Tice said he believes it violates the Constitution's protection against unlawful search and seizures but has no way of sharing the information without breaking classification laws. He is not even allowed to tell the congressional intelligence committees - members or their staff - because they lack high enough clearance.

Neither could he brief the inspector general of the NSA because that office is not cleared to hear the information, he said.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said they believe a few members of the Armed Services Committee are cleared for the information, but they said believe their committee and the intelligence committees have jurisdiction to hear the allegations.

"Congressman Kucinich wants Congressman Shays to hold a hearing (on the program)," said Doug Gordon, Kucinich's spokesman. "Obviously it would have to take place in some kind of a closed hearing. But Congress has a role to play in oversight. The (Bush) administration does not get to decide what Congress can and can not hear."

Tice was testifying because he was a National Security Agency intelligence officer who was stripped of his security clearance after he reported his suspicions that a former colleague at the Defense Intelligence Agency was a spy. The matter was dismissed by the DIA, but Tice pressed it later and was subsequently ordered to take a psychological examination, during which he was declared paranoid. He is now unemployed.

Tice was one of the New York Times sources for its wiretapping story, but he told the committee the information he provided was not secret and could have been provided by an private sector electronic communications professional.

Shaffer told a House Government Reform subcommittee that he and other intelligence officers and contractors working on the top-secret program code-named "Able Danger" had identified Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, but were prevented from passing their findings to the FBI.

"I became a whistleblower not out of choice, but out of necessity," Shaffer said. "Many of us have a personal commitment to ... going forward to expose the truth and wrongdoing of government officials who - before and after the 9/11 attacks - failed to do their job."

Shaffer contradicted recent statements by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, who denied having met with Shaffer and other Able Danger operatives in Afghanistan in October 2003.

"I did meet with him," Shaffer said. "I have the business card he gave me. I find it hard to believe that he could not remember meeting me."

The commission set up by Congress to probe the Sept. 11 attacks didn't mention the Able Danger project on al Qaeda in its final report in July 2004.

When former Able Danger operatives began to talk with reporters and lawmakers about the program last year, the commission's chairman and vice chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, released a statement saying the panel had looked into the work of Able Danger and found it "historically insignificant."

Shafer was to testify today (Wednesday) at a separate House Armed Services subcommittee hearing devoted to Able Danger.

Spc. Samuel Provance, also dressed in Army green, said he was demoted and humiliated after telling a general investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal that senior officers had covered up the full extent of abuse during interrogations of detainees at the U.S. military prison in Iraq.

"Young soldiers were scapegoated while superiors misrepresented what had happened and tried to misdirect attention away from what was really going on," Provance said. "I considered all of this conduct to be dishonorable and inconsistent with the traditions of the Army. I was ashamed and embarrassed to be associated with it."

The Abu Ghraib interrogations caused an international uproar in 2004 after the release of photographs of Iraqi prisoners in sexual and other degrading positions.

Provance made a new allegation about the Abu Ghraib controversy, saying that U.S. forces had captured the 16-year-old son of an Iraqi general under Saddam Hussein, Hamid Zabar, to pressure the general into providing information.

"I was extremely uncomfortable about the way General Zabar had been treated, but particularly the fact that his son had been captured and used in this way," Provance said. "It struck me as morally reprehensible, and I could not understand why our command was doing it."

Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican and chairman of the national security subcommittee that held the hearing, told Provance: "It takes a tremendous amount of courage for someone of your rank to tell a general what they may not want to hear."

Asked what his current military duties are, the former computer specialist replied," The only thing I've been doing since being demoted is picking up trash and pulling guard duty."

Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst who was a New York Times source for its reporting on domestic wiretapping, told of having been classified as mentally ill and then fired in connection with an earlier episode at the espionage agency.

Tice said he would have to testify in closed hearings about the details of the eavesdropping program, which President Bush authorized soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. But under questioning by lawmakers, Tice suggested that other NSA programs also raised concerns for him.

"Some of the programs that I worked on I believe treaded on illegalities and, I believe, unconstitutional activity," Tice said.

In one of the hearing's most dramatic moments, Tice read aloud the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects Americans against "unreasonable searches and seizures" without a court warrant. Tice also read an NSA policy that limits the signals agency to monitoring foreign communications.

"As intelligence officers, we take an oath and swear to protect the Constitution," Tice said.

Michael German, a veteran FBI agent, said he was punished after reporting his bosses in Tampa, Fla., for having altered documents in a counter-terrorism investigation.

"They produced false documents and literally took Whiteout to change official records," German said.

Richard Levernier said the Energy Department pulled his security clearance after he complained that the agency was glossing over security problems at nuclear weapons sites.

"These agencies are out of control," said Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican. "If we don't take action we're all in trouble."

Shays said he convened the hearing because military and intelligence employees don't have the same whistleblower protections the government affords other federal workers or even employees of private firms.

"Whistleblowers in critical national security positions are vulnerable to unique forms of retaliation," Shays said. "There is nothing top secret about gross waste or the abuse of power."

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, criticized Defense Department officials for directing "trumped-up charges" against Shaffer. Duncan ridiculed the Pentagon for having accused the decorated intelligence officer of misusing small amounts of money while the government was wasting billions of dollars on rebuilding Iraq.

"If they really wanted to go after me, I had millions of dollars of equipment I was responsible for," Shaffer said.

After he began speaking out about Able Danger, Shaffer said, the Pentagon leaked personal information about him, including allegedly inflated expense reports for $67 in extra phone charges. Shaffer said the charges were to cover calls transferred from his work phone to his cell phone on weekends, so that he could be available at all times.

As the overflow hearing room grew silent, Weldon asked Shaffer to respond to separate Pentagon allegations that the colonel had been romantically involved with one of his aides.

"Have you ever had an affair with anyone on my staff, male or female?" Weldon asked.

"No, sir, but that was what DIA (the Defense Intelligence Agency) put out," Shaffer replied.

In a recent address in Palm Beach, former CNN News Night anchor Aaron Brown said that "truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news." How unfortunate it is that Brown and others may only offer this perception when they are no longer in front of a nightly news camera--CNN unmoored Brown as a result of a ratings issue.

Brown's observation, however, locates the obvious: truth, in some quarters, doesn't rate. Not only that, the media on the whole grows more accustomed to ignoring important stories that cry out for real, gumshoed investigations. One such story is the 2004 election: In the latest edition of Project Censored, number three on its most- censored list is the chapter, "Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage". The report gives a quick survey of the some of the election's suspicious activities. (A fuller discussion of the tactics deployed by the Bush party may be perused in Fooled Again by Mark Crispin Miller. Many of those tactics mirror those used in 2000, discussed in Grand Theft 2000, Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election, Douglas Kellner.)

According to Project Censored, one of the troubling aspects of the 2004 election is the discrepancy "between exit poll data and the actual vote count" that "was not scrutinized in the mainstream media." Rather than provide meaningful analysis, the media--other than MSNBC's Keith Olbermann--simply dismissed the controversy with derogatory name-calling and labels such as "conspiracy nuts," "sore losers," "sour grapes", "let's move on" and so forth. One need only read Rep. John Conyers' (D-MI) election report What Went Wrong in Ohio and the Government Accounting Office's (GAO) October 2005 report to dispel such superficial claims. Mark Crispin Miller writes in Harper's Magazine, August 2005, "None Dare Call It Stolen": "It was as if they [media] were reporting from inside a forest fire without acknowledging the fire, except to keep insisting that there was no fire." Moreover, competent university statisticians Steven Freeman, Jonathan Simon and Dr. Ron Baiman (two of whom have books coming out soon on their research) have calculated that the odds of the discrepancy being due to random error are statistically impossible. Furthermore, it's odd that the Bush administration considered the 2005 Ukrainian presidential election's exit polls correct, but not the U.S.'s exit polls.

Another disturbing aspect of the election revolves around the issue of electronic voting machines that are privately owned and managed by GOP vendors sans federal oversight that hold the firms accountable for the reliability and security of the e-voting systems, and as such, the machines provide a prime opportunity for foul play. The GAO, for example, found that it was possible to alter the machines' ballots and system audit logs without being detected: "It is easy to alter a file defining how a ballot appears, making it possible for one candidate actually be recorded as voting for an entirely different candidate", for example, shifting votes from Kerry to Bush. The GAO also discovered that election results could be falsified without leaving evidence with altered memory cards, and that access to one machine gave access to the entire network. Joe Baker, editor of the Rock River Times, comments that this "critical finding showed that rigging the election didn't take a 'widespread conspiracy', but simply the cooperation of a small number of operators" who could "alter the vote totals at will."

Some computer scientists believe there is a more serious problem. According to writer Arlene Montemarano, Buzzflash, a Trojan Horse might be involved: "A computer code that can be programmed to hide inside voting software, emerge in less than one second to change an election, then destroy itself immediately afterwards, going undetected." She cites Barbara Simons, a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery who is co-authoring a book on computerized voting: "The problem is that the Trojan Horse cannot be detected unless the software is inspected continuously."

This is not an encouraging development for a democracy. The GAO's findings indicate that the election in Ohio, and by implication other states, was vulnerable to hijacking through the machines, let alone all the other problems. Overall issues identified by the GAO include: 1) flaws in system security controls 2) flaws in access controls 3) flaws in physical hardware controls 4) weak security management practices by voting machine vendors. The report concluded that rectifying the problems in a timely fashion to affect the 2006 elections are unlikely.

Finally, Rep. Conyers' report identifies criminal behaviors of the GOP in 2004 that violated the U.S. and Ohio Constitutions, the Voting Rights Act, Equal Protection, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. To date, there have been no indictments.

We live in a nation of gluttonous stupor and comfortable surroundings, easily distracted by the cocktail of materialism that lines our homes. We are trained to live to work, not work to live, sacrificing love of life for love for the Almighty dollar, becoming worker bees and soldier ants, selling our souls to the demons of capitalism in exchange for the happiness and stress-free lives of yesteryear, needing pharmaceutical drugs to escape the depression of our daily lives, willingly choosing to indebt our present and future in order to possess the vast array of adult toys marketed to manipulate our emotions, wrongly thinking this or that product will reincarnate lost happiness. America is the land of plenty, where waistlines expand, stress increases, mental problems grow, work hours increase and vehicles get bigger and bigger, a land addicted to the devil’s excrement, like a heroin user injecting black gold into its ever thirsty veins, becoming a violent, warmongering junkie when the perpetual case of cold turkey arises.

Never before has a society been afforded the wealth and excessiveness that we possess, yet neither has a citizenry been subjected to the consequences invariably arising in order to achieve those ends. Unhappiness, depression, financial hardship, stress, inner demons, anger, dislike, psychological problems, undisciplined and unreared children are some of the costs of maintaining our standards of living. The escapism needed to forget the madness of these costs, accumulated year after year, in daily life, work, finances and society, stands like an idol ready to be worshipped in the middle of our homes, its dark screen awakened with the push of a remote control.

It is the television, that drug of mental escapism and intellectual erosion, the invaluable purveyor of fantasy and fiction, that serves to distract, distort and alleviate the stresses of a life made exceedingly harder by the continued growth of the corporatist state, where profit will always supercede people and the interests of the corporation will always trump those of the People. Yet in the television we also see the greatest tool of mass manipulation ever created, in the last few decades discovered by government and corporate interests for the incredible power emanating from its warm glow. In the span of a couple of decades it has transformed human society, acting as the corporate and governmental invasion of our homes, and into our brainwaves, affecting both the innocent and the old, indiscriminately penetrating the minds of black and white, male and female.

The propaganda emanating from its waves and the fiction produced by its owners has mutated American society into one of slouching couch potatoes, dumbed down ignoramuses, lazy and indifferent citizens, unthinking drones and brainwashed primates, turning a citizenry of creativity, vision, imagination and intelligence into one devoid of each, eroding the minds of experience and altering those of innocence, slowly catapulting America into the precipice of intellectual and knowledge collapse. It is the television that has created the amnesia running rampant from Pacific to Atlantic, saturating us with the brain manipulations of the corporatist world, creating a population needing the sensationalist programming designed to dumb down and distract, feeding into our minds senseless garbage of celebrity adoration and idol worship, introducing us to wave after wave of scheming advertisements and the thoughts and opinions the Establishment want us to incorporate as our own.

Television is the greatest addiction we face, a malignancy that controls entire populations, becoming a drug infiltrating all regions of the brain, altering brainwaves in children, thoughts in adults, creating a population easily controlled and programmed, becoming, over the course of a lifetime, the human antenna receiving the endless stream of propaganda disseminated by government and corporate entities. The effects of television on the human brain have become quite clear after only sixty years in existence. At no other time in human history had our primitive minds been subjected to the rapid imagery, fictionalized programming, brainwashing techniques, ceaseless propaganda, video capabilities and sound distortions of television.

We can now see the results of a decades old experiment, and Americans of today, as the people that most watch the monitor on a daily basis, with our rapid intellectual decline, loss of knowledge, extinction of logic and analytical reasoning, erosion of free thought and our propensity to absorb as our own anything aired on television, are the end result.


Leapfrogging Towards War


Our masters can today do with us as they wish, using the television as the instrument used to implant corporatist propaganda into our minds, knowing that millions upon millions of Americans no longer think for themselves, certain that the anemic education prevalent throughout the nation is succeeding in molding loyal sheep conditioned to obey, consume and produce. Our thoughts are being homogenized; our minds now linger in the assembly lines of corporate propaganda, robbing us of individuality, of different personalities, of various tastes and wants. We are the pawns in the front lines of the corporatist takeover of our nation and most importantly, our minds, with those in power toying with us, making us marionettes whose strings are easily manipulated by the few who control television.

Behind the magic curtain of power we can see that once again America is going on the warpath, getting herself ready for another imperialist offensive preemptive attack, disguised in the full spectrum of colors that are coordinated to hide the real reasons for war. Thus, the conditioning of the War Culture has for a few months now been set in motion with a media blitzkrieg engineered to prepare the nation’s consciousness for further conflict. Gently, slowly, systematically and methodically propaganda is being delivered into our comfortable homes on a daily basis that is designed to mold us into hating another nation, another people, using the same mold as before to deceive and manipulate an always gullible citizenry. The powers that decide the destiny of the nation have very little challenge in brainwashing the American public.

Knowing that Americans have perfected the art of amnesia, easily forgetting yesterday in a haze of distraction and escapism, possessing the attention spans of gnats and the enlightenment existing during the Dark Ages, ignorant to the world beyond our bubble of excessiveness, finding us addicted to television, videogames and prescription pills, relying on ten second sound bites and the subjective drivel of talking heads for information, our minds made distorted by the fantasy and fiction we watch incessantly, with free thought now made extinct by the massive abandonment of reading books, with mental lethargy now the rule rather than the exception, the Establishment can recycle long used and recently implemented blueprints to steer the nation towards the acceptance of illegal offensive war and further crimes against humanity.

The warmonger rulers realize that with such a dumbed down populace, readily accepting as true everything told them by their government, believing everything their television generates, no lie is too big or outlandish, no deception will ever be rebelled against and no whitewash will ever be questioned. Using television, which is today but an instrument furthering corporate control of our lives, spewing only what is of interest to the corporatist world, Americans are bombarded with the propaganda that will manufacture an enemy out of Iran. Without the television, able to reach hundreds of millions of people, able to penetrate our psyches and minds, able to affect our emotions and behaviors, getting our full attention as we sit glued to the set, listening to talking heads and government lackeys, the brainwashing of the masses by the government and the corporatist world would be a much harder endeavor. With it, however, the mobilization of minds is a relatively easy accomplishment, and the conditioning of hundreds of millions of citizens becomes cheap, efficient and successful.

With the same manual as that used to mobilize us for the war on Iraq, the warmongers begin instilling fear into our minds, repeating lie after lie, over and over again, that the new enemy is a threat to America, our way or life, our freedoms and democracy. They realize that most people do not want war, so they must be cajoled into supporting what is already a predetermined inevitability. Thus, exploiting our mammalian emotions and behaviors, using our own animal instincts against us, the warmongers in power envelope us with the fear factor, repeating the perceived threat enough times, in so many different ways and mediums, that most people instinctively begin to believe what their “trusted” leaders are telling them. With Iraq it was the threat of mushroom clouds, of WMD, of terrorists. Similarly, the mirage that is the Iranian threat has been marketed to penetrate our deepest fears, scaring us into believing that Iran seeks nuclear weapons, with the inherent lie that as our enemy, they would not hesitate to bomb one or more of our cities.

War marketers understand fully that rationality and common sense vanish in the wake of introduced fear and hatred. Therefore, the use of fear and terror to condition the masses into believing that only through war can their lives be made safer will once again be used, conveniently attaching the illusion of George W. Bush as the one man that will insure their security. Over the next few weeks and perhaps even months, the propaganda used to vilify Iran will intensify, just as it was prior to the Iraq War. We will be forced to hear, repeatedly, the evils of the regime, the wicked intentions of the new president and the manufactured threat to our security. We will be told over and over again how Iran has been a pariah on the world stage, that they overthrew our puppet dictator a few decades back, held America’s embassy hostage, support most of the world’s terrorists, are a tyrannical regime, want to destroy Israel, are a clear and present danger to our national security and, if we are lucky, that they even harbor the bogeymen of the moment, Al-Qaeda.

The newspapers of importance and prestige, those in New York and Washington, will be used to conjure up false intelligence and bogus news reports, most manufactured by the war marketers using cherry-picked intelligence, the false reporting of reporters with vested interests, concocted documents and reports from foreign intelligence services, and the false accusations by so-called Iranian dissidents and defectors. These newspapers, whose weight is heavy in the media world, will begin pasting on the front pages articles of deception regarding Iran’s nuclear energy program, making us believe in the imminent threat to our security and that of certain Middle Eastern nation whose interests are well protected by the newspapers’ editors.

Stories unfavorable to Iran will appear, making it look like the member of the Axis of Evil, making it hated in the mind of Americans. President Ahmadinejad will become the new Osama, Zarqawi and Saddam, a new evildoer extraordinaire, becoming the new poster child for the perpetual, and fictional, war on terror, just the latest incarnation of America’s enemy. Again, fear and hatred will be used to cloud reason and logic; terror will be introduced to exploit both our emotions and still-fragile post 9/11 psychology.

The lies, deceptions and propaganda first outlined in print will invariably make their way to the televised media, where they will be disseminated far and wide, their content picked apart and dissected by talking heads and media hacks whose only purpose in life is to become the stenographers of the corporatists, as always pushing the idea of war into the mind of the viewer. Partisan talking heads from certain think tanks, many with the interests of foreign nations at heart, will make the rounds, chatting without stop in support of preemption, appearing incessantly in a barrage of subjective opinion and prepared propaganda, as always offering only the views for war and preemptive attack, as always appearing without dissenting views and opinion. Along with partisan talking heads, certain influential politicians, those carrying the mantra of deceived trust, will also appear incessantly on television, making the case for war and preemption using the same failed logic and manipulated lies used to sell the Iraq war, again without dissenting views present to contradict and debate the push for attack.

Like an advertising campaign, where the entire organization at a company’s disposal is used to sell the product, the push to sell the American people into accepting an attack on Iran will be all-encompassing, reaching hundreds of millions of Americans through the television, radio and printed media. The public relations campaign run out of the White House will be relentless and assiduous, in the end convincing millions that an American attack is in the best interests of the nation. Already, for example, over 50 percent of the public has made it known that they would have no problem if Bush attacked Iran, a figure that perhaps reflects the ignorance, mass amnesia and incomprehensible idiocy of half the population. This figure represents a high percentage favoring attack, even before the campaign of propaganda, lies and deceptions even heats up. The percentage will only rise once the campaign hits its peak.

Iran will be made out to be a lawless nation at odds with the rest of the world. Of course diplomacy will be designed to fail, as it was prior to the Iraq war. While shouting that the UN must act, thereby being able to claim legitimacy, America will maneuver its vast system of control and inevitably lead the charade of the UN to fail, granting Bush the excuse to attack. Terror threats will be manufactured, danger to us will be reborn and, in the end, Iran will be attacked and crippled, killing tens of thousands, escalating tensions, creating insecurity, perpetuating an already never-ending war and unleashing human violence upon the globe. Using the naiveté and ignorance of the citizenry to its advantage, the military industrial energy complex will claim to fight for freedom, democracy and an end to tyranny, again jumping on the fictional war on terror bandwagon to excuse its offensive attacks for imperial aspirations and control of the world’s remaining oil fields.

The threat of nuclear attack by Iran will of course be exaggerated, as will its failure to comply with international law and its use of nuclear technology. Orwellian newspeak and doubletalk will permeate the airwaves; news reports will be manipulated to fit the predetermined storyline. Facts and figures will be contorted and altered, their true meanings erased, their mirror image twisted. And it will all be repeated, over and over and over again, designed to manipulate, condition and steer us toward accepting further death and destruction in the Muslim world. The plethora of broken UN resolutions of a certain Middle Eastern nation will never be mentioned, nor its possession of 200 nuclear missiles, nor the fact that Iran would be committing suicide if it attacked with nuclear weapons either America or Israel, nor the fact that any nation under the intense threat faced by Iran will inevitably seek to defend itself through nuclear weapons, nor the fact that every nation is entitled to sovereign creation of civilian nuclear technology for energy purposes, nor the fact that Iran possesses roughly thirteen percent of the world’s available fossil fuels, nor the fact that its new oil bourse threatens the stability of the US dollar, nor the fact that we are in the age of resource wars, already engaged in clandestine battle with China, Russia, Europe and India, nor the fact that America has over 700 bases worldwide, including four new permanent bases in Iraq, wishing for a few more in the geopolitical treasure that is Iran, nor the fact that this rebranded offensive strategy and attack is nothing more than pursuit of strategic oil fields close to Iraq, containment of a very potent rival, control over oil and, as always when America interferes in the Middle East, proxy wars benefiting Israel.

Using the bully pulpit afforded the President, George W. Bush will release the hounds of his administration, parading known liars and immoral miscreants, each shouting loudly the case for war. Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Goss, Chertoff, Hadley, the nest of neocons festering in Washington and Bush himself will be given a podium and a microphone from which to preach the virtue of offensive warfare, as usual manipulating our instincts and emotions, as always resurrecting 9/11 to engender fear, hatred and anger amongst the populace. They will grace our television monitors, given all the airtime they desire, their lies and deceptions heard around the nation, never to be contradicted, always to be believed.

It will not matter that they lied, deceived and manipulated the case for war against Iraq. It will not matter that they took America to war on false pretenses, creating a wasted debacle in Mesopotamia. It will not matter that their incompetence, arrogance, ignorance and immorality have made us less safe, not more, creating more terrorists, not less, endangering our “way of life” more by their actions at home than by their ineptitude abroad. It will not matter that their potential actions could engulf an entire region in violence, conflagrating the Eurasian land mass in a very dangerous and long-lasting new Cold War against potent rivals. It will not matter that with each new attack or act of humiliation upon the Muslim world the fire of hatred continues to boil inside the minds of one billions Muslims, threatening to destabilize the entire planet. Of course it will not matter that these warmongers seek to perpetuate the vicious cycle of Muslim killing Westerner and Westerner killing Muslim, thereby giving rise to the perpetual war on terror, now remarketed “Long War,” for they have been wishing for this for a very long time, finally giving rise to their “clash of civilizations,” thus birthing their self-fulfilling prophesy. None of the above will matter, for all has been forgotten and disregarded, for we live in the United States of Amnesia.


Land of Paradoxes and Certainties


This is the America of the early 21st century, a land of paradoxes and of certainties, at once the richest nation on the planet yet offering anemic and dilapidating educations to the bearers of its future torch; a nation rich in technology yet its people dumbed down to the point that ignorance of both the natural world and human civilization prevails; a nation industrialized and modern yet a place where tens of millions remain captive to the theologies and beliefs more in tune to those of the Middle Ages; a country once enlightened by creativity and imagination now eviscerating both through the incessant illumination every night of that disseminator of fiction, fantasy and propaganda called television; a people once shining bright, allowed innumerable freedoms and rights, now extinguished by the same system they protect and defend; a citizenry once active, loud and knowledgeable now made indifferent and servile thanks to the comforts inherent in mass consumerism and materialism; a people at one time questioning and seeking accountability of government now transformed into the acquiescent and complicit serfs of corporatism; a land once fighting for the rights of workers now a land fighting for the rights of slaves; a nation of, by and for the People mutated into a country of, by and for the Corporate World.

Such is the state of affairs inside the borders of the War Culture, with almost 300 million human beings conditioned from birth to become subservient instruments of war aiding and abetting the war machine of the Pentagon. Thanks to the military industrial complex and its vast instruments of control, they have become a nation of warmongers and xenophobes, clandestinely cheering the rumbles of tanks and the cracks of guns, the dropping of bombs and the sadistic torture of Arabs. Like Pavlovian dogs, hundreds of millions of American citizens drool at the sounds of the trumpets of war blasted into their minds by the television monitor, eager to satisfy the destructive cravings of inner conscious propagated throughout the citizenry by an ingenious mechanism of mass manipulation.

When the drums of war commence their thunderous beat the inbred thirst for bloodshed and violence is unleashed, with the population instinctively aware that the Empire’s addiction to war will soon be satisfied. Half of Americans, at once eager to smell the blood of brown-skinned humans, their hidden xenophobia and bigotry having a chance to finally rise to the surface, ingratiated by the sounds of destruction, mesmerized by the pyrotechnics and concussions of military might, are quick to march in lock step behind the tanks and battalions of the Empire, becoming an army of chickenhawks, yellow elephants and armchair generals, as always extolling war yet living in cowardice, preaching Jesus yet practicing Satan, preferring the safety of jingoism rather than the bravery of service, hiding behind the Flag and the charade of 9/11, made deaf by the hymns of that fantasy called American exceptionalism, becoming members of the cult which follows White House incompetence and ineptitude, all the while basking in their debt-ridden comforts and toys of escapism while the less fortunate among us fight their wars and battles.

At the first hints of military mobilization by the state, this half of the population, otherwise decent and law abiding people, jump at attention, ready to become the clandestine storm troopers that will blindly follow those in power into battle, never questioning the reasoning behind the push for war, never wondering why America must again go to battle and never thinking for themselves as to whose interests are being furthered and what ramifications will arise from mass murder and destruction. Without thinking and rationalizing tens of millions of citizens will support the military industrial complex and its sinister designs without ever knowing what the military industrial complex is.

At the sound of war drums these millions blindly align themselves behind the President, regardless of the incompetence, the ineptitude, the chicanery, the criminality, the illegality and the immorality. To these sheeple, the herd mentality is in full effect, in essence eagerly following a wolf dressed in shepherd’s clothing, unable to see the horizon, unable to see the journey, unable to think independently, blinded by fear, needing the diapers of bed wetters and the pacifiers of security, eager to follow and be led to the slaughterhouse disguised as so-called security and protection, unable to see anything except the blind manifestation of ignorant loyalty.

The other half of America, meanwhile, talk the talk but rarely, if ever, walk the walk, preferring instead to protest and dissent from the comfort and security of their keyboard or through the messages on their car bumper, as if that alone grants them entitlement to call themselves self-proclaimed anti-war activist, with many placing more interest and exerting more energy in the asinine, non-important, relatively insignificant news regarding the quail hunting adventures of Dick Cheney than in the much larger issues affecting the nation, with many unwilling to sacrifice time, effort and energy to fight for the future of the country.

They criticize without remorse but cannot bring it upon themselves to mobilize and take to the streets in protest, preferring losing freedoms and rights than being bothered into joining a mass movement. From their pajamas they proclaim vitriol at the chicanery of the Bush Administration yet refuse to take the direct action those that came before once did, voicing their frustrations at the direction America is taking through Internet message boards and simple family gatherings.

Merrily this half proclaims undying and blind loyalty to the impotent and spineless minority party, unwilling to see, thanks to the denial so prevalent among diehard Democrats, that their beloved party is but the lesser of two evils, naïve in their belief that this side of the army of corrupt politicians will ever again have their interest at the forefront, their ideology acting to mask the fact that their cherished heroes are but the prostitutes of corporatism and that their party is an illusion designed to convey the mistaken belief that an opposition exists.

Gone from their core, thanks to the comfortable and pampered existence they have been granted and the conditioning that has enveloped them from birth, is the fire that once lit brightly during the time of another American debacle, thriving inside the youth of a now vanished generation, a fire that granted radiance to bravery and warmth to courage, transforming a nation and a time, bringing truth to power and justice to criminality.

The fire that engulfed the sixties has been extinguished by consumerism, materialism and the glow of television, by an indifference that gives complacency a welcome embrace, by a collective amnesia that forgets yesterday and fails to recognize today, by videogame distractions and unenlightened passivity, and by the dark covers that have virtually eliminated from our consciousness the lost war in the Middle East, with millions of armchair protesters made placid to the cries of an America hemorrhaging to death, unwilling to create a movement, unable to leave the comfortable warmth of their homes, preferring to protest on the Internet, unable to mobilize more than a minute and insignificant number of souls while the nation rots and fascism grows.

Gone are the massive marches, campus insurrections, the defying solidarity, the movement that altered history. A giant tsunami of change that once brought the upper echelons of government to its knees has given way to those who have sold out to principles once held dear, no longer to be bothered by truth, justice and peace, and to younger generations suffering the laziness and ignorance spawned by the excessiveness of living in America. Gone is the military draft and the threat of conscription, once a tinderbox that fed fuel to the peace movement’s fire, for without it middle class America, white America, has no real vested interest in protesting, no loved ones to bring home, no friends to fight for, no sons and fathers to protest over, no funerals to attend, no threat of them being drafted.

In Iraq it is not their sons or fathers or brothers or daughters being maimed and dying. It is not their relatives or friends being psychologically damaged; they do not see the devastation done and the demons spawned. This is a war that does not hit middle class America close to home or inside their sphere of existence, where the heart is, where emotion flows and anger grows. To the great majority, the Iraq war remains an abstract reality, seen in images and in articles, not in the flesh or in immediate suffering. As such, and as long as the lower castes of American society are made to “volunteer” for war, with those from urban jungles or of rural regions comprising the armed forces, as long as middle class America is not conscripted, there will not exist a massive peace movement, the kind that once moved mountains and introduced fear into the halls of power. This the Bush Administration knows all too well, which is why they avoid it at all costs, while at the same time manipulating the system in a myriad of ways to assure itself of enough cannon fodder to continue its war of imperialism and occupation.


Warmongers One and All


The War Culture we are called, birthed from the first images of cartoons our innocent minds are bombarded with, their entire content based on conflict, aggression, violence and destruction, our brainwaves slowly manipulated and altered to suit the ways of war. Conditioned from infancy to accept the sounds of gunfire, the dropping of bombs, the violence of war, the violent conflict of man versus man, we in time become immune to death and violence, suppressing inside us feelings of horror and revulsion. As we begin getting older we are introduced to the magical world of Hollywood, full of pyrotechnic wonder and digital artistry, making us awe and gawk at exploding bombs and reverberating waves of thunderous booms, becoming wide-eyed by the destruction unleashed by the weapons of war and the heroes we fantasize about.

Transfixed by Dolby digital sounds, the concussions of bombs exploding in our ears, the whizzing of bullets flying by, mushroom clouds of fire and smoke emanating on screen, blood and guts spilled throughout, we are made to accept war and violence and destruction as inherent mechanisms of conflict resolution. Slowly but surely we are conditioned to believe that the brutality of man killing man is not as severe as we believe it to be, that blood and guts are but movie magic, that death and injury are as fictional as that seen in the movies. We are made to love mayhem; we are made to love weapons; we are made to accept violence; we are made to believe death is nothing more than the role an actor must play.

In our deluded minds, thanks to years of watching television and movies, lies the ingrained propaganda that everything the military does is benevolent and altruistic, as always fighting for “freedom and democracy,” for “human rights,” for the salvation from “tyranny.” In our distorted view of human reality, the US military is always the good guy fighting the enemy, who is always evil, a dreaded evildoer. This black and white view of the world has been firmly planted into our minds by the happy ending, good-guy always wins bull manure manufactured by the fictional geniuses in Hollywood, where America is always the winner and where the evildoer of the moment always gets killed or caught. In a war such as the present debacle in Iraq, therefore, where reality is hidden and truth suppressed, our instinct will always be to blindly believe, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that the US military has been sent to Iraq for good, altruistic and noble intentions.

The truth, though, is altogether different, as evidenced by the devastation unleashed by the American military inside Iraq. The sadistic images that emerged from Abu Ghraib, the crimes against humanity being committed in Guantanamo and other such clandestine gulags, the death of perhaps 200,000 innocent Iraqis, the complete devastation of Iraq’s infrastructure, the indiscriminate shooting of civilians, the immeasurable level of suffering created as a result of occupation, the destruction of Fallujah missile, bomb and use of white phosphorus, the lack of electricity, sewage, fuel and adequate drinking water, the ongoing dropping of bombs and an increase in the aerial war are but a few examples of the wickedness exported into Iraq by America’s illegal and immoral invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. The complete collapse of society and unfettered chaos in the streets, the civil war now raging and expanding, the insecurity prevalent throughout the nation and the deep seated anger and hate brewing in Iraq are all a result of what our cherished military, at the behest of George W. Bush, has helped birth in a nation once tranquil and secure.

Yet to millions of Americans who either do not care or will never know reality, what we have done in Iraq is bringing “freedom and democracy,” even though women now have fewer rights than before invasion, freeing a nation from its tyrant, even though America has become the new tyrant, that they hate us for our freedoms, when in reality they hate us for our foreign policies, our imperialism and our support of ruthless tyrants, and “fighting them over there so we do not have to fight them over here,” even though there were no terrorists in Iraq before but now it has become a training ground for thousands who will one day use their expertise in order to inflict blowback at the United States.

Lost from the memory of tens of millions of Americans, whether conveniently or from the general amnesia now prevalent throughout society, are the myriad of excuses used to justify the illegal invasion and occupation, from WMDs, mushroom clouds, connections to 9/11 and Al-Qaeda. Lost is the reality that we are the invading Red Coats fighting against American Revolutionaries in the Iraqi version of the Revolutionary War and War for Independence, that the truth behind the Iraq war is freedom fighters trying to cleanse their lands of the imperial invaders intent on dehumanizing Iraqis, raping their women, killing and brutalizing their children, conquering their oil fields and possessing their geostrategic lands. We cheer freedom fighters in expensive Hollywood productions, yet not when we are the invaders and occupiers. Such is the power of propaganda. Thanks to incessant propaganda, however, tens of millions of Americans will continue to live in the illusion that we are fighting the so-called war on terror against Al-Qaeda, that Iraq is the central front in this mirage, that we are the defenders of humanity, pursuing evildoer bogeymen with no interest in controlling the vast oil fields deemed vital to the continued expansion both of our economy and the coffers of the military-industrial-energy complex.

After years of propaganda and conditioning, and thanks to continued and incessant brainwashing by the mainstream media, we readily accept war as an institution, as a product re-introduced every few years for the benefit of the state. War thus becomes a necessary component that we inherently associate, perhaps subconsciously, with the continued health of the nation and its economy. By association, then, war is good not only for the country but for us as individuals, assuring our children of continued excessiveness. Inside our minds exists the charade that without war we would not possess the vast wealth we have or the comfortable lifestyles we live in.

Yet we also know that without war, without our reckless grab for land and exploitation, the nation would stutter and cease to be the power that has allowed us to dominate the globe, pillaging the world’s people and their resources in the process, in wanton fashion exacerbating misery, regional wars, global warming, poverty and thus further imperiling the security of the planet. It is this reality that we are fully aware of yet refuse to accept or openly talk about, becoming the ugly truth that must never be allowed to escape its dark closet. It is better to live in denial and in hypocrisy than in the shantytowns exclusively reserved for billions of our fellow human beings.

Millions of us know we owe our fruitful and gluttonous lifestyles to war, to the suffering of billions and the imperialist mechanisms controlled by us, yet many of us refuse to change our ways, refusing to act in opposition to the Empire, refusing to acknowledge that our lifestyle was born in sin, in human misery and in the invasion and colonization of alien lands. Living inside the belly of the beast, using and exploiting its many riches, living its comfortable reality, yet refusing to alter our standards of living or our comfortable existence, refusing to amend our crimes and stop our exploitation of the planet, we remain, as always, fully complicit in the crimes and destruction and misery unleashed by our government. Remaining silent, indifferent and ignorant to this reality does not absolve any of us.

Through silence we merely acquiesce to everything done in our name. Our failure or unwillingness to alter our ways, our inability or refusal to change the direction of this nation and the continued indifference or complicity to the plight of billions has unmasked us all. This hidden truth lies at the heart of us all, making us a nation of warmongers, one and all, of amnesiacs, one and all, of pampered and spoiled primates, one and all, a citizenry unapologetic in its complicity and acquiescence to imperialism, war and destruction through our excessiveness, comfortable lifestyles and deafening silence.

We are a nation asleep at the wheel, drunk off our self-exceptionalism and gluttony, ramming head on into the massive trunk of unthinking self-destruction, our arrogance blinding us to the giant cancer in our midst, addicted to materialism and television, every day dumbed down further, unwilling to learn about the world outside our infallible bubble, creating a snowball rolling downhill, gaining momentum and growing in size, in its path eviscerating the dreams and hopes of the future as well as an American past that once offered humanity a glimmer of hope in an ever-dwindling and myopic world.


www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet columnist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel made available at most online book sellers.

Writing in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar has launched a furious assault on the Bush administration for its manipulation of prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and links to al Qaeda. Mr. Pillar should know, because he was the CIA's National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia (NESA) from 2000 to 2005.

Most damaging is his assertion: "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made." That decision, of course, was to invade Iraq. And, as we know, plenty of evidence exists -- especially as provided by Bush administration insider, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- to prove that the Bush administration plotted, from its very first day in office, to effect regime change in Iraq.

Pillar's firsthand proof of intelligence manipulation appears to be unassailable: The Bush administration "went to war without requesting - and evidently without being influenced by - any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq…As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq; the first request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war."

As Pillar correctly notes, it was the Senate -- not the Bush administration -- that requested such a strategic-level assessment, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Yet, what precipitated that request was the "cherry-picking" from intelligence about aluminum tubes, by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, which exaggerated how close Iraq was to acquiring nuclear weapons. Presumably, such manipulation is what Pillar has in mind when he complains about how "the administration selected pieces of raw intelligence to use in the public case for war, leaving the intelligence community to register varying degrees of private protest when such use started to go beyond what analysts deemed credible or reasonable."

But, much worse than mere cherry-picking for exaggeration from legitimate, if partial, intelligence was the Bush administration's attempt to frighten Congress -- just a few weeks before it was scheduled to vote on a resolution to support war -- by falsely proclaiming the existence of links connecting Iraq with al Qaeda. Why? Because the intelligence community already had expressed its doubts about such links in four classified reports. Thus, there existed no legitimate intelligence to cherry-pick from.

Nevertheless, but from pure fabrication, President Bush falsely warned against allowing al Qaeda to become "an extension of Saddam's madness." Not to be outdone, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld falsely claimed, "that American intelligence had 'bulletproof' evidence of links between al Qaeda and the government of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq."

Anyone who had read the four classified reports would have known that Bush and Rumsfeld were making false statements. Which means that virtually every senior official in the Bush administration was an accomplice.

Unfortunately, few individuals outside the Bush administration knew about those four classified intelligence reports. And Pillar doesn't mention them in his article. But our British allies in the war against Iraq knew what was going on. And, now, so do we, thanks to the individual who leaked the highly classified "Downing Street Memo" of July 2002.

According to that memo, the Chief of British Intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet the following information about his recent talks in Washington: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Moreover, as Pillar confirms, "the greatest discrepancy between the administration's public statements and the intelligence community's judgments [precisely] concerned …the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda." In fact, it required only the first of those four classified reports -- co-authored by Pillar's NESA and issued to the President's Daily Brief principals on September 21, 2001 -- to provoke neoconservatives in the Pentagon to establish a small office tasked with cultivating that very discrepancy.

That office, staffed by untrained but appropriately biased political hacks, was set up by Douglas Feith and called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG). According to Pillar, with the formation of that group, "The administration's rejection of the intelligence community's judgments became especially clear." Not only did the PCEG deliberately resurrect and disseminate damning, but erroneous, raw intelligence about Iraq's links to al Qaeda (raw intelligence that the intelligence community already had dismissed), it also solicited raw intelligence from now discredited anti-Saddamist defectors programmed by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.

Thus, was it an accident that the PCEG's "intelligence" affirming Iraq's links to al Qaeda found its way into the pre-invasion public utterances of the Defense Secretary, National Security Adviser, Vice President and President? Didn't Cheney speak for them all when he wrote the following note on one of Feith's briefings: "This is very good…Encouraging…Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of the CIA."

"Encouraging?" Manipulating evidence to go to war is "encouraging?" Perhaps that entire exercise best explains why the least enthusiastic member of Bush's war party, Colin Powell, called Feith's group a "Gestapo office."

A recent poll indicated that 53 percent of Americans supported the impeachment of President Bush, "if it was in fact proven that Bush had lied about the basis for invading Iraq." Thus, it's up to that 53 percent to determine whether the very establishment of a "Gestapo office" dedicated to supplanting legitimate classified reports with discredited and ultimately false intelligence that, in turn, was used eagerly and uncritically by senior Bush administration officials, constitutes anything other than the "BIG LIE" that so-called totalitarian regimes had perfected in the past.

Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA). His own comprehensive examination of Feith's PCEG - Visit his website.

In case you don't know, on January 19 the latest audiotape from Osama bin Laden was released and in it he declared: "If you [Americans] are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book ‛Rogue State', which states in its introduction ... " He then goes on to quote the opening of a paragraph I wrote (which appears actually in the Foreword of the British edition only, that was later translated to Arabic), which in full reads:

"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize -- very publicly and very sincerely -- to all the widows and the orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. I would then announce that America’s global interventions -- including the awful bombings -- have come to an end. And I would inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but -– oddly enough -– a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings and invasions. There would be more than enough money. Do you know what one year of the US military budget is equal to? One year. It’s equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.

"That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated."

Within hours I was swamped by the media and soon appeared on many of the leading TV shows, dozens of radio programs, with long profiles in the Washington Post, Salon.com and elsewhere. In the previous ten years the Post had declined to print a single one of my letters, most of which had pointed out errors in their foreign news coverage. Now my photo was on page one.

Much of the media wanted me to say that I was repulsed by bin Laden's "endorsement". I did not say I was repulsed because I was not. After a couple of days of interviews I got my reply together and it usually went something like this:

"There are two elements involved here: On the one hand, I totally despise any kind of religious fundamentalism and the societies spawned by such, like the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the other hand, I'm a member of a movement which has the very ambitious goal of slowing down, if not stopping, the American Empire, to keep it from continuing to go round the world doing things like bombings, invasions, overthrowing governments, and torture. To have any success, we need to reach the American people with our message. And to reach the American people we need to have access to the mass media. What has just happened has given me the opportunity to reach millions of people I would otherwise never reach. Why should I not be glad about that? How could I let such an opportunity go to waste?"

Celebrity -- modern civilization's highest cultural achievement -- is a peculiar phenomenon. It really isn't worth anything unless you do something with it.

The callers into the programs I was on, and sometimes the host, in addition to numerous emails, repeated two main arguments against me. (1) Where else but in the United States could I have the freedom to say what I was saying on national media?

Besides their profound ignorance in not knowing of scores of countries with at least equal freedom of speech (particularly since September 11), what they are saying in effect is that I should be so grateful for my freedom of speech that I should show my gratitude by not exercising that freedom. If they're not saying that, they're not saying anything.

(2) America has always done marvelous things for the world, from the Marshall Plan and defeating communism and the Taliban to rebuilding destroyed countries and freeing Iraq.

I have dealt with these myths and misconceptions previously; like sub-atomic particles, they behave differently when observed. For example, in last month's report I pointed out in detail that "destroyed countries" were usually destroyed by American bombs; and America did not rebuild them. As to the Taliban, the United States overthrew a secular, women's-rights government in Afghanistan, which led to the Taliban coming to power; so the US can hardly be honored for ousting the Taliban a decade later, replacing it with an American occupation, an American puppet president, assorted warlords, and women chained.

But try to explain all these fine points in the minute or so one has on radio or TV. However, I think I somehow managed to squeeze in a lot of information and thoughts new to the American psyche.

Some hosts and many callers were clearly pained to hear me say that anti-American terrorists are retaliating against the harm done to their countries by US foreign policy, and are not just evil, mindless, madmen from another planet.[1] Many of them assumed, with lots of certainty and no good reason at all, that I was a supporter of the Democratic Party and they proceeded to attack Bill Clinton. When I pointed out that I was no fan at all of the Democrats or Clinton, they were usually confused into silence for a few moments before seamlessly jumping to some other piece of nonsense. They do not know that an entire alternative world exists above and beyond the Republicans and Democrats.

Just recently we have been hearing and reading comments in the American media about how hopelessly backward and violent were those Muslims protesting the Danish cartoons, carrying signs calling for the beheading of those that insult Islam. But a caller to a radio program I was on said I "should be taken care of", and one of the hundreds of nasty emails I received began: "Death to you and your family."

One of my personal favorite moments: On an AM radio program in Pennsylvania, discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The host (with anguish in her voice): "What has Israel ever done to the Palestinians?"

Me: "Have you been in a coma the past 20 years?"
This is a question I could ask many of those who interrogated me the past few weeks. Actually, 60 years would be more appropriate.

Elections my teacher never told me about

Americans are all taught from childhood on of the significance and sanctity of free elections: You can't have the thing called "democracy" without the thing called "free elections". And when you have the thing called free elections it's virtually synonymous with having the thing called democracy. And who were we taught was the greatest champion of free elections anywhere in the world? Why, our very same teacher, God's country, the good ol' US of A.

But what was God's country actually doing all those years we were absorbing and swearing by this message? God's country was actually interfering in free elections in every corner of the known world; seriously so.

The latest example is the recent elections in Palestine, where the US Agency for International Development (AID) poured in some two million dollars (a huge amount in that impoverished area) to try to tilt the election to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its political wing, Fatah, and prevent the radical Islamic group Hamas from taking power. The money was spent on various social programs and events to increase the popularity of the PA; the projects bore no evidence of US involvement and did not fall within the definitions of traditional development work. In addition, the United States funded many newspaper advertisements publicizing these projects in the name of the PA, with no mention of AID.

"Public outreach is integrated into the design of each project to highlight the role of the P.A. in meeting citizens needs," said a progress report on the projects. "The plan is to have events running every day of the coming week, beginning 13 January, such that there is a constant stream of announcements and public outreach about positive happenings all over Palestinian areas in the critical week before the elections."

Under the rules of the Palestinian election system, campaigns and candidates were prohibited from accepting money from foreign sources.[2] American law explicitly forbids the same in US elections.

Since Hamas won the election, the United States has made it clear that it does not recognize the election as any kind of victory for democracy and that it has no intention of having normal diplomatic relations with the Hamas government. (Israel has adopted a similar attitude, but it should not be forgotten that Israel funded and supported the emergence of Hamas in Gaza during its early days, hoping that it would challenge the Palestine Liberation Organization as well as Palestinian leftist elements.)

By my count, there have been more than 30 instances of gross Washington interference in foreign elections since the end of World War II -- from Italy in 1948 and the Philippines and Lebanon in the 1950s, to Nicaragua, Bolivia and Slovakia in the 2000s -- most of them carried out in an even more flagrant manner than the Palestinian example.[3] Some of the techniques employed have been used in the United States itself as our electoral system, once the object of much national and international pride, has slid inexorably from "one person, one vote", to "one dollar, one vote".

Coming soon to a country (or city) near you

On January 13 the United States of America, in its shocking and awesome wisdom, saw fit to fly an unmanned Predator aircraft over a remote village in the sovereign nation of Pakistan and fire a Hellfire missile into a residential compound in an attempt to kill some "bad guys". Several houses were incinerated, 18 people were killed, including an unknown number of "bad guys"; reports since then give every indication that the unknown number is as low as zero, al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, the principal target, not being amongst them. Outrage is still being expressed in Pakistan. In the United States the reaction in the Senate typified the American outrage:

"We apologize, but I can't tell you that we wouldn't do the same thing again" said Sen. John McCain of Arizona "It's a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do?" said Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. "My information is that this strike was clearly justified by the intelligence," said Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi.[4]

Similar US attacks using such drones and missiles have angered citizens and political leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen. In has not been uncommon for the destruction to be so complete that it is impossible to establish who was killed, or even how many people. Amnesty International has lodged complaints with the Busheviks following each suspected Predator strike. A UN report in the wake of the 2002 strike in Yemen called it "an alarming precedent [and] a clear case of extrajudicial killing" in violation of international laws and treaties.[5]

Can it be imagined that American officials would fire a missile into a house in Paris or London or Ottawa because they suspected that high-ranking al Qaeda members were present there? Even if the US knew of their presence for an absolute fact, and not just speculation as in the Predator cases mentioned above? Well, most likely not, but can we put anything past Swaggering- Superarrogant-Superpower-Cowboys-on-steroids? After all, they've already done it to their own, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On May 13, 1985, a bomb dropped by a police helicopter burned down an entire block, some 60 homes destroyed, 11 dead, including several small children. The police, the mayor’s office, and the FBI were all involved in this effort to evict an organization called MOVE from the house they lived in.

The victims were all black of course. So let's rephrase the question. Can it be imagined that American officials would fire a missile into a residential area of Beverly Hills or the upper east side of Manhattan? Stay tuned.

"The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Milan Kundera

I'm occasionally taken to task for being so negative about the United States role in the world. Why do you keep looking for all the negative stuff and tear down the positive? I'm asked.

Well, it's a nasty job, but someone has to do it. Besides, for each negative piece I'm paid $500 by al Qaeda. And the publicity given to my books by Osama ... priceless.

The new documentary film by Eugene Jarecki, ""Why We Fight", which won the Sundance Festival's Grand Jury prize, relates how the pursuit of profit by arms merchants and other US corporations has fueled America's post-World War II wars a lot more than any love of freedom and democracy. The unlikely hero of the film is Dwight Eisenhower, whose famous warning about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex" is the film's principal motif.

Here is Jarecki being interviewed by the Washington Post:

Post: Why did you make "Why We Fight?"

Jarecki: The simple answer: Eisenhower. He caught me off-guard. He seemed to have so much to say about our contemporary society and our general tilt towards militarism. ... The voices in Washington and the media have become so shrill. ... It seemed important to bring a little gray hair into the mix.

Post: How would you classify your politics? You've been accused of being a lefty.

Jarecki: I'm a radical centrist. ... If Dwight Eisenhower is a lefty, I am too. Then I'll walk with Ike.[6] [ellipses in original]

Isn't it nice that a film portraying the seamier side of the military-industrial complex is receiving such popular attention? And that we are able to look fondly upon an American president? How long has that been? Well, here I go again.

Eisenhower, regardless of what he said as he was leaving the presidency, was hardly an obstacle to American militarism or corporate imperialism. During his eight years in office, the United States intervened in every corner of the world, overthrowing the governments of Iran, Guatemala, Laos, the Congo, and British Guiana, and attempting to do the same in Costa Rica, Syria, Egypt, and Indonesia, as well as laying the military and political groundwork for the coming Indochinese holocaust.

Eisenhower's moralistically overbearing Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, summed up the administration's world outlook thusly: "For us there are two sorts of people in the world: there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise and there are the others."[7]

NOTES
[1] See my essay on this subject at: http://members.aol.com/essays6/myth.htm

[2] Washington Post, January 22 and 24, 2006

[3] Rogue State, chapter 18, includes the text of the US law prohibiting foreign contributions to US elections.

[4] Associated Press, January 15, 2006

[5] Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2006

[6] Washington Post, February 12, 2006, p.N3

[7] Roger Morgan, "The United States and West Germany, 1945-1973" (1974), p.54

William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir. Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire www.killinghope.org Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

On 28 February 2005, with the Prevention of Terrorism Bill being discussed in Parliament, Tony Blair made the following comment to listeners to Women's Hour: "What they [the security services] say is that you have got to give us powers in between mere surveillance of these people - there are several hundred of them in this country who we believe are engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts - you have got to give us power in between just surveying them and being sure enough to prosecute them beyond reasonable doubt. There are people out there who are determined to destroy our way of life and there is no point in us being naïve about it. "

Anyone listening to the Prime Minister's remarks must have felt that, within days of the Prevention of Terrorism Act being passed, the "several hundred" individuals plotting to wreak devastation through Britain would have been under lock and key. And yet that is not the case at all. Nearly a year has gone by and yet no more than 17 individuals have been made subject to control orders. The Prime Minister's suggestion that the security services were demanding new powers in order to deal with a new category of terrorist suspect turns out to have been nonsense. His figure of " several hundred" terrorists plotting mayhem seems to have been plucked out of thin air.

THE POLITICISATION OF TERROR

In the immediate aftermath of the 7 July outrages the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, was swift to make contact with his opposite numbers the shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, and the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten. Parallel lines of communication were developed between their staff members and cemented by a regular exchange of letters and e-mails. There seemed to be a real chance that some good could come out of the calamity of the London bombings: politicians of all parties coming together to fight a ruthless common enemy.

By the start of August, there was a general agreement that everything was on course for announcements at the party conference season and the passing of an anti-terrorism Act, with cross-party support, by Christmas. Clarke, Davis and Oaten each set off on holiday. They had taken the precaution of sharing contact numbers in case of an emergency.

On the afternoon of 4 August, both Oaten and Davis were surprised to receive a call from the Home Office minister Hazel Blears. Oaten was in St Tropez when he took his, while Davis was in the north of England. According to both, Blears gave the impression that the call was little more a formality. She told them that there would be an announcement on terrorism by the Prime Minister the following day, but it would not go further than had already been agreed between the three parties.

The following day, in his monthly Downing Street press conference, the Prime Minister went far beyond anything agreed, or even discussed with, the opposition parties. He dramatically announced a "12-point plan" which put forward new measures which he surely knew that the opposition parties could not support. This 12-point plan at once shattered the harmonious working relationship between the three main parties.

Charles Clarke, it must be said, rebuts any suggestion that he was put under pressure from Downing Street or kept out of loop, saying: "I was on holiday in America at that time, and I was on the phone to the Prime Minister a great deal during that time, right up to the statements that he actually made. I was fully involved, fully supported it and thought it was the right thing to do." Be that as it may, there are grounds for speculation that 10 Downing Street had seized control of the terrorism agenda from the Home Office.

The context is important: the Prime Minister had been confronted by a concerted campaign in the tabloid press for new anti-terror laws. He may well have concluded that the thoughtful, consensual strategy worked out with the two main opposition parties came at too great a political cost. He may have decided that it was more profitable to give an impression of acting tough. That was the impression gained by many MPs, including his own supporters. John Denham, a former Home Office minister and chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, described the proposals as "half-baked". He told me later: "There must be concern that the Government agenda is sometimes driven by public and media pressure in this area, rather than a concern for what is most effective."

Tony Blair's terror initiative showed numerous signs of having been cobbled together in a hurry. Some of the measures proved ill thought-out and unworkable. However, it may have achieved the result that the Prime Minister, who left the following day for the West Indies to stay at Cliff Richard's holiday home, wanted. For days before the plan was announced, he had been under heavy pressure from a tabloid campaign, led by The Sun, claiming that holidaying politicians were not taking the terror threat seriously enough.

On 3 August, The Sun raged against holidaying MPs: "LET'S HOPE THE BOMBERS ARE ON HOLIDAY TOO". On 5 August an open letter from Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of The Sun, was headlined: "DEAR MPs, SIX WEEKS HOLIDAY IS ENOUGH FOR ANYONE". Then on 6 August, as Tony Blair flew to the West Indies with his family, The Sun headline was much more reassuring: "VICTORY FOR SUN OVER NEW TERROR LAWS."

RICIN

In early 2003 just as the Government was seeking to persuade the British people to wage war against Saddam Hussein in order to prevent him distributing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, the police made a significant announcement. They had, they said, foiled a terrorist ring in its attempt to launch a chemical attack in Britain using the deadly poison ricin.

According to a press release from Scotland Yard issued in the names of the deputy chief medical officer, Dr Pat Troop, and Assistant Commissioner David Veness of the Metropolitan Police, ricin had been found in a flat in Wood Green, north London. The Government latched on to the news. On 7 January, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and the Health Secretary, John Reid, issued a joint statement stating that "traces of ricin" had been found. The Prime Minister joined in by warning that the discovery highlighted the dangers from weapons of mass destruction, adding: "The arrests which were made show this danger is present and real and with us now. Its potential is huge."

It is unusual, and potentially prejudicial, for ministers to comment on upcoming court cases. Nevertheless, as the ricin case moved towards trial, ministers continued to regard the ricin trial as an important publicity resource. In due course, the trial judge was provoked into warning the Home Secretary to curb his public remarks for fear of prejudicing the case.

No ricin was ever found in the Wood Green flat - just a small number of ingredients for the manufacture of ricin. The announcement from David Veness and Pat Troop that "a small amount of the material recovered from the Wood Green premises has tested positive for the presence of ricin poison" was misleading: the tests were only capable of indicating that ricin might be present. But they did not establish its presence.

On 7 January, chemical weapons experts at the government research facility at Porton Down carried out more accurate tests into the presence of ricin. These tests established that there was no ricin. Curiously, Porton Down apparently did not pass on this information to the British Government until late March. And apparently the Government never asked for the results of this definitive test. The existence of ricin continued to be proclaimed for over two years.

OLD TRAFFORD

In April 2004, the British people were alerted to an amazing coup. They learned how the police had seized a terrorist gang just as it prepared to launch an audacious bomb attack on Old Trafford stadium on match day, an attack which could have killed thousands of people. It was a national sensation. And yet there was not a shred of truth in the story. Unlike in the ricin case, the Government cannot be blamed. The police and, to an extent the media, are responsible for the invention.

On the morning of Monday 19 April 2004, more than 400 officers from four police forces, many of them armed, raided half a dozen houses, flats and businesses in and around Manchester. They arrested eight men, one woman and a 16-year-old boy. They were held for several days and intensively interrogated. In due course the suspects were released. No charges were ever laid.

The newspapers, by contrast, had no doubt about what the story was. The front page of The Sun proclaimed: "MAN U SUICIDE BOMB PLOT". On pages four and five the paper claimed: "EXCLUSIVE: MAN UTD SUICIDE BLASTS FOILED".

Once the story had started to run, it was further fuelled by the Manchester police. Rather than issue a cool denial, they played it up by holding a press conference. The accompanying press release read: "We are confident that the steps that we have taken to date have significantly reduced any potential threat in the Greater Manchester area." With the weekend fixtures looming, it went on: "Greater Manchester Police and Manchester United Football Club have put in place extra security measures to reassure the public about the safety of both matches."

The police and security services have, very properly, refused to discuss what intelligence led to the raids of 19 April being made. But the police interrogations of the suspects shed a ray of light. One of the suspects, a Kurd, suffered so badly from having his name linked to a terrorist plot that he wants to remain anonymous.

He told me how Old Trafford had cropped up in his interrogation: "I was in the police station and the interview stopped, like a rest, and somebody, they bring in the coffee and they ask me what you like? I say I like the football. Oh, who do you support? They ask me just like a friendly, who do you support? I say Manchester United. Oh, how long you support Manchester United? I said a long time I support Manchester United, when I was tiny, I was small, you know and all my family supported Manchester United ... they asked me, have you been football ground? I said, of course I've been to the football ground. Two years ago, long time ago, I can't remember."

These questions were surely prompted by the discovery, at the anonymous suspect's flat, of Manchester United paraphernalia: a poster of Old Trafford, and ticket stubs the suspect had kept as souvenirs of his only visit to the ground, when he had gone with a friend to watch United play Arsenal the year before.

The two friends had bought their tickets from touts, which meant that they sat at different parts of the ground. The Sun reported that the bombers planned to sit at different parts of the ground, in order to cause maximum damage with their bombs. This claim can only have been based on the fact that the old ticket stubs found by the police were for seats in different parts of the stadium. This information had not been made public, so The Sun could only have obtained it from the police.

The Kurds I spoke to had come to Britain in order to escape the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime. Perhaps their most meaningful emotional connection with Britain was a love for Manchester United, which was why they kept the souvenirs in their flat. The Manchester police discovered nothing else suspicious. Nevertheless the police probably viewed the Manchester United souvenirs as potential evidence of a bomb plot. This evidence was then prematurely leaked, through unofficial police sources, to the press.

Manchester police then encouraged the story to run by issuing public statements that, while falling a long way short of giving outright confirmation, could be read as corroborating the story. Disgracefully, the Greater Manchester Police refused to launch an investigation into the numerous leaks.

The reporting of this incident was inflammatory and misleading. It caused needless alarm among millions of TV viewers and newspaper readers. It stirred up anti-Islamic prejudice. It ruined the lives of several of the suspects. They lost their homes, their jobs and their friends as a result. They have never received a personal apology, either from the police or from the press.

MUSLIM WORKING GROUPS

In the wake of the London bombings, the Prime Minister made a series of announcements aimed at averting another catastrophe. One of the most visible was the setting up of seven task forces to investigate Muslim extremism and to recommend initiatives for tackling it. This was a considerable enterprise by any standards, requiring deep learning and insight, and generous resources.

But Tony Blair's task forces into the roots of Muslim extremism were given six weeks to do their business. They seem to have met just three times before reaching their conclusions. One of the Muslim leaders involved, the Liberal Democrat peer Kishwer Falkner, told us: "When we agreed to be on the working groups and we were told what the deadlines were, we were taken aback. We spoke to one another and queried whether we were just being set up as a tokenistic exercise, because it didn't seem to me, in the middle of August, when half the country is on holiday, that two or three meetings of a couple of hours each would set right a host of intractable and difficult long-term problems to do with how we co-exist, how we integrate with each other.

Falkner feels that the recommendation of her working parties were second-guessed by the Prime Minister's 12-point plan, announced just two weeks after the working parties were set up. She says she was: "... completely dismayed, within days of being set up, to discover in the speech the Prime Minister made on 5 August, that he was proceeding full steam ahead with a raft of measures without waiting for us to come up with our recommendations, or indeed our analysis of the problems. And the raft of measures was completely counter to reducing alienation and extremism. In fact, if anything, it was going to increase alienation in terms of the Muslim community.

Her criticism was echoed by Haras Rafiq, co-founder of Bridges TV (UK), a Muslim television organisation which will start broadcasting later this year. He told us: "The brief was to find ways or find a solution to the problem of extremism and radicalisation within the Muslim community. Now let's just reflect on that. Find a solution for extremism and radicalisation in the Muslim community in the UK, that's a huge piece of work. It isn't something that can be tackled, you know, in the space of a month, two months. The whole process smacked to me a little bit of presentationalism and to be seen to be doing something rather than actually producing an effective and constructive piece of work."

It is hard to regard these task forces as a great deal more than some shallow spin from the Government. In the three years before the London bombings, the Government had commissioned two major enquiries into the problems of Muslim segregation and extremism - Ted Cantle's report in the wake of the Bradford riots and a government report of 2004, Young Muslims and Extremism - and largely dismissed both. The idea that Tony Blair's h urriedly formed and short-lived Muslim working groups could provide a better analysis than either of these two earlier studies was absurd.

CONCLUSION

The Government has persistently failed to tell the truth either to itself or to the British public about the terror threat in Britain. These failures of diagnosis have led to failures of response. An example is the Prime Minister's denial that there is a connection between the Iraq war and domestic terrorism. That denial is not merely false. It also inhibits the kind of deep understanding of the motives of Muslim terrorists which the Prime Minister presumably wants.

The defeat in the House of Commons of the Government's proposals for 90 days detention without trial for terrorist suspects was represented at the time as an indication of Tony Blair's political weakness. This analysis missed the point. That Commons defeat signalled a national crisis in public trust in politicians, the police and the security services. Consider this: the Prime Minister of the day, fully backed by the police, had thrown his weight behind a measure he described as crucial for national security and the fight against terrorism. And yet it was comfortably rejected by MPs.

This collapse in trust has come about because few people now believe what the Prime Minister, the security services and the police tell us about security matters. This dissonance is a massive problem. Britain today faces a threat from international and domestic terrorism which is far more dangerous and insidious than anything it has confronted before. We need to trust our politicians, our police, and the media. But that trust has been betrayed.

This is an edited extract taken from The Use and Abuse of Terror - The Construction of a False Narrative on the Domestic Terror Threat, published today by the Centre for Policy Studies. Peter Oborne is also presenting a Channel 4 documentary 'Dispatches: Spinning Terror' on Monday at 8pm

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited