In our latest podcast, (left to right) editors Henry
See, Scott Ogrin, and Joe Quinn chat with one guest
from Australia about the nature and effects of the
average US resident's perspective of the world.
First we take a look at some of the worldwide effects
of the war on terror, which seems to be a direct result
of a US administration that is able to act virtually
unquestioned by the populace. The discussion then turns
to the roots of the uniquely "American" perspective,
focusing on various aspects of past and present US
society. Topics include xenophobia, the US educational
system, and a look at why there aren't more Cindy Sheehan's
standing up for the truth.
If you have any questions for the Signs Team or would
like to suggest a topic for future Podcast discussion,
you can write us at:
[...]There is also the good
point made by other posters, that we can see other
cultures without ever leaving the U.S.. We can travel
further than most Europeans and still be within the
U.S. Hell, living in far west Texas, I can drive
800 miles east, and still be in the state of Texas!
When I get there, not only will the climate be different,
but the culture will be different also. [...]
Whereas interacting
with the global community inspires Americans to
reflect on the diverse multi-cultural background
that has defined the United States as a great country
of cooperation... (Introduced in House)
HRES 327 IH
109th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 327
Supporting the goals and ideals of National Passport
Month.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
June 16, 2005
Ms. LEE (for herself, Mr. LANTOS, Mr. PAYNE, Mr.
GUTIERREZ, Ms. NORTON, Mr. CONYERS, Mr. OWENS,
and Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas) submitted the following
resolution; which was referred to the Committee
on Government Reform
Whereas, through international travel, Americans
can individually play a major role towards improving
foreign relations by building bridges and making
connections with citizens of other countries;
Whereas interacting with the global community
inspires Americans to reflect on the diverse multi-cultural
background that has defined the United States as
a great country of cooperation and progress;
Whereas having a passport and traveling abroad
creates connections with the global community,
supporting goodwill throughout the world;
Whereas having a passport and traveling abroad
promotes understanding and goodwill throughout
the world, opening the doors to increased peace,
tolerance, and acceptance;
Whereas having a passport and traveling abroad
opens up a preponderance of educational opportunities
and experiences for Americans of all ages;
Whereas having a passport and traveling abroad
enables Americans to see first-hand the effect
of the United States on the world, including the
tremendous amount of humanitarian aid given by
the United States through both public and private
sectors;
Whereas having a passport and traveling abroad
reminds Americans that they are members of a global
family and gives them opportunities to mend rifts
around the world;
Whereas fewer than 23 percent of Americans have
passports, thereby limiting their ability to travel
outside the United States;
Whereas the more Americans travel outside the
United States, the more they will experience opportunities
to increase their understanding of the world and
the place of the United States in it;
Whereas the creation and support of a National
Passport Month signals to Americans the important
role they can play as ambassadors for the United
States by serving as agents of understanding, tolerance,
and mutual respect; and
Whereas travel publishers along with travel editors
from the most prestigious media outlets in the
United States, student travel organizations, and
book sellers have designated September as `National
Passport Month' to educate the public about the
importance of having a passport and the positive
impact international travel has on individuals:
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
(1) supports the goals and ideals of National Passport Month; and
(2) requests that the President issue a proclamation calling on the
Federal Government, States, localities, schools, nonprofit organizations,
businesses, other entities, and the people of the United States
to observe the month with appropriate ceremonies, programs, and
activities.
Australian terror suspect David
Hicks will be dodging justice if he gets out of Guantanamo
Bay via British citizenship, Foreign Minister Alexander
Downer says.
Hicks, 30, has been in detention for nearly four years but hopes that British
citizenship - through his British mother, could clear a path to freedom.
During a recent chat about the Ashes cricket series
with his US military-appointed lawyer Major Michael
Mori, Hicks revealed his mother was British and had
never taken out Australian citizenship.
Major Mori then took an application for citizenship
for Hicks to the British embassy in Washington.
The British government has refused to allow any of
its nine inmates of the United States' detention facility
in Cuba to be tried because of concerns the US military
tribunals do not meet international justice standards.
Mr Downer said today he would not stand in the way
of the citizenship bid, but felt Hicks should "face
justice" by remaining in Guantanamo Bay for the
tribunal that charged him.
"If Mr Hicks and his lawyers want to try to circumvent
justice by going to some other country and think that
will help them, that's a matter between him and that
country," he told reporters.
"Our point about Mr Hicks is that he should face
justice.
"I would have thought charges like conspiracy
to commit war crimes and attempting to murder people
are charges that should be heard."
Mr Downer said the clear difference between Hicks
and the freed British detainees was that the Brits
were never charged and Hicks had been.
If Hicks can provide the appropriate documentation,
the chances of getting British citizenship appear good
- but it could take a year.
His trial before a military commission is expected
sooner than that.
A spokeswoman for the British High Commission in Canberra
said Britain brought in new laws in 2002 allowing people
to claim citizenship if their mothers had British citizenship.
She said 1769 Australians had so far applied for citizenship
under this category.
Asked if an applicant's character or legal status
could affect their application, she said people weren't
asked about past criminal convictions and character
became more of an issue if they were seeking to be
naturalised.
She said the process could take 12 months and the
final decision rested ultimately with Britain's Home
Secretary.
Mr Downer chastised the federal opposition for championing
Hicks' cause.
"The opposition running around saying we should
free Mr Hicks, I don't think that's a responsible position
for them as a so-called `alternative government' to
be taking," he said.
"Mr Hicks is no hero, he is facing very serious
charges."
Labor leader Kim Beazley criticised the government
for failing to stand up for Hicks' legal rights.
"I don't know what the British will do (about
Hicks' citizenship application) but the issue arises
because the government hasn't pressed the Americans
in the same way the British have ... to ensure that
Australian citizens ... are tried under appropriate
American jurisdiction," Mr Beazley told reporters.
Hicks pleaded not guilty before a US military commission
last year to conspiracy, aiding the enemy and attempted
murder.
A trial date has yet to be set.
UK citizenship rules
The British high commission website says a person
born between 1961 and 1983 to a mother who was a British
citizen at the time of the birth is entitled to make
an application for citizenship.
However, it warns that applications, which incur a
fee of $390.25, can take between six and 12 months
to process, and sometimes longer.
If an applicant is successful, he or she is required
to make a pledge, similar to an oath of allegiance,
at a citizenship ceremony before being issued with
their British citizenship.
The website makes no mention of whether the pledge,
which costs an additional $78, can be made at alternative
locations, such as in a detention facility.
The citizenship application form asks a range of questions
about the applicant and their parents, and even grandparents,
but has no questions referring to the applicant's current
legal status.
Belief in the myth of the self-made man has made
many ordinary people suckers for the right-wing pitch.
By David Moberg, In These
Times.
Posted June 30, 2005.
The
myth of the self-made man is American culture's own
special heart of darkness, helping to explain both
its infectious optimism and ruthless greed.
The idea holds enough truth and seductiveness to
make it easy to forget its delusional dangers. To
reprise Marx's famous formulation, individuals, like
humankind, do make their own personal history, but
not under conditions they choose. But in America,
we choose to ignore the caveat about conditions at
our peril.
The myth, or belief, that people are solely what
they make of themselves is useful to keep in mind
while reading two ongoing series: the New York Times'
on class and the Wall Street Journal's on social
mobility. Both focus attention on a truth about American
society that runs counter to most people's deep-seated
beliefs: There is less social
mobility in the United States now than in the '80s
(and less then than in the '70s) and less mobility
than in many other industrial countries, including
Canada, Finland, Sweden and Germany.
Yet 40 percent of respondents to
a Times poll said that there was a greater chance
to move up from one class to another now than 30
years ago, and 46 percent said it was easier to do
so in the United States than in Europe.
Although the news about social mobility has not
been widely reported, it is generally recognized
that inequality has grown over the past thirty years.
The Times series highlights how much the super-rich
have made out like, well, bandits.
While the real income of the bottom
90 percent of Americans fell from 1980 to 2002, the
income of the top 0.1 percent--making $1.6 million
or more--went up two and a half times in real terms
before taxes. With the help of the Bush tax cuts,
the gap between the super-rich and everyone else
grew even larger.
The American people accept this, it is argued, because
they think not only that there's more social mobility
than there is, but also that they'll personally get
rich. Indeed, a poll in 2000
indicated that 39 percent of Americans thought they
were either in the wealthiest one percent or would
be "soon." The Times poll was slightly
less exuberant: 11 percent thought it was very likely
they would become wealthy, another 34 percent somewhat
likely.
"It is okay to have ever-greater differences
between rich and poor, [Americans] seem to believe," David
Wessel wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "as
long as their children have a good chance of grasping
the brass ring."
This view is problematic. First, the greater the
inequality, the less likely the possibility of mobility.
Increased inequality worsens the large disparities
in resources that families can devote to education
-- resources that are increasingly important for
both entering many careers and for social mobility.
A college degree, it should be stressed, is important
not just because of the knowledge acquired, but because
college serves as a class-biased sorting mechanism
for entry to certain jobs. In contrast, the record
suggests that countries with greater equality also
have greater mobility. Substantive equality creates
more equality of opportunity.
But even if there were mobility, such inequality
would be problematic. Is it fair that society's wealth
be divided so unevenly? Isn't there a decent standard
of living -- rising as economies become wealthier
-- to which everyone who "works hard and plays
by the rules," in the Clintonian formulation,
should be entitled? Great
social disparity means that the financially well-off
use their money and greater political leverage to
protect their privilege rather than to design policies
for the common good.
In defense of the rich getting richer, former Bush
economic advisor Gregory Mankiw wrote in response
to the Times series that the richest increased their
share when the economy boomed; so if we want prosperity,
let the plutocrats prosper. But the economy grew
faster in the first three decades after World War
II when equality was increasing than in the next
three decades when equality was decreasing. In any
case, if the income from growth is captured by the
very rich, as it largely has been for a couple decades,
this path to prosperity offers little to most people.
Also, with high inequality, even the pretense of
community declines, social conflict increases and
society functions more poorly. Individual
mobility is not the only way to improve one's lot.
Social solidarity and working together can improve
everyone's lot.
This brings us back to the self-made
man. It becomes clear, as the Times series is titled,
that "class matters," just as race, gender
and other accidents of history matter. The social
class into which someone is born largely defines
one's class as an adult, and both make a difference
in how healthy or how long-lived the person will
be, especially in the absence of universal health
insurance. It influences access to education and
to jobs.
The myth of the self-made person,
however, encourages the person who succeeds to think
his good fortune is due entirely to his work and
genius. For this reason businessmen in the United
States have historically been more anti-union and
hostile to government than their counterparts in
Europe. And the myth makes those who fail blame themselves.
According to recent polls, American workers -- worried
more about job insecurity, rising costs of education,
health care expenses, the availability of insurance,
pension failures and social security privatization
-- are increasingly looking for stronger social action
to provide security. They are deeply skeptical about
the globalization that has increased inequality and
insecurity. Like the French vote on the European
Union constitution, a U.S. referendum on globalization
might well divide along class lines. The irony is
that taking responsibility as a society to guarantee
more stability and equality -- by regulating the
global economy and establishing universal guarantees
of health care, education, and retirement security
-- can provide citizens with more individual freedom.
For now, the realm of freedom
for most Americans remains constricted to the shopping
mall, where they can buy their identities. Both
the Journal and Times point to the rapid growth
of personal credit as one way that Americans have
continued to buy while earnings have stagnated.
Former United Auto Workers official Frank Joyce
even sees the rise of credit cards as undermining
workers' interest in unions. Income, earned or
borrowed, obviously greatly differentiates people's
lives, even if a working class consumer can only
indulge in a box of luxury chocolates or sub-luxury
car. And the growing differences in income are
exacerbated by growing but unmeasured differences
in health insurance, as well as various business
perks such as free cars or expense accounts.
But the focus on income ignores
the even greater inequalities of wealth. Wealth provides
security. As the Times series points out, the better-off
consistently talk of making choices while working
class individuals talk about feeling trapped. Kids
from wealthy families can take unpaid internships,
spend a year abroad or experiment with careers; kids
from working class families are likely to stick with
a summer job that pays the bills and provides health
insurance, thus failing to finish college.
More important, wealth and class are issues of power.
Aaron Kemp, who lost his job when Maytag shifted
production from Illinois to Mexico and Korea (see "Maytag
Moves to Mexico," January 17), remarked, "I
never remember even thinking about what class I was
in until after the plant closing announcement and
layoff. And then you begin to think about what class
you're in." Rather than manners or fashion,
class ultimately has more to do with who has the
power to make such decisions and the powerlessness
of the majority. These crucial aspects of class--social,
political and economic power--have been missing from
the series.
It might have been good for the Times to run an
excerpt of Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro's new book, Death
by a Thousand Cuts. It recounts how the super-rich
worked with ultra-conservatives to demonize and possibly
eliminate the estate tax, which they renamed the "death
tax." As William Gates, Sr., father of Microsoft
Bill, often argued on behalf of the tax, the very
rich accumulate their wealth not simply because of
what they did but because of the society in which
they lived, and they have a debt to that society.
And the heirs of such wealth are the antithesis of
self-made men.
The rich used their political power, their money
and the right's shameless, mendacious hucksters to
protect their riches, at the expense of society.
But belief in the myth of the self-made man--abetted
by the feckless incompetence of Democratic opposition--made
many ordinary people suckers for the right-wing pitch.
Class matters, but so does consciousness of class.
That's another, longer story.
By BEN FELLER, AP Education
Writer
Wed Dec 17, 3:54 PM ET
WASHINGTON
- Students in some of the nation's largest urban
school districts score below the national average
on federal math and reading tests, new scores show.
[...]
Education officials say the
new scores reflect expanded efforts by urban districts
to help children succeed despite language barriers,
crowded conditions and poverty. The results, however,
also underscore how much ground schools must gain
in raising achievement for all.
Across the country, in reading,
only 30 percent of fourth-graders and eighth-graders
reach at least the key level, proficient, which
means competency over difficult material. In math,
31 percent of fourth-graders and 27 percent of
eighth-graders do at least that well.
In almost every case, the city
students did worse. That means less than three
out of 10 students achieved at the level they should
have, based on federal standards. [...]
Comment: It
is probably no coincidence that the country whose
people honestly believe they are the most "free" also
happen to have been schooled in one of the worst
educational systems in the world. It appears that
with the recent covert addition of Patriot Act II,
the US and the world will soon realize that ignorance
is not bliss - it is slavery.
By BEN FELLER, AP Education
Writer
October 1, 2003
WASHINGTON
- The image of students lugging home heavy packs
of books may be familiar in many homes, but two new
studies offer a different picture: The nation's homework
load is light. [...]
Most students have less than an hour of homework
a night, according to a Brookings analysis of a
broad range of homework research. The report is
based on data from the Education Department, international
surveys and research by the University of Michigan
and the University of California-Los Angeles, among
other sources.
For example, when asked how much homework they
were assigned the day before, most students age
9, 13 and 17 all reported less than an hour, according
to a federal long-term survey in 1999. The
share of students assigned more than an hour of
homework has dropped for all three age groups since
1984.
Only about one in 10 high school students does
a substantial amount of homework - more than two
hours a night - according to a separate study co-authored
by Brian Gill of the RAND Corp.,
another research group. The figure has
held fairly stable for 50 years. [...]
Comment: The
U.S. educational system seems to be designed to produce
mindless automatons who are more concerned with who
will marry a fake millionaire on TV than with objective
reality.
[...] By the turn of the century,
America's new educrats were pushing a new form of
schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach).
The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote
in 1897:
Every teacher should realize he is a social
servant set apart for the maintenance of the
proper social order and the securing of the right
social growth.
In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers
College, Elwood Cubberly - the future Dean of Education
at Stanford - wrote that schools should be factories
"in which raw products, children, are to
be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured
like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing
will come from government and industry."
The next year, the Rockefeller
Education Board - which funded the creation
of numerous public schools - issued a statement
which read in part:
In our dreams...people yield themselves with
perfect docility to our molding hands. The present
educational conventions [intellectual and character
education] fade from our minds, and unhampered
by tradition we work our own good will upon a
grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try
to make these people or any of their children
into philosophers or men of learning or men of
science. We have not to raise up from among them
authors, educators, poets or men of letters.
We shall not search for embryo great artists,
painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers,
politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample
supply. The task we set before ourselves is very
simple...we will organize children...and teach
them to do in a perfect way the things their
fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect
way.
At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner
of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:
Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk
in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This
is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which,
scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
In that same book, The Philosophy of Education
, Harris also revealed:
The great purpose of school can be realized
better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is
to master the physical self, to transcend the
beauty of nature. School should develop the power
to withdraw from the external world.
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson
would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:
We want one class to have a liberal education.
We want another class, a very much larger class
of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal
education and fit themselves to perform specific
difficult manual tasks.
Writes Gatto: "Another
major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard,
said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government
schooling was about
'the perfect organization of the hive.'"
While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953,
James Bryant Conant wrote that the change
to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational
system had been demanded by "certain industrialists
and the innovative who were altering the nature
of the industrial process."
In other words, the captains of industry and government
explicitly wanted an educational system that would
maintain social order by teaching us just enough
to get by but not enough so that we could think
for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order,
or communicate articulately. We were to become
good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of
the population - mainly the children of the captains
of industry and government - to rise to the level
where they could continue running things.
This was the openly admitted blueprint for the
public schooling system, a blueprint which remains
unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons
behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're
apparently still known within education circles.
Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in
2001:
I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely
bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional
defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the
boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored.
His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me.
However, she added,
"They told us at the state conference that
our job is to get them ready for the work world…that
the children have to get used to not being stimulated
all the time or they will lose their jobs in
the real world." [...]
Police
states don't exist without help and acquiescence...
Most recently, a cop in the small town of Barre...took
it upon himself to do some reconnaissance in the
Bush war on the world.
According to the Times-Argus (the daily paper
that serves this region of Vermont), office John
Mott had heard that one of the history teachers
at the local high school was encouraging his students
to think critically about the war on Iraq and other
controversial actions of the Bush administration.
The teacher, Tom Treece, is a pacifist who has
made it clear that he opposes the current administration's
warmongering. Although most of the high school's
students don't seem to have a problem with Treece's
stance and vocal support of it, certain citizens
do. Indeed, some of them have gone so far as to
form a small citizen's group called Citizens Advocating
Responsible Education (CARE), to oppose Treece's
teaching. An underlying motive of the group is
to scuttle the school district's budget.
...The facts are these. At 1:30 in the morning
of April 9, 2003, Officer Mott, in full uniform,
convinced a custodian at Spaulding High School
in Barre, Vt. To let him in to the high school
and enter Treece's classroom. Mott was on duty
at the time and was out of his assigned jurisdiction.
Upon entering Treece's classroom, Mott began photographing
a number of student projects concerning the war
on Iraq and other aspects of Washington's current
policies. Mott defended his actions in the Times-Argus,
stating, "Having spent 30 years in uniform,
I was insulted, I'm just taking a stand on what
happens in that classroom as a resident and a voter
and a taxpayer of this community." Mott's
recon mission took place the day after he attended
a school board meeting where CARE presented their
complaints to the board regarding Treece's instructional
approach. CARE's founders claim that the issue
is not free speech. To them, "It's an issue
of balance and it's an issue of professionalism."
...According to the Times Argus, one of the opponents
of Treece and his class (called Public Issues)
said: "The purpose of education is to teach
students facts and how to use these facts to compete
in the real world." Academic freedom, continued
this speaker, is a waste of time.
...Mott has expressed no remorse over the forced
entry into the school, nor has he expressed any
doubt as to his right to use his police uniform
to do so. It's clear that Mott and his supporters
have forgotten (if they ever knew) the reasons
that certain of our country's founders insisted
on the Bill of Rights before they would approve
the constitution. It's also clear that these folks'
leaders in Washington like things that way. This
is why the minds of the young are their battleground.
After all, if young people can think critically
about their government and its actions, they might
want to change it. If young people start asking
why their friends are being asked to go to war
and why there are military recruiters in their
schools and their mailboxes, they might decide
to oppose those wars and the liars who try and
sweet talk them into fighting them. If young people
start questioning why policemen can use their uniform
to commit acts that would be illegal for anyone
else, they might want to rein in the police.
Comment: Big
brother is alive and well and in a neighbourhood
near you! Freedom of speech is most definitely a
thing of the past, especially when even the teachers
have been co-opted to act as state spys and dupes...
Do you know who Halliburton is? Dick Cheney? How
about Karl Rove? Alas, most Americans don't
By Mark Morford, SF Gate
Columnist
October 6, 2004
Let's be honest. Percentage-wise,
few people in America really give much of a crap about
what's going on in the hallowed halls of politics and
power.
This is what we in the media and maybe you in the
media-consuming audience tend to forget far too easily:
This country is simply jam-packed with millions of
people who have no time for, or interest in, politics,
or media, or environmental policy, or education,
or global issues, or which presidential candidate
lied his ass off about which aspect of his military
career and which Orange Alert is totally bogus and
how many soldiers are dying for what imbecilic war.
It seems hard to believe. But the general rule of
thumb is that major cities are slightly more attuned
due to aggressive media saturation and how issues
tend to make themselves known more urgently, more
immediately, whereas Middle America is a scattershot
conglomeration of the politically apathetic and the
actively disenfranchised, full of people far too
busy with their lives and kids and jobs and zoning
out on "Fear Factor" and "Monday Night
Football" to care about following the elitist,
ever dire dramas playing out on the nation's gilded
stages.
Most Americans, in other words,
have no idea what the hell a Halliburton is. Or a
Karl Rove. Or a Donny "Shriveled Soul" Rumsfeld.
Or a Lockheed Martin. Or a Carlysle Group. Or have
any idea that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do
with 9/11. Or that WMDs were never found. Or that
President Bush has taken more vacation time than
any president in U.S. history. Or that Jesus thinks
Dubya is "sort of a dink." Or where Iraq
is on a map.
Fact is, in the past decade, TV-news ratings --
cable and network, combined -- has shrunk to a fraction
of its former numbers. Newspaper subscriptions have
been either flat or dropping for just about as long.
Newsmagazines, radio, historical nonfiction: flat
or dropping fast. Even the Internet, that vast teeming
customizable firestorm of news and info streaming
in from all over the planet, even the awesome Net
draws far more people to its porn and gossip and
shopping departments than any e-news joint could
ever wet dream.
Is this unfair? Does it sound elitist and biased?
It's not. There have been studies. And reports. And
alarming indicators of all kinds telling us time
and again that, for example, fully 50 percent of
eligible Americans don't even bother to vote (a 15
percent drop since 1964), and many have no idea who's
on the Supreme Court or what Congress does, and many
can't even point to France on a globe.
Voter turnout, comparatively, in
Italy, Spain, the U.K., or Germany? Anywhere from
75 to 92 percent, every time. The sad fact is, the
United States ranks 139th out of 172 countries in
voter turnout. Wave that flag proudly, baby.
You've seen the headlines. Alarming numbers of American
high school students can't even identify the current
vice president, much less name a half dozen presidents
from history. Far too many citizens can't name the
capital of their own home state or recognize their
own senators, much less discern how Bush's environmental
policy is poisoning their water or how Ashcroft wants
to scan their email and tap their phones and suck
the pith from their souls. A
whopping 49 percent of Americans aged 18-25 can't
find New York on a map, and 11 percent can't even
locate the United States. Now that's patriotism.
Comment: HALF
of Americans aged 18-25 cannot find New York on
a map! And a little over one tenth can't even locate
the US!! Think about it...
A recent report by the Organisation
for Economic Co-Operation and Development states
that upward of 60 percent of Americans ages 16-25
are 'functionally illiterate', meaning they
can't, for example, fill out a detailed form or
read a numerical table (like a time schedule).
A recent Florida study shows
at least 70 percent of recent high school graduates
need remedial courses -- that is, basic reading
and math -- when they enter community college. These
are kids who, you can be assured, think Colin Powell
is that nasty British dude on "American Idol." [...]
Maybe this, then, is the most pressing question
of our time: How to get the vast majority of Americans
to care? To pay attention? To read? To effect change
and demand accountability from bumbling spoon-fed
leaders who count on voter apathy and force-fed ignorance
to cram through their environmental rollbacks and
homophobic laws and draconian Patriot Acts? Is it
even possible? Are we too far gone?
How to make America more like,
say, Europe, where knowledge of current events and
political intrigue is not only hugely important to
the vast majority of citizens but is also deeply
woven into the very fabric of daily life, an integral
part of the educational system and the café conversation
and the workplace water-cooler chats, and to ignore
it is considered, well, irresponsible and even a
mite traitorous?
True, part of why they care so much is because America
is the foremost bully on the block and it pays to
know what makes the bully tick. And whine. And kill.
In short, as the theory goes, most Americans don't
give a damn because we're on top and we own everything
and have more nukes than anyone and we're never the
ones getting invaded. It's
our unofficial motto -- America: We Don't Have to
Care.
And this very column is frequently slapped with
the accusation that it merely "preaches to the
choir," and if I really want to affect minds
I should consider tempering or sanitizing my opinions
for a more "moderate" mainstream readership,
as if the nation was chock-full of opinionated, well-read,
temperate thinkers ready to be gently informed of
new ideas, when in fact this group is but a fraction,
a sliver, far overshadowed and overpowered by the
real majority in America: The detached. The disinterested.
The intellectually lazy.
So, what's the solution? It is as simple as dramatically
changing the way we educate our children, our population?
Is it desanitizing our vacuous history textbooks
and making media studies and political science and
current events as mandatory to the educational diet
as macho sports and bad lunches and playground kickball?
Or maybe it's a new national
draft? Will that galvanize the rest of the populace
sufficiently? How about Iraq devolving even
faster into Vietnam 2.0? Is it 10,000 dead U.S.
soldiers and nary an imprisoned terrorist or fresh
barrel of oil to show for it? How about five bucks
a gallon? Ten? Is it legalizing pot and banning
guns? What will it take?
Maybe another massive national catastrophe? Maybe
a 9/11 cubed, and cubed again, something unthinkably
horrific and unleashed upon the innocents and the
children and the puppies, something that so jars
and infuriates and undermines our desperate empire
that even the cold-blooded neoconservative Right
can't possibly leverage our sorrow and pain for its
own political gain? Very possible. After all, nothing
like a little hard-earned apocalypse to make you
consider voting independent.
Or maybe it's something entirely different, maybe
some sort of potent, unimaginable spiritual enlightenment
that looks like revelation and smells like Vishnu
and sounds like harmonic convergence and tastes like
Buddha and has nothing whatsoever to do with fundamentalism
or Christianity or Bush's angry homophobic flag-wavin'
God. The mystics say we're very close. They claim
the next decade will offer, to those who care to
participate, one helluva transformational vibrational
wallop. Possible?
Whatever it looks like, we can rest assured we're
still not out of the dark, dank woods just yet. Our
national apathy is well protected, our intellectual
ignorance secure and our fears well fed and carefully,
perpetually reinforced by the Powers That Be and
the fact that the overall 50 percent voter turnout
never moves by more than a point or two, usually
downward.
And the Establishment, it only smiles
knowingly, and nods, and says there there now. It'll
be all right. Just go back to sleep.
Comment: Readers
have written to us and asked how it would be possible
for the powers that be to pull off enormous scams such
as the attacks on 9/11, or lying to the population about
the reasons for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. This article
is an excellent answer to such questions. How hard can
it be when such a huge percentage of Americans are so
woefully uninformed and misinformed? If today's young
adults cannot even find New York on a map of the US,
does anyone think they will have a clue about the location,
culture, or politics of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine,
or Israel??
Around this time last year I
had a conversation in Washington that summed up what
was bound to go wrong for America in Iraq. I was
talking to a mid-ranking official in the US Treasury
about American plans for the post-war reconstruction
of the Iraqi economy. She had just attended a meeting
on precisely that subject. "So what kind of
historical precedents have you been considering?" I
asked. "The post-Communist economies of Eastern
Europe," she replied. "We have quite a
bit of experience we can draw on from the 1990s."
When I suggested that the problems of privatisation
in Poland might not prove relevant on the banks
of the Euphrates, she seemed surprised. And
when I suggested that she and her colleagues ought
at least to take a look at the last Anglophone
occupation of Iraq, her surprise turned to incredulity. Not
for the first time since crossing the Atlantic,
I was confronted with the disturbing reality about
the way Americans make policy. Theory looms surprisingly
large. [...] The lessons of history come a poor
second, and only recent history - preferably recent
American history - gets considered.
There was amazement last year when I pointed out
in the journal Foreign Affairs that in 1917 a British
general had occupied Baghdad and proclaimed: "Our
armies do not come into your cities and lands as
conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." By
the same token, scarcely
any American outside university history departments
is aware that within just a few months of the formal
British takeover of Iraq, there was a full-scale
anti-British revolt.
What happened in
Iraq last week so closely resembles the events
of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could
be surprised. [...]
Comment: Freedom
can be defined in terms of the level of ability
to interact in a real and meaningful way with life
and the world around us. Freedom is nothing if
it is not freedom to know and understand truth
and reality. The closer we can get to an objective
view of true reality the freer we are. Conversely,
the further we are from a true understanding of
reality, the less we are able to interact in a
meaningful way with life, and the more enslaved
we are.
Far
from being a land of opportunity where persecuted
peoples the world over could find refuge and realise
their dream of creating the first truly free and
egalitarian society, with hindsight it seems that
modern America was designed, from the very beginning,
to be a vast Petri dish for an experiment to create
a nation of people that would willingly submit
their will to the ruling elite to an extent never
before seen in modern times, while at the same
time believing themselves to be the living embodiment
of personal freedom.
Of
course, such a grand plan could not be accomplished
overtly or by the use of force, since the key to
success was in creating an environment where the
people themselves would fight to maintain their
own state of enslavement. The most obvious and
natural way to achieve this was to make lies and
illusion the foundation of modern American society
and the yardstick by which the American people
define themselves. The battle then was for control
of the minds of the American people.
As
infants we know nothing of reality, as we grow
we undergo a process of socialisation, from which
we obtain our sense of who we are, our values,
our sense of morality and, perhaps most significantly,
our education. All of these things are given to
us at a stage in our lives when we have no ability
to choose if we truly want them or not. By the
time we are old enough to make "independent" choices
about what to do with our lives we have already
been so programmed to view the world in one specific
way, that there is literally nothing independent
about any choices we might make from then on. This
process of socialisation then is crucial in defining
our view and understanding of reality.
While
morality, values and sense of self are all important
for our development as conscious responsible human
beings, we will not get far without at least a
semi-objective understanding of the world in which
we live. As a result of the dire level of education
offered to the average American citizen, their
understanding of the world outside the borders
of their "great nation" is virtually
nil, or distorted to such an extent that they would
probably be better off if it were nil. Of course,
such a state of affairs is without doubt deliberately
contrived by those that set the educational curriculum.
Humans by their nature have an inherent need to
understand, yet we also tend towards egocentricity
and fear of the unknown. This aspect of human nature
has been used against Americans to great effect
in securing their participation in their own enslavement.
By
denying most Americans access to good quality education
the ruling elite are able to play on this fear
of the unknown and make Americans very susceptible
to xenophobic propaganda and the idea that their
country is the definition of freedom. Of course,
when your have little or no awareness or appreciation
of other cultures or peoples (at least none that
is based in reality), it is much easier to allow
yourself to be convinced that your country is the "greatest
nation on earth" and that other nations and
peoples are somehow lesser. The level of deception
is so deep and the illusions so engrained that
few Americans know or would be willing or able
to accept that their "great nation" stands
tall only because it stands on the corpses of 80
million native American Indians who had to be sacrificed
to create the world's first "free and democratic
nation." It seems that the ability of modern
Americans to appreciate irony is another casualty
of the grand American enslavement experiment.
While
on one level it is true that America became a home
for a diversity of racial types and cultures, any
potential benefits of this eclecticism were subverted
through the promotion of an internal xenophobia,
and all original cultures were forced to give way
to the hollow "benefits" of a homogenous
yet soulless American "culture".
It
is not hard to see how the ignorance and fear of
other cultures and the ethnocentricity that is
rife in American "culture" readily gives
rise to indifference among Americans when their
leaders are seen to carry out acts of cruelty and
inhumanity against other peoples. Of course, there
are US citizens who, even when made aware of the
deception and lies that have lead them to support
the atrocities carried out in their name by their
leaders, will continue to support them.
The
real tragedy is that there appears to be a large
number of US citizens who, even at this late stage,
remain unwitting victims of the insidious
and incredibly pervasive mind programming that
defines American society and culture. If given
a chance, they might choose to stand up for truth,
yet the fact that they have never known even simple
truth, and never admitted that are being lied to,
makes the task of recognising and accepting deeper
truth all the more difficult, if not almost impossible.
One wonders then why we would even try to convey
these ideas to our American readers? The reason
of course is that there is no other option. We
have to hope that, even against odds that were
not included in our expectations, the seed of love
for the truth exists and will finally spring forth.
Nothing
short of an intense and deliberate effort to SEE
the truth of the perilous situation is required,
if we are to hope that the bonds of mental (and
soon to be physical) enslavement can be broken,
and the chance to act for our own collective destinies
secured.
As
Gurdjieff commented:
"The
white man knows, as it were, nothing about the
ways of life which are not his own. The world-wide
diffusion of western civilisation has protected
him better than ever before from having to take
seriously that of other peoples.The uniformity
of behaviour and the general outlook which he
sees are prevalent everywhere seem to him sufficiently
convincing and he accepts without further ado
the idea of a simple equivalence between human
nature and his own cultural standards."
In
Order to shake off the contemptuous ignorance
and prejudices which still exist in contemporary
man, a certain disorientation seems necessary
at the outset. He needs to feel the full blast
of a gale force wind and to submit to the shock
of enquiry, which runs counter to all his habitual
ways of thinking and his ethical beliefs. If
his instinct for self preservation, or concern
for his intellectual comfort do not hinder him
too much, he has some chance of then discovering
in himself and echo of these ways of thinking
and of feeling which are so unfamiliar to him,
and which will resound in him not as a menacing
frustration but, the very opposite, as an enrichment,
a broadening of his field of experience. - "In
Search of a Living Culture" - Lecture by
Henri Tracol, 1961, Aix en Provence, France
The US Army has launched a new
investigation into the death of a US football star
who turned down a lucrative sport career to fight the
war on terror as a simple soldier, a military official
disclosed late.
Twenty-seven-year-old Army Ranger Pat Tillman was
killed in southeastern Afghanistan last April, in
what was initially described by his superiors as
a shootout with Taliban guerrillas who had attacked
his convoy.
A subsequent probe determined that
Tillman, who gained national hero status when he
forswore a 3.6-million-dollar National Football League
contract to join special forces for 18,000 dollars
a year in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks,
fell victim of "friendly fire."
But independent probes undertaken
in the intervening months by two leading US newspapers
have shown the episode could have been the result
of outright negligence on the part of Tillman's superiors.
"Because of concerns and questions that the
Tillman family had, the Army started a new investigation
into this matter," Sergeant Kyle Cosner, a spokesman
for the Army Special Operations Command, told AFP.
[...]
The Los Angeles Times, for instance, quoted Afghan
militia commanders as expressing doubt the Ranger
unit was under rebel attack to begin with.
The commanders said one team of
Rangers had likely mistaken a landmine explosion
for an attack and began uncontrollably strafing a
canyon where Tillman and other US soldiers were,
the newspaper report points out.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post quoted
a confidential Army document questioning the wisdom
of a commander's decision to split Corporal Tillman's
platoon into two teams, saying it had "contributed
to the eventual breakdown in internal platoon communications."
As a result, the late football star's family is
now raising pointed and angry questions about the
Pentagon's handling of the matter. [...]
Comment: Remember
the story about brave and heroic Pat Tillman? The following
article contains a summary of the first story we were
told about Tillman's death.
By Josh White, Washington
Post Staff Writer
Sun May 30, 2004 1:00 AM ET
Pat Tillman, the former pro football
player, was killed by other American troops in
a "friendly fire" episode in Afghanistan last
month and not by enemy bullets, according to
a U.S. investigation of the incident.
New details released yesterday about Tillman's death
indicate that he was gunned down by members
of his elite Army Ranger platoon who mistakenly shot
in his direction when the unit was ambushed. According
to a summary of the Army investigation, a Ranger
squad leader mistook an allied Afghan Militia Force soldier
standing near Tillman as the enemy, and he and other
U.S. soldiers opened fire, killing both men.
That Tillman, 27, wasn't
killed by enemy fire in a heroic rescue attempt
was a major revelation by the U.S. military
more than a month after the April 22 incident,
which the Pentagon and members of Congress had
hailed as an example of combat bravery.Tillman's
sacrifice of millions of dollars when he left the National
Football League's Arizona Cardinals to become a
soldier has been held up as a stark contrast
to the prison scandal in Iraq.
Comment: And
here we see one of the reasons for the blatant lies...
Shortly after his death, Army officials awarded
Tillman a Silver Star for combat valor and
a Purple Heart. He also was promoted from specialist
to corporal. They said
Tillman was killed while charging at the enemy up
a hill, allowing the rest of his platoon to
escape alive.
Instead, it appears Tillman's
bravery in battle led him to become a victim of
a series of errors as he was trying to protect
part of his stranded platoon, which Army
officials say was attacked while hampered by a
disabled vehicle it had in tow. The
report said Tillman got out of his vehicle and
shot at the enemy during a 20-minute firefight
before he was killed when members of his unit
opened fire after returning to the scene to help.
[...]
Comment: So,
first Tillman was a hero for charging at the enemy
up a hill, thereby allowing the rest of his platoon
to escape. Then the story changed to his death due
to friendly fire when he was trying to protect his
stranded platoon from an attack by enemy soldiers.
Now it seems the story is changing again: there may
not have been any attack at all. Tillman was killed
by friendly fire when his fellow soldiers freaked out
and started firing wildly when a land mine detonated.
We anxiously await episode four of this exciting saga!
If the government will lie to such an extent just
to drum up support for the war and make Americans
forget about Abu Ghraib, how many other bigger lies
have been passed off as the truth to the masses?
And what does the intentional propaganda involving
Tillman - released around the time the Abu Ghraib
story broke - say about the complicity of the government,
intelligence agencies, and military in the torture
committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere? If Abu Ghraib
was just a few bad apples, why would the Tillman
propaganda be needed?
In any case, it was well-conceived propaganda -
even though the execution was obviously far from
flawless. A football star who had been offered over
three million dollars by the NFL turns down the offer,
joins the military, and sets off to defend his countrymen
from evil terrorists. If Tillman's death had not
been glorified as it was, some Americans may have
looked upon his death as unnecessary, and his passing
up of the NFL contract as a terrible waste. Had it
not been for Abu Ghraib, a simple little lie about
Tillman's fate would have prevented any doubt amongst
the masses. Instead, he was made into a self-sacrificing
and noble hero, thereby reinforcing his decision,
making all football players look good (and we all
know how terribly important sports stars are in American
culture), and stirring up a tidal wave of patriotism
that drowned out any concern about US forces using
torture.
NEW YORK--Never miss the Saturday
paper. Because it's the skimpiest and least-circulated
edition of the week, it's the venue of choice for
lowballing the stories the government can't completely
cover up. September 24's New York Times, for example,
contained the bombshell revelation that the U.S.
government continues to torture innocent men, women
and children in Iraq.
An army captain and two sergeants from the elite 82nd Airborne Division
confirm previous reports that Bagram and other concentration camps
in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan are a kind of Torture University where
American troops are taught how to abuse prisoners who have neither
been charged with nor found guilty of any crime. "The soldiers
told Human Rights Watch that while they were serving in Afghanistan," reports
The Times, "they learned the stress techniques [sic] from watching
Central Intelligence Agency operatives interrogating prisoners." Veterans
who served as prison guards in Afghanistan went on to apply their newfound
knowledge at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
One of the sergeants, his name withheld to protect him from Pentagon
reprisals, confirms that torture continued even after the Abu Ghraib
scandal broke. "We still did it, but we were careful," he
told HRW.
The latest sordid revelations concern Tiger Base on the border with
Syria, and Camp Mercury, near Fallujah, the Iraqi city leveled by U.S.
bombs in a campaign that officials claimed would finish off the insurgent
movement. After the army told him to shut up over the course of 17
months--tacit proof that the top brass condones torture--a frustrated
Captain Ian Fishback wrote to two conservative Republican senators
to tell them about the "death threats, beatings, broken bones,
murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking,
stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment" carried
out against Afghans and Iraqis unlucky enough to fall into American
hands.
"We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull
them down, kick dirt on them," one sergeant said. "This happened every
day...We did it for amusement." Another soldier says detainees were beaten
with a broken chemical light stick: "That made them glow in the dark, which
was real funny, but it burned their eyes, and their skin was irritated real bad." An
off-duty cook told an Iraqi prisoner "to bend over and broke the guy's leg
with a...metal bat." The sergeant continues: "I know that now. It was
wrong. There are a set of standards. But you gotta understand, this was the norm."
Torture, condemned by civilized nations and their citizens since the
Renaissance, has continued to be carried out in prisons and internment
camps in every nation. But save for a few exceptions, such as France's
overt torture of Algerian independence fighters during the late 1950s,
it has been hidden away, lied about and condemned when exposed. Torture
is shameful. It is never official policy.
That changed in the United States after 9/11. Current attorney general
Alberto Gonzales authored a convoluted legal memo to George W. Bush
justifying torture. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld joked about forcing
prisoners to stand all day and officially sanctioned keeping them naked
and threatening them with vicious dogs. Ultimately Bush declared that
U.S. forces in Afghanistan would ignore the Geneva Conventions. By
2004 a third of Americans told pollsters that they didn't have a problem
with torture.
Torture has been normalized.
By Monday, September 26, the story of torture at Camps Tiger and Mercury
to which New York Times editors had granted page one treatment two
days earlier had vanished entirely. Only a few papers, such as the
Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times, ran follow-ups.
In his 2000 book "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics
of Torture" John Conroy presciently describes the surprising means
by which democracies are actually more susceptible to becoming "torture
societies" than dictatorships: Where "notorious regimes have
fallen, there has been a public acknowledgement that people were tortured.
In democracies of long standing in which torture has taken place, however,
denial takes hold and official acknowledgement is extremely slow in
coming, if it appears at all." Conroy goes on to describe the "fairly
predictable" stages of governmental response:
First, writes Conroy, comes "absolute and complete denial." Rumsfeld
told Congress in 2004 that the U.S. had followed Geneva "to the
letter" in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"The second stage," he says, is "to minimize the abuse." Republican
mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh compared the murder and mayhem at Abu Ghraib to fraternity
hazing rituals.
Next is "to disparage the victims." Bush Administration officials
and right-wing pundits call the victims of torture in U.S. custody "terrorists," implying
that detainees--who are not charged because there is no evidence against
them--deserve whatever they get. Dick Cheney called victims of torture
at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (who, under U.S. law, are presumed innocent) "the
worst of a very bad lot." Rumsfeld called them "the worst
of the worst."
Other government tactics include charging "that those who take
up the cause of those tortured are aiding the enemies of the state" (Right-wing
bloggers have smeared me as a "terrorist sympathizer" because
I argue against torture); denying that torture is still occurring (numerous
Bush Administration officials claimed that Abu Ghraib marked the end
of the practice); placing "the blame on a few bad apples" (the
classic Fox News-Bush trope); and pointing out that "someone else
does or has done much worse things" (the beheadings of Western
hostages by Iraqi jihadi organizations was used to justify torturing
Iraqis who didn't belong to those groups).
Bear in mind: Conroy wrote his book in 2000, before Bush seized power
and more than a year before 9/11 was given as a pretext for legalizing
torture.
Citing the case of widespread and proven torture of arrestees by Chicago
cops, Conroy noted: "It wasn't a case of five people...doing nothing
or acting slowly, it was a case of millions of people knowing of an
emergency and doing nothing. People looked about, saw no great crusade
forming, saw protests only from the usual agitators, and assumed there
was no cause for alarm. Responsibility was diffused. Citizens offended
by torture could easily retreat into the notion that they lived in
a just world, that the experts would sort things out."
Ted Rall, America's hardest-hitting editorial cartoonist for Universal
Press Syndicate, is an award-winning commentator who also works as
an illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator. Visit his website
http://www.tedrall.com/
Quietly, firmly, relentlessly,
the good captain laid out the list of atrocities
committed at the order of the enemies of freedom: "Death
threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure
to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking,
stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment." A
catalogue of depravity, all of it designed -- with
diabolical sophistry -- by self-exalted men cloaking
their violent perversions with sham piety and righteous
sputum. This was terrorism on a grand scale, chewing
up the innocent and guilty alike.
The good man is of course Captain Ian Fishback, the born-again U.S.
Army officer who has blown the whistle on the systematic abuse of captives
rounded up in President George W. Bush's War on Terror, The New York
Times reports. Fishback, frustrated after 17 months of trying to get
the atrocities investigated through official channels, finally turned
to Human Rights Watch -- and top Republican senators -- seeking redress
for the bloody dishonor that Bush has brought upon America.
In one sense, Fishback's revelations -- corroborated by other soldiers,
now lying low to ward off the inevitable reprisals by Bush minions
-- are not news. For example, this column has been detailing the use
of torture in Bush's global gulag since January 2002. It was no secret;
at first, the Bushists even bragged about it. "The gloves are
coming off" was a favorite phrase of the deskbound tough guys
cracking foxy to an enthralled media.
They also boasted of "unleashing" the CIA, which set up its
own "shadow army" of non-uniformed combatants operating outside
the law -- i.e., "terrorists," according to Bush's own definition
-- while creating secret prisons all over the world. As one CIA op
enthused to The Boston Globe: "'We are doing things I never believed
we would do -- and I mean killing people!" A senior Bush official
proudly pointed to the ultimate authority for this deadly system: "If
the commander in chief didn't think it was appropriate, we wouldn't
be doing it."
We now know that in the very first weeks of the War on Terror, White
House legal lackeys began concocting weasel-worded "findings" to
justify a range of Torquemadan techniques while shielding Bush honchos
from prosecution for the clear breaches of U.S. and international law
they were already planning. Bush and his top officials signed off on
very specific torture parameters, including physical assault and psychological
torment; even beating a captive to death was countenanced, as long
the killer proclaimed that he had no murder in his heart when he commenced
to whupping, The New York Review of Books reports. Indeed, the lackeys
went so far as to establish a new principle of Executive Transcendence:
The president, they claimed, could not be constrained by any law whatsoever
in his conduct of the War on Terror.
Fishback saw the fruits of this vile labor in the vast Bushist holding
pens in Iraq, where thousands upon thousands of Iraqis were herded,
beaten and tortured -- even though 70 to 90 percent of them were innocent
of any crime, the International Red Cross reported in 2004. The incidents
he and the other soldiers detailed took place before, during -- and
after -- the photographic revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. The
mayhem "happened every day," said the soldiers, and it was
committed "under orders from military intelligence personnel to
soften up detainees."
"They wanted intel," said a sergeant, one of the ordinary, untrained
grunts pressed into duty as interrogation muscle. "As long as no [captives]
came up dead, it happened. We kept it to broken arms and legs" -- sometimes
with baseball bats, and occasionally augmented by scalding naked prisoners with
burning chemicals. The soldiers learned their "stress techniques" from
CIA interrogators, dropping into Iraq from their "unleashed" torture
centers in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia and points unknown.
But of course they didn't always "keep it" to
broken arms and legs. Fishback, who had been trying
desperately to get his superiors to act on the
atrocities he'd witnessed himself, discovered that
a captive had been "interrogated" to
death. From that point on, while still urging official
action, he also began gathering evidence and testimony
from fellow officers about the nightmarish regimen,
the Los Angeles Times reports. When at long last
he began to realize "that the Army is deliberately
misleading the American people about detainee treatment
within our custody," he stepped out of the
system -- and into the storm.
What will come of the good captain's moral courage? Nothing much. A
Pentagon investigation has been belatedly launched; no doubt a few
more bad eggs will be fried, just as the hapless Lynndie England, poster
girl for Abu Ghraib, was convicted this week for "aberrations" that,
as Fishback confirms, were countenanced and encouraged throughout Iraq.
Fishback himself will be certainly slimed in one of Karl Rove's patented
smear campaigns. By next week, the upright, Bible-believing West Point
grad -- a veteran of both the Afghan and Iraqi wars -- will be transformed
by Fox News and the war-porn bloggers into a cowardly, anti-American
terrorist sympathizer under the hypnotic control of Michael Moore.
Meanwhile, one of the Republican senators Fishback approached, Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist, has already put the kibosh on legislation
setting clear legal guidelines for prisoner treatment. Frist, a goonish
errand boy now under investigation for insider trading, killed the
bill after hearing Fishback's evidence. His White House masters don't
want any legal clarity for their dark deeds; they can only thrive in
the murk of moral chaos.
One thing is certain: The true architects of these atrocities will
never face justice. They'll go on to peaceful, prosperous retirements,
heedless of the broken bodies and broken nations -- including their
own -- left behind in their foul wake.
On the fourth
anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk
announces the availability of her latest book:
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books
have sought to explore the truth behind the official
version of events that day - yet to date, none of
these publications has provided a satisfactory answer
as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately
responsible for carrying them out.
Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura
Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of
the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and
ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks
played out.
9/11: The Ultimate
Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September
11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered
the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been
many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed
and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless
individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative
aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as
a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to
keep us confused and distracted to the reality of
the man behind the curtain.
Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk
eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear
evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural
cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity
to the brink of destruction in the present day.
For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core
of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to
be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation
that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover
their tracks, 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE
definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's
true implications are for the future of mankind.
Published by Red Pill Press
Scheduled for release in October
2005, readers can pre-order the book today at our bookstore.