Rex Regnant Sed Non Gubernat

We're playing the Sunni card in the Middle East – and that means playing footsie with al-Qaeda.

The latest Seymour Hersh piece has a lot of new information, some of it shocking, some of it not at all surprising to readers of Antiwar.com and observers of this space. An example of the latter:

"The administration is now examining a wave of new intelligence on Iran's weapons programs. Current and former American officials told me that the intelligence, which came from Israeli agents operating in Iran, includes a claim that Iran has developed a three-stage solid-fueled intercontinental missile capable of delivering several small warheads – each with limited accuracy – inside Europe. The validity of this human intelligence is still being debated."

We can thank Scooter Libby and the vice president of the United States for having blinded American intelligence to Iranian WMD programs – Valerie Plame was reportedly the CIA's resident expert on Iranian WMD, and her outfit, Brewster-Jennings "consulting," was the U.S. government's regional eyes and ears on nuclear proliferation issues. I guess that's why we have to depend on the Israelis.

The Mossad has been quite busy, not only in Kurdistan but also in Iran. Although the Iranians indignantly deny it, the Israeli presence in Iran may have been responsible for the recent "accidental" death of a top Iranian nuclear scientist. In any case, the Israelis, according to an earlier report by Hersh, have thoroughly penetrated Kurdistan, where they train the peshmerga. Using the Kurdish rebels in Iran, known as Pejak, they have launched sorties into Iranian territory.

What is less clear – although I've touched on the subject recently – is the extent to which clandestine activities are being carried out by the U.S. in Iran, and, according to Hersh, Lebanon.

The policymakers are taking a new turn, says Hersh, supposedly necessitated by the consequences of the Iraq war. The U.S. invasion turned Iraq over to a Shi'ite coalition of pro-Iranianparties, and now we're playing the Sunni card. Hersh cites "a former senior intelligence official" as saying

"We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shi'ite influence, and we're spreading the money around as much as we can…. In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It's a very high-risk venture."

Doesn't anyone ever learn from history? U.S. aid to the Afghan "freedom fighters" in the 1980s consolidated the core of what was to become al-Qaeda – a Frankenstein's monster that turned on its creator. Now the U.S. is repeating that blunder, only this time on a much wider scale – with consequences we can only begin to imagine in our darkest, most sweat-soaked nightmares.

Once again we are in league with the Saudis, who were instrumental in setting up the Afghan networks that morphed into al-Qaeda. Bin Laden is their errant son, come back to haunt them – and us. The Kingdom is the worst tyranny in the entire region, steeped in a fanatic version of Islam that is, by regional standards, barbaric. Ruled over by a sclerotic aristocracy more decadent and deserving of overthrow than even the haughty Bourbons or the crazed Romanovs, it is precisely our association with these royal kleptocrats that has generated anti-Americanism and killed the possibility of a genuine liberal movement.

The Saudis are backing the Siniora government against Shi'ite Hezbollah and its Christian allies, and the U.S. is funneling covert aid that is allowed to "end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south," writes Hersh. "These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with al-Qaeda."

So let's get this straight: U.S. taxpayer dollars are subsidizing al-Qaeda's emerging Lebanese affiliate. Remember that as you fill out your income tax forms this year.

The "war on terrorism" sparked by al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack has ended with the U.S. in alliance with bin Laden's boys against a supposedly emerging Shi'ite threat. Now how bitter is that ironic twist?

Forget al-Qaeda: nobody is even trying to capture bin Laden, and no wonder. He's our ally now. That's what Michael Scheuer has always said, but now I see it's official. Bin Laden was yesterday's villain: today's hate figure is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Although the Iranians insist their nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, i.e., power generation, a full-court propaganda campaign has been ongoing to convince us the mullahs aim to nuke New York. It's the same old scenario we saw played out in the run-up to war with Iraq: as a conflict with Tehran looms closer, the War Party hopes images of mushroom clouds and mad mullahs will be enough to scare the American public into going along with it. Iran is the enemy of the moment – after all, Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be wiped off the map (or perhaps not). In any case, the Lobby is hard at work, whipping up war hysteria and inventing yet more "evidence" of Iranian perfidy in Iraq. And shadowy groups, including Sunni extremists with connections to al-Qaeda, are being used in U.S.-sponsored covert operations – including terrorist attacks.

In Lebanon, the tinderbox of a volatile region, the Siniora government and the Americans are getting in bed with Fatah al-Islam, a radical Palestinian faction. This murky grouplet, which seceded from a pro-Syrian parent group, is supposedly the holder of the al-Qaeda franchise for Lebanon, but Hersh's reportage sheds new light on where the money is coming from. Former MI6 official Alastair Crooke tells Hersh,

"I was told that within twenty-four hours [of the split] they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government's interests – presumably to take on Hezbollah."

We are also apparently in league with Asbat al-Ansar, a Salafist terrorist outfit that has been described by some experts as "ineffectual" – and doesn't it just figure that Uncle Sam would line up with these losers? I guess there weren't too many bids for this particular government contract. So far, all they've managed to do is bomb a few churches, take out some casinos, and hit other minor targets deemed "un-Islamic." Flush with U.S. cash, no doubt in the future they'll be carrying out some spectacular terrorist acts.

Having handed the Middle East to Tehran on a silver platter, we are mobilizing all available forces in a single-minded effort to snatch it from them. More surrealist than Orwellian, this self-defeating rat-on-a-treadmill policy guarantees one thing: perpetual war. It is just the sort of overly "clever" Machiavellian move that is bound to backfire, and badly. One shudders to imagine the sort of "blowback" playing the Sunni card will entail. The last time we sided with Sunni radicals, we got bin Laden – and 9/11.

This time, it's entirely possible we'll reap an even harsher whirlwind.

- Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. 

You are only allowed to watch this video once.

Seriously, do not cheat!

In the video you will see a group of basketball players, some in white and some in black passing two balls around.

Your goal is to count how many times the ball is passed by those wearing white shirts.

It's that simple.

Remember, count just the passes of the ball by those wearing white.

Once the movie is over, write down the number of passes you have counted.

Do not watch the video again.

VIDEO LINK

After you have watched the video go to this page to understand your results.

VIEW RESULTS 

It stinks of desperation. George Monbiot, inveterate leftist of the foundation financed environmentalist persuasion, has once again taken a swing at the “conspiracy idiots” who believe government is capable of mass murder, including the reflexive murder of its own subjects.

Not unlike his brethren, most notably Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn, Monbiot buys the Ward Churchill version of events in regard to the attacks of September 11, 2001—that is to say Osama and a small number of cave-dwelling Wahhabi fanatics magically made NORAD stand down and defied the immutable laws of physics, thus delivering one to the conclusion a piece of paper cannot be slipped between Monbiot and the moonstruck followers of the neocons, as they all buy the same Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

“Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build,” complains the former BBC employee. “Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues—climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality—are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.”

In fact, Mr. Monbiot and his ilk are part and parcel of the “mainstream political process,” especially considering the degree of foundation funding and support his cherished “movements” receive, from the likes of the Ford, Schumann, Rockefeller, and MacArthur foundations, to name but a handful.

Monbiot’s “progressive” left was long ago sold down the river. In effect, the foundation oiled “movements” so dear to Monbiot’s heart are completely and utterly ineffectual, having accomplished dreadful little over the decades, and instead serve as a facile target of convenience for Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael “Savage” Weiner, Sean Hannity and the neocon fascists dominating the corporate media.

For all his effort and that of his pals, Monbiot has managed to make the machine of progress, as he gauges it, turn in reverse. It is not the 9/11 “morons” destroying Mr. Monbiot’s “movements,” but his own enervated struggle, his own inability to understand reality and deal with it, even as he has made a career out of complaint minus substantial result.

According to Monbiot, questioning the official version of events, replete with bad science and glaring omission, is “a displacement activity” and avoidance “of the real issues we must confront,” never mind Monbiot and his fellows have confronted for decade after decade “issues” they swear are “real,” only to slide backward down a long slope into the muck of irrelevance, made a laughingstock and a cavalcade of clowns by the corporate media.

For Monbiot, the documentary Loose Change is a “concatenation of ill-attested nonsense,” never mind the good professor, from on-high at Oxford Brookes University, does not bother to detail such ill-attestation, caring only to tell us Benjamin Chertoff, the “senior researcher” of Popular Mechanics tasked with slamming 9/11 research far and wide, is not related to Michael Chertoff, a fact disputed by none other than Benjamin’s mother, Judy Dargan, in Pelham, New York. “Yes, of course, he is a cousin,” she told journalist Christopher Bollyn.

Mr. Monbiot is determined to attack the “crazy distraction” that supposedly “presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements,” never mind by and large such movements long ago went to fossil precisely because of the inability of intellectual doyens—represented by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Monbiot—to accept the fact that, indeed, George Bush and the neocons—and yes, even the faceless bureaucrats the progressives submit grant applications to over at the Ford and Rockefeller foundations—are cold-blooded killers who are determined to not only slaughter Iraqis as they did Vietnamese, but no small number of innocent office workers on a sunny morning in New York as well.

But not to despair, George, there is still time.
If you put aside your petty jealousies and hurt feelings and join the 9/11 truth movement you claim to despise, we actually may be able to effectuate change before it is too late.

Short of that, and the possibility of the unthinkable now breathing down our necks, we will know who will share the blame come the day after. 

Statement at Hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, February 15, 2007

Transparency in monetary policy is a goal we should all support. I've often wondered why Congress so willingly has given up its prerogative over monetary policy. Astonishingly, Congress in essence has ceded total control over the value of our money to a secretive central bank.

Congress created the Federal Reserve, yet it had no constitutional authority to do so. We forget that those powers not explicitly granted to Congress by the Constitution are inherently denied to Congress – and thus the authority to establish a central bank never was given. Of course Jefferson and Hamilton had that debate early on, a debate seemingly settled in 1913.

But transparency and oversight are something else, and they're worth considering. Congress, although not by law, essentially has given up all its oversight responsibility over the Federal Reserve. There are no true audits, and Congress knows nothing of the conversations, plans, and actions taken in concert with other central banks. We get less and less information regarding the money supply each year, especially now that M3 is no longer reported.

The role the Fed plays in the President's secretive Working Group on Financial Markets goes unnoticed by members of Congress. The Federal Reserve shows no willingness to inform Congress voluntarily about how often the Working Group meets, what actions it takes that affect the financial markets, or why it takes those actions.

But these actions, directed by the Federal Reserve, alter the purchasing power of our money. And that purchasing power is always reduced. The dollar today is worth only four cents compared to the dollar in 1913, when the Federal Reserve started. This has profound consequences for our economy and our political stability. All paper currencies are vulnerable to collapse, and history is replete with examples of great suffering caused by such collapses, especially to a nation's poor and middle class. This leads to political turmoil.

Even before a currency collapse occurs, the damage done by a fiat system is significant. Our monetary system insidiously transfers wealth from the poor and middle class to the privileged rich. Wages never keep up with the profits of Wall Street and the banks, thus sowing the seeds of class discontent. When economic trouble hits, free markets and free trade often are blamed, while the harmful effects of a fiat monetary system are ignored. We deceive ourselves that all is well with the economy, and ignore the fundamental flaws that are a source of growing discontent among those who have not shared in the abundance of recent years.

Few understand that our consumption and apparent wealth is dependent on a current account deficit of $800 billion per year. This deficit shows that much of our prosperity is based on borrowing rather than a true increase in production. Statistics show year after year that our productive manufacturing jobs continue to go overseas. This phenomenon is not seen as a consequence of the international fiat monetary system, where the United States government benefits as the issuer of the world's reserve currency.

Government officials consistently claim that inflation is in check at barely 2%, but middle class Americans know that their purchasing power – especially when it comes to housing, energy, medical care, and school tuition – is shrinking much faster than 2% each year.

Even if prices were held in check, in spite of our monetary inflation, concentrating on CPI distracts from the real issue. We must address the important consequences of Fed manipulation of interest rates. When interests rates are artificially low, below market rates, insidious mal-investment and excessive indebtedness inevitably bring about the economic downturn that everyone dreads.

We look at GDP numbers to reassure ourselves that all is well, yet a growing number of Americans still do not enjoy the higher standard of living that monetary inflation brings to the privileged few. Those few have access to the newly created money first, before its value is diluted.

For example: Before the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, CEO income was about 30 times the average worker's pay. Today, it's closer to 500 times. It's hard to explain this simply by market forces and increases in productivity. One Wall Street firm last year gave out bonuses totaling $16.5 billion. There's little evidence that this represents free market capitalism.

In 2006 dollars, the minimum wage was $9.50 before the 1971 breakdown of Bretton Woods. Today that dollar is worth $5.15. Congress congratulates itself for raising the minimum wage by mandate, but in reality it has lowered the minimum wage by allowing the Fed to devalue the dollar. We must consider how the growing inequalities created by our monetary system will lead to social discord.

GDP purportedly is now growing at 3.5%, and everyone seems pleased. What we fail to understand is how much government entitlement spending contributes to the increase in the GDP. Rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by hurricanes, which simply gets us back to even, is considered part of GDP growth. Wall Street profits and salaries, pumped up by the Fed's increase in money, also contribute to GDP statistical growth. Just buying military weapons that contribute nothing to the well being of our citizens, sending money down a rat hole, contributes to GDP growth!

Simple price increases caused by Fed monetary inflation contribute to nominal GDP growth. None of these factors represent any kind of real increases in economic output. So we should not carelessly cite misleading GDP figures which don't truly reflect what is happening in the economy. Bogus GDP figures explain in part why so many people are feeling squeezed despite our supposedly booming economy.

But since our fiat dollar system is not going away anytime soon, it would benefit Congress and the American people to bring more transparency to how and why Fed monetary policy functions.

For starters, the Federal Reserve should:

• Begin publishing the M3 statistics again. Let us see the numbers that most accurately reveal how much new money the Fed is pumping into the world economy.
• Tell us exactly what the President's Working Group on Financial Markets does and why.
• Explain how interest rates are set. Conservatives profess to support free markets, without wage and price controls. Yet the most important price of all, the price of money as determined by interest rates, is set arbitrarily in secret by the Fed rather than by markets! Why is this policy written in stone? Why is there no congressional input at least?
• Change legal tender laws to allow constitutional legal tender (commodity money) to compete domestically with the dollar.How can a policy of steadily debasing our currency be defended morally, knowing what harm it causes to those who still believe in saving money and assuming responsibility for themselves in their retirement years? Is it any wonder we are a nation of debtors rather than savers?

We need more transparency in how the Federal Reserve carries out monetary policy, and we need it soon.

- Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.

Other than being among the most contentious issues of the day, China's currency and global warming have little in common — unless you are George W. Bush.

The U.S. president has been slow to realize that if he wants China to allow the yuan to strengthen, he must offer something. In return for a rising currency, for example, China wants the U.S. to fix its current-account and budget deficits.

Now that Bush seems to be taking a green turn — he's speaking more about climate change than ever — there's an expectation that the onus will shift to developing nations such as China and India. Yet it's not that simple.

Yes, hugely populated emerging economies need to get serious about controlling emissions. In a perfect world, Chinese, Indians and other Asians should be allowed to pollute as much as the West did, and still does.
It's just unlikely the planet could withstand almost 3 billion Asians doing the same thing.

China, for example, is already home to six of the world's 10 most-polluted cities. Visiting Shanghai or Beijing, you can barely see across the street from your office building or hotel. Imagine how things might look when 400 million Chinese own cars.

It would be helpful if the U.S., the biggest producer of greenhouse gases, led by example. Even after Bush's State of the Union proposal to cut gasoline consumption by 20 percent during the next 10 years, the U.S. is failing to provide leadership. Bush's push is far more about energy independence from the Middle East than about reversing global warming.

Yuan connection

Asians have every right to view Bush's plans with skepticism. In recent years, the president talked about the need for conservation and alternative fuels, yet he didn't follow through. The White House would be wise to apply some of the lessons it has learned from China's reluctance to boost the yuan.

The biggest barrier to the U.S. getting serious about climate change is money. Politicians facing election every few years don't often see it in their interest to risk economic growth for something that will pay off years later. It's the same logic officials in Beijing apply to their currency.

While China technically depegged the yuan in July 2005, it's still effectively tied to the U.S. dollar. Exports are the key source of growth for the Chinese economy, which advanced almost 11 percent in 2006.

Inconvenient truths

China is hoping for the best as it lets growth barrel forward. It hopes the crises that some observers predict don't come to fruition. While it's not a perfect comparison, the strategy is not unlike how the U.S. has treated climate change.

In 2001, the Bush administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol, which limits emissions from burning oil, coal and natural gas that damage the earth's climate. Since then, Bush has treated global warming as more of a theory than a genuine risk.

Environmentalists and scientists such as James Hansen, the U.S. government's top climate researcher, say action must be taken before climate change causes irreversible damage to ecosystems and economies around the globe. It's an argument Al Gore made convincingly in his film "An Inconvenient Truth."

In Tokyo earlier this month, the former vice president said many U.S. businesses and state governments are now embracing the aims of the Kyoto Protocol, which may force Bush to alter his opposition to addressing global warming. So may the Democrats who now control Congress.

Getting Asia on board

That would help get Asians on board with any global effort to reduce greenhouse gases. Options might include some kind of successor agreement to Kyoto, creating a World Trade Organization-like entity focused on environmental issues or popularizing emissions-trading markets. Or why not create tax-free debt markets akin to municipal markets in the U.S. to finance efforts to address climate change?

All this is no longer a debate, but a necessity, and the effort must be global. The U.S. may not budge until developing nations such as China and India do, and vice versa. The cost of delay will amount to between 5 percent and 20 percent of the world's gross domestic product over time, according to Nicholas Stern, the U.K. government's chief economist.

The real key is getting Asia to limit emissions, and the earlier the better. There are increasing signs many parts of the region are reaching their environmental limits. Once upon a time, the blind pursuit of GDP was possible. Not anymore.

Global risks

Risks emanating from China alone are enough to keep one awake at night. That certainly was my experience after reading Jared Diamond's 2005 book "Collapse.""Marring the superlatives and achievements, China's environmental problems are among the most severe in any major country and are getting worse," Diamond wrote.

The bigger problem is that "China's large population, economy and area also guarantee that its environmental problems will not remain a domestic issue but will spill over to the rest of the world," he wrote.

Let's hope the Bush administration has more luck working with Asia on the environment than it has had on currencies. Achieving both goals may have more in common than the White House realizes.

-WILLIAM PESEK IS A BLOOMBERG NEWS COLUMNIST. 

“More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger,” reports the Associated Press. “Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.”
In short, Americans are easily frightened by crass manifestations of the tawdry and shallow consumer society they passively accept, even celebrate, usually with dangerous levels of credit card debt. Fear and mistrust are now endemic, thanks to nearly six years of incessant propaganda concerning universal terrorists, Muslim evil-doers, liquid bombs, homegrown fanatics, even dire warnings of pregnant suicide bombers lurking on the local bus or train.
“Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force,’ a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball…. It said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Austin, Texas, San Francisco and Philadelphia.”
However, nothing is more surreal than the idea Muslims want to convert the world to Islam by sword or nuke, kill all the Jews, behead heretics in Thedford, Nebraska, and force all our women to wear chadors. Nothing is more ludicrous than the term “Islamofascism” and brainless comparisons between Hitler and Ahmadinejad. It is completely absurd to believe Iran will patch together a nuke one day and drop it on Israel the next. Indeed, the prospect of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover AFB in increasing numbers and over 600,000 dead Iraqis predicated on lies and absurd falsification is grotesquely and nauseatingly surreal, to say the least.
Obviously, the neocons have us right where they want us—afraid of our own shadows, mistaking such for Osama with blood-soaked scimitar in hand, and taking puerile marketing gimmicks staged by multinational “entertainment” corporations as bombs.
“Hoaxes are a tremendous burden on local law enforcement and counter-terrorism resources and there’s absolutely no place for them in a post-9/11 world,” declared Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Ministry of Homeland Security.
Hoaxes? Please. Osama bin Laden and “al-Qaeda” are probably the most successful hoax in modern history. It says something when millions of people are so petrified of neocon contrived boogiemen in turbans and cartoon characters—no, not three anthropomorphic fast food items and their life together in New Jersey, but Osama, al-Zarqawi, and Azzam the American—they allow their capacity for higher reasoning to atrophy. Not only that, they allow their birthright, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to be torched right before their eyes.