"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows, that the Iraq war is largely about oil" - Alan Greenspan former head of the Federal Reserve

Tin-pot Iraqi dictator-in-waiting, Ayad Allawi was the US-appointed 'interim-Iraqi Prime Minister' for 9 months in 2004-5. Today he defeated incumbent Nouri al-Maliki to the position of Prime Minister by 10,000 votes according to reports.

Now there's one more CIA stooge ruling over yet another formerly sovereign nation and people.

Two weeks ago Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman introduced a stunning piece of draconian diatribe euphemistically called the bipartisan Senate Bill 3081, or the 'Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010'¹. The bill is 'bipartisan' in the sense that it is the product of at least two different types of psychopathic personality disorder.

Constitutional expert, lawyer and author Glen Greenwald described the bill as:

"probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect - including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they 'may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,' which everyone expects to last decades, at least."²

And that's pretty much it, although, it's not merely at the president's discretion that all you disgruntled citizens can be detained indefinitely, but rather at the discretion of the entire psychopathic U.S. political and corporate elite. Of course, you wouldn't be called a disgruntled citizen, but rather an 'unprivileged enemy belligerent' and you would be defined as someone:

"who has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners"

While the wording here appears to target bone fide 'terrorists', that is to say, those people who have been set up as terrorists by the US, Israeli and British governments and their affiliated Intel agencies, it is broad enough to potentially include anyone who protests, or is otherwise 'hostile' to the US government.

Have you ever felt hostile to the US government? Have you ever, perchance, marched down a street with a placard that flagrantly denounced the US government in some way? If so, you may have been 'materially supporting hostilities against the United States.'

But what interests me most is not so much that the bill was introduced (it's been a long time coming for anyone with eyes to see) but rather the string of 'homegrown terrorism' cases that have popped up in the mainstream media since. Coincidence?

You've gotta be kidding.

With the frequent and ongoing Climategate revelations covered in the past months' Connecting the Dots, we've noticed some interesting new developments coming from some even more interesting places. On March 15 The Weekly Standard published an article called 'In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign' by Steven F. Hayward. For those who do not know, The Weekly Standard is the Neocon journal par excellence. Its founder and editor is William Kristol, PNAC member and son of CIA asset Irving Kristol. Kirstol and Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle were two of the major shapers of Bush's war policy. Perle, of course, is a long-time spy for Israel. As an aid for Senator Henry Jackson in 1970, Perle was caught passing classified information to the Israeli embassy. Jackson refused to fire him, and since then Perle's influence has only grown.

One of the first to cry for a Global War on Terror, Kristol has stacked his editorial staff with an array of Israeli lobbyists and fellow Perle cronies: peddler of the false Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection, Stephen Hayes; George Bush speech-writer, co-author of An End to Evil (with his pal, Richard Perle) and all-round slime-ball David Frum; ex-psychiatrist turned Fox news regular and "Israel-can-do-no-wrong" cheerleader Charles Krauthammer; among others. In other words, The Weekly Standard editorial staff is staffed with a concentrated dose of Neocon psychopaths, schizoids, and Israel-first sycophants.

The recent editorial by Hayward, which provides a decent summary of the "unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science" first exposed by the leak of the Climate Research Unit emails in November, ends with the following prediction:

A Wall Street Psychopath?

In 1960 Bernie Madoff founded his Wall Street firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. As chairman of its Board of Directors until his arrest in December of 2008, Madoff saw his firm (and himself) rise to prominence on Wall Street, developing the technology that became NASDAQ, the first and largest electronic stock exchange in America, in the process. A multimillionaire with over $800-million in shared assets with his wife and high school sweetheart, Ruth Alpern, Madoff was well-regarded as a financial mastermind and prolific philanthropist. He exuded an aura of wealth, confidence, and connections, and many trusted him as a pillar of the community. Sounds like a great guy, huh?

His humanitarian image was supported by his work for various nonprofit groups like the American Jewish Congress and Yeshiva University in New York, the various commissions and boards on which he sat, and the millions he donated to educational, political, cultural, and medical causes. As his firm's website made clear at the time (it has now been removed): "Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark." It's funny how things change with a little perspective and a pattern emerges only in retrospect. It wasn't until December of 2008 that the public became aware that this "personal interest" was anything but one of integrity, and that image stopped being taken for reality.

An article in Sunday's UK Guardian newspaper tells the story of Observer reporter Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian who was hanged in Iraq as a spy 20 years ago by Saddam Hussein.

In penning the article, the author Donald Trelford, who was editor of the Observer when Bazoft was arrested, seeks to "remember a friend and colleague whose death served as a warning to the world about Saddam Hussein".

The official story goes like this:

In September 1989, Bazoft went to Iraq to cover elections in Kurdistan. On the day his press party arrived in Baghdad, a massive explosion occurred at a military complex in the city.

Farzad met the deputy foreign minister, Nizam Hamdoun, and asked to visit the site. He enlisted the help of Daphne Parish, a British nurse he had met on a previous visit. They went on successive days to take photographs and collect soil samples, though they always stayed on public roads.

While waiting for an Iraq Airways flight to London on the 15 September, he was picked up at Baghdad airport and taken for interrogation by Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat secret police.

On November 1st, the Iraqis issued a tape showing him "confessing" to being a spy for Israel. Earlier the Iraqis had claimed he was spying for Britain. On March 15th 1990 he was hanged.

As a veteran journalist, it is appalling that Trelford is content to limit his analysis of the case of Bazoft to the official story. With the US and Israel winding up the world's press to prepare the public for the first Gulf "war", there was good reason to be suspicious of any reports that demonized Saddam in the 1989-1990 period. With everything we know now about how willing Western politicians are to fabricate rationale for war, it is nothing short of yellow journalism to hold fast to the official story. Worse still is the fact that a much more plausible account of the case of Farzad Bazoft, from a truly reliable source - ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky - has been available to Trelford for 15 years.

Earthquakes dominate once again this month as a string of strong quakes prompts us to ask, "What in Earth is going on?" That the US government would engage in such nefarious activity to induce a strategically-placed earthquake in Haiti is a frightening prospect. Could any or all of the recent cluster have been deliberately induced? Or have we just witnessed Nature's awesome retort to the Evil Empire's puny arsenal? We'll examine the political state of play in Chile on the occasion of its most powerful earthquake in 50 years and recall the notorious roots of the Pathocrats' economic shock therapy that's so prevalent today.

Record snowfall blanketed all but Hawaii in the US and freezing temperatures froze ships mid-stream in Europe, yet Canada emerged from the cruelest of winters warm and dry. We would ask the "climatologists" for their take on this but they're too busy modelling alternate realities, answering corruption charges and just generally keeping well below the radar. We'll present an alternative Cosmic Climate Change hypothesis that honours the scientific data and doesn't require sleight of hand to "hide the decline."

Financial terrorism from Wall Street's finest banksters struck gold again this month with a false-flag attack on the euro. Economic warfare, like any other form of warfare, sears a trail of tears and destruction through innocent peoples' lives, only it comes in the covert manner of currency manipulations and speculative attacks on target economies. And just as with conventional warfare, its psychopathic conspirators often hatch their murderous plans over dinner and fine wine. From a meeting in Manhattan we'll chart the Evil Empire's desperate pitch to keep its paper-worthless dollar atop the sinking pile.

When a tiny country like Israel can manipulate empires from afar, what is there to stop it walking into its neighbour's house and murdering him? Well, nothing, as the Mossad brazenly demonstrated in January. But if Dubai can have Interpol serve arrest warrants where no other country dares to tread, we wonder if the international exposure Mossad Murder Inc received this month has severely compromised its cover of darkness? More light, say we!

Join us as we Connect the Dots in February...

Some days ago we received the following letter from a reader. We decided to publish it with a few observations of our own to illustrate the amount of disinformation the average seeker of truth needs to face.

Reader: [...] I attended the Alternative Research Community (Arc) Convention at Bath over the weekend, and I'd like to make a brief report. It was simultaneously good to be talking to people who were looking for answers, but at the same time, for me, it was also depressing. It seems the level of discernment out there is just... low, to the point of non-existent. There are many who seem to be basically nice people, including the organisers, genuinely looking for a path to knowledge and trying to navigate all the information that floods the alternative scene, but it was really hard work dealing with the simply huge problem of both disinfo and naivete. It is like they live in a whole different imaginary universe. The road to hell is paved with good intentions indeed.

People just assume that because they are on the 'alternative' side, they have the Truth and it won't be taken from them. This is a pity because quite a few of them do seem sincere, but they are like sheep under the guidance of wolves. Listening to so much crap from some of the speakers - while others were just too superficial and speculative - and seeing how much is uncritically accepted by the audience made me want to go have a shower by the end.

Israel is a young nation, yet its intelligence apparatus has a long and sordid history. From staging Muslim terror attacks in Egypt in 1954, to orchestrating 'Arab' terrorist hijackings in 1976, to directing 'al-Qaeda' terror attacks in 2006, there seems little that the Mossad will not do in an effort to give legitimacy to the Israeli government's slow genocide of the Palestinian people and bolster the American government's phony 'war on terror'.

That the Mossad eagerly assassinates all enemies of Israel (real, imagined and fabricated) is generally accepted, if not condoned, but the details of precisely how agents go about their dirty work has remained sketchy to say the least, with the revelations of former agents like Victor Ostrovsky the most reliable reference. The recent murder of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel, however, gives a never-before seen inside look at the extent to which the Mossad operates 'by way of deception'.

Beginning immediately after World War II and continuing in the decades after the imposition of Soviet dictatorship on the countries of Eastern Europe, a group of scientists - primarily Polish, Czech, and Hungarian - secretly collaborated on a scientific study of the nature of totalitarianism. Blocked by the State Security Services from contact with the West, their work remained secret, even while American researchers like Hervey Cleckley and Gustave Gilbert were struggling with the same questions.¹ The last known living member of this group, a Polish psychologist and expert on psychopathy named Andrzej Łobaczewski (1921-2007), would eventually name their new science - a synthesis of psychological, psychiatric, sociological, and historical studies - "ponerology", a term he borrowed from the priests of the Benedictine Abbey in the historic Polish village of Tyniec. Derived from poneros in New Testament Greek, the word suggests an inborn evil with a corrupting influence, a fitting description of psychopathy and its social effects.

Most of what we know about this research comes from precious few sources. Łobaczewski's sole contact with the researchers was through Stefan Szuman (1889 - 1972), a retired professor who passed along anonymous summaries of research between members of the group. The consequences for being discovered doing this type of forbidden research were severe; scientists faced arrest, torture, and even death, so strict conspiracy amongst their little group was essential. They safeguarded themselves and their work by sharing their work anonymously. This way, if any were arrested and tortured, they could not reveal names and locations of others, a very real threat to their personal safety and the completion of the work. Łobaczewski only shared the names of two Polish professors of the previous generation who were involved in the early stages of the work - Stefan Błachowski (1889 - 1962) and Kazimierz Dąbrowski (1902 - 1980).² Błachowski died under suspicious circumstances and Łobaczewski speculates that he was murdered by the State police for his part in the research. Dąbrowski emigrated and, unwilling to renounce his Polish citizenship in order to work in the United States, took a position at the University of Alberta in Canada, where he was able to have dual citezenship. A close reading of Dąbrowski's published works in English shows the theoretical roots of what would become ponerology.³

There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

- Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men

Over the last decades the Coen brothers have repeatedly proven themselves to be masters of portraying the tragicomic realities of American life. From the quirky and trivial to the depths of moral failings and utter depravity, their films often focus on the criminal mind and its varied psychological roots. They get to the heart of human weakness, the tempting lure of a "free lunch", and the inscrutable darkness of the psychopathic mind. Most notable of recent years was Javier Bardem's rendition of Anton Chigurh, the psychopathic killer from the Coens' Academy Award-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men. In many ways recalling the Coens' earlier work, Fargo, the audience experiences the film's drama through the eyes and conscience of a county Sheriff in West Texas, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). We share his confusion and pained desire to understand the senseless violence against which he struggles every day.