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ENEMY OF THE STATE


 Senate Committee STALLS inquiry into pre-war intel failures - FBI Taking Another Look
 

http://lnk.nu/rawstory.com/6np.html

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Senate Intelligence Committee stalling pre-war intelligence report

12/02/2005 @ 11:54 am

Filed by Larisa Alexandrovna

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Phase II, the follow-up to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into pre-war intelligence on Iraq, is still facing opposition from administration officials and has seen little action from the committee’s chairman, Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), RAW STORY has learned.

Following a surprising move early last month by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D -NV), in which he shut down the Senate in an effort to force discussion on the inquiry, the Senate leadership established a six member bipartisan task force and set a Nov. 15 deadline for a progress report.

The six task force members selected were Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Carl Levin (D-MI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Pat Roberts (R–KS), Trent Lott (R–MS) and Kit Bond (R-MO).

A week later, on Nov. 8, the Senate Intelligence Committee staff briefed task force members on the investigative work done thus far.

The full Intelligence Committee met Nov. 9 for a briefing from staff, but according to Senate sources close to the Intel Committee, the task force is “unable to provide a timeline for Phase II completion.”

To date, there has been no Phase II report.

Senior Democratic Senate aides familiar with the task force’s activities say Republicans are stonewalling. One aide, who asked not to be named citing the secrecy of the investigation, explained that without the power of subpoena, Democrats are left with few options. “Phase II is dead,” the staffer said.

Others familiar with the task force say some progress is being made, citing draft reports on two areas of focus:

-The postwar findings about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and weapons programs and links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessments.

-Prewar intelligence assessments about postwar Iraq.

Exactly who has seen these drafts and what is in them remains a mystery. “Everything remains to be seen,” one source said.

Key Areas of Focus

Phase II is the second part of a larger investigation into pre-war planning and post-invasion failures. Phase I focused primarily on intelligence failures by the CIA, while Phase II focuses on five specific areas of inquiry:

-Whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information;

-The postwar findings about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and weapons programs and links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessments;

-Prewar intelligence assessments about conditions to be expected in postwar Iraq;

-Any intelligence activities relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and

-The use by the Intelligence Community of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress (INC).

Feith and the Office of Special Plans

Part of the delay is due to resistance from the Pentagon regarding its ultra-secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP). The group was set up by then Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith. OSP was considered by many Defense Department officers and staff to be highly paranoid, secretive cabal of ideologues bent on creating a war with Iraq.

The group was tasked with finding intelligence that fit the administration’s anti-Iraq policy.

The Pentagon has specifically refused to address Feith's role and the activities of OSP.

Members of OSP included Larry Franklin, now charged with conspiracy to leak classified and defense information to a Washington pro-Israel lobby; Iran Contra player Michael Ledeen, hired by Feith as a consultant; and Harold Rhode, a staunch anti-Muslim said to have been directly involved in purging the DOD of anyone opposing the anti-Iraq policy who Feith also brought on as a consultant.

Other, “visiting,” players in the group included the now-discredited German intelligence source , “Curveball”; Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, who fed bogus intelligence to the Pentagon and U.S. papers; and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who conveyed Chalabi’s falsehoods to the American body politic.

Under orders from Feith, Ledeen, Rhode and Franklin made un-authorized trips to meet with Manucher Ghorbanifar, another Iran Contra figure, in Rome and Paris in 2001, 2002 and 2003. The meetings have yet to be explained, but some suspect they are linked to the Niger forgeries.

More documents are needed

Democratic senators on the Phase II task force have requested interviews and documents from Feith’s office regarding Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress and “Curveball,” but have been denied access.

According to a Nov. 14 status report memo written by Democratic task force members Rockefeller, Levin and Feinstein, no agreement could be reached on how to handle Feith’s office, which has rebuffed requests for pre-war documentation and interviews for a year and a half.

The memo noted that Chairman Roberts asked the Defense Department inspector general to investigate Feith’s office and his activities, thus deferring a Senate inquiry.

Democrats expressed concern that the “Inspector General[’s] review should not take the place of the authorized Committee investigation and that it is essential that the Committee insist on the documents and interviews that the Department of Defense has denied us for the past two years, even if it means using the Committee's subpoena power.”

Subpoena power – the power to legally compel testimony and documents -- rests solely in the hands of Chairman Roberts, who has not indicated any interest in forcing the Pentagon’s hand. An earlier RAW STORY investigation of Roberts revealed a pattern of collusion with the Vice President’s office not only in stalling the investigation of pre-war intelligence, but also in thwarting inquiries into allegations of torture by the US military, the Niger forgeries and the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

Sources close to the Intelligence Committee say that the three Republicans on the task force -- Lott, Roberts and Bond -- have yet to provide the agreed-upon progress report to Sen. Frist and Sen. Reid.

“They claimed they were verbally in touch with Frist so it wasn’t necessary," a senior Senate aide said.

Democrats are also pressing for documents and interviews which would cast light on the Vice President’s role in stalling the investigation and in withholding documents. They cite “…troubling reports that the Office of the Vice President overruled White House lawyers and withheld documents from Committee will require that we undertake additional interviews to obtain a complete picture of how faulty intelligence made its way into Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 speech before the United Nations.”

Some insiders question whether the Office of Special Plans, and Feith in particular, violated the 1947 National Security Act.

The Act requires the heads of all departments to:

“keep the congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities, other than a covert action (as defined in section 503(e)), which are the responsibility of, are engaged in by, or are carried out for or on behalf of, any department, agency, or entity of the United States Government, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity and any significant intelligence failure; and

(2) furnish the congressional intelligence committees any information or material concerning intelligence activities, other than covert actions, which is within their custody or control, and which is requested by either of the congressional intelligence committees in order to carry out its authorized responsibilities.”

“If Feith’s office was running intelligence activities that were unauthorized or not in compliance with this National Security Act and other legal requirements, then the activity may have been unlawful,” a source said.

Others remain optimistic. During a Nov. 4 press conference, Sen. Levin said, “I just want to say that we're determined that this be finished, it be finished promptly, and it be finished thoroughly,” Levin said. “There is no justification for anything less than that. We owe it to the American people. We owe it to the families of the men and women who have given their lives and who have been injured in this combat.”

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ALSO SEE:

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FBI Is Taking Another Look at Forged Prewar Intelligence

By Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writers

December 3, 2005

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WASHINGTON — The FBI has reopened an inquiry into one of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion.

The documents inspired intense U.S. interest in the buildup to the war — and they led the CIA to send a former ambassador to the African nation of Niger to investigate whether Iraq had sought the materials there. The ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, found little evidence to support such a claim, and the documents were later deemed to have been forged.

But President Bush referred to the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in making the case for the invasion. Bush's speech, Wilson's trip and the role Wilson's wife played in sending him have created a political storm that still envelops the White House.

The documents in question included letters on Niger government letterhead and purported contracts showing sales of uranium to Iraq. They were provided in 2002 to an Italian magazine, which turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

The FBI's decision to reopen the investigation reverses the agency's announcement last month that it had finished a two-year inquiry and concluded that the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme — and not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.

Those findings concerned some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a former Italian spy named Rocco Martino, who was identified as the original source of the documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation.

"This is such a high-profile issue for a lot of reasons, and we think it's important to make sure there aren't lingering questions," said an aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. "There's always a chance that you do a little more investigating and you uncover something you hadn't seen before or you hadn't realized."

A senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, confirmed late Friday that the bureau had reopened the inquiry.

Federal officials familiar with the case say investigators might examine whether the forgeries were instigated by U.S. citizens who advocated an invasion of Iraq or by members of the Iraqi National Congress — the group led by Ahmad Chalabi that worked closely with Bush administration officials in the buildup to the war.

But the senior federal official said, "I don't expect the results to be any different. I think the answer is going to be that [Martino] wasn't acting in behalf of any government or intelligence agency. This guy was trying to peddle this to whoever he could."

Until now, the FBI's inquiry had been limited to probing whether foreign governments were involved in the forgeries, despite a broader request from Rockefeller that the FBI look into whether the forgeries reflected a "larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

"I was surprised that [the FBI] ever closed it without coming to a conclusion as to the source," said former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the Niger uranium claims first surfaced in the U.S. "It looks as if it's a fairly straightforward investigation trail to who the source was. And I'm glad the FBI has resumed the hunt."

The claim that Iraq had obtained or was seeking uranium in Niger was a central part of the administration's case for war. It was mentioned explicitly in late 2002 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and in January 2003 by Bush to illustrate the threat posed by Iraq's then-president, Saddam Hussein.

In March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that the documents on which the Niger claim was partly based were forgeries. Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet later took responsibility for allowing the claim into Bush's State of the Union speech.

The issue erupted in July 2003, when Wilson published his findings in a New York Times opinion piece. Administration officials leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, allegedly as part of an effort to discredit Wilson — prompting a separate investigation into the potentially illegal unmasking of a covert agent.

The Plame case — in which Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been charged with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements — has raised questions about the administration's use of intelligence and how it targeted its critics.

Citing concern that the forged Niger documents might be evidence of a "larger deception campaign," Rockefeller initially had requested that the FBI determine the source of the forgeries and why the intelligence community did not realize earlier that the documents were fraudulent, among other questions.
A senior FBI official said the bureau's initial investigation found no evidence of foreign government involvement in the forgeries. But the FBI did not interview Martino, a central figure in a parallel drama unfolding in Rome.

In late October, Martino told the Los Angeles Times through his lawyer that he did not realize that the documents were forged.

Recent accounts in the Italian press said that Martino, a businessman and former freelance spy who was fired from the Italian military intelligence agency, obtained the documents from a female friend who worked at Niger's embassy in Rome. Martino has said he was working with a more senior Italian intelligence agent, Col. Antonio Nucero, and peddled the documents to French intelligence and eventually, in 2002, to Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba.

Burba, a reporter for the magazine Panorama, later told The Times that she was angry that the fraudulent documents "had been used to justify a war." The magazine is owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a close U.S. ally and supporter of the Iraq invasion.

Last month, Martino was further implicated when Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italian military intelligence, denied that his agency was involved in fabricating the documents. Instead, Pollari told the parliamentary intelligence committee that the dossier came from Martino.

The agency soon realized the documents were fake, Pollari said, according to legislators who were at the meeting. Although Martino's role has long been known, it remains unclear whom he was working with and whether the entire scheme was his idea alone.

After the Pollari testimony, Martino was quoted in an Italian newspaper as saying that he was working for the intelligence agency and not on his own. He acknowledged his role of "postman," as he put it, but said that his instructions were coming from Nucero.

"I did not make this thing up," he was quoted as saying in the newspaper Il Giornale. "I didn't even know where Niger was."

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Rome contributed to this report.

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"If only lies left semen stains." Jon Stewart, Comedy Central´s Daily Show

Posted by ENEMY OF THE STATE at 7:07 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
 Smear Pattern by Paul Sperry
 

http://www.antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=8201

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December 3, 2005

Smear Pattern

by Paul Sperry

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On July 15, 2003, ABC News aired a story about the plummeting morale of U.S. troops in Iraq. It quoted soldiers questioning the war and the judgment and candor of their commanders. One frosted GI even went on camera to call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

It was a devastating report, and the White House went into orbit over it. Rather than address the issues the soldiers raised, angry White House officials devised a plan to attack the messenger – the ABC correspondent who filed the story, Jeffrey Kofman.

He's gay, officials whispered to cyber-gossip Matt Drudge, a reliable Bush toady. Not only that, they sneered, he's not even an American. He's a Canadian.

Drudge, no longer the gadfly he once was during the Clinton years, dutifully posted a banner smear of Kofman on his Web site the day after the powerful ABC story, which had made national headlines. Drudge, who supports the Iraq invasion, later acknowledged the White House tipping him off, remarking that it "has become slightly more aggressive about contacting reporters."

Indeed it had.

Just four days earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney devised a scheme to attack the credibility of another messenger of bad news regarding Iraq – Ambassador Joe Wilson. The previous week, Wilson had blown the whistle on the White House's bogus claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy fuel for nuclear weapons from Niger.

Cheney hatched the plan with top aide Scooter Libby aboard Air Force Two during a flight from Norfolk, Va., on July 12, 2003. That same day Libby leaked to Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine the secret identity of Wilson's CIA wife.

Also that day, another administration official who hasn't been identified publicly called Walter Pincus of the Washington Post to point out that Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger was a "boondoggle" set up by his CIA wife, Valerie Plame. You can't trust what he's saying, he suggested; it's nepotism.

July 2003 was a bad month for the White House. The Iraq insurgency was growing. U.S. troop morale was flagging. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. And people were starting to come forward to question the White House's story in selling the war.

So the White House went into full attack mode. The marching orders issued by Cheney and President Bush were clear: Trash and smear whoever got in the way of their wholesale campaign of deceit. Kofman, Wilson, anyone.

And yet now, with Libby's indictment, the White House expects us all to believe that smearing a key war critic was the furthest thing from their minds. Why, they just wanted to correct the record about who sent Wilson to Niger, because it wasn't Cheney as Wilson said in his New York Times piece.

Never mind that Wilson never said that. And never mind that White House officials launched a whisper campaign, which is a pretty odd way to go about correcting the public record.

The White House also expects us to believe that asking the CIA about the secret employment of Wilson's wife and then leaking it to several reporters and columnists was perfectly innocent and routine White House business. And no one blew Plame's cover – c'mon, it was all just harmless gossip!

"There was no underlying crime. I mean, it really is ridiculous," grumbled Fox News analyst Bill Kristol on a recent Sunday show. "The notion that there was a concerted administration effort to smear its enemies I think has been utterly discredited."

Or so Kristol wishes.

The neocon acolyte of superstatist Leo Strauss helped Libby and his White House co-conspirators sell the "noble lies" that got us into war in Iraq. Now they're in trouble for viciously (and illegally) attacking the CIA wife of a critic who helped expose their lies, and Kristol has dutifully taken up the cudgels for them, knowing that his reputation is yoked to theirs.

Such remarks are designed to suspend disbelief about their treachery. But they are wholly unconvincing against the pattern of smearing war critics that was going on in the Bush White House that month in 2003.

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ALSO SEE:

ANOTHER vicious Bush administration attack
on a U.S. intelligence professional - WMR

http://lnk.nu/enemyofthestate.blogstream.com/6nv.html

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"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." - Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Posted by ENEMY OF THE STATE at 6:56 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
 A Cabal of Criminality by Manuel Valenzuela
 

"...The new America, born in sin and arrogance, delusional in Manifest Destiny, bred in overabundant gluttony, consumerist and materialist, fathered by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Cabal of Criminality, a country flocked by sheeple, ignorant and conditioned, indifferent to a world growing up around it, living delusions of empire and of omnipotence, building hatred against it and its policies throughout the planet, slowly dumbing down its citizens, losing its edge in the sciences and arts, producing a nation of acquiescent automatons brainwashed to never question authority and always faithfully follow the crimes of governance...."

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11203.htm

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A Cabal of Criminality

By Manuel Valenzuela

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12/02/05 "ICH" -- -- The disaster in Iraq has continued to regress with the same velocity and intensity as when it first started, raging onwards in a classical resistance, guerilla-style form of urban warfare that usually befalls occupying invaders of alien lands, yet as 2005 ends and 2006 gets set to begin, in the minds of millions of Americans finally out of the hypnotic, denial-laced clouds of 9/11, the time has finally arrived to show ever-increasing animosity to a war that was lost the moment the first American boots entered Iraq. Nobody, after all, likes a loser, and nobody jumps on the bandwagon of a so-called superpower nation being bled, of both blood and treasure, by a resistance with one-billionth the financial resources and military might – though possessing much more intelligence and patience – of the nation it is slowly and calculatingly hemorrhaging.

Iraq is now, and always has been, a quagmire that has turned into a suffocating and inextricable tar pit for American forces, where the inevitable defeat of George Bush’s policy combines with the greatest strategic disaster in American history, where the total miscalculation of war and mismanagement of peace has resulted in the collapse of Middle East stability, making America and the world less safe, not more, where wet dreams of imperial domination, fused with delusions of grandeur have helped build a monolithic wall of bad karma that will take decades to tear down.

Iraq, like Vietnam before it, has served to remind us that, like the war on communism, the war on terror is but a charade, a fear engendering escapade, designed to control populations and empower the elite, unleashing fear onto the citizenry while delivering enormous profit to the military-industrial complex. Using Arab men as bogeymen, hidden in the shadows, without faces, countries and, with the help of Hollywood and the corporate media, with a growing brutal reputation, dark skinned Muslims replaced white Soviet Reds as the new American enemy, the new cash cow granting the government and military industrial complex a new generation of destructive war from which to bleed the American taxpayer dry, providing misallocation of resources to the former and enormous profit to the latter.

What the Iraq/Bush war shows the world is how a Cabal of Criminality, numbering less than a few hundred individuals, can bamboozle a nation into a war whose ramifications on our future we cannot yet fully comprehend. The Bush war, the single-greatest blunder in America’s foreign policy history, was spawned by greed-addicted corporatists and treasonous neoconartists, presstitute lackeys and political hacks, placed in charge of US foreign policy and the propaganda acting as corporate media, easily in control of a nitwit, ignorant puppet, possessing his bully pulpit from which to spew the fabrications and manipulations needed to con America. Delusional, incompetent, dangerous and trapped in bubbles of naked grandeur, expecting fictional flowers and candy to flow from Iraqis expected to greet Americans as liberators, the Cabal of Criminality had no qualms sacrificing thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, for greed, power, profit, wealth and ego.

Through lies, deceit, fear-mongering, immorality, chicanery and criminality a group of a few hundred people led America into war, using the new Pearl Harbor, 9/11, with its plethora of highly charged emotions and fragile psyches, to launch a war they thought would be only the first of many, using Iraq as a beachhead to invade Iran and Syria. Suffocating inside the clouds of 9/11, blinded to reality and captured by delusion, America’s normally stable citizenry was mobilized to seek revenge through war, was conditioned to hate through scapegoats, was silenced by fear and intimidation, was brainwashed to blindly follow through incessant propaganda, jingoism and Madison Avenue style marketing.

In short, Americans were used, enslaved to the dictates of power, branded as sheeple, not people, our emotions of hatred, vengeance, fear and justice used against us, making us impotent conduits of crime and murder. Complicit we became in the delusional game played by the Cabal of Criminality, where the death of 3000 people became the key to unlocking the gates of war upon Mesopotamia. The plan had been set in motion, the new Pearl Harbor was allowed to bear fruit, the cataclysmic event needed to enrage the people and grease up the machines of war would not be stopped.

With each passing year, with each passing month the Iraq/Bush war has descended more and more into chaos, a battle defined by the resistance, not the US army. Using the most sophisticated weaponry money can buy, with the most modern technologies, possessing incalculable financial resources, American forces find themselves losing to an enemy that fights against occupation and for freedom. The resistance is homegrown, composed of fathers and sons, daughters and mothers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers and cousins, all fighting an invading army they see as the catalyst of death, mass murder, burnings, maimings, intolerable suffering and cruel and inhumane collective punishment. The resistance has increased exponentially – and will not diminish until American forces are expelled – with every death, maiming, destroyed home, rape, imprisonment, shooting and act of collective punishment upon the Iraqi people, with every death of a son, father, mother or daughter.

America is the cause and the effect of the resistance, the reason Iraqis fight, whether carrying AK-47’s or giving logistical support. Whether planting improvised explosive devices or acting as eyes and ears infiltrating the Green Zone, Iraqis see America as the enemy, yet one more imperial invading army thinking itself blessed by providence to claim the lands of the Fertile Crescent. A guerilla army cannot function without the support of the citizenry, and neither can the success the resistance is having against American forces. With every Iraqi death a dozen more resistance fighters join the battle, with every Iraqi death or American crime the hatred grows and calls for vengeance beckon. Trapped inside a vicious cycle of violence begetting violence, American forces have been their own worst enemy. Each year the resistance grows stronger, more sophisticated, more dangerous, learning, improving, evolving, and becoming ever more destructive. America’s presence and prolonged occupation of Iraq will only exacerbate an already volatile vortex of violence.

Yet to the Cabal of Criminality lurking and slithering in the halls of power the lives of thousands of America’s young mean not a thing. Tens of thousands have returned maimed, burned or scarred not only physically, but mentally as well, changed, altered, innocence lost, wickedness spawned. Tens of thousands will forever linger in the purgatory that their mind has become, lost among the ghosts of the innocents they killed, maimed, raped or tortured, haunted by the visions of death they saw and the realities of war they were forced to endure, and confront. Burning inside their minds Hell has arisen, echoing the screams of the suffering and the drips of the blood they helped spill, hearing the cries of armless children, weeping widows and fatherless daughters. Hell on Earth, after all, lies with the demons of life lurking inside the crevices deep within the mind.

Trained to maim and kill without asking questions, robbed of their ability to think independently, taught to never question authority, always following orders, no matter how immoral or wicked the assignment, these oftentimes young, impressionable, easily conditioned soldiers are forced to confront the most evil endeavor of man, that thing called war, through the prism of human psychology, not of robotic understanding. The human animal becomes unleashed in war, untangled from most precepts of humanity, devoid of those virtues that contain us in peacetime. Raw emotion and animalistic passion are resurrected with the smell of burned flesh, the taste of blood, the adrenaline of self preservation. Quickly the human mind is forced to make of the enemy a creation of subhuman birth, transforming man and women into beast and monster, a perfect way for the human mind to release the remaining morsels of morality and accept crimes against fellow human beings.

The Cabal of Criminality has transformed American citizen soldiers into conduits of human evil, importing into Iraq tyranny, American style, replacing wickedness with wickedness, negative energy with negative energy. Thousands of normal, beautiful and otherwise decent human beings have been forced to commit heinous crimes against Iraqis for nothing but lies, greed and criminality. They have been forced to combat peoples fighting for freedom from occupation, freedom from tyranny, freedom to live in security and happiness. Fighting an entire population, killing over a hundred thousand people, destroying homes, lives and futures, unleashing hatred and animosity where none existed before, American forces have been forced to confront and oftentimes displace their own morality, replacing them with the principles of the Cabal of Criminality whose unscrupulous pathology bulldozes over anything and everything standing in their way, caring not an ounce for humanity, or for the effects their actions will one day have on future generations of Americans.

The ultimate victims of these principles, besides the Iraqi people, are American soldiers who upon returning to the safe shores of the United States find themselves transformed in mind and body, their personalities affected by what they saw, what they inflicted and were witness to. Many will return with the demons of war, of human wickedness embedded, forced to relieve stresses seen and experienced with lives that have been eroded by human violence. Tens of thousands damaged physically, missing arms and legs, some burned and scarred, others brain damaged beyond repair, yet it is those psychologically maimed that will have to struggle through marriages that no longer have meaning, through jobs that make no sense, through the normalcy of life that no longer exists. Divorce, unemployment, homelessness, addictions, abandonment, Hell on Earth, nightmares and lives forever altered are the mementos for many soldiers of the Iraq/Bush war, courtesy of the Cabal of Criminality.

The Cabal of Criminality and America

Through every lie, distortion, deception and crime that led America to war a pillar of American greatness has been lost, slowly eroding the foundations upon which a great nation once stood. A beacon of hope and human rights for billions of human beings for decades, the United States now has a sitting Vice President espousing torture, rendition and the destruction of due process. For years portending to fight the “Evil Empire’s” network of gulags, today America has its own gulag network throughout the vast reaches of Earth, torturing and murdering human beings, keeping hidden its atrocities, its activities, its lies. Proclaiming the Bush war as a means of cleansing Iraq of tyranny, America has nonetheless imported tyranny under the rubric of new blood and methods. Torture, rape, false imprisonment, white phosphorus, depleted uranium, collective punishment, mass murder, assassinations, insecurity, suffering and disappearances have become the hallmark of Iraq during American occupation.

A nation once admired and adored, the light that attracted freedom and democracy, has been extinguished in the minds of billions. The hypocrisy of America’s foreign policy can be seen worldwide, even if it still blinds hundreds of millions within its borders. Destroying Iraq and its culture only to help rebuild it; supporting the devastating apartheid and collective punishment of Palestinians by Israel; maintaining in power corrupt kings and despots in the Middle East, robbing hundreds of millions of the same freedom and democracy proclaimed for Iraq; labeling as a threat and as dictator a democratically elected leader in Venezuela when the last two American presidential elections have been filled with fraud and controversy, whose only crimes has been helping out the people of his nation through oil revenues sought by American corporations; calling as corrupt members of foreign governments and of international organizations when America’s Congress and Bush’s Administration is filled to the rafters with corruption and cronies and the most unscrupulous politicians known to exist, transforming America’s government into the bordello of the elite and the whorehouse of the corporatist few.

America proclaims to stand with the world but in reality trounces treaties and protocols and has become a rogue nation acting solely for its own corporate interests. Where once America’s Presidents were welcome to foreign lands with open arms, flowers and candy, today only hatred and anger await George Bush, with streets filled with protests and loathing, forcing him to travel in a vacuum, surrounded by an army of armed bodyguards, made to confront the animosity on the street of every country and city he visits, having become the laughingstock of the public in the open and of politicians in private.

The new America, born in sin and arrogance, delusional in Manifest Destiny, bred in overabundant gluttony, consumerist and materialist, fathered by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Cabal of Criminality, a country flocked by sheeple, ignorant and conditioned, indifferent to a world growing up around it, living delusions of empire and of omnipotence, building hatred against it and its policies throughout the planet, slowly dumbing down its citizens, losing its edge in the sciences and arts, producing a nation of acquiescent automatons brainwashed to never question authority and always faithfully follow the crimes of governance.

The new America would rather spend $500 billion a year on the military industrial complex, and an additional $200-300 billion for the Iraq/Bush war instead of on education, healthcare, Katrina, homelessness, enlightenment, equality and infrastructure, in the process condemning tomorrow’s adults to a nation without wisdom, vision and equality. The new America is producer and consumer, from cradle to grave, where slave wages abound for the working class and tax breaks thrive for the wealthy, creating a growing gap between haves and have nots, between the educated and the rest of us.

The new America is a nation never reared or disciplined, possessing the attention span of ten second sound bites and the naiveté of always placing blind faith in corrupt and incompetent leadership, a land living for the present, not the future, forgetting lessons from the past, its people programmed to seek the fictions, perfections and fantasies of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, millions of its citizens doped up on pharmaceutical drugs, depressed when reality triumphs over fiction, when real life eclipses dumbed down fantasy.

America is a country lacking the wisdom of older civilizations that comes with centuries of existence, having become the bully of the world, a rogue nation ignorant of other lands and cultures, possessing a government that acts on animal instinct, not reason, ready at a moments notice to destroy the world’s great cultures, with millions of its inhabitants conditioned from birth to the commands of corporate television, becoming the twenty-first century’s version of the “good Germans” of yesteryear, eager to cheer upon the war crimes being committed in their name, ready to celebrate the destruction of culture and the maiming of spirit, marching in lock step to the tunes of their manipulated hatred and thirst for dark-skinned blood.

America is a land where the corruption endemic in Washington is easily forgotten, where complacency of convenience leads to complicity of criminality, where the pilfering of so-called billions of dollars in Iraqi reconstruction funds and misappropriation of billions of dollars in Iraqi aid and oil revenues by Bush and Cheney cronies and fraudsters is ignored, quickly forgotten by a populace suddenly enthralled by the next adaptation of sensationalist and mind numbing corporate media designed to distract and quickly make forget.

The Cabal of Criminality is the epitome of an America decades in the making, of a land no longer able to see the awesome spectacle of the dawn of a new day, of a nation on the decline, steadily guiding itself towards inevitable implosion. The Cabal of Criminality is the epitome of gluttony, of arrogance, greed and the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, of crony capitalism and debauched democracy, of absolute power corrupting absolutely, a representation of what we have become, or of what we have allowed into our midst. The degenerate landfill that Washington has become, full of feces-saturated flies roaming atop governance, corruption having become their sustenance, robbing the nation blind, bending over to the sodomizing power of the corporate world, is at once both the anomaly of honor and integrity and the putrid sewer rotting the nation whole. This city, once thought the pinnacle of modern civilization, has become the cesspool ecosystem for the species called the Cabal of Criminality.

The Cabal of Criminality Exposed

The Cabal of Criminality has transformed the land of the free and the home of the brave, helping degenerate it from sea to shining sea, creating the mirror image of that which we detest the most, smearing our name with the torture devices and procedures of Abu Ghraib, the dehumanizing conditions at Guantanamo and the clandestine crime committed in all of America’s newfound gulags. They have shown the world America’s true colors of terrorism, from chemical warfare and Agent Orange in Vietnam to the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Iraq to the sponsorship and training of thieves, dictators and murderers now roaming the planet.

This is the same Cabal of Criminality, it must be recalled, that supported Saddam Hussein in his massacres against Kurds, Shia and during his chemical warfare campaign against Iran, using mostly American made weapons. This is the same Cabal that once green lighted the rise of autocratic dictators throughout the world, severely damaging the cherished principles of human rights, freedom and democracy they now hypocritically parade at every public relations stunt. This is the same Cabal that supported Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, helping arm and financially assisting his mujahedeen against the Soviets, calling them freedom fighters then but terrorists now.

Knowing perfectly well that the Bush war is only creating thousands more hatred-filled terrorists throughout the Muslim world, the Cabal of Criminality nonetheless continues to destroy, massacre and bomb, hoping enough enemies are created, and enough blowback boomerangs back, to sustain a decades long excuse for perpetual war and thus, perpetual profit, wealth and power. These individuals, a minute minority of the American population, eagerly await the next attack on American soil, willing to sacrifice innocent human beings in furtherance of their sinister, nefarious goals. To them, the American people are pawns, nothing short of collateral damage needed to manipulate the emotions of the masses and maintain, and expand, an immoral war without purpose, based on fictional charades and clever marketing techniques borrowed from past criminal regimes.

The Cabal of Criminality have accelerated the arrival of fascism onto our shores, mutating government with the tentacles of corporatist power, embedding their miscreant hacks, cronies and lackeys throughout once sacrosanct halls of power. They have succeeded in saturating our television monitors with pure propaganda and distraction-filled, dumbed-down programming, deploying their presstitutes in the media to manipulate, control and condition the people.

It is almost impossible to comprehend how a couple of hundred miscreants could hijack America’s government, its media, institutions and foreign policy, attaining in a few years, thanks to the new Pearl Harbor, long held goals to launch human evil throughout the globe. It is difficult to realize that a few hundred human beings could deceive an entire nation of 300 million citizens, using lies, manipulations and the powers of the corporate media to march us straight into a condemned war from where no good outcome can rise. A handful of criminals, thieves and murderers, thugs and gangsters, greed-infested warmongers, have helped condemn America and the world to years of insecurity and instability for what has been done cannot soon be alleviated or forgotten.

Throughout the planet innocent people are dying every day thanks to the workings of the Cabal of Criminality, whether by a suicide bombing or by economic genocide or by market colonialism or by state-sponsored terror. The policies of the Cabal affect all corners of Earth, becoming a contagious virus in some nations and a death sentence in others, whether under the guise of free trade, neoliberalism or of fighting the fictional “war on terror.” To this elite group it does not matter that Sub-Saharan Africans die by the millions every year because of AIDS, or that billions living in the Third World linger in perpetual poverty, destiny calling upon them to be born and die in an Earthly Purgatory of suffering.

The Cabal of Criminality cares nothing for 45 million Americans without healthcare, nor for the millions of socially engineered children poor, undereducated and malnourished, sentenced to become the next generation of slave labor, or the millions made homeless by the evils of twenty-first century American capitalism. Returning veterans of the Bush war, whether damaged mentally, physically, financially or socio-economically, are quickly dispatched aside and forgotten by the same Cabal that sent them to Iraq to act both as cannon fodder and as operators for the instruments of death in furtherance of corporate aggrandizement, hidden from cameras and the public’s attention, seen more as liabilities to the continuance of war than as the heroes they rightly are, in the end becoming yet one more group of casualties, sent to kill and be killed for nothing but greed, profit, wealth, ego and power.

The names of those comprising the Cabal of Criminality are well known, as are most of their faces. They are traitors to humanity and America, thieves and murderers empowered by the corruption of the system and the silent passivity of the masses. They are war criminals, espousing torture, the use of chemical weapons, collective punishment, assassinations, carpet bombing, the use of depleted uranium (clandestine nuclear war), false imprisonment and the use of gulags. They have murdered over 100,000 Iraqis, over 2,000 American soldiers, all the while ruining the lives of countless more.

Tyranny is their calling card; the suppression of freedom and democracy at home and abroad the means by which they retain power. To them dissent is unpatriotic, protest is subversive, debate to their decisions treasonous. Dividing a nation is a tool of expediency; using religion and ignorance to build their base, brew hatred and stir anger is part of doing business. In their worldview, the truth is the enemy, slavery is freedom, war is peace, ignorance is strength and reality is what they decide it to be.

Driven by greed, these armchair chicken hawks, lacking the wisdom that comes with experience, march other people’s children into immoral war, becoming warmongers trapped inside their own bubble, living in delusion, not able to see reality. These Mayberry Machiavelli’s are amateur dictators living the wet dreams of long since dead princes and kings, trying to resurrect fiefdoms, kingdoms and empires, sustaining their bubble-filled egos with the addiction to temporary power. Desperately wanting to leave a legacy they have bumbled, stumbled and made their ingrained imbecility known through their litany of failures, becoming a laughingstock to those who know and to those who will read the future words of historians.

Yet even in the face of constant failure the Cabal of Criminality persists, for their kind tramples of anything to retain power. They are liars, connivers, fraudsters and embezzlers, the worst of the human condition, laying waste, through their policies and control mechanisms, to millions of human energies around the planet. For they are a dangerous and vicious animal, capable of anything when cornered and trapped, sleazy and unscrupulous, caring not an ounce for the consequences to their actions. They have much destruction and carnage yet to unleash, for in their actions can be seen the madness of fools, the inherent callousness of psychopathic tendencies. If left powerful and strong there is no predicting what their next move might be.

Quite simply, they belong in a tribunal, tried for crimes against humanity and against the planet, rotting away inside the dark cells at The Hague or in Abu Ghraib, imprisoned for the world entire to see, finally made to stop their madness, given a taste of their own medicine, forced to contemplate the deviousness of their actions and the results of their existence.

They are the Cabal of Criminality, a mere asterisk to history if dealt with right. They stand guilty of war crimes, international crimes, crimes against humanity and the planet. They are guilty of treason, becoming traitors to America, its citizens and what we stand for, our principles, our values and our futures. These vultures, however, will in most likelihood never see the inside of a cell, much less a tribunal, continuing to pillage and destroy the beauty of mankind, for years to come condemning us ever closer to the inevitable annihilation of our civilization.

For they are the Cabal of Criminality, not knowing, not caring and not understanding that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, that for every Iraqi resistance fighter killed a dozen more take his place, that negative energy always boomerangs back, that karma is a powerful bitch and that, in the end, the truth always rises from the ashes of lies to shed light on a new, glorious day

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"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Posted by ENEMY OF THE STATE at 6:52 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
 U.S. ex-general & former NSA head calls for Iraq pull out
 

http://lnk.nu/upi.com/6nm.php

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U.S. ex-general calls for Iraq pull out

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WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- The U.S. general who used to head the National Security Agency says the only way to stabilize the Middle East is to leave Iraq.

Retired three star Lt. Gen. William Odom, writing for NiemanWatchdog.org, wrote that while President George W. Bush wants to bring democracy and stability to the Middle East, the only way to achieve that goal is for the U.S. armed forces to get out of Iraq now.

Odom, one of the most respected U.S. military analysts and a prominent figure at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, wrote, "We have seen most of our allies stand aside and engage in Schadenfreude over our painful bog-down in Iraq. Winston Churchill's glib observation, 'the only thing worse that having allies is having none,' was once again vindicated.

"There is no chance that our allies will join us in Iraq," he wrote. "... Iraq is the worst place to fight a battle for regional stability. Whose interests were best served by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place? It turns out that Iran and al-Qaida benefited the most, and that continues to be true every day U.S. forces remain there."

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  © Copyright 2005 United Press International, Inc.

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We are the OCCUPIERS in Iraq.  The OCCUPIERS have created institutions – an army, police, and paramilitary death squads among them – that are permanently tainted by our connection to them.  When our troops eventually leave, no number of “Marines over the horizon,” or punishing air strikes, or “battle-ready battalions” of Iraqis will keep the OCCUPIER’S institutions in place.  Resistance, some of it undoubtedly violent, will continue until those institutions are either removed or destroyed. - Mike Ferner, Beware Iraqization 
Posted by ENEMY OF THE STATE at 6:42 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
 Bullet Points over Baghdad by Paul Krugman
 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11201.htm

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Bullet Points over Baghdad

By Paul Krugman

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12/02/05 "New York Times" -- -- The National Security Council document released this week under the grandiose title "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It's simply the same old talking points - "victory in Iraq is a vital U.S. interest"; "failure is not an option" - repackaged in the style of a slide presentation for a business meeting.

It's an embarrassing piece of work. Yet it's also an important test for the news media. The Bush administration has lost none of its confidence that it can get away with fuzzy math and fuzzy facts - that it won't be called to account for obvious efforts to mislead the public. It's up to journalists to prove that confidence wrong.

Here's an example of how the White House attempts to mislead: the new document assures us that Iraq's economy is doing really well. "Oil production increased from an average of 1.58 million barrels per day in 2003, to an average of 2.25 million barrels per day in 2004." The document goes on to concede a "slight decrease" in production since then.

We're not expected to realize that the daily average for 2003 includes the months just before, during and just after the invasion of Iraq, when its oil industry was basically shut down. As a result, we're not supposed to understand that the real story of Iraq's oil industry is one of unexpected failure: instead of achieving the surge predicted by some of the war's advocates, Iraqi production has rarely matched its prewar level, and has been on a downward trend for the past year.

What about the security situation? During much of 2004, the document tells us: "Fallujah, Najaf, and Samara were under enemy control. Today, these cities are under Iraqi government control."

Najaf was never controlled by the "enemy," if that means the people we're currently fighting. It was briefly controlled by Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. The United States once vowed to destroy that militia, but these days it's as strong as ever. And according to The New York Times, Mr. Sadr has now become a "kingmaker in Iraqi politics." So what sort of victory did we win, exactly, in Najaf?

Moreover, in what sense is Najaf now under government control? According to The Christian Science Monitor, "Sadr supporters and many Najaf residents say an armed Badr Brigade" - the militia of a Shiite group that opposes Mr. Sadr and his supporters - "still exists as the Najaf police force."

Meanwhile, this is the third time that coalition forces have driven the insurgents out of Samara. On the two previous occasions, the insurgents came back after the Americans left. And there, too, it's stretching things to say that the city is under Iraqi government control: according to The Associated Press, only 100 of the city's 700 policemen show up for work on most days.

There's a lot more like that in the document. Refuting some of the upbeat assertions about Iraq requires specialized knowledge, but many of them can be quickly debunked by anyone with an Internet connection.

The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

So Mr. Bush's new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren't true? Or has the worm finally turned?

There have been encouraging signs, notably a thorough front-page fact-checking article - which even included charts showing the stagnation of oil production and electricity generation! - in USA Today. But the next few days will tell.

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"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." - Edward R. Murrow
Posted by ENEMY OF THE STATE at 6:38 AM - No Comments   Add a Comment  
 
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