John Negroponte, Henry Kissinger understudy and death squad ambassador to Honduras, has admitted the Straussian neocon and Jabotinsky Likudite plan to break "all Arab states into smaller units" is on schedule (a plan going back at least to Moshe Sharett, the second Israeli PM, according to Livia Rokach, daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the Sharett government), thus implementing "balkanization and vassalization," as Rokach described it in her book, Israel's Sacred Terrorism and detailed in Oded Yinon's A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.

American Heroin

It oftentimes boggles the mind to try and understand the ease with which the Establishment can manipulate the American citizenry into another warmongering escapade, this time an ominous foray into the Persian lands of Iran, a nation rich in history, culture, location and most importantly to the Evil Empire, oil and gas. Yet upon further inspection it is easy to comprehend this phenomenon, for we live, as Gore Vidal has labeled it, inside the United States of Amnesia, a country where all semblance of the yesterday becomes but a haze of blatant forgetfulness and convenient whitewash, a black hole of Alzheimer's-like darkness from where no recollection of past lessons, mistakes, errors or history can be seen or touched.

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

If we are to believe the corporate media, Bush's “secret eavesdropping program” is useless and “out-dated” because a shrewd “al-Qaeda” has “undoubtedly has changed its means of communication to avoid Washington's monitoring,” according to the Associated Press. “Does anyone really believe that, after 50 days of having this program on the front page of our newspapers, across talk shows across America, that al-Qaida has not changed the way that it communicates?” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the House intelligence-committee chairman, thus expecting us to believe al-Qaeda once utilized cell phones and email as it planned terrorist attacks. Since “al-Qaeda” is actually al-CIA-duh, it has no need to communicate via cell phone or email, that is unless it wants to leave a conspicuous trail to be used later to frame patsies.

As we know, the massive NSA violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution at the behest of the Bush neocons is not intended to catch “al-Qaeda” bad guys, but rather monitor and eventually snare Americans who disagree with the Straussian neocons, Machiavellian followers of Leo Strauss and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt who hate the Bill of Rights and the very idea of a constitutional republic and are in the process of destroying its last proud vestiges. NSA snooping has nothing to do with preventing rogue intelligence terrorism and everything to do with subverting the liberties of American citizens. In the 1960s and 70s, the NSA compiled intercepts on U.S. peace activists and it was this unchecked and illegal behavior that resulted in the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Bush (or rather his neocon handlers) circumvented the FISA process precisely because they were (and are) snooping on their domestic enemies—it has absolutely nothing to do with the CIA-created fake terrorist group called “al-Qaeda.”

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.