Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts

Friday, February 06, 2015

Paul Craig Roberts provides a guest column by Gerald Celente, who sums up American culture revealed by the movie “American Sniper”: “exceptional people”, barbaric, murderous, perverse.


Guest Column — Gerald Celente — America: Murder, Inc.

Fubruary 3, 2015 | Original Here                                            Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter

Guest Column — Gerald Celente — America: Murder, Inc.

In this article Gerald Celente sums up American culture as revealed by the movie “American Sniper.” The culture of the “exceptional people” is barbaric, murderous, perverse.

Be a “Proud American.” We hate, blindly. We murder, blindly, whether on the streets of Ferguson, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Somolia, Ukraine. Wherever there are people to be killed, we are there, doing the job. It is the American way.

American Sniper: A Model American
By Gerald Celente
Publisher, Trends Journal

The votes are in and the decision is overwhelmingly clear. Chris Kyle—the Navy SEAL portrayed in the blockbuster movie purported killer of some 200 Iraqis during four tours of duty—is the people’s choice.


From record ticket sales to major media accolades, from the halls of Congress to the White House, the nation has spoken: “American Sniper” is all-American. Chris Kyle—the most lethal killer in U.S. military history, a true hero, a brave warrior—has been anointed as a role model for all that America has come to stand for.

“American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!” said Brandon Griggs of CNN. And as Michelle Obama contends, “… for all those folks in America who don’t have these kinds of opportunities [to meet veterans and military families personally] films and TV are often the best way to share those stories.”

Speaking at a film industry event, Ms. Obama said the movie stressed, “The complicated moral decisions they [troops] are tasked with … the balancing of love of family with love of country.”

For Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the essence of his “love of country” lay in obeying his commander in chief and living up to Washington’s “moral decisions.” As the movie has it, when the Twin Towers were brought down on 9/11, off to war Kyle marched. This take-no-prisoners Texan dutifully followed the orders of the tough-talking faux-Texan George W. Bush to get those “evil doers.”

Bush’s simplistic and transparently shallow bravado about bringing ‘em in “dead or alive,” a comforting scenario made plausible by nearly a century of Hollywood Westerns, once again played out perfectly in Hollywood’s “American Sniper.” In a nation where politics has become show business for ugly people, the mindset of America’s first lady made perfect sense; film and TV’s dumbed-down, glossed over, whitewashed versions of hard facts served as the perfect substitutes for harsh reality and the solid truth.

Perhaps Ms. Obama had found a soft spot in her heart for Mr. Kyle because he closely reflects the words and deeds of her husband. In his book, American Sniper, Kyle wrote that killing is “fun,” something he “loved.” In the book “DoubleDown,” authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann  wrote that President Obama bragged that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes with his staff.

If not exactly presidential material, Kyle certainly has what it takes to be second in command. In his memoir, he wrote “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we want to f$#@ with you … we will kill you…”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in his response to the recently released report on CIA torture, said he was proud of his role in creating the gruesome interrogation program that included water boarding and rectal feeding. Did he have any regrets for what he ordered? “No … absolutely not … and I’d do it again in a minute,” Cheney said.

Indeed, if Kyle were alive he would certainly be a force to be reckoned with in the 2016 race for the White House. While it would be difficult to trump Hillary Clinton’s giggling glee over the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, (“We came, we saw … he died,”) in a war that she personally pushed for, Kyle’s statement that he “… couldn’t give a flying f%@# about the Iraqis. I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do … it was fun,” comes very close.

The American Sniper is a model American. And the American model is immorality. George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condaleeza Rice, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers … the list of perpetrators goes on. And so does the list of their crimes: slaughtering millions by waging wars based of false information, overthrowing sovereign governments based on lies, killing innocents and “suspects in drone strikes” without regard to international law and with no personal regret for their roles in fostering the mass murders. Like Chris Kyle, each of them speak proudly of their actions and express not a hint of sorrow.

Most Americans have forgotten about former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who defended Bill Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment. When the show’s host, Lesley Stahl, asked her “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima … is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “we think the price is worth it.”

“We,” she says, as if it truly included “us.” So speak the moralizing madmen and madwomen—sociopaths and psychopaths—who pontificate from their positions of high office, telling the rest of us what we must believe and who should be killed next.

Chris Kyle did his patriotic duty. He obeyed orders, followed the words and carried out the tasks issued from the White House. The fish rots from the head down. The American Government is the American Sniper.

Gerald Celente is the founder and director of the Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y., and publisher of the Trends Journal and Trendsresearch.com.



Wednesday, February 04, 2015

This interview with Paul Craig Roberts provides an excellent history of the neocons in the U.S., beginning with their prosecution by Ronald Reagan, their turning loose by George H. W. Bush, their acceptance by all presidents since then, and finally, when they have become totally insane, they have been given carte blanche by the U.S. government as they prepare to kill us all by provoking a nuclear war with Russia.




http://youtu.be/Il-Bbw6XJVc
Russia and the Neocon March to World War 3 with Paul Craig Roberts

The LIP TV




Published on Jan 30, 2015
The Neocon march to World War III with Russia is explored with retired Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts. How George W. Bush and Dick Cheney managed to embolden the far right towards reckless endangerment of global peace, and how Russia has become the focus of the static is discussed. The possibility of global economic collapse, plus the Reagan administration figure talks about how the political landscape has changed for the worse in this uncensored political discussion on Buzzsaw, hosted by Sean Stone.

GUEST INFO:
Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business. He is chairman of The Institute for Political Economy. President Reagan appointed Dr. Roberts Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and he was confirmed in office by the U.S. Senate. From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy. After leaving the Treasury, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

ADD’L LINKS: 
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/ 
http://thelip.tv/ 
http://thelip.tv/show/buzzsaw/Buzzsaw 
Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlaaQ... 
Buzzsaw Short Clips Playlist: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdp0I... 
https://www.facebook.com/EnterTheBuzz... 
https://www.facebook.com/thelip.tv 
http://www.youtube.com/theliptv

EPISODE BREAKDOWN: 
00:01 Welcome to Buzzsaw 
00:20 Introducing Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of Treasury. 
01:15 Is the antagonization of Russia something Reagan would have supported? 
02:45 Neoconservatives who were fired by Reagan and pardoned by George Bush Sr.
07:15 Neoconservative mindset to destabilize anyone who opposes the United States.
07:45 Do neoconservatives want to eliminate the possibility of a bi-partisan world? 
23:55 Are we on the brink of another economic collapse? 
29:25 Thank you and goodbye.

Category                         News & Politics
License                          Standard YouTube License


Saturday, November 29, 2014

Writer, nuclear power expert, and green-powered-Earth advocate Harvey Wasserman reflects on how much better our country would have been today if President Kennedy had not been cruelly taken from us by conspirators never quite identified ...except maybe now in the must-watch preceding post!



Can We Ever Recover from the Murder of John Kennedy?

Harvey Wasserman | November 24, 2014 7:25 am


The images we ingest never cease to shape us.

Just 51 years ago, the head of a profoundly gifted young man was blown apart.

A few months earlier he’d given a speech that promised a new dawn.

He reached out to our enemies. He talked of going to the moon, of technological breakthrough and human promise. And he stopped the radioactive madness of atmospheric Bomb testing, a reason many of us are alive today.

It’s easy to idealize John Kennedy.


We still debate what he might have done in Vietnam.

But since the war did escalate, and we know the horrible costs to us all, then the possibility that he might have gotten us out gnaws at our soul.

So does not being sure about who actually killed him.

And then there’s the horror of the moment itself. A fellow human, blown apart before our eyes.

It hurts to think about it. To write about it. How can sorrow not reign in our hearts over this terrible human image that so deeply defines us?

As a nation, we still feel the murder of Abraham Lincoln. Having won a Constitutional Amendment to end slavery, he was the only one to smooth the transition from civil war to progressive peace. We still pay for losing him.

And for the image of a good man, seated happily in a theater, next to his wife … as a time for healing is unbearably shattered by a bullet to the head.

Russia never really recovered after Alexander II, a rare reformist czar, was murdered in 1881 while moving his nation toward a democratic constitution.

Michael Collins was a violent Irish revolutionary who turned to peace amidst a horrendous civil war.

Could he have ended it? All we know is the Troubles dragged on a ghastly seven decades after he was shot.

Mahatma Gandhi led the world’s first successful nonviolent anti-imperial campaign, then fasted nearly to the death to help halt a Hindu-Muslim civil war.

Then he was shot. And what is the outcome?

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin were also murdered. And what’s come since?

In America … Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy … and then John Lennon.

Around the world, names we don’t know. Faces we haven’t seen. Social movements crushed, freedoms lost, good people killed (too often by our own government) deadening the soul.

And who is next? Does all this mean activists of great heart and artists for social change inevitably court a death sentence?

It’s long been clear, for a wide variety of reasons, that we cannot rely on “great leaders” to save our world for us.

But can our minds and souls ever recover from such horrible images repeatedly rammed into our brains?

Lynn Stuart Parramore has written with brilliance at AlterNet about the traumas we all face in today’s America.

In their wake, we are being poisoned by a ghastly, malignant class of zombie corporations somehow granted human rights and no human responsibilities.

They have gutted the Democratic Party and seized our government.

Their cancer is of injustice, cynicism, pollution and war.

Avoidable poverty, racism for the hell of it, a gutted democracy, eco-suicide for private profit, perpetual war for its own sake … they all metastasize to feed the corporate tumor.

Another election has been bought, rigged, stolen and lynched. The internet is endangered. Likewise our civil liberties.

So do we turn our heads “until the darkness goes”?

Or do we face the unthinkable head-on, and refuse to blink (except momentarily—we all need a break from time to time) at what we see?

Somehow we have survived since John Kennedy was killed. Kids have been born … and so have social movements … along with many surprising twists of fate.

We are winning a culture war barely begun in 1963.

Silent Spring had just been published. An avid sailor, we don’t know how JFK might have interacted with a nascent environmental movement.

But born it was. A half-century later, Solartopian technologies are poised to green-power our economy. We have the means to survive in harmony with our Mother Earth.

But can we muster the political power to cure our corporate cancer?

Richard Nixon has come and gone. So have Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Now “Hope and Change” join them in the compost of history. They came too cheap. They meant too little.

Apparently we have more lessons to learn, more inner strength to build.

Departed friend, whoever you might have become, whatever you might have done, you have left us no choice.

The better angels of our souls now demand that we ask not what our planet can do for us …
HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. In 1960, he saw John Kennedy speak on the steps of the Ohio statehouse.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

The first video (Body of War) is a naked and honest portrayal of what it's like inside the body, heart and soul of an extraordinary and heroic young man struggling to deal with the complexities of a paralyzed body resulting from a bullet to the spine as a soldier in Iraq. Also in this film, we see the historic debate unfolding in the Congress about going to war in Iraq. The second video (War, Whistleblowing and Independent Journalism) is a panel moderated by The Real News’ Jessica Desvarieau and Phil Donahoe, featuring interviews with high-ranking government employees who sacrificed their jobs, and some cases risked imprisonment, to blow the whistle on corruption, waste, fraud, and illegal spying in their respective agencies.


                                                                          Originals here and here






Body of War

Body of War, a film by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue. It is an intimate and transformational feature documentary about the true face of war today. - September 24, 14


More at The Real News


Precis                                                                                       

Body of War, a film by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to several standing ovations and acclaim. It won Best Documentary from the prestigious National Board of Review and was nominated for Best Documentary from Producer's Guild of America. Body of War was short-listed for an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary and was released theatrically through Landmark Theatres. Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro were featured in a special on Bill Moyers http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03212008/watch2.html, as well as appearing on all the major networks and publications. Body of War is an intimate and transformational feature documentary about the true face of war today. Meet Tomas Young, 25 years old, paralyzed from a bullet to his spine - wounded after serving in Iraq for less than a week.

Body of War is Tomas' coming home story as he evolves into a new person, coming to terms with his disability and finding his own unique and passionate voice against the war. The film is produced and directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, and features two original songs by Eddie Vedder. Body of War is a naked and honest portrayal of what it's like inside the body, heart and soul of this extraordinary and heroic young man.

Body of War unfolds on two parallel tracks. On the one hand, we see Tomas evolving into a powerful voice against the war as he struggles to deal with the complexities of a paralyzed body. And on the other, we see the historic debate unfolding in the Congress about going to war in Iraq.

The film opens as Tomas and his fiance Brie prepare for their wedding. However, because of his disability, we see how the simple everyday activities for Tomas are involved and challenging. War is personal and the film takes us into the skin and bones of what it means to have no control over basic bodily functions. In many remarkable scenes, we directly experience how vulnerable and open Tomas is as he interacts with his wife, family, and friends.

For their honeymoon, Tomas and Brie journey to Camp Casey, the anti-war encampment in Crawford, Texas, down the road from President Bush's Texas ranch. It was here that Cindy Sheehan galvanized the world's media and jumpstarted a new and growing anti-war movement. Cindy's son Casey and Tomas were both shot on the same day in Iraq. Tomas speaks publicly, gives interviews, finding his new voice and role. As the film progresses, we witness Tomas' evolution into a powerful leader, finding fresh abilities out of his disability and expressing his new form of patriotism. He is interviewed by Mike Wallace for "60 Minutes" and featured in a photo essay in The Nation magazine.

On a parallel track, Body of War follows the historic deliberations in Congress to grant President Bush authority to invade Iraq. During the fall of 2002, both Houses debated the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Forces against Iraq (H. J. Res 114). The House of Representatives adopted the resolution on October 10, by a vote of 296-133. The next day, the Senate passed it by a vote of 77-23. In the film, scenes of Tomas speaking out against the war are interspersed with the packaged debate in both houses of Congress, and the vote by vote tally in the U.S. Senate. (The vote on this resolution remains highly controversial five years later. In the current presidential campaign, the vote comes up again and again.)

The foremost voice of restraint in Congress was Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, the longest serving senator in U. S. history, first elected in 1958. His eloquent opposition to this momentous resolution is vividly captured in Body of War.

In the final riveting scene, the two streams of the film come together, as Tomas visits Senator Byrd in his office on Capitol Hill. Together, they review the historic Senate vote and read aloud the names of the "Immortal 23" who stood against the war.

War, Whistleblowing and Independent Journalism Panel

Panel includes: William Binney, NSA whistleblower; Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, EPA whistleblower; Jessica Desvarieux, journalist [moderator]; Phil Donahue, journalist; Thomas Drake, NSA whistleblower; and Kirk Wiebe, NSA whistleblower - September 22, 14


More at The Real News


Bio                                                                                            

Phil Donahue and the Donahue show have been honored with 20 Daytime Emmy Awards, including nine for Outstanding Host and a George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Journalism Award.

Kirk Wiebe is a former NSA Senior Intelligence Analyst and an NSA Whistleblower who worked with NSA for more than 32 years, and was awarded that Agency’s second highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award. He retired from NSA in October 2001 along with fellow NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney and Ed Loomis.

William Binney was the former technical director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group and a senior NSA cryptomathematician at the NSA. He worked there for over three decades, and retired after 9/11 as the agency began to implement domestic spying programs that he says are unconstitutional. He is also a whistleblower, having disclosed information to the Defense Department in 2002 about corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse in the agency related to the use of data collection and analysis program called Trailblazer.

Thomas Drake, NSA whistleblower

Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo received her BA degree from Barnard College/Columbia University and her doctorate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblower's Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA.

Dr. Coleman-Adebayo was a Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of the Administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency. She has held various academic positions as Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University _ School of Foreign Studies and Visiting Scholar in the Department of African-American Studies at George Mason University.

On August 18, 2000, Dr. Coleman-Adebayo won an historic lawsuit against the EPA on the basis of race, sex, color discrimination, and a hostile work environment. She subsequently testified before Congress on two occasions. As a result, the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act [No FEAR] was introduced by Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee ( D-TX) and Senator John Warner (R- VA). Along with the No FEAR Coalition, she ushered the No FEAR Bill through Congress. President George W. Bush signed the No FEAR Act into law. Thousands of federal workers and their families have directly benefited from this law. She serves as a producer on the dramatic film: No FEAR!

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Memo to my fellow Democrats: The enemy is not “the Republicans,” rather it is the Republicans AND Democrats “elected” to Congress and the White House. (I put “elected” in quotes because the elections are systematically rigged.) Here Paul Craig Roberts, a highly educated old-school Republican with on-the-job credentials in both Reagan’s cabinet and Wall Street, relates the work of other educated out-side-the-box thinkers who see the U.S. media for what it is: a propaganda machine that would make Goebbels jealous. Roberts finishes with a critic of Obama’s recent speech to the graduating class of The Ohio State University: “Outdoing George Orwell’s Big Brother, Obama said in public to a graduating class of a great university without shame: ‘You have grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as . . . some sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.’” Well, tyranny is already here my friends. But thanks to the “presstitute” media, the majority of Americans are unaware that the U.S. Constitution has long since been shredded.










How Elites and Media Minimize Dissent and Bury Truth — Paul Craig Roberts

May 11, 2013 | Original Here                                                        Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter

Over the last several years I have watched the rise of an important new intellect on the American scene. Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, has demonstrated time and again the extraordinary ability to reexamine settled issues and show that the accepted conclusion was incorrect.

One of his early achievements was to dispose of the myth of immigrant crime by demonstrating that “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age and gender.” You can imagine the uproar, but Unz won the debate.

Unz provoked and prevailed in another controversy when he concluded that Mexican-Americans have approximately the same innate intelligence as whites, with their lower IQs being due to transitory socio-economic deprivation.

He next surprised by showing the connection between the declining real value of the minimum wage (about one-third less than in the 1960s) and immigration. Americans cannot survive on one-third less minimum income than four decades ago, and the unfilled jobs are taken by Hispanics who live many to the room. A higher minimum wage, Unz pointed out, would cure the illegal immigration problem as American citizens would fill the jobs.

I wrote about some of Unz’s remarkable findings. One of my favorites is his comparison of the responsiveness of the Chinese and US governments to their publics. I found his conclusion convincing that the authoritarian one-party Chinese government was more responsive to the Chinese people than democratic two-party Washington is to the American people.

The person is rare who can take on such controversial issues in such a professional way that he wins the admiration even of his critics. In my opinion, Ron Unz is a national resource. He has established online libraries of important periodicals and magazines from the pre-Internet era, information that otherwise essentially would be lost. I have not met him, but he donates to this site and is an independent thinker free of The Matrix.

Unz’s latest article, “Our American Pravda,” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-american-pravda/ is a striking account of the failure of media, regulatory, and national security organizations and subsequent coverups that leave the public deceived. Unz uses the Iraq war as one example:

“The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

“True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

“The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy [and a police state]. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.

“But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.”

Unz covers a number of cases of criminality, treason, and coverups at high levels of government and points out that “these dramatic, well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media.” One reason for “this wall of uninterest” is that both parties are complicit and thus equally eager to bury the facts.

Unz is raising the question of the efficacy of democracy. Does the way democracy works in America provide any more self-rule than in undemocratic regimes? He offers this example:

“Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernake at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.”

In an article not long ago, I raised the issue whether Americans live in The Matrix with their perceptions and thoughts controlled by disinformation as in George Orwell’s 1984.

Unz adds to this perspective. He tells the story of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky’s plan to transform Russia into a make-believe two-party state complete with heated battles fought on divisive and symbolic issues. Behind the scenes the political elites would orchestrate the political battles between the parties with the purpose of keeping the population divided and funneling popular dissatisfaction into meaningless dead-end issues. In such a system, self-serving power prevails. After describing Berezovsky’s plot, Unz asks if Berezovsky got his idea from observing the American political scene.

Thinking further about the propagandistic nature of the US media, Unz writes:

“Individuals from less trusting societies are often surprised at the extent to which so many educated Americans tend to believe whatever the media tells them and ignore whatever it does not, placing few constraints on even the most ridiculous propaganda. For example, a commentator on my article described the East German media propaganda he had experienced prior to Reunification as being in many respects more factual and less totally ridiculous than what he now saw on American cable news shows. One obvious difference was that Western media was so globally dominant during that era that the inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic inevitably had reasonable access to a contrasting second source of information, forcing their media to be much more cautious in its dishonesty, while today almost any nonsense uniformly supported by the MSNBC-to-FoxNews spectrum of acceptable opinion remains almost totally unquestioned by most Americans.” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/american-pravda-reality-television/

Unz’s view of the US media as propagandists for power is consistent with that of John Pilger, one of the last remaining real journalists who refuses to serve power, and with Gerald Celente, who sums up the sordid American media in one word–”presstitutes.” I know from my own media experience that an independent print and TV media no longer exists in the West. The American media is a tightly controlled disinformation ministry.

Those few Americans who are free of the constraints imposed by dogmas on their ability to think and to process information have a huge responsibility for their small number. The assault on the rule of law began in the last years of the Clinton regime, but the real destruction of the US Constitution, the basis for the United States, was achieved by the neoconservative George W. Bush and Obama regimes. Wars without declarations by Congress, torture in violation of both US and international law, war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg standard, indefinite detention and assassination of US citizens without due process of law, universal spying on US citizens without warrants, federalization of state and local police now armed with military weapons and uniforms, detention centers, “your papers, please” (without the Gestapo “please”) not only at airports but also on highways, streets, bus terminals, train stations, and at sporting events.

On May 5 Obama gave the commencement address at Ohio State University. No doubt that the graduates thought that they were being honored by being addressed by the world’s greatest tyrant.

Obama told the graduating class, to applause, that their obligation as citizens is to trust the government. Outdoing George Orwell’s Big Brother, Obama said in public to a graduating class of a great university without shame: “You have grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as . . . some sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”
Blogger's Note: You should understand the monologue below as PCR's parody of what Obama might have been thinking in that moment, as opposed to the words he was actually using at the Ohio State commencement.
Listen to my propaganda, not to those constitutional experts, legal authorities, and critics of me, the First Black President, who tell you to beware of unaccountable government. Due process is decided by the demands of the war on terror. If there is a war on terror, do you want a fair trial or do you want to be safe? I am going to make you safe by not giving defendants accused of terrorism, who some liberal-pinko-commie judge would set free, a fair trial.

Making you safe by enveloping you in a police state is a nonpartisan undertaking. Just listen to Lindsay Graham and Peter King and John McCain. These Republican leaders are demanding the police state that I am providing.

As my own legal department, The US Department Of Justice, decided, the Dictator, I mean, elected president, has the power to save the country from domestic and foreign terrorists by abrogating the US Constitution, an out-of-date document that binds our hands and prevents us from keeping you, our serfs and minions, I mean our cherished citizens, safe.

Trust me. That is your obligation as a US citizen. Trust me and I will make you free, happy, employed sometime later in this century when the Amerikan Empire controls the world.

The US Constitution was written by people who opposed Empire. These people were misguided, just like the Roman Republicans who did not understand the need for a Caesar. The American Empire, as the neoconservatives have made clear, is what keeps you free from terrorism. We have to kill them over there before they come over here. And those who are over here will be killed too. We tolerate no dissent. That part of the Constitution is gone, along with the rest of it.

Now give me my honorary doctorate, another sign of approval of my usurpation.



Friday, March 22, 2013

Author and activist David Swanson speaks in Washington on the subject of war in general and in particular the U.S. government lies used to justify the Iraq war. Saddam Hussein was claimed by the Bush White House to have weapons of mass destruction (UN inspectors repeatedly found none, even when told by the State Department where to look) and he was depicted as repressing the Iraqi people (yes, he was a despot, but the country's infrastructure was modern, the citizens had civil rights, and sectarian violence was held in check). The result of the war was about 1.5 million Iraqis killed, similar numbers of Iraqis injured or displaced, thousands of deformed babies due to extensive use of spent-uranium munitions, and deliberate triggering of now-irreversible Sunni-Shite internecine violence. Swanson's research caused him to conclude that not only was the supposed justification for attacking Iraq based on lies, but so too have been all other wars.


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http://youtu.be/cEjVHW5OUk4
Iraq 10 Years Later: Still Shocked, Not Awed

StoryofAmerica




Published on Mar 19, 2013
David Swanson's remarks were filmed March 18, 2013 at Busboys and Poets in Washington DC.

From Wikipedia:

In May 2005, Swanson was instrumental in making the Downing Street memo known in the United States and discussed in Congress. He co-founded After Downing Street (now War Is A Crime .org) and led an ongoing campaign to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.[2] Swanson continues to work closely with the peace movement and often leads campaigns to end the Iraq War and punish those involved in launching that war.

In 2009, he wrote Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union[3] and the introduction to Dennis Kucinich's The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush.[4][5] He wrote War Is a Lie in 2010.

Swanson is the Washington Director of Democrats.com;[1] a board member of Progressive Democrats of America[6] and VotersForPeace;[7] a convenor of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, and the chair of its working group on Accountability and Prosecution;[citation needed] a member of War Is A Crime.org's Robert Jackson Steering Committee;[8] and a blogger for the Backbone Campaign.[9] Swanson does paid work for various peace and justice groups, including creating websites and organizing campaigns. Most recently, Swanson has been working on Velvet Revolution's campaign to oppose the United States Chamber of Commerce and its CEO Tom J. Donohue,[10] and October 2011.[11][12]

In January 2012 Swanson offered a "peace lily" to the Charlottesville City Council after it passed its "anti-Iran war" resolution (which he helped to author).

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

"A DECADE AGO THE BUSH REGIME DEMONSTRATED THAT IT COULD OVER-RIDE US STATUTARY LAW, THE US CONSTITUTION, AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL SEPARATION OF POWERS IN ORDER TO CONCENTRATE UNNACCOUNTABLE POWER IN THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. THE DEMOCRATS, WHEN THEY GAINED CONTROL OF CONGRESS IN THE MID-TERM ELECTIONS, DID NOTHING ABOUT THE UNPRECEDENTED LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL CRIMES OF GEORGE W. BUSH. WHEN A PEOPLE HAVE NO POLITICAL PARTY THAT REPRESENTS THEM, THEY ARE DOOMED TO TYRANNY. AND TO WAR." -- PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS


THE REPUBLICANS CROSS THE RUBICON ~ Paul Craig Roberts



Does anyone remember when National Public Radio was an independent voice?

During the 1980s NPR was continually on the case of the Reagan administration. NPR certainly had a Democratic slant, and a lot of its reporting about the Reagan administration was one-sided. Yet, NPR was an independent voice, and it sometimes got things correct.

In the 21st century that voice has disappeared, which was the intention of the George W. Bush regime. Bush put a Republican woman in charge who made it clear to NPR producers and show hosts that the federal part of their funding was at risk.

Money often over-rules principle, and when corporations added their really big money NPR collapsed. Today the local stations still pretend to be funded by listeners, but if you have noticed, as I have, there are now a large number of corporate advertisements, disguised in the traditional terms “with support from . . .” If you are not listening to classical music, you are listening to corporate advertisements.

Today the entire “mainstream media” is closed to truth-tellers. The US media is Washington’s propaganda ministry. The US media has only one function – to lie for Washington.

What reminded me of NPR’s surrender was NPR’s August 31 report with its two regular talking voice political pundits discussing the Republican Convention and Romney’s speech. After witnessing the Republicans at their nominating convention at Tampa violate all their own rules and ride roughshod over the Ron Paul delegates, one expected some discussion of the Republican Party’s refusal to allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination or his delegate account to be announced.

The operative question was obvious: How can the American people trust the Republicans with the awesome power of the executive branch when the Republican Party just finished demonstrating for all to see its Stalinist qualities by crushing the anti-war, anti-police state wing of its party?

The authoritarianism was gratuitous. Romney had a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated. It would have cost Romney nothing to follow the rules and allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination and his delegate numbers to be reported. Instead, Romney wrote off the liberty contingent of the Republican Party. The Brownshirts demonstrated their power.

The last Republican who wrote off a chunk of his own party was Barry Goldwater, and he went down to crushing defeat. Makes one wonder if the Republicans are relying on those electronic voting machines programed with proprietary Republican software that leave no paper trail. The Democrats have acquiesced to Republican election theft. There have been numerous cases where exit polls indicate that voters chose a different candidate than the one chosen by the Republican programmed voting machines.
One would have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found the parallel with Goldwater worth comment, but the suppression of the Ron Paul delegates was already down the memory hole.

One would also have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found Clint Eastwood’s speech a fascinating topic of discussion. Eastwood had a Republican National Committee approved speech, but discarded it. Instead, Eastwood stood beside an empty chair and pretended to be talking to Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney in the chair. By pretending to be talking to Obama, Eastwood made his points without eliciting boos from the Republican audience.

Not many in the Republican audience caught on, but there were some stony faces when Eastwood said “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” More stony Republican faces when Eastwood showed his opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars and asks the chair, “why don’t you just bring them [the troops] home tomorrow morning?” Those who thought he was digging at Obama cheered; those who realized he was criticizing hardline Republican positions were displeased.

But NPR and the US media in general are uncomfortable with such real news as a political party being told off by one of its heroes and a political party sufficiently stupid to repeat Barry Goldwater’s mistake. The establishment might complain. The money might dry up or employees be fired for permitting such a story to be aired. The Democrats lost their independent financing when jobs offshoring destroyed the unions. There are no longer countervailing powers to Wall Street and the corporations, which have been endowed by the Republican US Supreme Court with First Amendment rights to purchase US elections, and placed in charge of the US Treasury, the regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve.

In Tampa the Republicans wrote off the Ron Paul vote, because they are enamored of power and its gratuitous demonstration. Can people so desirous of power and the thrill of its use be trusted to let go of power when they lose the next election? There are enough presidential executive orders and national security orders, even some signed by the Democrat Obama, that any president can assert them and refuse to face election.

Once Rome accepted Julius Caesar’s coup, the Roman Republic was gone. Those who tried to save the Roman Republic by assassinating Caesar failed, because the majority of the legions had gone over to the dictatorship, which promised them more money than the Republic had. Caesar’s name became the title for Rome’s dictators.

In the US, even your friendly local police have gone over to dictatorship. And they are armed with its tools. A friend, a competitive shooter for accuracy, told me that as he left his gun club on August 27, a local sheriff department entered in a military armored vehicle, something one would expect to see on a battlefield, followed by a large sheriff’s department truck full of military equipment. He says that the gun club allows local police to use the club’s facilities so that club members are not stopped and harassed about their firearms as they go to and from the club. He reports that the police will line up 30 abreast, with automatic weapons, not allowed to club members, and fire at one target, with 30 police emptying 30-round magazines at the same target.

He once asked our protectors if they were practicing for some competition. The answer was, “No, we are preparing to control the outcome when there is trouble.”

Control is the operative word. We have seen for a number of years now that the Republican Party is power-addicted. Remember when the Bush administration fired the US Attorneys who refused the order to indict only Democrats? Remember the Republican Party’s transparent frame-up of popular Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman? Evidence indicates that the Republican operative Karl Rove took advantage of a Republican federal judge, vulnerable according to news reports to corruption charges, and a compliant Republican US attorney in Alabama to railroad Governor Siegelman. The message to Democrats was: if you get elected in our Southern Territory, we will get you.

But never fear, we have “freedom and democracy.” George W. Bush told us so himself.

The weak, chicken-hearted Obama administration has not commuted Siegelman’s outrageous sentence. The inability of the Democrats to stand up for their own members and their own principles is the best indication we have that Republican tyranny will prevail.

It didn’t take Caesar George W. Bush 10 minutes to wipe out the prison sentence of vice president Dick Cheney’s chief aid for revealing the identity of a CIA operative, a felony under US law. But the Obama Justice (sic) Department supports Karl Rove’s destruction of one of its most popular governors.
It was the German left-wing’s weak opposition to the National Socialists that gave the world Hitler.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Hate. Decades of frustration have made Republicans mean. They object to everything that has happened since the Great Depression in the 1930s to make the US a more just and humane society.

The Republican Party wants power so that it can smash all vestiges of regulation and welfare and all those of whom Republicans disapprove: the poor, the minorities, liberals, the imagined “foreign enemies,” war protestors and others who challenge authority, those American weaklings who have compassion for the unfortunate, the US Constitution, that pinko-liberal-commie document that coddles criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists, and all dissenters from the policy of enriching the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent.

Above all else, the Republicans want to turn Social Security and Medicare into profit centers for private corporations.

Would the world be surprised if Republicans donned brown shirts? America has declared itself to be “the indispensable nation,” justifying its hegemony over the world. Any country that does not submit to Washington is “a foe.” The neoconservative propaganda that America is the indispensable nation with a right to world hegemony sounds a lot like “Deutschland uber alles.”

A decade ago the Bush regime demonstrated that it could over-ride US statutory law, the US Constitution, and the constitutional separation of powers in order to concentrate unaccountable power in the office of the president.

The Democrats, when they gained control of Congress in the mid-term elections, did nothing about the unprecedented legal and constitutional crimes of George W. Bush. The Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who could easily have impeached George W. Bush for his obvious crimes against US law and the US Constitution, announced that “impeachment is off the table.” Money was more important to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi than the rule of law.

When a people have no political party that represents them, they are doomed to tyranny.

And to war.

Russia and China are in the way of Washington’s hegemony. Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has declared Russia to be “our number one geopolitical foe” for opposing Washington’s plans to overthrow by violence the Syrian government. Why is overthrowing the Syrian government so advantageous to Washington that Romney in a fit of pique recklessly brought the United States into direct confrontation with Russia?

Arrogance and hubris lead to wars. Do Americans really want a person as president who is so reckless as to gratuitously declare a large nuclear-armed country to be our number one enemy? The American and Israeli trained Georgian army did not last an hour when the former Soviet republic foolishly, on Washington’s encouragement, provoked the Russian bear.

Meanwhile the Obama regime, concerned with China’s rapid economic rise, has indicated that it thinks China is the number one enemy. The Obama regime has forgot that China, when a primitive, backward country, fought the US to a stalemate in Korea more than a half century ago.

The Obama regime has announced that the US Navy is being repositioned to the Eastern Pacific, that the US regards the South China Sea as America’s national interest, and that new naval, air, and troop bases are being established in the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in the region. The purpose of these bases is to block China’s access to energy and raw materials, which is what Washington did to Japan in the 1930s.

Are Americans aware that the hubris and idiocy of their political leaders have now saddled Americans with the burden of two number one enemies, both well equipped with armies and nuclear weapons? Only Iran can be happy about this as it moves Iran off the front burner.

Washington is putting its forward military bases in place, and the propaganda war is being cranked up. The subservient British press was quick to fall in line with Washington. A British reader of my column reports that the Guardian/Observer and New Statesman are at Putin’s throat: “Every day this week we’ve had Russia/Putin hate stories. Headlines such as ‘medieval dictatorship’ as we saw in last Sunday’s Observer [August 26] are common. In this week’s New Statesman we have a front page picture of Putin with the headline ‘Putin’s reign of terror.’ They’ve got Putin with a crown on his head and dressed as a Tsar-like figure. It’s a relentless information battlefield assault on Russia.”

Another line of Washington’s attack on Russia is Washington’s covert backing of Chechnya terrorist groups in the Caucasus and funding of front groups in Russia for protest and terrorist organizations. Allegations of corruption and stolen elections come primarily from Washington-funded groups operating in Russia. See http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-blitzkrieg-wests-terror-battalions-eye-russia-next/ and http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/08/bombshell-us-neo-cons-state-department.html Through these methods, Washington hopes to destabilize the Russian government and to isolate it internationally in order to remove a barrier to Washington’s hegemony.

Two of Romney’s right-wing neoconservative advisors said that Romney as president would “confront Moscow on its poor record on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” The western media will not comment on the irony of these propagandistic allegations against Russia issuing from the US, the country that has destroyed habeas corpus and due process protections of the accused, tortured detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and its own statutory law, kidnaps, tortures, and assassinates foreign nationals as well as its own citizens, supports terrorism against Libya, Syria, Iran, and Russia, runs roughshod over international law, never submitting to law itself but using law as a weapon against governments that it has demonized, while it carries on military operations against seven Muslim countries without a declaration of war.

The Nuremberg Trials of Germans after World War II established that naked aggression is a war crime. Naked aggression, renamed by Washington, “preemptive war,” has become the operative principle of US foreign policy.

As Putin remarked, Washington is guilty of the crimes of which it accuses others, but Washington permits all things to “the indispensable nation.”

Amerika uber alles!



Thursday, June 14, 2012

U.S. ELECTIONS ARE RECORDED ON HACKABLE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES AND RECORDED BY PRIVATE CONTRACTORS, WHILE THE CORPORATE-OWNED "MAINSTREAM" MEDIA MAKE UP STORIES TO EXPLAIN UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES ...EVEN THOUGH THESE OUTCOMES ARE "STATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE" IN AN UNRIGGED ELECTION.









Bob Fitrakis

Wisconsin: None dare call it vote rigging
June 14, 2012

If vote-rigging prospers, none may call it vote-rigging. It simply becomes the new norm. Once again, the universal laws of statistics apply only outside U.S. borders. The recall vote in Wisconsin produced another significant 7% discrepancy between the unadjusted exit poll and the so-called "recorded vote." In actual social science, this level of discrepancy, with the results being so far outside the expected margin of error would not be accepted.

When I took Ph.D. statistics to secure my doctorate in political science, we were taught to work through the rubric, sometime referred to as HISMISTER. The "H" stood for an explanation of the discrepancy rooted in some historical intervention, such as one of the candidates being caught in a public restroom with his pants down and a "wide stance" soliciting an undercover cop. The "I" that came next suggested we should check our instrumentation, that is, are the devices adequately reporting the data?

Here's where U.S. elections become laughable. A couple of private companies, count our votes with secret proprietary hardware and software, the most notable being ES&S. Every standard of election transparency is routinely violated in the U.S. electronic version of faith-based voting. How the corporate-dominated media deals with the issue is by "adjusting the exit polls." They simply assume the recorded vote on easily hacked and programmed private machines are correct and that the international gold standard for detecting election fraud – exit polls – must be wrong.

They are not going to go through the rest of the acronym and check to see if the Sample makes sense, that the right Measurements are being taken, or whether or not there's been a breakdown in Implementing the exit polling. They won't check to see if the representative Size of the polling numbers are accurate, or if there are problems with the pollster's Technique, or if there was human Error, or if there's just bad Recording going on.

Of course, the machines could be recording wrong because they are programmed for an incorrect outcome. The easiest people to convince regarding the absurdity of electronic voting with private proprietary hardware and software are the computer programmers across the political spectrum. Statisticians and mathematicians also readily comprehend the obvious nature of rigged elections.

One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift" occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters.

In Charnin's analysis of exit poll data, we can say with a 95% confidence level – that means in 95 out of 100 elections – that the exit polls will fall within a statistically predictable margin of error. Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 state elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 state presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.

What is the probability of this happening?

"One in one million trillion trillion trlllion trillion trillion trillion," said Charnin.

More proof of Republican operatives and sympathizers is found in the fact that 132 of the elections fell outside the margin in favor of the GOP. We would expect eight.

Say you have a fair coin to flip. We would expect that if we flip that coin there would be an even split between heads and tails – or in this case, Republicans and Democrats. Election results falling outside the margin of error should be equally split between both parties. Yet, only five times, less than expected, did the extra votes fall in the direction of the Democratic Party.

So what are the odds? According to Charnin, of 132 out of 300 state presidential elections exceeding the margin of error in the direction of the Republicans – one in 600 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.

The corporate-owned media does not want to mention that the problems with the exit polls began with the ascendancy of the former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush to the presidency in 1988. It is also that year when the non-transparent push-and-pray voting machines were introduced in the New Hampshire primary by Bush ally John Sununu. Bush, who rigged elections for the CIA throughout the Third World did unexpectedly well where the voting machines were brought in.

In any other election outside the U.S., the U.S. State Department would condemn the use of the these highly riggable machines based on the discrepancy in the exit polls. It's predictable what would happen if an anti-U.S. KGB agent in some former Soviet Central Asian republic picked up an unexplained 5% of the votes at odds with the exit polls. A new election would be called for, as it was in the Ukraine in 2004. We would not have accepted the reported vote from the corrupt intelligence officer.

The CIA Director's son wins with laughable exit poll discrepancies in 2000 and 2004 and the mainstream media sees no evil. The media's perspective is to discredit the exit polls, which they sponsor, and call any who point to the polls "conspiracy theorists."

In 2004, 22 states had a red shift to the CIA Director's son, George W. Bush. Usually such improbably results are signs of a Banana Republic. Now we have a too-close-to-call neck and neck recall race in Wisconsin that show an obvious red shift for a right-wing red governor. Nobody wants to look at the non-transparent black box machines. Electronic election rigging has prospered. Long live the "adjusted" vote totals.

--
Originally published by The Free Press, http://freepress.org.


Wednesday, May 30, 2012

BUSH CONVICTION OF WAR CRIMES AT A TRIBUNAL IN MALAYSIA NOW UNDER CONSIDERATION BY THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT


 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

MAY 29, 2012

Bush Convicted of War Crimes at Tribunal

Francis Boyle: Judgement at Malaysian hearing may help push case at ICC; Obama in violation for not pursuing indictment


More at The Real News


Bio

Francis Boyle is a Professor of Law at the University of llinois School of Law, where he currently teaches courses on Public International Law and International Human Rights. He was a part of the prosecution team that tried former US President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisors in absentia in Malaysia.

Friday, November 12, 2010

PBS Is Dead. Long Live Press TV!

Blogger's Note: There is no way this video will ever be found on YouTube, so I couldn't find a way to embed it. Rather I present only a single frame of this stunning set of interviews of three American patriots by Judy Woodruff's counterpart in Tehran. Please link to it here. If for any reason it doesn't play, please read the transcript.


'America wages wars for profit'


Thu Nov 11, 2010 2:38PM
Interview with Stephen Lendman, writer and radio host from Chicago; Bill Jones with the Executive Intelligence Review from Washington; and Jeff Gates, US attorney and author from California
Again, here's the link.


Former US President George W. Bush has in his book said that by going to war in Iraq, the US has saved British lives as it stopped possible terrorist attacks.

What he did not reveal was that the Iraq war created much terrorism inside the country as many sources say the war has led to the deaths of over a million Iraqi lives.

To discuss the issue, Press TV had an interview with Stephen Lendman, writer and radio host from Chicago, Bill Jones with the Executive Intelligence Review from Washington and Jeff Gates, US attorney and author from California. The following is the transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Mr. Lendman, Bush has boasted about giving the okay on water-boarding alleged terrorist suspects in American custody. Both the current president and attorney general have said that water-boarding is torture. Where exactly does that leave Bush?

Stephen Lendman: Well, water-boarding is absolutely torture. Torture is illegal under international law and the US law. All treaties, Geneva, the UN Convention against Torture 1984, the US War Crimes Act, and the international treaties that America has signed before Geneva treaties, under the supremacy cause of the US constitution. They are automatically US law. The UN charter I might add as well.

Torture is illegal. Unequivocally illegal at all times and under all circumstances with no allowed exceptions. Water-boarding is torture. I've written about it. I do a lot of writing. I've written about water-boarding. Water-boarding simulates drowning but it's worse than that. It literally endangers the lives of the people submitted to it. For example, I've written about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the supposed 9/11 mastermind who I think had nothing whatsoever to do with it. He was water-boarded 186 times. Now just imagine that. That means maybe 186 times he thought he was going to die. Besides all the other tortures inflicted on him for many years. 9/11, I have discussed it on my program, I have written about it. I don't have a smoking gun to prove it, but I think my own government is responsible for 9/11.

My own belief is that it literally was a co-effort between the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. It had nothing to do with the people they blamed it on.

Press TV: We definitely need to do a program looking into 9/11 again, but, getting back to the situation that we are looking at right now, you said in all cases that water-boarding is torture. Now George W. Bush has said that he would ask his legal advisers. And they said that it was absolutely no torture. Do you think he is lying or his advisers told him something wrong? What do you think is going on here?

Stephen Lendman: Well, his advisers told him what he wanted to hear. That's the way the system works. One of them was the infamous John Yoo. He wrote two torture memos authorizing torture which basically as Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Secretary, put it, "We can do anything to anybody short of causing organ failure. In other words, if you don kill them, you can inflict anything on them, any amount of pain, any amount of discomfort. You can call it torture, you can call it whatever you want. As long as we don't kill them, it's legal. Well, sorry. International law says it's illegal.

Now lawyers like John Yoo [, he] absolutely knows that when he wrote torture memos authorizing these procedures to be committed. John Yoo is complicit with George Bush, Rumsfeld and everyone else in the administration, administering torture.

Press TV: Mr. Jones, Bush seems to have no remorse for the loss of lives which have taken place based on a fabrication of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. What do you think about this? He was not apologetic. He was basically not saying that he was sorry that he went to war, but said that he would do the same thing again.

Bill Jones: Well, I think basically Bush is a fool. He was placed into office because he was the son of a president by people who were more powerful and more intelligent than him. And he was basically a stooge for them. And he has proven that gross ignorance in the fact that he can come out and say the things he is saying now. I think he did it because of the tremendous defeat of the Obama administration in the latest elections. He probably thought time was right to stick his head up. He has been in hiding for quite a while, reviled by many people as the worst president we have ever had. But now he feels that he can come out and try and speak in his defense. The issue of the 9/11 is of course that he's tallying the whole time as the reason, I'm in agreement with the former speaker, although you have to look at the Saudi and British role in that development, but it was used in the same way that the Reich Stag fire was used by the Nazis. Whoever may have perpetrated it, it was used to turn up and down the thinking in the United States that these kinds of things that occurred post-9/11 would have been unthinkable, illegal and immoral prior to that period, but because of the so-called emergency laws that were put in, Bush was able, at the instigation of Cheney and other people in control, to move in the direction of what was really, what I would consider, a fascist policy.

Press TV: Mr. Gates, Under the international law, Bush's admission that he authorized acts that amount to torture are enough to trigger Washington's obligations to investigate his admissions and if substantiated, to prosecute him. Do you think that will happen?

Jeff Gates: Probably not, for the same reason that he became president to begin with. If you watch the president's election closely, in effect, he preempted that in the primary of 2000 when this syndicate raised about 50 million dollars in about a six week period. It then had a brand name of politicians to put into office, who a national security column says were a classic asset. An asset of someone with the profile of sufficient debts, but you know if you place them in a time and place and circumstance, by which you have considered an influx, the behavior consistent with that …he could be charged with war crimes …He could probably be charged with … we know that he had facts in front of him that he did not make his decision on instead based on his belief. He came to office as a Christian Zionist not unlike Harry Truman who recognized Israel over … one or two close advisors. You fast forward it to 2000 and you bring in another Christian Zionist into the Presidency, recovering alcoholic, out of source with his dad and a long range of dysfunctions and that's what made him a classic asset. No wonder you can blame him but you also blame a whole series of previous presidents that set this up. But I think this misses the point. The point is how do we continue to do this presidency after presidency. And how do we as Americans end up … called guilt by association. How destruction and self-deceit commit America to war, as we were truly deceived to go to war. If you look back at all that intelligence it doesn't go to Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld; those are faces on a far more systemic and frankly more sinister phenomenon.

All of this traces back to … notion of Zionism. I as a lawyer call it trans-generation organized crime…

The attitude in the US and the Middle East has not changed with the shift from the Republicans to the Democrats, it is only the same policies with a different face on the same problem.

Press TV: Mr. Lendman, the US is a signatory to the UN Convention against Torture. What exactly has happened? Why hasn't the UN gotten involved and do you expect that perhaps the UN would play a role in this and get involved, being that the US is a signatory to this [UN convention]?

Stephen Lendman: Not at all, the US was instrumental in setting up the UN in the 1940s after the World War II. And of course we have a Security Council with a veto. America can veto all the other countries of the world combined. It could be the whole world going one way and America going the other way. And as long as you have a UN run like that, the UN is literally a tool of US policy.

And the US is the only country that has egregiously used that veto. Once in a blue moon, another country does. Only four others can do it besides the US. But America has egregiously used the veto power. So the UN can do absolutely nothing to stop America. An important point for people to know is America may have two major parties but America is a one-party state. It doesn't matter whether Democrats are in power or the Republicans. It's referred to as the money party or the property party. And Barack Obama is merely George Bush's third term. Bill Clinton was worse than Ronald Reagan. George Bush was worse than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, believe it or not, is worse than George Bush. It's hard to believe. But he's worse than George Bush. He is smoother but before his term runs out, people will catch on. They are catching on now slowly. I think he'd be a one-term president. But the policies are seamless. The wars are planned in advance. The pretexts come about after the plans are made.

We went to war with Afghanistan four weeks after 9/11. It takes months to plan a war like that. The plan to go to war with Iraq was already conceived. The blueprint was written. It was on the shelf ready to take out. The only decision was which country we go to war with first. They picked Afghanistan. Iraq and Afghanistan of course had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. They didn't threaten the US. George Bush lied. Everybody else in the administration lied. I agree George Bush was a tool. Obama is a tool. And it doesn't matter whether it's Obama or whoever comes after him. It's the system that needs to be indicted.

Press TV: If what you are saying is true, where are the American people in the middle of this? If nothing really changes and it's the system that is consistent and as you said is getting worse. Are the American people not informed about this? Why isn't there a lot being said about this in general, this perspective that you have just brought out? Why no analyses are being made?

Stephen Lendman: It's such an important point. I have read about it and talked about it on my radio program. People get more informed all the time. The problem is even though the majority are not… the majority get the news and information from TV which means the cable channels, CNN, FOX, the broadcast channels; the CBS the NBC. They lie, they do not inform. They produce managed news not real news and information. They bring on a host, they bring on pundits and they lie. They misinform, they censor. But even people who do know what's going on, most of them are indifferent. They have their own lives. They worry about nonsensical things like shopping, like the latest films, the latest fashions. That's crazy but that's what they think about. And they say, "Well I need to go to work, I need to support my family." They worry about these things. So in France, you see strikes, a million, two or three million people come out on the streets day after day after day after day. None of us in America [is doing the same]. We are having our liberty stolen. We are having our wealth stolen. And people are just indifferent to the possibility that some day what they think is a country that is free will turn out to be … a police state. And all the benefits are gone, and when they finally awaken to that it will be too late.

Press TV: Mr. Jones, in the light of what Mr. Lendman has said, there are human rights organizations that try to keep a tab on things. For example, according to the Amnesty International, Bush's admittance to knowing and approving water-boarding makes him accountable. What would it take in the United States for someone like Bush to be held accountable?

Bill Jones: Well, it will probably take a general mass uprising which could indeed occur at certain points. The problem with the American people is that they are concerned about what's going on. They were concerned when they elected Barack Obama because they elected Barack Obama because he wasn't George Bush. But Barack Obama was much more George Bush than people thought, which is why his popularity now has gone down the tubes rapidly, putting him in a position, I think the latest polls proved it, that his popularity is worse than Bush's.

The real problem is the lack of leadership. I would say the cowardice of what leadership is in this country. I will give you an example. Barack Obama has basically through Nancy Pelosi horsewhipped the Congress into accepting a policy that most of them probably admitted was wrong. Namely, to spend over one trillion dollars in bailing out Wall Street when our cities were falling apart, when our bridges were coming down, when there are all kinds of infrastructures that needed money. This trillion dollars plus went to Wall Street to bail out the bankers and the people suffered. Most of the congressmen who were hearing from their districts on what the problems were knew that that was a wrong policy but they were too cowardly...

Press TV: Let me interrupt you there. If you say that basically the leaders in the US right now do not have the courage to do what they basically should do, they are cowards, then who is really running the show? If they are bowing obviously to some higher power, who do you think is behind the show in Washington?

Bill Jones: Well, primarily the ones who have been running the show during the Obama administration have been really the Wall Street banks. It's not just only the Wall Street banks. It's really the London banks, because Obama's policy has been to try and save the bankrupt financial system with the trillions and trillions of dollars of debt that cannot be paid instead of moving in the direction of, say, creating a new financial system and agreements between governments.

A lot of things could have been done to resolve this economic crisis. But the bankers were telling Geithner and Larry Summers "you've got to save Wall Street, whatever it's going to cost. Give them what they need." And then Bernanke and Geithner went to the president and said, "OK, give them what they want."

Press TV: Based on what you have said, would you say that it is not only Bush that is implicit in what he has said but the whole system has been implicit in basically allowing this to happen. Would you say that is true?

Bill Jones: It's fundamental corruption in the system which is ruled by the money that a lot of these people need in order to win their election. That is the case with Congress. The rule in Congress is "Go along to get along." That's once these guys get into the Congress and will see what happens to these Tea Party and all these other wild people who have been elected now... When word comes down, you want a position in the committee; you want a position in this and that. You have to follow the rules here.

And it's all about the money. Now if somebody opposes that… they could do it, if they mobilized the people, if they went to the people and said "we cannot allow this to happen." But nobody, up in to this point, in the US Congress, has shown the guts to try and do that. And that is, like I said, a problem of leadership. If anybody would do that, they would gain the immediate support from the American population who are totally disgusted with the way that Washington works.


Press TV: Being that you have said, that it is a corrupt system, where does it go from here? And, basically, what happened to the so-called justice that the US said it stood for?

Stephen Lendman: Well, America says a lot of things, but what it does and what it says go in two different paths. Who runs America? It is very clear who runs America. Corporate America runs the country. Bankers [are] in the lead [of] really what is called the fire sector, finance, real state, insurance led by the big Wall Street banks. And of course the Federal Reserve is not federal. It is owned by the banks. The Wall Street banks have a controlling interest. They decide the way the country will be run, including waging wars. One reason for waging wars is they are so profitable. Not just to the defense contractors, [but also] to the big banks, to technology companies, all companies that supply goods and services including private contractors that have every incentive to want America to be in war.

America has a prominent war agenda, we just need to find new enemies, and if they don't exist, we need to create them. It is the system that is broken and corrupted, and I agree. Unless there is a mass uprising, that is nowhere in sight, this will not change. It will only get worse.

GHN/HJL/MB/AKM