- Signs of the Times for Fri, 17 Feb 2006 -

The other day SOTT received an email from a popular “Activist” website soliciting funds. The message said:

Dear member,

Yesterday 6,613 of us contributed $389,900 towards our $3.5 million field organizing plan for the election, smashing our goal of $250,000 for the week. Amazing. This generosity gives us a great deal of hope--and we've got to keep the momentum going. Can we make it to $600,000 by Friday?

A contribution of $100 from 2,100 more of us will get us there. Can you pitch in? You can contribute by credit card or check at the link below—it takes just a minute.

Wow! In one day they were able to raise $389,900.00 !!! And they are shooting for Three and a Half MILLION? What for?

Well, for their political ads and campaigns.

We wondered just what planet the people live on who gave this kind of money? Haven't they been paying attention? Don't they know that there is absolutely NO possibility that buying political ads or backing political candidates is going to make one bit of difference?

Think about it: Bush and the Neocons have been spying illegally for over a year now, and he has the gall to brag about it and shove it in our faces, and to declare that he's going to continue. In the midst of this uproar, he even gets his court pick accepted ensuring that no legal action will ever be taken against him. And while we are on the subject, just WHO have the Neocons been spying on that were such sensitive targets that they couldn't even be bothered with getting a rubber stamp approval?

The object of the illegal spying wasn't really to target innocent Americans as the Neocons would like us all to think.

Does anyone actually think that Bush and Gang would spend their time listening in on conversations between Junior and his granny in Pakistan? Does anyone seriously think that the arrogant Karl Rove is going to waste his time on “average Americans?” Do you think he - or ANY of them - really think that there are "terrorists" in America?

Of course not. They know that the whole "terrorist threat" is manufactured. They aren't going to waste their time looking for something that they created in their sick imaginations.

So, WHO are they REALLY spying on? And why did they out themselves as Bush did just before Christmas?

Sure, we read that it was done because the NY Times was going to publish a story that they had withheld for over a year. "President George W. Bush was so desperate to stop The New York Times' secret spy program story he summoned Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Executive Editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office to try to talk them out of running it, Newsweek reported on its Web site on Monday."

That smacks of smokescreen. Does anyone really believe that if the President wanted the NY Times to keep quiet that there would be a problem? After Judy Miller? Not a chance.

The whole thing stinks of a smokescreen. So, what are they trying to hide? What are they trying to distract attention away from? As Paul Craig Roberts has written:

We have reached a point where the Bush administration is determined to totally eclipse the people. Bewitched by neoconservatives and lustful for power, the Bush administration and the Republican Party are aligning themselves firmly against the American people. Their first victims, of course, were the true conservatives. Having eliminated internal opposition, the Bush administration is now using blackmail obtained through illegal spying on American citizens to silence the media and the opposition party.

Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.[...]

The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.

So, what other journalists, congressmen, judges, various other government officials are they REALLY spying on? After all, considering the nature of these creatures that have taken over the U.S., you have to know that they are only going to expend their energy on things that will bring them the biggest rewards of money and power. The hoopla about spying on innocent Americans to ferret out terrorists is just a smokescreen; it was, purely and simply, to spy on political opponents, journalists, and to obtain material for blackmail so as to completely control the political process.

And that means that all those hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars even, that are flowing into the coffers of various “Political Action” groups are all going to waste. It's all for nothing. Nothing will change. They will spend your money, make a big show, make a good living off of it, and nothing, NOTHING, will change.

Yes indeed, the desire for change in the country is intense – 60% think America is on the wrong track.

Yes, President Bush is very unpopular. Only 39% approve of him in one poll – his polls are as bad as Nixon's were around Watergate.

No, the news isn't any better for Congress; 63% of Americans want Congress to move in a new direction. Based on very good information it seems that many members of Congress did NOT approve of the confirmation of Samuel Alito. But he was confirmed anyway with some notable Democratic switchovers! (A little domestic spying bearing fruit?)

Yes, it is true that the Republican-controlled Congress' approval ratings are at 29%, but don't think for a minute that the wheels are coming off the right-wing machine. Sure, Karl Rove is under scrutiny, Tom DeLay is under indictment and the Abramoff scandal keeps everyone titillated while the Neocon juggernaut just keeps on stomping across America.

Yes, it is true that everywhere, on all the issues, the people are rejecting the Bush/Neocon agenda from Iraq to Social Security to budget cuts, to funding the war machine, to drilling in the Arctic. But none of it makes one bit of difference to an administration that owns the media, the Intelligence agencies, the military, the Congress and now, the Supreme Court. While the pundits tell us Bush is in trouble, he continues to get his victories on the ground.

Nothing that the political activists have done or said or advertised about has made one whit of difference. Nothing. The same game is being played with Iran that was played with Iraq, and if something doesn't change in a very fundamental way very, very soon, America IS going to be embroiled in a global war that may, indeed, be the end of America.

With so many of our readers writing to us asking “What to do?”, we thought that we would make an experiment. We fought like hell against the Alito confirmation for weeks. We activated our group members, wrote letters, sent emails, made phone calls, sent FAXes, day after day after day. We blogged, we posted to internet forums, we listened to the agreement of hundreds of thousands of people who stood with us against the confirmation of Alito.

We KNOW we were having an effect because, toward the end, there WERE notable congressional reps responding to this pressure and calling for the filibuster. We don't think for a minute that they were serious, we think that rather they were giving lip-service to the idea to calm down all the activists.

The facts “on the ground” are that Alito was confirmed. He was confirmed because the Neocons OWN everything, including the Democrats. It's that simple.

As it now stands, the Republican juggernaut is unbreakable. The corruption scandals, the admitted lying, the low approval ratings, none of that makes any difference. This fall, there is absolutely NO chance of ending the Republican stranglehold on Congress. Anybody who does not see this is deluding themselves and taking you for your money. It's that simple.

As long as the Neocons own the media, the intelligence agencies, the military, the courts, congress AND the voting machines, NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE.

Would it make a difference if the Democrats returned to power?

MoveOn.org, the organisation who's email we cited above, is a front for the Democratic Party in the US. They serve to rally and deflect liberals who want to do something in the face of the Bush gang into doing exactly the kinds of activities that can change nothing. Their latest plan is to try and raise money to fight the Republicans in the next election. What? So that the spineless and equally corrupt Democrats, who have allowed Bush to capture the Supreme Court, illegally spy on Americans, get away with phoney commissions about 9/11, allowed the neo-cons and Israel to get away with 9/11, allowed Israel to continue its genocide of the Palestinians, who say that Bush needs to get serious about the war in Iraq and win it, who may not have received as much money from Abramoff as the Republicans, but who have their own lobbyists and slush funds, be put into power in order to improve things??? Is it really going to change anything? Is any dollar given to this cause going to be better spent than if it were thrown into a fire and burned?

You might as well imagine that Ariel Sharon going to rise from his sickbed and lead the Palestinians to a just and equitable one-state solution.

If there is no political opposition in the United States, if none of this anti-Bush busy work can have any beneficial affect, we come back to the question "What can I do?"

We receive many emails from people asking us this question. They can objectively see the situation in the United States, they understand that the Bush gang are imposing fascism, that the neo-cons and Israel were behind 9/11, that the administration lies, that the US Constitution has been torn into tiny pieces... they understand all that. So they ask us, "What can we do?"

As John Kaminski says with his usual eloquence in his article "Pain in the Brain":

Over and over I keep repeating: It doesn't matter who gets elected. All that stuff is a waste of time. America will continue to bomb and poison the world no matter who's in the White House.... The conversation on the radio show was about peace demonstrations. I commented that large peace events were nice for meeting people, but didn't accomplish anything, except reinforce the hollow illusion that we have free speech in the USA.

Indeed. Letters to the editor, peace marches, petitions, phone calls to your congressmen, these are only symbolic acts, moments when one can take a stand for the truth, doing so with no thought or anticipation to the outcome. They will change nothing... yet.

No amount of money that you give to any political organization is going to make any difference whatsoever.

That's the bad news. Activism based on the old model simply doesn't work against fascism.

Is there any good news? What does work? Can anything work? What can we DO?

We think there IS something that can be done, but it is going to require something that we talk about a lot on this website: Networking, colinearity and nonlinear dynamics. To just briefly explain, colinearity is when a lot of people are networked together, all going in the same direction. Nonlinear dynamics are the laws of physics that tell us that constantly applied pressure can keep building and building until it reaches a “popping” point when EVERYTHING shifts, and no one can know beforehand exactly when, where or how that critical mass will be reached.

We think that the solution to the problems facing America today can't yet be seen because there aren't enough people going in the same direction, all applying the pressure to the same goal/point.

That has got to change. And that can only change by a mass change of thinking. Americans needs to stop wasting energy on the wrong things and start spending it on the right things in the right way at the right time. We think that those who are sincerely working for change need to network together, to support each other not only in word and deed, but financially.

Yes, we have a plan. But like any plan, it requires funding. And unlike useless political plans, we can't reveal all the details because we want the plan to work. For those of you who have figured it out, yes, this is an information war, and we don't have the trillions of dollars that the Pentagon has to wage it. We have very limited funds, in fact.

In order to begin to implement our plan, we are going to need a lot of money. But we aren't asking you for that money, we aren't asking you for $3.25 million like certain political activist groups that don't accomplish anything. We are asking for something quite different. We are asking you to help us fund a real, significant Conscience Network. We already contribute financially to several 9-11 researchers and Activists who are struggling to stay afloat. We need to do more. Every day we see the sincere one, the ones that can't be bought off or co-opted, falling by the wayside, giving up in frustration and despair. Everyday we see the agents of COINTELPRO spreading their clever lies wrapped in truths over an ever widening sphere of influence, and those who can see, those who KNOW, are helpless. If they say a word, the small income they have will be cut off and they will have no further means of continuing to speak out.

That's how it works. First they try to buy off the sincere Truth seeker and speaker. If that doesn't work, then they try to destroy them financially. If that doesn't work, then they try to destroy your reputation. We've seen it and experienced it.

If you read these pages, it is likely to be because you get something from them. Readers of Signs of the Times and the Cassiopaea sites, as well as Laura's books, tell us how much our work means to them. You have come across this work, and it has touched you. It may even have changed you.

You know this to be true.

What if you could help us to support others of like mind, and then to help more and more people to have access to that work? And then, what if those others began to open their eyes and minds to what a true NETWORK is all about?

Up until now limited financial resources have meant that we have not been able to compete with the Pentagon COINTELPRO and Propaganda Budget. We've had to bootstrap every phase of our activity for the past eight years. You, the reader, can see the changes, the development of the site, the spreading influence and increasing readership. That has been due mostly to steady and consistent work, word of mouth advertising, and extremely positive feedback. But, it has now become clear that unless we can get make some serious moves, we will never reach those millions of people that are asking serious questions, thirsting for answers and receiving only lies and disinformation from their government and mainstream media. We won't reach them in time. And if we don't reach them in time, the rest of our plan cannot be put into effect. It all depends on a shift in mass consciousness.

Last year, we asked our readers to help to us raise the money to buy new computer and sound recording equipment in order to improve the services that we offer to our readers free. Thanks to your generosity, the Signs Team has been equipped with the necessary tools to increase our ability to give back, to reach more people, and it has caused a dramatic increase in our readership. More and more people are looking for exactly what Signs of the Times offers: a daily charting of the changing face of our world that keeps our readers abreast of essential information, the news behind the news, that may literally save their lives.

Now, more than ever, as galloping fascism stalks the world, there is a need for as many people as possible to be appraised of the reality of the world in which they live so that this knowledge can be utilised to protect themselves and those they love. It is clear that there is absolutely no chance that the mainstream media will ever provide this service to the people of the world.

It is also clear that there are plans afoot to shut down the Internet as a source of alternative news and points of view that point out the lies, that give people an accurate account of what is happening on our planet, and that demand that the will of the majority be respected. When that happens, sites like Signs of the Times will no longer be available, the information that you get today for free will not even be available if you were willing to pay. To prepare for this, we have been publishing as much of our material as possible as books. To date, we have books totalling over 4000 pages. We have plans for much more during the coming year.

But the books serve no purpose if they sit on shelves or boxed up in cartons. They need to move, they need to get out into bookstores, and from bookstores into homes. For that, we need to advertise. And that costs money. People thirsty for knowledge need the opportunity to learn about our work so that they, too, will understand the gravity of the situation we face and can see the possibility of a different way of living, of be ing.

We CAN make a difference; we just have to go about it in an altogether different way than has been tried up to this point. We need a bootstrap to the next level. That's what we are asking you for.

But we don't have much time. We need to work fast. The Darkness is falling and we need a lot of fuel to keep the lighthouse going. As Bob Dylan put, “It's not dark yet, but it's getting there”.

If every one of our daily readers could give $100.00 to help us counter the propaganda of the dark forces occupying America and open the eyes of others to the infinite possibilities of a colinear network pushing the envelope, we could create a network of Light and Truth that will shine from Sea to Shining Sea.

At this point, none of us have anything to lose anymore, except the last vestiges of our freedom. So, please, dig as deep as you can TODAY. If you can't possibly afford $100, then give what you can. It's time to Rock and Roll!

Click here to donate now!

You want the news behind the news? You want to know just how far from reality the official truth is? Consider the following story from today's UK Guardian:

href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/egypt/story/0,,1711892,00.html" target="_blank">UK to build ties with banned Islamist group

Friday February 17, 2006

A leaked Foreign Office memo published yesterday reveals that the government is to establish ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group banned by the Egyptian government.

Like other western countries, Britain is struggling with the dilemma posed by the electoral successes of Islamist groups either directly linked to terrorism or alleged to be fronts for violent organisations.

The memo, written on January 17 and leaked to the New Statesman, recommends increased engagement with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamist group in the world. The recommendation has been accepted by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary.

Now reading the above, you could easily come away with the idea that the proposed contact between the British government and the Muslim Brotherhood is a first. In reality however...

The "Muslim Brotherhood" was founded in Egypt in the late 1920s by Hassan al-Banna, and has fought for over 70 years for the formation of a pure pan-Islamic theocratic state. Inside the Middle East, Egypt has been the most vigorous opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian government has been at war with the Muslim Brotherhood since the early 1950s, when then Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser banned the group and arrested many of its leaders.

As an organization committed to the establishment of a pan-Islamic state, the Muslim Brotherhood bitterly opposed Nasser's secular form of pan-Arab nationalism. The Muslim Brotherhood's staunch opposition to secular nationalism has also attracted financial support, particularly from Saudi Arabia.

The British War Against Nasser

In their dealings with Nasser (Egyptian Prime Minister 1952-1970) the British used any means necessary, including espionage, diplomacy, bribery and even direct military might to retain control over Egypt and the Suez Canal. The newly founded CIA also became interested in Egypt when Nasser showed signs of tilting to the Soviet Union. Aburish explains h ow this new avenue of intrigue evolved.

"According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955... When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East... This signalled the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic movements against Nasser and other secular forces." (1)

The CIA was following the example of British Intelligence and sought to use Islam to further its goals. They wanted to find a charismatic religious leader that they could promote and control and they began to cooperate with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. With the rise of Nasser the Brotherhood was also courted more seriously by the pro-Western Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They needed all the popular support that they could muster against the rise of Nasser-inspired Arab nationalism to keep their regimes intact.

The Muslim Brotherhood was an obvious ally against Nasser, because he had abolished it from Egypt after it was involved in a failed assassination attempt on his life in 1954. The Brotherhood rejected Nasser's policy that, for the most part, kept religion out of politics. Officially the Brotherhood was an outlawed organization, but it remained influential and active within Egypt working against the secular regime, often hand-in-hand with British Intelligence. In June of 1955 MI6 was already approaching the Brotherhood in Syria to agitate against the new government that showed strong left-wing tendencies and a desire to merge with Egypt (2). The Brotherhood became an even more important asset after Nasser announced the Egyptian takeover of the Suez. Author Stephen Dorril documents how this move was viewed from Britain,

"On 26 July in Alexandria, in a calm speech, but one that was described by London as hysterical, Nasser made his nationalisation announcement, which from a strictly legal point of view was no more 'than a decision to buy out the shareholders.' That night in Downing Street, [British Prime Minister] Eden's bitterness at the decision was not concealed from his guests... Eden summoned a council of war, which continued until 4 a.m. An emotional Prime Minister told his colleagues that Nasser could not be allowed, in Eden's phrase, 'to have his hand on our windpipe.' The 'muslim Mussolini' must be 'destroyed.' Eden added: 'I want him removed and I don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos in Egypt.'" (3)

Former Prime Minister Churchill had fueled Eden's fire by counseling him about the Egyptians, saying, "Tell them if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should have never emerged." (4)

Sir Anthony Nutting, a member of the Foreign Office at the time, recalls an irate phone call from Eden who was upset at the slow pace of the campaign against Nasser. Eden raged, "What's all this poppycock you've sent me? ... What's all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or "neutralizing" him, as you call it? I want him destroyed, can't you understand? I want him murdered..." (5)

To prepare the way for the desired coup the British Information Research Department (IRD) was called into action. They ratcheted up their efforts to control radio broadcasts into Egypt and they planted false stories in the BBC, the London Press Service and the Arab News Agency. Forged documents were created that suggested that Nasser was planning to take over the entire Middle East oil trade, and a bogus report was disseminated that alleged that Egyptian dissidents were being sent to a concentration camp manned by ex-Nazis. (6)

Kurt Nimmo wrote in September 2004:

Larry Franklin: Just a Sideshow on the Road to Total War

By Kurt Nimmo
Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Isn't it curious that right smack in the middle of an investigation of Israel spying on its best "friend," Hamas pulls off back-to-back suicide bombings—after a lull of nearly six months—in Beersheba? Hamas declares the bombing was revenge for Israel's assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi. Rantissi was assassinated on April 17 and Yassin on March 22.

Is there a reason Hamas waited so long to take revenge? Of course there is. Hamas is essentially an Israeli contrivance. It's used for effect when politically expedient.

Israel "aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO," Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told the UPI's Richard Sale in 2002. Hamas is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization long ago penetrated by the CIA. "There is a long historic alliance between the CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood," writes Peter Goodgame. "The entire Bin Laden-CIA created ‘mujahideen' network came from the Muslim Brotherhood." As we now know, Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence, in cahoots with William Casey of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, sent bin Laden to Afghanistan and bankrolled the Services Center (Makhtab al-Khidmat) of the Jordanian Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, in the offices of the World Muslim League and Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar (see Rashid, Taliban, p.131). After Azzam was assassinated, Makhtab al-Khidmat became al-Qaeda, although bin Laden did not call his organization such.

It should be obvious by now that the CIA and Mossad manufactured a virulent strain of Islamic terrorism for their own purposes. For instance, as an excuse for the Zionists to never make peace with the Palestinians. "What does frighten Sharon," Yossi Sarid, chairman of the Meretz party, told Haaretz in 2002, "is any prospect or sign of calm or moderation. If the situation were to calm down and stabilize, Sharon would have to return to the negotiating table and, in the wake of pressure from within and without, he would have to raise serious proposals for an agreement. This moment terrifies Sharon and he wants to put it off for as long as he possibly can."

No doubt Sharon is also keen to deflect attention from the fact that Israel has a long-standing spy operation in America. Of course, considering how the Bushites and Congress bend over backwards to please the Likudites in Israel, such a spy operation may not even be necessary. Regardless, the casual relationship between the Zionist neocons in the Pentagon and the Zionists in Israel—for the moment splashed all over the front page—looks bad for Sharon, especially during the US election cycle. Hamas strikes when the Likudites need a diversion. Same thing for Bush and his facile cave dweller terror threats.

In addition, the latest terror attack in Israel gives Sharon all the more reason to push his 720-kilometre apartheid wall, as Reuters quoted Sharon as saying he would do hours after the attack. Last month the UN General Assembly put forward a resolution demanding Israel dismantle the apartheid wall after the International Court of Justice declared it to be in violation of international law. But then the Likudites and the Bushcons are above international law. International law is to be used as a crowbar against Iran as it scrambles to develop a few nukes, knowing full well what the Zionists in Tel Aviv and Washington have in mind for the Iranian people. As North Korea understands full well, saber-rattling enemies think twice when you have a few nuclear warheads under your belt.

Israel is truly an outlaw nation. Its criminal government is run by racist settlers who are pushing for war against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Israel realizes it cannot possibly wage war against the Arabs and the Iranians without America's military prowess—and its large supply of naive bullet-stoppers—so it has spent years undermining the US government and buying off Congress through AIPAC. It has exploited the mental problems of the Christian Zionists—who believe Israeli murder and hegemony are key to their fanatical biblical fantasies—and has worked tirelessly to subvert the highest reaches of the American government by installing the conniving Zionist neocons in the White House and Pentagon. Sharon really does not want John Kerry in the White House, but if push comes to shove Kerry will do in a pinch because he is also an avowed Zionist—some say more of a Zionist than even Bush—and he would be the first Jewish president of the United States (not only was his grandfather born Fritz Kohn, but his brother, Cameron Kerry, converted to Judaism when he married a Jewish woman, Kathy Weinman).

Lost in the chatter about Larry Franklin is the fact the neocons and Sharon are itching to invade Iran, possibly before the election in November. "News of the investigation of Larry Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon, indicates that we are now approaching a critical choice-point on the road to war with Iran, and towards a synthetic terrorism attack inside the US which would be used as an additional pretext to start such a war," Webster Griffin Tarpley warns. "War with Iran means a military draft, just for starters. If Iran can close the Straits of Hormuz, it might mean rationing of food and fuel. ... [The] goal is now to establish a neocon fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with martial law, special tribunals, press and media censorship, and the full pervasive apparatus of the modern police state." For the Straussian neocons, it would be a dream come true.

The FBI may copy the hard drive of Steve Rosen, AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues—and it may even arrest a neocon or two (certainly not Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz)—but this momentary sideshow will not put an end to or even slow down appreciably the demented neocon Master Plan for war against Islam in the name of Greater Israel. "This is not an Israeli problem. This time it is a world problem," Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, said last month. "Iran is seeking to become a world power." In other words, Iran must be attacked soon, before it can patch together a few nukes and give Israel a run for its money—or, rather, a run for the money weaseled out of increasingly stressed American taxpayers. No number of FBI agents running around Washington, interviewing traitorous neocons and copying hard drives, will slow down the Zionists, not when the entire political establishment of the United States—both sides of the Property Party—are spoony over Arab killing Zionists.

Once again, Sharon has used Hamas—a Frankenstein monster devised by Mossad, as al-Qaeda was devised by the CIA—to not only distract from the minor problem presented by Larry Franklin, but also to remind the timorous and easily bamboozled (American and Israeli citizens alike) that terrorism is alive and well, even if it takes a long and inexplicable hiatus on occasion. Blowing up commuter buses drives home an unrelenting message: there is evil lurking out there, Muslim evil, and it is supported by malevolent mullahs in Tehran, the minions of Arafat in Ramallah, and the crafty cave dwellers of Osama. As Bush says, the war on terrorism cannot be won—terrorism is interminable, perpetual, and unending.

The point being made by these authors is that the current "clash of civilisations" is not a result of chance, "divine will" (at least not in the traditional sense), or the innate nature of humanity, but rather the concerted efforts of a small group of "power brokers" who, over a period of time spanning many generations, have sought to manufacture the right conditions that will facilitate the ushering in of a "new world order".

Such a theory is not new or groundbreaking by any means. There are many authors sounding the alarm over what they see as clear evidence of a "hegelian" plot to deliberately create facts on the ground (the clash of civilisations) so that, when things get bad enough, humanity will be ready to accept a "new paradigm", a new perception of reality - presented to us, of course, by these same "power brokers". To date, we are not aware of any theories about the deeper reasons, if any, for such a dastardly scheme, other than the accrual of power for its own sake.

No one will deny that our history, and in particular the successive human cultures and societies that have defined it, has been periodically subjected to powerful "forces", which washed away (usually with much bloodshed) the preceding status quo (or popular view of reality). But the question we must answer, and it is a question that goes to the very heart of the nature of our existence here on this planet, is: have such events occurred as a result of the chaotic, random and essentially unintelligent nature of life and the forces that drive it, or is there some necessarily intelligent "guiding hand" that has been shaping the course of our history, and which logically should have have very definite plans for our future.

If we take the former to be true, a brief look at our history will soon prompt the nagging question of, why then have we, as a species, repeatedly received such a "raw deal" from random fate? The repeated suffering that typifies the human experience in general, seems to lead those who take the time to ponder this "why" towards the conclusion that there must be some conscious, intelligent force that somehow intervenes in, shapes, and even creates, world events, and does so with decidedly negative results for the masses of humanity. By nature, such a force would have to be in some way 'supernatural', given that such consistent and generation-spanning manipulations would be difficult to maintain with any degree of success for the average mortal human being.

A third possibility is the idea that, while there is no supernatural intelligent force shaping world events, within each generation there have been intelligent and particularly self-centered individuals or groups who have taken advantage of the prevailing conditions of the day and merely profited from the apathy of the masses and their disinclination to facing into this unsavory reality and taking an active role in attempting to shape our collective future.

Ironically, this theory, in combining the two preceding and opposing arguments and creating a third supposedly more true thesis, uses the dictates of the very hegelian dialectic that many conspiracy authors accuse the "power brokers" of employing to usher in the New World Order/New Paradigm/New Reality.

From our point of view, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that the truth is a combination of the second and third theories - that there does indeed exist some 'supernatural power' or better said, a 'hyperdimensional control system' that overlays our own, the denizens of which, not being subject to or restricted by the laws of our third density reality, are able to control and manipulate (over many generations) the human power brokers who, in the final analysis, are little more than puppets of this 'higher power', whether they know it or not.

From Valenzuela's Veritas

American Heroin

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.

Ehud Olmert, acting like Governor-General Hans Frank, has decided to turn the Gaza Strip into the Warsaw Ghetto. Frank was of course Governor-General of occupied Poland and Olmert is the acting PM of Israel, also known as occupied Palestine (ministerial powers were transferred to Olmert after the war criminal Ariel Sharon suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke). Frank was prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials and sent to the gallows. Olmert will never face trial for killing Palestinians and will likely go on to become a big cheese in the “centrist” Kadima party.

“Israeli officials on Friday discussed virtually sealing off the Gaza Strip, banning the entry of Palestinian day workers and freezing money due to the Palestinian Authority once a Hamas-dominated parliament is sworn in on Saturday,” reports the Financial Times. In other words, since “democracy” didn’t turn out the way the Israelis wanted, they will now wall up the Palestinians much the same way the Nazis in Poland “sealed off” the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Obviously, not allowing Palestinians to work or receive money will result not only in massive misery and privation but ultimately starvation as well. But then, as the Jabotinsky Likudite and former Irgun terrorist, Menachem Begin, once quipped, Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs, so really their largely ignored abuse and even murder is no big deal. Ehud Olmert, a former member of the Beitar Youth Organization and a staunch Jabotinsky Likudite, is one of many of Begin’s successors, and thus determined to victimize the Palestinians relentlessly.

Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a “special access” electronic surveillance program that he characterized as far more wide-ranging than the warrentless wiretapping recently exposed by the New York Times but he is forbidden from discussing the program with Congress.