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'The French Connection'

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IMPEACH GEORGE BUSH! - Articles of Impeachment and the FAX number of your representative. Download, print and FAX.

Ark's Jokes

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Q&A session with CIA Analyst Stephen Pelletiere

The maker of this flash presentation deserves a medal.

Pentagoon: I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag

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As always, Caveat Lector! The material presented in the linked articles does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the owners of Cassiopaea.org. Research on your own and if you can validate any of the articles, or if you discover deception and/or an obvious agenda, we will appreciate if you drop us a line! We often post such comments along with the article synopses for the benefit of other readers.

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The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." - Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. --Voltaire--

Faith of consciousness is freedom
Faith of feeling is weakness
Faith of body is stupidity.
Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Love of the body depends only on type and polarity.
Hope of consciousness is strength
Hope of feeling is slavery
Hope of body is disease. [Gurdjieff]

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future." [Cassiopaea 09-28-02]

March 15, 2003 Today's edition of Brought to You by The Bush Junta, Produced and Directed by the CIA, based on an original script by Henry Kissinger, with a cast of billions.... The "Greatest Shew on Earth," no doubt, and if you don't have a good sense of humor, don't read this page! It is designed to reveal the "unseen." If you can't stand the heat of Objective Reality, get out of the kitchen!

Still think war on Iraq is justified? Watch this video and then decide..

If you read nothing else, read the below article...

The World is a "Limited Hangout". A limited hangout is an admission of a small scandal that really covers up a much bigger, nastier scandal. You plan a limited hangout in hopes that the press and public will swallow the smaller story and forget about the looming elephant right behind it. Intelligence agencies do it all the time. "Yeah, it turns out the document that defecting spy gave us was a forgery. But he gave us some very good information as well." The truth is, the defecting spy was still working for Russia in the bowels of the CIA. As the war against Iraq fills the press, a much larger story sits behind it. Yes, in a very real sense, the whole war is a limited hangout that is covering up something else:

THE ONGOING BUILD-UP OF A GLOBAL MILITARY CARTEL, WHICH CAN BE DEPLOYED ANYWHERE ON THE PLANET, TO MAINTAIN A PRE-ORDAINED MAP OF NATIONS.

This map designates which nations will function as colonies that offer up their raw materials to other nations that are the true industrial players. The global military cartel will squash any nation that tries to throw off its role as a pure colony. That happened to the Shah in Iran, and it also happened to Saddam in 1991, in the sense that Iraq is destined, on the map, to be a stone-age horror show that happens to have a lot of oil. Whereas Saddam wanted a more modernized totalitarian state. A war is a great limited hangout, because very few people can imagine anything more important than the deaths of millions of people. What could be hiding behind THAT? Well, how about a world in which billions of people are in a stone-age horror, while the natural resources of their lands are being ripped away? How about a world that is run by generals who are, in turn, coordinated from an international central command?

In other words, something like what we have now, but a lot worse. In this light, the defections and refusals of Turkey and France and Russia to support the war against Iraq can be seen as JOCKEYING on the issue of: WHO WILL RUN THE NOW AND FUTURE GLOBAL MILITARY CARTEL? WHO WILL DO THE GRUNT WORK? Will the chief honcho be the European Union, the US, the Asian Sector, dominated by China and North Korea? Make no mistake about it, whoever runs this military cartel will be after the same thing: maintaining a world map that lays out the colonies and the major industrial players.

Except countries like China and Russia have arguments about the composition of the map, too. I know, all this sounds like science fiction. I wish it were. There are many smaller-scale models one can consult, however, to see the basic idea: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the US imperial structure. It's there. only now we're really talkng about the whole planet... The above scenario is also affected, as I've written before, by the monetary battle that is going on between the EU and the US. The US dollar versus the Euro---as the basic currency of choice for global oil transactions. Saddam, in 1999, went to the Euro, and that was eventually seen, by the US, as a treacherous move to subvert the dollar. Slightly adjusting the focus, one can also view this monetary move by Saddam as an effort to take his nation out of the traditional role of an oil colony, by allying it with Europe---with hopes to become a more active trading partner with the EU. And a more modernized country.

Here is my prior story on limited hangouts: OCTOBER 16. As you no doubt know, since 9/11 a number of independent journalists have been looking into unanswered questions about the attacks on NY and Washington. From this multiple investigation, many strange facts have come to light. On a much more watered-down level, the Congress has tried to get a panel off the ground to dig into 9/11. An independent commission. Bush finally said he approved of this idea. But Cheney has acted on his own to squash the commission---which tells you something about who holds power in the White House. Generally, the White House assigns the v,p. duties like attending teas and tallying up the number of $600 screwdrivers bought by the Pentagon.

As Newsweek is reporting, last Thursday Cheney called Porter Goss, who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, after which Goss called a closed-door meeting with some of his own Committee people. Goss told them he could not move ahead with the independent inquiry into 9/11---even though Congressional negotiators had finalized the deal. Goss said he was constrained because, get this, he had instructions from ABOVE HIS PAY GRADE. Newsweek does not bother to comment on this outrageous excuse. Since when does Congress defer to people who have higher pay grades? Perhaps Goss was in the middle of a flashback---you see, before he was a congressman he was an employee of the CIA. And there, pay-grades are taken seriously in the chain of command. Come to think of it, how odd that the current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is a former CIA exec. After all, that Committee is supposed to OVERSEE actions of the CIA. Could one say that Goss is still working for his old employer?

Who stands to benefit from the disintegration of the effort to investigate 9/11? Among other entities, the CIA. Cheney, who hasn’t been attending teas or adding up $600 screwdrivers bought by the Pentagon, has been very active in opposing any move to obtain 9/11-type documents from executive-branch agencies. He wants to rule out the questioning of certain witnesses, too---for example, the FBI informant who actually lived with two men who have been named as 9/11 hijackers. Well, of course. Naturally. No one should able to ask this FBI informant about his time as a roommate of these two men. It might emerge, for example, that they were NOT hijackers after all. It might emerge that they were simply dupes named as terrorists, in order to cover up the real truth about 9/11. Can’t have that. Newsweek caps off its wimpy piece in this fashion: Bush officials are claiming to take a PRINCIPLED STAND on this issue. The Bushies are saying that Congress would be crossing a line and eroding the separation of executive and legislative powers by probing 9/11. Huh? H e l l o?

The House Intelligence Committee has, AS ITS JOB, the overseeing of CIA activities. It regularly meets to do this. The system of checks and balances was created, in part, to make sure that each branch of government would, in fact, stick its nose into the business of the other branches. I think what Cheney and others mean is: “We don’t mind the House Committee dong its regular job, which is to defer to the CIA and bow down and fold up under the slightest pressure. That’s standard. That’s fine. But to actually request documents and interview people with unsavory answers to unsavory questions? Why, that would be Unconstitutional.” And finally, Newsweek reports that one GOP staffer IN CONGRESS agrees with the Cheney forces that this refusal is about principle. The staffer said: “There’s just this general philosophical orientation [in the White House] that the less the world knows, the better.”

I see. This is PHILOSOPHY. PRINCIPLE.

My, my. “We have a philosophy that everyone should be kept in the dark.” Works for them.

Here are just a few questions out of hundreds that a true and independent panel on 9/11 could ask:

HOW DID THEY FIND A PRISTINE PASSPORT OF AN ONBOARD HIJACKER IN A NYC STREET AFTER THE PLANE CRASHED AND BLEW UP AND BURNED?

WHY DID THE PENTAGON FAIL TO SCRAMBLE FIGHTER JETS AS A PASSENGER PLANE WAS HEADING FOR THE PENTAGON?

HOW DID A JUMBO JETLINER CAUSE RELATIVELY LITTLE DAMAGE TO THE PENTAGON?

HOW DID THE FBI DISCOVER THE NAMES OF THE 19 HIJACKERS SO QUICKLY, SINCE THESE PURPORTED HIJACKERS HAD USED FAKE PASSPORTS BEFORE BOARDING THE 9/11 FLIGHTS?

AND WHY ARE SOME OF THOSE SUICIDE HIJACKERS STILL ALIVE?

The Newsweek article is part of an overall OP called “a limited hangout.” That’s a preppy intell term for appearing to tell the truth about an embarrassing situation--- when, in fact, you’re only telling part of the truth, the least important part. Another limited hangout is: “Yes, the CIA has had to employ drug traffickers so we could learn the truth about what is going on in foreign lands. Mea culpa, maybe that was a mistake on our part.” The entire CBS show, The Agency (which I reviewed yesterday) is a limited hangout. In a limited hangout, you assume some fragment of the embarrassing situation is coming to light and you can’t stop it, so you pre-empt the potentially enormous revelations by admitting to some little piece of the truth. And you hope that the rest of the situation will fade out. The world of media runs on limited hangouts.

So now we get a juicy-sounding Newsweek piece about Cheney and his outrageous blocking of the independent inquiry into 9/11. We may get even more on this. But the motive is: “Maybe that’ll be enough. Maybe they’ll go away. Maybe Cheney will look bad for six seconds. Or one day.” Yes, what Cheney is doing IS outrageous. But in the larger scheme of things, so what? As long as the really embarrassing questions about 9/11 aren’t asked and answered, the cover-up will stay in place. I mean, suppose it is revealed that the US government really has no idea how those planes were guided into the WTC and the Pentagon? Suppose there is NO credible evidence that any of the 19 or 20 hijackers named were really on those planes? Then we would be talking about information that goes far beyond any limited hangout. Then we would be asking, who benefits from lying about 9/11? And who is controlling those liars?

Then we would begin to put things together in a whole new way: “Let’s see. The government says that 20 Arab terrorists crashed the planes on 9/11. They link these men to Osama bin Laden. They say that bin Laden is in Afghanistan. They give him ample warning time to escape. Then they launch a war on Afghanistan, a war they had actually been planning---and needed an excuse to launch---at least a year before 9/11. Afghanistan is the very place designated for a pipeline that would open up the vast oil reserves in Central Asia. And Afghanistan is also the key place where the trillion-dollar heroin business begins. The business which was heading into oblivion because the Taliban---those old “freedom-fighters” trained and equipped by the CIA to harass the USSR in the 1980s---suddenly decided to do a 180 on their agreement to protect the opium poppy fields. Hmm.” At this point, all limited hangouts are exploded. At this point, some sounds of crashing Washington careers and crashing public faith can be heard all over the US.

At this point, Americans from Maine to Southern California are forcibly aroused from their chronic slumber. They are angry at being yanked into a waking state. They are grumpy and peeved and resentful, and they are looking for someone to blame. Oops. Not a good situation for the power brokers. Far too much exposure. So instead, let’s have a series of “hard-hitting” media stories and some roil and turmoil in the halls of power, in Washington. Let’s have some controversy and debate. Let’s talk about what the CIA might have known in advance of 9/11, and how culpable, in that regard, the Agency is. Let’s do that. Let’s get busy on a whole limited hangout re 9/11. Yeah, let’s do that.

This is how the game works.

Media reporters, like trained monkeys with bananas floating in front of their faces, dig in and talk to their best sources in government. And lo and behold, documents emerge and FBI people come out of the woodwork with stories. Stories about government fore-knowledge of “something sort of like 9/11.” Wow. Oooo. This is great stuff. Let’s go with it. Print it. Hooray. We’re doing our jobs. We’re the watchdog media. Terrific. Nothing gets by us. We’re premier goalies. We stop that puck. And one limited-hangout story magically leads to another, and this process takes up everyone’s time and effort. It’s a beautiful thing to see. This is how the game works. And “hip” people everywhere spend their time pointing out that the US government actually could have avoided 9/11. I hope you see how widely you can apply the concept of limited hangout. It’s everywhere, like gardens of organized weeds.

You might, for example, want to check out a program at the federally-funded National Institutes of Health. NIH is the largest single medical-research facility in the world. Over there they have a special branch that investigates, with a frozen smile and an optimistic and patronizing glance, the field of alternative medicine. Isn’t that just wonderful? They pay homage to alternative medicine. They fund a few studies of massage and acupuncture. They stage a limited hangout to deflect the public from the fact that, aside from crisis-trauma-emergency medicine, the whole medical system is being “attacked” by millions and millions of people who are finding solace and help outside the mainstream, in alternative health strategies. Oops.

As my long-time source on propaganda matters, Ellis Medavoy, once told me, “Limited hangout is the manna from heaven. It gives people like me work, endless amounts of work. Along with straight-out lying, it’s my best source of employment. If I lived to be 600 years old, I would never need a job. I could do limited hangouts like a cow eats grass. On and on. As long as they have grass, I eat. I say a prayer every night to limited hangout. It IS the substance of the so-called real world, which is about as real as a circus run by cockroaches. But, you see, after awhile, people get used to the idea that cockroaches really CAN run circuses. People accept that as part of the scenery. They just accept it as hard truth, just like they accept chairs and tables and stoves. They don’t really think about it. They just believe it. It’s a wondrous thing to behold, when you are the one who is creating these hangouts, and when you see the people accept them.” You would do well to consider the revelations of scandals in every single area of public life as limited hangouts. You will be wrong a lot less than you will be right.

Example: Enron crashes and burns. There are accusations of corporate malfeasance and money-grabbing. A few execs are called before Congress. The public is outraged. The president is outraged. Week after week, new stories appear. Accounting firms are also accused of lying and cheating. But what is beyond this hangout? The fact that the collapse of Enron was engineered, in part, to burst the bubble of public confidence in the stock market. A few rich dupes take the fall. The hangout works. People aim their venom wholly at the CEOs and other honchos of these Enrons and WorldComs. How easy.

How very easy. Comment: This article goes a long way to explaining the true nature of the world in which we live, those that hold power and the way we should view world events. We are the pawns in their game, pawns are used because they have no power, knowledge is power, get yourself some.

Mirror matter mystery Two Australian scientists believe they have found evidence of a parallel universe of strange matter within our own Solar System. Dr Robert Foot and Dr Saibal Mitra, of the University of Melbourne, report that close-up observations of the asteroid Eros by the Near-Shoemaker probe indicate it has been splattered by so-called "mirror matter". Mirror matter is not anti-matter, it is altogether weirder. It is somehow a "reflection" of normal matter, a sort of parallel series of particles required to restore the balance of the Universe. Sounds far-fetched - some believe so. However, experiments are underway to confirm or deny the existence of this strange, potentially significant but as yet undetected component of the cosmos.

Cosmic balance: Mirror matter is a hypothetical form of matter that restores nature's flawed left-right symmetry. Laws of nature, such as the rules that govern the interactions of fundamental particles, show a high degree of symmetry except that some laws are not the same when reflected in a hypothetical mirror. This means that elementary particles display a preference for left over right. In a way, the Universe is left-handed. Why? Nobody knows. Many physicists are happy with this idea believing that in the first instants of the Big Bang everything was perfectly symmetrical. Only when the cosmos cooled did it become asymmetric, with a difference emerging between left and right. But some scientists do not accept this. They maintain that the Universe has a left-right balance because there exists "mirror matter" - for every known particle there is a mirror particle that restores the cosmic balance.

Dark matter Mirror matter would produce its own light but we would not be able to see it because mirror matter only interacts with our matter via gravity. Dr Robert Foot believes that mirror matter would have been made in abundance in the Big Bang and that it is all around us but we can't see it. "There could be mirror matter stars, planets and galaxies out there," he told BBC News Online. "In fact, some think that the unseen so-called "dark matter" of the Universe could actually be mirror matter," he adds. "Mirror matter is perfect to explain dark matter. It's dark and can only be detected through its gravity." Dr Foot believes he has found evidence that it is here, closer than we believed, and that it had had a measurable effect on our spaceprobes.

Mysterious force In October 2000, the Near-Shoemaker spacecraft lightly touched down on the 13-by-13-by-33-km (8 by 8 by 20 miles) Eros asteroid. It was the first time a probe had landed on an asteroid. Its close scrutiny of Eros revealed many strange features - such as flat-bottomed craters filled with a peculiar bluish dust, and a puzzling lack of small craters. Unexplained by conventional understanding, Dr Foot believes that mirror matter provides an answer. He calculates that small objects containing mirror matter could have struck the asteroid and left behind precisely the same scars that are seen. Indeed, he says there is no other credible explanation. He also calculates that mirror matter may explain the mysterious force that acts on both the Pioneer 10 and 11 deep spaceprobes.

Distant probes Launched in 1972, the Pioneers are leaving the Solar System in opposite directions. Detailed analysis of their trajectory indicates that they are both subject to a tiny, unexplained force that is slowing them down. Dr Foot believes that mirror matter exerting a drag on the Pioneers could be to blame. "How else can you explain that both Pioneers, on opposite ends of the Solar System, experience the same force pushing in the same direction?" Dr Foot asks. In a research paper to be published shortly, Drs Foot and Mitra suggest that mirror matter may even have struck the Earth. He singles out three possible events: the 1908 Tunguska impact in Siberia and low-altitude, low-velocity fireballs seen in Spain in 1994 and in Jordan in 2001. "Mirror matter could also explain these events," he told BBC News Online.

Future experiments Many scientists dismiss mirror matter as wild speculation but even the sceptics will have cause for thought if the latest experiments from the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern) are to be believed. Experiments involving so-called ortho-positronium - an arrangement in which an electron orbits a positron (its antimatter equivalent) - show that it decays slightly faster than can be explained. This could be due, says Dr Foot, to the electrons changing fleetingly into mirror matter and then back again. Experiments at Cern and in Moscow hope to determine in the next year or so if mirror matter really does exist.

Top US military planner fears a 'likely' repeat of Somalia bloodbath. A former military aide to General Norman Schwarzkopf has warned that a US-led war against Iraq could turn into a disaster that echoes the bloody debacle of Somalia rather than the relatively painless 1991 Gulf war. Retired Colonel Mike Turner, who also served as military planner with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, believes the Bush administration is ignoring potential risks – some that could cost the US dearly. "There's a saying in military circles: We always fight the last war. It means that too much focus on past enemy behaviour can easily lead to misjudging an enemy capability in the future," he said.

"So I asked myself today which war will this be: Desert Storm or Somalia? In 1991, we had four iron-clad prerequisites for war with Iraq: a clear political end state, overwhelming force to achieve a quick and decisive victory, a viable Arab coalition to avoid empowering Arab extremists, and absolutely no Israeli involvement to avoid a global holy war. "In Somalia, we ignored the most critical of these lessons. Mission creep turned our original objective of humanitarian aid into simply 'Get Aidid,' the Somali factional leader we were battling. We committed US troops to a high-risk military operation in an urban area with extraordinarily dangerous variables in play on the battlefield, and with insufficient firepower."

Colonel Turner said the US had made the mistake of fixing its sights early on ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. This plan had met stiff opposition from the uniformed staff within the Pentagon, but the administration had chosen this focus regardlessly. Colonel Turner outlined a worst-case scenario: "Within hours of our attack, Saddam launches Scuds on Israel. Israel's government launches a full-scale attack on Iraq, creating a holy war. Saddam, threatened with his own survival, uses chemical and biological weapons and human shields. He torches his own oil fields, thousands of his own people are killed. Photos of US soldiers amid landscapes of Iraqi civilian bodies blanket the world press which aligns unanimously against the US."

He then envisaged the US left to administer a post-Saddam Iraq with minimal international co-operation and open to terror attacks from al- Qa'ida. North Korea could take advantage and start exporting nuclear weapons. "These are not remote possibilities, but in my view reasonable, possibly even likely outcomes," he concluded. Comment: Naturally Bush and Blair and the military planners are well aware of this and that is precisely why they have over a quarter of a million troops and all the hardware they can muster pointing at Iraq, they are ready and willing to "pay the blood price" as Blair said. The above scenario as outlined by Colonel Turner dosent really poses a threat to Bush, I mean, you think he, Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other the backroom chickenhawks care? Just so long as they ensure US control and dominance in the middle east they couldn't care less how many people die if the world descends into bloody chaos, in fact they might be betting on that exact scenario, they know very well by now that a state of perpetual war is the best atmosphere in which to maintain complete control, at both home and abroad, since it give you free reign to bomb the hell out of whoever you like and the population at home are too terrified to do anything about it. The "bloodbath" that this war in Iraq will turn out to be is intended, it signals the final push for power and control, the final manipulation to set us all on the slippery slope towards utter chaos and the subsequent totalitarian control of the planet

Bush may end up doing more harm to U.S. than IraqThe United States is about to go to war saying that diplomacy has failed. They're right about that. Day after day, month after month, President Bush and his men have made things worse for themselves in one of the most ruinous exercises in diplomacy the country has ever seen. Not to put too fine a point on it — and no matter how the war against Iraq goes — it is hard not to conclude that the president is ignorant, the secretary of defense nuts and the secretary of state incompetent.

I do not think this war is necessary, but trying to put myself in the other fellow's shoes, I have to sympathize with what must be despair and confusion in this frustrated White House. ''We are in the thick of diplomacy,'' press secretary Ari Fleischer said Monday. He might have been more accurate to say we are the thick of diplomacy.

The world of the only superpower is shattering around us, at least diplomatically. We have alienated and divided our own allies, from France and Turkey right up to the 51st state, Great Britain. We have divided our most creative diplomatic initiative of the last century, the United Nations. We have divided the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, our inspired military response to communist expansionism, a military arm that won a war without fighting. We have, with ignorance and arrogance aforethought, brought the world (and ourselves) to crisis — and perhaps to chaos.

Our president, confusing the United Nations with the Texas Legislature, seemed to believe that we could bully, bluff and buy the rest of the world into going along with whatever we wanted, wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted — no matter what arguments he used and changed. Sept. 11, disarmament, regime change, a stabilized Middle East, whatever. Instead, as Bush now knows, he was getting lousy advice from Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told him time was on our side. It was not.

Time and the United Nations gave the rest of the world the chance to organize against, or take revenge on, American unilateralism. The world's only superpower was checked diplomatically by a new superpower called the world, which, given time to think and talk, concluded that Iraq was not the imminent threat the Americans were saying it was, and that if these Americans so wanted to be alone, let them. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who first won plaudits as the grumpy ghost of Christmas past, turned his sarcasm from the press to our oldest and best allies — up to and including Great Britain — calling them all outdated, irrelevant and unnecessary.

The only world leader who must be more frustrated than Bush right now is British Prime Minister Tony Blair, loyal and principled, who could be destroyed by the blundering of his American friends. ''He may be wrong in Iraq, badly wrong, but he has never been less than honest,'' editorialized The Guardian, the British paper that usually speaks most well of Blair's Labor Party. The paper's line now is that the prime minister was a fool to trust Bush, Rumsfeld and company. The more centrist Independent on Sunday covered the top of its front page with one long ''Not in Our Name, Mr. Blair. You do not have the evidence. You do not have U.N. approval. You do not have the country's support. You do not have the legal right. You do not have the moral right. You must not drag Britain into Bush's unjust and unnecessary war.''

So, after humbling weeks of ignorant assumption and unforced error, the Bush of Bush's war is in a corner of his own design. Presumably he will try to fight his way out — and militarily he should prevail. But there is also the chance, whatever happens on desert battlefields, that this sorry chapter of diplomacy and geopolitics may do considerably more damage to the United States than to Iraq. They say that the president likes to be alone. When this is over, he may be. Comment: Here's hoping, but whoever replaces him will be just another dupe, although probably a smarter one.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Tells Bush 'It's Not a Game, It's Not Over'French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin on Friday sent a message to President Bush on Iraq: "It's not a game, it's not over." The comment, made by Raffarin during a visit to India, was in response to Bush's remark on Thursday that "the game is over" for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

France is one of the strongest anti-war voices among the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Raffarin's statement followed talks with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Earlier on Friday, President Jacques Chirac said there was still an alternative to war. Vajpayee also told a joint news conference by the two men: "I don't think that the game is over." He said U.N. weapons inspectors must be encouraged to continue their work in Iraq.

Washington is determined to force Iraq to comply with United Nations demands on Baghdad to disarm, or launch an assault to topple Saddam Hussein. Iraq insists it has no weapons of mass destruction and that it is cooperating with U.N. arms inspectors. Raffarin, who broke into English to say that the crisis over Iraq was not a game, also said there was an alternative to war. Comment: I get the distince feeling that France is setting itself up for a majoe showdown with the US at some stage in the future. We have mentioned the idea that France is playing the part of the "Athenians" vs the US as "Atlantis" in the legendary battle where the Athenias triumphed, yet I find it hard to see how this could happen in a conventinal war. There is more than one way to defeat a nation however....the US has some VERY big and nasty skeletons in its closet, the most recent to be stuffed under teh floorboards being the events around the attacks of 9/11. Conclusive proof about US and/or Israeli complicity or these attacks would surely spell the end for the current adminstration

Everyone Loves A Dead Iraqi On the verge of Bush's brutal war for oil, the U.S. proves its arrogance, and the world is disgusted. So let's see if we have this straight. We still don't seem to have this straight Because there stands emasculated and completely Cheney-whipped Colin Powell, up in front of the U.N. Security Council and the world's TV cameras, scowling and pounding his fist and making a big show of indignation and showing everyone -- what? Some blurry satellite photos with little red squares? An audiotape of an alleged phone conversation between members of the Iraqi military, proving the existence of some biological agents we probably sold to them? Is he serious?
There is no real evidence. There is no smoking gun. There isn't even a smoking spit wad. There is only, basically, a smoking middle finger.

We are going to war with another impoverished, petty country for largely fabricated, faux-patriotic reasons. "Let's roll!" smirks Shrub during an appallingly vague State of the Union address, sending in 180,000 U.S. troops and gearing up to bomb the living crap out of a country that is no direct threat to us whatsoever. Do we not see? Let's get it even straighter: There is zero proof that Iraq is producing any sort of serious WMD of any significant threat or lethal potential, certainly nothing remotely dangerous to the United States, and even the weapons we do think they might be hiding and even those few the inspectors actually found are either empty canisters with a range of about 12 miles or rusty hulls of weapons we knew they had back in 1992. Swell.

Straighter still: There is zero direct threat to the United States from Iraq. None whatsoever. No long-range nukes, no Hefty bags of anthrax, no seething cells of swarthy bearded Islamic fundamentalists heading over to sodomize our daughters and steal our Ford Expeditions and use up all the credit on our Starbucks cards. Clear? Poor Colin. He used to be so smart, so judicious and calm and fair minded and restrained. He fits poorly into that hawk costume. There is no reason to send in nearly a quarter-million U.S. troops to slaughter a half-million Iraqi people and create another estimated one million refugees. This is the U.N. estimate. Saddam's a brutal thug? Is this the reason? Well, join the club. And he's a pipsqueak compared to, say, North Korea's Kim Jong-il. Or how about the two million or so massacred in Rwanda a few years ago? Should we discuss them and the United States not giving much of a damn? No? I see.

Saddam intentionally gassed his own people? Yes, apparently he did. No question, he's a vile and barbarous dictator -- exactly as he was when he was our ally. And we knew about the gassing of the Kurds all along, as it was happening, and we did nothing to stop it -- in fact, we were more than happy to help Saddam gas all the Iranians he could during the Iran-Iraq war, employing many of the same chemical agents the United States (via its key Iraq liaison at the time -- hi, Mr. Rumsfeld!) supplied to him. What, us? Hypocrites? Never. The sad fact remains, the United States is, right now, as you read this, acting very much exactly like the arrogant and thuggish hypercapitalist rogue nation all these hate-filled countries claim we are. Oh, and that goes for much of the European Union too. In greater Europe, and beyond, George W. Bush is far scarier than Saddam could ever be. 9/11 sympathy? Not anymore.

France knows it, Germany knows it -- hell, even Russia and China know it, and those ravenous wolves love nothing more than to eviscerate surrounding countries and throttle their own people for no other reason than to expand their power base. Environmental atrocities? Logging in national forests? Massive unemployment? Gouging women's rights? Weakening the Clean Air Act? Bigger tax breaks for buying gluttonous SUVs? Failed economic stimulus? Record deficits? A trillion-dollar national debt? No wonder ShrubCo is positively salivating over this war. What a wonderful way to distract the populace from the Enron President's other ongoing failures and embarrassments and cultural molestations.

This is not an easy stance to voice. Such sentiments frequently elicit the following reaction, full of indignation and hissing patriotism: How dare you disrespect our president in a time of war! Don't you remember 9/11? Have you no heart? No sympathy for the thousands who died so horribly? Saddam must be stopped! Terrorism must be annihilated! We are threatened! This is brilliant. And terribly sad. Because shocking indeed are the numbers of Americans who truly believe Saddam carried out the 9/11 attack, or at least had a significant role in it. He didn't. Let us repeat: The war on Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks are completely separate issues, forcibly joined in the minds of fear-drunk Americans (and huge numbers of media lapdogs) by an incessant barrage of White House spin and thin-lipped Cheney-speak.

Do you get it? Once more, with feeling: bin Laden/al Qaeda = Sept. 11 and terrorism. Saddam/Iraq = oil and power. Clear? But wait, Saddam is reportedly sympathetic to terrorists, you might argue, parroting exactly what the White House has spun your way. Right. So are roughly 153 other Third World nations and sociopathic tyrants, many of whom will hate us even more once we start bombing. Another reminder: The majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis and Egyptians. No Iraqis at all. Is it interesting to note how we aren't exactly eager to drop $10 billion worth of deadly ordnance on downtown Riyadh? Of course it's not. Extremely sensitive, extremely orgiastic, extremely complicated power relations having to do with billions in oil and money and U.S. corporate investment, is why.

No such complications with Iraq. Ain't no McDonald's in Baghdad, honey. We're about to bomb the living hell out of Iraq for the oil and the expansion of our power base. Simple. Even Bush can understand it. A-ha. Now it becomes clearer. Oh, North Korea? That little bastard? A much larger, far more lethal military than Iraq, a couple working nukes, a loathed and ruthless dictator, despised by its neighbors, a horribly impoverished nation trembling on the edge of chaos, much more volatile and dangerous than Iraq could ever be. Shrub just shrugs.

No time for that now, already have two false wars to run. Not to mention a record $300 bil deficit to justify for 2003, another projected $350 bil for next year, the biggest in history, gutting the economy, the biggest deficits since Bush Sr. was president. How sweet. And those numbers don't even include the tens of billions it will cost to massacre Iraq. Guess who picks up the tab? Guess whose economy gets reamed? Guess whose voice of protest or restraint or peace doesn't matter in the slightest? See that mirror?

Look. Look closer. The terrorists have not won. The White House PR machine has won. We are not winning the war on terror. We are merely perpetuating it. We are guaranteeing it will last for decades to come. It is a vicious and bloody downward spiral. We are going to massacre Iraq very soon now, no matter what anyone says, no matter which appalled U.N. member nation vetoes the decision. Poll after poll, protest after protest show the American people don't want it, the int'l community is horrified and disgusted, our U.N. standing is a joke and we are quickly becoming the sanctimonious self-righteous laughingstock brat child of the entire global community. Problem is, ShrubCo's got all the bombs. A-ha. Now it becomes clearer.

Secret US report scorns Bush policy attacks Middle East policy A classified State Department report has poured scorn on George Bush's much-touted policy that a military invasion of Iraq will lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East. The report, leaked to the Los Angeles Times, is the latest indication of divisions within the Bush administration on the goals and even the wisdom of the war it is itching to start. And it offers a rebuke to neo-conservatives whose grandiose theories about refashioning the world in America's image have been central to the Iraq enterprise from the start.

"Political changes conducive to broader and enduring stability throughout the region will be difficult to achieve for a very long time," the report says. It cites corruption, serious infrastructure degradation and overpopulation as reasons to doubt whether any kind of stability, much less fully functioning democratic government, will be possible in the foreseeable future, in Iraq or in many of its neighbours. "Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," the report goes on. And it warns that any electoral democracy would be subject to exploitation by "anti- American elements" – a reference to the Islamist parties that American foreign policy has been at pains to exclude from government across the Middle East, even if that means supporting autocratic and repressive regimes. The intelligence source who leaked the document concluded: "This idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."

The date on the report, 26 February, was the very day the President laid out his vision of a domino effect, in which a US invasion of Iraq would be the beginning of a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," Mr Bush said. The State Department report, by contrast, dismisses the domino theory in its title: Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes. Comment: How much more evidence do we need that nothing but BS flows from the mouths of Bush and Co.?

Doubts grow over legality of war Tony Blair will fly to the Portuguese islands of the Azores tomorrow for a meeting with George Bush to discuss plans for war as the British diplomatic push continues to flounder at the United Nations.
Among myriad proposals at the UN yesterday was one from Chile, one of the six undecided security council countries, that involves a three-week delay. It was dismissed out of hand by the White House.

It emerged too that the British government's legal position may not be watertight. Ministers say that if a second resolution is tabled and lost, the legal position is that they can go to war under the earlier UN resolution 1441, which demanded that Saddam Hussein give up his weapons or face serious consequences. But there was a suggestion last night that the government has been told it is not as simple as that. Any second resolution that fell would mean that Britain would have to go to war in breach of international law. This could have serious consequences for the government and the armed forces.

Amid intercontinental diplomatic manoeuvring, Mr Bush announced in Washington that the long-awaited "road map" agreed last December between the US, the UN, the European Union and Russia, towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, will be published soon. Mr Blair, who has been pushing hard for this behind the scenes with Mr Bush, leapt on the announcement, calling a special press conference at Downing Street aimed at the Arab world, which has accused the west of double standards in dealing with Iraq but not with Israel-Palestine.

Mr Blair told the press conference, at which London-based Arab journalists were given prominent seats, that publication of the "road map" showed that the US and Britain were being "even-handed". The publication will also help Mr Blair on the domestic front. His ministers, as well as Labour party members, have frequently argued that Israel-Palestine is a more important issue than Iraq. Comment: This publishing of the "middle east roadmap" is an obvious last ditch desperate ploy to garner support for the US "war by the backdoor". It will not work. I try to think what the reaction of Palestinians must be when they hear this regurgitated distribe from western nations, especially the US, about "peace in the middle" east. Who in their right mind would listen to a word Bush or any US president has to say about "peace in the middle east" when, even as they speak, they continue to supply Israel with the means to massacre Palestinians? It seems that their hypocrasy knows no bounds as Israel plans to expel Palestinians under cover of the US war on Iraq and with US approval. It is laughable and a grave insult to the Arab peoples that the US cynically attempts to use the promise of peace for Palestinians in order to justify murdering Iraqis. Tomorrow we will hear a "loud sucking noise" from the mid atlantic as the "three amigos" withdraw their second resolution offer and decide on the best diplomatic wording to say they intend to murder thousands of Iraqis and push the world into a hole that it may never climb out of.

US MEDIA AIRS ALLEGED ZIONIST ROLE IN IRAQ WAR With an invasion of Iraq looming, some critics of the war have revived allegations the U.S. campaign is the brainchild of Jewish neoconservatives who promoted the idea in the 1990s and assumed positions of power when the Bush administration took office in 2001. Rep. James Moran, a Virginia Democrat, brought down a torrent of opprobrium on his head this month when he said the United States would not be planning an invasion of Iraq "if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community."

"The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should," a newspaper quoted him as saying. The White House condemned his remark as "shocking," as did congressional leaders of both parties. Moran later apologized. Rep. Jim Kolbe, an Arizona Republican, asked Secretary of State Colin Powell directly on Thursday whether there was any truth to the claim that supporters of Israel or any other group were conspiring to influence U.S. policy.

"It (policy on Iraq) is not driven by any small cabal that is buried away somewhere that is telling President Bush ... what our policies should be," Powell replied, speaking to a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The Washington Post, which has been mostly supportive of the Bush administration on Iraq, took up the attack on Moran on Wednesday, saying it was "demonstrably wrong" that Bush's Iraq policy is motivated primarily by the desire to protect Israel. "The argument moves from merely wrong to patently offensive when it attributes to Jews or 'the Jewish community' a single view and a nefarious influence," it added.

The two big East Coast newspapers, the Post and The New York Times, have given the conspiracy theory some airing on their op-ed pages, if only to try to quash it. "How the Bush administration has arrived at the brink of war with (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein, and to what extent Israeli influence has brought it there, is a legitimate question about which there is ample room for disagreement," Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the Post. Bill Keller, in The New York Times on Sunday, said the theory deserved some attention because the idea that the war was about Israel was "more widely held than you may think" and because it has "sprouted from a seed of truth."

The alleged seed of truth is that several key second-tier officials in the Bush administration are Jewish neoconservatives who have advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein to enhance the security of Israel. The group is said to include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, National Security Council Middle East official Elliot Abrams and Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Some of their allies are former members or advisers to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a Washington organization which argues that the security of the United States and Israel is inextricably intertwined, or to the like-minded Center for Security Policy. That group includes Cheney, Feith, Perle and Under Secretaries of State John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky.


Feith put the case in public last month when he told a Senate committee that democracy in Iraq could help bring to power the kind of Palestinians Israel wants to talk to. The most prominent U.S. politician accusing them of foisting the war on Bush for Israel's sake is former Reform Party presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, an isolationist opposed to foreign adventures by the United States.
Buchanan, writing in the American Conservative this week, said: "The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. "Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are ... claiming the status of a persecuted minority group."

Keller said the element of truth was that the interests of Israel and the United States coincide in the case of Iraq. "(That) does not mean that a Zionist fifth column has hijacked the president's brain. ... Making the world safer for us -- defusing terrorism and beginning to reform a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for -- happens to make the world safer for Israel as well," he said. The public debate so far has been mainly over whether it is anti-Semitic even to suggest that the neoconservatives may have a dual loyalty to Israel and to the United States, not so much over whether the allegation might be true.

Kaplan said that, although the debate was legitimate, the accusation of impaired loyalty was beyond the pale. "Invoking the specter of dual loyalty ... amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity?" he wrote. Buchanan, who said before the 1991 Gulf War that the only groups beating the drums for war in the Middle East were "the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States," is undeterred. "Those hurling these charges (of anti-Semitism) harbor a 'passionate attachment' to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America," he wrote. Comment: Again we see evidence that the Israelis are being manipulated to orchestrate their own ultimate destruction..

Sept 24 2001
Q: What is going to happen with the Middleastern situation; this Afghanistan or whatever?
A: Herding of population to much finer order of control.
Q: (L) What is the purpose of this control; this increasing control.
A: Preparation for war in Palestine.
Q: (L) But nobody has said anything about having a war in Palestine. They're all talking about having a war in Afghanistan. How does Palestine fit in here?
A: It is the ultimate objective of Israel.
Q: (L) Why would they want to have war in their own country? Well, aside from the fact that they've been having a war in their own country for a long time. I guess they want to bring it to a final conclusion. What is going to be the result of this plan?
A: Destruction of Jews.
Q: (L) Well obviously this is not what THEY are planning, is it?
A: No.
Q:(L) They are planning destruction of Palestinians, right?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) It seems that through out history whenever the jews have plotted and planned to destroy somebody, they are the ones who have ended up being destroyed themselves. Or am I misreading my history here?
A: No.

Can the war turn nuclear? If war breaks out because of the Iraqi problem, a nuclear scenario cannot be excluded, writes Mohamed Sid-Ahmed American military strategists agree that it is virtually impossible to predict how the war on Iraq will play out. The possibilities are endless, ranging from the most optimistic scenario (a fast, decisive US victory with minimum casualties) to the most pessimistic (a long drawn-out war that could even, eventually, acquire a nuclear dimension). This uncertainty is very different from the situation which prevailed in the run-up to the war waged by the incumbent American president's father against Iraq in 1991. At the time, the senior Bush's military experts were only too ready to predict the course of the war. As it happened, their predictions of a protracted war with high levels of resistance and heavy casualties turned out to be completely off the mark. However, what proved to be an overly pessimistic prediction then could well turn out to be only too accurate this time around. If the 1991 war ended relatively quickly, it was because it set itself the limited aim of driving the Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. The war this time sets itself the far more ambitious aim of overthrowing the Iraqi regime and capturing Saddam Hussein, dead or alive.

One thing most American military strategists do agree on is that the invading US troops are unlikely to face stiff resistance because Saddam is hated by his people and his overthrow will be welcomed by most Iraqis. But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the attacks of 11 September 2001, it is that the surprise factor can render the most scientific and rational predictions meaningless. And yet, in making its case for war, the Bush administration discounts the surprise factor completely. Thus on the one hand, it is asking us to believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Saddam is still in possession of a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and that this represents a clear and present danger to which it must respond by attacking Iraq, and, on the other, that the removal of a desperate leader with vast amounts of chemical and biological weapons at his disposal and with his back to the wall will be an easy matter. How to reconcile these two contradictory assumptions?

Russian experts have come up with more realistic assessments, predicting three possible scenarios of how the war might develop. The first scenario posits a decisive victory by the US-led military coalition over Iraq's armed forces in four to six weeks. The assumption here is that the key role in the first phase of combat operations will be played by the air and naval forces of the US and its allies, which will first target Iraq's air defence, then its command posts, basic components of communication and combat supervision, the headquarters of the security forces and the Republican Guard and the most combat-capable divisions of the Iraqi army. This best-case scenario assumes there will not be any significant damage that could seriously impair Iraq's economic reconstruction and that Saddam Hussein regime will collapse. It also assumes that Iraq will not use weapons of mass destruction against American and allied troops. The scenario actually carries an inbuilt contradiction: the American- led attack must be powerful enough to dislodge Saddam and his top associates and moderate enough not to have the team that will be chosen to replace Saddam perceived as mere instruments of the invaders. Russian experts say the chances for this first scenario are 40-60 per cent.

The second scenario predicts that combat operations will last between six and 12 weeks. The main elements include the following: a major surprise resistance from Iraq's air force; protracted street battles in some towns; moderate civilian casualties and severe property damage; attempts by Iraq to use weapons of mass destruction to a limited extent and to strike oil fields in the region. Experts believe the chances for this second scenario are 30-40 per cent. The third scenario is the worst for the US and its allies. According to this prediction, military operations will last between three and six months, with fierce military resistance from Iraq's air force, intense street battles, heavy civilian casualties and considerable material damage. In this last scenario, Iraq will attack the armed forces of the US and its allies, targeting Israel in particular, with weapons of mass destruction, and successfully strike oil plants in the region. Iraq will, according to this third scenario, attack Turkey's bases and towns and carry out formidable acts of terror against regional -- and perhaps global -- facilities that are of interest to the US and Britain. Experts say the chances for this third scenario are about 10 per cent.

But what if this last, albeit least likely, scenario does come into play? How will Israel rear to an Iraqi attack? In 1991, Washington persuaded Israel not to retaliate when Saddam launched his Scud missiles against it. Today, it is questionable whether Bush will, like his father, ask Israel to exercise self-restraint or, indeed, whether Israel would be willing to comply if he does. So Israel, and its possible reaction to an Iraqi attack, is the wild card in a pack already heavily stacked against any prospect of regional stability in the foreseeable future. If a cornered Saddam, who has once before demonstrated that he considers Israel a legitimate target, fits out the missiles Washington insists he still possesses with chemical or biological warheads and launches them against Israel, there are fears that the latter will be tempted to retaliate by firing a nuclear weapon at Baghdad. According to John Pike, director of the independent think tank Global Security, if Saddam manages to kill only 50 or even 500 Israelis, Israel would probably not use its nuclear option. But in the event of "50 thousand casualties -- done deal!" An Israeli nuclear bomb, which could kill millions of Iraqis, might turn the attack on a single nation into a world war, he says, with some Muslim nations joining Iraq's side against a US-Israeli alliance. Such a development would, he adds, "shape the course of Mideast history for the rest of the millennium".

But even if Israel holds back from striking a retaliatory blow, it is certain that a war waged by the US against Iraq will expose America's alliances with Islamic countries, such as Pakistan, for example, to deep tensions. The Afghan war has exposed the Musharraf regime to serious trouble and has strengthened religious radicalism. There is also the fact that relations between Pakistan and India, both with proven nuclear capability, are deeply strained over Kashmir. The well-known political analyst Strobe Talbott, who served as deputy secretary of state under Clinton, believes that if a radical government in Pakistan were to overthrow Musharraf, the danger of nuclear war in South Asia would "increase dramatically". American officials are talking openly of not limiting their regime change policy to Iraq, but of extending it to a number of Middle East countries including Iran, Syria, Libya and Lebanon. Actually, what we are facing here is the most ambitious plan to redraw the political map of the Middle East since the 1916 Sykes- Picot Treaty by which Britain and France carved up the Ottoman-ruled region between themselves after World War I. The regime change policy espoused by the current administration is in fact a revamped version of the Eisenhower Doctrine by which America sought to replace Britain and France as the dominant power in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Suez crisis. It is also a more ambitious version of the Doctrine, seeking not only to assert America's control over the Middle East and its vast oil reserves, but its preponderant position in a unipolar world order.

A particularly hot zone with which America will have to contend if war breaks out is the border area separating Iraq from Turkey. The vast majority of Turks -- 94 per cent according to recent polls -- are opposed to war. And, despite promises of a massive economic payoff for Turkey's cooperation and strong pressure from Turkey's powerful military establishment and its big bourgeoisie, the Turkish parliament voted against taking part in an American-led war on Iraq. Actually, Turkey's involvement in the war would have far-reaching implications. In the power struggle that is expected to follow the collapse of the government in Baghdad, it is far from certain that Iraq's territorial integrity will remain intact. The threat of fragmentation is very real: we might well see the country broken up into a Kurdish state in the north, a Shi'ite state in the south and a Sunni state in between. If Turkey does take part in the war, the Kurdish region in the north will become particularly explosive, with Kurdish-Turkish, and possibly Kurdish-Iranian tensions reaching critical levels.

Thus the outbreak of war can ignite a number of hot spots simultaneously. For example, if Saddam decides to use the 6,500 gallons of anthrax Bush insists are still unaccounted for, or if Israel respond to an Iraqi attack with a nuclear strike, the war could get completely out of hand. But despite all the risks involved. Bush continues to insist that nothing, not even a Security Council veto, will make him abandon his war plans. 11 September 2001, was not the first time America's sense of invincibility was shattered. A similarly traumatic event was the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941. In response to that slap in the face, America dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Will the war on Iraq, which is justified in the name of 11 September, produce equally cataclysmic scenarios? Comment: Most likely since the US themselves orchestrated Pearl Harbour and Sept. 11th. The conclusion then is clear, using the US as its front the power brokers of this world are pushing for all out dominance and will stop at nothing to achieve it, while they in turn are being controlled by the true "rulers from the behind the veil" whose agenda is a long standing one, and includes the perpetuation of the spiritual enslavement of humanity.

War with Iraq looms. The pro- and anti-war brigades fight out their issues in the UN as the hourglass empties. Everyone is glued to their TVs or turned with their faces towards the Gulf. And there's me having a sneaking look in a different direction to see what’s happening while everybody's back is turned. In Europe, were told all the time about bad, wicked America. But how many eyes are turned on what the new superpower of the 21st century is up to: the European Union?

Some FACTS now follow which will affect ALL Europeans:

Did you know that the European Union, soon to dwarf the USA with a population of 450 million after May 2004, has a constitution planned for this summer that, once signed, will end its member states' ability ever to leave, short of war? Did you know that the European Union has criminalised the sale of hundreds of perfectly safe vitamin, mineral, food supplement and herbal products with effect from July 2005?

Were you aware that all members of the EUs governing structure, together with the tens of thousands of bureaucrats and civil servants who run the union, have been granted A LIFETIME IMMUNITY FROM PROSECUTION and are, by their own admission, above the law? Did anyone tell you this also goes for the sinister new European police force? Under the new EU Arrest Warrant, Europol has now been granted powers to arrest and detain any citizen speaking out against the EU for up to 9 months without having to provide any evidence.

Have you been told that if your country is talked into adopting the euro, all your nations gold reserves, all silver stocks and dollar assets will be handed over to the EUs central bank, leaving your nation independently incapacitated and unable to re-launch its independence? Did you know that the European Union, which now imperiously runs the economies of 15 countries (soon to expand to 25), has been unable even to have its own accounts signed off EIGHT YEARS IN SUCCESSION? This is because of the corruption and criminal fraud carried out by its officers, who are predictably protected by the above blanket immunity from prosecution.

Israel prepares to 'expel' Palestinians US provides 'green light' and historical/political cover While the world is super busy with crisis here and crisis there, the Israelis have now prepared the way for mass 'expulsion' of as many Palestinians as they can get away with. They even have their own sanitized word for it - 'transfer'. Of course the actual reality is more akin to 'ethnic cleansing'. And make no mistake about it, everything is being done with the full knowledge and coordination of the Americans -- don't believe for even a moment any longer what is uttered in public by official Washington. Furthermore, at least some of the top officials associated with the more-than-ever US-controlled 'Palestinian Authority' are also quietly in on it; this their chance to purge and vanquish their own enemies and opponents desperate as they are to keep the power and money and control in their own hands.


A few months ago in an unprecedented step Israeli academics issued a public warning to the world that their government was about to commit expulsion and war crimes against the Palestinians (as with most such matters available in the MER archives section). A few knowledgeable and courageous journalists in Israel have raised the warning flag, as has the 'Gush Shalom' organization (though that's another not-so-simple-or-nice story which we've also dealt with in the past). And at least one very knowledgeable and respected Palestinian journalist known to us has tried to publish an extraordinarily insightful 'insiders' analysis of all this -- with specific information where and how the first expulsions are likely to take place -- but true to form the captive American media has so far refused to publish.

 

 

Israeli Mossad helps prepare for 'ethnic cleansing' When invasion of Iraq war begins In an interview with the British Ambassador to Germany on InfoRadio Berlin, Sunday 9/3/03, one of the hosting journalists tells what he had learned the previous day:

"The Mossad has contacted the German security services in order to secure that Germany does not protest when, as the war on Iraq begins, Israel starts to drive Palestinians out from Palestinian areas." The program is Pressetreff (Meet the Press), hosted by Volker Mayr with
discussants Hans-Hermann Klare, head of Stern Magazine foreign desk and Jürgen Hogrefe of the Der Spiegel. The British Ambassador to Germany is Sir Paul Lever.

WorldCom posts mammoth loss. US telecoms firm WorldCom, bankrupted after an accounting scandal last year, has posted a net loss of almost $80bn in December alone after writing down some of its assets. Overlooking the effects of the write-down - a necessary procedure for book-keeping purposes - the company made a modest operating loss of $47m on revenues of $2.2bn during the month. Comment: The US economy is suffering due to the massive redirection of funds to the defence (or rather attack) budget. This does not worry the Pres, since he thinks he'll be "flush" when he strikes black gold in Iraq. Only thing is, this war could well go in a direction that none in the whitehouse are expecting.

March 14, 2003 Today's edition of Brought to You by The Bush Junta, Produced and Directed by the CIA, based on an original script by Henry Kissinger, with a cast of billions.... The "Greatest Shew on Earth," no doubt, and if you don't have a good sense of humor, don't read this page! It is designed to reveal the "unseen." If you can't stand the heat of Objective Reality, get out of the kitchen!

Clear And Irrefutable Proof The US Government Planed And Executed Genocidal Acts Against The Iraqi People. Our Worst Fears Confirmed. Washington professor Tom Nagy appeared tonight (March 13 , 2003) on the national Swiss TV-channel SFDRS 1:

This Washington professor presented Pentagon papers providing hard evidence on the past and present war-doctrines of the USAF and other US troops . These documents are hard evidence and proof of intentional genocide against the entire Iraqi civilian population. These war crimes we committed by destroying the water systems with precision bombing .

The bombing of the Iraqi water systems never was an obvious intentional target ! It' worked well in 1991, so we can expect that they'll use it once again. These US-War Criminals should be brought to justice.A further US attack on Iraq's water purification systems will bring untold deaths due to lack of clean drinkable water and will ultimately lead to the deaths of million of Iraqi Civilians.We really have to face this clearly.

The US-Government is prepared to commit intentionally an unimaginable GENOCIDE. We have the common duty to do whatever it takes to stop this war, everything possible which fits the concept of Peace and avoids the concept of War . Comment: Whats new? The US has been involved in the massacring of innocent civilians for a very long time.

Iraqi Troops Moving Toward Kuwait The Defense Department is seeing movement of Iraqi troops and heavy artillery toward the south, possibly to take up positions in Southern Iraq, where they could be able to shell U.S. troops dug in inside Kuwait, defense officials confirmed to Fox News on Thursday.U.S. officials also told Fox News they are seeing Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles (Scuds) moved into Western Iraq within striking distance of Israel.

Fox News has already reported that the Iraqis have wired many key oil fields in the north and the south of the country with explosives for possible detonation should the coalition launch an attack.

Defense officials told Fox News that the above-mentioned developments could signal that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is mulling pre-emptive missile attacks on Israel, as well as attacks on U.S. forces stationed along his southern border, and his own people. Officials said any and all such eventualities are built into their main battle plan, meaning there are prescribed counter-measures in place, should Saddam attack first.

The Defense Department is watching these developments very closely -- the Scuds in the west in particular -- because the thought is that Saddam desperately wants to draw Israel into this fight. The pre-emptive attack from Saddam that has been thought about for months. "We have to assume that if he feels he has been backed into a corner, he may believe his only real shot comes from trying something first," one official said Thursday night. Read more Comment: Yeah right! Pull the other one, there really is no end to the BS these officials will spew. Only according to them is Saddam backed into a corner, for the rest of the world it is Bush and Blair that have lied themselves into a difficult situation and now with this news seem to fabricating the evidence to get themselves out of it. The one BIG problem with this story is that it is ridiculous to think that at this stage with Bush and Blair squirming that Saddam would do ANYTHING to get them out of the soup. Think sabout it, why would he attack anyone at this stage of the game? He has spent months doing everything he can to prevent a war and he has done a good job! So why would he now throw all that effort away? The answer is he wouldnt. The US and UK desperately need a reason to get their bloody war going, they (Mossad) orchestrated the attack on the twin towers so it is nothing for them to fire on friendly troops or launch a few scuds into Israel. Wait and see.

Blair is a coward. William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his hands" to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass killing of ordinary people. In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair.There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that affirms his "authority".

In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes againsthumanity.The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest authority". Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors have found, as one put it, "zilch".

Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover. Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not consult parliament or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime. Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of "endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.

All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: "I must have war." He then had it. To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility. He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American "interests", such as a voracious appetite for the world's resources, like oil.

When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about "bringing democracy to the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA that installed the Ba'ath Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein. "That was my favourite coup," said the CIA man responsible. When you next hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask why the US government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq's weapons declaration, saying they contained "sensitive information" which needed "a little editing".

Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American, British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions. In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full list of lawbreaking British companies. He has never explained why. As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected to people's lives.

The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands. Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.

They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the "long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a "box" was presumed destroyed. When I reached a village within the "box", the street had been replaced by a crater.

I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.

I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in that "media war" I never saw images of these grotesque sights on television or in the pages of a newspaper. I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon as a kind of freaks' gallery. SOME years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent Orange. It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.

This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliche-mongers would now call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam. Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukaemia.You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be pinned up on a wall and they are old news now. That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.

I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I travelled in Iraq two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards of children similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf war in 1991. She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on grey little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes. More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British.

Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes cancer. In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable. For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields. It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the south. LAST November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defence Minister Adam Ingram what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium were held by British forces operating in Iraq.

His robotic reply was: "I am withholding details in accordance with Exemption 1 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information." Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America and Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq "physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people 800 cruise missiles in two days. This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.

A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before." The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud inventor. He said: "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes." What will his "Hiroshima effect" actually do to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14? The answer is to be found in a "confidential" UN document, based on World Health Organisation estimates, which says that "as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries".

A Bush-Blair attack will destroy "a functioning primary health care system" and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population. There is "likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions". It is Washington's utter disregard for humanity, I believe, together with Blair's lies that have turned most people in this country against them, including people who have not protested before. Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN weapons inspectors to find a "smoking gun" for Iraq to be attacked.

Compare that with his reassurance in October 2001 that there would be no "wider war" against Iraq unless there was "absolute evidence" of Iraqi complicity in September 11. And there has been no evidence. Blair's deceptions are too numerous to list here. He has lied about the nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering up the fact that Washington, with Britain's support, is withholding more than $5billion worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council. He has lied about Iraq buying aluminium tubes, which he told Parliament were "needed to enrich uranium". The International Atomic Energy Agency has denied this outright. He has lied about an Iraqi "threat", which he discovered only following September 11 2001 when Bush made Iraq a gratuitous target of his "war on terror". Blair's "Iraq dossier" has been mocked by human rights groups.

However, what is wonderful is that across the world the sheer force of public opinion isolates Bush and Blair and their lemming, John Howard in Australia. So few people believe them and support them that The Guardian this week went in search of the few who do - "the hawks". The paper published a list of celebrity warmongers, some apparently shy at describing their contortion of intellect and morality. It is a small list. IN CONTRAST the majority of people in the West, including the United States, are now against this gruesome adventure and the numbers grow every day.

It is time MPs joined their constituents and reclaimed the true authority of parliament. MPs like Tam Dalyell, Alice Mahon, Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway have stood alone for too long on this issue and there have been too many sham debates manipulated by Downing Street. If, as Galloway says, a majority of Labour backbenchers are against an attack, let them speak up now. Blair's figleaf of a "coalition" is very important to Bush and only the moral power of the British people can bring the troops home without them firing a shot. The consequences of not speaking out go well beyond an attack on Iraq. Washington will effectively take over the Middle East, ensuring an age of terrorism other than their own.

The next American attack is likely to be Iran - the Israelis want this - and their aircraft are already in place in Turkey. Then it may be China's turn. "Endless war" is Vice-President Cheney's contribution to our understanding. Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons "if necessary". On March 26 last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries "can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons". Such madness is the true enemy. What's more, it is right here at home and you, the British people, can stop it.

 



 

 
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