Patrick Cockburn has done some of the best Iraq reporting, and he's of course correct to point to the outcome of the war as the dissolution of the Iraqi state (involving an unspeakable tragedy for the Iraqi people, the vast waste of human and financial resources, lasting political instability from which we may never recover, etc. etc.) yet his title: That's the way Bush and Blair wanted it -- promises much more than the article delivers.
Let's say it clearly: the purpose of the invasion of Iraq was to destroy Iraq.
For two reasons:
a. To destroy a potential opponent of Israeli hegemony
b. to sustain the momentum of a permanent war agenda by homegrown irrational American radicals bent on destruction for the sake of destruction: war for the sake of war. If this seems counterintuitive, that's because we're normal people.
Here I have to part company a little from my (political) friends Mearshimer and Walt who argue that the Iraq war was imposed on the Bush administration by the Israeli lobby. No, it was the Israeli lobby who made it possible, who greased the way. Without them the Bush, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld clique would have had to swim that much further upstream against a public aware of how wildly irrational was the war. It couldn't have been done without the Lobby. But the Iraq war was in the end an essentially American adventure, with US neocons brilliantly and cynically making use of a Likud program for their own endless war agenda.
It should be self evident that this was not a war for oil even to Chomsky, since we're getting less of its oil than when Saddam was in power, (not was it for control of Middle East oil, whatever that means: does controlling it mean burning it in our gas tanks?) nor was this a war for privatization, nor was it a war on behalf of the bankers or the Illuminati, or the Council on Foreign Relations, since the irrational radicals who lead our government don't care about such things. They only care about destruction.
Some weeks ago Frank Rich came pretty close to putting his finger on it when he used the pillage of the Iraqi museum and the destruction of the Iraqi universities as the central motif of his Sunday NYT op ed column. He came so close to saying that this vicious clique INTEND the destruction of as much of Iraqi culture and civil life as they can manage. What did Rumsfeld say? Things happen.
Is there anything in their record over the last five years that suggests that they aren't intent also on destroying the civil and cultural life of the US? Recall that culture, science, education is their enemy. They believe that the power of the government to do anything positive domestically or internationally should be destroyed. They believe the only legitimate purpose of government is to make war if you're stronger than anyone else. Yes, they're bullies.
What did Grover Norquist say -- out loud?! He wants to reduce government (i.e., its power to do good) to the point where he can drown it in the bathtub. We may soon begin to take him seriously. --Ronald Bleier /www.bleiersblog.blogspot.com
October 26, 2006
www.counterpunch.org
The Iraqi Government is Weak, Because That's the Way Bush and Blaired Wanted It
From "Mission Accomplished" to "Mission Impossible" in Iraq
By PATRICK COCKBURN
"It sounds like a face-saving way of announcing a withdrawal," commented an Iraqi political leader yesterday on hearing that the US military commander in Iraq and the chief American envoy in Baghdad had said that Iraqi police and army should be able to take charge of security in a year or 18 months.
Yet the only real strength of the Iraqi government is the US army. In theory, it has 264,000 soldiers and police under its command. In practice they obey the orders of their communal leaders in so far as they obey anybody.
There is still a hopeless lack of realism in statements from senior American officials. It is as if the taste of defeat is too bitter. "This Mehdi Army militia group has to be brought under control," said the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad at a press conference in Baghdad yesterday. But in the past few months most of the Shia districts in Baghdad --and Shia are the majority in the capital --have come under the control of the Mehdi Army, the militia of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It is all so different from that moment of exuberant imperial hubris in May 2003 when President George Bush announced mission accomplished in Iraq.
Where did the US go wrong? Saddam Hussein's government collapsed almost without a fight. Iraqis would not fight for him. Iraqis may not have welcomed American tanks with sweets and rose petals but they were very glad to see the back of their own disaster-prone leader.
The greatest American mistake was to turn what could have been presented as liberation into an occupation. The US effectively dissolved the Iraqi state. It has since been said by US generals --many of whom now claim to have been opponents of the invasion all along --that given a larger US army and a more competent occupation regime, all might still have been well. This is doubtful. The five million Sunni Arabs were always going to fight the occupation. The only Iraqi community to support it were the five million Kurds. The Shia wanted to use it to gain the power their 60 per cent of the Iraqi population warranted but they never liked it.
One theme has been constant throughout the past three-and-a-half years --the Iraqi government has always been weak. For this, the US and Britain were largely responsible. They wanted an Iraqi government which was strong towards the insurgents but otherwise compliant to what the White House and Downing Street wanted. All Iraqi governments, unelected and elected, have been tainted and de-legitimised by being dependent on the US. This is as true of the government of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki today as it was when sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq under the prime minister Iyad Allawi in June 2004. Real authority had remained in the hands of the US. The result was a government whose ministers could not move outside the Green Zone. They showed great enthusiasm for press conferences abroad where they breathed defiance at the insurgents and agreed with everything said by Mr. Bush or Tony Blair.
The government can do nothing because it only came into existence after ministries were divided up between the political parties after prolonged negotiations. Each ministry is a bastion of that party, a source of jobs and money. The government can implement no policy because of these deep divisions. The government cannot turn on the militias because they are too strong.
It is also true that almost all parties that make up the government have their own militias: the Kurds have the Peshmerga; the Shia have the Mehdi Army and the Badr Organisation; the Sunni have the insurgents. In areas of Iraq where civil war is already raging or where it is impending, people look to these militias to defend their homes and not to the police or regular army.
The US has lost more than 500 of its soldiers, dead and wounded, this month. Every month this year the combined figure --more telling than that for dead alone --has been creeping up, as the area of US control is diminishing. The handover of security to Iraqi government forces --the long-trumpeted aim of American and British policy --is, in practice, a handover to the local militias.
The problem for the US and British is that many Iraqi leaders outside the government think the British and Americans are on the run. Wait, they say, and they will become even weaker. The US is talking to senior Baath party military officials in Saudi Arabia and Jordan who control the insurgency if anybody does. But it is unlikely that they would call a ceasefire except on terms wholly unacceptable to other Iraqis.
Can the US extract itself from Iraq? Probably it could but only with great loss of face which the present administration could not endure after its boasts of victory three-and-a-half years ago.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', published by Verso.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
FDR, Gruber and me: Zionists stymie WWII rescue plan
by Ronald Bleier
September 2006
From time to time I get into conversations which allow me to tell the story of my family’s immigration to the U.S. when I was an infant during WWII. Late in the war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to accept about 1000 mostly Jewish refugees into the U.S. for temporary asylum. My parents, my brother and I were among these refugees. We traveled to the U.S. by ship from Italy to New York in August 1944. Upon arrival we were interned at an old army barracks in Oswego, N.Y. for almost two years. (After the war, Congress passed, and President Truman signed legislation that allowed us to remain in the U.S.)
A special hero of this story was a woman called Ruth Gruber, who had been working in the Interior Dept under Harold Ickes. As she relates in her book on the subject, Haven (1983) (later made into an undistinguished TV movie), she bravely volunteered to be our liaison with the government, to join us in Italy and accompany us to the U.S. Wonderfully capable and compassionate, she was loved and revered by all for her untiring and invaluable efforts on our behalf.
It so happens that Ms Gruber, now about 95 years old, is a New Yorker and my family and I met her in the late 1980s in connection with a reunion of the Oswego refugees. We met one evening at her apartment on the West Side of Manhattan and then we went to dinner together. She had written several books, among them a novel called Rebecca, that I happened to browse while at her apartment. I read the first page which described an Arab raid on a terrified Zionist kibbutz in Palestine in the pre-1948 period. It was clear that the story was written from the Jewish settler’s point of view.
Some time after our dinner evening together, I telephoned Ms. Gruber and raised the question of Zionism’s record when it came to the human and national rights of the Palestinians. The tone of our conversation remained friendly, but she was very clear that there was little I could say that would cause her to change her strong pro-Israeli and pro-Zionist views.
In Haven, she tells the story of how she volunteered to join our refugee group in wartime Italy, and she gives some background as to how FDR made the decision to shelter 1,000 refugees. Upon receiving permission to join the mission as our liaison, she did some research in State Department files.
According to Gruber (Haven, Ch.2), President Roosevelt was forced into making some kind of demonstration on behalf of European, especially Jewish, refugees because of the embarrassing publication of war time cables from the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland to Washington relating to what later became known as the Holocaust. According to Gruber, in these documents, the State Department in Washington, D.C. revealed its disinterest if not outright anti-Semitic hostility toward the mostly Jewish victims of Nazi persecution by ordering their colleagues in Switzerland to discontinue sending Washington such news.
In Gruber’s version, the shocking disclosure of these communications empowered members of the Jewish community to apply to a reluctant (and she implies, anti-Semitic) President Roosevelt, with a proposal to save hundreds of thousands of European Jews. In Gruber’s version, FDR finally agreed that the U.S. provide temporary haven for 1,000 refugees.
I believed Gruber’s story and repeated it often to friends. Only later did I learn that the very opposite was the truth. The real FDR was very much aware of and troubled by the plight of the wartime refugees and he proposed a plan to save half a million or more. He envisioned an agreement with such countries as the UK, Canada, Australia, and others with the U.S. and the U.K. leading the way by each taking in 150,000 “displaced persons” as they were then called. FDR’s emissary for this plan managed to get agreement in principle from the British but in the end the plan was vetoed by the Zionists. The Jewish leadership were afraid that providing haven for European Jewish refugees anywhere but Palestine would be at cross purposes with their plan for a Jewish state there.
Noted anti-Zionist author Alfred Lilienthal tells this story in his important and effectively buried book What Price Israel.
Here’s Lilienthal’s version
www.alfredlilienthal.com/what_price_israel_2.htm
President Roosevelt was deeply concerned with the plight of the European refugees and thought that all the free nations of the world ought to accept a certain number of immigrants, irrespective of race, creed, color or political belief. The President hoped that the rescue of 500,000 Displaced Persons could be achieved by such a generous grant of a worldwide political asylum. In line with this humanitarian idea, Morris Ernst, New York attorney and close friend of the President went to London in the middle of the war to see if the British would take in 100,000 or 200,000 uprooted people. The President had reasons to assume that Canada, Australia and the South American countries would gladly open their doors. And if such good examples were set by other nations, Mr. Roosevelt felt that the American Congress could be "educated to go back to our traditional position of asylum." The key was in London. Would Morris Ernst succeed there? Mr. Ernst came home to report, and this is what took place in the White House (as related by Mr. Ernst to a Cincinnati audience in 1950):
Ernst: "We are at home plate. That little island [and it was during the second Blitz that he visited England] on a properly representative program of a World Immigration Budget, will match the United States up to 150,000.
Roosevelt: "150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere, and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people."
A week later, or so, Mr. Ernst and his wife again visited the President.
Roosevelt (turning to Mrs. Ernst): "Margaret, can't you get me a Jewish Pope? I cannot stand it any more. I have got to be careful that when Stevie Wise leaves the White House he doesn't see Joe Proskauer on the way in." Then, to Mr. Ernst: "Nothing doing on the program. We can't put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won't stand for it."
"It's impossible! Why?" asked Ernst.
Roosevelt: "They are right from their point of view. The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, 'There is no other place this poor Jew can go.' But if there is a world political asylum for all people irrespective of race, creed or color, they cannot raise their money. Then the people who do not want to give the money will have an excuse to say 'What do you mean, there is no place they can go but Palestine? They are the preferred wards of the world."
Morris Ernst, shocked, first refused to believe his leader and friend. He began to lobby among his influential Jewish friends for this world program of rescue, without mentioning the President's or the British reaction. As he himself has put it: "I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine who very frankly said 'Morris, this is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.' " He ran into the same reaction amongst all Jewish groups and their leaders. Everywhere he found "a deep, genuine, often fanatically emotional vested interest in putting over the Palestinian movement" in men "who are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own."
This response of Zionism ended the remarkable Roosevelt effort to rescue Europe's Displaced Persons.
September 2006
From time to time I get into conversations which allow me to tell the story of my family’s immigration to the U.S. when I was an infant during WWII. Late in the war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to accept about 1000 mostly Jewish refugees into the U.S. for temporary asylum. My parents, my brother and I were among these refugees. We traveled to the U.S. by ship from Italy to New York in August 1944. Upon arrival we were interned at an old army barracks in Oswego, N.Y. for almost two years. (After the war, Congress passed, and President Truman signed legislation that allowed us to remain in the U.S.)
A special hero of this story was a woman called Ruth Gruber, who had been working in the Interior Dept under Harold Ickes. As she relates in her book on the subject, Haven (1983) (later made into an undistinguished TV movie), she bravely volunteered to be our liaison with the government, to join us in Italy and accompany us to the U.S. Wonderfully capable and compassionate, she was loved and revered by all for her untiring and invaluable efforts on our behalf.
It so happens that Ms Gruber, now about 95 years old, is a New Yorker and my family and I met her in the late 1980s in connection with a reunion of the Oswego refugees. We met one evening at her apartment on the West Side of Manhattan and then we went to dinner together. She had written several books, among them a novel called Rebecca, that I happened to browse while at her apartment. I read the first page which described an Arab raid on a terrified Zionist kibbutz in Palestine in the pre-1948 period. It was clear that the story was written from the Jewish settler’s point of view.
Some time after our dinner evening together, I telephoned Ms. Gruber and raised the question of Zionism’s record when it came to the human and national rights of the Palestinians. The tone of our conversation remained friendly, but she was very clear that there was little I could say that would cause her to change her strong pro-Israeli and pro-Zionist views.
In Haven, she tells the story of how she volunteered to join our refugee group in wartime Italy, and she gives some background as to how FDR made the decision to shelter 1,000 refugees. Upon receiving permission to join the mission as our liaison, she did some research in State Department files.
According to Gruber (Haven, Ch.2), President Roosevelt was forced into making some kind of demonstration on behalf of European, especially Jewish, refugees because of the embarrassing publication of war time cables from the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland to Washington relating to what later became known as the Holocaust. According to Gruber, in these documents, the State Department in Washington, D.C. revealed its disinterest if not outright anti-Semitic hostility toward the mostly Jewish victims of Nazi persecution by ordering their colleagues in Switzerland to discontinue sending Washington such news.
In Gruber’s version, the shocking disclosure of these communications empowered members of the Jewish community to apply to a reluctant (and she implies, anti-Semitic) President Roosevelt, with a proposal to save hundreds of thousands of European Jews. In Gruber’s version, FDR finally agreed that the U.S. provide temporary haven for 1,000 refugees.
I believed Gruber’s story and repeated it often to friends. Only later did I learn that the very opposite was the truth. The real FDR was very much aware of and troubled by the plight of the wartime refugees and he proposed a plan to save half a million or more. He envisioned an agreement with such countries as the UK, Canada, Australia, and others with the U.S. and the U.K. leading the way by each taking in 150,000 “displaced persons” as they were then called. FDR’s emissary for this plan managed to get agreement in principle from the British but in the end the plan was vetoed by the Zionists. The Jewish leadership were afraid that providing haven for European Jewish refugees anywhere but Palestine would be at cross purposes with their plan for a Jewish state there.
Noted anti-Zionist author Alfred Lilienthal tells this story in his important and effectively buried book What Price Israel.
Here’s Lilienthal’s version
www.alfredlilienthal.com/what_price_israel_2.htm
President Roosevelt was deeply concerned with the plight of the European refugees and thought that all the free nations of the world ought to accept a certain number of immigrants, irrespective of race, creed, color or political belief. The President hoped that the rescue of 500,000 Displaced Persons could be achieved by such a generous grant of a worldwide political asylum. In line with this humanitarian idea, Morris Ernst, New York attorney and close friend of the President went to London in the middle of the war to see if the British would take in 100,000 or 200,000 uprooted people. The President had reasons to assume that Canada, Australia and the South American countries would gladly open their doors. And if such good examples were set by other nations, Mr. Roosevelt felt that the American Congress could be "educated to go back to our traditional position of asylum." The key was in London. Would Morris Ernst succeed there? Mr. Ernst came home to report, and this is what took place in the White House (as related by Mr. Ernst to a Cincinnati audience in 1950):
Ernst: "We are at home plate. That little island [and it was during the second Blitz that he visited England] on a properly representative program of a World Immigration Budget, will match the United States up to 150,000.
Roosevelt: "150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere, and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people."
A week later, or so, Mr. Ernst and his wife again visited the President.
Roosevelt (turning to Mrs. Ernst): "Margaret, can't you get me a Jewish Pope? I cannot stand it any more. I have got to be careful that when Stevie Wise leaves the White House he doesn't see Joe Proskauer on the way in." Then, to Mr. Ernst: "Nothing doing on the program. We can't put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won't stand for it."
"It's impossible! Why?" asked Ernst.
Roosevelt: "They are right from their point of view. The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, 'There is no other place this poor Jew can go.' But if there is a world political asylum for all people irrespective of race, creed or color, they cannot raise their money. Then the people who do not want to give the money will have an excuse to say 'What do you mean, there is no place they can go but Palestine? They are the preferred wards of the world."
Morris Ernst, shocked, first refused to believe his leader and friend. He began to lobby among his influential Jewish friends for this world program of rescue, without mentioning the President's or the British reaction. As he himself has put it: "I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine who very frankly said 'Morris, this is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.' " He ran into the same reaction amongst all Jewish groups and their leaders. Everywhere he found "a deep, genuine, often fanatically emotional vested interest in putting over the Palestinian movement" in men "who are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own."
This response of Zionism ended the remarkable Roosevelt effort to rescue Europe's Displaced Persons.
Kurt Nimmo: Not My Son in Video Says Atta Sr.
See below for another Nimmo post on the same subject.
Kurt Nimmo writes:
Not My Son in Video, Declares Atta Senior
Tuesday October 03rd 2006, 6:57 pm
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=587
In fairness, you’d think the corporate media would hear out Muhammad al-Amir al-Sayd Atta, father of patsy hijacker Mohammed Atta, who has told the Saudi daily al-Watan the latest intelligence video fabrication, allegedly showing Mohammed and Ziad Jarrah, is a crass fake. “The video-testament of my son is false and I continue to believe he is innocent,” Atta said. “There is a big difference between this photo and the images shown by the Americans—that one is not my boy…. “The Americans tampered with and falsified that video … they want to change the truth in order to achieve their goals in the Middle East.”
A Google News search returns exactly one reference to Atta’s comments, posted on the Adnkronos International web site. But even Adnkronos International accepts as gospel truth the dubitable myth the younger Atta “flew one of the planes that brought down the World Trade Center.” As of yet, nobody has demonstrated Atta was anywhere near an airplane on September 11 and as for bringing down the WTC with planes, this is in the province of flat-worlders and physical science no-nothings, including not only every damn neocon on the planet but no shortage of daft left gatekeepers such as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn.
It is interesting to compare the now infamous mugshot of Atta with this supposed earlier likeness. According to at least one nine eleven researcher, the Mohammed in Florida was fond of alcohol and cocaine, and if indeed this is the case imbibing these substances must have taken a heavy toll over the period of 20 months because the Atta portrayed in the passport mugshot is far more haggard and older looking than the earlier, smiling Atta, who looks to be less of a psychopath as well.
But the inconsistencies really shine in compared photos of Ziad Jarrah, as Steve and Paul Watson demonstrate on the Infowars web site.
“These are clearly not the same man, there are up to three different people feature\d here! The passport found in the wreckage does not show the face of the Jarrah in the latest video release who is Jarrah #1,” write the Watson brothers.
As for the recently released video, they conclude: “All indicators suggest that it was filmed by U.S. intelligence and purposefully timed for a politically expedient release to coincide the the passage of the Military Commissions Act. The fact that Atta and Jarrah appear in the same release, even though it was not the same day as the Rally and they may not have been in the same location as Bin Laden makes the whole thing stink to high heaven.”
Indeed, it does stink to high heaven, and then some.
This latest attempt to add fluff to the boxcutter wielding hijackers fable fits nicely in previous attempts, most notably the fat Bin Laden video, the Osama with a nose job video, and the recycling of old, pre-nine eleven CIA videos shot in Afghanistan, attempting to pass them off as newly acquired footage.
Of course, for the corporate media, not allowing Muhammad al-Amir al-Sayd Atta to have his say is wholly predictable, as they have a vested interest in promulgating the neocon version of events, considering the multinational corporations that own our media stand to cash-in on the “clash of civilizations” farce. However, you’d think, with the billions of dollars at their disposal, they would do a better job at pulling the wool over our eyes.
See also Nimmo's previous post on the same subject.
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=584
Missing Link Atta “Martyrdom” Video Appears Five Weeks Before Election
Sunday October 01st 2006, 9:31 am
Suddenly, with the midterm election five weeks away, a previously undiscovered video emerges, showing Mohammed Atta “reading his ‘martyrdom’ will inside Afghanistan at Usama bin Laden’s headquarters.”
In another segment, Atta appears with Ziad Jarrah, who, according to the official nine eleven fairy tale, was the pilot of “United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck,” according to Fox News.
As an extra added bonus, the tape shows Ramzi Binalshibh, the “senior” al-Qaeda leader and Hamburg cell member, supposedly captured after a gunbattle in Karachi, Pakistan, on September 11, 2002, and handed over to the United States.
Read the full post
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=587
Kurt Nimmo writes:
Not My Son in Video, Declares Atta Senior
Tuesday October 03rd 2006, 6:57 pm
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=587
In fairness, you’d think the corporate media would hear out Muhammad al-Amir al-Sayd Atta, father of patsy hijacker Mohammed Atta, who has told the Saudi daily al-Watan the latest intelligence video fabrication, allegedly showing Mohammed and Ziad Jarrah, is a crass fake. “The video-testament of my son is false and I continue to believe he is innocent,” Atta said. “There is a big difference between this photo and the images shown by the Americans—that one is not my boy…. “The Americans tampered with and falsified that video … they want to change the truth in order to achieve their goals in the Middle East.”
A Google News search returns exactly one reference to Atta’s comments, posted on the Adnkronos International web site. But even Adnkronos International accepts as gospel truth the dubitable myth the younger Atta “flew one of the planes that brought down the World Trade Center.” As of yet, nobody has demonstrated Atta was anywhere near an airplane on September 11 and as for bringing down the WTC with planes, this is in the province of flat-worlders and physical science no-nothings, including not only every damn neocon on the planet but no shortage of daft left gatekeepers such as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn.
It is interesting to compare the now infamous mugshot of Atta with this supposed earlier likeness. According to at least one nine eleven researcher, the Mohammed in Florida was fond of alcohol and cocaine, and if indeed this is the case imbibing these substances must have taken a heavy toll over the period of 20 months because the Atta portrayed in the passport mugshot is far more haggard and older looking than the earlier, smiling Atta, who looks to be less of a psychopath as well.
But the inconsistencies really shine in compared photos of Ziad Jarrah, as Steve and Paul Watson demonstrate on the Infowars web site.
“These are clearly not the same man, there are up to three different people feature\d here! The passport found in the wreckage does not show the face of the Jarrah in the latest video release who is Jarrah #1,” write the Watson brothers.
As for the recently released video, they conclude: “All indicators suggest that it was filmed by U.S. intelligence and purposefully timed for a politically expedient release to coincide the the passage of the Military Commissions Act. The fact that Atta and Jarrah appear in the same release, even though it was not the same day as the Rally and they may not have been in the same location as Bin Laden makes the whole thing stink to high heaven.”
Indeed, it does stink to high heaven, and then some.
This latest attempt to add fluff to the boxcutter wielding hijackers fable fits nicely in previous attempts, most notably the fat Bin Laden video, the Osama with a nose job video, and the recycling of old, pre-nine eleven CIA videos shot in Afghanistan, attempting to pass them off as newly acquired footage.
Of course, for the corporate media, not allowing Muhammad al-Amir al-Sayd Atta to have his say is wholly predictable, as they have a vested interest in promulgating the neocon version of events, considering the multinational corporations that own our media stand to cash-in on the “clash of civilizations” farce. However, you’d think, with the billions of dollars at their disposal, they would do a better job at pulling the wool over our eyes.
See also Nimmo's previous post on the same subject.
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=584
Missing Link Atta “Martyrdom” Video Appears Five Weeks Before Election
Sunday October 01st 2006, 9:31 am
Suddenly, with the midterm election five weeks away, a previously undiscovered video emerges, showing Mohammed Atta “reading his ‘martyrdom’ will inside Afghanistan at Usama bin Laden’s headquarters.”
In another segment, Atta appears with Ziad Jarrah, who, according to the official nine eleven fairy tale, was the pilot of “United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck,” according to Fox News.
As an extra added bonus, the tape shows Ramzi Binalshibh, the “senior” al-Qaeda leader and Hamburg cell member, supposedly captured after a gunbattle in Karachi, Pakistan, on September 11, 2002, and handed over to the United States.
Read the full post
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=587
Mark Crispin Miller: How They're Gonna Keep Control of Congress -- Part 2
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061015playbook_1.cfm
Even while the NYT continues to print Page One upbeat articles about the coming November elections, ("With Guarded Cheer, Democrats Dare to Believe This is Their Time," by Adam Nogourney and Robin Toner, 10.22.06) the issue of the Republican plan to steal the election once again by means of electronic voting manipulation, control of voter rolls, suppression of the Democratic vote and other such means continues to be virtually universally ignored not least by John Kerry and the Democratic Party.
That the plan is currently firmly in place was revealed in a glaring example in a California by-election this summer that Mark Crisipin Miller cites in the second part of his essay on our election process. Note that not even Democracy Now noticed or bothered to report on this outrage and they have been covering the issue far more than others. --RB
Mark Crispin Miller writes:
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061015playbook_1.cfm
BRAZEN BEHAVIOR—While the [Republican] party has pre-empted innumerable votes below the radar, it has also shown a steely willingness to thwart the voters openly, if they should dare resist the party's will. Take, for example, last summer's special race in San Diego to fill the empty seat of the felonious Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman who is now doing time for accepting bribes. Although leading in the pre-election polls, the Democrat, Francine Busby, lost to Brian Bilbray of the GOP; and then it came out that the party's poll workers had been ordered to take the e-voting machinery home with them for several days before the vote.
At the news of this jaw-dropping wrong (it being a very simple task to fiddle with the gadgets' memory cards and thereby fix the final count), San Diegans called for an investigation and a new election. A week after the election—and seventeen days before the vote was even certified—Bilbray flew to Washington, where he was summarily sworn in by House Speaker Dennis Hastert. In late August that amazing move was, still more amazingly, approved by Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann, who argued that the state of California had no jurisdiction once the Speaker of the House had made the people's choice.
If Dennis Hastert can choose Brian Bilbray for that seat, irrespective of the will of the electorate, why bother having House elections anywhere? Indeed, why bother with elections? Why not just have Congress's membership decided by the Speaker of the House—or by President Bush himself? Maybe that imperial arrangement would amuse the press as much as it appeals to Bush & Co. Otherwise there might have been some coverage of the scandal by the news media, which has largely disregarded it (while Hastert's role in Foleygate is a huge story).
The other new point that Miller makes is that if by chance the Republicans lose either House of Congress they have a plan to counter the Democratic victory. While it's far from clear that it will work, we should be aware of the danger.
ELEVENTH-HOUR PLAN—Such journalistic silence [about Republican plans to steal the election once again] makes it all the likelier that the Republicans will get away with it again—although it's also possible, of course, that they will somehow fail to steal it on Election Day. Chance, accident, imperial over-reaching and/or popular resistance can thwart the best-laid plans. If that should happen, though, the party has a plan to fix the problem; and the press's eerie silence on the danger of election fraud could help that strategy succeed.
If the GOP should lose the House or Senate, its troops will mount a noisy propaganda drive accusing their opponents of election fraud. This is no mere speculation, according to a well-placed party operative who lately told talk radio host Thom Hartmann, off the record, that the game will be to shriek indignantly that those dark-hearted Democrats have fixed the race. We will hear endlessly of Democratic "voter fraud" through phantom ballots, rigged machines, intimidation tactics, and all the other tricks whereby the Bush regime has come to power. The regime will, in short, deploy the ultimate Swift Boat maneuver to turn around as many races as they need so as to nullify the will of the electorate.
For the full text of Miller's article:
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061015playbook_1.cfm
Two NYT articles in mid October provided evidence that Bush has signaled to all who are interested: Republican solons, members of the Justice and Homeland Security departments, the entire Fed bureaucracy, the army of Washington and local lobbyists, that they needn’t be concerned about a possible loss of Congressional control of congress.
1.Bush Joins Hastert at Rally, And Lavishes the Praise,” Jim Rutenberg, NYT, 13 Oct 2006
We might expect that if the elections were fair, Bush would distance himself from the tainted Hastert
2.. Jim Rutenberg “President Sees Signs Favoring GOP Victory,” NYT, 12 October 13, 2006
The fix is very much in.
Even while the NYT continues to print Page One upbeat articles about the coming November elections, ("With Guarded Cheer, Democrats Dare to Believe This is Their Time," by Adam Nogourney and Robin Toner, 10.22.06) the issue of the Republican plan to steal the election once again by means of electronic voting manipulation, control of voter rolls, suppression of the Democratic vote and other such means continues to be virtually universally ignored not least by John Kerry and the Democratic Party.
That the plan is currently firmly in place was revealed in a glaring example in a California by-election this summer that Mark Crisipin Miller cites in the second part of his essay on our election process. Note that not even Democracy Now noticed or bothered to report on this outrage and they have been covering the issue far more than others. --RB
Mark Crispin Miller writes:
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061015playbook_1.cfm
BRAZEN BEHAVIOR—While the [Republican] party has pre-empted innumerable votes below the radar, it has also shown a steely willingness to thwart the voters openly, if they should dare resist the party's will. Take, for example, last summer's special race in San Diego to fill the empty seat of the felonious Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman who is now doing time for accepting bribes. Although leading in the pre-election polls, the Democrat, Francine Busby, lost to Brian Bilbray of the GOP; and then it came out that the party's poll workers had been ordered to take the e-voting machinery home with them for several days before the vote.
At the news of this jaw-dropping wrong (it being a very simple task to fiddle with the gadgets' memory cards and thereby fix the final count), San Diegans called for an investigation and a new election. A week after the election—and seventeen days before the vote was even certified—Bilbray flew to Washington, where he was summarily sworn in by House Speaker Dennis Hastert. In late August that amazing move was, still more amazingly, approved by Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann, who argued that the state of California had no jurisdiction once the Speaker of the House had made the people's choice.
If Dennis Hastert can choose Brian Bilbray for that seat, irrespective of the will of the electorate, why bother having House elections anywhere? Indeed, why bother with elections? Why not just have Congress's membership decided by the Speaker of the House—or by President Bush himself? Maybe that imperial arrangement would amuse the press as much as it appeals to Bush & Co. Otherwise there might have been some coverage of the scandal by the news media, which has largely disregarded it (while Hastert's role in Foleygate is a huge story).
The other new point that Miller makes is that if by chance the Republicans lose either House of Congress they have a plan to counter the Democratic victory. While it's far from clear that it will work, we should be aware of the danger.
ELEVENTH-HOUR PLAN—Such journalistic silence [about Republican plans to steal the election once again] makes it all the likelier that the Republicans will get away with it again—although it's also possible, of course, that they will somehow fail to steal it on Election Day. Chance, accident, imperial over-reaching and/or popular resistance can thwart the best-laid plans. If that should happen, though, the party has a plan to fix the problem; and the press's eerie silence on the danger of election fraud could help that strategy succeed.
If the GOP should lose the House or Senate, its troops will mount a noisy propaganda drive accusing their opponents of election fraud. This is no mere speculation, according to a well-placed party operative who lately told talk radio host Thom Hartmann, off the record, that the game will be to shriek indignantly that those dark-hearted Democrats have fixed the race. We will hear endlessly of Democratic "voter fraud" through phantom ballots, rigged machines, intimidation tactics, and all the other tricks whereby the Bush regime has come to power. The regime will, in short, deploy the ultimate Swift Boat maneuver to turn around as many races as they need so as to nullify the will of the electorate.
For the full text of Miller's article:
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061015playbook_1.cfm
Two NYT articles in mid October provided evidence that Bush has signaled to all who are interested: Republican solons, members of the Justice and Homeland Security departments, the entire Fed bureaucracy, the army of Washington and local lobbyists, that they needn’t be concerned about a possible loss of Congressional control of congress.
1.Bush Joins Hastert at Rally, And Lavishes the Praise,” Jim Rutenberg, NYT, 13 Oct 2006
We might expect that if the elections were fair, Bush would distance himself from the tainted Hastert
2.. Jim Rutenberg “President Sees Signs Favoring GOP Victory,” NYT, 12 October 13, 2006
The fix is very much in.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Mark Crispin Miller: Stolen Elections Explain Radical Agenda
Synopsis and commentary by Ronald Bleier
In early September 2006 Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of culture and communications at New York University, the author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (2005), spoke briefly as part of a presentation conducted by the World Can’t Wait organization in connection with their October 5 day of protest.
Miller began by asserting that the government of George W. Bush has never been elected, that they have come to office through stolen elections. He explained that they have to steal elections because their agenda is so extreme that they wouldn’t be in power otherwise. Gerrymandering upheld by the Supreme Court has facilitated their election fraud. They don’t fear electoral defeat.
Miller explained that their electoral strategy as determined by Karl Rove is to have Republicans keep repeating the election year mantra of:
War and Terrorism,
War and Terrorism,
War and Terrorism.
According to Miller, this is not because Rove thinks such repetition will make people vote for them, but is simply to give the media talking points in order to provide the necessary cover story for the day after.
Miller asserted that whatever the Democrats do, it won’t matter. They might have the best electoral strategy in the world, and they will still lose because “these people have no exit strategy.” Despite the current talk of a Democratic victory in November, the Karl Rove team will not allow a Democratic victory.
“Understand this,” Miller continued: they (the Bush administration) “are not incompetent.” Incompetence was not the reason for the kind of response we saw in Katrina. As for Iraq, “the way this war was handled, it’s not about incompetence.”
“At holding power,” Miller continued, “at stifling dissent, at making the world a more dangerous place, at hastening Judgment Day, bringing the apocalypse a little closer, They’re extremely good, they’ve done a great job.”
That’s why the terrorists get along with Bush and Cheney; Osama Bin Laden and the other terrorists share with them an apocalyptic world view. Such a view is profoundly un-American, Miller said towards the close of his brief remarks.
***
Commentary
It was heartening to find one public intellectual at last make the obvious and totally ignored connection between the Bush/Rove control of the election process and their radical, unpopular and destructive agenda.
The connection between stolen elections and their radical agenda is regularly ignored both in the mainstream media and in the Left and, progressive media, despite growing public awareness and massive evidence of voter fraud in every election cycle since at least 2000. Typical of mass media coverage is a front page story in the New York Times (9.28.06) headlined: “Democrats Cite New Hope In Bid to Retake Senate,” ignoring the implications of election fraud.
Anecdotally, when I’ve raised this issue with friends, I’ve had several offers to bet that the Democrats will win at least one house of Congress. Unfortunately I’ve sworn off betting. (Much of this was written before the front page efflorescence of the Mark Foley scandal which could change things. Are all bets off? I don't know. Even at this late hour, a month before the election, I can’t imagine Karl Rove letting November 2006 slip away from him without a fight.)
A perfect example of the way the mainstream media ignore the implications of election fraud on foreign and domestic policy is the New York Times’s editorial, “Rushing Off a Cliff” (9.28.06) expressing horror at Senate approval of the Military Commissions Act which gave President Bush everything he wanted. The Times editorial writers could have been channeling Karl Rove as they repeatedly insisted that the purpose of this bill was to intimidate and clobber the Democrats in the upcoming November elections. Once again the Times ignored evidence that the Bush administration act as if they are not worried about the electoral process.
The NYT can fulminate as it did in its “Rushing off a Cliff” editorial about Bush’s “ghastly ideas about terrorism,” but they ignore their own responsibility in joining the silence of the Democratic party about the illegitimacy of the last two presidential elections and many state wide elections going back to at least 1998.
Incompetence or policy goals
On the issue of whether or not the response to Katrina and the Iraq disaster can be put down to incompetence, had Miller been given more time he might have made the case that the administration’s response to Katrina and the continued immiseration and eviction of tens of thousands of its poorest and minority citizens was precisely what the Bush administration intended and successfully fought to ensure.
In the case of Iraq, given more time, Miller might have pointed out the Bush clique intended the current tragedy and dysfunction that Iraq is today. For one thing, the ongoing nightmare makes it impossible for Iraq to play its former role as a leading adversary of Israeli hegemony. The current Iraqi disarray also contributes to the instability and chaos in the area favored by Washington in its pursuit of a permanent war agenda.
In addition, pouring $8 billion a month into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fits nicely into their radical right wing program of “starving the beast,” i.e., the Federal treasury, of funds that might go toward social spending.
One can’t help but wonder about a political culture where only political outsiders like Mark Crispin Miller make the obvious connection between our eviscerated voting process and a radical agenda, intentionally far more destructive than any previous American government. Apparently this is what Miller had in mind when he insisted that the current regime is very good “at stifling dissent, at making the world a more dangerous place, at hastening Judgment Day, bringing the apocalypse a little closer.”
For a video of Miller’s remarks click on the following url:
http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2905&Itemid=223
See also Miller’s excellent blog: www.markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com
For an important follow up see Miller's recent article for the Washington Spectator, “The Elephant in the Polling Booth,” (October 2006)
www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061001elephant_3.cfm
Here Miller asserts:
That Bush/Cheney stole their "re-election" is not a "theory" but a fact that has by now been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. The case was made, first, by the House Judiciary Committee—or rather by its Democratic members, who conducted a meticulous inquiry into the debacle in Ohio. (The Republicans boycotted the investigation, and obstructed it.) Its findings were released on January 5, 2005, in the so-called Conyers Report, after Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the committee's ranking Democrat. The Republicans attacked it, and the press and leading Democrats ignored it; yet that report was sound, its major findings wholly accurate.
In early September 2006 Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of culture and communications at New York University, the author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (2005), spoke briefly as part of a presentation conducted by the World Can’t Wait organization in connection with their October 5 day of protest.
Miller began by asserting that the government of George W. Bush has never been elected, that they have come to office through stolen elections. He explained that they have to steal elections because their agenda is so extreme that they wouldn’t be in power otherwise. Gerrymandering upheld by the Supreme Court has facilitated their election fraud. They don’t fear electoral defeat.
Miller explained that their electoral strategy as determined by Karl Rove is to have Republicans keep repeating the election year mantra of:
War and Terrorism,
War and Terrorism,
War and Terrorism.
According to Miller, this is not because Rove thinks such repetition will make people vote for them, but is simply to give the media talking points in order to provide the necessary cover story for the day after.
Miller asserted that whatever the Democrats do, it won’t matter. They might have the best electoral strategy in the world, and they will still lose because “these people have no exit strategy.” Despite the current talk of a Democratic victory in November, the Karl Rove team will not allow a Democratic victory.
“Understand this,” Miller continued: they (the Bush administration) “are not incompetent.” Incompetence was not the reason for the kind of response we saw in Katrina. As for Iraq, “the way this war was handled, it’s not about incompetence.”
“At holding power,” Miller continued, “at stifling dissent, at making the world a more dangerous place, at hastening Judgment Day, bringing the apocalypse a little closer, They’re extremely good, they’ve done a great job.”
That’s why the terrorists get along with Bush and Cheney; Osama Bin Laden and the other terrorists share with them an apocalyptic world view. Such a view is profoundly un-American, Miller said towards the close of his brief remarks.
***
Commentary
It was heartening to find one public intellectual at last make the obvious and totally ignored connection between the Bush/Rove control of the election process and their radical, unpopular and destructive agenda.
The connection between stolen elections and their radical agenda is regularly ignored both in the mainstream media and in the Left and, progressive media, despite growing public awareness and massive evidence of voter fraud in every election cycle since at least 2000. Typical of mass media coverage is a front page story in the New York Times (9.28.06) headlined: “Democrats Cite New Hope In Bid to Retake Senate,” ignoring the implications of election fraud.
Anecdotally, when I’ve raised this issue with friends, I’ve had several offers to bet that the Democrats will win at least one house of Congress. Unfortunately I’ve sworn off betting. (Much of this was written before the front page efflorescence of the Mark Foley scandal which could change things. Are all bets off? I don't know. Even at this late hour, a month before the election, I can’t imagine Karl Rove letting November 2006 slip away from him without a fight.)
A perfect example of the way the mainstream media ignore the implications of election fraud on foreign and domestic policy is the New York Times’s editorial, “Rushing Off a Cliff” (9.28.06) expressing horror at Senate approval of the Military Commissions Act which gave President Bush everything he wanted. The Times editorial writers could have been channeling Karl Rove as they repeatedly insisted that the purpose of this bill was to intimidate and clobber the Democrats in the upcoming November elections. Once again the Times ignored evidence that the Bush administration act as if they are not worried about the electoral process.
The NYT can fulminate as it did in its “Rushing off a Cliff” editorial about Bush’s “ghastly ideas about terrorism,” but they ignore their own responsibility in joining the silence of the Democratic party about the illegitimacy of the last two presidential elections and many state wide elections going back to at least 1998.
Incompetence or policy goals
On the issue of whether or not the response to Katrina and the Iraq disaster can be put down to incompetence, had Miller been given more time he might have made the case that the administration’s response to Katrina and the continued immiseration and eviction of tens of thousands of its poorest and minority citizens was precisely what the Bush administration intended and successfully fought to ensure.
In the case of Iraq, given more time, Miller might have pointed out the Bush clique intended the current tragedy and dysfunction that Iraq is today. For one thing, the ongoing nightmare makes it impossible for Iraq to play its former role as a leading adversary of Israeli hegemony. The current Iraqi disarray also contributes to the instability and chaos in the area favored by Washington in its pursuit of a permanent war agenda.
In addition, pouring $8 billion a month into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fits nicely into their radical right wing program of “starving the beast,” i.e., the Federal treasury, of funds that might go toward social spending.
One can’t help but wonder about a political culture where only political outsiders like Mark Crispin Miller make the obvious connection between our eviscerated voting process and a radical agenda, intentionally far more destructive than any previous American government. Apparently this is what Miller had in mind when he insisted that the current regime is very good “at stifling dissent, at making the world a more dangerous place, at hastening Judgment Day, bringing the apocalypse a little closer.”
For a video of Miller’s remarks click on the following url:
http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2905&Itemid=223
See also Miller’s excellent blog: www.markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com
For an important follow up see Miller's recent article for the Washington Spectator, “The Elephant in the Polling Booth,” (October 2006)
www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061001elephant_3.cfm
Here Miller asserts:
That Bush/Cheney stole their "re-election" is not a "theory" but a fact that has by now been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. The case was made, first, by the House Judiciary Committee—or rather by its Democratic members, who conducted a meticulous inquiry into the debacle in Ohio. (The Republicans boycotted the investigation, and obstructed it.) Its findings were released on January 5, 2005, in the so-called Conyers Report, after Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the committee's ranking Democrat. The Republicans attacked it, and the press and leading Democrats ignored it; yet that report was sound, its major findings wholly accurate.
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