Monday, February 13, 2006
Another day in the empire!
NSA Snoop Fiasco: Democrats Sell the Constitution Down the River
Monday February 13th 2006, 10:25 am
If we are to believe the corporate media, Bush's "secret eavesdropping
program" is useless and "out-dated" because a shrewd "al-Qaeda" has
"undoubtedly has changed its means of communication to avoid
Washington's monitoring," according to the Associated Press. "Does
anyone really believe that, after 50 days of having this program on the
front page of our newspapers, across talk shows across America, that
al-Qaida has not changed the way that it communicates?" said Rep. Peter
Hoekstra
the House intelligence-committee chairman, thus expecting us to believe
al-Qaeda once utilized cell phones and email as it planned terrorist
attacks. Since "al-Qaeda" is actually al-CIA-duh, it has no need to
communicate via cell phone or email, that is unless it wants to leave a
conspicuous trail to be used later to frame patsies.
As we know, the massive NSA violation of the Fourth Amendment of the
Constitution at the behest of the Bush neocons is not intended to catch
"al-Qaeda" bad guys, but rather monitor and eventually snare Americans
who disagree with the Straussian neocons, Machiavellian followers of Leo
Strauss and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt who hate the Bill of Rights and
the very idea of a constitutional republic and are in the process of
destroying its last proud vestiges. NSA snooping has nothing to do with
preventing rogue intelligence terrorism and everything to do with
subverting the liberties of American citizens. In the 1960s and 70s, the
NSA compiled intercepts on U.S. peace activists and it was this
unchecked and illegal behavior that resulted in the creation of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Bush (or rather his
neocon handlers) circumvented the FISA process precisely because they
were (and are) snooping on their domestic enemies---it has absolutely
nothing to do with the CIA-created fake terrorist group called "al-Qaeda."
All of this---including the trashing of the Bill of Rights---shall now
move forward under a nod and wink provided by spineless Democrats.
"Having failed at turning the NSA program to surveil international calls
connected with suspected terrorists into a 'domestic' spying scandal,
Democrats have reversed course and now want the program to continue but
under new Congressional rules," reports Free-Market News Network . "The reversal
has shown that President Bush's offensive against the critics, starting
with his immediate acknowledgement of authorizing the program, has once
again damaged the Democrats on national security and has pushed them to
settle the issue quickly." In other words, the Democrats---understanding
well the NSA snoop scandal is all about domestic opposition---have sold
the Constitution down the river, a traitorous act that should not be
surprising, and warrentless snooping will soon be considered fine and
dandy, so long as Congress makes "rules" on how the Constitution should
be violated.
Iran Attack: Turning America into a Straussian Totalitarian State
Monday February 13th 2006, 6:50 am
In the weeks before the Straussian neocons invaded Iraq, we were told
only a few thousand Iraqis, at most, would die in the initial onslaught.
Of course, thanks to the Pentagon, uninterested in body counts, we do
not have a good idea of how many Iraqis died in the initial assault, and
to make matters worse, "Iraq's Health Ministry ... ordered a halt to a
count of civilians killed during the war and told its statistics
department not to release figures compiled so far," the Associated Press
reported in December, 2003, months after the invasion. The following
year, however, a British medical journal, the Lancet, conducted surveys
in Iraq and determined that over 100,000 Iraqis had died since the
invasion, the Washington Post
reported. Now we are told a "major American attack on Iran's nuclear
sites would kill up to 10,000 people and lead to war in the Middle
East," according to the Oxford Research Group .
Attacking the Bushehr nuclear facility alone would be a nightmare,
releasing radiation into the atmosphere, the report notes. "To attack
Iran's nuclear facilities will not only provoke war, but it could also
unleash clouds of radiation far beyond the targets and the borders of
Iran," Elias Tuma of the Arab Internet Network, told the Federal News Service last March.
In addition, it is almost a certainty Iran would retaliate by hitting
Israel's Dimona nuclear complex (military experts view this as unlikely,
however Europeans "are fretting over the risk of radiation releases from
Dimona and, more likely, Iran's bombed nuclear plants," according to
Eric Margolis ).
However, even more Iranians will die from nuclear blast and radiation
poisoning, as the United States Strategic Command, under instructions
from the war criminal Dick Cheney, has drawn up a "contingency plan"
that "includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both
conventional and tactical nuclear weapons." According to Philip Giraldi
(a former CIA officer) of the American Conservative, "the response is
not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism
directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers
involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of
what they are doing---that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked
nuclear attack---but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing
any objections." Obviously, the lives of a few hundred thousand Iranians
(the population of Tehran is 12,059,000) are not worth the career of one
air force officer.
"Precision bombing could put Iran's weapons program back five to 10
years but within a month the situation would become 'an extremely
dangerous conflict', says Prof Paul Rogers, the report's author," the
Daily Telegraph reports. "The attack would result in 'a protracted
military confrontation' involving Israel, Lebanon and some Gulf states."
Not mentioned here is the most crucial component---if the United States
and Israel attack Iran, U.S. troops in Iraq will have hell to pay,
especially in the Shia south of the country. Iranian retaliation "would
surely start with attempts to mobilize Shia partisans in Iraq to try to
turn the Iraqi south into an extension of the insurgency in the Sunni
triangle," Gary Sick, professor of Middle East studies at Columbia
University and former National Security Council adviser to then
President Jimmy Carter, told a congressional panel last February.
Moreover, within "minutes of any attack, Iran's air and sea forces could
threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf as well as the Gulf of Oman.
Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow
waterway through which oil tankers must navigate, and could sink ships,
mine sea routes or bomb oil platforms," according to a Center for
Strategic and International Studies report . Closing the
Strait of Hormuz, and Iran turning off its oil spigot, would create
immediate havoc in the world economy, so closely tied to petroleum. "Oil
prices on the international markets would shoot up to $400 a barrel if
an attack were to be carried out on Iran, a senior Revolutionary Guards
commander warned" last September, according to Iran Focus.
Billionaire globalist and neolib investor, George Soros,
was a bit more modest, telling CNN Money last month that "Iran is on a
collision course and I have a difficulty seeing how such a collision can
be avoided" and this collision might jack oil prices up to $262 per barrel.
Either Cheney or the Straussian neocons are insane---courting depression
and social and political disaster---or something else is up their
sleeves. In order to understand what the Iran attack means in the larger
context, it pays to examine the Straussian philosophy.
"Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is
united by an external threat, and following Machiavelli, he maintains
that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured,"
writes Shadia Drury. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to
be governed," Strauss wrote. "Such governance can only be established,
however, when men are united---and they can only be united against other
people." Strauss' established governance, according to Drury, is made
possible through "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," and
"[p]erpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in."
According to Jim Lobe, "Strauss'
neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a
'national destiny'---as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983---that
goes far beyond the narrow confines of a 'myopic national security.'"
Attacking Iran, with its ensuing financial and social chaos, is
precisely the sort of "national destiny" the Straussian neocons have in
mind for America. "A sense of perpetual crisis and war cements the
society together with absolute loyalty" to the ruling Straussians,
explains Michael Doliner. The Straussians "are
not, as some think, merely agents of Israel," Doliner continues.
Nor was the war fought merely for oil. They did not ally themselves
with the religious right merely for expedience. They do not seek
primarily to further the fortunes of Halliburton and Bechtel. All
these are real motives, but they are peripheral motives. Their goal
is to turn America into the Straussian State and rule it
perpetually. Consequently, the debacle in Iraq [or the coming
debacle in Iran] does not seriously affect their plans. Even the
Katrina aftermath might not shake them. A Straussian society needs
an endless war to supply a "them" against which "we" will do endless
battle. The endless war, such a horrible prospect for the rest of
us, provided the political glue to transform the United States of
American from a liberal democracy to a Straussian totalitarian state.
Attacking Iran and courting disaster will provide the Straussian neocons
with the perfect excuse to turn America into a dictatorship under the
exigencies of nuclear war because they "want an endless war and the more
embattled Americans feel the more inclined they will be to accept a
strong ruler and the rest of the Straussian program."
And what is the "the rest of the Straussian program"? Doliner again:
Straussians would rip up American traditions starting from the
Declaration of Independence, an Enlightenment document if there ever
was one. Nothing could be more repellent to them than the rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is a description
of decadent liberalism. They prefer death, bondage, and the fear of
God (for others.) Straussians are orders of magnitude more
subversive than any communist ever was. Paradoxically, Straussians
do think that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey died for a noble cause, the
transformation of the United States of America into the Straussian
State. But of course they can never say so for their goal must
remain a secret one. It must remain secret because the Straussian
state is the good society only for the philosophers. Everyone else
remains deluded and oppressed. While the "philosophers play with
their puppies" the rest of us slave away or go off to die.
It is, of course, far too late to stop the Straussian neocon Iran
attack. However, as negative as it may sound, we can take a bit of
solace in the possibility that the United States will bite off more than
it can chew. If the entire Middle East rises up in response to the
unprovoked attack upon Iran---and, more ominous, Russia and China
support the Muslim enemies of the perfidious Straussian neocons---there
is a distinct chance the Straussian project will collapse and fail.
However, the specter of nuclear war remains, as the fascistic Straussian
neocons will certainly not go down without a fight---or without killing
millions of innocent people. Before this happens, hopefully sanity will
rule at the Pentagon and officers less concerned with their careers than
the fate of mankind will step up and depose the Straussian neocons.
I dream of a day when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz,
Feith, Libby, et al, are paraded before TV cameras in orange jumpsuits,
shackled and humiliated, and soon to suffer the fate Hermann Goering,
Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg Trials.
However, the people of America (not unlike the people of Nazi Germany or
Stalin's Russia before them), as Wilhelm Reich knew before he was thrown
in prison, "give impotent people with evil intentions the power to
represent [them]. Only too late do [they] realize that again and again
[they] are being defrauded. [They] must come to realize that [they] make
[their] little men [their] own oppressors, and that [they] made martyrs
out of [their] truly great men." Our oppressors, fast at work
undermining what remains of our constitutional republic, are the
Straussian neocons.
More Evidence Nuking Iran is on Schedule
Sunday February 12th 2006, 3:38 am
In a story appearing in the Sunday Telegraph,
the newspaper once owned by the Canadian criminal finagler and neocon
"Lord" Conrad Black, amoral strategists "at the Pentagon are drawing up
plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched
ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a 'last
resort' to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb." If not so
deadly serious, the idea that the Straussian neocons will shock and awe
Iran only as a "last resort" would be comical. In fact, they have long
planned to bomb Iran---imaginary nukes or not---and kill as many
Iranians as possible and decimate the civilian infrastructure, as they
have done in Iraq (some estimates put the death toll thus far above
130,000). "Central Command and Strategic Command planners are
identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for
an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt."
In fact, the Pentagon has long mapped out its targets, including
"secondary targets," usually civilian airports, radio and TV
installations, telecommunications centers, government buildings,
conventional power plants, water and waste treatment plants, highways
and bridges, and rail lines. In Iraq (twice) this sort of "targeting"
resulted in massive suffering and death (coupled with sanctions after
the first Bush Iraq Invasion, more than a million Iraqis died of
starvation and disease, a stunning crime against humanity).
These criminal strategists, basically no different than the German
Wehrmacht strategists who planned Operation Barbarossa, "are reporting
to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, as America
updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the
Islamic republic's nuclear bomb ambitions." Of course, this "diplomatic
offensive" is designed to fail, as the "diplomatic offensive" prior to
the Iraqi invasion failed (and the "diplomatic offensive" in Afghanistan
failed, even though the Taliban were ready to turn over Osama bin Laden,
if only the Americans were able to provide evidence of his complicity in
nine eleven, something the Americans were unable and unwilling to do
because they did not have compelling evidence and, besides, they had
planned to invade Afghanistan well before nine eleven, as plenty of
evidence attests).
"This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," a
senior Pentagon adviser told the Telegraph. "This has taken on much
greater urgency in recent months."
Indeed, the shock and awe dismemberment of Iranian society is considered
more "than just the standard military contingency assessment," as the
PNAC Straussian neocons have long told us. It has "taken on much greater
urgency in recent months" because the Bush administration, a front for
the Straussian neocon nihilists, is winding down and it will take months
to obliterate Iranian culture and civil society. Moreover, the neocons
need to fit in Syria, at minimum---they would prefer to do Lebanon,
Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, but this is obviously too ambitious, that is
unless they can figure out a way to keep Bush in office.
"The prospect of military action could put Washington at odds with
Britain which fears that an attack would spark violence across the
Middle East, reprisals in the West and may not cripple Teheran's nuclear
program. But the steady flow of disclosures about Iran's secret nuclear
operations and the virulent anti-Israeli threats of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has prompted the fresh assessment of military options by
Washington. The most likely strategy would involve aerial bombardment by
long-distance B2 bombers, each armed with up to 40,000lb of precision
weapons, including the latest bunker-busting devices. They would fly
from bases in Missouri with mid-air refuelling."
Nonsense, Tony Blair is fully onboard with the plan to reduce the Middle
East to a simmering cauldron of violence and dead, mutilated bodies.
Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al, are ecstatic over Ahmadinejad's highly
suspect anti-Semitic (or rather, anti-Ashkenazi, since the majority of
Jews in Israel are white Europeans and not Semites) declarations,
leading more than a few people to believe he is a Mossad agent or has an
as of yet unknown reason for egging on the Israelis and Americans.
Either way, Ahmadinejad is courting disaster.
As former CIA intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi told the American
Conservative last July, the United States plans to nuke the be-jesus out
of Iran. "The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President
Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command
(STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response
to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan
includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional
and tactical nuclear weapons." All of this despite the fact Iran is a
non-nuclear country, a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,
and working with the IAEA, although the latter reported Iran to the UN
Security Council last week. So itchy is the Pentagon to use nukes
against non-nuke countries, they wrote the "policy" in their "Doctrine
for Joint Nuclear Operations"
(pdf doc).
"Senator Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, [said] Mr. Bush is expected to be
faced by the decision [to criminally bomb Iran] within two years." More
balderdash---the United States plans to bomb Iran next month, or soon
thereafter. It wants Iran wasted sooner before later. Last week Vladimir
Zhirinovsky,
leader of the Liberal Democrats in Russia, told the Ekho Moskvy radio
station "that the Muslim [cartoon] riots were orchestrated by the US to
garner European backing for the military strike" and the "war is
inevitable because the Americans want this war. Any country claiming a
leading position in the world will need to wage wars. Otherwise it will
simply not be able to retain its leading position," as well spelled out
by the PNAC maniacs who have captured the flag in Washington.
