weapons.

A further example is NATO’s bombing campaign in 1999 against Yugoslavia, which was ostensibly carried out to end atrocities on the ground, but which instead resulted in a sharp escalation of the violence – a consequence of the bombing predicted by the NATO leadership.

Kuperman also happens to mention that campaign, but, again, as with his mention of Osirak, arrives at other conclusions. Here, ignoring perhaps the most obvious lessons from his own argument and examples, his conclusion is that “Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Bombing once won’t work, so Iran must be bombed repeatedly. This logic is akin to arguing that since poking a snake with a stick once might cause it to strike, it must be poked continually in order to prevent it from being able to do so.

Similarly, Kuperman draws other lessons from Iraq. “If nothing else,” he writes, “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the United States military can oust regimes in weeks if it wants to.”

Indeed. But if we set aside intentional ignorance, other relevant lessons just might perhaps be drawn. Kuperman, rather like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy and friends to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, goes to extraordinary efforts to deflect attention away from these, though.

Casting aside some of the most obvious lessons from Iraq, Kuperman, having acknowledged the, shall we say, “drawbacks” of his proposed solution, concludes simply that air strikes “are worth a try.”

One might note the rather cavalier attitude towards the use of violence against civilian targets for political ends (the very definition of “terrorism”), an incitement to violence that might raise questions about the nature of American intellectual culture, and the moral values (or lack thereof) of the intelligentsia, if we bother to ponder on the subject.

Kuperman, needless to say, doesn’t. Instead, he has just one “final question”: “who should launch the air strikes?”

The obvious answer is Israel, which “has shown an eagerness” to bomb Iran, the option “some hawks in Washington favor” in order “to avoid fueling anti-Americanism in the Islamic world” – a rationale of astounding ignorance; the Islamic world surely would recognize that were Israel to bomb Iran, it would be with a “green light” from Washington, a wink and a nod. But never mind that.

Kuperman continues, however, with “three compelling reasons that the United States itself should carry out the bombings”, the obvious fueling of anti-Americanism and other predicted and potentially disastrous consequences aside. The U.S. has better equipment to do the job, could more credibly threaten “to expand the bombing campaign” (that is, to repeatedly bomb the country), and it would be an opportunity to send “a strong warning” to other countries.

This latter rationale for the U.S. bombing of Iran provides a more credible explanation for what the actual purpose of such a bombing would be.

Kuperman, in line with the official rationale for keeping the military “option” “on the table” – an explicit rejection of principle that force should be used only as a last resort, as well as a direct violation of international law – suggests the “strong warning” would be for “other would-be proliferators”.

Proliferation being obviously of little to no consideration to U.S. policymakers – an elementary observation drawn even from the arguments provided here – “proliferators” clearly isn’t the right word here. “Nations seeking to act independently from and in opposition to Washington” might be more accurate.

“The sooner the United States takes action” – that is, the sooner it bombs Iran – “the better”, concludes Kuperman.

At stake is U.S. “credibility”, in the Mafioso sense of the word. Washington simply can’t have a country defying its orders. That’s the bottom line. That’s the underlying foundation of the policy of the Obama administration, carried over from the policy of his predecessor.

But, of course, just as the war in Iraq couldn’t be sold to the American public on the basis of its actual rationale, expanding U.S. global hegemony, neither can the true reasons for Washington’s policies towards Iran be mentioned. It just wouldn’t do.

Better, as with Iraq, to construct nonsensical arguments dependent upon an extraordinary level of intentional ignorance and consisting at the most fundamental level of claims for which there is little, if any, evidence to support.

Whether the American public has learned the more obvious and crucial lessons from Iraq and has the moral integrity to act on them remains to be seen. But what is for certain is that without massive public pressure on Washington to alter its Iran policy, the U.S. will maintain a course the consequences of which might very well prove, as with Iraq, to be disastrous.

America’s Terrorist Ally

A Closer Look at Israel’s Role in Terrorism…

“It’s very good….Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)”.

Response of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when asked on September 11, 2001 what the attacks meant for U.S.-Israeli relations

Game theory war-planners rely on mathematical models to anticipate and shape outcomes with staged provocations. For the agent provocateur, the reactions to a provocation—as well as the reactions to those reactions—thereby become predictable within an acceptable range of probabilities.

With ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan poised to expand to Iran and Pakistan, it is time to take a closer look at how conflicts are catalyzed—by way of deception.

When Israeli game theorist Robert J. Aumann received the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic science, he conceded from Jerusalem, “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.” A professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew University, Aumann’s Nobel lecture, titled “War and Peace,” expounded on the rationality of war.

With a well-modeled provocation, a target’s anticipated reaction can even become a weapon in the aggressor’s arsenal. In response to the provocation of 9-11, how difficult was it to foresee that the U.S. would deploy its military to avenge that attack? With U.S. intelligence “fixed” by well-placed insiders around a predetermined goal, how difficult was it to anticipate that the reaction to 9-11 could be redirected to wage war in Iraq?

The emotional component of a provocation plays a key role in game theory warfare. With the nationally televised mass murder of 3,000 people, a state of shock, grief and outrage made it easier for Americans to believe that a known Evil Doer in Iraq was responsible—regardless of the facts.

For false beliefs to displace real facts requires mental preconditioning so that a targeted population can be persuaded to put their faith in fictions. That conditioning enhances the probability of a successful deception. Those who deceived the U.S. to invade Iraq in March 2003 began a decade beforehand to lay the “mental threads” and make the requisite mental associations to advance that agenda.

Notable among those threads was the 1993 publication in Foreign Affairs of a theme-setting article by Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington. By the time his analysis appeared in book-length form in 1996 as The Clash of Civilizations, more than 100 think tanks were prepared to promote it. The result created a widely touted narrative—a thematic storyline—supporting a “clash consensus” five years before 9-11 provided a plausible rationale for war.

Also published in 1996 under the guidance of Richard Perle was A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (i.e., Israel). A member since 1987 of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, this self-professed Zionist became its chairman in 2001.

As an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Perle’s Pentagon advisory post provided a powerful insider position to shape the national security mindset around the removal of Saddam Hussein, a key theme of A Clean Break—released five years before 9-11. That same year Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress at the invitation of Newt Gingrich, the Christian Zionist Speaker of the House.

Murders, books, articles, think tanks and well-placed insiders are common components in a “probabilistic” model deployed by war-planning game theorists. Lawmakers are also a customary ingredient. They provide credibility and a facade of legitimacy—a critical element when inducing a nation to war with phony intelligence fixed around a preset agenda.

That role was eagerly filled by Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, a Jewish Zionist from Connecticut, and Jon Kyl, a Christian Zionist from Arizona, when they co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. By promoting Israel’s 1996 agenda for Securing the Realm, their legislation laid yet another mental thread in the public mindset by calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein—three years before 9-11.

The legislation also appropriated $97 million to promote their agenda. Distracted by mid-term Congressional elections and impeachment proceedings catalyzed by a well-timed presidential affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton signed that Zionist agenda into law in October 1998—4-1/2 years before a U.S.-led invasion removed the Iraqi leader.

After 9-11, McCain and Lieberman became inseparable travel companions and irrepressible advocates for the invasion of Iraq. Striking a presidential pose aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in January 2002, McCain—a son and grandson of admirals—laid another mental thread when he waved an admiral’s cap and proclaimed, alongside Lieberman, “On to Baghdad.”

By Way of Deception

The confidence with which this game theory strategy progressed in plain sight could be seen in the behavior of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another Zionist insider. Four days after 9-11 while in a principals’ meeting at Camp David, he proposed that the U.S. invade Iraq. At that time, the intelligence did not point to Iraqi involvement and Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding in a remote region of Afghanistan.

On that same day, San Diego FBI Special Agent Stephen Butler interrogated Iraqi Munther Ghazal at his home near San Diego to determine if he was funding Mel Rockefeller, an American with whom Ghazal traveled to Baghdad in early 1997. After meeting for several days with a top nuclear physicist with oversight of Iraq’s mothballed nuclear weapons program, Rockefeller returned to the U.S. with a practical proposal for removing Saddam Hussein without this war and without triggering an insurgency.

When regional specialists at the U.S. Department of State would not meet with him, he traveled to Ottawa in April 1997 where he met with Middle East specialists in the Canadian government to ensure a written record was made to confirm there was an alternative to war in Iraq—six years before the invasion. Instead of debriefing him, FBI agents sought to discredit him. Though FBI agents interviewed Ghazal many times, they have yet to meet with Mel Rockefeller.

Agent Butler cashed checks and paid rent for the two San Diego-based hijackers who piloted planes into the World Trade Center towers. The same Iman counseling Major Nidal Hasan (with FBI knowledge) before he was transferred to Fort Hood also counseled the San Diego-based hijackers—with FBI knowledge. As of December 1, 2009, no one from the FBI or national security had debriefed Mel Rockefeller—eight years after 9-11.

See: Ft. Hood: “Death By Political Correctness”?

and Ft. Hood Tragedy: The Real Story of the Terrorist “Mad Doctor Hasan”

When President George H.W. Bush declined to invade Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, Pentagon Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz imposed a No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq. By the invasion of March 2003, the Israeli Mossad had agents deployed for a decade in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Intelligence reports of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda were also traced to Mosul—reports that proved false. Mosul again emerged in November 2004 as a center of the insurgency that destabilized Iraq. That reaction precluded the speedy exit of coalition forces promised in Congressional testimony by senior war-planner Wolfowitz in the lead-up to the invasion.

An Inside Job?

The common pro-Israeli source of the phony intelligence that induced war in Iraq has yet to be acknowledged even though intelligence experts agree that deception on such a scale required a decade to plan, staff, pre-stage, orchestrate and—until now—cover up. The leaders of the 9-11 Commission conceded they were thwarted by Commission members adamantly opposed to hearing testimony on the hijackers’ motivation for 9-11: the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The fictions reported as facts by mainstream media included Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraqi purchases of “yellowcake” uranium from Niger. Only the last claim was conceded as bogus prior to the invasion.

Only after the war began were the balance of the claims disclosed as false, flawed or outright fabricated. An attempt to punish former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Joe Wilson for his exposure of the phony yellowcake account led to a federal conviction of vice-presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby, another well-placed Zionist insider.

The multi-decade consistency of agent-provocateur fact patterns suggests that this game theory-modeled warfare includes the Israeli provocation that catalyzed the Second Intifada. An intifada is an uprising or, literally, a “shaking off” of an oppressor. The Second Intifada dates from September 2000 when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led an armed march to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—one year before 9-11.

After a year of calm during which Palestinians believed that Israel was sincere about peace, suicide bombings recommenced. As Sharon conceded, his march was meant to demonstrate Israeli control over a site considered holy by Muslims worldwide. In response to this second failed attempt at “shaking off” Israeli domination, Sharon and Netanyahu observed that only when Americans “feel our pain” would they understand the plight of the victimized Israelis.

These Likud Party leaders commented that the requisite empathy (“feel our pain”) would require a weighted body count of 4,500 to 5,000 Americans lost to terrorism—the initial estimate of those who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center—one year later.

In other words, only with pain could we identify with the Israelis. Does that mean that only with a mass murder could we be induced to respond with our military to advance their agenda? Was the U.S. response mathematically modeled at the Center for the Study of Rationality? Seven months after 9-11, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech in a U.S. Senate office building where he was introduced by Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Liebermn

American Valkyrie?

When successful, game theory warfare strengthens the agent provocateur while leaving the target discredited and depleted by the anticipated reaction. By game theory standards, 9-11 was a strategic success because the U.S.—by its response—was widely criticized for waging war on false pretenses. Only in hindsight did a deceived public realize that Iraq had nothing to do with that mass murder. However, that invasion had everything to do with “securing the realm.”

Our response (predictably) triggered a deadly insurgency with devastating consequences for Iraqis, the U.S. and a “coalition of the willing” led to war by a successfully duped U.S. From a game theory perspective, that insurgency was a predictable reaction in a nation populated by three long-feuding sects: Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. A violent invasion led by a nation closely allied with Jewish nationalists only further fueled the flames of violence and extremism—another foreseeable outcome.

Until the U.S.-led invasion, peace was maintained by an unsavory dictator and former U.S. ally who was rebranded an Evil Doer in the lead-up to war. As the cost in blood and treasure from our “liberation” of Iraq expanded, the U.S. became overextended militarily, financially and diplomatically.

The sectarian violence unleashed in Iraq is precisely what Messrs. Rockefeller and Ghazal were cautioned against in early 1997 should Saddam Hussein be removed suddenly and violently. The 1.3 million Iraqi deaths from war-related causes exceeds the worst of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities. As any competent game theory war-planner knew, the strategic winner in this war was certain to be Tehran as the U.S. neutralized its key foe—and is now urged by Israel to wage war on Iran.

As the U.S.—the primary target of this deception—emerged in the foreground, the agent provocateur faded into the background. But only after catalyzing dynamics that steadily drained the U.S. of credibility, resources and resolve. This “probabilistic” Israeli victory also ensured widespread cynicism, insecurity, distrust and disillusionment along with a steadily declining capacity to defend our real interests.

Meanwhile the American public came under a system of oversight and surveillance packaged and sold as “homeland security.” This ominously titled operation includes rhetorical echoes of a WWII-era “fatherland” featuring a domestic security force completely alien to U.S. traditions. It is not yet clear whether this new agency was established to protect Americans. Or whether it is meant to shield from Americans those responsible for deceiving us to wage their wars.

In January 2003, Secret Service Agent Richard Sierze interrogated Mel Rockefeller at his home in Fresno, California after he sent an email to Florida Governor Jeb Bush. The email said, in effect, that if the governor’s brother (President George Bush) did not interview him on a public record prior to invading Iraq, he would do his best to ensure that lawful means were deployed to see the president executed for treason by a firing squad.

When questioned by Sierze, Rockefeller offered to have the agent speak with Dr. Glenn Olds, an adviser to four presidents, his senior adviser since 1994 and a former U.N. Ambassador who assisted him in entering Iraq through Jordon at a time when Americans were prohibited from traveling there. Sierze declined.

He also repeated his intent to see the president executed for treason and insisted that he be charged and taken before a federal magistrate to present evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that an alternative to war had been available since early 1997. Agent Sierze declined his demand to be arraigned in a U.S. Federal District Court—seven weeks before the invasion.

Agent Sierze should be interviewed to see if, in retrospect, he agrees that—had this advice been followed—the war in Iraq may well have been prevented. To date, no one with line responsibility has interviewed Mel Rockefeller on a public record. Why? The answer to that question would reveal those responsible for this ongoing deception.

The victims of these serial deceptions, including the families of those murdered in November at Fort Hood, may have a wrongful death cause of action against those with line responsibility who aided these operations by failing to engage the Rockefeller record in a timely fashion.

Foreseeable Futures

By manipulating the shared mindset, skilled game theory war-planners can wage wars on multiple fronts with minimal resources. One proven strategy: Pose as an ally of a well-armed nation predisposed to deploy its military in response to a mass murder.

In this case, the result destabilized Iraq while creating (predictable) crises that could be exploited to greater strategic advantage by expanding the conflict to Iran, another Israeli goal announced in A Clean Break—seven years before the invasion of Iraq.

Today’s mathematically model-able outcomes undermined U.S. national security by discrediting our leadership, degrading our financial condition and disabling our political will. In game theory terms, this devastation was perfectly predictable—within an acceptable range of probabilities.

Pakistan is primed to emerge as the next battleground for game theory war-planners. When India, an ally of Israel, became the nation honored by the Obama administration’s first state dinner, that occasion gave reason for concern due to the dynamics already at work in the background.

See “What Is Israel’s Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?”

In the asymmetry that typifies modern warfare, those who are few in number have no alternative when pursuing an expansionist agenda but to wage their wars by way of deception. To maintain its perceived status as a perennial victim, Israeli aggression must proceed non-transparently. Its only option is to operate with duplicitous means, including leveraging the power of its insider influence to advance an agenda from the shadows.

Thus the strategic necessity that this extremist enclave befriend the U.S.—with the intent to betray that friendship to advance its geopolitical goals. Thus the strategic need to create a relationship of trust with a post-WWII super power—in order to defraud us. How else could Colonial Zionists wage their wars except with our military? How else could Jewish nationalists induce our aggression absent the widely shared belief that Israel is not an aggressor but a victim?

Winning Wars from the Inside Out

Game theory war-planners manipulate the shared mental environment by shaping the perceptions and impressions that become consensus opinions. With a combination of well-timed crises, fixed intelligence and a complicit media, policy-makers can be induced to support a predetermined agenda—not because lawmakers are Evil Doers but because the public mindset has been pre-conditioned to respond to manipulated thoughts, emotions and beliefs.

Without the mass murder of 9-11, would America’s credibility be in tatters and its creditworthiness in jeopardy? By steadily displacing facts with false beliefs, those duplicitous few-within-the-few amplify the impact of their deceit. By their steady focus on the mental environment, game theory war-planners can defeat an opponent with vastly superior resources.

Today’s intelligence wars are waged in plain sight and under the cover of shared beliefs. By manipulating consensus opinion, psy-ops wars can be won from the inside out by inducing a targeted populace to freely choose the very forces that imperil their freedom.

Thus in the Information Age the disproportionate power wielded by those with outsized influence in media, popular culture, think tanks, academia and politics—domains where Zionist influence is pervasive not only in the U.S. but also in other nations induced to war on false pretenses.

Germany offers a case study in manipulation of the public mindset in plain sight and under the banner of a free press. In 2003, Zionist media mogul Haim Saban acquired the second largest media conglomerate in Germany. Why? As Saban investment banker Steve Rattner explained his client’s motivation: “Because Germany is important to Israel.” Or, as Saban concedes: “I have only one issue and that issue is Israel.”

By 2005, Saban had succeeded in electing Angela Merkel as German Chancellor. She quickly became the European Union’s most reliable and forceful advocate for Israel. By November 2009, she was prepared to sponsor in Berlin an unprecedented joint session of the German and Israeli governments. Following his political success in Germany, Saban acquired in 2007 a controlling interest in Univision, a Latino-focused network serving the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S.

Media manipulation serves as an essential force-multiplier to wage intelligence wars from the periphery or, as with Haim Saban, in plain sight. At the operational core of such psy-ops are game theory war-planners skilled at personality profiling and masterful at anticipating responses to staged provocations and then incorporating those responses into their arsenal.

In the case of Iraq, our (mathematically) foreseeable response to 9-11 led, in practical effect, to Israel’s deployment of our military to invade Iraq. For aggressors adept at psy-ops warfare, facts are only an inconvenience to be overcome when waging war by way of deception. Thus the key role played by consensus-shapers featured in mainstream media outlets who focus not on informing the public but on mental conditioning.

For targeted populations dependent on facts and informed consent to protect their freedom and preserve the rule of law, such treachery poses the greatest possible threat. Yet even now many Americans believe that Israel is not an aggressor but a victim and even an ally despite facts confirming a multi-decade pattern of expansionist nationalism and geopolitical deception.

Adhering to an Enemy

The U.S. is far less secure than before 9-11. Tel Aviv clearly intends to continue its serial provocations as evidenced by its ongoing expansion of settlements and its continuing blockade of Gaza. Israel has shown no willingness to negotiate in good faith. With few exceptions, Barack Obama has named as senior advisers either Zionists are those known to be strongly pro-Israeli.

The greatest threat to world peace is not Islam. The most fundamental threat that underlies all others is our “special relationship” with a skilled agent provocateur. Without U.S. support for an enclave of nuclear-armed religious extremists, the common source of this threat could long ago have been identified and steps taken to ensure its containment.

In the same way that lengthy pre-staging was required to induce the U.S. to invade Iraq, a similar strategy is now underway to persuade the U.S. to invade Iran or support an attack by Israel. Pakistan is also now on the agenda of those marketing The Clash narrative with its vision of a perpetual war against “militant Islam.” Similar mental conditioning is again at work, including the high profile branding of the requisite Evil Doer: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad.

From its outset, the Zionist enterprise sought supremacy in the Middle East. To date, its alliance with the U.S. has enabled the deployment of American military might in pursuit of goals set by Jewish nationalists more than a half-century before a Christian Zionist U.S. president was induced to extend nation-state recognition. Harry Truman made that fateful decision despite his fears that Israel would become what Zionist lobbyists assured him it would not become—and what it immediately became: a racist and theocratic state.

Only one nation had the means, motive, opportunity and stable nation state intelligence required to take the U.S. to war in the Middle East while making it appear that Islam—not Israel—is the problem. When a long-deceived American public—especially the U.S. military—grasps the common source of this devastating duplicity, the response will shift the geopolitical landscape. The facts suggest that “sympathy for Israel” is not among the probable reactions.

If Barack Obama continues to cater to these extremists, this Nobel peace laureate can rightly be blamed when the next attack features the usual orgy of evidence pointing to a pre-staged Evil Doer. Should another mass murder occur, that incident may well be traceable to the U.S.-Israeli relationship and to the failure of our policy-makers to protect America—and world peace—from this enemy within.

Yeswecanistan

All the crying from the left about how Obama “the peace candidate” has now become “a war president” … Whatever are they talking about? Here’s what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:

We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don’t do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.

Why should anyone be surprised at Obama’s foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: “Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.” This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.

But the shortcomings of Barack Obama and the naiveté of his fans is not the important issue. The important issue is the continuation and escalation of the American war in Afghanistan, based on the myth that the individuals we label “Taliban” are indistinguishable from those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, whom we usually label “al Qaeda”. “I am convinced,” the president said in his speech at the United States Military Academy (West Point) on December 1, “that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

Obama used one form or another of the word “extremist” eleven times in his half-hour talk. Young, impressionable minds must be carefully taught; a future generation of military leaders who will command America’s never-ending wars must have no doubts that the bad guys are “extremists”, that “extremists” are by definition bad guys, that “extremists” are beyond the pale and do not act from human, rational motivation like we do, that we — quintessential non-extremists, peace-loving moderates — are the good guys, forced into one war after another against our will. Sending robotic death machines flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan to drop powerful bombs on the top of wedding parties, funerals, and homes is of course not extremist behavior for human beings.

And the bad guys attacked the US “from here”, Afghanistan. That’s why the United States is “there”, Afghanistan. But in fact the 9-11 attack was planned in Germany, Spain and the United States as much as in Afghanistan. It could have been planned in a single small room in Panama City, Taiwan, or Bucharest. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? And the attack was carried out entirely in the United States. But Barack Obama has to maintain the fiction that Afghanistan was, and is, vital and indispensable to any attack on the United States, past or future. That gives him the right to occupy the country and kill the citizens as he sees fit. Robert Baer, former CIA officer with long involvement in that part of the world has noted: “The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. They simply want us gone because we’re foreigners, and they’re rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters.” ¹

The pretenses extend further. US leaders have fed the public a certain image of the insurgents (all labeled together under the name “Taliban”) and of the conflict to cover the true imperialistic motivation behind the war. The predominant image at the headlines/TV news level and beyond is that of the Taliban as an implacable and monolithic “enemy” which must be militarily defeated at all costs for America’s security, with a negotiated settlement or compromise not being an option. However, consider the following which have been reported at various times during the past two years about the actual behavior of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban, which can raise questions about Obama’s latest escalation: ²

The US military in Afghanistan has long been considering paying Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul, as the United States has done with Iraqi insurgents.

President Obama has floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban. ³

US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said last month that the United States would support any role Saudi Arabia chose to pursue in trying to engage Taliban officials. ⁴

Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban in various ways.

A top European Union official and a United Nations staff member were ordered by the Kabul government to leave the country after allegations that they had met Taliban insurgents without the administration’s knowledge. And two senior diplomats for the United Nations were expelled from the country, accused by the Afghan government of unauthorized dealings with insurgents. However, the Afghanistan government itself has had a series of secret talks with “moderate Taliban” since 2003 and President Hamid Karzai has called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.

Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the United Nations have become increasingly open about their contacts with the Taliban leadership and other insurgent groups.

Gestures of openness are common practice among some of Washington’s allies in Afghanistan, notably the Dutch, who make negotiating with the Taliban an explicit part of their military policy.

The German government is officially against negotiations, but some members of the governing coalition have suggested Berlin host talks with the Taliban.

MI-6, Britain’s external security service, has held secret talks with the Taliban up to half a dozen times. At the local level, the British cut a deal, appointing a former Taliban leader as a district chief in Helmand province in exchange for security guarantees.

Senior British officers involved with the Afghan mission have confirmed that direct contact with the Taliban has led to insurgents changing sides as well as rivals in the Taliban movement providing intelligence which has led to leaders being killed or captured.

British authorities hold that there are distinct differences between different “tiers” of the Taliban and that it is essential to try to separate the doctrinaire extremists from others who are fighting for money or because they resent the presence of foreign forces in their country.

British contacts with the Taliban have occurred despite British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly ruling out such talks; on one occasion he told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

For months there have been repeated reports of “good Taliban” forces being airlifted by Western helicopters from one part of Afghanistan to another to protect them from Afghan or Pakistani military forces. At an October 11 news conference in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai himself claimed that “some unidentified helicopters dropped armed men in the northern provinces at night.” ⁵

On November 2, IslamOnline.net (Qatar) reported: “The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed. ‘US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast … America wants eight army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of [the] Al-Qaeda network,’ a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net.” ⁶

There has been no confirmation of this from American officials, but the New York Times on October 28 listed six provinces that were being considered to receive priority protection from the US military, five which are amongst the eight mentioned in the IslamOnline report as being planned for US military bases, although no mention is made in the Times of the above-mentioned offer. The next day, Asia Times reported: “The United States has withdrawn its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan [or Nooristan], on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban-led insurgency to orchestrate its regional battles.” Nuristan, where earlier in the month eight US soldiers were killed and three Apache helicopters hit by hostile fire, is one of the six provinces offered to the Taliban as reported in the IslamOnline.net story.

The part about al-Qaeda is ambiguous and questionable, not only because the term has long been loosely used as a catch-all for any group or individual in opposition to US foreign policy in this part of the world, but also because the president’s own national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, stated in early October: “I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” ⁷

Shortly after Jones’s remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal: “Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.” ⁸

From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.

How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007. ⁹

Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d’être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?

So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.

Although the “surge” failed as policy, it succeeded as propaganda.

They don’t always use the word “surge”, but that’s what they mean. Our admirable leaders and our mainstream media that love to interview them would like us to believe that escalation of the war in Afghanistan is in effect a “surge”, like the one in Iraq which, they believe, has proven so successful. But the reality of the surge in Iraq was nothing like its promotional campaign. To the extent that there has been a reduction in violence in Iraq (now down to a level that virtually any other society in the world would find horrible and intolerable, including Iraqi society before the US invasion and occupation), we must keep in mind the following summary of how and why it “succeeded”:

• Thanks to America’s lovely little war, there are many millions Iraqis either dead, wounded, crippled, homebound or otherwise physically limited, internally displaced, in foreign exile, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. Many others have been so traumatized that they are concerned simply for their own survival. Thus, a huge number of potential victims and killers has been markedly reduced.
• Extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place: Sunnis and Shiites are now living much more than before in their own special enclaves, with entire neighborhoods surrounded by high concrete walls and strict security checkpoints; violence of the sectarian type has accordingly gone down.
• In the face of numerous “improvised explosive devices” on the roads, US soldiers venture out a lot less, so the violence against them has been sharply down. It should be kept in mind that insurgent attacks on American forces following the invasion of 2003 is how the Iraqi violence all began in the first place.
• For a long period, the US military was paying insurgents (or “former insurgents”) to not attack occupation forces.
• The powerful Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire for his militia, including attacks against US troops, that was in effect for an extended period; this was totally unconnected to the surge.

We should never forget that Iraqi society has been destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal system, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their security, their friends, their families, their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have their surge.

The War against Everything and Everyone, Endlessly

Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 and wounded some 30 at Fort Hood, Texas in November reportedly regards the US War on Terror as a war aimed at Muslims. He told colleagues that “the US was battling not against security threats in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Islam itself.” ¹⁰ Hasan had long been in close contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric and al Qaeda sympathizer now living in Yemen, who also called the US War on Terror a “war against Muslims”. Many, probably most, Muslims all over the world hold a similar view about American foreign policy.

I believe they’re mistaken. For many years, going back to at least the Korean war, it’s been fairly common for accusations to be made by activists opposed to US policies, in the United States and abroad, as well as by Muslims, that the United States chooses as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that in 1999 one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns ever — 78 days in a row — was carried out against the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia: white, European, Christians. Indeed, we were told that the bombing was to rescue the people of Kosovo, who are largely Muslim. Earlier, the United States had come to the aid of the Muslims of Bosnia in their struggle against the Serbs. The United States is in fact an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become an American bombing target appear to be: (a) It poses a sufficient obstacle — real, imagined, or, as with Serbia, ideological — to the desires of the empire; (b) It is virtually defenseless against aerial attack.

Notes

1. Video on Information Clearinghouse ^↩
2. For the news items which follow if not otherwise sourced, see:
   • The Independent (London), December 14, 2007
   • Daily Telegraph (UK) December 26, 2007
   • The Globe and Mail (Toronto) May 1, 2008
   • BBC News, October 28, 2009 ^↩
3. New York Times, March 11, 2009 ^↩
4. Kuwait News Agency, November 24, 2009 ^↩
5. Pakistan Observer (Islamabad daily), October 19, 2009; The Jamestown Foundation (conservative Washington, DC think tank), “Karzai claims mystery helicopters ferrying Taliban to north Afghanistan”, November 6, 2009; Institute for War and Peace Reporting (London), “Helicopter rumour refuses to die”, October 26, 2009 ^↩
6. IslamOnline, “US Offers Taliban 6 Provinces for 8 Bases“, November 2, 2009^↩
7. Washington Times, October 5, 2009, from a CNN interview ^↩
8. Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2009 ^↩
9. Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007. ^↩
10. Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2009 ^↩

What is Israel’s Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?

When waging war “by way of deception,” the motto of the Israeli Mossad, well-timed crises play a critical agenda-setting role by displacing facts with what a target population can be deceived to believe. Thus the force-multiplier effect when staged crises are reinforced with pre-staged intelligence. In combination, the two often prove persuasive.

That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a “consensus” belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those “facts” proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.

Such agent provocateur operations typically include collateral incidents as pre-staging for the intended main event. Ongoing incidents suggest a follow-on operation is underway. Recent history suggests we’ll see an orgy of evidence that plausibly indicts a pre-staged Evil Doer. Though Iran is an obvious candidate, Pakistan is also a possibility where outside forces have been destabilizing this nuclear Islamic nation with a series of violent incidents.

Will it be coincidence if the next war—like the last—is consistent with the expansive goals of Jewish nationalists?

The Indo-Israel Alliance

December 2007 saw the murder of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mark Siegel, her Ashkenazim biographer and lobbyist, assured U.S. diplomats that her return was “the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.”

President Pervez Musharraf had announced that resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict was essential to the resolution of conflicts in Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan. That comment made him a target for Tel Aviv.

During Bhutto’s two terms as prime minister, Pakistani support for the Taliban—then celebrated as the freedom-fighting Mujahadin—enabled her to wield influence in Afghanistan while also catalyzing conflicts in Kashmir. By fueling tension with India, she also fueled an Indo-Israel alliance as Tel Aviv provided New Delhi an emergency shipment of artillery shells during a conflict over the Kirpal region of Kashmir.

In January 2009, Israel delivered to India the first of three Phalcon Airborne Warning & Control Systems (AWACS) shifting the balance of conventional weapons in the region. That sale confirmed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier announced: “Our ties with India don’t have any limitation….” That became apparent in April when Israel signed a $1.1 billion agreement to provide India an advanced tactical air defense system developed by Raytheon, a U.S. defense contractor.

In August 2008, Ashkenazim General David Kezerashvili returned to Georgia from Tel Aviv to lead an assault on separatists in South Ossetia with the support of Israeli arms and training. That crisis ignited Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, key members of the Quartet (along with the EU and the UN) pledged to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Little was said about the Israeli interest in a pipeline across Georgia meant to move Caspian oil through Turkey and on to Eurasia, using Israel as an intermediary while undermining Russia’s oil industry.

More Game Theory Warfare?

Bhutto’s murder ensured a crisis that replaced Musharaff with Asif Ali Zardari, her notoriously corrupt husband. By Washington’s alliance with Zardari, the U.S. could be portrayed as extending its corrupting influence in the region.

On August 7, 2008, the Zadari-led ruling coalition called for a no-confidence vote in Parliament against Musharraf just as he was departing for the Summer Olympics in Beijing. On August 8, heavy fighting erupted overnight in South Ossetia. As with many of the recent incidents in Pakistan, this violent event involved armed separatists.

But for pro-Israeli influence inside the U.S. government, would our State Department have installed in office the corrupt Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, leading to record-level poppy production? Is the heroin epidemic presently eroding Russian society traceable to Israel’s infamous game theory war-planners? [See “How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare” http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/08/26/jeff-gates-how-israel-wages-game-theory-warfare/ and “Israel and 9-11” http://www.middle-east-online.com/English/?id=34283.]

In late November 2008, a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India’s financial center, renewed fears of nuclear tension between India and Pakistan. When the attackers struck a hostel managed by Chabad Lubavitch, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect from New York, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced from Tel Aviv: “Our world is under attack.” By early December, Israeli journalists urged that we “fortify the security of Jewish institutions worldwide.”

Soon after “India’s 9-11” was found to include operatives from Pakistan’s western tribal region, Zardari announced an agreement with the Taliban to allow Sharia law to govern a swath of the North West Frontier Province where Al Qaeda members reportedly reside.

Pakistani cooperation with “Islamic extremists” created the impression of enhanced insecurity and vulnerability for the U.S. and its allies. That perceived threat was marketed by mainstream media as proof of the perils of “militant Islam.”

With the Taliban and Al Qaeda portrayed as operating freely in a nuclear-armed Islamic state, Tel Aviv gained traction for its claim that a nuclear Tehran posed an “existential threat” to the Jewish state. Meanwhile Israel’s election of an ultra-nationalist/ultra-orthodox coalition further delayed resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

More delay is destined to evoke more extremism and gain more traction for those marketing the “global war on terrorism.” Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni argued after the assault in Mumbai: “Israel, India and the rest of the free world are positioned in the forefront of the battle against terrorists and extremism.”

In announcing that list, Islamabad was indicted by its exclusion even though Pakistan is dominantly Sunni and, unlike Iran’s Shi’a, abhors theocratic rule. The fact patterns suggest that Pakistan, not India, was the target of the murderous terrorism in Mumbai.

Advised by legions of Ashkenazim, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent mission to Islamabad was a diplomatic disaster. Abrasive and arrogant, America’s top diplomat reinforced Pakistani concerns that it is surrounded by hostile forces and that the nation is being set up to fail by Jewish nationalist advisers to a nation it considered an ally.

In a climate of heightened tensions, Clinton undermined U.S. interests, boosted the Israeli case for a global war on “Islamo-fascism” and lent credence to the Clash of Civilizations.

Destabilization as a Prequel to Domination

As Afghanistan and Pakistan join other nations being destabilized by outside forces, key questions must be answered:

• Was India’s 9-11 a form of geopolitical misdirection meant to serve both the tactical goals of Muslim extremists and the strategic goals of Jewish nationalists? Who benefits—within Pakistan—from humiliation at the hands of India and the U.S.?
• With Bhutto’s murder and Musharraf’s departure, the crisis in Mumbai drew Pakistani forces to the Indian border and away from the western tribal region. Was that the geostrategic goal of these well-timed crises? What role, if any, did Israel play?
• Is delay in ending the occupation of Palestine part of an agent provocateur strategy? Was the latest assault on Gaza part of this strategy?

Each of these crises incrementally advanced the expansionist agenda of Colonial Zionists. Do these collateral incidents trace their origin to a common source? Is that source again using serial events to pre-stage a main event?

The public has an intuitive grasp of the source of this oft-recurring behavior. An October 2003 poll of 7,500 respondents in member nations of the European Union found that Israel was considered the greatest threat to world peace.

Is terrorism limited to “Islamo-fascists”? Are mass murders also deployed—from the shadows—as a strategy of geopolitical manipulation by those who Ashkenazim philosopher Hannah Arendt described as “Jewish fascists”?

Will Tel Aviv Take the U.S. to War – Again?

Tel Aviv long ago proved its mastery at waging war “by way of deception” – the operative credo of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence and foreign operations directorate. Yet its latest operation reveals a need to freshen up its repertoire of dirty tricks. As Israel’s patron, those of us who live in the U.S. are painfully familiar with such duplicity. Yet the recent frequency of its frauds renders their latest treachery remarkably transparent.

Consider the similarities. First a network of pro-Israelis fixed the intelligence that induced us to invade Iraq in support of an expansionist agenda for Greater Israel. Who can forget Iraqi WMD, scary images of mushroom clouds and secret meetings in Prague? Who can fail to recall the yellowcake uranium from Niger and those ominous warnings of “high-level contacts” between secular Baghdad and the religious fundamentalists of Al Qaeda?

Even Colin Powell was duped when pro-Israelis in the G.W. Bush administration associated his credibility with false U.N. testimony avowing Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories. Though all was deception, it had the intended effect. To others, it looked like the U.S. was at fault. Yet our policy-makers are no better than the information on which they must rely—and the allies they are persuaded to trust.

The same old Israeli duplicity is back but with a new twist. And, importantly, ably aided by a new commander-in-chief. As with the deception that induced the invasion of Iraq, war in Iran also requires weaving a web of consensus beliefs from threads of deceit.

This time there is less emphasis on fixed intelligence than on false impressions—albeit with the same goal: to advance an Israeli agenda. Though Tel Aviv’s goals for Iran are now within reach, the success of this latest operation is not yet assured.

The Cast

The stage-managing of this presidency has been a wonder to behold—even when compared with G.W. Bush. This latest production involves two key insiders, both Jewish. Rahm Emanuel, son of an Irgun operative and the most influential chief of staff in decades, served in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1991 Gulf War. Communications Director David Axelrod oversaw a campaign strategy that garnered 78% of the Jewish vote.

It’s not difficult to imagine the source of the chutzpah that flew Obama from a speech in Cairo—meant to mollify Muslims—directly to a Holocaust photo-op at a death camp in Germany. Communication-wise, which event left the deeper impression? Was that trip meant for the 1.3 billion Muslims miffed at six decades of U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine? Or did these presidential image-makers aim to please the American Ashkenazim that fondly refer to Barack Obama as “the first Jewish president”?

Who but pro-Israeli insiders could insert in a U.N. speech by the first Black president a racist reference to “the Jewish state of Israel”? That code phrase was certain to provoke Muslims worldwide, particularly those whose lands Israel occupies. Even Harry Truman, a political product of Kansas City’s corrupt Pendergast political machine, deleted that theocratic and racist reference when, in May 1948, he extended U.S. recognition to an enclave of violent Jewish extremists soon after they ethnically cleansed 400-plus Palestinian villages.

The Plot

So now comes a new twist on an old trick. First Barack Obama was persuaded by his advisers to lambast Iran for a covert nuclear site—days after it was revealed by Tehran. So already it looks to the public like yet another U.S. president is relying on flawed intelligence. When Iran promised cooperation with international inspectors, Tel Aviv quickly countered that Israel may well attack anyway. Why not? After all, the U.S. attacked Iraq. And clearly U.S. intelligence is no better now than then, right?

So what if Iran, like Iraq, has no WMD? That misses the point. A nuclear-armed “Jewish state” of five million can still attack a Muslim nation of 75 million using U.S.-provided, laser-guided bunker-buster bombs. Tel Aviv can then point to the similarity of its patron’s conduct when the U.S. launched a preemptive attack based on false intelligence.

Winning is not the point. There is no military solution in the Middle East. The point is to create yet another crisis and yet another provocation. And, importantly, to once again make the U.S. appear guilty by association. Absent another crisis that misdirects attention and consumes scarce intelligence resources, Americans will soon enough be forced to confront an uncomfortable fact: Israel, its lobby and its supporters deceived us to wage its wars.

Americans are not stupid. We are, however, perilously misinformed. Yet that too traces to pro-Israelis in mainstream media. Absent another crisis, Americans may well awaken to the essential role played by a complicit media in these serial deceptions.
The Consequences

Iran is not about nuclear weapons. Neither was Iraq. Iran is about the need for serial well-timed crises to advance Israel’s expansionist agenda. No one dares bring that agenda to a vote. Or even mention it. Thus the treachery required of those whose numbers are few but whose ambitions are great. What choice do they have but to wage war by way of deception?

Yet this time Americans are more aware of how such duplicity can progress in plain sight. They have access to Internet news. Wade through the online clutter and the analyses found there can expose the common source of this deceit, including its media support.

Plus Americans are hurting. They know something is fundamentally amiss. Yet they are understandably wary of conspiracy theories. They want facts. As the facts point to a common source for much of what is wrong, those complicit are scrambling to obscure that source. That scrambling, in turn, is making that source steadily more transparent.

To date, this political product of Chicago’s Ashkenazim has been a catastrophe for national security. And for an economy poised to decline at an accelerating pace. Yet he’s ideal for those skilled at waging war on nations from within. And for those proficient at inducing us to freely embrace the very forces that now imperil our freedom.

We Americans may persist on this path, seduced by the allure of empty eloquence. Or we could awaken. If so, this latest president could find that, like recent predecessors, his legacy is relegated to infamy. Given the course Obama has set, Americans may yet take matters into their own hands to protect what he is allowing this purported ally to imperil.

Workers to Obama: No Recovery in Sight

After the recent unemployment numbers were announced, smug politicians promising economic recovery stuttered a bit. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Mainstream economists were predicting a smooth upswing in employment, but in September 263,000 more jobs were lost, 62,000 more than August.

Obama reacted predictably to the surprise. He first pointed out that “employment is the last thing to recover from a recession,” and concluded that “…we are going to need to grind out this recovery, step by step.” Brilliant.

Not one word on measures to help out the staggering number of unemployed workers, 1.4 million of which will have their benefits dropped by the end of the year. Behind them are millions more workers who’ve been unemployed for over six months — 5.4 million and counting.

All Obama is offering is “hope” that the economy will get better, an illusion shared by most of the mainstream media. Sometimes, however, the truth sneaks into Big Media. This from the New York Times:

“…the underlying weakness of the economy will probably reassert itself, say experts. After years of borrowing against homes and cashing in stock to spend in excess of their incomes, many Americans are tapped out. Austerity and saving have replaced spending and investment in many households, constraining the economy.” (October 2, 2009)

When an economy is dependent on 70 percent consumer spending and the nation’s consumers are effectively bankrupt, recovery comes from…the government. Indeed, the economic “green shoots” that the Democrats still obsess over were real, and based on government programs such as the highly touted Cash for Clunkers, and tax credits for first time homeowners, while the financial recovery was simply banks using bailout money to gamble on Wall Street.

It is estimated that these government subsidies resulted in 700,000 car sales and potentially 400,000 home sales, having a positive ripple effect on other parts of the economy that contribute to the making and distributing of cars and houses.

Cash for Clunkers has since ended and car sales are plummeting: Ford is down 5 percent, Toyota 13 percent, Honda down 20 percent, Chrysler down 42 percent, and GM down 45 percent (Bloomberg, October 2, 2009).

The homeowner subsidy ends soon, and with it the second economic pillar will have been removed, leaving Wall Street gambling to uphold the barely-functioning economy.

Many workers are starting to realize they’ve been lied to about the recession ending; patience is wearing thin. If Obama thinks he can keep the country’s workers quiet forever by telling us to “tighten belts” and remain “patient,” he has another think coming.

The reality of the situation is forcing itself upon the minds of millions of people, who will stay patient only as long as their budgets allow. The seemingly quiet American working-class has profound resentment and bitterness brewing right below the surface, to be released at any given moment.

When the majority of workers become suddenly engaged in politics, they’ll likely begin demanding that unemployment benefits be extended, and that the government provide living wage jobs with a worker-directed stimulus package.

There is much work to be done on America’s crumbling infrastructure, and many workers are available to do the job. Unfortunately, Democrats seem more intent on maintaining foreign wars and bailing out banks, policies that have created an enormous American debt. It is this debt, say Democrats and Republicans, that prevents the government from spending any money on worker-oriented programs.

Therefore, unions and community organizations must also demand that a plan be worked out to address the debt issue; wars and bank bailouts must stop, and taxes for the super-wealthy must be raised to pre-Reagan levels. American society has plenty of resources to address the needs of the working-class, but not while corporations have complete control over the direction of the country.

To switch directions we need a mass working-class movement, but such a thing will not fall out of the sky. A mass movement will emerge when unions and community groups organize together and begin collectively demanding specific changes in government policy. Likely, such a pro-worker coalition will be ignored by the corporate-owned Democrats, and find it necessary to break with the two-party system forever.

The U.S. Creeps Closer to a Police State

When word first arrived that the G-20 would be meeting in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, activists began organizing protest demonstrations. Events like this are what freedom of speech is made for. What better occasion to protest than a meeting of the world’s 20 top leaders — most of them deservedly hated — where they will be imposing policy on billions of people worldwide?

The majority of protesters consisted of labor and community groups; they encountered an army of police…literally. The New York Times paints an intimidating picture:

“…the police were out in force, patrolling on bicycles, foot and horseback, by river and by air … protesters trying to march toward the convention center…encountered roaming squads of police officers carrying plastic shields and batons. The police fired a sound cannon (a new weapon) that emitted shrill beeps … then threw tear gas canisters that released clouds of white smoke and stun grenades that exploded with sharp flashes of light.” Rubber bullets were used in a separate incident.

And:

“Riot fences lined the sidewalks. Police helicopters, gunboats and Humvees darted to and fro. City officials announced they had up to 1,000 jail cells ready after county officials freed up additional space last week by releasing 300 people who had been arrested on minor probation violations.” (September 25, 2009).

What threat required such a military-like response? None was given. The New York Times article and many like it imply that the mere existence of marching protesters warrants a colossal reaction. Of course the presence of “anarchists” is used to further scare readers into accepting such foolishness, as if this breed of protester is especially lethal (the vast majority of anarchists are like all protesters — they do not attack the police or anybody else, though some protesters respond aggressively when being confronted with the above mentioned police weapons).

The G-20 police presence is not a terrible surprise to anyone who has attended a legitimate, community-organized protest over the years. Non-provoked usage of brutal weaponry is becoming commonplace; the police-enforced use of “free speech zones” at protests — small areas surrounded by fences in some cases — is nothing new.

But the staggering police presence at the G-20 confirms that the stakes have been raised. Two turning points that deserve special attention — since the mainstream media continues to ignore them — are last years Democratic and Republican National Conventions. In both cases incredible abuses of police powers were witnessed, with the Republican Convention (RNC) showcasing the most extreme cases of state repression.

At the RNC the unlawful tactic of mass arrests were used when, in separate incidents, a public park and bridge were surrounded by police, trapping everyone in the dragnet. The documentary, Terrorizing Dissent, has excellent footage of both episodes (www.terrorizingdissent.org). Police brutality was also a regular occurrence at the RNC — including much unnecessary usage of pepper spray and tasers — while occurring alongside an even more troubling episode.

The group now referred to as the RNC 8 consists of eight community organizers potentially facing years in jail for helping organize protests at the RNC. The original charge was the Orwellian Conspiracy to Riot in the second degree in Furtherance of Terrorism (other terrorism-related charges were later added). These terrorism charges were the first ever usage of the Patriot Act toward political activists. And although the terrorism provisions of the charges have since been dropped, due to public pressure, the attempt to equate terrorism with activism has incredible, non-accidental implications for the future.

When the Patriot Act was first enacted, there was no shortage of writers and activists warning about the potential of misuse. These predictions have been fully confirmed. Both the Military Commissions Act and the Patriot Act have created what many believe to be the framework for a full-fledged police state, with the initial flurry of abuses creating a series of dangerous precedents.

One famous precedent is the so-called Telecom scandal, where tele-communication corporations colluded with the Bush-controlled National Security Agency to illegally spy on an unknown number of innocent people. No one has gone to jail for this. Indeed, as a Senator, Obama was one of many Democrats who supported Bush’s telecom immunity bill, which excuses those who broke the law while creating new powers to make spying on Americans legal.

Equally outrageous is the Military Commissions Act, created under Bush to destroy a fundamental democratic right: habeas corpus, or due process. This right says that the government cannot jail a person unless there is proof of crimes committed, while also giving that person a chance to challenge these charges in a legal court with a jury.

Bush created a separate category of person called an “enemy combatant,” which he claimed was too dangerous to be treated constitutionally. An “enemy combatant” can be tried in a military court with secret or no evidence; or they can be jailed forever without even the symbolic military trial. Of course, it is only a hop and a skip away for political activists charged with terrorist crimes to be considered “enemy combatants” or “domestic terrorists.”

Obama continues to uphold Bush’s destruction of due process. Obama has said publicly that many so-called enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay will be held “indefinitely” without being tried for their alleged crimes. Supposedly, they are “the worst of the worst.” If this is true then evidence should be produced to prove it, since anyone can accuse anybody of the most heinous crimes. Without evidence, however, such accusations correctly fall on deaf ears. But no more. Now, accusations of “terrorist activities” warrant life sentences. No crime need be committed, only a vague intention — even if such intentions were formed by the suggestions of an FBI informant and are impossible to implement. The media blares these absurd “terrorist plots” as facts, and the rationale behind the destruction of civil liberties is re-enforced.

It must not be forgotten that many of the “crimes” Guantanamo Bay inmates are being accused of are merely acts of resistance to the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, something they have every right to do.

The grossly illegal Guantanamo Bay is not being closed down like Obama promised, but moved. The equally illegal Bagram air base in Afghanistan is getting an upgrade, this according to the Independent:

“The air base is about to undergo a $60 [million] (£42m) expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.” (February 22, 2009).

Not only will Bagram continue to be an institution of terror, but also some analysts estimate that there remain 18,000 people held worldwide in foreign U.S. facilities — so-called black sites — with no legal rights. The absence of even Red Cross observation at these prisons insures that “harsh interrogations” (torture) will remain a regular habit.

The above abuses of the Patriot Act have trickled down from high-profile terrorism cases (some who have made confessions under torture), to regular usage against alleged gang members, drug dealers and immigrants.

For example, one section of the Patriot Act gives police the power to search people’s home secretly without notifying the homeowner — called “sneak and peeks,” a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. The logic again was that “special powers” were needed to track down “terrorists.” The Huffington Post reported, “Only three of the 763 “sneak-and-peek” requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases… Sixty-five percent were drug cases.” (September 23, 2009).

The illegal entry and searching of immigrant’s homes — or anyone suspected of being an immigrant — is widely known by the Latino community and continues to include the terror-inducing tactics of pre-dawn raids with guns drawn.

Once anti-constitutional behavior is applied to alleged terrorists, and extended to immigrants and people suspected of being gang members or drug dealers, such police behavior becomes normalized, and can then be easily expanded to all people accused of being “criminals.” Police are widely known to consider political activists, protesters, and striking workers as criminal types, beliefs encouraged by the mainstream media.

Which brings us to why? Why does the destruction of democratic rights that accelerated under Bush continue with Obama? With every political “why” question one must first answer: who benefits?

In this case the benefiting parties are the giant corporations that dominate politics in the U.S. The people steering these companies had good foresight: they saw that the global capitalist economy necessitated a race to the bottom for workers’ living standards. As U.S. corporations faced stiffer competition abroad for international markets, wages and benefits for U.S. workers would have to shrink, especially when U.S. corporations were investing heavily in emerging economies — China, India, etc., — for their slave wages.

U.S. corporate executives also understood that China became a police state out of necessity, so that its dollar-a-day workers could be brought into line (U.S. corporate investment rose sharply after the Tiananmen Square massacre). The trend of U.S. workers’ wages leads logically to similar conclusions.

The creation of NAFTA to extend the dominance of U.S. corporations to Mexico and Canada would also have predictably negative effects on workers’ living standards. Now, with two unpopular wars taking place and a third on the way (Pakistan) to further extend the profit margins of U.S. corporations, a breaking point is nearing.

Public money is being used to bail out banks and wage foreign wars while the recession continues to destroy jobs and drive down wages. This unpopular policy is viewed as a necessity for U.S. corporations, and Obama has no intention of reversing course. The police-state foundation created by Bush and continued under Obama is a stern warning to the U.S. working class to accept our fate or face dire consequences. It is already a fact that many people are too afraid of police repression to attend a protest, just as some workers are too afraid to be on a picket line during a strike.

Ultimately, a real democracy cannot function where there exists tremendous inequalities in wealth, where large sections of the population are in poverty. This is why democracies are not viable in poor countries: the super-rich use their power over the state — including dictatorships and mass repression — to crush social movements that challenge the status quo, as we are witnessing today in Honduras. The same dynamic is being created in the United States, where the vast majority of people are clamoring for real change, while those in the two-party system are using all means available to keep their rotten system in place.

Israel’s Fifth Column: The People in Between

In October 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates coined a generic term to describe the most challenging combatants when waging unconventional warfare. He called them simply “the people in between.” Those people, a dominant force in mainstream American media, comprise a fifth column in support of those skilled at waging war by way of deception.

The term ‘fifth column’ originated in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to depict forces that clandestinely undermine a populace—from within—to aid an external enemy. The term was later cited as a rationale for interning citizens during WWII, including Germans in the U.K and Japanese in the U.S. Israelis routinely refer to Arab-Israelis as a fifth column residing within what Tel Aviv describes as the Jewish state.

Though misapplied in practice, the term remains an apt depiction of how internal influence can be wielded by a hostile force. In the Information Age, this fifth column focuses on those ‘in between’ domains where modest numbers can wield outsized influence. Television news is optimal as modern-day media operates “in between” a populace and the facts they require for a system of governance reliant on informed consent.

The dominant influence of pro-Israelis in mainstream media is not the focus of this article. Here the focus is Wolf Blitzer at Cable News Network who typifies how “the people in between” manipulate public opinion in plain sight and, to date, with legal impunity.

While working as a Washington correspondent for Jerusalem Post (1973-1990), Blitzer served as an editor of Near East Report, a publication founded by Isaiah Kenen, a registered foreign agent of Israel, who also founded the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC coordinates a network of transnational political operatives known loosely as “the Israel lobby.” Neither AIPAC nor Blitzer has yet registered as a foreign agent in the U.S.

The son of Polish Ashkenazi émigrés, Blitzer first emerged on the media scene in 1989 with the publication of Territory of Lies, an account of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard that The New York Times obligingly included in its list of “Notable Books of the Year.” Reviewer Robert Friedman described Blitzer’s sympathetic treatment of Pollard’s treason (the theft of more than one million classified documents) “a slick piece of damage control that would make his former employers at AIPAC (not to mention Israel’s Defense Ministry) proud.”

As a writer for Hebrew language newspapers in the 1970s, Blitzer wrote under the name Ze’ev Barak—Hebrew for “wolf lightning.” The Blitzer media presence first emerged with his CNN coverage of the Gulf War in 1991 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Initially a military reporter for CNN, he became a fixture on television news as CNN’s Clinton-era White House correspondent until 1999 when he became a high profile CNN anchor.

Since August 2005, CNN (marketed as “the most trusted name in news”) has featured the former AIPAC editor broadcasting from a White House-associative studio set branded as “The Situation Room.” CNN colleague John King deploys a similar credibility enhancing set by broadcasting from “The State of the Union.”

Abuse of the Public Trust

On one key media principle U.S. law is clear: the airwaves belong to the public. The nation’s Founders knew that the preservation of self-governance depends on an informed populace. That’s why modern-day lawmakers enacted legislation to ensure that media outlets are not concentrated in a few hands, enabling a fifth column to shape public opinion around a predetermined agenda.

Little could America’s first lawmakers have known that an ideologically aligned few would concentrate broadcast media in the hands of those who share an undisclosed bias. When Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon fell ill in Israel, Blitzer’s broadcast originated from Jerusalem. Likewise when Israel invaded Lebanon in July 2006. Blitzer again relocated to Israel to focus viewer attention on the situation there.

As Tel Aviv sought to expand the war to Iran, several anti-Zionist rabbis appeared in Tehran alongside Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who echoed their wish that Zionism be “erased from the pages of history” (widely reported as a wish to “wipe Israel off the map”). Rather than interview these dissident rabbis, Blitzer featured David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. Rather than associate the Iranian president with anti-Zionism, Blitzer used the Situation Room to associate him with racism and anti-Semitism.

Between the U.S populace and the facts they require for informed consent lies an “in between” domain. In that realm is found a network of like-minded fifth column operatives whose pro-Israeli bias works unseen—yet in plain sight—to shape public opinion around a predetermined agenda. That agenda-shaping “news” routinely features commentators from think tanks who share the same bias.

What is the reach of this media-induced corruption of informed consent? According to CNN’s August 2009 advertising in The New York Times, this cable network delivers trusted news to 70.6 million television viewers in the U.S. What’s been the cost in blood and treasure of this undisclosed bias—not just to the U.S. but also worldwide?

The most trusted name in news featured National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in September 2002 when she issued a fact-free warning about Iraqi WMD: “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” From the Pentagon’s perspective, “the people in between” are waging unconventional warfare. From the perspective of this enemy within, the only unconventional aspect of their deception is the fact that a long-deceived public is now learning about it—many of them for the first time.

The displacement of facts with what a populace can be induced to believe is the very threat to personal freedom that the Founders sought to escape. The only modern aspect of this ancient form of warfare is the reach of the media technologies with which such deception can now operate—as with CNN—on a global scale.

Money-Lender Bernanke Should Be Fired

“GET AHOLD OF FIFTY OF THE WEALTHIEST JEWISH FINANCIERS,” urged Henry Ford in his Dearborn Independent “and you will put an end to all wars.”

Ford’s warning was presaged by Rabbi Reichorn speaking at the funeral of Grand Rabbi Simeon Ben-Judah in 1869: “Thanks to the power of our International Banks we have forced Christians into countless wars. Our banks grow fat on Christian wars. Millions of Christians have been swept off the face of the earth by wars – and the end is not yet.”

And from the 20th Century German economist, Werner Sombert: “In the TALMUD you will find that the Jews made an art of lending money. They fathomed all the secrets that lay hidden in money. They became Lords of Money and Lords of the World.”

If any should ignore these quotes as being ‘Anti-Semitic,’ President Bill Clinton’s mentor, Professor Carroll Quigley, affirmed all of the above in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope:

“A network of international financiers exists who have no aversion to cooperating with the Communists or any other groups to reach their aims. I know of the operations of this financial network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted in the early 1960s to examine its papers and secret records.” View All Quotes Here.

And now with Ben Shalom Bernanke, the chief Jewish money-lender (WITH INTEREST) of the Fed, appointed by Obama for a second term, the necks of Christian Americans are being squeezed into further deadly servitude by war-funding (WITH INTEREST) Jews.

WHY BERNANKE SHOULD BE FIRED

“THE VERY PEOPLE WHO DEVISED THE POLICIES THAT PRODUCED THE MESS WE ARE NOW IN,” writes Thomas Woods in his best-seller, Meltdown, “are now posing as the wise public servants who will show us the way out.”

Any idiot will tell you that Ben Shalom Bernanke, the chief Jewish money-lender of the United States of America, is at the top of the list of high-finance Jews who got America into the current economic malaise in the first place.

Succeeding Alan Greenspan in 2006 after serving on the Board of Governors since 2002, Bernanke was in a position to know that a pending housing bubble explosion due to the Fed’s easy credit was about to burst upon America – as it indeed did in August of 2008.

When the “wise public servants,” that is, the world’s central bankers met last week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, held August 20-21, Bernanke delivered to his fellow Jewish international bankers the opening address: Reflections On A Year Of Crisis.

Bernanke reflected in his speech that he had presided over a similar gathering a year ago at a time when the financial crisis was thought—at least by the international Jewish money lenders—to be relatively under control. “While there were signs of a slowdown,” Bernanke said, “there was little to suggest that the financial situation was about to take a sharp turn for the worse.” (Did Bernanke say this with a straight face?)

Yet for all of his education in monetary policy, Bernanke ignored the mainstream media’s warnings, reported as early as April of 2006, of rising housing prices conjoined with falling housing sales. A tell-tale sign that the housing bubble was about to burst was that rental properties did not follow the trend with its own rising prices, but remained stable.

If we were to grade Bernanke’s perfomance on a curve along with the performance of his fellow Jewish banksters, then Ben Shalom Bernanke would get at least a passing grade.

But if ordinary journalists warned us of a pending economic crisis as early as 2006, then by comparison, Bernanke flunked. Why should a flunkee be given another chance? (Because Obama is ruled by Jews, that’s why.)

WHERE’S THE $2 TRILLION BEN?

THE DUNCE BERNANKE ALSO APPEARS to be a lying thief. He has refused to provide the public, or even the relevant congressional committees, with information on the trillions of dollars in loans that were made through the Fed’s special lending facilities.

As Dean Baker of The Guardian points out, the information we do have, is not encouraging. At the peak of the financial crisis in October of 2008, the Jewish bank, Goldman Sachs, converted itself from an investment bank into a bank holding company so that it could tap an FDIC loan guarantee programme.

Remarkably, Bernanke allowed Goldman Sachs to continue to act as an investment bank, taking highly speculative positions even after it had borrowed $28bn with the FDIC’s guarantee. View Dean Baker’s Article Here & Here.

How is it that only after six months since Goldman Sachs received a bailout from US taxpayers, Goldman’s CEO, the Jew, Lloyd Blankfein, announced a profit of $2 billion on April 14, 2008, one day before enslaved Gentiles paid their taxes? Does this not give us a hint where Bernanke’s secret $2 trillion went? (Synagogue buddies always take care of their own.)

If Ben Shalom Bernanke was in any other line of work, he would never be re-appointed. This would be like the captain of the Titanic asking for another command based on how quickly he swam to shore while everyone else drowned.

But in spite of the low standards upon which Jewish money-lenders base their actions before the ‘dumb goys,’ Bernanke and his fellow Jewish banksters always get their way…

http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=431

Keeping Track of the Empire’s Crimes

If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA’s hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don’t know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it’s an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.¹

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don’t qualify as “assassinations”, for somehow killing “terrorists” from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.

But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media’s practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence)²; the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to, and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966³, referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.⁴

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries⁵
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world⁶

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

“The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.”⁷

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when it’s killed tens of thousands of them simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving … utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life’s savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It’s not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same “causes” for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world’s oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: “I want everyone to know,” he said during an interview in November. “They died for us.”⁸

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we’ll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she’s a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he’s as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don’t enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes, would not agree with her. “At the constitutional level where we work,” he said, “ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.”⁹

By Sotomayor’s own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she’s a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the “War on Terror”? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. “The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group,” the Washington Post reported. “On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue.”¹⁰ No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people’s legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.

It didn’t have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: “Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.”

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his “Stop NATO” mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world’s only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station’s transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO’s bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the “Stop NATO” mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] yahoo.com. Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you’ll receive is often considerable. You’ll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages.

Notes

1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009 ^?
2. Fabian Escalante, “Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro” (Ocean Press, 2006) ^?
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32^?
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23 ^?
5. Ibid., chapter 18 ^?
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions ^?
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com ^?
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009 ^?
9. William O. Douglas, “The Court Years, 1939-1975″ (1980), p.8 ^?
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007 ^?

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