As former CIA intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi told the American Conservative last July, the United States plans to nuke the be-jesus out of Iran. “The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.”

In a story appearing in the Sunday Telegraph, the newspaper once owned by the Canadian criminal finagler and neocon “Lord” Conrad Black, amoral strategists “at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a ‘last resort' to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.” If not so deadly serious, the idea that the Straussian neocons will shock and awe Iran only as a “last resort” would be comical. In fact, they have long planned to bomb Iran—imaginary nukes or not—and kill as many Iranians as possible and decimate the civilian infrastructure, as they have done in Iraq (some estimates put the death toll thus far above 130,000). “Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.”

Magus, a friend of Signs of the Times and former 60s activist in the United States, looks back finds some answers to questions that have been haunting him for three decades.

Greetings from the Swamps of Eugnosia, Forum Friends and Passengers,The old Magus, being of a more formal time than this era we now traverse, simply cannot countenance warping the standards of his tastes so as to pronounce upon the Good Lady's journal such an unkind name as is "blog" (which resonates upon the tongue as though 'twere describing some misbegotten amphibious creature born in a bog on a log); to describe the Signs writ large and the one who writes them there, when both be filled with Graces and Fair indeed for the readers' eyes to behold, indulge me as I quote her sage advice. Taken from Maestra Laura's Missive, "How To Spot COINTELPRO Agents":

"How To Spot a Spy"

One way to neutralize a potential activist is to get them to be in a group that does all the wrong things. Why?

1) The message doesn't get out.

2) A lot of time is wasted

3) The activist is frustrated and discouraged

4) Nothing good is accomplished. FBI and Police Informers and Infiltrators will infest any group and they have phony activist organizations established.

Does this man have any credibility? Only with those who think that Osama and Saddam are one and the same and, of course, the people who still believe that Iraq attacked us on September 11, 2001. Yes, that's the answer. Oh, and the scared.

Actually, I don't buy this foiled plot Bush announced today--that al Qaeda planned to fly a plane into the Library Tower. And one of the many reasons is because he had to read it to us. If there were any truth to his success at preventing a disaster, he would have been capable of telling it.

When I speak against this war and the lies of the Bush Administration that took us to Iraq where my nephew died, I don't have to look down at a piece of paper, look up, stumble, and, then, look down again. This boob didn't even give us the correct name of the tower. He called it the "Liberty Tower." If the plot were true, he'd sure as hell know what tower because it would have been discussed in the inner sanctum of the White House over and over. But George knows he's in trouble. His polls are down and he's using the same tired trick, this time with a little twist of creativity. One of his handlers should've told him to memorize it though. I guess Karl wasn't there to help plan this tactic and then stamp it with his seal of approval

Please, America, wake up. Bush is the boogeyman.

In the past, the lies that have come out of the White House have at least been potentially almost kind of a little bit true. Now we've reached a new low.

Today our President told the country that his illegal wiretapping allowed the US government to foil a terrorist plot four years ago to hijack an airplane using shoe-bombs and fly it into the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles.

Bullshit.

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

It's a crazy, polarized world. On the one hand, we have former GCN radio show host Daryl Bradford Smith declaring fellow radio talk show host and website proprietor Jeff Rense a Zionist stooge, and on the other hand we have a reactionary Horowitzite and Israeli settler Steve Plaut, calling him a "Holocaust Denier, a Neo-Nazi, and a UFO nut."It seems to be open season on poor Jeff Rense, as the creation of a "watch" blog slapped up in the templated blogger zone by a hereto unknown Nova Scotian indicates (it is originally called The Rense Watch). Rense is not a neo-Nazi, a Holocaust Denier—in the current Straussian dominated political climate, just about anybody who takes Israel to task is considered a Holocaust Denier—or is he a Zionist stooge, as Smith would have it. Neither Plaut nor Smith can satisfactorily demonstrate their claims.

Since Steve Plaut's career consists primarily of character assassination and slander—a fallback position for Straussian neocon “conservative” (not) and Jabotinsky Likudite apologists who are allergic to making reasoned arguments, because they really don't have any—his take on Rense is ho-hum predictable (he does not bother to explain exactly why Rense is a neo-Nazi, but then Straussian neocon wannabes and Jabotinsky fanatics never explain themselves), while Smith's take is seriously paranoid (as of late Smith has expended a lot of energy casting numerous folks in the deflated “patriot movement” as "crypto-Jews," whatever that means—as a matter of a fact, and Plaut would likely have a laugh at this one, Smith considers your humble blogger a "crypto-Jew" because on occasion Rense posts my blog entries on his “Holocaust Denier” website).

The deception that launched the invasion of Iraq now increasingly shapes media coverage of the occupation

Three years after invading Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair are still dipping into the trough of deception and disinformation that launched the war: hailing non-existent progress, declaring sanctimonious satisfaction with sectarian elections and holding out the mirage of early withdrawal. In reality, the occupation and divide-and-rule tactics have spawned death squads, torture, kidnappings, chemical attacks, polluted water, depleted uranium, bombardment of civilians, probably more than 100,000 people dead and a relentless deterioration in Iraqis' daily lives.

Much of this goes unreported in the British and American media, stripped of context or consigned to the small print.The headlines are reserved for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorism, Saddam Hussein's farcical trial and the perennial "exit strategy". We are fed the occupiers' spin, while words of scepticism are deemed jarring. Invited to join a popular BBC radio programme for Iraq's recent elections, I quoted George Bush's accidental brush with reality when he declared: "You can't have free and fair elections in Lebanon under Syrian occupation." An editor politely said: "Sorry Sami, but we are sticking to a positive spin on this one. I am sure we will invite you on other occasions."

A few days ago, a large-scale opinion poll conducted by Maryland University showed that 87% of Iraqis (including 64% of Kurds) endorsed a demand for a timetabled withdrawal of the occupiers. The findings were mostly ignored by the British media.

[Editor's note: This story first appeared in 1991 in Leisure Weekly, Keene, NH, USA, where the author was once managing editor.]

A good society is a means to a good life for those who compose it; not something having a kind of excellence on its own account. - Bertrand Russell

In a perfect world, there would be no soldiers, no police, no crime, no hatred, no oil spills. A ritually stabilized world population, structured so each person connected with an actualized family unit, would have behaviorally internalized integrity and civility and this was reflected in friendly social behavior and totally amiable international relations.

Osama, dead and buried, is the reason George Bush and the NSA are snooping your daughter's cell phone calls to her boyfriend, or reading your email, disregarding the Constitution, and turning America into an Orwellian police state. All of this is necessary because, who knows, your neighbor might be a member of a sleeper cell or a vegetarian.

“US President George W. Bush said today that a controversial domestic spying program that some critics say is illegal was necessary in light of new threats on an audiotape from Osama bin Laden,” reports the Herald Sun. “Listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously. When he says he's going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it,” said Bush, and that's why the government needs to know what books you check out of the library. “I take it seriously. And the people of NSA take it seriously. And most of the American people take it seriously as well.” Bush tells us the Bill of Rights must be sacrificed because “al-Qaeda” has placed “operatives inside of our country. They blend in with the civilian population. They get their orders from overseas. And then they emerge to strike from within.” Never mind that since nine eleven not one “al-Qaeda” terrorist has been apprehended and convicted of plotting against the United States.

It's amazing the way the corporate media simply passes along unsubstantiated claims and outright Bushcon propaganda as fact - for instance, over at the Chicago Tribune, it is said an "al-Qaida offshoot" is "spearheading the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq," in other words, according to Joel Greenberg of the Tribune, the al-Zarqawi black op designed to discredit Iraqis who are attempting to end the illegal occupation of their country are terrorists who blow up hotels in neighboring countries. No doubt Greenberg is paid well to make up such fairy tales - or rather pass along the lies and distortions contrived by his editors and the Bushcons.

"After first claiming responsibility for the Wednesday attacks on three hotels popular with Israelis and Westerners, al-Qaida in Iraq later issued a second Internet statement that appeared to acknowledge that its tactics may have backfired and undermined any support the group enjoyed among the Jordanian population," writes Greenberg. In other words, the intelligence ops who issue these "internet statements" for the dead al-Zarqawi's P2OG false flag terrorist group decided their initial story didn't hold water, so they are sending out a clarification via one of their secured servers.

"The group said the attacks were launched only after its leaders became 'confident that (the hotels) are centers for launching war on Islam and support the crusaders' presence in Iraq and the Arab peninsula and the presence of the Jews on the land of Palestine,'" Greenberg continues. "They also were, the group asserted, 'a secure place for the filthy Israeli and Western tourists to spread corruption and adultery at the expense and suffering of the Muslims.'" No mention here of the now scrubbed fact the "filthy Israelis" were tipped off and evacuated the hotel before the black op unit attacked. Moreover, as usual, the blasts killed not only innocent Arabs, but in this instance also "the commander of the Palestinian Special Forces, Bashir Nafeh, Jihad Fatouh, the commercial attaché at the Palestinian Embassy in Cairo, and Mosab Khorma, deputy Chairman of Cairo-Amman Bank in the Palestinian territories and Col. Abed Allun, another high-ranking Preventive Security forces official, were also killed in the three nearly simultaneous suicide bombings on American-owned hotels," according to Rumor Mill News. It sure is odd how al-Zarqawi kills important Palestinians for the Likudites.