"To say that the [Bush-Cheney] secret presidency is undemocratic is an understatement. I'm anything but skittish about government, but I must say this administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." - (former Nixon White House counsel) JOHN DEANut 0w9 "...This is the most corrupt and racist American administration in over 80 years". He said: "Some US journalist came up to me and said: 'How can you say this about President Bush?' Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction." - KEN LIVINGSTONE, the MAYOR of LONDON ohhwpe9ohhpe98ut0w98ut0w " We are talking about despotism. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with-- --even using much of the same language."8ut0w - GORE VIDALuuu ________________________________________ First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me - and by then there was no one left to speak out for me. - Pastor Martin Niemöller ________________________________________

"The US is really beyond reason now.

It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do.

There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany."

- Harold Pinter (below)

_______________________________________ An uncannily prescient warning from 50 YEARS AGO:

   The Danger of American Fascism
  By Henry A. Wallace
  The New York Times
  From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

  "The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact."

"...They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution."

  Sunday 09 April 1944

  On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

  What is a fascist?
  How many fascists have we?
  How dangerous are they?

  A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

  The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

  The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.

hThe American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

9If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

9gbgfbrr

  American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

     "Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has `arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the disenfranchisement of White men." - State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01

  The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

  Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

  Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases:

  The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler's game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.

"...This is the most corrupt and racist American administration in over 80 years." - Ken Livingstone, the MAYOR of LONDON

  The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection

  Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

  It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini's vaunted claim that he "made the trains run on time." In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler's claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

  Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second.It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.

"It's no longer possible to tell where the corporate world ends and government begins."

- Bill Moyers

"The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and Corporate power."

- Benito Mussolini, the inventor of fascism

As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:

 * Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique

* Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

  The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

"War is the natural state of mankind."

  Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

  It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and "with malice toward none and charity for all" go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

-From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies." - Kurt Vonnegut "Strange Weather Lately, |5.9.03 "...And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka "Christians", and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or "PPs." - From "Kurt Vonnegut Vs. the !*!@", In These Times ______________________________________________________________ "And we base it, our history, and our decision making, our future, on solid values. The first value is, we're all God's children." -- George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Jul. 16, 2003 "Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has `arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the disenfranchisement of White men."      - State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01   e8ut0w9 ohhwpe98ohhwp  ohpe9we98ut0w9ut0w9 "When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph Hitler were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together."    - Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 01-21-938ut0 8ohhwp  ohwpe9we98ut0w "I think Robertson stepped down because the position has already been filled ... [Bush] is that leader right now." - Gary Bauer, former president of the Family Research Council, crediting George W. Bush with Pat Robertson's decision to resign as president of the Christian Coalition; The Washington Post, December 23, 2001   ohwpe9w "He is the leader of the Christian right." - [italics theirs] Marshall Wittmann, formerly with the Christian Coalition, now with the Hudson Institute, referring to George W. Bush:The Washington Post, December 23, 2001 wp    "Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I'm proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans."     - Rep. Don Young (R-AK), Alaska Public Radio, 08-19-96   ohwpe9w oh  "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual gay sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family and that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. It all comes from, I would argue, the right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution." - Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), Associated Press, 04-22-03    u hhwpeohhwpe98ut0 "There is only one way to eliminate nuclear weapons...use them." - "Rush Limbaugh's Original 35 Undeniable Truths of Life " ohhwpeohhwpe98ut0w998ut0w9 "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation." - George W. Bush, quoted in Bob Woodward's "Bush at War". ohhwpe8ut0w9 "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." - Michael Ledeen , resident scholar in the "Freedom Chair" at the American Enterprise Institute.

  

"At the American Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds. I want to thank them for their service, but I also want to remind people that for 60 years, AEI scholars have made vital contributions to our country and to our government, and we are grateful for those contributiions." - The President Discusses the Future of Iraq. February 26, 2003 ohhwpe98ut0w9 "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"  - Barbara Bush, said on 'Good Morning America' the day before the Iraq war started, New York Times, 01-13-03 ohhwpohhwp8ut0we98ut0w9 "The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable. It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day." - U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt (R-WA) w9  "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." - Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02   ohhwpe9t0w9 "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." - Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02 ut0w hhwpe9u90w9e98ut0w9    "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for."    - Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95 hhwpe98ut0w90w9er, 08-26-02  o"Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him."    - Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton, as reported by journalist Steve Miner of KSUB radio who overheard his conversation, 11-01-98 ohhwpeohhwpe98ut0w998ut0w9 "Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past -- I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal withpotential trouble -- recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."  - John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01  "We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."    - Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95w90 hhwpe9u    "The homosexual blitzkrieg has been better planned and executed than Hitler's."   - Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA), The New Republic,

"I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life. And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions. The fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own."

That's right folks: pro-choice = terrorism. Hughes claimed afterwards that she would "never make such a comparison," which is odd considering that's exactly what she'd just done. Interestingly, Hughes' comments come only a few months after Education Secretary Rod Paige called America's largest teachers union a "terrorist organization" (see Idiots 145). Is anyone starting to spot a pattern here? If you're pro-choice, you're a terrorist. If you're a teacher, you're a terrorist. America - as far as the Bush administration is concerned, you are the terrorists.

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me -
and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöllerw9ut

________________________________________

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"To say that the [Bush-Cheney] secret presidency is undemocratic is an understatement. I'm anything but skittish about government, but I must say this administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." - (former Nixon White House counsel ) JOHN DEAN

Blood Money
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

"In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." - President Dwight Eisenhower, January 1961.

Thursday 27 February 2003

George W. Bush gave a speech Wednesday night before the Godfather of conservative Washington think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. In his speech, Bush quantified his coming war with Iraq as part of a larger struggle to bring pro-western governments into power in the Middle East. Couched in hopeful language describing peace and freedom for all, the speech was in fact the closest articulation of the actual plan for Iraq that has yet been heard from the administration.

In a previous truthout article from February 21, the ideological connections between an extremist right-wing Washington think tank and the foreign policy aspirations of the Bush administration were detailed.

The Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, is a group founded in 1997 that has been agitating since its inception for a war with Iraq. PNAC was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, a bill that painted a veneer of legality over the ultimate designs behind such a conflict. The names of every prominent PNAC member were on a letter delivered to President Clinton in 1998 which castigated him for not implementing the Act by driving troops into Baghdad.

PNAC has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to a Hussein opposition group called the Iraqi National Congress, and to Iraq's heir-apparent, Ahmed Chalabi, despite the fact that Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 counts of bank fraud. Chalabi and the INC have, over the years, gathered support for their cause by promising oil contracts to anyone that would help to put them in power in Iraq.

Most recently, PNAC created a new group called The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Staffed entirely by PNAC members, The Committee has set out to "educate" Americans via cable news connections about the need for war in Iraq. This group met recently with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice regarding the ways and means of this education.

Who is PNAC? Its members include:

 

* Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the PNAC founders, who served as Secretary of Defense for Bush Sr.;

* I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's top national security assistant;

* Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, also a founding member, along with four of his chief aides including;

* Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, arguably the ideological father of the group;

* Eliot Abrams, prominent member of Bush's National Security Council, who was pardoned by Bush Sr. in the Iran/Contra scandal;

* John Bolton, who serves as Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security in the Bush administration;

* Richard Perle, former Reagan administration official and present chairman of the powerful Defense Policy Board;

* Randy Scheunemann, President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who was Trent Lott's national security aide and who served as an advisor to Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2001;

* Bruce Jackson, Chairman of PNAC, a position he took after serving for years as vice president of weapons manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, and who also headed the Republican Party Platform subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy during the 2000 campaign. His section of the 2000 GOP Platform explicitly called for the removal of Saddam Hussein;

* William Kristol, noted conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, a magazine owned along with the Fox News Network by conservative media mogul Ruppert Murdoch.

The Project for the New American Century seeks to establish what they call 'Pax Americana' across the globe. Essentially, their goal is to transform America, the sole remaining superpower, into a planetary empire by force of arms. A report released by PNAC in September of 2000 entitled 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' codifies this plan, which requires a massive increase in defense spending and the fighting of several major theater wars in order to establish American dominance. The first has been achieved in Bush's new budget plan, which calls for the exact dollar amount to be spent on defense that was requested by PNAC in 2000. Arrangements are underway for the fighting of the wars.

The men from PNAC are in a perfect position to see their foreign policy schemes, hatched in 1997, brought into reality. They control the White House, the Pentagon and Defense Department, by way of this the armed forces and intelligence communities, and have at their feet a Republican-dominated Congress that will rubber-stamp virtually everything on their wish list.

The first step towards the establishment of this Pax Americana is, and has always been, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq. The purpose of this is threefold: 1) To acquire control of the oilheads so as to fund the entire enterprise; 2) To fire a warning shot across the bows of every leader in the Middle East; 3) To establish in Iraq a military staging area for the eventual invasion and overthrow of several Middle Eastern regimes, including some that are allies of the United States.

Another PNAC signatory, author Norman Podhoretz, quantified this aspect of the grand plan in the September 2002 issue of his journal, 'Commentary'. In it, Podhoretz notes that the regimes, "that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced, are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen." At bottom, for Podhoretz, this action is about "the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam."

This casts Bush's speech to AEI on Wednesday in a completely different light.

Weapons of mass destruction are a smokescreen. Paeans to the idea of Iraqi liberation and democratization are cynical in their inception. At the end of the day, this is not even about oil. The drive behind this war is ideological in nature, a crusade to 'reform' the religion of Islam as it exists in both government and society within the Middle East. Once this is accomplished, the road to empire will be open, ten lanes wide and steppin' out over the line.

At the end of the day, however, ideology is only good for bull sessions in the board room and the bar. Something has to grease the skids, to make the whole thing worthwhile to those involved, and entice those outside the loop to get into the game.

Thus, the payout.

It is well known by now that Dick Cheney, before becoming Vice President, served as chairman and chief executive of the Dallas-based petroleum corporation Halliburton. During his tenure, according to oil industry executives and United Nations records, Halliburton did a brisk $73 million in business with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. While working face-to-face with Hussein, Cheney and Halliburton were also moving into position to capitalize upon Hussein's removal from power. In October of 1995, the same month Cheney was made CEO of Halliburton, that company announced a deal that would put it first in line should war break out in Iraq. Their job: To take control of burning oil wells, put out the fires, and prepare them for service.

Another corporation that stands to do well by a war in Iraq is Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Ostensibly, Brown & Root is in the construction business, and thus has won a share of the $900 million government contract for the rebuilding of post-war Iraqi bridges, roads and other basic infrastructure. This is but the tip of the financial iceberg, as the oil wells will also have to be repaired after parent-company Halliburton puts out the fires.

More ominously is Brown & Root's stock in trade: the building of permanent American military bases. There are twelve permanent U.S. bases in Kosovo today, all built and maintained by Brown & Root for a multi-billion dollar profit. If anyone should wonder why the administration has not offered an exit strategy to the Iraq war plans, the presence of Brown & Root should answer them succinctly. We do not plan on exiting. In all likelihood, Brown & Root is in Iraq to build permanent bases there, from which attacks upon other Middle Eastern nations can be staged and managed.

Again, this casts Bush's speech on Wednesday in a new light.

Being at the center of the action is nothing new for Halliburton and Brown & Root. The two companies have worked closely with governments in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burma, Croatia, Haiti, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Somalia during the worst chapters in those nation's histories. Many environmental and human rights groups claim that Cheney, Halliburton and Brown & Root were, in fact, centrally involved in these fiascos. More recently, Brown & Root was contracted by the Defense Department to build cells for detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The bill for that one project came to $300 million.

Cheney became involved with PNAC officially in 1997, while still profiting from deals between Halliburton and Hussein. One year later, Cheney and PNAC began actively and publicly agitating for war on Iraq. They have not stopped to this very day.

Another company with a vested interest in both war on Iraq and massively increased defense spending is the Carlyle Group. Carlyle, a private global investment firm with more than $12.5 billion in capital under management, was formed in 1987. Its interests are spread across 164 companies, inemployedcluding telecommunications firms and defense contractors. It is staffed at the highest levels by former members of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Former President George H. W. Bush is himself by Carlyle as a senior advisor, as is long-time Bush family advisor and former Secretary of State James Baker III.

One company acquired by Carlyle is United Defense, a weapons manufacturer based in Arlington, VA. United Defense provides the Defense Department with combat vehicle systems, fire support, combat support vehicle systems, weapons delivery systems, amphibious assault vehicles, combat support services and naval armaments. Specifically, United Defense manufactures the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the M113 armored personnel carrier, the M88A2 Recovery Vehicle, the Grizzly, the M9 ACE, the Composite Armored Vehicle, the M6 Linebacker, the M7 BFIST, the Armored Gun System, the M4 Command and Control Vehicle, the Battle Command Vehicle, the Paladin, the Crusader, and Electric Gun/Pulse Power weapons technology.

In other words, everything a growing Defense Department, a war in Iraq, and a burgeoning American military empire needs.

Ironically, one group that won't profit from Carlyle's involvement in American military buildup is the family of Osama bin Laden. The bin Laden family fortune was amassed by Mohammed bin Laden, father of Osama, who built a multi-billion dollar construction empire through contracts with the Saudi government. The Saudi BinLaden Group, as this company is called, was heavily invested in Carlyle for years. Specifically, they were invested in Carlyle's Partners II Fund, which includes in that portfolio United Defense and other weapons manufacturers.

This relationship was described in a September 27, 2001 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled 'Bin Laden Family Could Profit From Jump in Defense Spending Due to Ties to US Bank.' The 'bank' in question was the Carlyle Group. A follow-up article published by the Journal on September 28 entitled ' Bin Laden Family Has Intricate Ties With Washington - Saudi Clan Has Had Access To Influential Republicans ' further describes the relationship. In October of 2001, Saudi BinLaden and Carlyle severed their relationship by mutual agreement. The timing is auspicious.

There are a number of depths to be plumbed in all of this. The Bush administration has claimed all along that this war with Iraq is about Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, though through it all they have roundly failed to establish any basis for either accusation. On Wednesday, Bush went further to claim that the war is about liberating the Iraqi people and bringing democracy to the Middle East. This ignores cultural realities on the ground in Iraq and throughout the region that, salted with decades of deep mistrust for American motives, make such a democracy movement brought at the point of the sword utterly impossible to achieve.

This movement, cloaked in democracy, is in fact a PNAC-inspired push for an American global empire. It behooves Americans to understand that there is a great difference between being the citizen of a constitutional democracy and being a citizen of an empire. The establishment of an empire requires some significant sacrifices.

Essential social, medical, educational and retirement services will have to be gutted so that those funds can be directed towards a necessary military buildup. Actions taken abroad to establish the preeminence of American power, most specifically in the Middle East, will bring a torrent of terrorist attacks to the home front.Such attacks will bring about the final suspension of constitutional rights and the rule of habeas corpus, as we will find ourselves under martial law. In the end, however, this may be inevitable. An empire cannot function with the slow, cumbersome machine of a constitutional democracy on its back. Empires must be ruled with speed and ruthlessness, in a manner utterly antithetical to the way in which America has been governed for 227 years.

And yes, of course, a great many people will die.

It would be one thing if all of this was based purely on the ideology of our leaders. It is another thing altogether to consider the incredible profit motive behind it all. The President, his father, the Vice President, a whole host of powerful government officials, along with stockholders and executives from Halliburton and Carlyle, stand to make a mint off this war. Long-time corporate sponsors from the defense, construction and petroleum industries will likewise profit enormously.

Critics of the Bush administration like to bandy about the word "fascist" when speaking of George. The image that word conjures is of Nazi stormtroopers marching in unison towards Hitler's Final Solution. This does not at all fit. It is better, in this matter, to view the Bush administration through the eyes of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini, dubbed 'the father of Fascism,' defined the word in a far more pertinent fashion. "Fascism," said Mussolini, "should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."

Boycott the French, the Germans, and the other 114 nations who stand against this Iraq war all you wish. France and Germany do not oppose Bush because they are cowards, or because they enjoy the existence of Saddam Hussein. France and Germany stand against the Bush administration because they intend to stop this Pax Americana in its tracks if they can. They have seen militant fascism up close and personal before, and wish never to see it again.

Would that we Americans could be so wise.

______________________________________________________________________

SEE ALSO: IN THEIR OWN WORDS: The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) : "Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President" and Iraq War Planned Pre-9/11? (CBS News, Jan. 10,2004) ______________________________________________________________________

Dick and Lynne's Christmas card

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dick Cheney overlooked more relevant quotes from Benjamin Franklin when he chose one for his Christmas card. Here are a few he should have used.

Dick Cheney, Vice President of the US, used the following quote by Benjamin Franklin on his Christmas card this year: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid ?"
The implication is that God must approve of the wars he is vice-presiding over, and be actively assisting the rise of the US empire.
Folowing the same logic, God must also be approving of and assisting the Iraqi resistance to the occupation. Is God therefore following classic US foreign policy by supporting both sides in a conflict to destabilise a region ? Let's leave Cheney to this theological mess, he's used to messes, and move on to more relevant quotations from Benjamin Franklin he could have used.
As regards the total mess the US has made in post-war Iraq (that means pre- Bush strutting about on an aircraft carrier) he could have used,
" By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."
As regards the onslaught on the people of Afghanistan following 9/11, we have,
"Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame."
And as regards both wars started by the Bush regime to feed the bottomless greed of their corporate buddies, we have,
"There never was a good war or a bad peace."
Finally, Franklin prophetically had the measure of Bush and Cheney as pathetic reincarnations of past greed and shame when he said,
".... the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see they are never satisfied, but always want more .... There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the people's money, then their lands, then make them and their children servants for ever ..." That kind of encapsulates the essence of the Bush regime, and if Cheney won't use it next Christmas, Bush really should.

________________________________________________________________________________________________ "We are talking about despotism. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with-- --even using much of the same language. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged." -Gore Vidal, LA WEEKLY, Nov.14-20, 2003 ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Legendary playwright Harold Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair

"The US is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany."

 

Angelique Chrisafis and Imogen Tilden
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,975048,00.html

The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush's administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the US was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched.

Pinter, 72, was at the National Theatre in London to read from War, a new collection of his anti-war poetry that had been published in the press in response to events in Iraq.

In conversation on stage with Michael Billington, the Guardian's theatre critic, Pinter said the US government was the most dangerous power that had ever existed.

The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida and Taliban suspects were being held, was a concentration camp.

The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an unelected president to take power and the British were exhausted from protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a "deluded idiot" Pinter hoped would resign.

After a big operation for cancer, Pinter returned to public life last year to speak out against American belligerence. He called it a return from a "personal nightmare" to an "infinitely more pervasive public nightmare".

The playwright said: "The US is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.

"Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. The US wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate that.

"In a policy document, the US has used the term 'full-spectrum domination', that means control of land, sea, air and space, and that is exactly what's intended and what the US wants to fulfil. They are quite blatant about it."

Pinter blamed "millions of totally deluded American people" for not staging a mass revolt.

He said that because of propaganda and control of the media, millions of Americans believed that every word Mr Bush said was "accurate and moral".

The US population could not be let off scot-free for putting the country under the control of an "illegally elected president - in other words, a fake".

He asked: "What objections have there been in the US to Guantanamo Bay? At this very moment there are 700 people chained, padlocked, handcuffed, hooded and treated like animals. It is actually a concentration camp.

"I haven't heard anything about the US population saying: 'We can't do this, we are Americans.' Nobody gives a damn. And nor does Tony Blair." Pinter added: "Blair sees himself as a representative of moral rectitude. He is actually a mass murderer. But we forget that - we are as much victims of delusions as Americans are."

In a British society where people were increasingly encouraged not to use their brains, the only way to protest was by "thought, intelligence and solidarity".

· Michael Billington was last night voted theatre critic of the year in a survey of theatregoers for the website whatsonstage.com.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

There's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there

watching ...

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

"A Monster of Obscene & Grotesque Proportions"
The Bush / Blair Gang

by HAROLD PINTER

Harold Pinter is a "Leading middle and late twentieth century dramatist: actor, director, playwright, screen writer, poet, critic, and political activist."

Full bio at: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hpinter.htm

December 4, 2002

There's an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the Irish town of Drogheda the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his lieutenants: "Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men." One of his aides said: "Excuse me, general. Isn't it the other way around?" A voice from the crowd called out: "Mr Cromwell knows what he's doing."

That voice is the voice of Tony Blair --"Mr Bush knows what he's doing."

The fact is that Mr Bush and his gang do know what they're doing and Blair, unless he really is the deluded idiot he often appears to be, also knows what they're doing. Bush and company are determined, quite simply, to control the world and the world's resources. And they don't give a damn how many people they murder on the way. And Blair goes along with it.

He hasn't the support of the Labour Party, he hasn't the support of the country or of the celebrated "international community". How can he justify taking this country into a war nobody wants? He can't. He can only resort to rhetoric, cliche and propaganda. Little did we think when we voted Blair into power that we would come to despise him. The idea that he has influence over Bush is laughable. His supine acceptance of US bullying is pathetic.

Bullying is, of course, a time-honoured US tradition. Addressing the Greek ambassador to the US in 1965, Lyndon Johnson said: "Fuck your parliament and your constitution. The US is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows continue itching the elephant they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good."

He meant what he said. Shortly afterwards the colonels, supported by the US, took over in Greece and the Greek people spent seven years in hell.

As for the US elephant, it has grown to be a monster of grotesque and obscene proportions.

The terrible atrocity in Bali does not alter the facts of the case.

The "special relationship" between the US and the UK has, in the last 12 years, brought about the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia. All this in pursuit of the US and UK "moral crusade" to bring "peace and stability" to the world.

The use of depleted uranium in the Gulf War has been particularly effective. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.'

-

Blair and Bush are of course totally indifferent to such facts, not forgetting the charming, grinning, beguiling Bill Clinton, who was apparently given a standing ovation at the Labour Party conference. For what? Killing Iraqi children? Or Serbian children?

Bush has said: "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders." Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.

The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction", and is prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow any inspection of its own factories.

It is holding hundreds of Afghans prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, allowing them no legal redress despite their being charged with nothing, holding them captive virtually for ever.

It is insisting on immunity from the international criminal court, a stance that beggars belief but which is now supported by the UK. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Tony Blair's contemptible subservience to this criminal US regime demeans and dishonours his country.

Harold Pinter is a playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist. This text was first delivered as a speech to an anti-war meeting at the House of Commons.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Harold Pinter - House of Commons Speech

Tuesday 21st January 2003

One of the more nauseating images of the year 2002 is that of our Prime Minister kneeling in the church on Christmas Day praying for peace on earth and good will towards all men while simultaneously preparing to assist in the murder of thousands of totally innocent people in Iraq.

I've been taken to task recently by the American Ambassador to Britain for calling the US Administration a blood thirsty wild animal. All I can say is: take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's face and the case is made.

I believe that not only is this contemplated act criminal, malevolent and barbaric, it also contains within itself a palpable joy in destruction. Power, as has often been remarked, is the great aphrodisiac, and so, it would seem, is the death of others.

The Americans have the ostensible support of the 'international community' through various sure-fire modes of intimidation; bullying, bribery, blackmail and bullshit. The 'international community' becomes a degraded entity bludgeoned into the service of a brutal military force out of control. The most despicable position is that of course of this country which pretends to stand shoulder to shoulder with its great ally while in fact being more of a whipped dog than anyone else. We are demeaned, undermined and dishonoured by our government's contemptible subservience to the United States.

The planned war can only bring about the collapse of what remains of the Iraqi infrastructure, widespread death, mutilation and disease, an estimated one million refugees and escalation of violence throughout the world, but it will still masquerade as a 'moral crusade', a 'just war', a war waged by 'freedom loving democracies', to bring 'democracy' to Iraq.

The stink of the hypocrisy is suffocating.

This is in reality a simple tale of invasion of sovereign territory, military occupation and control of oil.

________________________________________________________________________________________________


"An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country ---like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act." - Gore Vidal, LA WEEKLY, Nov.14-20, 2003

 

US Using 'Terrorist' Methods Over Guantanamo Prisoners: Former Hostage Terry Waite     By Agence France Presse     Friday 05 Febuary 2004 t0oit0t "When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany."    - Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 01-21-93 t0oit0t "International law? I better call my lawyer! I don't know what you're talking about, about international law." -George W. Bush, in response to the administration's handing out of reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Dec.11,2003

     LONDON - Former hostage Terry Waite, who was held in captivity by Islamic extremists for almost five years in Lebanon, said the United States was using terrorist methods in its treatment of detainees at a prison camp in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. "You do not defeat terrorism by adopting methods of terrorists," said Waite speaking alongside the families of British and French prisoners at the launch of a campaign for Guantanamo prisoners to be treated in accordance with international law.

     "I know what it's like to have no rights," Waite told a press conference the day before he and other representatives of the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission take their campaign to New York and then Washington.

     "My family know what it is like to have no information about me, even whether I am alive or dead," Waite said Friday.

     "There are many families around the world who are in this same position now because of Guantanamo Bay," he said.

     Five British detainees who are set to be freed by US authorities from Guantanamo Bay will be back in Britain next week, Maxine Fiddler, the sister of one of those to be released and also a member of the commission, said earlier Friday.

     "All that we know is that the Britons are being brought home sometime next week," she told BBC radio, adding she had not been given a specific date for her brother's return.

     The five are among nine Britons, and a total of more than 650 prisoners, at the isolated US naval base where US President George W. Bush's administration has been holding non-American suspects in its "war on terror".

     Guantanamo "detainees have been hooded, shackled and, I understand, kept in cages which in itself amounts to mental torture," Waite said. "There are reports that they have been subjected to very severe hardship in order to extract information.

     "I was blindfolded, shackled, kept in solitary confinement and interrogated," he said.

     This "should not be happening in a civilized nation", Waite said. "I have no truck with terrorism and what happened in the United States on September 11 was a terrible tragedy.

     "But I firmly believe that if you are going to deal with this problem you should follow due process," he said.

     "Some of these people may be guilty and some of them may be innocent," he added. "None of us will know unless they follow due process."

     The delegation, which includes actors and leading human rights activists Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, novelist Margaret Drabble and family members of European detainees, will submit letters to Bush at the White House on Monday.

     It will also lobby US legislators and appeal to the public about the prisoners' plight, dividing their time between New York and Washington before flying home on Thursday next week.

     The team is also planning to meet Democratic Party presidential hopeful John Kerry, who has criticized the US-led invasion of Iraq.

     "Our message is very simple," Corin Redgrave told journalists: "America has given the world a model of democracy which is founded on the rule of law, on fundamental human rights, including the right to fair trial, the right to silence. Guantanamo offers an alternative model to the world, a model where no rights are sustained."

     Waite, 64, was held from January 1987 until November 1991 -- much of the time in solitary confinement -- by a shadowy group calling itself Islamic Jihad.

     He was kidnapped while trying to negotiate the release of Western hostages in his capacity as a special envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican church.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

"America's gift to the world, freedom is The Almighty God's gift to every person who lives in the world." ­ George W. Bush "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ­ Benjamin Franklin

____________________________________________________________

Foundations are in place for martial law in the US By Ritt Goldstein Sydney Morning Herald

"On June 7 the former presidential counsel John Dean spoke of America's sliding into a 'constitutional dictatorship' and martial law."

July 27 2002

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/1027497418339.html

Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States.

When president Ronald Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua he issued a series of executive orders that provided the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with broad powers in the event of a "crisis" such as "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition against a US military invasion abroad". They were never used.

But with the looming possibility of a US invasion of Iraq, recent pronouncements by President George Bush's domestic security chief, Tom Ridge, and an official with the US Civil Rights Commission should fire concerns that these powers could be employed or a de facto drift into their deployment could occur.

On July 20 the Detroit Free Press ran a story entitled "Arabs in US could be held, official warns". The story referred to a member of the US Civil Rights Commission who foresaw the possibility of internment camps for Arab Americans. FEMA has practised for such an occasion.

FEMA, whose main role is disaster response, is also responsible for handling US domestic unrest.

From 1982-84 Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil defence preparations. Details of these plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal.

They included executive orders providing for suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president and FEMA.

A Miami Herald article on July 5, 1987, reported that the former FEMA director Louis Guiffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial law portion of the planning. The plan was said to be similar to one Mr Giuffrida had developed earlier to combat "a national uprising by black militants". It provided for the detention "of at least 21million American Negroes"' in "assembly centres or relocation camps".

Today Mr Brinkerhoff is with the highly influential Anser Institute for Homeland Security. Following a request by the Pentagon in January that the US military be allowed the option of deploying troops on American streets, the institute in February published a paper by Mr Brinkerhoff arguing the legality of this.

He alleged that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which has long been accepted as prohibiting such deployments, had simply been misunderstood and misapplied.

The preface to the article also provided the revelation that the national plan he had worked on, under Mr Giuffrida, was "approved by Reagan, and actions were taken to implement it".

By April, the US military had created a Northern Command to aid Homeland defence. Reuters reported that the command is "mainly expected to play a supporting role to local authorities".

However, Mr Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security, has just advocated a review of US law regarding the use of the military for law enforcement duties.

Disturbingly, the full facts and final contents of Mr Reagan's national plan remain uncertain. This is in part because President Bush took the unusual step of sealing the Reagan presidential papers last November. However, many of the key figures of the Reagan era are part of the present administration, including John Poindexter, to whom Oliver North later reported.

At the time of the Reagan initiatives, the then attorney-general, William French Smith, wrote to the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane: "I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a co-ordinating agency for emergency preparedness ... this department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an 'emergency czar' role for FEMA."

Criticism of the Bush Administration's response to September11 echoes Mr Smith's warning. On June 7 the former presidential counsel John Dean spoke of America's sliding into a "constitutional dictatorship" and martial law.

Ritt Goldstein is an investigative journalist and a former leader in the movement for US law enforcement accountability. He revealed exclusively in the Herald last week the Bush Administration's plans for a domestic spying system more pervasive than the Stasi network in East Germany.

 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Friendly Fire
Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba

By David Ruppe

ABC NEWS

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html

N E W  Y O R K, May 1, 2001 - In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

"These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

"The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."

Gunning for War

The documents show "the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," writes Bamford.

The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic]."

The plans were motivated by an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro, who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader in the Western Hemisphere - only 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The earlier CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower.The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.

"The whole thing was so bizarre," says Bamford, noting public and international support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro.

Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military - not democratic - control over the island nation after the invasion.

"That's what we're supposed to be freeing them from," Bamford says. "The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing."

'Over the Edge'

The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the military.

Whether the Joint Chiefs' plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.

The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.

There were reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election.

And at least two popular books were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing the limits against government policy of the day. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a "considerable danger" in the "education and propaganda activities of military personnel" had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress didn't get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.

"Although no one in Congress could have known at the time," he writes, "Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge."

Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext" operations at least through 1963.

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base - an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

"There really was a worry at the time about the military going off crazy and they did, but they never succeeded, but it wasn't for lack of trying," he says.

After 40 Years

Ironically, the documents came to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

As public interest in the assassination swelled after JFK's release, Congress passed a law designed to increase the public's access to government records related to the assassination.

The author says a friend on the board tipped him off to the documents.

Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.

"The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after," says Bamford.

 

READ MORE on OPERATION NORTHWOODS

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"To say that the [Bush-Cheney] secret presidency is undemocratic is an understatement. I'm anything but skittish about government, but I must say this administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." - (former Nixon White House counsel ) JOHN DEAN y0ih9o90i-dit9ggis- y0ih9o90i-dit9ggis- Planning for martial law: When the war hits home U.S. Plans for Martial Law, Tele-Governance, and the Suspension of Elections

By John Stanton and Wayne Madsen, Counterpunch, May 15 , 2002

http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen0514.html

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush Regime, the US Congress and senior personnel in the U.S. military have been busy planning their escape routes from Washington, D.C. and surrounding communities in the event that the continental United States is attacked by another 19 global insurgents possessing little more than wit, dedication, an unrepentant animosity towards America, and an ample dose of radioactive material packed inside an explosive-laden metallic suitcase. Corporate executives have ensured that they too will find a place in the bunker along side their effete government colleagues through organizations such as National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC). That group is composed of "up to 30 industry chief executives representing the major communications and network service providers and information technology, finance, and aerospace companies the NSTAC provides industry-based advice and expertise to the President on issues and problems related to implementing national security and emergency preparedness " Defense contracting giants play a prominent role on the NSTAC and include Lockheed Martin, SAIC, Oracle (the company that volunteered to develop a post-911 national identification database), Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and CSC. The chairman of the NSTAC also conveniently serves as an ex-officio member of Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge's President's Homeland Security Advisory Council.

The U.S. government and its military and corporate officials are fond of making the pitch to the American public that the U.S. Constitution mandates that their survival, above all others, is absolutely necessary to ensure that the government that emanates from that document survives a debilitating attack. It is astonishing that the American public believes such absurdities. But one has to admire the boldly craven and callous "doomsday" planning of the Bush regime and its military centurions and corporate nabobs, who take pleasure in gutting the environment, the workforce, the economy, and the world in general. These are the same people who played hide-and-seek with the American public in September 2001.

We the People?

On September 11, 2001, one of the commercial aircraft commandeered by suspected Saudi and Yemeni insurgents made its final approach to its destination, the Pentagon -- located roughly three miles across the Potomac River from the U.S. Capitol and White House in Washington, DC -- by following Columbia Pike, in Arlington, Virginia, to its target. The Pentagon is located adjacent to the glitzy Pentagon City Mall in Arlington, Virginia, not Washington, DC, as much of the media conveniently fudged the geographic difference. Although not Manhattan, Arlington is a densely packed and diverse community of close to 200,000 people. It hosts five high schools and two notable colleges: Marymount University and George Mason Law School. When the aircraft slammed into the Pentagon, residents of Arlington--including many in office buildings, stores, and schools in the "South Side" -- felt the thud of the explosion as the aircraft incinerated a block of the Pentagon and killed 123 employees and contractors on the ground and 64 on the Boeing 757.

Arlington fire fighters, police and EMT units were on the scene at the Pentagon -- as were their counterparts at the World Trade Centers in New York City-- within seconds of the aircraft's explosion. In Arlington's case, the rapidity of response was due to alert firefighters and police officers who noticed the aircraft off-path as it flew dangerously low over the heavily populated Columbia Pike corridor in Arlington that leads directly to the Pentagon. They alerted their colleagues in the Arlington Fire and Police Departments that something was terribly wrong. Someone at the controls of the aircraft knew to pick up the visual of the "Pike" as it is called by Arlingtonians, the same way other pilots pick up the Potomac River on visual to land at Reagan National Airport.

Local residents scrambled to get their youngsters out of schools where the hallways were filled with the crying and unsettled. Teachers, counselors, and coaches did all they could to calm student's nerves. Local firefighters and police were busy trying to give relief to the Pentagon structure and its mangled people. Local hospitals were alerted to receive Pentagon injured. The same scene was played out in New York City.

As mayhem broke loose in Arlington, Virginia, adjacent Washington, and New York City, the response of those who are tasked with national governance provides important clues as to who will live and die during the next disaster. Prior to 911, the only insight into continuity-of-government planning was provided by Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove, which through its characters, portrayed dimwitted "leaders"-- most un-elected -- sheltering themselves ahead of their populations.

911 Hide and Seek

Dick Cheney was hustled into a bunker and ultimately ended up in a cave running the Shadow Government. U.S. Supreme Court-anointed George Bush II and staff was whisked from an elementary school class--minus the children, teachers and school staff --- to undisclosed locations scattered across the land. Military installations barricade their gates. As F-16s patrolled the skies, government officials lauded the protection they were providing despite the fact that the fighters were there to shoot down commercial passenger planes. Leaders of both parties in Congress, and, in fact, all of Congress, were escorted from Washington, DC as if Gort from the Hollywood classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still" had gone on a rampage.

The Bush Regime's senior appointees and bureaucrats sprinted off to hardened bunkers or were taken by helicopter, like their military counterparts, to place like Site R in Pennsylvania to "monitor" the situation. Many of the local corporate senior managers and local newsreaders instructed the "public" to remain calm and not panic. A commonplace refrain from this lot was to "keep busy, be productive". The lone Superpower, with its arsenals and vaunted intelligence agencies convulsed from the handiwork of 19 insurgents, became enfeebled. In effect, the nation came under the rule of a tele-government. Undoubtedly, government and military planners -- and their think tanks - have discussed attack scenarios that include the institution of a Federal government tele-governing operation. Members of the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court justices, and the President and his cabinet could easily debate, vote, set policy, render legal decisions via encrypted communications lines, from the comfort of their protective bunkers, home shelters, and command posts on land, sea, and air. In the eventuality of nationwide martial law, these individuals, based on their cowardly performance on 911, would no doubt prefer the safe confines of Hitleresque bunkers. Such was the case on September 11, when, from the safety of a studio in a bunker and a phone line from a basement, the nation's "leadership" sought to govern in an ersatz manner.

The American public fell for this act from a "government" whose inserted president and appointees are the wealthiest Americans ever to oversee a US populace. And as the wealthiest and most corrupt person ever to occupy the White House uttered his inanities, "average people" were taking care of their post-attack communities in Arlington and New York City. As they suffered, the so-called civilian and military "leaders" ducked and covered in a classic CYA move. These are America's leaders who -- through sheer arrogance and stunning stupidity -- ignored reports from tireless FBI field agents that involved suspicious flight school activities and similar reports from gutsy Drug Enforcement Administration agents about the activities of Israeli "art student" spies who happened to be living in the same Florida and Texas neighborhoods as the future hijackers. The same "leaders" would stand by and watch the state of California get raped by Enron -- the Bush family's fund raising Ponzi scheme contrivance.

Where was the Senator or Representative, or Cabinet official (save for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) who said, "I'm staying with the people" and showed up in the bucket line? Where was the General or Admiral who said I'm staying with my people and worked with the body bags? Where was the Corporate Executive who, instead, was busy turning "patriotism" into profiteering to gain market share and recoup profits? Where will they be during the next attack?

As the U.S. military-industrial complex sells more and more advanced weaponry to Israel, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Pakistan, India, and Nepal and as more and more ethnic and religious minority groups, poor villagers, nomads, urban laborers, and sustenance farmers are massacred by national armies in the pay of ruling oligarchs and multinational corporations, will America's leaders care? No, it's good for business. After U.S. snubbing of the International Criminal Court (to protect war criminals like Henry Kissinger), Conventions on child soldiers and land mines, long-held international nuclear test-ban treaties, international protocols involving HIV/AIDS and global warming, will America's leaders care? No. When the Turkmens, Uzbeks, Afghans, Pakistanis, Azeris, Kurds, Turks, and Georgians tire of the special treatment that US Special Forces receive for guarding gas and oil pipelines -- and the young troops are killed-- will America's leaders notice? No.

Hand it to the CYA crowd, they now know that they can successfully sell the American public a rotten barrel of apples (or oil) and they will buy it gladly. Armed with that knowledge, the next attack may trigger enactment of national martial law.

Martial Law: Coming to a Neighborhood Near You?

The U.S. government has used martial law on numerous occasions, most often to quell domestic disturbances in specific locations around the country. According to the United States Constitution Online, during the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson imposed martial law in an area of New Orleans. When a judge demanded Jackson produce, through the writ of habeas corpus, a man arrested for sedition, Jackson ordered the arrest of the judge. in 1892 at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, rebellious mine workers blew up a mill and shot at strike breaking workers. Mine owners requested that the state's governor impose martial law and, to no surprise, he did. In 1914, federal troops were ordered by Woodrow Wilson to end the Coal Field Wars in Colorado. In 1934, dockworkers in San Francisco initiated a strike and the governor declared the dockyards subject to martial law empowering the National Guard to make arrests and try detainees. The Supreme Court opined twice on matters involving martial law in Ex Parte Milligan and Duncan v. Kahanamoku. In 1866, Milligan's Supreme Court writers proclaimed that Abraham Lincoln's imposition of martial law had been unconstitutional:

"Martial law destroys every guarantee of the Constitution and effectually renders the military independent of any superior to the civil power--the attempt to do which by the King of Great Britain was deemed by our fathers such an offense that they assigned it to the world as one of the causes which impelled them to declare their independence. Civil liberty and this kind of martial law cannot endure together; the antagonism is irreconcilable, and, in the conflict, one or the other must perish."

In 1946, the Supreme Court ruled that the military arrest of two civilians in Hawaii during World War II and their subsequent trial by military tribunals was unconstitutional.

In 2002, with the U.S. Supreme Court nothing more than a useful machination of the Bush regime, it seems likely that if Americans become subjected to a Bush declaration of martial law, any challenge to it would fail miserably. With that thought in mind, its useful to note that the Bush crowd has had plenty of experience with martial law and states-of-emergency. In 1992, Bush the Elder issued Executive Order 12804 in response to the Los Angeles riots. Hence, the US Army 7th Infantry Division and detachments of US Marines were deployed to mop up Los Angeles. That order was only issued after the city's poor had destroyed their neighborhoods. As an aside, that event would expose the CIA's penchant for selling drugs to inner city youth to raise funds for U.S. government covert operations in Central and South America. Bush the Elder was the overseer of much of this activity when he lorded over the Iran-contra scandal while Vice President under Ronald Reagan. One of Bush's underlings at the time, Oliver North, came up with a secret plan, along with the fascist-oriented Federal Emergency Management Agency (the key-masters for the doors to the bunkers), to declare martial law in the event of a "national crisis," including "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." Florida's provincial ruler Jeb Bush signed Executive Order 01-262 on September 11, 2001 declaring a State of Emergency in Florida. That was prior to similar declarations in New York and Virginia where the action was. "Jebbie" (that's what Bill Clinton calls him) also has the power to suspend elections for 30 days in a county under a State of Emergency.

The Bush family has managed to involve the United States in two wars; two invasions in Latin America, one that resulted in the fiery deaths of thousands of poor Panamanian barrio residents and another that resulted in the Bay of Pigs fiasco; aiding and abetting through murky financial investments America's Teutonic enemy in the last world war; corrupting the U.S. presidential election process; and making the wealthiest Americans and U.S. corporations richer while at the same cutting federal health, education, and welfare budgets and offloading those tasks to the overburdened states.

As the economy sputters with real unemployment close to 8 percent and as income disparity reaches astronomical proportions, it seems that the Bush regime will begin another war. Will that war be against Iraq, as Bush's neo-conservative hawks want? Or will the Seven Days in May crowd spin the Axis of Evil roulette wheel? Will the arrow point to Cuba? North Korea? Venezuela? The Bush family's record of death and destruction prompted one elderly couple in Baltimore, Maryland (the husband being a highly decorated WW II U.S. Army veteran) to say, " The Bush family should be barred from ever holding political office. Look what they've done to this nation!"

"An invasion of Iraq or any of the "Axis of Evil" or "Beyond Axis of Evil" nations is likely to result in a response that means American citizens will die here in the U.S."

 

And They Are Not Done Yet

An invasion of Iraq or any of the "Axis of Evil" or "Beyond Axis of Evil" nations is likely to result in a response that means American citizens will die here in the U.S. One incident, one aircraft hijacked, a "dirty nuke" set off in a small town, may well prompt the Bush regime, let's say during the election campaign of 2003-2004, to suspend national elections for a year while his government ensures stability. The precedent for such thinking is now enshrined in GOP politics. Another egotistical politician, Rudolph Giuliani, suggested that he should stay on as Mayor of New York a while longer past his term to make sure "New Yorkers would get through this thing". Would it be any surprise to hear Bush II say the same thing late in 2003 after insurgents would have destroyed part of a city or a chemical weapons cloud spreads over half of a small state?

Many closed-door meetings have been held on these subjects and the notices for these meetings have been closely monitored by the definitive www.cryptome.org. In the event of martial law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which has already been largely gutted by the USA Patriot Act and other Bush II actions, would cease to exist. Posse Comitatus has, for over 100 years, served as an important criminal law safeguard proscribing the use of the Army (later, the Air Force and Navy) to "execute the laws," except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or by Congress. With the abrogation of Posse Comitatus and the imposition of martial law, the military would, as it did during post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South, be able to arrest and detain civilians for any flimsy reason. Civilian detainees consigned to federal prisons would be under the control of the Bureau of Prisons while those detained by the military would be subject to the regulations imposed by military commanders. The writ of habeas corpus would be suspended and the family members and legal representatives for detainees would not have a right to see them. This situation has already occurred with those detained in the wake of September 11 without a formal imposition of martial law.

Military tribunals could, as they did in Hawaii during the war, try and convict U.S. civilians. If prisons could not hold all the detainees, the government already has plans to create or reactivate large prison camps in the South and West. Some of these were already used to detain Cuban, Vietnamese, and Haitian "boat people."

In the event of martial law, Draconian censorship laws would be implemented. Even now, the Patriot Act grants authority to obtain an order from the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court requiring any person or business to produce any books, records, documents, or items." That law would undoubtedly be extended to encompass the Internet as well. It should be of little wonder why the Pentagon has brought Iran-contra felon Admiral John Poindexter back from retirement to head the Office of Information Awareness. Coupled with the Office of Information Exploitation, Poindexter's office is seeking ways to identify, block, and determine the sources of seditious material posted on the Internet. Blocked web sites, confiscated computers and servers, and the arrest of non-conforming web site managers would become the rule of the day.

Not that it would need much in the way of pressure, but the broadcast media would similarly be required to air only that which has been approved by government censors. For example, U.S. Air Force scientists are soon to meet with CNN to figure out how to gather and disseminate information. During the war against Yugoslavia, CNN and National Public Radio hosted as interns U.S. Army psychological warfare operatives who worked on news stories concerning the war.

Similar closed-door meetings for "Continuity of Government" have taken place since September 11, 2001. Odd, it seems, that no "regular U.S. citizen" and few first responders have had any input into this process. Chalk that up to the fact that the entire process is classified and a matter of "national security" - the rubric that is used to justify the constant whittling away of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. If the general public knew that "Continuity" actually means that the abilities of the Internal Revenue Service to continue to collect taxes, the Customs Service to continue to collect duties, and the Environmental Protection Agency to continue to collect fines actually outweigh the health and safety of American citizens, they would be outraged. Hence the secrecy surrounding the continuity plans.

James Madison had in right in 1794 when he wisely warned about "the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government." The United States was founded by political sages like Madison, Jefferson, and Franklin. It will ultimately see its demise as a democracy through the likes of Bush II, his father, and the Trent Lotts and Dick Armeys that pervade the American body politic.

John Stanton is an Arlington, VA-based writer and Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC journalist and commentator on national security and intelligence affairs. They can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com Reprinted from Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"We are talking about despotism. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with-- --even using much of the same language. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged." -Gore Vidal, LA WEEKLY, Nov.14-20, 2003

"John Dean, of Watergate fame, says, "I've been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy." - "This Isn't America", By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, Tuesday 30 March 2004

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

 

"... the people grew fat and got lazy
Now their vote is a meaningless joke"

MAKING VOTES COUNT

    When the Umpires Take Sides
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Monday 29 March 2004

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/033004F.shtml

     When Katherine Harris had to decide which candidate won Florida in 2000, many people were disturbed to learn she was both the state's top elections official and co-chairwoman of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign. This year, that kind of unhealthy injection of partisanship into the administration of a presidential election could happen again.

     Ms. Harris's successor is staying out of partisan politics this year, but other secretaries of state are diving right in. In Missouri, as important a swing state as Florida, the secretary of state has a top position in the Missouri Bush-Cheney campaign. In Michigan, another battleground state, the secretary of state has signed on as co-chairwoman of the Bush-Cheney campaign, and has been supporting an openly Republican voter registration drive.

     When international observers monitor voting in new democracies, a key factor they look for is nonpartisan election administration. (A guidebook monitors use instructs that this can be done by the use of either "mainly professional" or "politically balanced" administrators.) This advice is rarely followed here at home. Decisions about voting machines and voter eligibility, and about who has won a close election, are often in the hands of partisan officials. The private companies that are rapidly moving into the elections field have political ties as well. To remove the appearance, and perhaps the reality, of bias, this culture of partisanship in election operations should be dismantled.

     In most states, the top election arbiter is a secretary of state who ran for office as a Republican or Democrat. While some try to carve out a more independent identity once in the job, many are actively involved in electioneering for their party, or in their own campaigns for higher office. West Virginia's secretary of state, who has installed a new statewide voter database and made important decisions about what voting machines the state will use, is running in his state's Democratic primary for governor. Ohio's secretary of state, who has been overseeing the purchase of new machines in his state, is also running for governor.

     Many of the decisions secretaries of state make have the potential to change an election's results. Purging voting rolls too aggressively, as Ms. Harris did in 2000,can change the party breakdown of the electorate. Not purging voters who are ineligible can, too. Decisions about whether and where to install more reliable voting machines can change the outcome. So can rules about processing new registrations and the location of polling places.

     Private companies are playing a large, and growing, role in election administration. This trend has the potential to "professionalize" the system, but unfortunately, most of these companies have hurt their own credibility by getting involved in partisan politics. The chief executive of Diebold, one of the leading electronic voting-machine manufacturers, made headlines when he wrote a fund-raising letter saying he was committed to seeing President Bush re-elected. Other leading companies have, more quietly, abandoned their own neutrality. Accenture, which put together a voter database for Florida and is preparing one for Pennsylvania, is a generous donor to both parties, although it gives about twice as much money to Republicans as Democrats.

     The idea of getting the secretary of state out of partisan politics is a foreign one to many states, where the job has always been an elective one. But at the very least, no state official who helps run elections should continue to be involved in political campaigns or other partisan activity. Companies that do this work should not make campaign contributions, and states should not hire them if they do. This country should start holding its election system to the same standards of impartiality that its election monitors routinely apply to others.

__________________________________________________________________________

 

 

"... the people grew fat and got lazy
Now their vote is a meaningless joke"

"... And this is more and more my view of the American people in general. They've allowed an election to be stolen in November 2000. They made no fuss." Gore Vidal, LA WEEKLY, Nov.14-20, 2003

    Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy      By Bob Fitrakis The Columbus Free Press "Maybe the Diebold decision makes sense, if you believe, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, that democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

Wednesday 25 February 2004

     The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent state officials, commute to their downtown Columbus offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called "Golden Finger," the safe route through the majority black inner-city near east side. The Broad Street BP station, just east of downtown, is the place where affluent suburbanites from Bexley can stop, gas up, get their coffee and New York Times. Those in need of cash visit BP's Diebold manufactured CashSource+ ATM machine which provides a paper receipt of the transaction to all customers upon request.

     Many of Taft's and President George W. Bush's major donors, like Diebold's current CEO Walden "Wally" O'Dell, reside in Columbus' northwest suburb Upper Arlington. O'Dell is on record stating that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President" this year. On September 26, 2003, he hosted an Ohio Republican Party fundraiser for Bush's re-election at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $1000 per couple, but O'Dell's fundraising letter urged those attending to "Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio Republican Party."

     According to the Columbus Dispatch: "Last year, O'Dell and his wife Patricia, campaigned for passage of two liquor options that made their portion of Tremont Road wet.

     On November 5, Upper Arlington residents narrowly passed measures that allowed fundraising parties to offer more than beer, even though his 10,800-square-foot home is a residence, a permit is required because alcohol is included in the price of fundraising tickets. O'Dell is also allowed to serve "beer, wine and mixed drinks" at Sunday fundraisers.

     O'Dell's fund-raising letter followed on the heels of a visit to President Bush's Crawford Texas ranch by "Pioneers and Rangers," the designation for people who had raised $100,000 or more for Bush's re-election.

     If Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote.

     Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine's calculations. Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function.

     State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio generate a "voter verified paper audit trail." Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to "derail" election reform. Blackwell's political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform, became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor's mansion.

    Voter fraud

     A joint study by the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology following the 2000 election determined that between 1.5 and 2 million votes were not counted due to confusing paper ballots or faulty equipment. The federal government's solution to the problem was to pass the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

     One of the law's stated goals was "Replacement of punch card and lever voting machines." The new voting machines would be high-tech touch screen computers, but if there's no paper trail, how do you know if there's been a computer glitch? How can the results be trusted? And how do you recount to see if the actual votes match the computer's tally?

     Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, argues that without a paper trail, these machines are open to massive voter fraud. Diebold has already placed some 50,000 machines in 37 states and their track record is causing Harris, Johns Hopkins University professors and others great concern.

     Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold's electronic voting software contained "stunning flaws." The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access. Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report, claiming the researchers came to "a multitude of false conclusions."

     Perhaps to settle the issue, someone illegally hacked into the Diebold Election Systems website in March 2003 and stole internal documents from the company and posted them online. Diebold went to court to stop, according to court records, the "wholesale reproduction" of some 13,000 pages of company material.

     The Associated Press reported in November 2003 that: "Computer programmers, ISPs and students at [at] least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received cease and desist letters" from Diebold. A group of Swarthmore College students launched an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign to keep the hacked documents permanently posted on the Internet.

     Harris writes that the hacked documents expose how the mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as winner of Florida after someone "subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush." Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold, reads: "I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded." Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents "unauthorized" replacement votes in Volusia County.

     Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report and noted, "According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the election for Bush." The first person to call the election for Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

z

    Incestuous relationships

     Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an explanation have looked to Diebold's history for clues. The electronic voting industry is dominated by only a few corporations ­ Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S combined count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic votes.

     In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S's originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family's ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.

     In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, ". . . primarily funded by evangelical Christians ­ particularly the wealthy Ahmanson family of Irvine ­ the [Discovery] institute's $1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and postdoctoral research." The chief philanthropists of the Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist science and education in California, are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

     According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson's politics.

     "On the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades to political projects both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into President Clinton's sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White House insider Vincent Foster)," wrote The Independent last November.

     The Sunday Mail described an individual as, ". . . a fundamentalist Christian more in the mould of U.S. multi-millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who uses his fortune to promote so-called traditional family values . . . by waving fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson has the ability to cajole candidates into backing his right-wing Christian agenda.

     Ahmanson is also a chief contributor to the Chalcedon Institute that supports the Christian reconstruction movement. The movement's philosophy advocates, among other things, "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards."

         The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.

     In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elections, Hagel's ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services, confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel's first election victory was described as a "stunning upset" by one Nebraska newspaper.

     Hagel's official biography states, "Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Hagel worked in the private sector as the President of McCarthy and Company, an investment banking firm based in Omaha, Nebraska and served as Chairman of the Board of American Information Systems." During the first Bush presidency, Hagel served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations (G-7 Summit).

     Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Election Systems and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold's original electronic voting machine software. Thus, the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic voting in the United States.

     Like Ohio, the State of Maryland was disturbed by the potential for massive electronic voter fraud. The voters of that state were reassured when the state hired SAIC to monitor Diebold's system. SAIC's former CEO is Admiral Bill Owens. Owens served as a military aide to both Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who now works with George H.W. Bush at the controversial Carlyle Group. Robert Gates, former CIA Director and close friend of the Bush family, also served on the SAIC Board.

    Diebold's track record

     Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were "fixed by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated companies." The scoop investigation concluded that: "The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines." Those machines were supplied by Diebold.

     Wired News reported that ". . . a former worker in Diebold's Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state's 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials." Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes ­ 18,181.

     Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its equipment.

     Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that one of the favorite tactics of the CIA during the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s was to control countries by manipulating the election process. "CIA apologists leap up and say, 'Well, most of these things are not so bloody.' And that's true. You're giving politicians some money so he'll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it's still illegal intervention in other country's affairs, raising the question of whether or not we're going to have a world in which laws, rules of behavior are respected," Stockwell wrote. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriega's rise to power in Panama and in Marcos' attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many of the Reagan administration's staunchest supporters were members of the Council on National Policy.

 

    The perfect solution

     Ohio Senator Fedor continues to fight valiantly for Senate Bill 167 and the Holy Grail of the "voter verified paper audit trail." Proponents of a paper trail were emboldened when Athan Gibbs, President and CEO of TruVote International, demonstrated a voting machine at a vendor's fair in Columbus that provides two separate voting receipts.

     The first paper receipt displays the voter's touch screen selection under plexiglass that falls into a lockbox after the voter approves. Also, the TruVote system provides the voter with a receipt that includes a unique voter ID and pin number which can be used to call in to a voter audit internet connection to make sure the vote cast was actually counted.

     Brooks Thomas, Coordinator of Elections in Tennessee, stated, "I've not seen anything that compares to the Gibbs' TruVote validation system. . . ." The Assistant Secretary of State of Georgia, Terrel L. Slayton, Jr., claimed Gibbs had come up with the "perfect solution."

     Still, there remains opposition from Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell. His spokesperson Carlo LoParo recently pointed out that federal mandates under HAVA do not require a paper trail: ". . . if Congress changes the federal law to require it [a paper trail], we'll certainly make that a requirement of our efforts." LoParo went on to accuse advocates of a paper trail of attempting to "derail" voting reform.

     U.S. Representative Rush Holt introduced HR 2239, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail so that voters may verify that their screen touches match their actual vote. Election officials would also have a paper trail for recounts.

     As Blackwell pressures the Ohio legislature to adopt electronic voting machines without a paper trail, Athan Gibbs wonders, "Why would you buy a voting machine from a company like Diebold which provides a paper trail for every single machine it makes except its voting machines? And then, when you ask it to verify its numbers, it hides behind 'trade secrets.'"

    Maybe the Diebold decision makes sense, if you believe, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, that democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.

 

"If I may, I'd like to remind you what I said at the State of the Union. Liberty is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to each and every person. And that's what I believe. I believe that when we see totalitarianism, that we must deal with it." -- George W. Bush, prime time press conference, White House, Mar. 6, 2003 ____________________________________________________________________________

 

When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

by Thom Hartmann

Published on Sunday, March 16, 2003 by CommonDreams.org

Thom Hartmann llived and worked in Germany during the 1980s, and is the author of over a dozen books, including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight." This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.


T
he 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States,
and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.

It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.

Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to assure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.

He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at out disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.

But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (later known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.

With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.

It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous British people that giving in to this leader's new first-strike doctrine would bring "peace for our time." Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.

In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself. Those questioning him were labeled "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.

Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn't enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but threatening the middle class's way of life.

A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; the nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in the name of national security. It was the end of Germany's first experiment with democracy.

As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.

February 27, 2003, was the 70th anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."

Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.

We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violent warfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which, while generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable "shock and awe" among the nation's leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book "Shock And Awe" published by the National Defense University Press.

Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using war as a tool to keep power: "fas-cism (fbsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.

______________________________________________________

 

'Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and associations; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.'

- Adolph Hitler's 1933 speech calling for 'an Enabling Act' for 'the protection of the People and the State' after the catastrophic Reichstag fire

"He knows that we are waging this war for a better peace, that we are fighting for the happiness of people who have so often been oppressed by their governments."jj "No power in the world will make us deny our duty, or forget even for a moment our historical task of maintaining the freedom of our people." - Joseph Goebbels, chief Nazi propagandist

_____________________________________________________________________________________

"We are talking about despotism. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with-- --even using much of the same language. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged." -Gore Vidal, LA WEEKLY, Nov.14-20, 2003

______________________________________________________

"I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America." - BILL MOYERS

"The US is really beyond reason now.

It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do.

There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany."

- playwright Harold Pinter

12 warning signs of fascism

( CLICK HERE )

___________________________________________________________________________________

(Goering): ". . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

Hermann Goering

(Gilbert) : "There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

(Goering): "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

_____________________________________________________________________________________

 

"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government." - Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.

444444444444444444444444444444444444444444 "We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." - David Rockefeller - Statement to the United Nations Business Council, 1994 444444444444444444444444444444444444444444

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries." - David Rockefeller, ( founder of the Trilateral Commission), in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.

 

 

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson

 

 

________________________ ANYONE BUT BUSH  IN '04 for the survival of the planet ________________________


To (NOT-SO) FRIENDLY FASCISM Part 2
When Democracy Fails
/_____________ / Smart People nrfnnfnf/ Bushwars / Bushlies / Cheneylies / Incurious George / St. George / King George (the madness of) / George the Lionheart and the New Crusades / George of Orwell / Georgie Warbucks / George W. Hoover / Vanishing Votes // Death Culture / Hall of Shame // 911 Accountability / (Not-so) Friendly Fascism / Project For A New American Perpetual War / Fanning the Flames of Fear, Loathing and Terror / T h e C o l l a t e r a l C h i l d r e n / About This Site: A Gathering Danger _____________// / More writings by, and interviews with SMART PEOPLE on our Dire Situation: / Kurt Vonnegut Speaks  / Bill Moyers Rallies / Gore Vidal Rants / Mark Twain Sings _____________// ...

FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.