"Emboldened by their adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and deluded by the IAEA conclusion that Iraq has no nuclear weapons, the warlords are set to go into a war that will definitely lead to massive bloodshed in the Middle East and the downfall of the United States as we see it."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11981.htm

Why America will reap in Iran what it doesn’t expect

By abid Ullah Jan

02/19/06 "ICH" -- [link] -- Many anti-war analysts believe that Iran has no nuclear weapons program in place and no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to the contrary. Yet they fear that the Bush administration’s spurious accusations and subsequent war will lead to a wider World War.

If Iran has no nuclear weapons, as concludes Mohammed el-Baradei the respected chief of the IAEA, the war on Iran, in itself, will not lead to the speculated World War 3. It will only worsen the situation worldwide. Instead of directly ending up in a World War, the war on Iran will only become a next phase in spreading the World War that is already on without our realizing that we are passing through its initial phases [link] . [1]

On the other hand, a false assumption that Iran has no nuclear weapons will, in fact, quickly engulf many more countries and take the World War that is already on [link] to a quick climax.[2]

Under-estimating Iran’s nuclear capacity is pushing the extremists in Washington into launching a war that the US administration has been planning since a long time. The IAEA’s inspections and confirmation that Iran has no nuclear weapons and there is no nuclear program in operation are no different than the confirmation by the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Confirmation of the absence of weapons actually led to the United States' final decision to launch a war of aggression on Iraq.

This time around, the United States is in for a big trouble. It is attacking Iran, not for the reason that it has, or it is planning to have nuclear weapons, but only because it has assumed that Iran is years away from producing nuclear weapons.

Many analysts believe that an attack on Iran will turn into a World War because the Iranian government has a long-range strategy for "asymmetrical" warfare that will disrupt the flow of oil and challenge American interests around the world. Certainly, if one is facing an implacable enemy that is committed to "regime change" there is no reason to hold back on doing what is necessary to defeat that adversary. However, the main reason for escalation of the conflict will be exactly the assumption on the part of the United States, Israel and Britain that Iran cannot respond with nuclear weapons.

At a time when nuclear material—including red mercury and different forms of Uranium—were flowing in the streets of Pakistan [link] , a high ranking Pakistani official, working in the Iranian consulate, told this writer that Iran is obtaining smuggled nuclear material from its field commanders in Afghanistan. It was well before the nuclear testing by India and Pakistan took place. Keeping this fact in mind, it is simply naïve to assume that the United States or Israel will launch an un-provoked war of aggression on Iran, and Iran will remain a sitting duck and not retaliate with what it must have refined and retooled since mid-nineties.[3]

Even if we assume that the Iranian government purchased nuclear material without any intention of putting it to use, it is highly unlikely that it will still let this material gather dust while it is being openly and seriously threatened by the United States and Israel. If scientists in Germany and the United States could work to develop nuclear weapons from scratch during the World War II, how long will it take a nation pushed against the wall and with all the ingredients available to put something workable together and retaliate with a bang?

So, the practical chances of Iran’s retaliation with a nuclear weapon in the face of a war of aggression imposed on it are far more than the theoretical assumptions that Iranian Intelligence will plan covert operations which will be carried out in the event of an unprovoked attack on their facilities.

It is true that a nuclear response from Iran would mean a definite suicide when looked in perspective of the nuclear power of the United States and Iran. But it also doesn’t make any sense that the United States would keep bombing Iran, the way it has planned, into the Stone Age, yet despite being able to respond, Iran will simply turn the other cheek. This chain of inevitable reactions will in fact lead a wider conflagration that the warlords in Washington and Tel Aviv have not even imagined.

Emboldened by their adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and deluded by the IAEA conclusion that Iraq has no nuclear weapons, the warlords are set to go into a war that will definitely lead to massive bloodshed in the Middle East and the downfall of the United States as we see it. Despite Bush and company’s claims that the world is not the same after 9/11, the world remained more or less the same after 9/11. However, their world will surely turn upside down with their miscalculation of going into a third war of aggression in five years.

The Russian and Chinese stakes in this issue cannot be ignored altogether. Attacking Iran would prove too much for Russia and China. Russia has snubbed Washington by announcing it would go ahead and honor a $700 million contract to arm Iran with surface-to-air missiles, slated to guard Iran's nuclear facilities. And after being burned when the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority invalidated Hussein-era oil deals, China has snapped up strategic energy contracts across the world, including in Latin America, Canada and Iran. It can be assumed that both China and Russia will not sit idly by and watch Iran being annihilated by the United States.

If Iran is attacked with lethal force, it will retaliate with the utmost force available at its disposal; that much is certain. Remembering my discussion 9 year ago with a well informed source who was working for the Iranian government, I am pretty sure that the utmost force in the hands of Iran definitely includes nuclear weapons. One of the signs for that is the confidence with which the Iranian government responds to US threats.

Iranian leaders have acted responsibly and reasonably so far. It is always the mistake of extremists to misjudge the behavior of reasonable men. The Iranians tried to avoid purchasing nuclear material from the Pakistani black market to avoid arousing unnecessary suspicion. They kept their nuclear program limited to energy production. It is the United States and its allies which are provoking it into reaction. As a result, it has been a mistake of reasonable men in Iran to mistake the behavior of extremists in Washington and not getting out of NPT or testing a few nuclear devices to balance its power against its enemies.

Many analysts are predicting that attack on Iran will be provoked because a majority of Americans are not in favor of a new war. Although setting up a pre-text [link] for domestic support cannot be ruled out, one can say with certainty from the track record of Bush and company that they will hardly bother to engineer another terrorist attack.[4] In the fits of madness, they have already made themselves believe that they have enough justification to wage a war or aggression on Iran. The Washington Times [link] has already started beating war drums and promoting "policy experts" who believe the US must go alone if needed (Feb 6, 2006).[5]

Irrespective of any pretext and going alone or in a coalition of barbarians, the signs tell us that the warlords are not going to relinquish their totalitarian dreams. It is very unfortunate on their part that they are putting their hands in hornet nest where they may get stung with nuclear weapons. Their retaliation, for sure, will lead to total disaster. A disaster, far worse than what the title "World War 3" can convey.


Abid Ullah Jan's latest book, The Musharraf Factor [link] was released in December 2005. His book, Afghanistan: The Genesis of the Final Crusade will be released shortly.

Notes/links:

1. icssa.org/ICSS%20-%20waronIslam.beginning_of_final.htm [link]

2. icssa.org/ICSS%20-%20waronIslam.world_war_is_on.htm [link]

3. www.icssa.org/mocking_pakistan.htm [link]

4. www.montrealmuslimnews.net/iranheather.htm [link]

5. washingtontimes.com/upi/20060203-044418-1878r.htm [link]

"How ironic that the Pentagon proposes using nuclear weapons on the pretext of protecting the world from nuclear weapons. Ironic also that Iran has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything," yet those pushing for an attack, the USA and Israel, have not."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11980.htm

WWIII or Bust: Implications of a US Attack on Iran

"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous... Having said that, all options are on the table." George W. Bush, February 2005

By Heather Wokusch


BR> 02/19/06 "ICH" -- [link] -- Witnessing the Bush administration's drive for an attack on Iran is like being a passenger in a car with a raving drunk at the wheel. Reports of impending doom surfaced a year ago, but now it's official: under orders from Vice President Cheney's office, the Pentagon has developed "last resort" aerial-assault plans using long-distance B2 bombers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles with both conventional and nuclear weapons.

How ironic that the Pentagon proposes using nuclear weapons on the pretext of protecting the world from nuclear weapons. Ironic also that Iran has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything," yet those pushing for an attack, the USA and Israel, have not.

The nuclear threat from Iran is hardly urgent. As the Washington Post reported in August 2005, the latest consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies is that "Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon [link] , roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years." The Institute for Science and International Security estimated that while Iran could have a bomb by 2009 at the earliest [link] [PDF] , the US intelligence community assumed technical difficulties would cause "significantly delay." The director of Middle East Studies at Brown University and a specialist in Middle Eastern energy economics both called the State Department's claims of a proliferation threat from Iran's Bushehr reactor "demonstrably false," concluding that "the physical evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran simply does not exist." [link]

So there's no urgency - just a bad case of déjà vu all over again. The Bush administration is recycling its hype over Hussein's supposed WMD threat into rhetoric about Iran, but look where the charade got us last time: tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a country teetering on civil war and increased global terrorism.

Yet the stakes in Iran are arguably much higher.

Consider that many in the US and Iran seek religious salvation through a Middle Eastern blowout. "End times" Christian fundamentalists believe a cataclysmic Armageddon will enable the Messiah to reappear and transport them to heaven, leaving behind Muslims and other non-believers to face plagues and violent death. Iran's new Shia Islam president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, subscribes to a competing version of the messianic comeback, whereby the skies turn to flames and blood flows in a final showdown of good and evil. The Hidden Imam returns, bringing world peace by establishing Islam as the global religion.

Both the US and Iran have presidents who arguably see themselves as divinely chosen and who covet their own country's apocalypse-seeking fundamentalist voters. And into this tinderbox Bush proposes bringing nuclear weapons.

As expected, the usual suspects press for a US attack on Iran. Neo-cons who brought us the "cakewalk" of Iraq want to bomb the country. There's also Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, busy coordinating the action plan against Iran, who just released the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review calling for US forces to "operate around the globe" in an infinite "long war." One can assume Rumsfeld wants to bomb a lot of countries.

There's also Israel, keen that no other country in the region gains access to nuclear weapons. In late 2002, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Iran should be targeted [link] "the day after" Iraq was subdued, and Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party, recently warned that if he wins the presidential race in March 2006, Israel will "do what we did in the past against Saddam's reactor," an obvious reference to the 1981 bombing of the Osirak nuclear facility in Iraq. It doesn't help that Iran's Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a myth and said that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

In the eyes of the Bush administration, however, Iran's worst transgression has less to do with nuclear ambitions or anti-Semitism than with the petro-euro oil bourse Tehran is slated to open in March 2006. Iran's plan to allow oil trading in euros threatens to break the dollar's monopoly as the global reserve currency, and since the greenback is severely overvalued due to huge trade deficits, the move could be devastating for the US economy.

So we remain pedal to the metal with Bush for an attack on Iran.

But what if the US does go ahead and launch an assault in the coming months? The Pentagon has already identified 450 strategic targets, some of which are underground and would require the use of nuclear weapons to destroy. What happens then?

You can bet that Iran would retaliate. Tehran promised a "crushing response" to any US or Israeli attack, and while the country - ironically - doesn't possess nuclear weapons to scare off attackers, it does have other options. Iran boasts ground forces estimated at 800,000 personnel, as well as long-range missiles that could hit Israel and possibly even Europe. In addition, much of the world's oil supply is transported through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch of ocean which Iran borders to the north. In 1997, Iran's deputy foreign minister warned that the country might close off that shipping route if ever threatened, and it wouldn't be difficult. Just a few missiles or gunboats could bring down vessels and block the Strait, thereby threatening the global oil supply and shooting energy prices into the stratosphere.

An attack on Iran would also inflame tensions in the Middle East, especially provoking the Shiite Muslim populations. Considering that Shiites largely run the governments of Iran and Iraq and are a potent force in Saudi Arabia, that doesn't bode well for calm in the region. It would incite the Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Iran's, potentially sparking increased global terrorism. A Shiite rebellion in Iraq would further endanger US troops and push the country deeper into civil war.

Attacking Iran could also tip the scales towards a new geopolitical balance, one in which the US finds itself shut out by Russia, China, Iran, Muslim countries and the many others Bush has managed to piss off during his period in office. Just last month, Russia snubbed Washington by announcing it would go ahead and honor a $700 million contract to arm Iran with surface-to-air missiles, slated to guard Iran's nuclear facilities. And after being burned when the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority invalidated Hussein-era oil deals, China has snapped up strategic energy contracts across the world, including in Latin America, Canada and Iran. It can be assumed that China will not sit idly by and watch Tehran fall to the Americans.

Russia and China have developed strong ties recently, both with each other and with Iran. Each possesses nuclear weapons, and arguably more threatening to the US, each holds large reserves of US dollars which can be dumped in favor of euros. Bush crosses them at his nation's peril.

Yet another danger is that an attack on Iran could set off a global arms race - if the US flaunts the non-proliferation treaty and goes nuclear, there would be little incentive for other countries to abide by global disarmament agreements either. Besides, the Bush administration's message to its enemies has been very clear: if you possess WMD you're safe, and if you don't, you're fair game. Iraq had no nuclear weapons and was invaded, Iran doesn't as well and risks attack, yet that other "Axis of Evil" country, North Korea, reportedly does have nuclear weapons and is left alone. It’s also hard to justify striking Iran over its allegedly developing a secret nuclear weapons program, when India and Pakistan (and presumably Israel) did the same thing and remain on good terms with Washington.

The most horrific impact of a US assault on Iran, of course, would be the potentially catastrophic number of casualties. The Oxford Research Group predicted that up to 10,000 people would die [link] if the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites, and that an attack on the Bushehr nuclear reactor could send a radioactive cloud over the Gulf. If the US uses nuclear weapons, such as earth-penetrating "bunker buster" bombs, radioactive fallout would become even more disastrous.

Given what's at stake, few allies, apart from Israel, can be expected to support a US attack on Iran. While Jacques Chirac has blustered about using his nukes defensively, it's doubtful that France would join an unprovoked assault, and even loyal allies, such as the UK, prefer going through the UN Security Council.

Which means the wildcard is Turkey. The nation shares a border with Iran, and according to Noam Chomsky, is heavily supported by the domestic Israeli lobby in Washington, permitting 12% of the Israeli air and tank force to be stationed in its territory [link] . Turkey's crucial role in an attack on Iran explains why there's been a spurt of high-level US visitors to Ankara lately, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director Porter Goss. In fact, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported in December 2005 that Goss had told the Turkish government it would be "informed of any possible air strikes against Iran a few hours before they happened" and that Turkey had been given a "green light" [link] to attack camps of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Iran "on the day in question."

It's intriguing that both Valerie Plame (the CIA agent whose identity was leaked to the media after her husband criticized the Bush administration's pre-invasion intelligence on Iraq) and Sibel Edmonds (the former FBI translator who turned whistleblower) have been linked to exposing intelligence breaches relating to Turkey, including potential nuclear trafficking. And now both women are effectively silenced.

The US public sees the issue of Iran as backburner, and has little eagerness for an attack on the country at this time. A USA Today/CNN Gallup Poll from early February 2006 found that a full 86% of respondents favored either taking no action or using economic/diplomatic efforts [link] towards Iran for now. Significantly, 69% said they were concerned "that the U.S. will be too quick to use military force in an attempt to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons."

And that begs the question: how can the US public be convinced to enter a potentially ugly and protracted war in Iran?

A domestic terrorist attack would do the trick. Just consider how long Congress went back and forth over reauthorizing Bush's Patriot Act, but how quickly opposing senators capitulated following last week's nerve-agent scare in a Senate building. The scare turned out to be a false alarm, but the Patriot Act got the support it needed.

Now consider the fact that former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi has said the Pentagon's plans to attack Iran were drawn up "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack [link] on the United States." Writing in The American Conservative in August 2005, Giraldi added, "As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

Chew on that one a minute. The Pentagon's plan should be used in response to a terrorist attack on the US, yet is not contingent upon Iran actually having been responsible. How outlandish is this scenario: another 9/11 hits the US, the administration says it has secret information implicating Iran, the US population demands retribution and bombs start dropping on Tehran.

That's the worst-case scenario, but even the best case doesn't look good. Let's say the Bush administration chooses the UN Security Council over military power in dealing with Iran. That still leaves the proposed oil bourse, along with the economic fallout that will occur if OPEC countries snub the greenback in favor of petro-euros. At the very least, the dollar will drop and inflation could soar, so you'd think the administration would be busy tightening the nation's collective belt. But no. The US trade deficit reached a record high of $725.8 billion in 2005, and Bush & Co.'s FY 2007 budget proposes increasing deficits by $192 billion over the next five years. The nation is hemorhaging roughly $7 billion a month on military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is expected to hit its debt ceiling of $8.184 trillion next month.

So the white-knuckle ride to war continues, with the administration's goals in Iran very clear. Recklessly naïve and impetuous perhaps, but clear: stop the petro-euro oil bourse, take over Khuzestan Province (which borders Iraq and has 90% of Iran's oil) and secure the Straits of Hormuz in the process. As US politician Newt Gingrich recently put it, Iranians cannot be trusted with nuclear technology, and they also "cannot be trusted with their oil."

But the Bush administration cannot be trusted with foreign policy. Its military adventurism has already proven disastrous across the globe. It's incumbent upon each of us to do whatever we can to stop this race towards war.


Originally from California, Heather Wokusch (heather@heatherwokusch.com) spent many years in Asia and Europe and through her travels has developed a unique perspective on the world and its people. With a background in clinical psychology, she works as a free-lance writer and cross-cultural trainer. Her writing has been featured across the web and in periodicals internationally. Visit her website www.heatherwokusch.com/ [link]

©Heather Wokusch 2002-2005

"...You might even want to bone up on your Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath) and see how the folks back then in the 30s dealt with the dust bowl depression days. Or, or what? You just might want to tell that sonofabush in DC what you think of him..."

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_518.shtml

Bush Bankrupts America

By Jerry Mazza

Online Journal Contributing Writer

Feb 19, 2006, 17:06

Under George W. Bush’s $2.77 trillion budget for fiscal 2007, federal spending would top revenue by $354 billion, following a six-year string of staggering deficits -- 2005’s was $429 billion. And that’s just for openers. Step right up, it’s the greatest rip on earth!

Bush’s 2007 budget also includes $120 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, total since 9-11 attacks about $440 billion. That’s apart from the defense budget upped 7 percent from last year to $439.3 billion. While spending on war like crazy, tax cuts to the rich so far weigh in at $880 billion. Bush recommends making them permanent, his Rx for disaster.

The red ink will wash like blood across the total federal debt to almost $9.3 trillion. It's dragging interest charges will make it even harder to deal with future fiscal problems. Consumer and corporate interest rates will be higher, making it harder to expand business, more difficult to live.

Additionally, while planning cuts in Medicare and Social Security, the president snuck some $700 billion for privatization in his budget (as of 2010) to be paid out over the first seven years, which revenues ironically would come from Social Security tax revenues. This is the same privatization plan Congress dumped with a thud last time it was presented.

But like the good Duce he is, he won't go away fast, at least not until he breaks the economy and he gets busted himself for his various illegalities: lying about Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction; killing Iraq citizens and American soldiers; outing a CIA operative whose husband, Joe Wilson, caught him lying about yellow-cake uranium from Niger; okaying NSA spying on US Citizens; torturing Abu Ghraib prisoners against the Geneva Conventions; not to mention the ever-widening, well-documented case that the administration participated in and engineered 9-11. Quite a rap sheet. And that’s just a paragraph.

Borrowing More and More

While the warring and tax-cutting sap us dry, the US trade deficit ballooned to a record $726 billion in 2005, swollen by a tsunami of imports from China, along with soaring energy prices. Remember who was and is the oil business’s little helper. In December, the US imported overall $65.7 billion more than it exported, up from $64.5 billion in November. The only things moving up for real in the Bush economy are debt, spending and tax cuts, all acida.

In fact, two of Bush Group’s heftiest imports are oil and money. China facilitates our debt by lending us even more, in return for US Bonds (those “worthless i.o.u.’s,” pieces of paper in the Social Security Trust). Foreign oil dependency is courtesy in part of our non-productive high-profit, home-grown energy companies, who get it out of the ground and refined cheaper they say “over there,” not far from where all the boys are dying.

Any rise in the GDP is coming from the housing bubble, where homeowners (mainly on the coasts) are converting their homes' soaring values into equity, that is, loans on the bubble prices. When the inflated wealth bursts, it will leave a lot of hurt people. For sure, it will be an ugly day on Wall Street in the securities and bond markets.

Losing Far More Jobs than Created

Job growth over the last five years is the lowest ever. We (the US economy) were 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. Anyone for immigration control? Add to that, US manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs in the last five years, close to 17 percent of its workforce, across the board. Remember when we were the manufacturing envy of the world? Them days be long gone, boss.

Forty-three percent of communication equipment’s workforce is gone; 37 percent of semiconductors and electronics components’ workforce gone; 30 percent of computers and electronic products’ workforce gone; 25 percent of electrical equipment and appliances workforce gone; 12 percent of automobile and parts’ workforce gone; 17 percent of furniture and related products’ workforce gone; almost 50 percent of apparel manufacturers’ workforce gone; 43 percent of textile mills’ workforce gone; 20 percent of paper and paper products’ workforce gone; 7 percent of beverages and tobacco products’ workforce gone. Want more? Why not? Slash, slash, slash, for cash.

So-called smart jobs: 17 percent of the information sector gone; 25 percent of telecommunications’ workforce gone. Wholesale and retail jobs gone. Four percent of bookkeeping jobs gone. Nine percent in computer systems design gone. Two hundred-nine thousand managers' and supervisors’ jobs gone. What’s up, Doc?

In five years, the economy created a measly 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, mostly clerical. Engineering enrollments are sliding, no gigs for grads. Several hundred thousand engineers out of work for years. One of them, Walter M., writes to me in a pure red hot rage every now and then. What can I tell the guy that he doesn’t know better than I do? These guys can’t even work at China-Mart because they’re told they’re overeducated. They might try to start a union, or compute the real value of hours put in and not paid for.

Are we screwed or are we screwed? There’s more.

Outsourcing and Offshore Production

The two words in the subhead have left the highly educated, once-employed up the creek without a paddle, and often with a PhD. And this doesn’t include people who have quietly given up. There is no recovery in sight that would pull people back like it did in the old days after a recession.

There’s so much permanent unemployment it’s not even reported anymore. Job types and industries have been buried by arbitrage gravediggers as the Corpos replace Americans with foreigners working not quite as well but certainly cheaper. The long range effects of their less than equal competence will be paid for by the consumer. Yes, those were the wheels that flew off your Chebby, baby.

Economists who are not rewriting government press releases rate US unemployment at between 7 percent and 8.5 percent. They say there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who won’t get back their investment in a college or university schooling. Apples anyone, nice, red, juicy? In fact, these sources say we’re experiencing a depression in jobs. Thank you, globalization. You’re an equal opportunity un-employer.

Our Free Marketers, working with Bush & Company, have sold us out; sold us into a kind of skin of the teeth making it slavery. It should happen to them, with my blessings!

Cutting More for War

Bush will look for more money by taking it now and in the future from health care, education, the environment (more about that in a minute), safety and veterans programs. Helluva guy. Even though spending on elementary and secondary education goes up in fiscal 2007, it peaks then down, down, down. Same goes for National Institutes of Health, Mine Safety and Health Administration, the federal nutrition program for women and children, homeless assistance, US marshals service and other programs.

US Forests For Sale

Yup, as of Feb. 11, the LA Times tells us Bushy would like to sell more than $1 billion in public lands over 10 years. This includes 85,000 acres of national forest in California. Is this land this piker’s to sell? I thought this land was your land; this land was my land. Or is Pete Seeger been putting us on all these years? The land proceeds would pay for roads and rural schools to make up for the federal subsidy cut from Bush’s 2007 budget. Get how nice it works?

Of course, Congress must rubber stamp, excuse me, approve this plan or he’ll have them shot. Not, just sent to the back of the class to stare at the wall with a dummy’s hat on. See, this is the largest land sale of its kind since President Teddy Roosevelt created the US Forest Service in 1905 and our modern national forest system. Professor of Enviromental History at Houston’s Trinity University, Char Miller, called it “ . . . A fire sale of public lands . . . utterly unprecedented. It signals that the lands and the agency that manages them are in deep trouble. For the American people, it is an awful way to understand that it no longer controls its public land.”

And, in a second proposal stuck into the 2007 budget, White House goons ordered the US Bureau of Land Management to sell off at least $350 million in public land, the money to go directly to their pockets, excuse me, the general treasury. Believe it. It’s happening.

And Now the Good News

As of this writing (February13) there are only 341 shopping days until Christmas, during which you can get yourself a little deeper in debt with your credit cards. Forget the stats. They’re too depressing. You suffered enough. But maybe (if you have one) you’ll want to sell your house in Malibu for big bucks (Sam, are you listening) and buy a piece of Yellowstone and live there as a bear. Sam’s a screenwriter friend of mine, and it could work for him, if anyone. Or I could sell my pad in New York before the bubble bursts. I could go and hide in a cave with the Berkshire bears and a laptop of course. Hey, yeah.

You can, too, particularly if you’re Chinese-American, move to China, and grab some of that American Cash via some multinational pie-maker. Or if you're Sino-American try Japan for some mulitnational sushi. Or, you might want to get yourself a Sari and some tanning lotion and take off for India. "Hi, my name is Cindy, can I have your mother’s birthday, please." How bout it?

You might even want to bone up on your Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath) and see how the folks back then in the 30s dealt with the dust bowl depression days. Or, or what? You just might want to tell that sonofabush in DC what you think of him. Like what a sceeve (New York street for the Italian, schifezza: disgusting, dreadful, rubbish) he is, for taking down a beautiful country like this. And maybe one day, one way, life will return the favor. Right, George. We love you a bunch, baby, especially the way you say "nucular."


Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer residing in Manhattan. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal

http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=8569


February 18, 2006

Not Another No-End-in-Sight War

by Gordon Prather


Last week, Representative Ron Paul (R, TX) pleaded with the House to not pass the House Concurrent Resolution entitled "Condemning the Government of Iran for violating its international nuclear nonproliferation obligations and expressing support for efforts to report Iran to the United Nations Security Council":


"Those reading this bill may find themselves feeling a sense of deja vu. In many cases one can just substitute 'Iraq' for 'Iran' in this bill and we could be back in the pre-2003 run up to war with Iraq.

And the logic of this current push for war is much the same as was the logic used in the argument for war on Iraq.

As earlier with Iraq, this resolution demands that Iran perform the impossible task of proving a negative – in this case that Iran does not have plans to build a nuclear weapon."


As Ron Paul notes, there are no violations of Iran’s "international nuclear nonproliferation obligations" for the House to condemn.

As a signatory to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons since 1968, Iran has undertaken


"not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly;

not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and

not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices."

As of this writing, there is no evidence that Iran has violated any of these "undertakings."

Furthermore, Iran – as a non-nuclear-weapons party to the NPT – concluded in 1974 a Safeguards Agreement [.pdf] with the International Atomic Energy Agency "with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices."


The IAEA Statute requires IAEA inspectors to report any observed non-compliance with Safeguards Agreements to the Director-General "who shall thereupon transmit the report to the Board of Governors".

The Board is then required to call upon the recipient State or States "to remedy forthwith any non-compliance which it finds to have occurred."

Until 2003 the Director-General apparently never had occasion to make such a report to the Board. However, in December, 2003, Iran signed an Additional Protocol to its Safeguards Agreement, and although not required to do so, immediately began to adhere to it provisions.

The Additional Protocol allows for intrusive snap-inspections of Safeguarded sites, as well to inspect – upon presentation of cause – non-Safeguarded sites, import and export records of dual-use materials, technologies, equipment, etc.

Consequently, IAEA inspectors began to discover activities – some taking place as early as 1985 – that the IAEA contended should have been made subject to Iran’s original Safeguards Agreement.

Nevertheless, by December, 2004, the Director-General was able to report to the Board that Iran was now in compliance with its original Safeguards Agreement, that there were no un-safeguarded "source or special nuclear materials" in Iran and that none of those activities the IAEA contended should have been reported involved the use of source or special nuclear materials "in furtherance of any military purpose."

The IAEA Statue requires the Board to report non-compliance to all members and to the Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations.

Apparently, the Board has yet to make such a report about Iran.

Now, the NPT imposes certain requirements on the IAEA Board, too. In particular:


"The safeguards required by this article shall be implemented in a manner designed to … avoid hampering the economic or technological development of the Parties or international cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including the international exchange of nuclear material and equipment for the processing, use or production of nuclear material for peaceful purposes…"


In other words, the IAEA Board, itself, is violating Article IV of the NPT when it "deems it necessary" – as in did in its resolution of 6 February, 2006 – for Iran to


* "re-establish full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development,"

* "reconsider the construction of a research reactor moderated by heavy water" and

* "implement transparency measures … which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol, and include…access to individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual use equipment, and certain military-owned workshops.


So, if the House wants to condemn someone for "violating its international nonproliferation obligations," why not condemn the IAEA Board? That’s not likely to result in another no-end-in-sight war.


Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.

http://www.counterpunch.org/werther02182006.html

Weekend Edition February 18 / 19, 2006


Who Is Osama? Where Did He Come From? How Did He Escape? What About Those Anthrax Attacks?

A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don't Want You to Ask

By WERTHER


The events of September 11, 2001 evoke painful memories, tinged with a powerful nostalgia for the way of life before it happened. The immediate tragedy caused a disorientation sufficient to distort the critical faculties in the direction of retrospectively predictable responses: bureaucratic adaptation, opportunism, profiteering, kitsch sentiment, and mindless sloganeering.

As 9/11, and the report of the commission charged to investigate it, fade into history like the Warren Commission that preceded it, the questions, gaps, and anomalies raised by the report have created an entire cottage industry of amateur speculation--as did the omissions and distortions of the Warren Report four decades ago. How could it not?

While initially received as definitive by a rapturous official press, the 9/11 Report has been overtaken by reality, not only because of unsatisfying content--like all "independent" government reports, it is fundamentally an apology and a coverup masquerading as an exposé--but because we now know more: more about the feckless invasion of Iraq, more about the occupation of Afghanistan and the purported hunt for Osama bin Laden, more about the post-9/11 stampede to repeal elements of the Bill of Rights, more about the rush to create the Department of Homeland Security, an agency to "prevent another 9/11," which, in retrospect, is plainly about cronyism, contracts, and Congressional boodle.

Many of the amateur sleuths of the 9/11 mystery have based their investigations on microscopic forensics regarding the publicly released video footage, or speculations into the physics of impacting aircraft or collapsing buildings. But staring too closely at the recorded traces of subatomic phenomena involved in a one-time event can deceive us into finding the answer we are looking for, as Professor Heisenberg once postulated. Over 40 years on, the Magic Bullet is still the Magic Bullet: improbable, yes, but not outside the realm of the possible.

But there is surprisingly little discussion of the basic higher-order political factors surrounding 9/11, factors that do not require knowledge of the melting point of girder steel or the unknowable piloting abilities of the presumed perpetrators. Let us proceed, then, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, to ask questions the 9/11 Commission was unprepared to ask.


1. Who is Osama bin Laden, and where did he come from?

On this point, the report retreats into obfuscation. While acknowledging that he had something to do with resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the report suggests, without explicitly so stating, that the links between Osama and the United States were practically nonexistent. This will not parse: until the present Global War on Terrorism, the CIA's operation against the Red Army in Afghanistan was the biggest and most expensive covert operation in the agency's history. The 9/11 Report provides no convincing documented refutation of Osama's links with the CIA, given that the agency was running a major war in which he was a participant. Similarly, the report's authors did not plumb the informal U.S. government connections with the same Saudi government whose links with the bin Laden family could have provided a cut-out for any CIA-Osama relationship. [1]

2. When were Osama's last non-hostile links with the U.S. government?

Consistent with its view of Osama's relationship with the CIA during the anti-Soviet enterprise, the 9/11 Report ignores the possibility that he may have had a continuing relationship with the U.S. government, particularly with its intelligence services. The report brushes this hypothesis aside with a footnote to the effect that both the CIA and purported second-ranking al Qaeda figure Ayman al Zawahiri deny a relationship. [2]

One may doubt the veracity of Langley's denials of a relationship with Osama bin Laden and his associates, given the lack of truthfulness of its earlier statement to the Warren Commission about not having had a relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald. Or in alleging that an employee named "Mr. George Bush" whom the agency cited in its reporting of the events of 22 November 1963 was a completely different person from the George Bush who subsequently became the 41st U.S. president, after serving as Director of Central Intelligence.

Likewise, Mr. Zawahiri's assertion of not having received a penny of CIA funds deserves the searchlight of skeptical scrutiny. What the report describes as Zawahiri's "memoir" is actually a broadside published in a London-based newspaper in December 2001, i.e., after the events of 9/11. It was obviously intended as a call to the Muslim faithful for a holy war against the infidel desecrator of the holy places; would such a person, conscious of the need to gain recruits in a war of pure faith against the Great Satan, have confirmed having been on the payroll of his principal enemy? It is no more likely than for the current President of the United States, in drawing parallels between the war in Iraq and World War II, to advert to the fact that his grandfather's bank was seized by the U.S. government in 1942 for illicit trading with the Third Reich.

Indeed, U.S. intelligence agencies have had, purely as a function of their charters, relationships with most of the world's scoundrels, con-men, and psychopaths of the last 70 years: from Lucky Luciano and the Gambino Mob, to Reinhard Gehlen and Timothy Leary, to the perpetrators of the massacre of 500,000 people in Indonesia in 1965, to the Cuban exiles who blew up an airliner in 1976 [3], to such shady characters as Ahmed Chalabi and his friend "Curveball." Among such a gallery of murderous kooks, bin Laden and his cohorts do not especially stand out.

More dispositive than these speculations, however, are the very real connections between Washington and Islamic jihadists in the Balkans throughout the 1990s. The report hints at this relationship by mentioning the presence of charity fronts of bin Laden's "network" in Zagreb and Sarajevo. In fact, the U.S. government engaged in a massive covert operation to infiltrate Islamic fighters, many of them veterans of the Afghan war, into the Balkans for the purpose of undermining the Milosevic government. The "arms embargo," enforced by the U.S. military, was a cover for this activity (i.e., using military force to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on).

A key Washington fixer for the Muslim government of Bosnia was the law firm of Feith and Zell. Yes, Douglas Feith, one of the principal conspirators involved in launching the Iraq war under the banner of opposing Islamic terrorism, was a proponent of introducing Islamic terrorists into South Eastern Europe. Do the "Islamofascists" of pseudo-conservative demonology accordingly seem less like satanic enemies and more like puppets dangling from an unseen hand? Or perhaps the analogy is incorrect: more like a Frankenstein's Monster that has slipped the control of its creator.

3. How did the President of United States React to the August 6 2001 Presidential Daily Brief?

Although the August 6 PBD had been mentioned in the foreign press since 2002, it did not come to the attention of official Washington until then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice impaled herself upon the hook of 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben Veniste's artful line of questioning in mid-2004. Blurting out the title of the PBD, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," she let the cat out of the bag--or perhaps not. Having opened Pandora's Box, the commissioners displayed no troublesome curiosity about its contents.

What concrete measures did the president take after receiving perhaps the most significant strategic warning that any head of state could have hoped to receive about an impending attack on his country? Did he alert the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the Border patrol, the Federal Aviation Administration, to comb through their current information and increase their alert rates? Did the threat warning of the PBD (granted that it did not reveal the tail numbers of the aircraft to be hijacked), in combination with the numerous threat warnings from other sources [4] elicit feverish activity to "protect the American people?" Not that we can observe.

So what was the actual response of the U.S. government? Here the 9/11 Report exhibits autism. As nearly as we can determine from contemporaneous bulletins, the president massacred whole hecatombs of mesquite bushes and large-mouthed bass, perfected his golf swing, and hosted various captains of industry in the rustic repose of Crawford, Texas. In other words, he presided over the most egregious example of Constitutional nonfeasance since the administration of James Buchanan allowed Southern secessionists to take possession of the arms in several federal arsenals. The 9/11 Commission's silence on this point is an abundant demonstration of its role as an apologist, rather than a dispassionate truth-teller.

The testimony of federal officials about what they did up to and during the attacks is telling, in so far as the false and misleading statements of witnesses provide clues. Ms. Rice, her tremulous voice betraying nervousness, averred, against the plain evidence of the public record and common sense, that a PBD stating that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike within the borders of the United States was too ambiguous to take any action.

Likewise, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft may have perjured himself when he denied under oath that acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard came to him on July 5, 2001 with information of terrorist plots--information that the Attorney General "did not want to hear about anymore," as NBC News reported on June 22, 2004. It might be considered a matter of Ashcroft's word against Pickering's, except for the fact that Pickering had a corroborating witness.

4. Who wrote the script for the rhetorical response to 9/11?

The smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center complex and the Pentagon when the unanimous and universal cry erupted in government circles, and was relentlessly amplified by the media, that this was "war," not a criminal act of terrorism. How very convenient that this war, declared against a diffuse and stateless entity, would trigger long-sought legal authorities and constitutional loopholes which would not apply in the case of a criminal act. [5] Torture, domestic spying, selective suspension of habeas corpus, all the unconstitutional monsters whose implications are only clear four years after the event, all slipped into immediate usage with the rhetorical invocation of war.

This was not merely war, it was unlimited war, both in the sense of total war meant by General Ludendorff (civilian rights being trivial), and in the sense of lacking a comprehensible time span. "A war that will not end in our lifetimes," said Vice President Cheney on Meet the Press on the very Sunday following the attacks. How could he be so sure during the fog of uncertainty following the strike?

If bin Laden and his followers were merely a limited number of fanatics living in Afghan caves, as we were assured at the time, why did the Bush administration relentlessly advance the meme that a decades-long war was inevitable? Could not a concerted intelligence, law-enforcement, and diplomatic campaign, embracing all sovereign countries, have effectively shut down "al Qaeda" within a reasonable period of time--say, within the period it took to fight World War II between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender?

Four years on, Vice President Cheney, doing a plausible imitation of the radio voice of The Shadow, continues to publicly mutter, in menacing tones of the lower octaves, that the war on terrorism [6] is a conflict that will last for decades. [7] This at the same time as the junior partner of the ruling dyarchy, the sitting president, is giving upbeat speeches promising victory in the war on terrorism (i.e., Iraq, the Central Front on the War on Terrorism) against a papier maché backdrop containing the printed slogan "Strategy for Victory."

It is curious that no one--not the watchdogs of the supposedly adversary media, nor the nominal opposition party in Washington, nor otherwise intelligent observers--has remarked on this seeming contradiction: victory is just around the corner, yet the war will last for decades. Quite in the manner of the war between Eastasia and Oceania in 1984.

In earlier times, this contradiction would have seemed newsworthy, if not scandalous. Suppose President Roosevelt had opined at the Teheran Conference that the Axis would be defeated in two years. Then suppose his vice president had at the same time traveled about the United States telling his audiences that the Axis would not be defeated for decades. An American public not yet conditioned by television would at least have noticed, and demanded some explanation.

So question number 4 concludes with a question: why does the U.S. government hive so firmly to the notion of a long, drawn-out, indeterminate war, when Occam's Razor would suggest the desirability of presenting a clear-cut victory within the span of imagination of the average impatient American--a couple of years at most? Or is endless war the point?

5. Why did the mysterious anthrax attacks come and go like a wraith?

For those in immediate proximity to the events, the September 11attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were frightening in the extreme, but they had not the slow accumulation of dread that the anthrax scare of October 2001 presented. Far more than any anomaly concerning 9/11 itself, the anthrax mystery is the undecoded Rosetta Stone of recent years.

The anthrax attacks were the most anomalous terrorist attacks in history: clever, successful, unpunished, causing five deaths and a billion dollars' damage. Yet never repeated. This alone makes them remarkable in the annals of criminal activity, but there is more--the intended victims (at least those with an official position) were warned in writing of their peril in sufficient detail that they could take steps to administer an antidote. Is this characteristic of terrorist attacks by "al Qaeda," or by any known Middle Eastern terrorist group?

Except for the ambiguous first attack (which killed a National Enquirer photo editor), all the deaths resulting from the anthrax plot were incidental--mail handlers and innocent recipients of mail which had been contaminated by proximity to the threat letters. Evidently the West Jefferson anthrax strain was more powerful and had greater accidental effects than the plotters had intended.

But what did the plotters intend, if they did not will the deaths of the addressees of their anthrax letters? It was pure coincidence, perhaps, that the anthrax scare was at its height, producing psychosomatic illness symptoms among members of Congress and staffers, just as the USA PATRIOT Act was wending its way through the legislative process. This measure, which originated among the same Justice Department lawyers who legally opined that torture was wholesome, was rammed through the Congress after enactment of the authorization of the use of force in Afghanistan. Why is this sequence significant?

The then-majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle, wrote a curious op-ed in the Washington Post four years after the events just described. [8]. In attempting to refute the administration's allegation that it had been granted plenary wiretap powers in the Afghanistan authorization, he stated that he and his Senatorial confreres explicitly rejected an administration proposal to authorize an effective state of war within the borders of the United States itself.

Given the administration's repeatedly demonstrated refusal to accept any limitation on its powers, it is logical that the rebuff on the war powers authorization was followed by the prompt submittal of the Justice Department's draft of the PATRIOT Act, containing many of the domestic authorities the Bush White House had sought in the use of force legislation. How doubly coincidental that two of the limited number of addressees of the threat letters should have been the offices of Daschle himself, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, then-chairman of the committee of jurisdiction over the PATRIOT Act.

Needless to say, the measure was passed by an even more comfortable margin than that enjoyed by the 1933 Enabling Law in the Reichstag. [9] Notwithstanding buyer's remorse exhibited by many members of Congress, and current efforts to amend its more onerous provisions, it appears we are saddled with the main burdens of its edicts in perpetuity.

How the government placed this perpetual burden on its citizens is bound up with the mysterious anthrax scare of October 2001, an outrage that, unlike 9/11, does not even merit an official explanation. No one has been charged.

6. Why did Osama bin Laden escape?

"Wanted, dead or alive!" "We'll smoke 'em out of their caves!" All Americans know the feeling of righteous retribution that attended the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the autumn and winter of 2001. Yet, suddenly, it fizzled out and became subsumed in attacking Iraq and its oilfields.

We know the explanation. Somehow, bin Laden escaped in the battle of Tora Bora, because "the back door was open." Only after the invasion of Iraq, more than a year later, was there general acknowledgement that resources intended for Afghanistan had been diverted to the buildup for Iraq. The public was lead to believe that supplemental appropriations for Afghanistan were siphoned into the Iraq project beginning about mid-2002.

But the strange apathy about Osama's whereabouts began sooner than that. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Bob Graham states the following:

"I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central Command to go into his office [this presumably means the CENTCOM Commander, GEN Tommy Franks. Underlings do not summon senior Senators into their offices]. We did, the door was closed, and he turned to me, and he said, 'Senator, we have stopped fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.' This is February of 2002 [emphasis added]. 'Senator, what we are engaged in now is a manhunt not a war, and we are not trained to conduct a manhunt.'"

Senator Graham elaborates on this matter in his book, Intelligence Matters, on page 125:

"At that point, General Franks asked for an additional word with me in his office. When I walked in, he closed the door. Looking troubled, he said, 'Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.'

"'Excuse me?" I asked.

"'Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,' he continued. 'The Predators are being relocated. What we are doing is a manhunt. We have wrapped ourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. We're better at being a meat axe than finding a needle in a haystack. That's not our mission, and that's not what we are trained or prepared to do.'"

In the first excerpt, the military officer might be ambivalent about the change in mission, merely saying that the U.S. military is supposedly not trained for conducting manhunts. The second excerpt provides more substance, suggesting that Franks himself agrees that looking for Osama bin Laden is a mug's game ("We have wrapped ourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.")

There we have it: as early as February 2002, the U.S. government was pulling the plug. Or was it even earlier? Gary Berntsen, a former CIA officer, says in his book Jawbreaker that his paramilitary team tracked bin Laden to the Tora Bora region late in 2001 and could have killed or captured him if his superiors had agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S. troops. But the administration was already gearing up for war with Iraq and troops were never sent, allowing bin Laden to escape.

Now, Berntsen is a typical Langley boy scout who buys into most of the flummery about the war on terrorism; but it is precisely for that reason that his testimony is worthwhile. Here is no ideological critic of the Bush administration and its foreign policies--on the contrary, he shares many of its assumptions. Like fellow Agency alumnus Michael Scheuer, he has experienced the cognitive dissonance of dealing with the administration's policies at first hand, and wishes to report on his findings.

Is it plausible that the United States Military, disposing of 1.4 million active duty troops and a million reservists, could not scare up 800 additional troops to capture what was then characterized as a fiend in human form? Perhaps the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, explained it best in a CNN interview on 6 April 2002, well after the hunt for bin Laden had apparently been concluded:

"Well, if you remember, if we go back to the beginning of this segment, the goal has never been to get bin Laden." [10]

What can one conclude from this series of questions? If the 9/11 mystery is like other great, mysterious events--such as the Kennedy assassination--the course is probable. For a year or two, raw emotion over the event forecloses inquiry; for the next several years after that, the public's attention wanes, and the desire to forget the painful memory predominates.

In a decade or so, though, some debunker will bring new facts into the public arena for the edification of those Americans, then in late middle age, who will view 9/11 as an intellectual puzzle: far from the urgent concerns of their daily lives.

Many people may, by that time, accept that the official explanation is bunk, and suspect that the government had once again tricked the American public, those ever-willing foils in the eternal Punch-and-Judy show. But the majority will neither know nor care about obscure international relationships during a bygone era.

In 1939, the English author Eric Ambler wrote a brilliant and now-disregarded novel whose theme was that the political events culminating in World War II were indistinguishable from the squalid doings of ordinary criminals. Let us quote from that novel, The Mask of Dimitrios:

"A writer of plays said that there are some situations that one cannot use on the stage; situations in which the audience can feel neither approval, sympathy, nor antipathy; situations out of which there is no possible way that is not humiliating or distressing and from which there is no truth, however bitter, to be extracted. . . . All I know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, these conditions will obtain."


Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. Werther can be reached at: werther@counterpunch.org


[1] Bob Woodward's 1987 book Veil describes the informal connections between personages in the U.S. government and the Saudi government, including the ubiquitous Prince Bandar. A tête á tête between CIA director William Casey and the Prince supposedly resulted in a false-flag "terrorist" bombing in Beirut to retaliate against the bombing of the Marine barracks there in 1983. Regrettably, the dead were mainly civilians.

[2] 9/11 Commission Report, 23rd footnote to chapter two, page 467.

[3] This is the case of Cuban "freedom fighter" Luis Posada Carriles, who is suspected of sending the jet-borne Cuban Olympic fencing team to Valhalla in order to express his opposition to Fidel Castro. The incumbent administration, otherwise so steadfastly opposed to international terrorism, has been resistant to extraditing Mr. Posada --no doubt the administration is casting an eye on Florida's electoral votes.

[4] To include the Phoenix Memo, FBI agent Colleen Rowley's urgent bulletins from Minnesota, tips from foreign intelligence agencies, warnings from the Federal government to its high-ranking government placemen not to fly by commercial airliner, the contemporaneously noted presence of art students-cum-Mossad agents within two blocks of 9/11 operative Mohammed Atta, and other indicators.

[5] Long sought by Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose formative and traumatic experiences in the executive branch were shaped by their revulsion against attempts by Congress, the federal bench, and the American people, to restrain Richard M. Nixon's assertion that the Constitution does not apply to a sitting president.

[6] The phrase "war on terrorism" is, as many people have commented, a somewhat hazy conception, being a war on a tactic, much as if FDR had declared war on naval aviation after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Significantly, the popular mind has contracted this phrase into "the war on terror," an even more illogical coinage. If the U.S. government is truly at war against a mental state that gives rise to ill-defined dread, it should disestablish itself forthwith, to the benefit of our rights, our bank balances, and our physical safety.

[7] "Cheney Warns of Decades of War" BBC, 6 October 2005.

[8] "Power We Didn't Grant" by Sen. Tom Daschle, Washington Post, 23 December 2005.

[9] The Enabling Law passed the Reichstag by a vote of 444-94, whereas the PATRIOT Act passed the House by a margin of 357-66, and the Senate by a vote of 98-1. Curiously, the Enabling Law was supposed to sunset in four years: on April Fool's Day, 1937, precisely paralleling the four-year expiration of many of the PATRIOT Act's provisions. Perhaps the eerie similarity reflects the influence of Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt on neoconservative lawyers of the Bush administration like David S. Addington, John Yoo, and Viet Dinh.

[10] News transcript: Gen. Myers Interview with CNN TV