Anglo-American Empire

Parallels of Conquest, Past and Present

2010-03-01T06:11:00.001-08:00

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=37514

2010-02-26
Parallels of Conquest, Past and Present

Like William the Conqueror who ignored the English battlefield dead, the US government has not identified – nor even made a good-faith effort to estimate – the number of Iraqis and Afghanis who have been killed. By suppressing the human toll, the war still can be sold as benefiting the Iraqi people. The reality of their intense suffering, however, is much different from the generally positive image that US propagandists seek to present, notes Douglas Valentine.

After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror’s army buried its fallen comrades, but left the corpses of the English defenders to rot in the fields.

Such is the brutal nature of war: the victor inflicts all manner of suffering and humiliation on the vanquished. Nearly a millennium later, what the United States is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is only marginally different.

William the Conqueror made no pretense about his brutal subjugation of the English. They hated him and resisted his occupation for 20 years, during which time he took their property and gave it to the Norman upper class.

Over 300,000 English people were murdered and starved (one fifth of the population) and some 300,000 French and Normans were planted in England in positions of authority.

During the repression, an English nobleman was likely blinded, castrated, and thrown into a dungeon in one of the hundreds of castles that William built across the countryside to defend Norman interests. The overall strategy was to eliminate native leadership and to terrorize the population into submission.

By the time William repented his sins on his deathbed in 1087, England had ceased being England.

While the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are different in many details, there are disturbing parallels in the extent of the carnage and the strategy of coercion, in the innocent blood that has flowed and the number of survivors who have been terrorized.

Like William the Conqueror who ignored the English battlefield dead, the US government has not identified – nor even made a good-faith effort to estimate – the number of Iraqis and Afghanis who have been killed.

That’s because the Bush administration – and now the Obama administration – have had an official policy of not counting the number of people killed, crippled, rendered homeless, starved, or condemned to disease and possibly insanity.

US government officials have claimed that this policy has been followed to escape the “body count” mindset that became notorious during the Vietnam War. But it also has made it impossible to quantitatively measure the amount of misery that US policymakers have inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lack of official numbers also has enabled the US government to cast doubt on unofficial estimates that put the number of Iraqi dead in the hundreds of thousands or possibly over one million. Most reports in the mainstream US news media cite much lower estimates, presumably to avoid offending the powers-that-be in Washington.

Out of the Press

As much as possible, US leaders have sought to keep the ugliness of these wars – the mangled bodies, the burned-off faces, the squalid refugee camps, the abused captives – out of the press and away from the public’s consciousness, thus to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American “exceptionalism.”

But the principal advantage of having no official casualty estimates and few photos of atrocities in Iraq is that the American people aren’t reminded of the horrendous consequences of a war launched by President George W. Bush under the false claim that Iraq possessed WMD stockpiles.

By suppressing the human toll, the war still can be sold as benefiting the Iraqi people. The reality of their intense suffering, however, is much different from the generally positive image that US propagandists seek to present.

And that is one big difference between the slaughter of Englishmen by William the Conqueror and the carnage unleashed by George W. Bush, the modern-day conqueror. William’s cruelty was done in the light of day.

Yet, it is not as if the US government doesn’t keep tabs on those killed, maimed or rendered as orphans. The government simply doesn’t want the American people to know the quantity or the specifics, all the better to strip the two conflicts of their human dimensions.

In Afghanistan, for example, the CIA and military have been conducting a census of every village, town and city in the country – much like William’s infamous Doomsday (or Domesday) Book, which assessed the property of every English landowner for the purpose of levying taxes or confiscation.

As commander of the US occupation army, General Stanley McChrystal wants to know the name of every Afghan, so his analysts can decide who is a Taliban and who is not, or in the even vaguer vernacular favored by the US military, who are the “bad guys.”

McChrystal’s survey seeks to determine where each man lives, how many people are in his family, who his wife and children and relatives are, where he works and where his property is.

In places like Marjah, considered a Taliban stronghold where a US-led offensive is currently underway, McChrystal is at a bit of a loss, but he still tries to obtain actionable intelligence through networks of spies and via all manner of electronic surveillance, including satellites.

Tracking the Taliban

This biographical information and other data about Afghanis are entered into a computer in McChrystal’s office, where the material is carefully monitored by the CIA and military special operations units.

Within a separate folder for suspected Taliban, every man is identified by the same biographical criteria as every other Afghan. In addition, each Taliban is categorized by his rank and position within the organization.

Low-level fighters are left to the Marines, while “high-value targets” get their own folder and are handled by the CIA and military special operations.

These “high-value targets” are given the kind of special attention that William the Conqueror reserved for English noblemen, who were viewed as especially important to kill or otherwise neutralize in order to pacify the countryside.

“High-value targets” in Afghanistan have the property (intellectual as well as physical, such as opium fields) that McChrystal wants to deny the Taliban. So, more biographical information is gathered about them, and their movements are tracked 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Through spies and sophisticated electronic surveillance, McChrystal even has a very good idea when they are leaving one safe house and traveling to another. The jets are fueled, and the drones are in the sky, waiting.

And this is how and why 27 Afghan civilians were slaughtered on Feb. 21 while traveling between remote provinces in a caravan of minibuses. The CIA and military special operations forces were alerted that some “high-value target” was traveling with his family, and McChrystal seized the opportunity to kill them all.

In a dirty war like the one in Afghanistan, killing “high-value targets” almost always involves murdering them while they are at home or while traveling with their families; otherwise they are much less accessible and thus harder targets.

Killing enemy leaders along with their entire families has a psychological-warfare impact, too, putting this secret policy under the intelligence rubric of “black propaganda.”

It is psychological warfare because these mass killings have a sobering effect on low-level Taliban who wish to rise in the ranks. It is a form of propaganda that every Afghan citizen is aware of, and it is “black” because it is not officially acknowledged, keeping the American people in the dark.

The mainstream US news media plays along by rarely citing the obvious facts of this dirty war. The killing of civilians is dismissed as an accident that is accompanied by a routine apology from General McChrystal or some other US spokesman.

Savagery, Past and Present

Though US media propagandists treat McChrystal as an honorable and hard-working warrior, the truth is that he is no less savage than William the Conqueror. Both spread terror by killing their enemies, dismembering bodies and inflicting death and cruelty on non-combatants as well.

The primary difference is that William and his army did their killing up close with battle axes and swords for everyone to see, while McChrystal and his high-tech killing machine inflict carnage from far away with 2,000-pound bombs or with missiles fired from drones – and then cloak the horror behind censorship and propaganda.

These cover-ups are essential because the American public might otherwise bolt against Washington’s imperial adventures, which often end up with working-class American soldiers dead or maimed while US corporations snake away with valuable resources from the conquered countries or otherwise use them for economic or geopolitical ends.

This strategy works because most Americans don’t know – and many may not care to know – the names and biographies of the victims.

Douglas Valentine is author of The Phoenix Program as well as The Strength of the Wolf and the new book Strength of the Pack. His Web site is DouglasValentine.com.

Challenging Christian Hegemony

2010-02-27T15:13:00.001-08:00

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/26/challenging-christian-hegemony/

Tikkun Daily at 3:15 pm
February 26, 2010 REPLIES: 7
By Be Scofield, Crossposted from Tikkun Daily

“You’re either with us or against us.” – from Matthew 12:30

“Language is the perfect instrument of empire.”- Antonia De Nebrija

I recommend checking out the latest booklet from Paul Kivel called “The Language of Dominant Christianity” (available as a downloadable PDF for only $3.50 or as a book for $4.95.) It is a short (85 page) A-Z dictionary of common vocabulary words in the English language that reveal how Christianity has influenced our thinking. In addition to defining a comprehensive list of words (64 pages) Kivel provides a section on “word groups” and points out how certain terms are found within our criminal/legal system, notions of morality, racial understandings, educational ideals and political ideology. And in the first part Kivel provides the context of why it is important to analyze and examine the Christian roots of our language.

This booklet is one part of Kivel’s latest project to name Christian dominance as one of the many systems of oppression. Kivel is a well respected violence prevention educator who wrote “Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Social Justice” among many other books on oppression. If you haven’t heard of him or want to know more about Paul’s work including his videos and interviews you can visit his website.

And in the spirit of my post last week where I pointed out how atheists are studying to be religious leaders at Starr King I want to emphasize that there are Christians who are equally concerned about Christian hegemony and are dedicating time and resources to ending it.

Paul Kivel describes Christian hegemony:

From www.christianhegemony.org

I define Christian hegemony as the everyday, pervasive, and systematic set of Christian values and beliefs, individuals and institutions that dominate all aspects of our society through the social, political, economic, and cultural power they wield. Nothing is unaffected by Christian hegemony (whether we are Christian or not) including our personal beliefs and values, our relationships to other people and to the natural environment, and our economic, political, education, health care, criminal/legal, housing, and other social systems.

Christian hegemony as a system of domination is complex, shifting, and operates through the agency of individuals, families, church communities, denominations, parachurch organizations, civil institutions, and through decisions made by members of the ruling class and power elite.

Christian hegemony benefits all Christians, all those raised Christian, and those passing as Christian. However the concentration of power, wealth, and privilege under Christian hegemony accumulates to the ruling class and the predominantly white male Christian power elite that serve its interests. All people who are not Christian, as well as most people who are, experience social, political, and economic exploitation, violence, cultural appropriation, marginalization, alienation and constant vulnerability from the dominance of Christian power and values in our society.

Christian hegemony operates on several levels. At one level is the internalization of dominant western Christian beliefs and values by individuals in our society. Another level is the power that individual preachers, ministers and priests have on people’s lives. Particular churches and some Christian denominations wield very significant political and economic power in our country. There is a vast network of parachurch organizations, general tax-supported non-profits such as hospitals, broadcasting networks, publishing houses, lobbying groups, and organizations like Focus on the Family, Prison Fellowship, The Family, World Mission, and thousands of others which wield influence in particular spheres of U.S. society and throughout the world. Another level of Christian dominance is within the power elite, the network of 7-10,000 predominantly white Christian men who control the largest and most powerful social, political, economic, and cultural institutions in the country. And finally there is the level which provides the foundation for all the others-the long and deep legacy of Christian ideas, values, practices, policies, icons, and texts that have been produced within dominant western Christianity over the centuries. That legacy continues to shape our language, culture, beliefs, and values and to frame public and foreign policy decisions.

Christian dominance has become so invisible that its manifestations appear to be secular, i.e. not religious. In this context, the phrase “secular Christian dominance” might be most appropriate, Christian hegemony under the guise of secularism. Of course, there are many forms of Christian fundamentalism which are anything but secular. Often fundamentalists want to create some kind of theocratic state. But the more mainstream, everyday way that dominant Christian values and institutions influence our lives and communities is less evident, although no less significant and certainly not limited to fundamentalists.

The Achilles Heel of the New World Order

2010-02-20T12:42:00.000-08:00

AS ALWAYS: THE ONLY WAY TO CONQUER EVIL TO CONFRONT IT AS A LARGE GROUP!!!

http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=15816

February 16, 2010
The Achilles Heel of the New World Order
By Jason Charles

The old world tendencies of war and iron-fist oppression is still present in today's elite ruling super-class, but technology has far outpaced even their diabolically dark intellect and the human dynamic has exploded on to the scene, making the people hyper-aware of the danger they face in this next decade.

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By Hawk | TruthAlliance.net | Feb. 10, 2009

The Dream of King Nebuchadnezzar as interpreted by Daniel the prophet,

You are that head of gold. "After you, another kingdom will rise, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron--for iron breaks and smashes everything--and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay. "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.

Daniel 2:38-44

This prophetic dream of the Babylonian King speaks of four empires that will rule the Earth, each in its turn. Starting with Babylon the Great and the golden head, each layer grows weaker and weaker representing each major empire in its turn.

Here we are many centuries later watching the collectivist impulse in the human species being carried out once again, yet the dynamics are very different as Unified Europe seeks to pull down the whole of the world into a Global Oder.

This 'new Babylon' has replaced priests with PhD's, Kings with Presidents, merchants with brokers, centurions with drones, and God with the self. The only difference is the whole of the global empire is teetering on the incredibly fragile infrastructure, everything about it says it's going to collapse in on itself.

The lumbering giant, symbol of tyranny and oppression will collapse as its feet of clay and iron crumble before it's beastly weight.

The Golden King

The Babylonian system represents a convergence of political might, economic might, and military might exercising uni-lateral authority over competing populations and its own. Babylon was known for it's great wealth conquering the once rich nation of Israel and many other nations, taking with it incredible riches and the spoils of war.

The support for the Babylonian kingdom among conquered nations was achieved by kidnapping and indoctrinating aristocratic youths into their system of empirical control. They would then insert them back into these conquered and domesticated cultures to maintain the illusion of popular support. These princes who under went Babylonian re-education would proclaim the superiority of their system, and as trade and wealth pored into their cities, discord soon waned among the people in invaded nations as time went on.

Support for the kingdom was waged more in the mind of its subjects than through the swift and devastating blade of military domination.

Babylon through superior economic leverage, and military force of arms,was quite impressive and was able to dominate the surrounding cultures through this method of suppression, but the true show of absolute power was focused in on their own people.

"That at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up. And whoso falleth not down and worshippeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace." Daniel 3:5,6

Total worship of the king and his image was demanded of the Babylonian nation states anyone who denied that all power and authority was present in the king and wielded godly authority on the Earth was quickly put to death. Life was good unless you set yourself against the edicts of the king.

The Alloy of Empires

The Babylonian system represents the holy trinity of the god-state, where all power and authority was recognized in one supreame executive that was worshiped as a god.

Every empire goes through a period of expansion and tremendous growth, but due to the corruption and hubris of competing factions with in, the empire will eventually experience a period of decline.

The Iron Legs of the Roman empire prove to be an excellent example of how an empires military can be incredibly disciplined and achieve total spectrum domination on the battlefield but due to the rock star excess and egotistical indulgence on the part of the emperor class, they remained forever politically unstable and subject to collapse.

As a result, empires moved away from the universal executives overt rule, and began to rule by more cunningly covert methods of control. Colonial rule, exercised by the British empire seemed new at the time but was really a revival of the old Babylonian system of waging economic war and buying influence through it's colonial agents. Agents who used the empires vast riches to ensnare the countries support through, treaties, banking deals and taxation to the crown.

What used to take thousands of foot soldiers to conquer, the resources and wealth of nations were now being spoiled through economic leveraging and the backroom dealings of shady colonial puppets with the empire.

The real gut wrenching example can be found with America succumbing to British control through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The subversion of the old emperical system of monatary control won out against the free people of America bringing them back under colonial British rule without the peoples knowledge. The super wealthy, Bank of England and the Rothschild family simply bought out the American government as share holders of the Federal Reserve Bank, as debtor is subject to lender so is the U.S. Treasury and thus the tax payers subject to the Federal Reserve.

Rebuilding on Unstable Ground

Here we are in the present, this system of colonial rule has developed considerably. Technology has exploded integrating human kind on a level never before seen. Everything has been wired together quite literally in vast networks of computers, fiber optics, satellites and economic channels across the globe.

The lines between commerce, and nation states have been blurred and the global elite have monopolized industries seeking to once again coalesce its power into a centralized empire. The old westernized world of the European elite, which houses the financial and political authority inside the newly constructed European Union, and it's mechanized military partner America have now begun the process of collapsing their respective economies in favor of a universally ruled global government made up of G20 nations.

What seems to be a well orchestrated plan over the last century to erode national sovereignty of colluding nation states has begun, and out of this inevitable collapse a new world order has been announced, in which representative rule in a global union will provide the facade for the real power brokers who remain behind the scenes exercising influence in privatized kingdoms, a council of industry titans that reside outside the law in this technological brave new world.

Iron doesn't Mix with Clay

The old world tendencies of war and iron-fist oppression is still present in today's elite ruling super-class, but technology has far outpaced even their diabolically dark intellect and the human dynamic has exploded on to the scene, making the people hyper-aware of the danger they face in this next decade.

We humans are the unpredictable wild card in all of this, technology has opened our eyes, and danger lurks on the rim of our vision. The New World Order , this old world iron is evil and it must be opposed. As the new Babylonian beast attempts to arise, it will find its feet are in-sufficient to support its un-godly weight.

Weakness 1: Technological Infrastructure

This is probably the most exposed aspect of the New World Order system, the entire military, financial system and 'Big Brother' control grid derives its power from the heavily integrated yet wholly outdated and fragile telecommunications infrastructure. All the computer systems of the world are wired together in a series of networks run by a gaggle of private and government based companies. Linked up by satellites, and telecommunications hubs all across the world.

There are literally hundreds of these network operating centers (NOC) and telecom Central Offices (CO) in each community switching massive amounts of data, plugged into military bases, financial institutions, and even key infrastructure complexes like nuclear power plants. It has been reported that one slip by a contractors shovel can cost billions of dollars of damage in down time.

The beast is literally wearing it's tender genitalia on it's face, and if it gets overly heavy handed the peoples of the world could easily grind this whole system to halt without a a single shot fired.

The technological advances and sophisticated military systems are so inter-dependent on diverse highly specialized manafactured components from companies all over the globe the right cable cut could ground i.e. fleets of F-16's and other key military supply lines to a halt, and in a matter of a year or less would be useless pieces of scrap metal.

NSA, DARPA, the Pentagon, Special Ops and everything is so heavily reliant on this technology if absent the playing field will once again be leveled back to the days of black powder where a man has to face his opponent on a open battlefield.

The elite are working to fix the problem, but it is and will remain to be the tender underbelly of the BEAST system. They sure as hell fire don't want the free peoples of the world to know, but anyone with a IT background knows this to be so and the secret is out.

Weakness 2: The Enemies Tactics of Control Exposed

There have been a number of critical errors on the part of the establishment, believing they can utilize technology to enslave the westernized nations has proven to be a costly error. Yes, propaganda, and t.v. media have shaped our culture into arrested developed dysfunctional, but the exponential spread of information has proven incredibly damaging as people wake up to the systems of sophisticated mind control that keeps men and women working their 9-5 and voting in rigged partisan political politics.

People are now capable of accessing, understanding and disseminating the elites own manuals regarding the complex systems of population dominance. A art once reserved to the upper echelons of dynastic rulers, or confined to the whispers of hidden mystery schools are now the subject of discussion on 1000's of forums across the internet.

The lies used to keep the hegemony of power in civilization under wraps, have already spilled their way into the consciousness of the people. Blogs, radio shows, and guerrilla video news have erupted and give little wiggle room to the current batch of charlatans and salesmen of the day.

Here are few of the tactics the elite use that have quite literally been snatched from their diabolical control freak hands. The information revolution has rendered these tactics useless like an exposed magicians parlor trick.

False Flag Terror Attacks - War build up is very profitable, and if there is no wars then the idea is to start them. How you ask? Simple, dress up your own people in opposition colors have them attack your own stronghold and sit back and wait for the outrage of your people to mount driving the nation to war.

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Double Think - Derived from the works of George Orwells book 1984, we see how a person can quite literally hold two paradoxical views in their heads that would quite easily cancel each other out under normal and less politically stressed conditions. I.E. "A country spending it's way out of bankruptcy", "War = Peace", "A jobless recovery" or "we have to give up our freedoms to secure liberty". These are purposely put forth to freeze critical thinking within a society.

Political Correctness - This is a method used to limit free speech in an open society, by setting up protected classes of people, whether religion, sexual orientation, political ideology or race this stifles any type of debate and progress with in the targeted society.

Divide and Conquer - A method to divide a unified group of people into factional categories along political, racial, religious lines. The more ways one can fracture the population the easier they are to manage and misdirect the force of their collective intent. Keeping one freeman at another freeman's throat allows the manipulators the opportunity to seize control amidst the chaos.

Problem, Reaction, Solution - Never let a good crisis go to waste, or just artificially create one. Fear is a powerful motivating force, simply engineer a crisis, fear and chaos ensues, and then people will react in panic, calling upon government to offer up the solution. Which usually means more, military, legislation, and money thrown at the problem giving those in power an excuse for more executive power to be centralized in a person or party who has the perceived "solution" ready to deploy.

Economic Enslavement - The central banking system is a ingenious way to enslave entire populations, simply use the control of money to encourage nations or people to take out loans at interest rates they could never pay back. When the debtor files bankruptcy the bank then seizes all property and assets or real value with in a society.

Destruction of the Family Unit - A incredibly damaging tactic of control is to break up and confuse the long established relationship between male and female. The family being the building blocks of all healthy societies have been targeted by the elite. By confusing the roles of husband and wife through eloborate social revolutions and empowerment movements with in a society one gender over the other and vise versa conflict arises disrupting this basic unit of society and can cause tremendous damage to the fabric of a nation. A society with out a strong family unit raises increasingly dysfunctional and self-destructive children, and is exponentially degenerate as generation passes this behavior on to their children and in turn their children.

Multiculturalism - Another way to destroy a country is to introduce a massive influx of cultures into a society that fail to learn the language and integrate into it's system of laws. The tide of illegal immigrants into the United States serves as a perfect example of this tactic at work in today's world and has proven to be incredibly taxing on the nation as a result, stressing it to a breaking point.

Front companies and co-intel pro - The wealthy have long known it is far easier to fund and train their own people to set up institutions, and organizations that cloak themselves as allies of the their opposition to slowly mobilize support and then when the time is right use their influence to create dissent and confusion with in the co-opted organization. This device works very well in rendering a collective useless and fighting among themselves.

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All of these tactics and more are currently being waged against the populations of the globe in a concise and orchestrated fashion to centralize power and support for the New World Order now emerging.

Weakness #3 Scientific Hoaxs and Social Engineering Uncovered

In order to establish a New World Order, the nation states of the world would have to willingly give up their sovereignty. This has posed a very, very big problem for our would be global masters. Especially here in the United States were we are exceptionally nationalistic. Billions of dollars have been used to create "think tanks" and UN backed scientific institutions to develop white papers on how exactly to do break the backs of nations who have proven to be uncooperative. The problem is most of their global empire is built on the "big lie" which is to say, tell the lie long and often enough and people will eventually come to accept it as true. This only works if information to the contrary is not ready available and easily disseminated which it is via the internet rendering these lies in-effective out of the gate.

You can challenge yourself by determining which "tactics" of empirical control come into play. I.e. "climate change = problem reaction solution". It's easy when you know the elites games.

Climate Change - The laughable "science" of global warming which has been proven an audacious lie to fund and build the bureaucratic constructs of a global system of governance have been exposed as a fraud. Which for the elite has literally been forced fed to populations as a global issue that can only be resolved by a global regulating body of some sort.

The swine flu pandemic - Another hoax that was perpetuated by big pharma and the global health organization body called the World Health Organization (WHO), aiming to create a crisis without a borders that can only be solved once again by global governance.

The War on Terror - Al-qaeda is a global specter and a instrument of political control, and not a real threat in the least. An establishment boogie man to induce a state of perpetual war.

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Eugenics and Population Control - Another false specter with "global implications", pushed into our consciousness. The maxim is simply we need a global government in place to curb the population explosion. This is another false reality, in most western countries population is declining, yet in the 3rd world population is a problem because the rate of infant death is extremely high, making it necessary for families to have 4-5 children assuring a chance of survival.

The answer is to simply economically empower these 3rd world countries which naturally reduces the need for large families as access to medicine and food become readily available.

Instead they and the western nations have been targeted by the global body of social engineers for population reduction. The rise in cancer rates, and debilitating disease in western societies and rise in AIDS and sterilization programs in the 3rd world have risen astronomically. The population is undergoing what is termed "soft kill" extermination programs and have been under way for decades. The water is full of poisons and heavy metals, food is tainted with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) and artificial chemicals that have been proven to destroy healthy function in the body. This is by design and has impacted you and your family.

Pulling Ourselves from the Rubble

As more and more people learn to read between the lines in this "new" Babylon system, the less likely the super-class will succeed in bringing their master plan to completion. When one realizes that these tactics and lies are what they have built their power base on, it becomes obvious that we simply can't allow such morally deficient, sociopaths to wield any sort of power on this planet much less universal power. They have shown their hand, the outrage is mounting and like the dream of Nebuchadnezzar God is raising up a new Kingdom, a Kingdom of sovereign individuals that the Babylon system will hurl itself against only to be smashed to pieces. It simply can't stand when built upon a foundation of lies, brutality and a flimsy technological infrastructure.

For those who can see it, we have arrived. The Beast must fall first though, as the system realizes the people have indeed awakened to its dark implications it will attempt to lunge forward without having completed its formation, causing its un-timely demise. Set your spiritual and physically house in order and may God Bless the people of the 'New Kingdom'.

Many Are Dying For Our Having Hoped Obama Would Not Practice Imperialism

2010-02-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

Imperialism is psychopathic and evil (including demonic evil). People need to !!!WAKE UP!!!, give these things their PROPER NAMES and !!!STAND UP AGAINST!!! EVIL COLLECTIVELY!!!!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Many-Are-Dying-For-Our-Hav-by-Jay-Janson-100216-174.html
February 18, 2010

By Jay Janson

In retrospect, does it not sound terribly naive that we would hope a U.S. president whose candidacy was selected and backed by our most powerful bankers would be permitted, just maybe, perhaps by virtue of his being black and well spoken, to modify the intense imperialism that has characterized all previous presidencies since, if not including, that of Teddy Roosevelt and before?

He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has.

He indicated he would be willing to sacrifice men, women and children to assassinate leaders of those warring against American occupations and he has.

He said he would, and he did, send more troops to broaden the war against Pashtun Taliban, formerly the Reagan approved and recognized government of Afghanistan.

He has praised Americans for having fought the Vietnamese in their own country and keeps American troops in Iraq, though he called Iraq a "dumb war." when seeking the votes of citizens no longer supporting that war.

He has praised European settlers for their westward march across America without acknowledging the death and suffering of the indigenous peoples of the continent whose nations the settlers from across the sea conquered

He pre-justified the week long massacre of Gaza, and kept silent during the chilling dispatch of four hundred Palestinian children along with over a thousand of their relatives and friends

While still a candidate, he signed on to giving hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers who favor, propagate and profit from wars.

We could have been pretty sure Obama would never condemn the industrial investment banks of Henry Ford, Rockefeller, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Dupont, Joe Kennedy, Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman, Brown Brothers, J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Allen and John Foster Dulles, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, ITT, and media magnates William Randolph Hearst, the UP Syndicate, the Chicago Tribune, and others for having backed Adolph Hitler and invested in arming the Germany of the Nazis up to superpower status, knowing full well (and in most cases pleased) that Hitler persecuted Jews and Communists.

Obama has always proclaimed capitalism and the United States as, overall, "a force for good in the world."

"Hope springs eternal." is the saying often applied to circumstances that don't appear to warrant hope.

Zen Buddhists, practicing a strict application of highly disciplined mind, understand "hope' and "fear' as two sides of the same coin.

Just as fear can have a negative function, hope can paralyze, can be made to substitute for action and can becloud accurate appraisal and decision making.

Both hope and fear anticipate something that has not yet happened. For example, hoping that a certain damn will not break is similar to fearing that it will.

Fear and hope, not unlike prayers evoked in their name, are retreats from endeavor, a postponement or avoidance of involvement. As does fear, hope lessens the awareness and attention so critical to decisive action.

Millions of progressives, even if not completely hooked by the campaign slogan of "change" hoped that Obama would be different. But, as the wise saying goes, "Hoping doesn't make it so."

Before the election our priority was getting a Democrat elected as America's first black president, and we felt obliged to lay low so the rabid and ignorant right wing plurality out there would not associate Obama with criticism of America, or the peace movement which corporate media characterizes as appeasement and weakness. Immediately after inauguration Obama bombed Pakistan as promised (a promise most assuredly meant for the ear of the military complex).

During our present generation, the lies, misrepresentations and treachery of U.S. presidents (Obama now included), Congresses and a Pentagon subservient media cartel have caused a multi massive amount of Muslim children to fall in harms way of lethal U.S. military action in Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Pakistan and Yemen. This merely continues a century long history of vicious and cruel armed Western imperialism in Muslim lands: various sub-Saharan African colonies, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq, since the Ottoman empire was sliced up for England and France with United States of America in profitable acquiescence.

Our hope was incredibly misplaced, that once in office, Obama would have acted contrary to his promises of bellicose intentions and as an exception to all his imperialist predecessors, that he had only pretended to be a hawk before an war indoctrinated electorate in order to gain office. A capitalist chief executive allowed to place the lives of children being slaughtered by U.S. military in poor Third World countries above the interests of Wall Street war profits would have no precedent.

Extremists fighting for justice in a world of U.S. military hegemony hold the millions of Americans limiting themselves to only hoping for a safer fate for foreign children, guilty and responsible as the Commander-in Chief Obama's other officials of U.S. corporate governance.

Americans in general have a good amount of leisure but little or no interest in the crimes of their government abroad. Among them are many Americans who are personally disturbed or uncomfortable particularly about their awesomely powerful military taking the lives and limbs of children. But the greater part of pangs of conscience is devoted to hoping rather than any action at all. Those who seek news and information beyond that twisted on TV and in tabloids, will know of daily atrocities by the same boastful military that though having a large military facility less than three hundred miles from the Haiti earthquake zone did little more than block the aid coming into the Port-au Prince airport from other nations, disembarking its fine Navy hospital ship from Maryland only three days after the quake struck.

Since hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, obviously fear of retribution beyond that of 9/11 is more prevalent than the hope that our killing will cease.

End of Empire - Waking Zombie Nations / Psychology, Consciousness and the Egoic Mind

2010-02-18T13:19:00.000-08:00

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End of Empire - Waking Zombie Nations / Psychology, Consciousness and the Egoic Mind

By Cognitive Dissonance
Created 02/17/2010

To be fair, this article could just as easily have been called “Waking a Zombie World”. While various people and governments point to the USA as the bad actor in this mess, in fact it has taken dozens of nations to form this conga line to hell and the rest of the world is far from blameless. Nor is America the sole residence of the world’s zombie population. However, since this writer and much of the ZH readership reside in American, we will assume an American (ego) centric focus. My apologies for the delay in posting this article which I had promised some time ago. In my defense, there are hundreds of thick and dusty books on this subject at the local library, proof that it’s not very easy to condense this complex subject into a 10 minute read. In fact, it’s impossible to do so and not even worth trying. While you can break visible light down to its primary colors, it’s actually composed of millions. The same applies to this subject. What I finally decided to do was break it down into separate postings so that the reader could find the courage and stamina to actually read it. Even with the division, be forewarned that this first posting is still a long read.

This article is an effort to understand what’s really going on, why Americans (and the rest of the world) appear to be frozen in place, seemingly helpless and hopeless in the face of incredible corruption and thieving. A quick review of history shows us this isn’t the first time it has happened, though it may be the biggest since the 1930’s. In fact, these types of disasters seem to occur regularly, following a well worn script to its inevitable conclusion. The bad guys escape with the loot while the general population looks on, tails between the legs, hands in pockets and eyes cast down, impotent to the end. Why do we allow ourselves to be used and abused like this? Why are we spectators to our own destruction? While the human condition can’t always be quantified, it can be understood to some extent, but only if we’re willing to peer into some extremely uncomfortable places. My ultimate goal in writing this “End of Empire” series is to promote reflection and understanding. Significant and lasting political and social change will not occur until we elevate our understanding and awareness far above where it is today. I most definitely don’t have all the answers and anyone who claims they do is smoking the good stuff and should share their stash with this formerly long haired hippie. Pass the bong dude.

In this article, I’ll describe how I see myself, the world and the people who live in it. By doing so, the reader will be looking over my shoulder at the workings of the human psyche, or at least my interpretation of the psyche. What you will not find is the consensus view on this subject. For that, all you need do is pop open a standard psychology 101 text book and dive in. The reason I leave the beaten path is simple. The really interesting ideas are usually found way out on the fringe and deep in the weeds. That’s not to say you can’t find “truth” or accurate knowledge within the consensus, just that cutting edge ideas and concepts aren’t tolerated well among the establishment. In my opinion, the established leaders rarely go into areas that aren’t well traveled and seldom stray from their own fields of expertise. Ironically, in a discipline that devotes much ink to the discussion of the ego, the principal players’ egos prevent little more than incremental forward progress. When you’re sipping from government and corporate grants, you don’t often make waves.

Now for the fine print disclaimer. My understanding is ever changing and evolving and I reserve the right to change my opinion before I finish this sentence or this series. The one constant thing in life is change. All I ask of the reader is to read this in its entirety and in the order written. When mucking around in the bushes, it’s very easy to take things out of context when you don’t read the context. The subject is so involved and complex that each paragraph could be expanded into 8 more and still not be complete. I ask the reader to consider that I just might have left some things out of this article in the interest of brevity and not because I’m clueless.

Established “facts” are often facts the consensus believes can be or has been proven, which in the field of psychology is usually what the majority believes to be fact. Circular logic is often accepted by the consensus because it substantiates and validates the consensus. We see this in religion, politics, science, finance, in every human behavior. Because of this, it’s impossible to understand ourselves and our world without a fundamental knowledge of psychology and philosophy and the willingness to break the boundaries of accepted thought and leave the pack. From my point of view, only when I began to color (way) outside the lines did I begin to pull together seemingly unconnected ideas and concepts into a bigger, more coherent picture. Psychology helps me understand why we do what we do and philosophy forces me (at least temporarily) to abandon any notions of right or wrong, good and bad, better or worse and see life as it really is. When thinking philosophically, I must leave my biases and prejudices at the door. I use these two tools, along with others, to gain (and hopefully maintain) perspective.

Since I’m not a classically trained psychologist with a consensus belief system, I’m at liberty to explore multiple ideas and concepts that aren’t constrained by a formal ideology or professional field of expertise. From my point of view, I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Instead of herding everything I learn into rigid categories for emotional and intellectual comfort, I try to follow the rabbit wherever it goes. After decades of trying to do things “my way or the highway” I’ve learned the hard way it’s best to navigate life with an open mind and a loosely held belief system, in the same manner one might gently cradle a delicate butterfly rather than desperately clutch a huge sack of potatoes. By doing so, when something doesn’t fit my worldview or belief system, I simply let go and let it mold itself into any shape that’s required to fit the new information. Contrary to what one might think, this doesn’t result in radical changes but rather subtle movements. The key is mental and emotional flexibility and with lots of practice and a healthy dose of courage, it can be as easy as that.

While this process might sound nonsensical, impossible even (“you have to believe something” I’ve been told) it’s actually very easy and quite liberating once you exercise it on a regular basis. Very young children do it every day, until it’s finally conditioned out of them using an extremely effective program of dogmatic repetition and indoctrination administered by our state sponsored training institutions known as the public and private school system. For those children who require additional training, there are 4 more years of intensive focus available for a substantial additional charge. Finally, in those tragic cases where a few unfortunate children refuse to absorb their conditioning, graduate school is offered. Quite frankly, it’s their last and only hope and it’s usually financed with huge loans and paid back in monthly installments, assuming they finally secure gainful employment once released onto an unsuspecting and vulnerable world. These adult children are hopelessly institutionalized and those who survive this level of indoctrination have historically done the most damage to society.

All kidding aside (well, actually I wasn’t kidding) the training I just described is not known to produce an open mind and a flexible belief system. As I continue to work on reversing and repairing a lifetime of damage to my own psyche and spirit, the perspective gained from this flexibility allows me to forcibly move my dominant ego to the back of the bus and away from the controls. I say forcibly because the ego is the original and ultimate control freak, a crisis manger that knows it all and won’t willingly release command. The ego will not go quietly into the night. By corralling the egoic mind, it enables my intellect and awareness to explore areas my ego would normally shield from me. It took me the longest time to realize that what I thought was “me”, my “self”, my conscious mind talking and thinking was often and sometimes exclusively my ego, which is a very constrained and purposely narrow slice of my full consciousness. In essence, I discovered that my ego, that constant companion I’d always assumed was “me”, wasn’t actually “me”. Worse yet, I realized my ego lied to me. As a matter of fact, my ego lied to me all the time, in a very successful attempt to shield me from myself and the world around me.

It appears I really am wearing rose colored glasses, placed there by an hyper vigilant ego perfectly adapted to an environment made dangerous by lions, tigers and bears (oh my) but mostly useless and quite self destructive in a modern world of townhouses and tea parties. While the ego is wonderfully capable of piloting the ship through dangerous shoals and shark infested waters, it is not well suited to the everyday mundane task of cruise ship captain. It is time to extract the (ego) maniac from the pilot house and put him in charge of the bilge pumps. However, you don’t want to remove the ego completely because you need it in a pinch. While the ego will scream and holler at first, (usually manifested in fear and anxiety) it really isn’t comfortable handling delicate cruise ship piloting duties 24/7. Once you negotiate a truce with your ego by assuring your ego you need it during crisis situations, the ego will stay busy rebuilding the bilge pumps and manning the life boats, where it really is much happier. You really don’t want the antisocial and paranoid head of security running the public relations department all the time.

Don’t believe me? Think this is silly? Well, you might be correct, but consider the following. Have you ever experienced a situation where you’re talking to someone, carrying on a somewhat heated conversation (meaning your ego is front and center) and yet at the same time you mentally float off and find yourself watching yourself as you argue with the person? Or something happens and you react instinctively, yet at the same time and in the back of your mind, you’re asking yourself why you’re doing or saying this or that? I’m talking about real time here, not after the fact. Sort of like watching yourself while also being in the “here and now”. This actually happens to many people but rarely do they talk about it publically, for fear of being branded crazy or weird. I suggest that if you’ve never experienced this, it might be because you’ve never tried or you’re more egocentric than some (that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just is what it is) and you might benefit from being aware of it.

To go a little further with this idea (and deeper into the weeds) as I’ve learned to control my dreams (I submit that dreaming is simply a different aspect of consciousness) there are times when I’m in my dream (seeing through my dream eyes in my dream body so to speak) while also watching myself in my dream, in exactly the same manner as described above. But I’ve also experienced (more accurately controlled) the third perspective while dreaming, moving in and out of my dream body at will, disembodied from myself, while at the same time watching me watch my ego in the dream. There are other perspectives as well (out of your dream body and into someone else’s dream body, which I find exhilarating) but I don’t wish to scare off the reader too soon.

I see all this as simply different perspectives or dimensions of the same consciousness. I humorously call this dream state the ultimate expression of me, myself and I (and that guy). While some people get physically and emotionally upset when I discuss this (yes, some people become quite threatened by things like this) if science can rationally discuss string and membrane theory, quantum mechanics and 11 dimensions, I can talk about expanded consciousness. For those readers experiencing a queasy stomach right about now, wondering who this lunatic is, you’re welcome to exit stage right if you like. For those readers who regularly read my comments on ZH, I’ll quote my all time favorite line from the movie “Starman”. “You wanted crazy, you got crazy.” :>)

Circling back, this heightened awareness has many different names in other cultures and (not surprisingly) it’s that place or level one wishes to reach during meditation, Yoga or intense concentration. Many “creative” and “religious” people have reported reaching a heightened state of awareness during moments of greatest inspiration and concentration. (I’ll touch the “religious” third rail in my next article.) This heightened awareness can only be reached by taking the ego out of the driver’s seat and engaging yourself. You, or more accurately your consciousness, can be found in this area of higher awareness, where your true creativity and knowledge is located. This is where you find the more fully formed you, not the everyday ego we all assume is us, which is what is exposed to the world when we’re on automatic pilot. This higher awareness is where your gut instinct resides, the place where problems are sorted out when you “sleep on it”, where you put something in the back of your mind for processing. If you think about it, there are dozens of popular cliché’s we use every day that actually describe a higher level of consciousness. While we kind of, maybe, sort of, accept this as possible, we rarely spend any time attempting to engage this area at will and use this power to our benefit.

Just think, all those wasted years in my late teens and early 20’s taking hallucinogenic drugs and looking for me when I was actually right here all the time. :>) You really can have lots of fun with this if you don’t take yourself too seriously and regularly tickle the funny bone. (I’ll cover more thoroughly the “hallucinogenic drugs” third rail next time.) My little laugh at my own expense actually highlights that most basic and fundamental aspect of being human, the longing or yearning for “meaning” that humans have described for thousands of years. Think of the tens of thousands of books, poems and songs written over the ages describing the search for the meaning and purpose of life. As you might suspect, I have some ideas on the subject but not here, not now. By the way, Microsoft’s “Word” spell check doesn’t like this article. Too many me, myself and I’s (which Word as king narcissist automatically corrects to read “me, me, me”) has Bill Gates’ crowning achievement all worked up.

Anyway, the phenomenon of watching your ego while awake and aware is sometimes called perspective but also has many other names and explanations. The real question is how are you able to do this if “you” are your ego and your ego is “you”? How can you be “you” and also be watching yourself at the same time? It’s almost as if you’re of two minds as the saying goes. In my opinion, the ego is a narrow slice of and a distinct part of your total consciousness (but a part of it none-the-less) something I call my basic self, where my mental reflexes lay, the emotional me, the crisis manager, my reptilian brain for lack of a better term. You can actually train yourself to step back and watch your ego at will, though it can be more difficult during times of stress, when the dominant ego asserts it’s primacy over your consciousness. Interestingly, during deep concentration or during meditation, when I’ve moved the ego into the background and my consciousness forward, I sense there are additional levels of awareness. It’s my understanding that it’s possible for the more highly developed conscious being (shamans, Dali Lama, etc) to “go” much further than I can even conceive of. This is a rabbit hole that’s very deep, endless even, and while I’ll never fully explore it in my lifetime, it’ll be loads of fun trying.

Once you begin to practice this, you find it’s much easier to subvert your ego because you no longer identify yourself with the ego. “You” are not your ego and your ego is not “you”. “You” are the master, the overseer, the conscious being and your ego is your servant, in the same manner your arm is a part of you but not “you”. (Unless of course you’re Peter Seller’s arm in “Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” a wonderfully powerful examination of global insanity created and accepted by the consensus reality.) Interestingly, it appears that for the last six thousand years, the ego has gained more and more control over the human psyche; to the point where today it remains dominant nearly all the time. In fact, there is growing evidence that ancient man didn’t “think” or experience reality in the same way we do today. But since we know of nothing else, of no other way to be, we assume this is normal and natural. My studies indicate it hasn’t always been normal for the ego to be primary, front and center, crowding out our greater awareness, pushing it into the background. (I’ll expand on this in the next article.)

Of course, at times you do want a dominant ego, such as when a car is about to strike you, the ladder is about to fall or someone is waving a gun in your face. You want and need that part of your consciousness to dominate, when any hesitation might kill you. But not when you’re sitting in the board room or on the throne in the bathroom. Servants don’t dominant the master but instead follow the masters bidding. BTW, please don’t get hung up on the word “control” because it’s not about control of the ego as much as understanding, awareness and perspective of the ego and your consciousness.

The next step in understanding your consciousness (once you understand the separation of “you” and your ego) is to understand that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no clear division of the conscious mind separated from the unconscious mind, with the ego mixed into the mess. Instead, understand that there is only a totality called consciousness (including the collective consciousness, which will be discussed in the next article) and the ego is constraining your view of your own total consciousness in the same way a massively large but completely dark warehouse might appear to you if all you have is a small flashlight which only illuminates a very small area. Now consider that your ego, which is usually controlling the direction and intensity of the flashlight, is a hyper alert, very frightened and extremely strong child wandering through the pitch black vastness completely alone.

Clearly the child is not in the mood to explore and understand. In fact, the child will deliberately ignore anything that could possibly be threatening, frightening or even confusing. You will be blind to many things because your ego will simply not illuminate it for you. Even if the ego recedes into the background, it still very effectively filters “reality” or “truth” if you’re not aware of the ego and its methods. You can’t see what you don’t know about or what you’re not aware of. (This reminds me of that wonderfully obtuse but factually correct statement by Donald Rumsfeld. “You have your known knowns, your known unknowns and your unknown unknowns.”) Your ego is a crisis manager and is always on high alert and not rational or logical under any circumstances. In fact, the term “rational or logical ego” is the ultimate oxymoron.

The ego’s fight or flight survival instincts, when allowed to be the dominant emotion, is not very well suited to exploration and understanding of the darkened area of your consciousness, which requires curiosity, insight, reflection, sensitivity, etc. However, the ego is very well adapted to deal with crisis, hunger, severe physical stress and so on, making the ego an excellent crisis manager. The ego, which is always on high alert though not always dominant, will “see” things such as scary shapes or movement and “hear” noises that for the most part will be a complete fabrication. Now switch on the overhead flood lights, illuminating the entire warehouse, and suddenly all those previously frightening shapes and sounds turn out to be easily recognizable familiar objects. While I don’t know how to (fully) turn on my mental flood lights, I’m absolutely convinced that if we were able to switch the lights on, we would laugh heartily at our own foolishness and insanity, for it would all make sense once we could see the big picture. We’ve all seen those picture grabs that are nearly impossible to decipher (like a circle with rods radiating outward) until we pull back to see the entire perspective (a Ferris or bicycle wheel) and suddenly it all makes sense.

While I’m a long way from this level of awareness, significant progress can still be realized if I understand that I’m no longer compelled to allow my ego to dominate and distort everything all the time. Just as important, knowing the past is littered with distortions and lies perpetrated by the ego, I must begin the process of re-examination and reflection. In addition, once I understand what the ego is and its role in my existence, I can more easily see through the ego’s distortion and subterfuge. While my ego still throws the occasional temper tantrum in the middle of the supermarket, I’ve learned to recognize the warning signs and not take it personally, pun intended. Even if I’m unable to stop the ego tantrum, I can still quickly escort my ego outside and lock it in the car. Understanding the circumstances that color my perception will go a long way towards dealing with it. The scary monster creeping up behind me is very often my ego.

In truly dysfunctional individuals, where the ego is extremely dominant and in constant tension with the conscious mind, I suspect the ego deliberately sabotages the individual to create crisis after crisis in order to “feel” needed and useful. While the ego might be an excellent crisis manager, once we recognize that the ego sees the world from an extremely narrow point of view, we shouldn’t ever expect the ego to act like a mature adult, applying reason and insight to lessons learned in order to modify future behavior. The ego is the one tiger that will never change its stripes. This might explain why some people seem to be extremely self destructive yet when carefully questioned, report that they’re completely clueless about their behavior.

Understanding the ego and its effect on human behavior helps explain, or at least helps one understand, all kinds of bizarre human behavior. Remember, the ego doesn’t make moral judgments as we understand “moral” to be (right or wrong, just or unjust, good or bad) but simply “sees” the world from its own narrow point of view, that of harm or no harm to itself or to the entire consciousness that it’s a part of. Actually, the ego sees itself as a separate and distinct entity rather than a part of the bigger whole. The ego sees itself as THE captain of the ship and everything else as passengers and cargo that the ego is responsible for. Thus, the ego sees itself as besieged on all sides by danger and oppression, under constant assault and in continuous survival mode. Psychopathic or sociopathic behavior is more understandable when seen through the eyes of the controlling ego. If the ego has completely taken over the conscious being and is continuously and permanently in control, from the point of view of the ego, it’s constantly fighting for its very existence and anything goes. The insanity of the psychopath/sociopath makes perfect sense when you understand that the ego is permanently in the psychopath’s drivers seat.

Circling back to the concept of a lightly held worldview, I’m not actually abandoning everything I know and believe each time I let go. Instead I’m simply changing my perspective. Each time I come face to face with a fact or idea that I might have previously rejected as impossible or unbelievable, instead of meeting it with “no” and rejecting it outright, I can first try “why not”. It requires letting go of my defensive position, my ego, my fight or flight crisis management reflex and trusting that I can emotionally and mentally withstand a shock to my belief system, that the new information is valuable to me rather than threatening. The thing is, once I let go, there is no shock to the system because there’s nothing there to resist. If you don’t “own” your belief system, there is nothing to lose when it must be released for reconditioning. It can be difficult at times to leave the old conditioning behind and it shows when I write “I believe” because those words implies ownership of a belief system. Habits are obvious indications of conditioning.

Think about that old joke, how it’s not the fall that kills you but the sudden stop. By removing the need to withstand assaults to your rigid belief system (because it’s light and flexible and easily released) there’s no sudden stop. It’s as if you’re a screen door, barely affected by the gust of wind passing through. It’s really remarkable how many doors you suddenly find open once you stop pounding on the closed door in front of you and look around. By letting go of the desperate urge (created by the ego) to control or restrict the information flow, suddenly we recognize that no idea or concept can harm us (manifested as fear and anxiety) unless we oppose it. It’s never a question of being able to learn new things; the problem lay with letting go of the old stuff.

This is why children are more easily trained and so impressionable. They’re an open book, with very little old baggage to overcome and plenty of open space to be filled. Worse (and this realization has brought me to tears a few times) we, you and I, our society, are teaching our own children’s ego to be dominant and to control, to lie and to cheat. Because the ego has no mechanism to distinguish between right and wrong, while the higher consciousness might better understand the difference between a “white” lie and full blown deceit, the ego simply sees this incoming information as tools to be used, usually against the consciousness and its human host, your son or daughter.

I’ll never forget the day a few decades back when I was trying to explain to my 4 year old son (to answer his question) the difference between a small lie and a big lie. My son was completely bewildered and I could see it in his eyes. I realized then and there that I was creating my very own Frankenstein’s monster. I was teaching my son how to rationalize and justify and game the system, to accept the conditioning, to be part of the hive mentality. And even when I fought against this insanity, society was more than willing to pick up the slack. While we’re training our child about hot stoves and thin ice, we’re also teaching the ego how to lie, cheat and deceive. As we are (in) forming the child’s consciousness, we are (in) forming the ego. This is a difficult rabbit hole to go down, to recognize that you’re harming your child, but it does deserve serious thought.

Well meaning people have tried to assure me that I was just doing what I thought was best to reinforce and validate their denial (no I wasn’t, I recognized what I was doing but I was too weak, lazy and conditioned to fight my own conditioning all the time) or that if I didn’t teach my child, he would not have been as well adjusted as he obviously was (being well adjusted to a sick and insane society is not a good thing) but I’ve made peace with myself on this matter. Just realize that anyone travelling down this road must deal with this speed bump eventually. However, with regard to learning about yourself and your consciousness, you can be a wide eyed and fearless little child again; open to new ideas and concepts, resilient and adaptable, a dry sponge waiting to be filled with water. It’s a matter of willingness, not ability or intelligence. In fact initially, when you’re first learning this process, thinking often gets in the way because the conditioned egocentric intellectual process is the old rut you’re stuck in and something to be avoided. You don’t want to push yourself into the same rut you’re pushing yourself out of.

I often think of life and our perception of reality as a jigsaw puzzle. There are countless puzzle pieces in front of us and from the moment we’re born (I suggest it starts before birth) we begin assembling the pieces into a coherent picture. While most of the more complex puzzle construction takes place during the training and conditioning phase we call our education, our basic concepts and beliefs are cemented into place by 5 or 6 years of age. Think of the children as Zombies in training. We are conditioned, well before the officially structured conditioning ever begins, to believe that the world (reality) is finite, quantifiable and static. Obviously the consensus view of how the pieces fit together is predetermined by society long before you’re born and very often the pieces don’t fit together very well. Because we trust those around us to know better, we simply accept what we’re told, that the ill fitting pieces are natural and to be expected. As we grow older and develop more independence, while we can clearly see there are pieces left over even when our education is done, we’re assured by society that these pieces are inconsequential, not needed, unimportant and immaterial. And quite frankly, society tends to ostracize those who ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. So as we navigate our lives, when outlier or incompatible information pushes to the top of the froth, we follow our conditioning and compare these stray and orphan pieces against our ever changing list of socially acceptable facts. The vast majority of the time we simply discard them when they don’t fit our view or that of society.

Let’s look at this a little closer. How many times over the past 12 months have you been reading a book, newspaper, magazine, trolling the Internet, listening to a news program, whatever, when something leaps to the center of your attention and immediately prompts a “What the hell” response. Here’s a stray puzzle piece that for whatever reason has been thrust into view. It doesn’t fit anywhere in your personal puzzle but there it is, commanding your attention and demanding resolution. But this piece is “out there” and for some reason you may feel a little uncomfortable, fearful, angry even. While it’s just one little piece of the puzzle, it feels threatening to you. How dare this puzzle piece jump out in front of you and disturb your peaceful day. Or maybe not, maybe you have no feeling either way. But still it doesn’t fit. So what do you do? Do you spend the next 3 hours re-examining your belief system or this puzzle piece in an honest attempt to understand the outlier. Of course you don’t, because the piece doesn’t fit. Out it goes, usually never to be seen again.

I cannot overemphasize how powerful the impulse is for the conditioned person (again, the Zombie) to stay within societies boundaries and discard the outlier puzzle pieces. Interestingly, the type of information (how contrary it is to the consensus opinion of society) is not always the sole or even principal determination used by the person when deciding what to do with it. The credibility of the purveyor of this information is often more important. For example, if the source of the information is suspect, the piece can be (more) easily discarded. However, if the source is extremely credible, the conditioned person faces a crisis of confidence. While they trust the source, the information is very disturbing. The ego sees this emotional stress and conflict as a crisis and struggles mightily to compel the person, through fear and anxiety, to reject the puzzle piece and return to emotional stability. If the person rejects the information, the ego will turn down (but never off) the fear and anxiety.

Even the credibility of the information itself is sometimes immaterial. The person often doesn’t even want to look at it very closely because doing so will simply make the crisis more difficult to deal with. It’s not the information that’s threatening as much as the person’s view of how that information will affect their position in society. If society is telling them that anyone who accepts this information will be rejected or ostracized, the information is downright dangerous to the person. The deeper the conditioning and the more the person has surrendered his identity to society and its conditioning, the deeper the crisis will be. This is the reason why so many people go through life with closed minds, seemingly certain they know precisely what’s right and wrong. In many ways, these people are protecting themselves from emotional crisis, though they would never admit that to themselves or to others because this insight is emotionally threatening. The dog is chasing its tail in a positive feedback loop.

If the leaders of a society wish to manipulate the population (duh) this explains why the leaders (we’re not just talking politicians here) would lie to their citizens, something I’ve repeatedly talked about on ZH. If the person (the conditioned mind) in crisis is confronted with information they desperately wish to reject, but the information or source is extremely credible, the person needs emotional help to discard the information. The ego is pounding on the person in the form of fear and anxiety to drop this hot potato, to resolve the crisis. The person is desperate for emotional cover to relieve their suffering. If they reject the information in order to stop the emotional pain and be accepted in the eyes of society (which is extremely important to the conditioned person) then they must personally reject the information and the source.

But they know deep down (though not always consciously) that they should at least look at the information more closely and quite possibly embrace it. This is what’s causing the crisis, the knowledge that it could be true. The conditioned mind always knows what the “truth” is and this exerts (additional) pressure on the conditioned mind, even if the conditioned mind is not aware of it. The person needs to receive permission to do what they want to do, which is to reject the information in a manner that allows them to relieve the emotional pain (denial will help them feel better about themselves) and still assure them of society’s acceptance. In other words, in this case they wish to reject the info in a personally and socially acceptable manner.

By the way, it doesn’t matter if “society” is not aware of this person’s crisis. It’s all about how the person see’s himself in relation to society. I will stress again that we’re talking about the conditioned mind here, the so called Zombie. People will reject information while alone at home just as quickly as they would in a public setting. To even be in possession (intellectually or physically, it doesn’t matter) of the information is often very threatening. I’m reminded of the Japanese person talking on the outdoor payphone and bowing while talking. In the person’s mind and manner (meaning in the consciousness) the other person is physically there. This is an important dynamic to understand and it helps explain the “phantom limb syndrome” many amputee’s experience. Experiments have shown that when you see a movie of someone lifting their arm, the part of your brain that controls your own arm lights up in the same manner as it does when you actually lift your own arm. The actual electrical impulses that would move the arm are blocked by another part of the brain (I think it’s your consciousness that blocks it) which apparently knows the difference between pictures and “reality”. But your brain doesn’t perceive any difference between the picture and the real thing. I guess this also explains the multibillion dollar pornography business, doesn’t it? :>) Perception is reality, at least to your brain.

When the politician (as the social leader) lies to the conditioned person (a social animal) about the information, the politician has in effect just given the conditioned mind the good housekeeping stamp of approval to do the same. Accepting the lie is good and acceptable to society because Daddy (society’s leader) says so. We’re talking about infantile responses here when examining the conditioned mind. The political leader, the “official” head of the society, has just told the person exactly what they want to hear. Daddy said it’s not true, the source is mistaken, crazy even, ignore that man behind the curtain, Daddy’s the great and mighty OZ. The conditioned mind can now safely reject the information and remain in good graces in society. Since society is willing to accept the lie, the person can do so as well. In effect, it isn’t a lie anymore because society (by way of society’s leaders) says it isn’t a lie. To the person reading this description of the dynamics of this personal and public subterfuge, it sounds incredible, unbelievable even. Yet this insanity goes on all the time, often in very subtle ways. You and I do this but since our ego won’t let us see ourselves clearly, deliberately obscuring our own self deceit and then papering it over with denial (and then denying the denial) we often remain convinced that others may do this but we don’t. But of course we do.

Let me also assure you that these dynamics are thoroughly understood and utilized by private parties (corporate advertising, sales organizations, etc) and government entities. Consider the entire alphabet soup of overt and covert government agencies here, including more and more private contractors doing the dirty work for the government these days. What exactly do you think is going on when you hear the term “psychological operations” and who do you think those “psyops” are being directed towards? Do you remember those mind control “experiments” conducted by the US government in the 50’s and 60’s, which were piggybacking on the work done by the Nazi doctors? (But let’s not go there, that’s on society’s no-no list.) The key for those who wish to manipulate and control the population is to maintain and extend the conditioning of society. I’ll give you one guess what the principal tool is and how this is accomplished. I’ll even give you a hint; the word contains the letters “T” and “V”. I’ll cover this more thoroughly in part 2 when I talk about control mechanisms.

The puzzle piece itself may be perfectly formed and acceptable in another time or place, or with another person, easily taken in and absorbed. But for this conditioned person, here and now, and for whatever reason, it’s discarded. Why? If you wish to overcome your conditioning, what’s wrong with simply seeing it as a stray puzzle piece that doesn’t yet have a home in your worldview or belief system? Rather than trashing it, you can place it back on the table for future reference. It really is that simple once you recognize that you’re creating the problem here, not the puzzle piece. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been able to pick up puzzle pieces months or years later that finally seem to fit, greatly contributing to my personal growth. I’m certain if I’d trashed them, it’s very likely they’d never be available again. This is because the more pieces I discard the deeper I surrender myself to societies conditioning. Each time we discard something, we must force ourselves deeper and deeper into denial in order to live with ourselves. The damage is cumulative and creates a growing dysfunction and neurosis. We must first deny it ever happened and them we must deny we ever denied it ever happened. This level of mental and emotional deceit can back up and needs to be cleared out occasionally or serious psychosis will develop. What happens when the toilet becomes jammed and won’t flush away life’s waste? A crisis is what happens.

As individuals and as a society, we’re growing more emotionally unstable each day. Witness the dramatic increase in school and work shootings & suicides over the past 30 years, to name just one example. Haven’t you ever wondered where this insanity is coming from? Doesn’t a little siren go off in the back of your head every time someone goes “postal”? Our insanity is increasing, which explains a population growing more obese, more dependent on drugs and distraction to make it through each day. It stands to reason then that the most disturbing puzzle pieces, and thus those most likely to be rejected by the conditioned mind, are those that pertain to society itself. To recognize that society’s leaders not only lie to us but may be trying to harm us (something that is obvious to the less condition mind) is nearly unthinkable. Similarly, recognizing that your spouse is sexually abusing your children or your father is molesting the neighborhood children is also extremely difficult to accept. To the conditioned mind, it is literally unimaginable. The ego will throw up a nearly impenetrable barrier to shield the conditioned mind from this information. How many times have you left a bad relationship and said something like “I never saw it coming” or “How could I have been so blind”? Your ego shielded you from the (coming) emotional trauma by blinding you to reality. Everyone else knew for months your spouse was cheating on you. Why didn’t you?

Sadly, this tendency is conditioned into us from birth and builds upon itself in an out-of-control positive feedback loop that acts as a control mechanism. While some might claim this is natural or just human nature to do so, I think just the opposite. I believe that the control mechanisms, the training and conditioning combined with social peer pressure and its positive feedback loop has been so completely assimilated into our very fabric and perception that it has become indistinguishable from reality, thus it is reality and by extension normal or natural. Perception, when fully and unquestionably accepted, is reality. In every sense of the word, we create our own realty on the fly, in real time, simply by the decisions we do or don’t make, the beliefs we maintain, which in turn are filtered by our rigid worldview, which is then reinforced by society and promoted by what I call “bad actors”.

Our rigid worldview is reinforced and encouraged by everything we interact with on a daily basis, enabling us to grow mentally lazy and intellectually stagnant. We’re assured by science that our material world is measurable, quantifiable, consistent and stable. We’ve been assured that most of the secrets of the universe have been teased out and independently confirmed, that matter and energy follow iron clad rules of physics and the few small inconsistencies will soon be worked out, as soon as that fancy new CERN collider in Geneva is fired up and working at full power. So how do we deal with some genuinely strange (scientific) puzzle pieces that are only now becoming widely accepted and that seem to be directly related to consciousness?

For instance, a scientific experiment confirmed that subatomic particles can instantly “communicate” across vast distances. In other words, “communicate” faster than the speed of light. This flies in the face of everything we think we know and breaks every rule we’ve been taught. Or my personal favorite, the now established fact that by simply observing something, we affect it. Matter can’t be accurately measured because it’s changed simply by being observed. When we “observe” something, what we’re really doing is directing our consciousness towards it, bringing the observed into of sphere of awareness. So does this mean our consciousness is a form of energy that can influence or even change other forms of energy (matter is energy in a different form or energy state) thus bringing full circle my constant refrain that perception is reality? If our consciousness is energy, then can it be destroyed (energy and matter are never destroyed, only changed in form or frequency) can it “die” when the human body dies? Clearly this information warrants careful study with an unbiased eye. Or do we just chuck these outliers out the window and sleep better now that we’ve maintained our rigid worldview? Is this a science, physics or consciousness puzzle piece? The rabbit hole really is bottomless when you get up a head of steam.

As much as I would love to believe that there’s a magic pill or a dynamic leader or a puzzle piece of information that would change all of this if only my neighbor would swallow it, vote for it or read it, the inescapable conclusion is that there’s no magic cure in the wings, waiting to be applied to fix what is broken. However, the unraveling has only just begun and I actually possess what I consider to be a realistic expectation that this mess will not completely implode into a seething roiling fireball of destruction. How does it end? I don’t really know but I will hazard a guess sometime down the line. If we’re honest about this, we all want our baubles and trinkets and a good paying job as well. We want everything to change and nothing to change. We want our cake and we want to eat it too.

So where does this leave us? Well, depending upon your point of view, either you’ve just wasted a chuck of your time reading this or your perspective is a little bit broader than it was earlier. As I stated at the beginning, if we’re ever going to understand why we’re frozen in place while our country is carted off piece by piece, we need to throw conventional wisdom out the door and look for alternative explanations. Every time I devote some time examining this question, I find myself falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. One link leads to another which leads to another which leads to another. But I do have some ideas I’d like to share with you next time.

How do you disempower a corrupt system? By empowering yourself.
How do you awaken a sleeping population? By awakening yourself.
How do you heal a toxic society? By healing yourself.
Neil Kramer

I wish to address one housekeeping item. There have been requests for me to include web links in my articles and I’ve made a deliberate and conscious decision not to. If you think about it for a moment, bibliographies, footnotes and web links are all intended to validate and legitimize the writer. All of the ideas and concepts I’ve discussed in this article can easily be found and I urge you to do so. Just be prepared to be snowed under. But I resist leaving a trail of bread crumbs for a number of reasons, one of which is primary and explained below.

There is no doubt in my mind that my biggest and most exciting discoveries and insights came from unexpected clicks of the mouse. More than a few times I’d start an evening of research with a specific subject in mind. But after a few clicks of the mouse, I’d quickly find myself deep in the weeds and far off the beaten path. I would rarely make it back to my original destination and that was just fine with me. If the reader really is interested in exploring further, the journey must be entirely yours and yours alone. I’ve found that when venturing off the beaten path (and I assure you the answers are way off the consensus reality path) it’s best if you find your own way.

My hope is that whatever you learn be yours, from your own hand, your own research, irrefutable in your mind and thus immensely valuable and indispensible to you. The purpose of the journey is not the destination but the journey itself. Each trip is unique and your experience is a product of the path you take. I’ve studied the Masters long enough to see the wisdom in their methods so I’ll simply repeat what they teach. I’ll point you in the right direction but the rest is up to you.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this exploration, coming to a theater near you.

What Do Empires Do?

2010-02-16T11:48:00.001-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/13-0

Michael Parenti
CommonDreams
Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:30 EST

When I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, as might be expected, some of my U.S. compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that U.S. rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defense or for humanitarian rescue operations or to overthrow tyranny, fight terrorism, and propagate democracy.

But by the year 2000, everyone started talking about the United States as an empire and writing books with titles like Sorrows of Empire, Follies of Empire, Twilight of Empire, or Empire of Illusions--- all referring to the United States when they spoke of empire.

Even conservatives started using the word. Amazing. One could hear right-wing pundits announcing on U.S. television, "We're an empire, with all the responsibilities and opportunities of empire and we better get used to it"; and "We are the strongest nation in the world and have every right to act as such"---as if having the power gives U.S. leaders an inherent entitlement to exercise it upon others as they might wish.

"What is going on here?" I asked myself at the time. How is it that so many people feel free to talk about empire when they mean a United States empire? The ideological orthodoxy had always been that, unlike other countries, the USA did not indulge in colonization and conquest.

The answer, I realized, is that the word has been divested of its full meaning. "Empire" seems nowadays to mean simply dominion and control. Empire---for most of these late-coming critics--- is concerned almost exclusively with power and prestige. What is usually missing from the public discourse is the process of empire and its politico-economic content. In other words, while we hear a lot about empire, we hear very little about imperialism.

Now that is strange, for imperialism is what empires are all about. Imperialism is what empires do. And by imperialism I do not mean the process of extending power and dominion without regard to material and financial interests. Indeed "imperialism" has been used by some authors in the same empty way that they use the word "empire," to simply denote dominion and control with little attention given to political economic realities.

But I define imperialism as follows: the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear their economic and military power upon another nation or region in order to expropriate its land, labor, natural resources, capital, and markets-in such a manner as to enrich the investor interests. In a word, empires do not just pursue "power for power's sake." There are real and enormous material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over.

So for centuries the ruling interests of Western Europe and later on North America and Japan went forth with their financiers---and when necessary their armies---to lay claim to most of planet Earth, including the labor of indigenous peoples, their markets, their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, tobacco, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently: uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil, and--say it again--oil. (Hardly a complete listing.)

Empires are enormously profitable for the dominant economic interests of the imperial nation but enormously costly to the people of the colonized country. In addition to suffering the pillage of their lands and natural resources, the people of these targeted countries are frequently killed in large numbers by the intruders.

This is another thing that empires do which too often goes unmentioned in the historical and political literature of countries like the United States, Britain, and France. Empires impoverish whole populations and kill lots and lots of innocent people. As I write this, President Obama and the national security state for which he works are waging two and a half wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, and northern Pakistan), and leveling military threats against Yemen, Iran, and, on a slow day, North Korea. Instead of sending medical and rescue aid to Haiti, Our Bomber sent in the Marines, the same Marines who engaged in years of mass murder in Haiti decades ago and supported more recent massacres by proxy forces.

The purpose of all this killing is to prevent alternative, independent, self-defining nations from emerging. So the empire uses its state power to gather private wealth for its investor class. And it uses its public wealth to shore up its state power and prevent other nations from self-developing.

Sooner or later this arrangement begins to wilt under the weight of its own contradictions. As the empire grows more menacing and more murderous toward others, it grows sick and impoverished within itself.
From ancient times to today, empires have always been involved in the bloody accumulation of wealth. If you don't think this is true of the United States then stop calling it "Empire." And when you write a book about how it wraps its arms around the planet, entitle it "Global Bully" or "Bossy Busybody," but be aware that you're not telling us much about imperialism.

Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press), and God and His Demons (forthcoming). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

Fascists Were Driven Out of Occupied Lands; So Will US Imperialists. Contrition?

2010-02-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Fascists-Were-Driven-Out-o-by-Jay-Janson-100203-137.html

February 4, 2010
By Jay Janson

All imperial occupations eventually end (though usually not before a ghastly massive pound of indigenous flesh is exacted along with the plunder originally intended).

Modern history has seen the various empires come and go, each having been the dominant military of its particular time enabling it to conquer and occupy the lands of others.

The Ottoman Sultans and Austrian Emperors, proud of their military prowess and ability to put down revolts, probably had difficulty imagining the extinction of their empires and their being reduced to Turkey and Austria, two small nations among a thousand others.

The sun never set on the Portuguese, Dutch, French, Spanish and English empires' occupations as they successively replaced each other as number one overseas European military power.

None were able to sustain their occupations (the northern part of Ireland and the Malvinas or Faukland Islands being the two large exceptions, remnants that will surely soon be freed from British control naturally).

Czarist Russia had managed better, for its conquered and occupied peoples were not overseas but neighbors, as was the case of the nascent imperial United States occupying the lands of nations native to North America.

The British were forced to leave India and China and were driven out of Kenya by requited homicidal violence against its vulnerable live-in exploiters. They were driven out of their American colonies two centuries earlier. The end of the fading French empire's occupations, rescued temporarily by the U.S., came with Laotian, Vietnamese and Algerian wars of independence.

The Deutsches Reich, and its collaborating Japanese Empire risen to first rank world power occupiers (thanks to American capitalist investment) usually lost control of occupied nations to popular partisan guerilla forces before the actual arrival of Allied troops.

The American empire's claim, "We seek no territory beyond our own,'' though hardly a political deception ever taken seriously abroad, served well at home to hail American exceptionalism as its armies roamed the earth and its merchant based society gained control of half the world's wealth and natural resources.

Today's U.S. wars of occupation and its having put most nations under its doctrine of right to bomb are evidence of an unproclaimed but murderously real American Empire of banking institutions and far flung world wide net of a hundred and seventy-five military installations.

From the seed of the appallingly ignorant racist pseudo philosophy of Manifest Destiny "justifying' a belligerent and primitive use of its navy, (as when Commodore Perry sailed into a Yokohama harbor and threatening to open fire), and its gunboats (on Chinese rivers and elsewhere) to force trade agreements, a nascent American commercial empire grew and converted itself into a more planted and seemingly permanent form of foreign hegemony beyond its intermittent occupations.

With its powerful military, the United States has managed to occupy nations at will throughout its history, witness the dozens and dozens of invasions and both short and long (decades long, in the case of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), in Latin America, in the Philippines and recently in other Far Eastern and Middle Eastern countries.

But limitations on its use of military cropped up early on and have continued to augment themselves.

In the 1920s, it felt obliged to withdraw two U.S. armies from revolutionary Russia, and found it too troublesome to continue its occupation of the Dominican Republic.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt felt it wise to withdraw the Marines from a nineteen year occupation of Haiti to herald in his defensive "Good Neighbor" policy;

In the 1940s, the newly forming empire American bankers and captains of industry helped build boldly attacked the U.S. navy in both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

In the 1950s, it was driven from North Korea;

In the 1960s, Eisenhower was unable to defeat a revolution against the French colonial backed Laotian government in spite of bombing that country more than any nation in the history of air attacks, and the quick defeat of a U.S. invasion of Cuba was its first in Latin America.

In the 1970s, came the defeat in Vietnam after thirty years of funding war and the death of fifty-eight thousand American warriors (the millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians are not considered of consequence).

In the 1980s, Carter's failed Operation Eagle Claw air commando raid against the Iranian revolutionary government cost him the election, and after an early invasion of Lebanon, Reagan withdrew after losing nearly three hundred servicemen to two suicide truck bombers.

In the 1990s, after it ordered some wild shooting it up in Somalia, it was faced with deadly citizen rage, and Clinton withdrew U.S. forces.

In 2000 the destroyer USS Cole was disabled in Yemen, and later saw its forces continually under attack in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.

As all empires, the United States of America has obedient satellites and pressured allies willing or forced to participate in its occupations, in its aggrandizing of wealth and resources, some earning imperial gratitude or remuneration for engaging in proxy wars of occupation or providing troops or tribute for the empire's own military initiatives.

Presently, Ethiopia in Somalia, NATO in Afghanistan and Columbia in South America and an "international community' arrayed ready to aid an another attack on Iran are are examples prominently lauded in imperial news media.

Dramatic instances of broad and compliant acquiescence to U.S. moves within nations are manifold: its taking over from the British in Greece; the colossus' roaring blitzes of Panama, tiny Grenada, the Dominica Republic; its CIA funding and participating in civil wars all over the former colonial Third World, as in Angola; its overthrowing of democratic governments in Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Chile and Haiti, handling of pan-nationalists like Cheddi, Jagan, Nassar and Nkruma, and seeing to the installation of proxy indigenous occupiers; its almost infantile lies to justify invasions and bombing of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen to cite only a very few during which little or no formal disapproval was voiced - perhaps the most striking of which was Washington having Saddam Hussein invade and war for eight years against upstart and oil rich Iran.

Part of this in international "cooperation' scenario is the U.N. being designated to provide medical aid and other humanitarian services in U.S. occupied countries, and to clean up afterward. The Empire easily dominates the U.N. Security Council and uses the U.N. name and organization to its own purposes. The U.S., during the absence of the Soviet Union on the Council, bombed, invaded and occupied Korea under the U.N. flag.

American bombings, invasions, occupations and control of many peoples across the world by economic leverage and covert destabilization and promoting civil wars will end someday relatively soon. In the meantime how many Americans will continue to be well adjusted to living with it and ignoring their responsibility for the crimes against humanity of their government. A government which proclaims that killing its designated bad guys everywhere, huge collateral death notwithstanding, is useful and necessary to the protection of the Empire's home nation.

At best, empires are amoral in their treatment of occupied populations . There were a few notable exceptions in the ancient world - that of a reformed and repentant great emperor Ashoka turning to Buddhism comes to mind.

Though today Germany and Japan have their small neo-fascist fringe groups on the margin as elsewhere, the general feeling in the public at large is now one of contrition for the atrocities committed in the name of their nations during brutal occupations accepted by their forefathers, who failed to prevent their country from falling under fascist domination. German and Japanese citizens feel some national complicity, not the innocence that most of their grandparents professed as they proclaimed themselves simply co-victims. Pride in their nations history as been diminished for its violent occupations of other nations.

One supposes that one day, a generation after all the U.S. troops, ships and planes have exited all the places they didn't belong doing things that imperial armed forces do, children in America will have a similar feeling and pangs of conscience, a bit of shame for the disappointing behavior of Americans that went before them.

The Empire Falls Back

2010-02-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2010
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

We've grown up with a Christian-Roman version of European and world history, primarily the Fall of Rome. The Romans --we are taught --created a great empire characterized by a sophisticated system of arrow-straight roads that made possible commerce and travel from the far flung reaches of empire from Briton to Constantinople, from Carthage to Germania.

Just outside the borders of empire, we are taught, lived uncivilized, untutored barbarian hordes intent upon harassing, plundering, threatening the Pax Romana that defined the Greatest Empire the world had ever seen. The term Pax Romana always rang false with me. Was it ever at peace but, rather, an Orwellian perpetual war, the 'corporatized' taking of human life required to keep the Leviathan afloat?

Much speculation about the fall of Rome is false. Fundamentalist Christians in America believe Rome fell because it indulged orgies, homosexuality and the feeding of Christians to lions. The more informed may cite Gibbon and sum up the fall of Rome in a phrase: loss of civic virtue. While no one pretends that Rome was in all ways and all times virtuous, the 'loss of civic virtue' applies as well to fiscal profligacy, arrogance and, perhaps most importantly, the consequences of conquest.

Conquest is thought necessary by nation-states like Rome, forgetting that an imperially ambitious nation substitutes conquest for real productivity. Instead of employing persons, Rome seized their farms and sent them off on wars of aggression and conquest. Obvious examples are Dacia and Gaul both of which Rome invaded for 'gold'. More recently, George W. Bush attacked and invaded Iraq for its oil. Little has changed but names and commodities. If you are still inclined to believe the Bushco cover story, please tell me how many bona fide terrorists were captured by Bush and cite a scintilla of evidence that they were anything but Iraqis defending their nation, their homes and families, against an aggressor, a thief, a war criminal. If the Bushco case against 'detainees' at Guantanamo and elsewhere were sound, then why did Bushco so adamantly deny them 'due process' or protections afforded them under the principles of the Geneva Convention? What had Bush to hide but war crimes and atrocities?

More than ever, I remain unimpressed with the assertion that the attack and invasion of Iraq had anything whatsoever to do with the faux 'war on terrorism'! Without an 'imminent threat', the U.S. attack and invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq are war crimes as are illegal detentions, torture, murder and other atrocities.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had anything to do with 911. Someone in the Bush administration had a bright idea: "let's call the opposition to U.S. aggression and conquest by the name 'Insurgent'!" I would not be surprised to learn that this 'phrase' was tested by a DC based consulting firm and focus group.

It takes tremendous courage to speak out against the machine, the Evil Empire, Moloch, Big Brother, the M.I.C. When the Crown persisted against the colonies, William Pitt rose to protest in Parliament:
If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms! Never! Never! Never! --William Pitt,

Many of Rome's enemies were at least as civilized as Rome and, by some standards, more so. Former 'Flying Circus' mainstay Terry Jones, a medieval scholar with several documentaries to his credit, may have pinpointed the source of many myths about Rome: Rome itself. It was Rome, primarily --not its conquered provinces --that wrote its history. Like American historians biased against the Native Americans, Roman historians may have been biased against non-Roman civilizations. The 'Empire' may have written off its conquered as 'uncivilized, savage and barbaric' though many were 'organized, motivated and intelligent individually and in groups, tribes, cities, nations'. Few, if any, posed an 'imminent threat' to Rome. Few, in any, had intentions of overthrowing Rome or plundering the empire. There may have been no terrorist threat to the citizens of Rome. The story of Rome from the point of view of the Britons, German, Gauls, Greeks, Persians, and Africans, is, perhaps, a foretaste of the contrarian history of the United States that is sure to be written.

The Vandals didn't vandalize - the Romans did. The Goths didn't sack Rome - the Romans did. Attila the Hun didn't go to Constantinople to destroy it, but because the Emperor's daughter wanted to marry him. And far from civilizing the societies they conquered the Romans often destroyed much of what they found. --Terry Jones' Barbarians

US military vows indefinite stay in Haiti

2010-02-08T07:25:00.001-08:00

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=118037§ionid=351020706

Press TV
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:28 EST

Amid allegations that the US is using Haiti's earthquake to occupy the country, Washington says its military forces would stay in the Caribbean nation as long as needed.

"We are in Haiti as long as we are needed," US Army Colonel Gregory Kane, the director of US Joint Task Force Haiti operations, said on Saturday.

This is while Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive had earlier announced that it would take about 10 years to reconstruct the country devastated by the quake.

On January 12, a deadly quake struck the capital city of Port-au-Prince, killing an estimated 212,000 people and leaving more than one million homeless.

The US has deployed 20,000 troops to the impoverished Caribbean nation to take over command of the distribution of humanitarian aid.

The Pentagon has sent one of its biggest aircraft carriers to Haiti, along with other navy and coast guard vessels.

However, the presence of the US military has infuriated some Latin American countries including, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and Ecuador.

In the latest criticism last week, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa had blasted the aid 'imperialism' arriving in Port-au-Prince.

"In this (aid), there is also much imperialism, donor imperialism, donate first, but recover in military ways through NGOs," according to Correa.

Meanwhile, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and President Evo Morales of Bolivia also accused the US of seeking to occupy the country.

Washington, in the past, has been accused of interfering in Haitian internal affairs on many occasions. The US military played a role in the departure of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide before his second term was over in early 2004. Aristide described his departure as kidnapping.

Haiti was occupied by US Marines for nearly 20 years from 1915 to 1934. Former US president Bill Clinton sent troops to Haiti in 1994.

Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite

2010-02-03T14:28:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Budgets-War-and-Blind-Amb-by-Chris-Floyd-100202-167.html

February 2, 2010
Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite
By Chris Floyd

The American elite's unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance -- based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war -- is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday's New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating "news analysis" of the Administration's just-announced $3.8 trillion budget.

Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. Completely ignoring the plain truth that his own expert source tell him later in the story -- that "forecasts 10 years out have no credibility" -- Sanger boldly plunges forward to tell us just what it all means. You will not be surprised to hear that the upshot of these big deficits is that neither Obama nor his successors will be able to spend any money on "new domestic initiatives" for years to come. But let's let Sanger, savant and seer, tell it in his own words:

In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country's entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget's projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama's own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. ...

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country's influence around the world eroded.

What is most interesting here, of course, is not Sanger's noodle-scratching over imaginary numbers projected into an unknowable future, but his total and apparently completely unconscious adoption of the mindset of militarist empire. For as he puzzles and puzzles till his puzzler is sore on how in God's name the United States can possibly find any money at all to spend on bettering the lives of its citizens over the next 10 years, it becomes clear that Sanger -- like the rest of our political and media elite -- literally cannot conceive of an end to empire. Our elites and their courtiers literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.

And so this consideration, this possible outcome, does not figure in Sanger's "analysis" because it cannot: it lies far outside the scope of his consciousness. The only possible alternative he can conceive to the empire's bloody and bankrupting business as usual is some kind of divine intervention, "miraculous growth" or some "miraculous political compromise."

And make no mistake: the "miraculous political compromise" he is talking about has nothing to do with ending or even trimming the empire. A "compromise" on this issue could only be posited if there was some present conflict over it. But both parties are deeply committed to increasing spending on the wars and the war machine.

No, by "compromise" Sanger means some sort of "Grand Bargain" between the parties to cut Social Security and Medicare, along the lines of the "blue-ribbon panel" of entitlement cutters now being pushed by the Obama Administration. An effort to impose this kind of elitist, unaccountable commission failed in the Senate a few weeks ago -- although the Republicans have proposed such panels before, they didn't like this one because Obama proposed it -- but the idea will keep coming back. Sanger and the elite will doubtless get their "miracle" of slashing the remaining bits of the safety net to shreds in due time.

For these are the only possibilities for deficit-cutting that Sanger can even remotely contemplate: some whiz-bang new techno gizmo -- or maybe some hot new "financial instruments" cooked up by Wall Street -- that will goose the economy with a bright new bubble ... or else finally telling our old, sick, vulnerable and unfortunate to just crawl off and die already. That's it. That's all that our elite can envision.

Yet the ending of the imperial wars and the dismantling of America's global military empire -- and its global gulag -- would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from direct military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for "Homeland security" funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants -- and inciting revenge and resistance.

This would release a flood of money for any number of "new domestic initiatives," while also giving scope for deep tax cuts across the board. Working people would thrive, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable would be bettered, businesses would grow, opportunity would expand, the care and education of our children would be greatly enhanced, our infrastructure could be repaired and strengthened, our environment better cleansed and cared for. In short, people could keep more of their own money while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life of all the nation's citizens.

This is no utopian vision. Many problems, much suffering would remain. But it would be a better society -- more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more prosperous than it is now. Such an alternative is entirely achievable, by ordinary humans; it would require no divine miracles, no god-like heroes to bring it about.

But such a society is precisely what our elites cannot -- or, to be more accurate, will not -- imagine. Because, yes, it would "erode" their "influence" around the world to some extent. Although they would still be comfortable, coddled and privileged, they could no longer merge their individual psyches with the larger entity of a globe-spanning, death-dealing empire -- a connection which, although itself a projection of their own brains, gives them a forever-inflated sense of worth and importance.

And on a more prosaic level, the end of empire would mean an end to the horrendous economic distortion wrought by our war-profiteering industries. Other businesses would inevitably come to the fore, economic activity would be spread more evenly across more sectors. And so, yes, those who have feasted so gluttonously for so long on blood money would not be quite as rich as they are now.

A better world -- again, not perfect, by no means perfect, but much better -- is entirely possible. We could easily dismantle the empire -- carefully, safely, with deliberation -- over the next ten years. It is a reasonable, moderate, serious option. It would not require violent revolution or vast social upheaval. But our elites do not want this. They can no longer fathom life without the exercise -- and worship -- of unrestricted power that empire entails. They will not accept -- or even contemplate -- any alternative to it.

And thus every option and policy we are offered -- whether from right-wing Republicans or "progressive" Democrats, or from "serious" news analysts on "serious" papers -- must fall within these pathetically cramped, constricted mental horizons. Empire -- the imposition of dominion by violence and threat of violence, and the financial and moral corruption this breeds, the malevolent example it sets at every level of society -- is the canker in the body politic. Until it is dealt with, there will be no healing, no hope, no change -- just more degradation and disaster all down the line.

Oil in Haiti, reasons for the US occupation, Part 2

2010-02-01T14:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Oil-in-Haiti-reasons-for-by-Ezili-Danto-100129-337.html

January 29, 2010
Oil in Haiti, reasons for the US occupation, Part 2
By Ezili Danto

I wrote Part 1 of Oil in Haiti as the economic reasons for the US/UN occupation back in October, 2009. After the earthquake I questioned whether oil drilling could have triggered the earthquake (Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?)

Then suddenly, after spending years hitting myself against Officialdom's colonial rock that kept denying Haiti had significant resources. After being called crazy and un-American for writing that the 2010 earthquake gives the US the perfect disaster-capitalism opportunity to come out from behind the UN and openly occupy Haiti to secure Haiti's oil, strategic location and other riches for the corporatocracy. Just after I wrote about oil drilling causing earthquakes, on the following Tuesday, a veteran oil company man comes forward in Businessweek to say, and one wonders how he can so authoritatively speculate about the area of the faultline without intimate knowledge of the drillings, explorations, Haiti's wellheads and oil map, et al, but nonetheless his sudden, seemingly unprompted REVELATION, is that Haiti lies in an area that has undiscovered amounts of oil, it must have oil and the earthquake "may have left clues" to petroleum reservoirs! Oil that, uhmmm, "could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, a geologist said." (Haiti Earthquake May Have Exposed Gas, Aiding Economy By Jim Polson, Jan. 26, 2010, Bloomberg.) Yep, yep he may really mean: "that could aid Haiti's US-occupied economy recover its strategic oil reserves" for the global elite. No? I could be wrong, but I am thinking "and the cover up, starts." But I won't say so. Let Stephen Pierce tell the story:

****************
The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said yesterday in a telephone interview.
"A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn't been drilled," said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas- based company that's drilling in Israel. "A discovery could significantly improve the country's economy and stimulate further exploration.

...The Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and their offshore waters, probably hold at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas, according to a 2000 report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Undiscovered amounts may be as high as 941 million barrels of oil and 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to the report. Among nations in the northern Caribbean, Cuba and Jamaica have awarded offshore leases for oil and gas development. Trinidad and Tobago, South American islands off the coast of Venezuela, account for most Caribbean oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

**************

For the record, Haiti has a large reserve of oil and natural gas. How could it not? It shares the waters with oil producing island from all around. We noted this also. Besides, this is not new or a surprise to the United States and certainly shouldn't be new to "a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp."

There's always been oil in Haiti. The US /USAID guaranteed an oil contract for an American businessman named Charles C. Valentine back in November 1962 that gave his company a monopoly control over pretty much everything to do with oil in Haiti and seems to have also paid him to back out of it.

Valentine successfully claimed $327,304 from the development agency, a sum USAID was itself able to extract from the Haitian government along with $4,396 in interest charges.

According to Haitian scholar Dr. Georges Michel, the US has known there's oil and natural gas reserves in Haiti since 1908 and did their explorations in the 1950s and locked up what they found as "strategic reserves for the US" to be tapped when Middle Eastern oil became less available. (See, Oil in Haiti by Dr. Georges Michel) I've been writing for years now that the US has been trying to get rid of Haiti's democratically elected government since 1991 so they could get to "their" strategic reserves without any fear of a populous president nationalizing the oil and gas reserves to benefit the miserably poor majority in Haiti as has been done in Venezuela or elsewhere in Latin America. (See, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, where these scientist say there's more oil in Haiti than in Venezuela.) No one has been listening. Not even the white liberals who are such defenders of Haiti. To the best of my knowledge, other than Haitians, over the long years before the earthquake, the only non-Haitian observers who ever paid attention and picked up on our reports and concerns about the plundering and pillaging of Haiti's riches, were John Maxwell and Chris Scott of CKUT Radio in Canada.That's it. All the others bought the State Department line that Haiti was a charity case and had no resources to mention. I supposed if they acknowleged Haiti could be self-reliant, these savoirs, wouldn't have a gig to support themselves and their heroic self-image, right?

Today Haiti has oil and it's all good cause 20,000 troops are down there to secure it and Haiti's other riches while the vision is to perhaps herd the displaced earthquake victims - who don't die from their TV-aid - into hastily constructed pre-fabricated houses and let the ghettos fester as they do in Kingston, Jamaica, while the areas the whites and Haitian oligarchy want are developed into tourist havens and all capital is flown out of Haiti.

Notice where the earthquake fault line is and its juxtaposition to the Bay of Port au Prince where the drilling or fracking may have been taking place and the damage at Kafou Feuille's Morne L'Hopital, near the epicenter of the earthquake and where the poor built their houses on the mountainside and all around the Southern coastal towns by the Bay of Cayes where there's oil according to Haitians and the geologist map of Haitian resources in the Lavalas white book. Notice how the earthquake was LOCALIZED to these areas and Port au Prince and never reached the Dominican Republic and there was no tsunami...

The earthquakes may have just been a large hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" operation designed to release the hydrocarbons from isolated pockets so oil and natural gas could be more easily accessed. Or, perhaps drilling at the existing wellheads in Port au Prince some 20 to 30 miles North of the fault line or offshore in the Bay of Port au Prince may have linked up with existing fractures and interconnected to affect the fault-line and cause the earthquake as an unintended consequence. There have been reports of minor earthquakes in Port au Prince these last few years of very small magnitudes. They could have caused damaged that interconnected with the latest fracking to destabilize the fault line, cause the earthquake.

The Lavalas map of Haiti's resources shows that Kafou's Morne Cabrit housed a huge reservoi of oil. Here's the article I wrote, last year documenting that Haiti had oil and that was the reason for the US/UN forced removal of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. I do so hope, this time, to honor the lives lost and really help protect the remaining survivors of Bush the first and Bush the lesser's two regimes changes in Haiti and now this total occupation, that conscious Americans and all decent folks on this earth, are paying attention and will help us stop this latest travesty.

The just thing for now, is to allow former President Aristide who was kidnapped out of Haiti on a rendition plane by the US Special forces and has been practically under house arrest in South African for 6-years, forbidden first by US Secretary of State Condi Rice and now Hillary Clinton from returning hom, to return to his country. He ought to be returned to Haiti so he may assist Haiti's majority at this agonizing time and help in the relief and rebuilding of the nation. (Go to: Part I, Oil in Haiti and Oil Refinery - an old notion for Fort Liberte as a transshipment terminal for US supertankers )

Don't fall for this hoax. The powers-that-be are already drilling and for years, HLLN has been pointing to the Lavalas' white book detailing Haiti's resources as part of the reason for removing President Aristide and putting in Haitian puppets to empire. Now that 20,000 US troops are in Haiti behind the pretext of humanitarian aid, oh yeah, by the way the EARTHQUAKE "may have left clues to petroleum reservoirs that could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, a geologist said"!!!

Never mind that stealth offshore and on-land drilling may have disturbed the fault line, those Haitians are Black idiots anyway. Just yesterday I was called CRAZY for saying Haiti had oil and substantial mineral resources. But today, today, if the white man says it, it must be true! Don't fall for the empire's latest spin and clean-up job. Two many defenseless people are still dying behind this earthquake and classquake. Too many long-suffering flesh and blood who won't get rescue, recovery, relief and rebuilding, but the cold steel of military occupation.

Author's Bio: Human Rights Lawyer, Ezili Danto/Marguerite Laurent is dedicated to correcting the media lies and colonial narratives about Haiti. A writer, performance poet and lawyer, Ezili Danto is founder of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, runs the Ezili Danto website, listserve, eyewitness project, FreeHaitiMovement and the on-line journal, Haitian Perspectives.

The Kidnapping of Haiti

2010-01-29T16:59:00.001-08:00

The Kidnapping of Haiti

John Pilger
John Pilger.com
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:12 EST

© Jan Sochor
Orphanage Bon Samaritain, Haiti
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the "swift and crude" appropriation of earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarised Obama administration. With George W. Bush attending to the "relief effort" and Bill Clinton the UN's man, The Comedians, Graham Greene's dark novel about exploted Haiti comes to mind.

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured "formal approval" from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to "secure" roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.

The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the "violence" and need for "security". In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens' groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general's assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that "looting is the only industry" and "the dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten." Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. "There's no doubt," reported Frei in the aftermath of America's bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East... is now increasingly tied up with military power."

In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W. Bush's policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700 billion. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup.

For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the "relief effort": a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene's The Comedians, set in Papa Doc's Haiti. As president, Bush's relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans' black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically-elected prime minister of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him in Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti's sweatshops.

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN's man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as "Mr. Nice Guy... bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land", Clinton is Haiti's most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed "tourist playground".

Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti's waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington's "rollback" plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela's abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama's secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven military bases to, according to US air force documents, "combat anti-US governments in the region".

Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama's next war. On 14 December, researchers at the University of West England published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC's reporting of Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez government, while the majority denigrated Chavez's extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.

Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.

China calls US an 'information imperialist'

2010-01-23T14:45:00.001-08:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-google-war-china-calls-us-an-information-imperialist-1876409.html

January 23, 2010
The Google war: China calls US an 'information imperialist'
By Clifford Coonan in Beijing
Speech by Hillary Clinton on internet freedom provokes angry response

China responded with a fierce broadside yesterday after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, attacked its record on internet freedom. The country labelled Washington an "information imperialist" and said accusations that China was manipulating the internet for its own ends were false.

Web giant Google's threat to leave China over cyber attacks on rights activists and internet censorship, combined with Ms Clinton's strong denunciation of censorship, have caused the Google affair to escalate into a major row between Washington and Beijing.

The Chinese say the tension between the two superpowers is harming diplomatic ties, and Beijing officials told Ms Clinton to "stop finger-pointing".

"The US side had criticised China's policies on Internet administration, alluding that China restricts internet freedom. We firmly oppose such words and deeds, which are against the facts and harm the China-US relations," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said on the government's website.

Many cyber experts suspect that the hacker attacks from China on Google and other targets were so sophisticated that official involvement was likely. The fact that human rights activists, journalists and dissidents were targeted also encouraged the suggestion that this might be the case.

Chinese hackers are famously patriotic and have been blamed for attacking the website of Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine, seen by many Asian nations as a symbol of Japan's past war-time aggression, and the website of the Melbourne International Film Festival after it said it would show a film about the Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.

It's the latest sign of strain between China and the US, with the two countries already at loggerheads over trade issues, China's currency and the sale of weapons by the US to Taiwan.

"We urge the US side to respect facts and stop using the so-called freedom of the internet to make unjustified accusations against China," the statement said.

In her speech in Washington, Clinton cited China as among a number of countries where there has been "a spike in threats to the free flow of information" over the past year. She also named Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. She said: "countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation."

Yesterday White House spokesman Bill Burton made clear that President Obama agreed with his secretary of state. "All we're looking for from China are some answers," he told reporters. He said that Obama "continues to be troubled by the cyber security breach".

Mr Ma insisted the internet was open and free in China. But such claims are at odds with the fact that the Chinese government heavily censors online activity and keeps a tight rein on the internet. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China, which uses a filtering system known as "The Great Firewall of China" to block any sites that have content which runs counter to the Communist Party's interests. The government said that this kind of censorship was in keeping with China's "national conditions and cultural traditions".

After July's riots in Xinjiang province, in the far north west of the country, the authorities completely cut off all but the most rudimentary internet access to the region, and have only recently allowed it to resume.

The Internet: New shot in the arm for US hegemony

2010-01-23T14:25:00.001-08:00

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-01/22/content_9364327.htm

The Internet: New shot in the arm for US hegemony
China Daily
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:20 EST

The Internet originated on American soil. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defense Department established the world's first testing packet-switched network (PSN) to connect four universities on US soil. The world saw a remarkable expansion of the scale and number of Internet users from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. In September 1989, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was founded with a grant from the US Department of Commence to administer the Internet terminal server. Over the past 40 years, the US has been dominating the world Internet as the core technique holder with an inherent advantage of being the cradle of the Internet.

There are 13 terminal servers in the world to keep the Internet running, with a master server and nine of the 12 secondary servers stationed in the US. In terms of technique, the network of a country will disappear from the world Internet if its domain name registry is blocked or deleted from the terminal server. This kind of conduct is not legally binding with the law of any country except ICANN. In April 2004, Libya was unseen on the Internet for three days after the collapse of the domain name registry of the country "LY" caused by a domain administration dispute.

Concerns about the US monopoly of the domain name server (DNS) system grew among other nations as much as their reliance on the Internet for issues ranging from politics and the economy to defense and the general society. Years ago, there was a proposal that the Internet be administered by the United Nations or under international cooperation. The European Union insisted that the World Wide Web is an international resource that should be jointly managed by all nations. Some developing countries pointed out that at the early stage of Internet development, developed countries seized large amounts of domain names, leaving a limited few for them, and demanded a share with the US over Internet administration. American officials opposed the suggestion.

The US Defense Strategy Review in March 2005 stated that Internet space should have the same priority as continental, marine, aerial and outer space jurisdictions for the US to maintain a decisive superiority. A statement from Washington on June 30, 2005, made it clear that the US government would maintain its control over the DNS indefinitely; stating that a transfer of its management to UN or international cooperative models would impede the free flow of information, lead to easy manipulation of the Internet and make global supervision more difficult.

In an attempt to thwart the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis in November 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote to then European Union president and British foreign minister that her government in Washington backed Internet administration and coordination by ICANN (an alleged NGO which is actually a quasi-government organization with the US Department of Commerce). Rice said management by private corporations would guarantee the safety and stability of the Internet, while the alternative choice of an inter-government mechanism would be an obstacle to Internet development. At the same time, the US Congress passed a bill by a vote of 423 to zero urging a manifesto by the White House that American control over Internet is inviolable. US Rep. John Taylor Doolittle, a Republican from California, said the United States invented the Internet and described it as a gift to the world based on American taxpayers' money. He said he opposed any move to transfer the country's control to the UN.

The control of the Internet plays a strategic role for US. Using the internet, the US can intercept information via the net, export US values and opinions, support a "Color Revolution", feed the opposition powers and rebels against anti-US governments, interfere with other countries' internal affairs and make proactive attacks on enemy's communication and directing networks. James-Adams, a famous military forecaster, wrote in his book, The Next World War, these words: "The computer is the weapon for the future war and there is no virtual front line, as the traditional battle and the byte will take the bullet's role to grab control of the air."

US companies intend to make preparations for future global information control and sanctions during the progress of research and manufacture under the direction of the US government. As early as 2002, a CIA Internet spying plot was disclosed by the British media, saying the CIA sought to collect information by breaking into giant companies, banks and governmental organs and organizations across the world. Under the cover of a high-tech civil company, the CIA took cooperated with a software development company in the Silicon Valley to design software "bugs" to collect information via the Internet. The spying software binding with normal software would install automatically once a netizen started to use the normal software.

The New York Times reported in December, 2005 that the CIA cooperated with the country's telecom enterprises to invent a computer program capable of intercepting Internet communications. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS TV) claimed on Jan 11, 2006, that the CIA had established a special institution for the interception of information from other countries by using high-tech means. The institution's person in charge said in an interview with CBS that the CIA had obtained a great amount of information of great importance. Although Iran had been trying to hide its nuclear research and development work, the CIA found ways to get first-hand information and photos of its nuclear weapons work. The adoption of the interception technology helped the CIA get into the door of Iran's secret nuclear experiment after the execution of a CIA informant. He added that the CIA had never stopped its supervisory control over Iran since the wide adoption of the Internet and had built three tape libraries to store the information collected.

In the New York Times' words, social networking sites, as a new Internet favorite in the 21st century, have played a big role in protests in Georgia, Egypt and Iceland. The unsuccessful "Color Revolution" in Moldova in April 2009 was also called the "Twitter Revolution" because of the involvement of Twitter, a popular US-based Internet social networking site. There are people at the US-based Soros Open Society Institute who are in charge of boosting so-called "Democratic movement" in a "closed society" in the US. Iran had been in a turbulent situation after its election in June 2009, as the opposition party was spreading false messages, venting their discontent and holding protests on social networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube. The US government thought it such an effective tool to use against Iran that it even asked Twitter to postpone its regular maintenance date on June 15, saying, "Iran is in a defining moment, and Twitter is playing such a vital part in it, can you let it just work as usual?" The founder of Twitter felt excited to see that its site had become the "political tool" of the US government.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Twitter and other social networking sites are "strategic assets of great importance" because "these new technologies make it harder for the 'dictator regimes' to control information". A former intelligence official said the channeling of US ideology via the Internet is much easier than sending spies to target countries or training local agents in target countries who identify with US ideology. The move the US government made in June 2009 -- when it dissented over the Chinese government's order to install the filtering software Green Dam and pressured China's government for interfering in the freedom on the 'Net and the freedom of information flow -- is probably related to its intention to infiltrate China.

According to a Hong Kong media agency, the CIA invests tens of millions of US dollars every year to aid "Chinese net traitors" to infiltrate Chinese net users with US ideology. They haunt major Chinese forums and portals. A website called "Wazhe Online" (Chinese Pinyin) is a secret mission with the cooperation of US government institutions and overseas "Tibetan splittist organizations" with the tasks of agitating, deluding, infiltrating and instigating Chinese net users, making up rumors to initiate riots and collecting information via the Internet. A Tibetan youth who once worked with one organization said it is an online spy agency which is supported by the US financially, controlled by the Americans and serves the Americans. A commentary on Hong Kong-based Ta Kung Pao said those who publish stories sensitive to China's policies on the net have complex backgrounds and are hired by US and Japanese spy agencies.

US State Secretary Hillary Clinton has also attached importance to the Internet after taking office. She claimed that it's necessary to deal with the countries that roll back US media with the force of the Internet, especially making use of Facebook, YouTube, Flicker and Twitter to send voices from the US.

Former US President George W. Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 16 (NSPD-16) to set up the first hacker force in American history, as well as of world history, in 2002. With the technology advantages, the US Department of Defense (DoD) advanced the idea of cyber warfare in 2004. In the summer of the same year, Bush signed a secret document which agreed to allow the DoD to launch a "hacker-style" devastation attacking enemies' computers. At the beginning of 2008, Bush again allowed the US forces to launch the cyber-attacks initially with the regard to giving the DoD a greater counter-power on the network. He demanded the forces to have the capability of accessing any open or closed long-distance computer network, and then maintain "complete concealment" and "quietly steal information" to destroy enemies' computer systems, destroy their command system, and even control their business and government affairs networks. The Air Force Cyber Command was founded on Sept 18, 2008, with the mission of defending their own network security and also attacking others.

US President Barack Obama repeatedly stressed the importance of the Internet during his campaign. He asked the relevant departments to assess the security of the American network, and to prepare for the implementation of information hegemony to continue the work of controlling the new generation of Internet Root Servers. The assessment report released by the US government on May 29, 2009, said that cyberspace threats have become one of the most serious economic and military threats facing the United States. The report emphasized that the US must show the world they were seriously responding to the challenge. Against this background, Microsoft announced the closure of MSN services for Cuba, Iran, Syria, Sudan and the DPRK. But the world opinion considers this as information sanction instead of meeting a challenge.

A report from the New York Times on May 31, 2009, claims that almost all large military enterprises -- including Northrop Grumman Corp, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Co -- have network contracts with the intelligence agencies of the US military. The first two enterprises engage in "offensive cyber war", which includes stealing other countries' sensitive information or paralyzing their networks by developing software tools after finding vulnerabilities in their computer systems.

The US Department of Defense announced a plan to establish the "United States Cyber Command" on June 23, 2009, in order to gain advantage in the field. Pentagon spokesman Whitman said the new command is going to "focus on protection". Only they themselves believe such a word. It is clear that the aim of founding the new command is to integrate the high-tech military units in different parts of the country and to strengthen defense. More importantly, it aims to improve the offensive ability and launch a preemptive cyber attack against "enemy countries" if necessary. For a long time in the past, the Pentagon has stressed that Internet is part of war and is a "military front". Before the first Gulf War, the CIA had planted a "virus chip" in the printers purchased by Iraq. They activated the virus using remote control technology before launching the strategic bombing. Then the air defense control system of Iraq suffered a failure. According to the estimation of defense expert Joel Harker, who has been studying the hacker program of the US military for 13 years, the US now has about 80,000 personnel engaging in cyber warfare. In terms of the "weapons" for cyber warfare, they have developed more than 2,000 computer viruses which could be used in cyber attacks such as Worms, Trojans, Logic Bombs and trap door viruses.

HAARP, Haiti, Brzezinski and the NWO

2010-01-23T11:37:00.001-08:00

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_5495.shtml

HAARP, Haiti, Brzezinski and the NWO
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor

Jan 22, 2010, 00:30

On October 25, 2005, I wrote an article for Online Journal, headlined Is it the weather or government terror, detailing government manipulation of weather, including earthquakes, for terror and destruction, mentioning that “your local weatherman was surely not up to pointing this out,” and adding “let me help with the forecast, past, present and long-range. Well, déjà vu all over again seems to have struck in Haiti on January 12.

When I wrote that article, I was disturbed over the effects of Katrina, on August 25, 2005, not to mention the Indonesian tsunami preceding it on December 26, 2004. It seemed to me it would take a helluva lot more than the weatherman to explain such cosmic events within a year, four months and a day. Today, I ask you to read my first article to familiarize yourself with HAARP, the acronym for the government’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which is about more than weather, but rather US Weapons of Meteorological Mass Destruction.

As I write that, I can hear the sirens of “conspiracy theory” going off on the airwaves as if a thief had broken into the dark hole of the Pentagon and was filling his pockets with all the secrets of these darker ops. Well, perhaps.

HAARP, as you will read in more detail, can shock the upper atmosphere with both a focused and navigable electromagnetic bolt. The ionosphere is the electrically charged sphere that surrounds the earth’s upper atmosphere, about 40 to 60 miles above the earth’s surface. Take a look also at the excellent Haiti Earthquake Raises HAARP Controversy at the phoenixaquua.blogspot, so you don’t think it’s just me thinking this. In fact, you can see filmed examples of how HAARP works, and how it has worked on Haiti.

You will particularly enjoy this article’s film clip of Pat Robertson’s analysis of the Haitian earthquake. Pat believes it’s due to the victory of the Haitians in their rebellion over Napoleon and the French in 1801. Their victory, he claims, was due to a pact the Haitians made with the Devil. And this pact, Pat iterates, haunts them to this day. This is a man who ran for president of the US, is the owner of a chain of TV and radio stations, and a leader of the Machiavellian Dominionists sect of Conservative Christianity. But I digress and I’m dizzy from this one.

HAARP has always been referred to by the US government as a tool for researching weather, but in fact has been developed and used by the military for Department of Defense purposes. This dark side of HAARP has been played down for obvious reasons, but Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning have done an excellent expose of this “Military Pandora’s Box” in their book, Angel’s Don’t Play This Harp. There as an excellent summary of the book at this site. It debunks the notion that HAARP is no different than other ionospheric heaters operating safely through the world in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union.

Yet a 1990 government document claims that the radio frequency (RF) power bolt can drive the ionosphere to “unnatural” activities. Quoting the authors . . .”at the highest HF powers available in the West, the instabilities commonly studied are approaching their maximum RF energy dissipative capability, beyond which the plasma process will ‘runaway’ until the next limiting factor is reached.” The program operates out the University of Alaska Fairbanks (in Sarah Palin-land), providing a ground-based “Star Wars” technology, offering a relatively inexpensive defense shield.

But the University also boasts about the most mind-boggling geophysical manipulations since nuclear bombs of which HAARP is capable. It’s based on the work of electrical genius Nicholas Tesla and the work and patents of Texas’ physicist Bernard Eastlund. The military has deliberately underestimated the deadly possibilities of this uber technology, most pointedly in this case to create earthquakes with the generation of bolts of electrical power aimed at specific targets.

In fact, HAARP’s potential for havoc drew the attention of none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, former NSA adviser to Jimmy Carter, science advisor to President Johnson, and political advisor to President Obama.

More than 25 years ago, when Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University, he wrote, “Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior [another strange purpose HAARP can be put to]. Geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald, a specialist in problems of warfare, says accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain legions of the earth . . . in this way one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period.”

He capped this statement with “no matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” Let me tell you, dear readers, it’s here.

As of 1970, Brzezinski predicted HAARP could be used for “a more controlled and directed society” linked to technology. This society would be dominated by an elite group which impresses voters by allegedly superior scientific know-how.” Furthermore, Dr. Strangelove states, “Unhindered by the restrains of traditional liberal values, this elite [the New World Order of today] would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Technical and scientific momentum would then feed on the situation it exploits.”

And thus spake Brzezinski, who also predicted that it would take an inciting incident like Pearl Harbor (i.e., 9/11) to engage the normally peaceful American population to go to war on a march for world hegemony (i.e., The War on Terror). And he was spot on.

Zbig is not afraid, in fact, is lauded for thinking down avenues that would make most of us shiver with disgust. Regrettably, his forecasts tend to prove accurate, because they inspire the worst people to do the worst things. And so, these “tools for the elite” and their temptation to use them increases incredibly. The policies to use them are in place. As to the “stepping stones” that could be used to reach this highly controlled techno-society, Brezinski expected them to be “persisting social crisis” and the use of mass media to gain the public’s confidence. Again, he’s spot on.

Way back in 1966, Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald, then associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UC, Los Angeles, was a member of President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee and later a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. He actually wrote a chapter called “How to Wreck the Environment” in his book, Unless Peace Comes. Of course, this came at the height of the Vietnam brutality. Given the aura of violence similar to today’s, Gordon described in his chapter, among other things, “polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering [italics mine], ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.”

The outstanding peculiarity of the Haitian earthquake is that it devastated Haiti, which is the western part of the larger island of Hispaniola, while the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, suffered some aftershocks but remained relatively unscathed, hotels operating, business booming, flights coming in and out. If this isn’t pinpoint targeting of an earthquake, it is a very strange, yet to be explained phenomena.

For the “official” statistics of the event, see the Tectonics of the Haitian earthquake by Chris Rowan at scienceblogs.com. Despite the fact that Rowan sees this as a “strike-slip in the Caribbean Plate with the crust on each side of the fault moving horizontally relative to the other side,” and so on, I still feel that the pinpointing of Haiti is not just another predictable earthquake. But read Chris’s full explanation. A bolt of HAARP energy could have caused that “strike-slip.”

What is far more interesting to note is an article from nextgov.com (Technology And The Business of Government), Defense launches online system to coordinate Haiti relief efforts, which was published last Friday but refers to a disaster relief drill that took place on Monday, January 11, a day before the earthquake. I quote, “As personnel representing hundreds of government and nongovernment agencies from around the world rush to the aid of earthquake-devastated Haiti, the Defense Information Systems Agency has launched a Web portal with multiple social networking tools to aid in coordinating their efforts.

“On Monday, [January 11, before the earthquake] Jean Demay, DISA’s technical manager for the agency’s Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. After the earthquake hit on Tuesday, Demay said SOUTHCOM decided to go live with the system [itlaics mine]. On Wednesday [the day after the earthquake], DISA opened up its All Partners Access Network, supported by the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, to any organization supporting Haiti relief efforts.

“The information sharing project, developed with backing from both SOUTHCOM and the Defense Department’s European Command, has been in development for three years. It is designed to facilitate multilateral collaboration between federal and nongovernmental agencies . . .”

You’ll pardon my paranoia, but this is identical to drills being set up the day before 9/11/01 by FEMA in NYC on 9/10/01 and NORAD.

The political truth is that Haiti has historically been a thorn in the side of those from the US and Europe, who would exploit its natural resources and dare to genocide its people. See Wiki’s History of Haiti, which opens by with the tale of Christopher Columbus, colonizer extraordinaire, naming the entire island, Hispaniola.

From the very beginning, Wiki notes, “Following the arrival of Europeans, Haiti’s indigenous population suffered near-extinction, in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas. A commonly accepted hypothesis attributes the high mortality of this colony in part to Old World diseases to which the natives had no immunity. The colonists also killed a considerable number of the natives both directly and indirectly by enslavement and murder.” And so the die was cast.

And, as Wayne Madsen reports, U.S. troops in Haiti to prevent Aristide’s return, “President Obama, in keeping with his CIA lineage, has permitted the Pentagon under Robert Gates to take charge of the humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti.

“As Cuban and Venezuelan field hospitals were already rendering first aid and trauma care to Haitians injured in the mega-quake, Obama was gathered at a White House photo op with Vice President Joe Biden and other Cabinet officers to state that U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft would fly over Haiti to assess the situation from the air. A U.S. P-3 Orion spy plane from Comalapa air base in El Salvador was dispatched to conduct the surveillance operation, an act that was already being accomplished by earth satellites, the images of which were available on Google Maps.

“As Obama was garnering praise from such sycophantic White House outlets as the largely-discredited Washington Post, a 37-person Icelandic search-and-rescue team was pulling trapped earthquake victims from the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. Iceland, a nation bankrupted by Obama’s banker pals on Wall Street and in the City of London, was able to react in a way that the slumbering and oafish dying super-power, the United States, could not -- with action aimed at providing immediate assistance to the Haitian people . . .” Read the full article for all the details.

Madsen was not the only one to comment that in the middle of this havoc the US seems more set on occupying Haiti with its Army than delivering relief aid. Press TV reports that Nicaraguan President Ortega warns of US deployment in Haiti. He stated, “What is happening in Haiti seriously concerns me as US troops have already taken control of the airport,” Ortega said on Saturday ”The Pentagon says it has deployed more than 10,000 soldiers in Haiti to help victims of Tuesday’s earthquake.

”This is while US paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division took control of the main airport in the capital Port-au-Prince on Friday three days after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake brought death and misery to the impoverished nation.”

Said Press TV, ”The leftist Nicaraguan president denounced Washington’s move in deploying military forces in Haiti, saying ‘It seems that the bases (on Latin America) are not sufficient.’

”’There is no logic that US troops landed in Haiti. Haiti seeks humanitarian aid, not troops. It would be madness if we all began to send troops to Haiti,’ said Ortega.”

Given Nicaragua’s horrific experiences with the US and the Contras, his doubts, as Madsen’s, are to be seriously considered. Back then, we had Reagan and Bush I pulling the strings, which eventually exploded into the Iran-Contra debacle, which attempted to continue New World Order advancement from Central America to the Middle East. So what has changed?

Bottom line, am I asking you to blame anyone slipping on a banana peel to be the result of HAARP’s cataclysmic power? No, I’m not. But I am asking you to pursue the given links and seriously consider the possibility of HAARP’s ability to produce this highly targeted mega-earthquake. It is one more weapon in the US arsenal. And the more you know, the better to discern the big picture. All you have you to lose are your political chains and the specter of Zbigniew Brzezinski and his clones.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, “State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on” is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com.

Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux

2010-01-23T10:23:00.001-08:00

More proof of oil interests in the area...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17063

Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux
By Cynthia McKinney
Global Research, January 19, 2010

President Obama's response to the tragedy in Haiti has been robust in military deployment and puny in what the Haitians need most: food; first responders and their specialized equipment; doctors and medical facilities and equipment; and engineers, heavy equipment, and heavy movers. Sadly, President Obama is dispatching Presidents Bush and Clinton, and thousands of Marines and U.S. soldiers. By contrast, Cuba has over 400 doctors on the ground and is sending in more; Cubans, Argentinians, Icelanders, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and many others are already on the ground working--saving lives and treating the injured. Senegal has offered land to Haitians willing to relocate to Africa.

The United States, on the day after the tragedy struck, confirmed that an entire Marine Expeditionary Force was being considered "to help restore order," when the "disorder" had been caused by an earthquake striking Haiti; not since 1751, 1770, 1842, 1860, and 1887 had Haiti experienced an earthquake. But, I remember the bogus reports of chaos and violence the led to the deployment of military assets, including Blackwater, in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One Katrina survivor noted that the people needed food and shelter and the U.S. government sent men with guns. Much to my disquiet, it seems, here we go again. From the very beginning, U.S. assistance to Haiti has looked to me more like an invasion than a humanitarian relief operation.

On Day Two of the tragedy, a C-130 plane with a military assessment team landed in Haiti, with the rest of the team expected to land soon thereafter. The stated purpose of this team was to determine what military resources were needed.

An Air Force special operations team was also expected to land to provide air traffic control. Now, the reports are that the U.S. is not allowing assistance in, shades of Hurricane Katrina, all over again.

On President Obama's orders military aircraft "flew over the island, mapping the destruction." So, the first U.S. contribution to the humanitarian relief needed in Haiti were reconnaissance drones whose staffing are more accustomed to looking for hidden weapon sites and surface-to-air missile batteries than wrecked infrastructure. The scope of the U.S. response soon became clear: aircraft carrer, Marine transport ship, four C-140 airlifts, and evacuations to Guantanamo. By the end of Day Two, according to the Washington Post report, the United States had evacuated to Guantanamo Bay about eight [8] severely injured patients, in addition to U.S. Embassy staffers, who had been "designated as priorities by the U.S. Ambassador and his staff."

On Day Three we learned that other U.S. ships, including destroyers, were moving toward Haiti. Interestingly, the Washington Post reported that the standing task force that coordinates the U.S. response to mass migration events from Cuba or Haiti was monitoring events, but had not yet ramped up its operations. That tidbit was interesting in and of itself, that those two countries are attended to by a standing task force, but the treatment of their nationals is vastly different, with Cubans being awarded immediate acceptance from the U.S. government, and by contrast, internment for Haitian nationals.

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral James Watson IV reassured Americans, "Our focus right now is to prevent that, and we are going to work with the Defense Department, the State Department, FEMA and all the agencies of the federal government to minimize the risk of Haitians who want to flee their country," Watson said. "We want to provide them those releif supplies so they can live in Haiti."

By the end of Day Four, the U.S. reportedly had evacuated over 800 U.S. nationals.

For those of us who have been following events in Haiti before the tragic earthquake, it is worth noting that several items have caused deep concern:

1. the continued exile of Haiti's democratically-elected and well-loved, yet twice-removed former priest, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide;

2. the unexplained continued occupation of the country by United Nations troops who have killed innocent Haitians and are hardly there for "security" (I've personally seen them on the roads that only lead to Haiti's sparsely-populated areas teeming with beautiful beaches);

3. U.S. construction of its fifth-largest embassy in the world in Port-au-Prince, Haiti;

4. mining and port licenses and contracts, including the privatization of Haiti's deep water ports, because certain off-shore oil and transshipment arrangements would not be possible inside the U.S. for environmental and other considerations; and

5. Extensive foreign NGO presence in Haiti that could be rendered unnecessary if, instead, appropriate U.S. and other government policy allowed the Haitian people some modicum of political and economic self-determination.

Therefore, we note here the writings of Ms. Marguerite Laurent, whom I met in her capacity as attorney for ousted President of Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Ms. Laurent reminds us of Haiti's offshore oil and other mineral riches and recent revivial of an old idea to use Haiti and an oil refinery to be built there as a transshipment terminal for U.S. supertankers. Ms. Laurent, also known as Ezili Danto of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN), writes:

"There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up. This is detailed by Dr. Georges Michel in an article dated March 27, 2004 outlining the history of oil explorations and oil reserves in Haiti and in the research of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin.

"There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti's deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or depots where crude oil could be stored and later transferred to small tankers to serve U.S. and Caribbean ports. This is detailed in a paper about the Dunn Plantation at Fort Liberte in Haiti.

"Ezili's HLLN underlines these two papers on Haiti's oil resources and the works of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin in order to provide a view one will not find in the mainstream media nor anywhere else as to the economic and strategic reasons the US has constructed its fifth largest embassy in the world - fifth only besides the US embassy in China, Iraq, Iran and Germany - in tiny Haiti, post the 2004 Haiti Bush regime change."

Unfortunately, before the tragedy struck, and despite pleading to the Administration by Haiti activists inside the United States, President Obama failed to stop the deportation of Haitians inside the United States and failed to grant TPS, temporary protected status, to Haitians inside the U.S. in peril of being deported due to visa expirations. That was corrected on Day Three of Haiti's earthquake tragedy with the January 15, 2010 announcement that Haiti would join Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, El Salvador, and Sudan as a country granted TPS by the Secretary of Homeland Security.

President Obama's appointment of President Bush to the Haiti relief effort is a swift left jab to the face, in my opinion. After President Bush's performance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the fact that still today, Hurricane Katrina survivors who want to return still have not been provided a way back home, the appointment might augur well for fundraising activities, but I doubt that it bodes well for the Haitian people. Afterall, the coup against and the kidnapping of President Aristide occurred under the watch of a Bush Presidency.

Finally, those with an appreciation of French literature know that among France's most beloved authors are Alexandre Dumas, son of a Haitian slave, and Victor Hugo who wrote: "Haiti est une lumiere." [Haiti is a light.] Indeed, Haiti for millions is a light: light into the methodology and evil of slavery; light into a successful slave rebellion, light into nationhood and notions of liberty, the rights of man, and of human dignity. Haiti is a light. And an example that makes the enemies of black liberation tremble. It is precisely because of Haiti's light into the evil genius of some individuals who wield power over others and man's ability, through unity and purpose, to overcome that evil, that some segments of the world have been at war with Haiti ever since 1804, the year of Haiti's creation as a Republic.

I'm not surprised at "Reverend" Pat Robertson's racist vitriol. Robertson's comments mirror, exactly, statements made by Napoleon's Cabinet when the Haitians defeated them. But in 2010, Robertson's statements reveal much more: Haitians are not the only ones who know their importance to the struggle against hatred, imperialism, and European domination.

This pesky, persistent, stubbornly non-Western, proudly African people of this piece of land that we call Haiti know their history and they know that they militarily defeated the ruling world empire of the day, Napoleon's France, and the global elite at that time who supported him. They know that they defeated the armies of England and Spain.

Haitians know that they used their status as a free state to help liberate Latin Americans from Spain, by funding and fighting alongside Simon Bolivar; their example inspired their still-enslaved African brothers and sisters on the American mainland; and before Haitians were even free, they fought against the British inside the U.S. during its war of independence and won a decisive battle in Savannah, Georgia, where I have visited the statue commemorating that victory.

Haitians know that France imposed reparations on them for being free, and Haiti paid them in full, but that President Aristide called for France to give that money back ($21 billion in 2003 dollars).

Haitians know that their "brother," then-Secretary of State Colin Powell lied to the world upon the kidnapping and second ouster of their President. (Sadly, it wouldn't be the last time that Secretary of State Colin Powell would lie to the world.) Haitians know, all-too-well, that high-ranking blacks in the United States are capable of helping them and of betraying them.

Haitians know, too, that the United States has installed its political proxies and even its own soldiers onto Haitian soil when the U.S. felt it was necessary. All in an effort to control the indomitable Haitian spirit that directs much-needed light to the rest of the oppressed world.

While the tears of the people of Haiti swell in my own eyes, and I remember their tremendous capacity for love, my broken heart and wet eyes don't dampen my ability to understand the grave danger that now faces my friends in Haiti.

I shudder to think that the "rollback" policies believed in by some foreign policy advisors to President Obama could use a prolonged U.S. military presence in Haiti as a springboard for rollback of areas in Latin America that have liberated themselves from U.S. neo-colonial domination. I would hate to think that this would even be attempted under the Presidency of Barack Obama. All of us must have our eyes wide open on Haiti and other parts of the world now dripping in blood as a result of the relentless onward march of the U.S. military machine.

So, on this remembrance of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I note that it was the U.S. government's own illegal Operation Lantern Spike that snuffed out the promise and light of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Every plane of humanitarian assistance that is turned away by the U.S. military (so far from CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, Médecins Sans Frontieres, Brazil, France, Italy, and even the U.S. Red Cross)--as was done in the wake of Hurricane Katrina--and the expected arrival on this very day of up to 10,000 U.S. troops, are lasting reminders of the existential threat that now looms over the valiant, proud people and the Republic of Haiti.

It's the "New Haiti"

2010-01-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/It-s-the-New-Haiti-by-Michael-Collins-100121-109.html

January 21, 2010
By Michael Collins

The appointment of former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as key players in Haitian relief should cause the people of Haiti grave concern, if they weren't otherwise preoccupied with survival. These former presidents' records as pro-life advocates on the international scene is tarnished by real world outcomes.

During his eight years as president, Clinton was responsible for sanctions on Iraq that resulted in the deaths of 170,000 children under five. Former President George W. Bush exceeded that death toll by invading Iraq. That caused civil chaos and conflict among Iraqis leading to the deaths of over one million citizens in that tragic nation. When you see these two coming, their record speaks for itself. (Image)

What will happen in Haiti? What can the citizens of that nation expect? It's instructive to look at the post Katrina rescue effort with a focus on New Orleans as a prototype.

"The Cleansing of New Orleans"

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, more than 200,000 citizens of New Orleans were transported to cities around the United States. Houston and Atlanta were major centers for congregating survivors. Shortly after the involuntary exodus, 43% wanted to return to New Orleans, and 44% wanted to stay in their new homes, and 12% were unsure of their choice.

Little did Katrina's survivors know that they would never have a choice. The state of Louisiana sent a message right away. Procedures were established to make sure that none of the refugees would be able to vote by absentee ballot unless they first returned home and voted in person. Of course, most lacked the resources to do that. Through a variety techniques and excuses, the survivors were turned into permanent non residents of their former home, without regard to their preference. The politics of relocation has whited out the city's former political make up.

The combined class and ethnic cleansing has continued in New Orleans. The evidence is the eviction of poor people from structures not harmed by the hurricane, and the re-zoning of areas where survivors could return into enclaves for the wealthy. It's called progress.

Haiti's Opportunities for Progress

Haiti is not New Orleans but give the financial elite some time. They're just warming up. This is, after all, their first captive nation due to natural calamity. They didn't have to fire a shot. The people are starving, unarmed, traumatized, and incapable of resistance. All this can be theirs!

There are some similarities to the post Katrina operation. Like New Orleanians, Haitians went without food and water for days. When supplies arrived, the effort was handled by military organizers.

The corporate media portrayed the starving citizens of New Orleans as looters as they foraged for anything to keep them alive. Haiti was no different. There was looting, we were told, without the post-script that people were literally starving and thirsting to death. Apparently, the security forces failed to debrief first-hand observers on the ground who reported no such lawlessness. Domestic and foreign oligarchs are the real looters of Haiti. They started well before the earthquake.

While the military secured the scene for relief, food, water, and medical care waited in line.The several days of delay created a fatigue and physical debilitation among citizens. It worked to make whatever security might have been needed much easier. A weakened population can be contained efficiently, with minimal force.

The most important similarities between New Orleans and Haiti are ethnicity and class based. In New Orleans, the majority of damage occurred in black, largely poor districts of the city. In Haiti, the entire nation is both black and, for the most part, living in poverty.

But the Haiti's divergence from the New Orleans story line is significant. It represents an entire nation, a huge, strategically placed land mass just waiting for the type of rehabilitation that New Orleans only dreamed about. And to the rescuers must have big plans.

Image

It's the "New Haiti"

Bill Clinton stood breathless on the tarmac of the crowded Port-au-Prince airport extolling the cooperation of all the Latin American nations. He said something like, they all want to be part of the new Haiti. That's probably the best storm warning that Haitians will get regarding their fate. Their nation and culture are in the cross hairs of the theme park entrepreneurs always seeking another real estate fiasco to perpetrate. Dubai World is dead. It's on to Haiti!

One wonders if the forces of repression have waited all these years to finally get even for losing and entire nation in "the only successful slave revolt in history," an inspiration to people everywhere.

But isn't this is a bleak vision given the outpouring of offers from all over the world? Individuals have contributed generously to Haitian relief. They are to be commended for their efforts, which are considerable. But individual contributions of several million can't match the hundreds of millions in commitments (not deliverables) of aid through national and multinational entities. These are the people calling the shots.

What can Haitians anticipate from the first world geniuses? Military occupation is first up. The security forces were first in because they were the force selected to run the show. The absence of a Haitian government is the problem, we're told. But that absence originated when the United States kidnapped the elected president of Haiti and spirited him off to Africa, for "his safety." The current government is virtually non existent, other than the U.S. favored president who officially welcomed foreign assistance.

The military emphasis will give way to food and water plus medical care. But will this relief be supplied in time to help the people? After days of dehydration and starvation, is the population ripe for disease? Will there be sufficient resources to deal with this? Are we going to hear about the need for temporary relocation as we did in New Orleans?

Will the current US model of funding banks and forgetting the people be employed, a variation of the trickle down approach?

What will the nation building look like? Iraq? Afghanistan?

Will the people of Haiti ever get a chance to rule their own nation?

Haiti is full of oil say Daniel and Ginette Mathurin

2010-01-22T14:28:00.001-08:00

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//www.metropolehaiti.com/metropole/full_une_fr.php%3Fid%3D13439&hl=en&langpair=auto%7Cen&tbb=1&ie=ISO-8859-1

Monday, January 28, 2008 09:45
Haiti is full of oil say Daniel and Ginette Mathurin

Scientists Daniel and Ginette Mathurin indicate that under Haitian soil is rich in oil and fuel fossible which were collected by Haitian and foreign experts. "We have identified 20 sites Oil, launches Daniel Mathurin stating that 5 of them are considered very important by practitioners and policies.

The Central Plateau, including the region of Thomond, the plain of the cul-de-sac and the bay of Port-au-Prince are filled with oil, he said, adding that Haiti's oil reserves are larger than those of Venezuela . An Olympic pool compared to a glass of water that is the comparison to show the importance of oil Haitian compared to those of Venezuela, "he explains.

Venezuela is one of the world's largest producers of oil.

Daniel Mathurin reveals that investigations of several previous governments have allowed to verify the existence of these large deposits of oil. It reminds a document of Lavalas party to power in 2004, had specified the number of sites in Haiti hydrocarbons.

According to Daniel et Ginette Mathurin, the lake region, with cities like Thomazeau and Cornillon, contains large deposits of oil.

Asked about the non-exploitation of these sites, Ginette Mathurin said that these deposits are declared strategic reserves of the United States of America. While stating his incomprehension of such a situation, it reminds that the Caribbean is considered the backyard of the United States.

But Daniel and Ginette Mathurin indicate that the U.S. government in 2005 authorized the use of strategic reserves of the United States. This door must be used by the Haitian political négiciations to launch with U.S. companies with a view to exploiting these deposits adds Daniel Mathurin

Experts argue that the government acted Jean Claude Duvalier had verified the existence of a major oilfield in the bay of Port-au-Prince shortly before its fall.

Moreover, Daniel et Ginette Mathurin show that uranium 238 and 235 and the deposit zyconium exist in several regions including in Jacmel. Uranium is used in nuclear reactors to produce electrical energy.

FACTS on HAITI

2010-01-21T12:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/FACTS-on-HAITI-by-ALONE-100118-325.html

January 20, 2010
By ALONE

Marc Becker returned from Haiti just a couple of days before a powerful earthquake rocked the country on January 12. He gives permission to publish and share:

I returned from Haiti just a couple of days before a powerful earthquake rocked the country on January 12. I was in Haiti on a solidarity delegation to document human rights abuses by the United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) and to observe preparations for February's legislative elections. Other members of the HAW Steering Committee encouraged me to share my thoughts with the broader HAW membership and friends on the historical background to this catastrophe.

Many people have observed that the Haitian earthquake was more a political disaster than a natural one. The similarly powerful 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California killed 63 people, while the death toll in Haiti appears as if it may soar over 100,000. Our experiences in the country confirmed that the solution to Haiti's problem is political in nature.

Two hundred some years ago Haiti was the richest colony in the world, but today it is the poorest and most unequal country in the Americas. A successful slave revolt in 1804 defeated the French planter class, but the only other independent country in the Americas, the United States, refused to welcome a Black Republic because of the powerful example it set for marginalized and oppressed people everywhere. The French demanded a 150 million franc payment from the Haitians for losing their prized pearl of the Antilles. Haiti made the payment, strangling any possibility for development, and sacrificing its future so as not to be seen as an international pariah.

In Haiti, we heard from grassroots activists who complained that large international aid agencies collect funds for administrative salaries, vehicles, and office support, but little of this money filters down to the people who need it the most. Dumping cheap rice on the country has destroyed the local agricultural economy. Haiti has a desperate short-term need for assistance, but this aid must be funneled through groups like Doctors Without Borders (http://doctorswithoutborders.org/) and Partners in Health (http://www.pih.org/) that have a track record and distribution networks necessary in place to make proper use of the aid.

The longer term solution, however, is political. Already conservative pundits are proclaiming that the earthquake is an opportunity to remake the country along neoliberal lines. But the extraction of natural resources, creation of low-wage jobs, and privatization of government functions are factors that have left Haiti incapable of responding to a natural disaster.

Haiti has never recovered from the ostracization it faced from the French and United States governments at independence, and ongoing international policies appear to be designed to sink the country deeper into debt. The U.S. Marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, and the earthquake seems to provide a convenient excuse for the United States once again to land military troops and reassert its imperial control over the country.

In 2004, the French, United States, and Canadian governments removed popular leftist president Jean Bertrand Aristide, who promised to shift resources to the most marginalized sectors of society. They have insisted that the current government ban his Fanmi Lavalas, the largest political party in Haiti, from participating in electoral contests.

The solution to Haiti's problems is to allow the country to develop its own economy and political system without constant outside intervention. Otherwise, Haiti's next natural calamity will be worse than this one, and the country will continue to sink deeper into poverty, inequality, and social exclusion.

Marc Becker
Associate Professor of Latin American History
Truman State University

More information is available on his website http://www.yachana.org/reports/haiti/. For more in depth information on the historical background and current events in Haiti, see:

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins; Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d rev ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Amy Wilentz, In the parish of the poor: Writings from Haiti (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1990).

Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Laura Flynn, Eyes of the heart: Seeking a path for the poor in the age of globalization (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).

David Patrick Geggus, Haitian revolutionary studies, Blacks in the diaspora (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 2002).

Garry Wills, "Negro president" Jefferson and the slave power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: the breached citadel, Rev. and updated ed. (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2004).

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).

Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, ed., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A brief history with documents, Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston, MA ; New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martins, 2006).

Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 3rd ed. (Monroe, Me: Common Courage Press, 2006).

Randall Robinson, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from revolution to the kidnapping of a president (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008).

David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering, ed., The World of the Haitian Revolution, Blacks in the diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

Note: You are receiving this email because you signed a Historians Against the War statement (see http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/) or asked to be including in HAW's informational mailings. If you no longer wish to receive these occasional messages about HAW's work, send an email to haw-info-request@stopthewars.org?subject=unsubscribe.

Bush, Clinton and the crimes of US imperialism in Haiti

2010-01-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j18.shtml

Patrick Martin
World Socialist Web Site
Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:44 EST

The Obama administration has announced that former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will head the fundraising for relief efforts in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. In his radio speech Saturday, Obama declared: "These two leaders send an unmistakable message to the people of Haiti and the world. In a moment of need, the United States stands united."

The message of the Clinton-Bush appointment is indeed significant, but hardly what the White House and the American media have suggested. In selecting his two immediate predecessors, those who have set US policy in the Caribbean since 1993, Obama demonstrates that the devastating human tragedy in Haiti will not bring any alteration in the rapacious role of US imperialism in that impoverished semi-colonial country.

For eight years apiece, Clinton and Bush were directly and deeply involved in a series of political machinations and military interventions that have played a major role in perpetuating the poverty, backwardness and repression in Haiti that have vastly compounded by the disaster that struck that country last Tuesday. Both men have the blood of Haitian workers and peasants on their hands.

Clinton took office in the immediate aftermath of the military coup which ousted Haiti's first democratically elected president, the populist cleric Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That coup was backed by the administration of Bush's father, who saw Aristide as an unwanted and potentially dangerous radical.

The new Democratic Party administration undertook a tactical shift in policy. Clinton imposed economic sanctions on the Haitian junta, which destroyed Haiti's fledgling export industries, then dispatched the Marines to Haiti - for the third time in the 20th century - to compel Gen. Raoul Cedras, the junta leader, to depart. The US restored Aristide to the presidency, after he had given assurances that he would do nothing to challenge the domination of either Washington or the native Haitian elite, and that he would leave office in 1996 without seeking reelection.

After Aristide obediently left office on schedule, he was succeeded by René Préval, who served the first of his two terms as president from 1996 to 2001, carrying out the dictates of an International Monetary Fund "structural adjustment" program that slashed employment, cut public services, and ruined domestic rice farmers.

When Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party won a clear victory in May 2000 legislative elections, the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled Congress refused to accept the election and cut off US aid. Aristide himself returned to the presidency after winning a landslide election victory in November 2000, only to face an implacable enemy in the incoming Bush administration.

For three years, Haiti was systematically starved by the US aid cutoff and measures taken by the Bush administration to block international aid and isolate the Aristide government. Finally, in February 2004, amid protests fomented by the Haitian ruling elite with covert American backing, the US military again intervened in the country, seizing Aristide and shipping him out of the country to exile.

The Marines turned over effective control of the country to a United Nations peacekeeping force, with Brazil providing the biggest troop contingent, propping up a series of unelected Haitian prime ministers until elections in 2006, from which candidates of Fanmi Lavalas were largely excluded. René Préval was elected president for the second time, in a term scheduled to end late this year. Once a supporter and professed political "twin" of Aristide, Préval has long since made his peace with both Washington and the Haitian ruling elite, and his second term has been characterized by slavish subservience to the economic prescriptions of Wall Street and the International Monetary Fund.

Throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations, US demands for adherence to IMF austerity policies were combined with a vicious program of repression against Haitians fleeing the country of their birth to seek refuge and a better life in the United States. In his first campaign for the presidency, in 1992, Clinton criticized the persecution and forced repatriation of Haitian refugees, only to reverse himself and continue those policies unaltered. For the next 17 years - and continuing with no change from Obama - hundreds of refugees have died in small boats seeking to evade the US Coast Guard blockade.

Most recently, Clinton has been the official UN envoy for Haiti, backing the corrupt Préval regime and seeking to develop Haiti as a base for a profitable US-run garment industry founded on near-starvation wages. Food riots swept the country in April 2008, but that did not stop Préval from blocking legislation that would have raised the minimum wage of $1.72 a day for workers in the garment factories.

As for George W. Bush, his selection as co-leader of a supposed humanitarian campaign is an insult to the people of both Haiti and the United States. His appointment by Obama is in keeping with the Democratic president's unflagging efforts since his election, the result of popular hatred of Bush and his party, to rehabilitate the Republicans.

An unapologetic war criminal who is responsible for the slaughter of a million Iraqis, Bush's signature domestic "achievement" was the abject failure of the US government either to prevent the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in Hurricane Katrina, or to mount an effective relief and recovery effort afterwards.

This is the record of the two men whom Barack Obama has selected as the public face of the latest US initiative in Haiti. Bush and Clinton made a series of media appearances over the weekend, including interviews on all five Sunday television news programs, during which they emphasized the need to restore "stability" to Haiti, and the important role that the United States would have to play in that effort.

Bush and Clinton personify the pernicious and reactionary role that American imperialism has played in Haiti for the last century. It is no exaggeration to say that the policies of their administrations have caused as much death and devastation in that country as last Tuesday's earthquake.

World Bank 'Destroyed Basic Grains' in Honduras, Haiti

2010-01-18T12:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=home&sid=aGxiawAqP0.w

World Bank 'Destroyed Basic Grains' in Honduras, Haiti
Alison Fitzgerald, Jason Gale and Helen Murphy
Bloomberg
Thu, 15 May 2008 06:40 EDT

Fidencio Alvarez abandoned his bean and corn farm in southern Honduras because of the rising cost of seeds, fuel and food. After months of one meal a day, he hiked with his wife and six children to find work in the city.

''We would wake up with empty stomachs and go to bed with empty stomachs,'' said Alvarez, 37, who sought help from the Mission Lazarus aid group in Choluteca in January. ''We couldn't afford the seeds to plant food or the bus fare to buy the food.''

Honduran farmers like Alvarez can't compete in a global marketplace where the costs of fuel and fertilizer soared and rice prices doubled in the past year. The former breadbasket of Central America now imports 83 percent of the rice it consumes -- a dependency triggered almost two decades ago when it adopted free-market policies pushed by the World Bank and other lenders.

The country was $3.6 billion in debt in 1990. In return for loans from the World Bank, Honduras became one of dozens of developing nations that abandoned policies designed to protect farmers and citizens from volatile food prices. The U.S. House Financial Services Committee in Washington today explored the causes of the global food crisis and possible solutions.

The committee examined whether policies advocated by the bank and the International Monetary Fund contributed to the situation. Governments from Ghana to the Philippines were pressured to cut protective tariffs and farm supports and to grow more high-value crops for export, reports by the Washington-based World Bank show.

Haiti Pressure

The IMF pressed Haiti, as a condition of a 1994 loan, to open its economy to trade, Raj Patel, a scholar at the Center for African Studies in the University of California at Berkeley told the committee. When trade barriers fell, imports of subsidized rice from the U.S. surged, devastating the local rice farmers, Patel said.

''That is very odd,'' said committee chair Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. ''For anyone to have looked at Haiti at that time and thought that it was a functioning economy is a sign I think of ideology going rampant.''

''Of course they got it wrong,'' said Robert S. Zeigler, director-general at the International Rice Research Institute, southeast of Manila. ''It will work if you're an extremely wealthy country and you can import rice at any price. But if you're not an extremely wealthy country, I think that's very poor advice.''

'Command and Control'

The bank's strategy -- summed up in a 1989 article by its chief economist for South Asia, John Williamson --became known as ''The Washington Consensus.''

''The focus of the liberalization was on lowering domestic food prices,'' said Mark Plant, the IMF's deputy director of policy development in Washington. Governments' ''command and control'' policies increased consumer costs and cut farmer income, he said.

Williamson, now affiliated with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a May 9 interview that the ideas are still sound, though they may have been pushed too hard by the World Bank.

''My own view is that all those things are good for countries,'' he said. ''But I'm not terribly sympathetic with the World Bank going in and laying down a list of things countries have to do.''

Highest Tariffs

Honduran agriculture stagnated through the 1980s because of subsidies and market controls, prompting the bank to recommend economic changes, said Adrian Fozzard, the institution's manager for Honduras.

Rice farmers in Honduras were protected by the highest import tariffs in Central America when former president Rafael Callejas took office in 1990 with the economy stalled. The trade barriers that helped the country meet more than 90 percent of domestic demand were dismantled under an agreement for a World Bank loan in September that year, allowing cheaper imports to flood the market.

The requirements for the loan included eliminating import restrictions and surcharges and reorganizing the agricultural finance system, according to Eurodad, a network of 54 European non-governmental organizations that was granted access to the World Bank's loan database to monitor loan conditions.

Prices Plunge

Prices paid to farmers fell by 13 percent in 1991 and 30 percent more in 1992, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

In August 1993, the World Bank advised Honduras to adopt a second round of economic changes as part of another loan, according to Eurodad. Those conditions included eliminating all price controls and cutting tariffs further.

''Remaining trade and price controls should be eliminated,'' bank officials said in a 1994 internal report. ''The program of privatization of state silos should be completed; and the use of a grain reserve for price stabilization should not be reinstated.''

The report's author, Daniel Cotlear, now a World Bank economist for Latin American and the Caribbean, declined to comment for this story.

The bank pushed the policies because food prices fell in real terms for at least two decades, and few economists expected that to change, said Mark Cackler, manager of its Agriculture and Rural Development Department. Free trade and open markets remain the best path to competitiveness, he said.

''There are actually opportunities to reduce protectionism that have a beneficial impact,'' Cackler said.

World Bank Reaction

World Bank spokesman Sergio Jellinek said it's impossible to connect today's food price crisis with 20-year-old free-trade policies.

''The price of food, especially grains, is determined in the international market and not in the local markets,'' he said. ''So if a country such as Mexico, or Colombia, or El Salvador or Honduras would have multiplied by three or four its grain production, that would not have significantly affected world supply. And food prices in local markets would be as high as they are today.''

There now are 1,300 rice farmers in Honduras, compared with more than 20,000 in 1989, according to human rights group FIAN.

''The international lending agencies have destroyed the basic grains industry in Honduras,'' said Gilberto Rios, executive secretary of FIAN Honduras. ''The best land now produces things like African palms, which are not for consumption.''

Last month, thousands of activists, students and farmers blocked highways and rallied in the capital, Tegucigalpa, to protest food prices and policies that made their country the most open to free trade in Latin America -- and one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

Not 'a Boon'

Per capita income rose by 0.5 percent a year from 1990 to 2004, one of the slowest growth rates in Latin America, a January report by the International Food Policy Research Institute found.

''Trade liberalization does not appear to have been much of a boon to the Honduran economy,'' the Washington-based institute said in the report.

In the Philippines, the World Bank encouraged the country, the world's biggest importer of rice, to stop striving for self- sufficiency and instead to diversify into crops like tropical fruits which have greater export value.

It approved a $60 million loan in 2004 to help the Philippines' Department of Agriculture become more market- oriented, diversify crops and stimulate private investment.

A World Bank Group technical working paper in June 2007 said the government shouldn't stockpile grain to stabilize prices. Rather, it should keep enough on hand for disasters and social welfare programs. It also advocated opening the domestic market to competition by cutting tariffs.

Philippines Reverses Course

Philippine President Gloria Arroyo now says the country has to change course toward being able to feed itself.

''We must move toward more self-sufficiency, not necessarily 100 percent, but more self-sufficiency, less import dependence on rice,'' she said last month.

African nations including Ghana and Mali similarly followed World Bank advice. In 1992, the bank required Ghana to cut tariffs on rice to 20 percent from 100 percent, leading to a tripling of cheap rice imports, Patel said.

In 2004, the bank advised Ethiopia to stop providing fertilizer and credit to small farmers as part of a debt relief package, and it persuaded Indonesia to dismantle its rice marketing board, according to Elizabeth Stuart in Washington, who is the head of relations with the World Bank and IMF for Oxfam International, the U.K.-based alliance fighting poverty.

Cheap Loans

Now farmers are asking the Honduran government to reverse policy and provide cheap, long-term loans to buy the seeds and fertilizers they need to survive.

The government of Honduras yesterday asked the IMF to send a team to the country to examine how the rising food and fuel prices are affecting the economy and whether they should reconsider some aspects of a current economic program, the IMF said in a press release.

''We haven't seen the worst of it yet; that's to come,'' said Jarrod Brown, president of the Mission Lazarus. ''They need help now.''

For Alvarez and his family, help can't come quickly enough.

''We want to go back to our land, it's all we have,'' he said.

The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust

2010-01-18T11:30:00.000-08:00

The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust

http://www.opednews.com/populum/print_friendly.php?p=The-Right-Testicle-of-Hell-by-Greg-Palast-100117-242.html

January 17, 2010
The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust
By Greg Palast

Blackwater before drinking water

1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?

2. There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity" plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, "My sister, she's under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her, "Obama will have Marines there in 'a few days'"?

4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.

5. Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has." We know Gates doesn't know.

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed -- without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

9. Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.

11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?

Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets - with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers' death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)

12. What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off through its "austerity" plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.

13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.

14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New England. Haiti's wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled - and have been paying for it ever since.

From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves' successful uprising. Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.

15. Secretary Gates tells us, "There are just some certain facts of life that affect how quickly you can do some of these things." The Navy's hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!

16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That's a fact of life too, Mr. President.

***
Through our journalism network, we are trying to get my friend's medicines to her father. If any reader does have someone getting into or near Port-au-Prince, please contact Haiti@GregPalast.com immediately.

Urgently recommended reading - The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful slave uprising in Hispaniola by the brilliant CLR James.

US, Fearing Political Tsunami in Haiti, Rolls in the Troops and Media Propaganda — Haitians Are Not Fooled

2010-01-17T08:15:00.000-08:00

http://hondurasoye.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/us-fearing-political-tsunami-in-haiti-rolls-in-the-troops-and-media-propaganda-haitians-are-not-fooled/

US, Fearing Political Tsunami in Haiti, Rolls in the Troops and Media Propaganda — Haitians Are Not Fooled
2010 JANUARY 16
by magbana

Yesterday, I watched news of rescue efforts in P-au-P. Elite rescue teams, such as the one from Fairfax County, VA, were focusing primarily on the Montana Hotel and the headquarters of the UN “peacekeeping” force, MINUSTAH. Anyone who knows Haiti knows that the Montana Hotel is the most lavish lodging your can find in Port-au-Prince and is frequented by wealthy business people, foreign dignitaries, and served as the initial headquarters of the MINUSTAH force. Meanwhile, in the neighborhoods most heavily hit by the earthquake, Haitians, equipped with nothing more than their bare hands, digged frantically to save their families and neighbors.

The Canada Haitian Action Network is circulating an aid worker’s account that tells of this class/race disparity in responding to the injured. The aid worker says rescue teams are refusing to go into popular neighborhoods because they fear “violence.” Breathlessly, the media rotate stories of poor, injured Haitians with warnings of violent Haitian masses on the verge of a nationwide riot.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s foil to counter Michael Moore about his indictment of the US health care system in his film, “Sick,” (Moore kicked his ass), reported two nights ago that a tent clinic in downtown Port-au-Prince was abandoned by all medical staff because of a “rumor” of impending violence. Gupta showed the CNN audience cot after cot of injured Haitians with no medical staff in sight. CNN would probably get an Emmy award if Gupta would quit playing journalist and used his time there being the doctor he was trained to be. This is not a place or time where ANY medical professional on the ground in Haiti should do anything other than treating the injured.

Those who have observed that US aid is slow getting to Haiti, such as the Navy’s USS Comfort which is leaving Baltimore, Md., only TODAY, should understand that the US is concentrating on getting military boots on the ground first. By the end of the weekend, the US will have 10,000 military in Haiti. Once this is done, it will be “safe” for aid workers to tend to the injured in the popular neighborhoods. As time goes on, pay attention to the back story and you will see that the placement of these soldiers has more to do with stemming a political tsunami than helping the people.

Maintaining a violence-prone profile for poor Haitians is de rigeur. During the US Marine occupation of 1915-1934, Haitians were characterized summarily as “bandits.” In the US’ destabilization campaign against President Aristide in 2003-2004, his followers were called “chimeres” or “thug-creatures,” a label created for propaganda purposes by a Western journalist. Further, the concept of the “violent Haitian” has given cover to the UN “peacekeeping” force to conduct one deadly attack after another in the middle of the night in poor neighborhoods against unarmed, sleeping Haitians.

On the day after the earthquake, reporters expressed concern about the prisoners who escaped from the collapsed Haitian penitentiary (the ones that didn’t die, of course). In the first and only mention of the Haitian National Police, the media reported that their top priority was apprehending these violent criminals. Yet, we have not heard of police helping the people dig out of the earthquake. This is not surprising. In the days after the US kidnapping of Aristide in 2004, the Haitian National Police were responsible for summary executions of Aristide’s supporters, illegal mass detentions, and numerous disappearances. Who knows how many of the dead or escaped prisoners there were who were incarcerated without cause over the course of the two years that followed Aristide’s departure. The whole point is that the police are worried about escaped prisoners when their entire country is in shambles. If you ask the average Haitian how concerned he/she is about these prisoners, they will look at you as if you are crazy. The prison story is good “violence” propaganda and we will most likely hear more about it.

President Aristide is as popular now in Haiti as he has ever been. The people, especially the poor which comprise the majority of the population, found Aristide to be the only president that ever gave a damn about them. The 2004 coup was a US, France, and Canadian expedition that had NO popular support in Haiti. In order to make the coup stick, the US engineered the placement of a 10,000 United Nations “peacekeeping” force there. As my friend Kevin Pina, journalist and documentary filmmaker who lived and reported from Haiti for many years says, “If MINUSTAH had not been brought into Haiti, the coup would have fallen in a week.” Aristide’s political party, Lavalas, undoubtedly the most popular party in Haiti, has been barred from the ballot in the two previous elections resulting in a massive boycott and illegitimate results for the state.

In the earthquake, MINUSTAH suffered many casualties and because its offices were destroyed, it is not fully functional. The US is scared that without full MINUSTAH muscle, the tsunami of Haitian demand for the return of Aristide will rise up, that is, until the planned 10,000 troops are on the ground. So, Haiti’s poor, already totally consumed by loss of homes, injury and the death of loved ones, will have to start watching their back as well – as always.

(Shirley Pate is a Haiti solidarity activist and was in Haiti six weeks after the 2004 coup participating on a delegation to determine the role of the US in the coup)

Can the U.S. Navy Make Jet Fuel Out of Sea Water?

2010-01-17T06:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.naturalnews.com/027953_jet_fuel_sea_water.html

by David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) U.S. Navy scientists are investigating a method for transforming ocean water into jet fuel as a way to maintain U.S. military superiority even in the face of dwindling global oil supplies.

"The U.S. Navy is surrounded by seawater and the Navy needs jet fuel," said researcher Robert Dorner, who works at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "In the seawater you have [carbon dioxide] and you have hydrogen. The question is, how do you convert that into jet fuel?"

The navy researchers hope to develop a new version of the Fischer-Tropsch process for combining carbon monoxide with hydrogen to produce synthetic gas (syngas), a precursor for both jet fuel and plastics. The Fischer-Tropsch process requires the use of cobalt catalysts and heat, and also produces waxes and the greenhouse gas methane as byproducts. Because of its high cost, it has rarely been used commercially -- most notably, the isolated regimes of Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa used it to transform solid coal into liquid fuel as a way of working around fuel embargoes.

Dorner and colleagues hope to modify the process to use the carbon dioxide dissolved in sea water instead of carbon monoxide, and an iron catalyst rather than cobalt. This latter change would reduce methane output by 70 percent and also increase syngas output. If this is successful, the researchers would then need to find a way to turn syngas into jet fuel.

"It's still a very energy-intensive process," Dorner said. "A lot of work remains to be done. We haven't even really looked at building an actual pilot plant yet."

According to Jean-Michel Lavoie of Sherbrooke University in Quebec, oil prices remain low enough that even a modified Fischer-Tropsch process is unlikely to become economical soon. The idea remains appealing to the navy, however.

Dorner says that if the Navy decides to adopt the technique, it would probably install the production factory in a separate ship, which jets would then visit in order to refuel.

The History That "Binds" the U.S. and Haiti

2010-01-17T03:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j15.shtml

Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:49 EST

In his statement on the Haitian earthquake Wednesday, President Barack Obama referred to the "long history that binds us together." Neither he nor the US media, however, have shown any inclination to probe the history of US-Haiti relations and its bearing on present catastrophe confronting the Haitian people.

Rather, the backwardness and poverty that have played a substantial role in driving the death toll into the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are presented as a natural state of affairs, if not the fault of the Haitians themselves. The United States is portrayed as a selfless benefactor, ready to come to the aid of Haiti with donations, rescue teams, warships and Marines.

In a cynical and dishonest editorial, the New York Times Thursday began, "Once again the world weeps with Haiti," a country which it goes on to describe as characterized by "poverty, despair and dysfunction that would be a disaster anywhere else but in Haiti are the norm."

The editorial continues: "Look at Haiti and you will see what generations of misrule, poverty and political strife will do to a country."

In a background article on the Haitian disaster, the Times adds that the country "is known for its many man-made woes - its dire poverty, political infighting and proclivity for insurrection."

In a shorter and even more dismissive editorial, the Wall Street Journal celebrates the fact that the US military will play the leading role in Washington's response to the earthquake as "a fresh reminder that the reach of America's power coincides with the reach of its goodness."

It goes on to draw an obscene comparison between the Haitian earthquake and the one that struck southern California in 1994, in which 72 people died. "The difference," the Journal declares, "is a function of a wealth-generating and law-abiding society that can afford, among other things, the expense of proper building codes."

The message is clear. The Haitians have only themselves to blame for the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, because they failed to create sufficient wealth and lacked respect for law and order.

What is deliberately obscured by this comparison is the real relationship, which has evolved over more than a century, between "wealth generation" in the United States and poverty in Haiti. It is a relationship built on the use of force to pursue US imperialism's predatory interests in a historically oppressed country.

If the Obama administration and the Pentagon carry through with reported plans to deploy a Marine expeditionary force in Haiti, it will mark the fourth time in the past 95 years that the US armed forces have occupied the impoverished Caribbean nation. This time, as in the past, rather than aiding the Haitian people, the essential purpose of such a military action will be to defend US interests and guard against what the Times refers to as the "proclivity for insurrection."

The roots of this relationship go back to the birth of Haiti as the first independent black republic in 1804, the product of a successful slave revolution led by Toussaint Louverture, and the subsequent defeat of a French army sent by Napoleon.

The ruling classes of the world never forgave Haiti for its revolutionary victory. It was subjected to a worldwide embargo that was led by the United States, which feared the Haitian example could inspire a similar revolt in the southern slave states. It was only with southern secession and the outbreak of the Civil War that the North recognized Haiti - nearly 60 years after its independence.

From the dawn of the 20th century, Haiti fell under the domination of Washington and the US banks, whose interests were defended by sending Marines to carry out an occupation that continued for nearly 20 years, maintained through the bloody suppression of Haitian resistance.

The Marines left only after carrying out the "Haitianization" - as the New York Times referred to it at the time - of the war against the Haitian people by building an army dedicated to internal repression.

Subsequently, Washington backed the 30-year dictatorship of the Duvaliers, which began with the coming to power of Papa Doc in 1957. While tens of thousands of Haitians died at the hands of the military and the dreaded Tontons Macoute, US imperialism saw the murderous dictatorship as a bulwark against communism and revolution in the Caribbean.

Since the mass upheavals that brought down the Duvaliers in 1986, successive US governments, Democratic and Republican alike, have sought to reconstruct a reliable client state capable of defending the markets and investments of US firms attracted by starvation wages, as well as the property and wealth of the Haitian ruling elite. This entails preventing any challenge to a socio-economic order that keeps 80 percent of the population in dire poverty.

This effort continues today under the tutelage of Bill and Hillary Clinton - respectively the UN's special representative to Haiti and the US Secretary of State - who together have Haitian blood on their hands.

Washington has backed two coups and sent US troops back into Haiti twice in the past 20 years. Both coups were organized to overthrow Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first Haitian president to be elected by popular vote and without Washington's approval. Together, the coups of 1991 and 2004 claimed the lives of at least 13,000 more Haitians. In the 2004 overthrow, Aristide was forcibly transported out of the country by US operatives.

Needing them in Iraq, the US withdrew its troops in 2004, contracting the job of repression out to a United Nations peacekeeping force of 9,000 under the leadership of the Brazilian army.

Despite Aristide's capitulation to the demands of the International Monetary Fund and his willingness to compromise with Washington, the mass support he attracted with his anti-imperialist rhetoric made him anathema to the ruling elites in both Washington and Port-au-Prince. On the orders of the Obama administration, he is barred from returning to Haiti and his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, remains effectively outlawed.

This is the real and continuing history that, as Obama put it, binds Haiti to US imperialism, which bears overwhelming responsibility for the desperate conditions that have compounded the carnage inflicted by the earthquake.

There are, however, other ties that bind and are deeply felt, as the immensity of the tragedy in Haiti unfolds. There are over half a million Haitian Americans officially counted in the US and undoubtedly hundreds of thousands more who are undocumented. Their presence concretizes the class interests and solidarity that unite Haitian and American workers. Together, it is their task to sweep away the conditions of poverty and devastation in both countries, along with the capitalist profit system that has created them.

Under the Boot of Western Empire: Haiti

2010-01-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7903623001730810789&hl=en#

AFRICOM: Latest U.S. Bid to Recolonise Continent

2010-01-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/201001070715.html

Tichaona Nhamoyebonde
AllAfrica.com
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:32 EST

Harare - African revolutionaries now have to sleep with one eye open because the United States of America is not stopping at anything in its bid to establish Africom, a highly-equipped US army that will be permanently resident in Africa to oversee the country's imperialist interests.

Towards the end of last year, the US government intensified its efforts to bring a permanent army to settle in Africa, dubbed the African Command (AFRICOM), the latest tool for the subtle recolonisation of Africa.

Just before end of last year, General William E. Garret, Commander US Army for Africa, met with defence attachés from all African embassies in Washington to lure them into selling the idea of an American army based in Africa to their governments.

Latest reports from the White House this January indicate that 75 percent of the army's establishment work has been done through a military unit based in Stuttgart, Germany, and that what is left is to get an African country to host the army and get things moving.

Liberia and Morocco have offered to host AFRICOM while SADC has closed out any possibility of any of its member states hosting the US army.

Other individual countries have remained quiet.

Liberia has longstanding ties with the US due to its slave history while errant Morocco, which is not a member of the African Union and does not hold elections, might want the US army to assist it to suppress any future democratic uprising.

SADC's refusal is a small victory for the people of Africa in their struggle for total independence but the rest of the regional blocs in Africa are yet to come up with a common position. This is worrying.

The US itself wanted a more strategic country than Morocco and Liberia since the army will be the epicentre of influencing, articulating and safeguarding US foreign and economic policies.

The other danger is that Africom will open up Africa as a battleground between America and anti-US terrorist groups.

AFRICOM is a smokescreen behind which America wants to hide its means to secure Africa's oil and other natural resources, nothing more.

African leaders must not forget that military might has been used by America and Europe again and again as the only effective way of accomplishing their agenda in ensuring that governments in each country are run by people who toe their line.

By virtue of its being resident in Africa, AFRICOM will ensure that America has its tentacles easily reaching every African country and influencing every event to the American advantage.

By hosting the army, Africa will have sub-contracted its military independence to America and will have accepted the process that starts its recolonisation through an army that can subdue any attempts by Africa to show its own military prowess.

The major question is: Who will remove AFRICOM once it is established? By what means?

By its origin AFRICOM will be technically and financially superior to any African country's army and will dictate the pace for regime change in any country at will and also give depth, direction and impetus to the US natural resource exploitation scheme.

There is no doubt that as soon as the army gets operational in Africa, all the gains of independence will be reversed.

If the current leadership in Africa succumbs to the whims of the US and accepts the operation of this army in Africa, they will go down in the annals of history as that generation of politicians who accepted the evil to prevail.

Even William Shakespeare would turn and twist in his grave and say: "I told you guys that it takes good men to do nothing for evil to prevail."

We must not forget that Africans, who are still smarting from colonialism-induced humiliation, subjugation, brutality and inferiority complex, do not need to be taken back to another form of colonialism, albeit subtle.

AFRICOM has been controversial on the continent ever since former US president George W. Bush first announced it in February 2007.

African leaders must not forget that under the Barack Obama administration, US policy towards Africa and the rest of the developing world has not changed an inch. It remains militaristic and materialistic.

Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations argue that the major objective of AFRICOM is to professionalise security forces in key countries across Africa.

However, both administrations do not attempt to address the impact of the setting up of AFRICOM on minority parties, governments and strong leaders considered errant or whether the US will not use AFRICOM to promote friendly dictators.

Training and weapons programmes and arms transfers from Ukraine to Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Ethiopia and the transitional government in Somalia, clearly indicate the use of military might to maintain influence in governments in Africa, and remains a priority of US foreign policy.

Ukraine's current leadership was put into power by the US under the Orange Revolution and is being given a free role to supply weaponry in African conflicts.

African leaders must show solidarity and block every move by America to set up its bases in the motherland unless they want to see a new round of colonisation.

Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Mugabe, Sam Nujoma, Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Kenneth Kaunda, Augustino Neto and Samora Machel, among others, will have fought liberation wars for nothing, if AFRICOM is allowed a base in Africa.

Thousands of Africans who died in colonial prisons and in war fronts during the liberation struggles, will have shed their blood for nothing if Africa is recolonised.

Why should the current crop of African leaders accept systematic recolonisation when they have learnt a lot from colonialism, apartheid and racism? Why should the current crop of African leaders fail to stand measure for measure against the US administration and tell it straight in the face that Africa does not need a foreign army since the AU is working out its own army.

African leaders do not need prophets from Mars to know that the US's fascination with oil, the war on terrorism and the military will now be centred on Africa, after that escapade in Iraq.

A sign of empire pathology

2010-01-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=268359

Finian Cunningham
Gulf Daily News
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:12 EST

Here is a shocking statistic that you won't hear in most western news media: over the past nine years, more US military personnel have taken their own lives than have died in action in either the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. These are official figures from the US Department of Defence, yet somehow they have not been deemed newsworthy to report. Last year alone, more than 330 serving members of the US armed forces committed suicide - more than the 320 killed in Afghanistan and the 150 who fell in Iraq.

Since 2001, when Washington launched its so-called war on terror, there has been a dramatic year-on-year increase in US military suicides, particularly in the army, which has borne the brunt of fighting abroad. Last year saw the highest total number since such records began in 1980. Prior to 2001, the suicide rate in the US military was lower than that for the general US population; now, it is nearly double the national average.

A growing number of these victims have been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. What these figures should tell us is that there is something fundamentally deranged about Washington's "war on terror" - which is probably why western news media prefer to ignore the issue. How damning is it about such military campaigns that the number of US soldiers who take their own lives outnumber those killed by enemy combatants.

What is even more disturbing is that the official figures only count victims of suicide among serving personnel. Not included are the many more veterans - officially classed a civilians - who take their own lives.

Most likely, these deaths are reported in some small-town newspaper in "a brief" news item with no context or background as to what drove these individuals to take their own lives. It is estimated that the suicide rate among veterans demobbed from fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq is as high as four times the national average. The US Department of Veteran Affairs calculates that over 6,000 former service personnel commit suicide every year.

Many of these men have come home to a country they have fought for only to find no jobs, their homes repossessed by banks that have enjoyed trillion-dollar bailouts and broken relationships.

Meanwhile, President Obama - the erstwhile peace candidate - has taken on the role of Commander in Chief with gusto, telling his countrymen and women that they are fighting a "just war" to "defend American lives". Only a year ago, he was campaigning for the presidency on a ticket to end such wars. Now, more than his predecessor, George W Bush, Obama is committing to wars without end. How soul-destroying is that for a grunt holed up in a bunker, with his young family back home probably telling him that they have just signed up for food stamps? In their guts, these US soldiers must know - as many other ordinary people around the world do - that these wars are nothing but a desperate, pathological bid by a dying power to salvage its crumbling empire - an empire that enriches a tiny elite and impoverishes the majority. Is it any wonder that many of them simply lose the will to live?

Africa: Africom - Latest U.S. Bid to Recolonise Continent

2010-01-12T17:00:00.000-08:00

http://allafrica.com/stories/201001070715.html

Tichaona Nhamoyebonde
7 January 2010
opinion

Harare — AFRICAN revolutionaries now have to sleep with one eye open because the United States of America is not stopping at anything in its bid to establish Africom, a highly-equipped US army that will be permanently resident in Africa to oversee the country's imperialist interests.

Towards the end of last year, the US government intensified its efforts to bring a permanent army to settle in Africa, dubbed the African Command (Africom) as a latest tool for the subtle recolonisation of Africa.

Just before end of last year, General William E. Garret, Commander US Army for Africa, met with defence attaches from all African embassies in Washington to lure them into selling the idea of an American army based in Africa to their governments.

Latest reports from the White House this January indicate that 75 percent of the army's establishment work has been done through a military unit based in Stuttgart, Germany, and that what is left is to get an African country to host the army and get things moving.

Liberia and Morocco have offered to host Africom while Sadc has closed out any possibility of any of its member states hosting the US army.

Other individual countries have remained quiet.

Liberia has longstanding ties with the US due to its slave history while errant Morocco, which is not a member of the African Union and does not hold elections, might want the US army to assist it to suppress any future democratic uprising.

Sadc's refusal is a small victory for the people of Africa in their struggle for total independence but the rest of the regional blocs in Africa are yet to come up with a common position. This is worrying.

The US itself wanted a more strategic country than Morocco and Liberia since the army will be the epicentre of influencing, articulating and safeguarding US foreign and economic policies.

The other danger is that Africom will open up Africa as a battleground between America and anti-US terrorist groups.

Africom is a smokescreen behind which America wants to hide its means to secure Africa's oil and other natural resources, nothing more.

African leaders must not forget that military might has been used by America and Europe again and again as the only effective way of accomplishing their agenda in ensuring that governments in each country are run by people who toe their line.

By virtue of its being resident in Africa, Africom will ensure that America has its tentacles easily reaching every African country and influencing every event to the American advantage.

By hosting the army, Africa will have sub-contracted its military independence to America and will have accepted the process that starts its recolonisation through an army that can subdue any attempts by Africa to show its own military prowess.

The major question is: Who will remove Africom once it is established? By what means?

By its origin Africom will be technically and financially superior to any African country's army and will dictate the pace for regime change in any country at will and also give depth, direction and impetus to the US natural resource exploitation scheme.

There is no doubt that as soon as the army gets operational in Africa, all the gains of independence will be reversed.

If the current leadership in Africa succumbs to the whims of the US and accept the operation of this army in Africa, they will go down in the annals of history as that generation of politicians who accepted the evil to prevail.

Even William Shakespeare would turn and twist in his grave and say: "I told you guys that it takes good men to do nothing for evil to prevail."

We must not forget that Africans, who are still smarting from colonialism-induced humiliation, subjugation, brutality and inferiority complex, do not need to be taken back to another form of colonialism, albeit subtle.

Africom has been controversial on the continent ever since former US president George W. Bush first announced it in February 2007.

African leaders must not forget that under the Barack Obama administration, US policy towards Africa and the rest of the developing world has not changed an inch. It remains militaristic and materialistic.

Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations argue that the major objective of Africom is to professionalise security forces in key countries across Africa.

However, both administrations do not attempt to address the impact of the setting up of Africom on minority parties, governments and strong leaders considered errant or whether the US will not use Africom to promote friendly dictators.

Training and weapons programmes and arms transfers from Ukraine to Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Ethiopia and the transitional government in Somalia, clearly indicate the use of military might to maintain influence in governments in Africa, remains a priority of US foreign policy.

Ukraine's current leadership was put into power by the US under the Orange Revolution and is being given a free role to supply weaponry in African conflicts.

African leaders must show solidarity and block every move by America to set up its bases in the motherland unless they want to see a new round of colonisation.

Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Mugabe, Sam Nujoma, Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Kenneth Kaunda, Augustino Neto and Samora Machel, among others, will have fought liberation wars for nothing, if Africom is allowed a base in Africa.

Thousands of Africans who died in colonial prisons and in war fronts during the liberation struggles, will have shed their blood for nothing if Africa is recolonised.

Why should the current crop of African leaders accept systematic recolonisation when they have learnt a lot from colonialism, apartheid and racism? Why should the current crop of African leaders fail to stand measure for measure against the US administration and tell it straight in the face that Africa does not need a foreign army since the AU is working out its own army.

African leaders do not need prophets from Mars to know that US's fascination with oil, the war on terrorism and the military will now be centred on Africa, after that escapade in Iraq.

Tichaona Nhamoyebonde is a political scientist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

The US Finds its Superpower Structure and Capital are Insufficient to Cope with a Transformed World

2010-01-12T13:21:00.001-08:00

http://www.oilprice.com/article-the-us-finds-its-superpower-structure-and-capital-are-insufficient-to-cope-with-a-transformed-world.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+oilpricecom+%28Oil+Price%29

Published : 11th January 2010

The US Finds its Superpower Structure and Capital are Insufficient to Cope with a Transformed World

The United States of America, in global strategic terms, is tumbling down a series of misadventures, declining in a “step of sighs” through frustrating economic and military endeavours as it discovers that its superpower structures and massive capital wealth are insufficient to cope with a transformed world.

This transformed world was created by the very superpower capabilities and massive wealth of the West. Even the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is beginning to recognize that massive financial holdings are inadequate to address all challenges to national survival and wellbeing.

The question is whether this current process through which the US is going must inevitably be played to a conclusion which sees the US itself — as the Roman and Hellenic and Mongol and British and Netherlands and Soviet empires once were — broken apart or reduced to modesty among the ruins of grandeur? It is not. Nothing is written which cannot be re-written.

The Russian Federation’s grand strategic growth began only with its recognition that it was forced, with the death of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1990-91, to put aside the pretensions that it had been a superpower. The defeat of the USSR-led bloc by the US-led bloc which determined the end of the Cold War engendered in Moscow the deep reflections and reorganizations which only defeat can bring. Russia, with this realization, was able to revive the strategic momentum which had been thwarted by the 1917 Revolution.

The West, and particularly the United States after the end of the Cold War, wallowed in a condition even worse than defeat. It wallowed in victory.

With defeat comes the ability — indeed, the license, mandate, and demand — to sweep out failed or obsolete institutions; to scour out the sclerotic accumulation of laws and bureaucratic procedures; and to purge the perpetuation of the kind of strategic insensitivities which had led to defeat. With victory, no such license is granted, and the presumption of superiority reinforces and compounds ancient structures. It does, however, reinforce the thinking and architecture which had led to victory. Further, victory it leads to the excesses of those who ride to power on the exhausted backs of those who, in fact, had created the victory.

Those who conceive, manoeuvre, and shed blood or risk careers for success are never those best suited to the shallow machinery of managing success when it has reached a plateau of self-satisfaction. But success is never able to be sustained if it is only “managed”. This is one of the lessons of The Art of Victory. Thus, the desire by the US to see itself not merely as the “sole surviving superpower” in the post-Cold War period, but to also see itself as the superior of its one-time allies, merely compounded the widespread Western view after 1991 that effort, creativity, alliance teamwork, and the humility of the threatened were unnecessary. It led to the belief that “the peace dividend” of victory could be spent recklessly, and forever, without heed.

Thus, in relative terms, post-Cold War, Russia and — in a different fashion — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) learned, re-organized, and began the process of rebuilding their societies, less hampered by the earlier constraints of state structures. They prepared for a new world, and acted accordingly. They learned from history, ancient and recent. The West — but again, particularly the US — engaged in no such introspection; did not bow to the humbling workload of reconstruction; and was left hidebound by institutions which had acquired the towering and massive strength of fortifications built for a war long past.

The West — including the US — is now in the hands of managers who know nothing of what it took to built Western values, institutions, methodologies, and wealth. They preside over populations increasingly ignorant of those values, and this suits the managers. The education systems created by the managers, displacing the pride and identity of the earlier warriors, reinforce ignorance of the real underpinnings of success, and, in fact, success itself is despised because there is no comprehension of what failure can bring. They cannot even observe the lessons which the Russians post-Cold War, or the Egyptians post the 1967 Six Day War, were forced to learn.

Wealth and identity, while being built, demand absolute self-awareness, discipline, and a constant understanding of context. Wealth, when it is being spent, is blind to everything but self-gratification. I once called this “the Saudi disease”: I am wealthy, therefore I am smart. It is now the Western disease. And the West will continue its decline until it has sunk so low, spent so much, that it is forced and humiliated into self-review. Even alcoholics — those who admit their condition — are aware of this phenomenon.

So what, then, are the options for the West, but particularly the US which was, until recently and briefly (for less than a century), primus inter pares among Western nations?

Any fundamental assessment of US goals, capabilities, and options must be conditioned on external realities which provide the context for any US aspirations. The nature of global rivalry has changed dramatically in the two decades which followed the end of the Cold War. This is not surprising. The entire global framework transformed in just two decades following World War I, and again in the few decades following World War II. Given the compounding pace of scientific and technological growth which began following World War II, what is, in fact, surprising is that the new global framework took so long to emerge, haltingly, from the mists of the swamp in which it has incubated.

It was postulated that the clearing of the post-Cold War mists would reveal a Pacific Century, an age dominated by China. Indeed, China may well continue its rise in strategic terms, but, equally, it is plagued by a legacy of challenges, particularly if it is to meet the growing expectations of its population. In any event, the Pacific Century was, arguably, the 20th Century, which gradually emerged as the Atlantic Century played out. But the rise in one region does not necessarily mean that others fail to rise. Just as the Atlantic era blended with the Pacific era, so the Pacific age blends with the emerging Indian Ocean age, and all — Atlantic , Pacific, and Indian oceanic regions — are inseparably bound, along with the fortunes of the heartlands.

If anything, the revival of the Great Silk Route binding together — finally — Europe. Asia, and the Middle East and Africa, spells the vital importance of all the oceanic aspects. In this regard, the Indian Ocean region, which enabled US projection into Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, has long been ignored, and seen only as a transit zone for extra-regional powers. That is now ending.

The Indian Ocean is a complex strategic theatre in its own right, and, with the Pacific and Atlantic in many ways already strategically “defined”, it is the one dynamic zone which can affect the global place of the great powers. It is one of the few fields of manoeuvre left open.

What it means to the regional inhabitants is one thing: the Indian Ocean is home to 48 littoral and dependent states, reaching up into its subsidiary seas and gulfs, and to a third of the world’s population. Indian Ocean states had, in 2007, a combined gross domestic product (GDP) in excess of $4-trillion.

What the Indian Ocean means to out-of-region powers, such as the US, is something else: it is a zone of transit; it is a zone which enables access to markets and resources. It is also one of the few dynamic zones through which alliance-building, or strategic spoiling, can have global ramifications.

The US has in Cold War and post-Cold War years viewed the region through different prisms, and never as a strategic whole. Moreover, it has in post-Cold War years viewed it mainly through the priority of land power projection. Its principal military thrusts into the region have been via the ground-force-dominated Central Command (CENTCOM), or the new, “soft” prism of African Command (AFRICOM), which has yet to find a means of actually functioning meaningfully in Africa. The US Navy, through what is now Pacific Command, has made side adventures into the Indian Ocean.

Now, however, the Indian Ocean demands greater attention because of its inherent resource wealth, growing markets, and the reality that it is integral to both the revived Great Silk Route, and the evolution of “the Great Silk Sea Route”, as this writer has termed the Indian Ocean’s increasingly complex transit trade.

Moreover, with the decline in on-the-ground influence in the Northern Tier coming to a head with the US retirement from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has little option but to rebuild its regional authority and power not on CENTCOM, but on the US Navy’s capabilities and historical legacy — minor though it is — in the Indian Ocean. The only presence which the US can maintain with any degree of authority and independence is its sea power.

The process, however, is complex, and the frameworks of alliances and competitors are no longer clear and simple. The Indian Ocean exemplifies the emerging nature of the global strategic pattern, in which friends and competitors are often the same nation-states; in which alliances may of necessity be restricted to shorter timeframes than in the past, or may be restricted to certain key issues. Friends will, more than ever, need to understand that they can disagree on some issues and yet remain allies.

Within this, the Indian Ocean is a major key to accessing and influencing Russia’s dominance of Central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. The Indian Ocean is, perhaps, the principal dynamic key to China’s strength, because competition in the Pacific is less critical — or perhaps less likely — to influence or concern Beijing. For India itself, the biggest single littoral economy and military power in the Indian Ocean, the choices are emerging more starkly.

India is, unless it radically alters its policies, faced with being marginalized to being a strictly Indian Ocean power; literally one in the Alfred Thayer Mahan model of a sea power state. While this would be significant, it would waste India’s potential role as a Eurasian land power state — a “heartland” state, as Sir Halford Mackinder’s strategic philosophies would have it — and make it vulnerable to the growing heartland power of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) states, dominated by the Russia Federation (RF) and the PRC. Thus, to be successful, India needs to ensure that it becomes a combination sea power and heartland power, with the ability to both dominate the Indian Ocean from a maritime sense, and access and influence the wealth and trade of the heartland Central Asia.

To achieve this combination, India needs to gradually expand its relations with the great sea power capabilities in the Indian Ocean of the other major Indian Ocean powers (Australia, and, ultimately, Iran), and the United States of America. This would enable India to preclude dominance by the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAAN) and any — as yet minimal — RF Navy resurgence in the region. Thus, the Indo-US strategic link must be expanded if New Delhi is to retain any global leverage.

However, and in superficial contradiction, New Delhi cannot become a player in the SCO’s heartland unless it allies itself, yet again, but with greater depth, with Russia to find a way into Central Asia. This would give it a measure of security against the PRC’s growing dominance of regional trade and pipelines across southern Central Asia and into the Northern Tier states of Iran and Afghanistan. Indeed, it needs Russia to help provide the geopolitical linkages into Central Asia, but at the same time must find a way to enjoy direct access to this region.

At present, the great impasse is the geographic and strategic linkage enjoyed between the PRC and Pakistan, and this is absolutely vital to Beijing. In Gwadar (linked via the PRC-funded Karakoram Highway across the mountains), the PRC sees the ability to use the Pakistani Baluchistan port as a terminus and hub into the East-West maritime trade, feeding raw materials into China from ships which have traversed the Indian Ocean from the Middle East and Africa. It will also become a means of exporting some Chinese product to Europe (potentially) through Gwadar to ships which would then transit the Indian Ocean and its subsidiary sea, the Red Sea, and through Suez to Europe.

This would give the PRC the ability to avoid the chokepoints of South-East Asia, particularly the Malacca Strait, which could be used to hold China to ransom. Even the Western Australian mineral and gas exports to the PRC could, conceivably, be partially re-oriented in their shipping routes to feed into pipelines and road transport from Pakistan’s Gwadar port up to the Western regions of the PRC as the logistic chain develops.

The PRC’s nurturing of stability and investments in Afghanistan, seen in the longer term and post the US/Coalition withdrawal from that country within the coming year or two, not only fits with Beijing’s expansion of commercial and supply interests deep into Central and South Asia, but also gives strategic depth to Pakistan in a way not seen since the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan linkages during the era of the Shah of Iran in the 1970s.

In addition to this, of course, the extensive and accelerating development of rail and other links from the PRC border down through Myanmar has been achieved by Beijing while the West has, in its moral piety, “sanctioned” Myanmar. The PRC, in fact, has moved to eliminate its dependence on the South-East Asian straits as its means of securing its trade with the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. It has begun developing a framework of linkages via (i) the overland northern Silk Route via Russia; (ii) the lower Silk Route via the Caspian; (iii) the overland linkages through Myanmar; (iv) the links through Pakistan, to subsequently embrace Afghanistan; and (v) through gradually growing links through Iran, to both the Indian Ocean and through Iran to Armenia, Turkey, and the Black Sea Basin into Europe.

Within all this, the US is losing its once-tight grip on the northern Indian Ocean states, including those in the Persian Gulf annex of the Indian Ocean, simply because it cannot sustain its land and air power presence in a meaningful way there. The future US maritime projection into the Ocean must be substantial, in order to show presence and therefore invoke influence, and yet it cannot rely on the same static array of bases which it once enjoyed as a legacy of assuming control of the former British sphere of influence.

The US, then, must view the Indian Ocean in its entirety, something which it has not yet done, having preferred to view the Middle East, South Asia, South-East Asia, and the Horn of Africa as somehow separate and unrelated areas, and areas totally removed from any relationship with South Africa and the Cape of Good Hope sea route (on the one hand), and Australia, in the South-East Quadrant — the Empty Quarter — of the Indian Ocean (on the other). Even the modest shift in mainstream US strategic thinking toward the Indian Ocean, exemplified by US author Robert Kaplan’s report in Foreign Affairs journal of March/April 2009, sees “the Indian Ocean” as the northern portions and in fairly traditional “arc of Islam” terms, for example.

To achieve its Indian Ocean goals, and to be a player in the “New Great Game” for Central Asia — having decisively lost the old “Great Game” to Russia by 2009 — the US will need to rely far more heavily on Australia as a maritime partner in the Indian Ocean. However, Washington will need to recognize that Australia, as the second most wealthy Indian Ocean state (and by far the wealthiest of the big states on a per capita basis), has its own delicate web of balanced interests with the PRC, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and the Middle East over a variety of trade, sea route, and other issues. Australia, both psychologically and strategically, cannot be “deputy” to the US’ “sheriff” in the region; its partnership with the US on Indian Ocean maritime issues must be delicate and balanced.

Australia, with its potential to offer home porting and fleet support to a US Navy presence in the Indian Ocean, is the key to US reinvigoration of its global role and re-entry into the Eurasian Great Game. On the other hand, if Australia must go it alone in the region, then it must. Its 2009 Defence White Paper highlighted the ongoing importance of the US-Australian alliance, but also the criticality of the need for Australia to develop totally independent security arrangements within the Indo-Pacific realm.

Indeed, the sophistry and legacy paternalism of Washington’s view of the Indian Ocean will need to give way to a more realistic and partnering approach to the region, particularly with Australia, quite rapidly if the US is to retain any momentum at all in the Indian Ocean, rather than suffering — as Britain did in 1964 — a downward spiralling erosion of influence and capabilities. The regional dynamic is such that Australia is reaching a point where, if the US does not partner with it on more or less equal terms in the Indian Ocean, then Australia will build other arrangements.

Australia is already at a point where it has recognized the need for independent intelligence capabilities and assessments on the Arabian Peninsula, the Northern Tier, and the Horn of Africa, as well as, of course, South and South-East Asia. There has been a growing realization that US assessments on, for example, Iran and Pakistan, or even on the Arabian Peninsula, have been undertaken through a prism of Islamist terrorism and oil, and this is too transitory and too narrow a focus for a country such as Australia, which is embedded into the region.

The US faces a situation, in the immediate term, in which its leadership wishes to disentangle as much as possible from all foreign engagements (certainly from Afghanistan and Iraq, seemingly regardless of the consequences for the region), and the necessity to divert funding away from defense and military operations to meet debt service and domestic social expenditures. It will, in other words, need to do more with less, if it is to sustain any sphere of influence. CENTCOM and AFRICOM can, and probably will, go some way into hibernation; PACCOM (Pacific Command) will become, even more than before, the major US force structure. There will probably be no stomach, or budget, in Washington to create a new Indian Ocean Command, and it would not, in any event, be ideal: the Indian Ocean has for too long been treated as “separate” by US planners.

The necessity will be for PACCOM to engage more strenuously in Indian Ocean deployment, both as a means of “showing the flag” and retaining influence through semi-soft projection; and also as a means to counter or balance or partner with the growing regional military capabilities of Indian Ocean states and other out-of-region states, such as the PRC.

Iran , largely because of a series of missteps by the US beginning with the removal of the Shah by US Pres. Jimmy Carter in 1978-79, will be a formidable and dominating power over Persian Gulf/Arabian Peninsula energy exports within a short period, unless the clerics’ rule collapses (which now seems unlikely in the short term). The US can only hope to rebuild a measure of credibility as an ally to its regional allies, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Oman, and it can now only do this delicately, given the vulnerability of US military assets in the region (including naval). But absent that effort by the US, it will eventually lose its great access to Middle Eastern energy and markets, because others are already on the ascendancy in the region.

Conclusions:

A variety of outcomes are likely in the Indian Ocean region, insofar as they affect the United States. They include (but are by no means limited to) the following:

1. The United States will, by virtue of its economic condition, be forced to reduce its global military presence, and find new means of exerting its influence. This will inevitably place new demands on its diplomatic and intelligence capabilities, which will need to be attuned to the need for creativity as a replacement for sheer strength of national military capabilities;
2. There will be a significant growth by the US, because of the decline in ground and air military assets, in the use of maritime projection as the most economic form of military diplomacy. This will place new burdens on the US Navy at a time when it’s comparative technological advantage over major (and some minor) foreign navies will decline. In an age when the carrier battle group retains some utility, but increasing vulnerability, there will be much more manoeuvre and diplomacy required from US naval projection, and no zone will be more challenging than the Indian Ocean region. At the same time, the US Navy has no ideal Indian Ocean basing arrangements which can fulfil the needs: Diego Garcia is sound for refuelling and rearming, but not for major fleet repairs or crew leave; Singapore has proven to be of limited viability, and Singapore itself has been reluctant to go too far in allowing USN basing; Vietnam, in the Pacific, may be supportive, but this does not help in the Indian Ocean. What this all gets down to is that the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) facility at Garden Island, south of Fremantle, may be the best support base for the USN in the Indian Ocean;
3. The US reach into the Middle East and Indian Ocean will be limited (because of budgetary constraints) by reductions in the real elements of power projection: aerial refuelling tankers, and heavy troop and armour transport aircraft. This will shape the kind of engagements which the US can consider going forward, even post-Obama;
4. The US will be a vital ally to India, but must recognize that India cannot afford the need to return to a solid strategic alliance with Russia, simply to re-engage into the Eurasian heartland;
5. The US, through recent discreet diplomacy, has ensured the longer-term survival of the Iranian clerics, and must now contend with the reality that Iran will project more deeply into the Indian Ocean region, but particularly (in the short-term) into the Arabian Peninsula through an expansion of the proxy challenges which Tehran is now raising there: the “Islamic Republic of Eastern Arabia”, the Yemeni-Saudi conflicts now underway, and so on. As well, Iran’s hand in the Horn of Africa is being extended, and pro-US states in the region (such as Ethiopia and the Republic of Somaliland), are justifiably fearful of the reality that the US and NATO will fail to support them. The December 2009-January 2010 moves by the US Obama Administration and UK Brown Government to provide funds to Yemen to combat the insurgencies there only reinforce regional beliefs that the US and UK are in no position to actually provide military and political strength to challenge Iran in the Peninsula;
6. The US can benefit from enhanced relations with the Indian Ocean littoral states. It has hardly considered, for example, planning a cooperative Indian Ocean maritime complex of actions which engage Egypt, Israel, a revived Ethiopian Red Sea presence, the use of the Republic of Somaliland, and so on, in the North-West Quadrant of the region; or of South Africa-Australia maritime linkages. The options are many. Even the US-India military relationship, which has expanded, has not included a significant maritime element. The US-Pakistan maritime relationship has itself not been really studied in light of the broader framework which must include the Pakistan-PRC relationship.

These are basic thoughts. But a variety of creative options begin to open up if the US, faced with economic and political constraints, addresses the new era in which creativity will be needed to replace budgets.

Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS.
Extract from Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis
© 2009 Global Information System, ISSA

Wars "R" Us: Making the World Safe for American Domination

2010-01-06T13:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Wars-R-Us-Making-the-Wo-by-Emily-Spence-100104-813.html

January 5, 2010
Wars "R" Us: Making the World Safe for American Domination
By Emily Spence

In Dee Pen destructive economic systems, there is a feedback loop wherein it becomes self-confirming that greed and aggression lead to gains rather than acts that involve "playing by the rules", sharing profits, cooperating and helping others to prosper. As activities on Wall Street and in transnational corporations confirm, successful players are expected to produce income by any means possible, pay workers as little as required, charge as much as can be obtained for products and always tap into new markets for an enlarged customer base. It, also, requires a perception to be created that some newly devised product is desirable and must replace the older versions for which there is often built-in obsolescence.

In any case, new markets must always be found in order to raise financial yields. Any corporate manager who did not strive to develop them would quickly find himself in an unemployment office in addition to his being blacklisted by former colleagues.

Moreover, new stocks of resources, the raw materials from which products are made, must be tapped for global industries regardless of whether the people in the regions supplying these stores want to share them or not. In a similar vein, large scale commercial operations heavily rely on fossil fuels in the obtainment of raw resources, haulage of them to manufacturing sites, production of finished products and transportation of merchandise to market. So a steady source of petroleum must, also, be guaranteed.

This entire process, therefore, requires government leaders in support of their countries' industries to wrestle control of needed goods. Simultaneously, they have to convince the public that there are solid reasons to carry out assaults in resource rich regions of the world -- places like the Caspian Sea, with its oil estimates ranging up to about 200 billion barrels or 15% of total world reserves. Add to this treasure the fact that the Caspian Sea, also, is believed to contain 4% of the world's proven reserves of gas according to the Congressional Research Service, an organization supplying bipartisan information to Congress, in its report titled "Caspian Oil and Gas: Production and Prospects".

Indeed, its author Bernard A. Gelb, a specialist in industry economics, states: "There is a likelihood of relatively large reserves of crude oil and natural gas in the Caspian Sea region, and a consequent large increase in oil and natural gas production from that area. Because diversity of energy sources and energy security are considerations in Congressional deliberations on energy policy, this prospect could play a role in such discussions. However, there are obstacles to increases in Caspian Sea region production of oil and gas [such as Russia's and Iran's unwillingness to hand Caspian Sea resources over to U.S. control] that may slow development." He goes on to add: "However, Iran now can compete somewhat with the BTC pipeline through oil "swaps" that ultimately divert Caspian region oil away from Western, including U.S., markets. Iran has enlarged its tanker terminal at Neka on the Caspian Sea coast, enhancing its capacity to deliver Caspian oil to refineries for local consumption, with an equivalent amount of Iranian oil exported through Persian Gulf terminals." [1]

Put alternately, uncooperative countries, such as Iran and Venezuela, with assets coveted by western corporations give the perfect excuse to western governments to demonize them, threaten them and seek out destabilization of their regimes. All the same, the maligned nations will not let their reserves be plundered whether bullied or not by outside groups willing to use any means possible to obtain their prizes.

Further, full government support of corporate goals is nearly always available. After all, members of Congress want huge donations for reelection campaigns.

At the same time, it becomes quickly clear about whose interests they, ultimately, serve (rather than the public's) when government officials' desire for these contributions, lucrative future jobs after exiting public service and maximization of personal profits from their financial holdings are added into the mix. Indeed, "members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in business that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon". [2] So taken all together, these conditions provide plenty of motivation to keep the nation's war drums beating.

Therefore, wars are big business, most notably for investors and employees in the aerospace and defense industries. The related purposes, like the ones guiding most corporations, are hardly humanistic. Instead new sources of revenue, cheap resources from conquered lands, and new markets for products and services are the sine qua non.

Accordingly, the Pentagon and the corporations that supply goods and manpower for wars have one general intention in mind and that is not even to win wars. Winning wars would mean that money-spinning contracts and growth of the organizations' national and global influence would shrink. Jobs, then, would disappear, high salaries would not be commanded and gargantuan earnings would cut back if wars were, actually, won and, thus, completed.

Instead, the intention is to strengthen control of regions and their resources, open up new markets for one's own country's products, continually advance into new territories to create the same outcome and, eventually, dictate assorted policies across the entire world. Consequently, the U.S.A., despite having a $12T federal deficit, aims to advance its ongoing plans to have full-spectrum dominance over the economies, territories, politics, military affairs and other entire governments on a full global scale and in support of American enterprises.

It, also, means that an all-out attempt to quell the Taliban will take place since Afghanistan and Pakistan are both needed to move the fossil fuels to emerging markets and ensure that central Asian economies are tied to U.S. corporate interests rather than those of Russia and China. On account, it is critical that both latter nations be blocked if western dominion over Asian markets for obtainment of raw resources and sales of final products, i.e., fossil fuels, are to result.

In the same vein, American citizens are not much of a consideration. After all, markets and remuneration for oil and other supplies might be superlative in India, China or other lands with advancing economies and plenty of money to spare. As such, concern over protection of us from terrorists (the latest justification for carrying out assaults abroad in lands like Yemen) and any desire to improve the lives of peoples in the U.S. or developing countries are minor considerations at best. Instead, it is far more on the mark to ask, as did Woodrow Wilson: "Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?"

So one winds up wondering whether a moment will ever arrive in which the public can, actually, identify this origin for wars and rise up in resistance to such a degenerate state of affairs. As an alternative, the populace can continue to equate support of war with a patriotic spirit, enthusiastically wave flags every time that there's a parade with tanks and other weaponry, and endorse far-away assaults with hardly a dissenting murmur. Meanwhile war activities, themselves, increasingly bankrupt the country morally and financially.

As such, it is useful to bear in mind that warfare almost exclusively concerns resources and trade except for religious rivalries and the small scale fighting of feudal lords. With the desire to gain ever greater advantages for oneself and one's own group by taking these away from other subjugated groups, campaigns have always been perpetuated under false pretexts, especially so when energy supplies are involved.

It follows, then, that any politician not exhibiting Woodrow Wilson's stark honesty on this point is both a liar and a propagandist with the ulterior motive to control public perception so there is advancement of war. This understanding, if nothing else, should be absolutely clear.

At the same time, the use of contractors all but guarantees that the sort of public backlash that occurred from so many troops having been killed and injured in Vietnam will not be repeated. If there exists no mandatory conscription due to freelancers being used, American citizens will feel less threatened by war even though they are paying an exorbitant amount for it and for the aid to far-away lands that the U.S. government wants to influence through bribes.

And the bribes keep coming. For example, a record State Department and foreign aid budget, amounting $49 billion, cleared the House last summer.

So is it surprising that some Americans are furious that universal single-payer health care, infrastructure repairs, WPA-style jobs and budget relief for insolvent States in the union aren't adequately provided? Is it flabbergasting that they are outraged over Israel receiving $2.4B in foreign aid (ostensibly used to buy weapons primarily manufactured by U.S. companies) in 2008 with an additional $30B promised over the next 10 years period? Should there be annoyance that many other countries receiving aid, i.e., Egypt ($1.7B in 2008), have the funds slated to purchase armaments ($1.3B of that Egyptian total) and have less than sterling human rights records? In any case, USAID's total assets amounted to $26.1 billion as of September 2009. This huge amount will, certainly, help guarantee that many U.S. agendas abroad will be heartily followed by others.

Moving to become a largely authoritarian militaristic state, the U.S.A. shows little self-constraint as it forces its will, through a combination of buy-offs and assaults, wherever and however it pleases upon the rest of the world. As a result, it has to create a positive perception and ever larger gifts of money to acquire allies, certainly, fit the bill.

In addition, Americans no longer getting riled up because their sons were conscripted through a mandatory recruitment system, also, does so. Instead of a draft, the Pentagon will authorize, according to the Congressional Research Service, between 26,000 to 56,000 additional battlefield contractors in Afghanistan, which would total as a force between 130,000 to 160,000, or very nearly two for every single troop despite the added 30,000 troops recently authorized to ship off to Afghanistan.

In other words, outsourced war, while terribly expensive for taxpayers, seems the wave of the future as it doesn't foment comprehensive anti-war activism. As such, the act of killing will increasingly become a large scale, lucrative industry supported by U.S. taxes and overseas loans (most notably from China).

So if any unemployed American wants a job, all that he needs to follow is the money, which is increasing going into U.S. invasions largely carried out by private mercenaries. Besides, he has many options if he doesn't want to become an outworker.

For instance, he could join the armed forces, which offer plenty of opportunities for work since the U.S. government currently has over 1,000 military bases spread out across the world and roughly the same number on U.S. soil. He'd, also, have plenty of company as there, presently, exist 1,445,000 active-duty armed service members, 800,000 DOD civilian employees and 1.2 million National Guards, along with other reservists who are periodically tapped for Middle East ventures.

This vast setup translates to the U.S., with only 4% of the world's population, allocating more than $711B annually in military spending, which obviously burdens the taxpayer and removes funds from other programs that would, actually, serve human welfare at home and abroad. In addition, arrangement, obviously, does not lead to global security, nor the alleviation of poverty. If there is any doubt on these points, ask any Iraqi or Afghani his assessment.

Instead regions are destabilized, and the social and material structures that previously had contributed to human benefits largely are blown to smithereens. Even so, fighting insurgents, at least for the U.S.A., will continue to be a mainstay of foreign policy, as well as the U.S. economy, itself.

All in all, the following facts well lay out the course that, instead of heavy reliance on diplomacy, the U.S. leadership has chosen:

"US military spending accounts for 48 percent, or almost half, of the world's total military spending
US military spending is more than the next 46 highest spending countries in the world combined
US military spending is 5.8 times more than China, 10.2 times more than Russia, and 98.6 times more than Iran.
US military spending is almost 55 times the spending on the six "rogue" states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) whose spending amounts to around $13 billion, maximum. (Tabulated data does not include four of the six, as the data only lists nations that have spent over 1 billion in the year, so their budget is assumed to be $1 billion each)
US spending is more than the combined spending of the next 45 countries.
The United States and its strongest allies (the NATO countries, Japan, South Korea and Australia) spend $1.1 trillion on their militaries combined, representing 72 percent of the world's total.
The six potential "enemies," Russia, and China together account for about $205 billion or 29% of the US military budget."

"[T]he lion's share of this money is not spent by the Pentagon on protecting American citizens. It goes to supporting U.S. military activities, including interventions, throughout the world. Were this budget and the organization it finances called the 'Military Department,' then attitudes might be quite different. Americans are willing to pay for defense, but they would probably be much less willing to spend billions of dollars if the money were labeled 'Foreign Military Operations.'" [3]

In any case, anyone choosing to enter military service should keep in mind that contracting companies often show little loyalty to U.S. troops, nor a sense of responsibility for their actions when involving civilians of war torn countries. This lapse in accountability is clearly demonstrated by the shootings and the recent dismissal of charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards for civilian deaths in Iraq. [4]

So instead, there increasingly exist situations in which depraved indifference to life is exhibited. One of many such circumstances is this one describing KBR's seemingly deliberate neglect to inform in a timely fashion about troop exposure to a highly poisonous chemical, sodium dichromate, at a site in Iraq overseen by KBR. In addition, KBR is fighting a reparatory lawsuit related to the incident. After all, any deserved payout for damage and death is to be avoided at all costs as remuneration would, absolutely, impact company earnings.

Concerning the event:

"What upsets some of the Guardsmen most of all is that, after serving their country faithfully, they believe the Army and KBR let them down by not fully acknowledging or investigating their exposure to the toxic chemical or their serious health problems. Some suffered for years and only recently have a possible explanation why."

"[Sodium dichromate] had been used by Iraqi workers prior to the war to prevent corrosion in the pipes at the plant. There were hundreds of bags at the chemical at the plant, some of them clearly labeled.

"The mission's official military name was Task Force RIO ('Restoration of Iraqi Oil'). KBR got the contract.

"Six years later, some of the Guardsmen assigned to provide security for Task Force RIO at the plant are dead, dying or suffering from serious health problems--including rashes, perforated septums and lung disease. One of the foremost experts in sodium dichromate, Dr. Herman Gibb, says the Guardsmen's symptoms are consistent with 'significant exposure' to the chemical.

"KBR argues that the company is not to blame. The company says it told the Army about the dangerous chemical as soon as it was identified at the plant. That, the company says, was on July 25, 2003.

"But, international KBR documents contradict that claim, and indicate that the company became aware of the chemical at the site two months earlier." [5]

Of course, one cannot expect mercenaries and outside contractors operating in war zones to care much about the lives of troops or others. After all, their main loyalty is not to the U.S. military, nor the U.S.A. as a whole, but to the companies that hired them and through which they are being paid to do whatever they are told.

MacD Hill

Aside from war zone contracting firms, many other transnational consortiums are doing equally well during the economic downturn, as the multimillion dollar bonuses given to management of these power houses continually remind. One such company is McDonald's. In fact, its balance sheet even indicates that it has been wildly prospering since the recession worsened.

With always more deforested land available around the globe, impoverished peoples looking to make a fast buck are more and more turning to cattle ranching and soy farming for animal feed. So therein lies plenty of breaks for McDonald's.

Not having to subsume the environmental costs for its policies, it and several other fast food syndicates are cornering the market in sales for families wanting to eat out, but without the funds to dine at more costly eateries. So for the first quarter of 2009, sales went up and earned an impressive $979.5 million, a nearly 4% increase. The rest of the year followed suit despite fears that a strengthening dollar might lower gains due to the exchange rate for other currencies collected at overseas' sites.

However, the company's management in Oak Brook, Ill really needn't have worried. After all, there are over 31,000 restaurants worldwide, with more than 1.5 million workers operating in 119 countries on six continents with over 47 million daily customers. So major losses would hardly be in the picture given that the majority of people around the world are now struggling to make ends meet.

At the same time, these stats are bound to change for the better when even more populations are inundated by American armed forces bent on subduing them, inadvertently destroying local businesses and creating opportunities for ever more McDonald's workers forced to accept minimum wages as an alternative to no job in their newly destroyed lands. Like their impoverished American counterparts, who've been stripped of good jobs with decent wages in the mad rush towards globalized industry, they too can find the satisfaction of a secure employment position with a low salary and, at the end of a weary day, a happy meal as an extra perk.

As McDonald's leadership surely must know, bringing "democracy" to developing nations, eventually, has a big payoff for American businesses focused on wiping out the small scale competition like Mom and Pop restaurants overseas. If one can endure patient waiting, the further openings will be a veritable whopper. It's just a matter of time.

In the end, wars are successful commercial enterprises. As a result, they are, progressively, becoming the foundation for the new American economy. Especially this is so as former jobs are not coming back to the American shores in that it's cheaper for transnational companies to outsource and offshore work.

In relation, the Second World War not only jump-started the American economy in the aftermath of the Great Depression, it provided lots of employment prospects for many subsequent years on account of the need to rebuild across whole continents and in their devastated cities like London, Dresden, Mukden (now Shenyang) and Ningbo. This is not the case this time around due to the heavy reliance on outside contractors, who more often than not don't reconstruct much well at all, as the U.S. soldier electrocutions on a base in Baghdad and the Task Force RIO poisonings clearly demonstrate. In other words, they often are potentially dangerous and largely useless.

This all in mind, any financial and other benefits from warfare will not uplift Main Street. Instead, they increasingly will serve the special interests of corporations. As such, the economic downturn will continue to deepen throughout the U.S.A. while thousands of foreigners in assault zones are maimed and murdered.

Consequently, all that we can hope is that Russia and China will persist in making improvements in their own nations and the lives of their citizens. It's obvious that, if they were to mimic America's squandering of money in ever enlarging wars, the outcome wouldn't be good at all.

References

[1]"Caspian Oil and Gas: Production and Prospects", CRS Report for Congress Received through the CRS Web, Bernard A. Gelb; Resources, Science, and Industry Division at Caspian Oil and Gas: Production and Prospects[http://italy.usembassy.gov/pdf/other/RS21190.pdf].

[2] FINANCE: U.S. Lawmakers Invested in Iraq, Afghanistan Wars - ...[http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41893].

[3]"In Context: US Military Spending Versus Rest of the World" and "The Billions for 'Defense' Jeopardize Our Safety",Center For Defense Information at World Military Spending -- Global Issues [http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending].

[4]Blackwater Dismissal Risks Hurting Iraq Relations - WSJ.com [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126229226969112429.html].

[5] NBC News Investigation: Toxic water in Iraq - The Daily ... [http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/articles/2120353.aspx].

Our Emperors and Their Empire

2009-12-31T10:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.amconmag.com/tactv/2009/12/28/our-emperors-and-their-empire/

Our Emperors and Their Empire
Posted on December 28th, 2009 by Jack Hunter

When conservatives used to bash Bill Clinton their arguments usually centered on one thing — Monica Lewinsky. He lied to the American people! Clinton disgraced the office of the presidency! “Slick Willie!” Much like the popular culture they often claim to abhor, conservatives tend to focus on the personalities in politics rather than policy.

I never cared much about Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky. My greatest problem with our 42nd president was that he wasn’t much different from the 41st or 43rd. Under Clinton, the size of government grew, our worsening illegal immigration problem was ignored, the U.S. needlessly punished the citizens of Iraq with sanctions and bombings and we foolishly intervened militarily in places like Kosovo, Somalia, and Haiti. Like his predecessor and his successor, Clinton simply maintained and expanded the already established American empire he inherited.

And yet in 2000, conservative reaction to the Clinton administration had the Right singing a much different tune on foreign policy.

Consider the language then-candidate George W. Bush thought necessary to appeal to his GOP base and voters-at-large during the 2000 presidential campaign. Attacking Clinton’s military adventures, Bush said during a debate with Al Gore: “I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say ‘this is the way it’s got to be… I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ‘ugly American’ is for us to go around the world saying ‘we do it this way, so should you.”

Criticizing Clinton’s military debacle in Somalia, Bush said “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called ‘nation building.” When asked how people around the world should view the US, Bush responded “It really depends upon how our nation conducts its foreign policy. If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, they’ll respect us.”

And Bush wasn’t alone. Consider the words of conservative talk host Sean Hannity toward Clinton’s foreign policy. Said Hannity in 1999 concerning Kosovo: “It seems that we’re talking about a very ill-conceived military action here. And now the question is, do you go in further and deeper, or do you pull back and rethink what the strategy’s going to be here, because there has really been no stated goal, mission, or objective… I say, back out of it, because innocent people are going to die for nothing.

That’s why I’m against it.” When Clinton compared Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to Adolph Hitler, Hannity asked “Is the president purposefully using propaganda and hyperbole to garner the American public for support?”

After 9/11, warnings from the Right about “nation building,” or support for a more humble foreign policy evaporated, along with any concern for limited government. Being the world’s policeman, or what Bush once called being an “arrogant nation,” “around the world” would come to define the Bush presidency. Even worse, for most of the last decade, being a conservative simply meant being pro-war and Bush ended his second term as the biggest big government president since Lyndon Johnson, much less Bill Clinton.

As Obama continues to spend even more than Bush and steps up US efforts in Afghanistan, the political environment on the Right is far closer to 2000 than 2003. In 2003, conservatives quickly became comfortable with Bush’s statist agenda because they were so enthusiastic about his invasion of Iraq. As this decade ends, conservatives are outraged by Obama’s spending and many are beginning to voice serious reservations about his end game in Afghanistan. Conservative columnist George Will, who was once one of Bush’s greatest supporters on Iraq is now one of Obama’s greatest critics on Afghanistan. Lest anyone think this hypocrisy is unique to Republicans, Democrats who once despised the belligerent neoconservatism of Bush-Cheney have now largely embraced that exact same foreign policy, only repackaged as Obama-style, liberal internationalism. When it comes to being antiwar under Obama-the Left is now completely useless.

And the Right may be as well. But conservative skepticism about Obama’s war coupled with widespread grassroots outrage over spending, makes the possibility of a genuine and comprehensive anti-government, anti-empire, “America first” movement, once again, at least tenable. The ingredients are there. What good did it do conservatives to elect George W. Bush, who was worse on both domestic and foreign policy than Bill Clinton? Obama is already proving to be worse than Bush. With each successive administration, government keeps getting bigger, our debt gets larger and our military stretched greater, for reasons that are vague at best. Americans may indeed be ready for a serious “change,” especially as they begin to realize Obama ain’t it.

It does not take a genius to figure out that railing against big government at home while championing it abroad doesn’t make much sense — one cancels out the other. But it might take a Democratic president, as it did a decade ago, to convince conservatives to question — and finally reject — both the welfare state and the warfare state for good.

Vladimir Putin calls for more weapons to stop America doing 'whatever it wants'

2009-12-31T10:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=103941

December 30, 2009
Vladimir Putin calls for more weapons to stop America doing 'whatever it wants'
Will Stewart in Moscow

Russia needs more weapons to punch through America’s new missile defence shield, Vladimir Putin said yesterday in blunt remarks that will complicate efforts to cut the nuclear arsenals of the former Cold War rivals.

The Russian Prime Minister, reasserting himself as the country’s real ruler, said that Moscow should press ahead with a new generation of weapons to stop the Americans doing “whatever they want”.

“To preserve the balance we must develop offensive weapons systems, not missile defence systems as the United States is doing,” he said during a visit to the naval port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast.

Until now, it had seemed that Washington and Moscow were edging towards a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), despite failing to meet the original target of December 5.

Asked why the talks had failed to reach agreement on a new deal, Mr Putin said: “What is the problem? The problem is that our American partners are building an anti-missile shield and we are not building one.”

The Prime Minister was believed to be voicing the deeply held views of hardliners in the Russian military machine, but his forthright statement may also be linked to growing signs that he is preparing to announce his intention to seek a new presidential term in 2012.

International arms treaties are the remit of the president. Mr Putin, in staking out his position, was wading into the domain of Dmitri Medvedev, his chosen successor in the Kremlin after he stood down last year.

It has always been widely believed that Mr Putin was allowing President Medvedev merely to keep his seat warm while he was taking a break, as laid down by the Constitution. His return to the presidential office would signal a harder line.

President Obama’s reversal in July of plans to station the American missile defence shield close to Russia’s borders in Central Europe — and his vow to reset relations with Moscow — were warmly welcomed by Mr Medvedev. The thaw was expected to pave the way for an agreement on a new nuclear arms reduction package.

Now Mr Putin suggests that the American concessions are not enough. “If we are not developing an anti- missile shield then there is a danger that our partners, by creating such an umbrella, will feel completely secure and thus can allow themselves to do what they want, disrupting the balance, and aggressiveness will rise immediately,” Mr Putin said.

He made it clear that Washington should share its missile defence plans — based on sea and land-based interceptors in Europe — with Moscow if it wanted to ease Russian concerns. “Let the Americans hand over all their information on missile defence and we are ready to hand over all the information on offensive weapons,” he said.

Mr Putin’s intervention was seen by observers as an attempt to extract more American concessions on the defence shield while also allowing him to demonstrate that he remains the paramount voice in Russian politics.

“This is not his sphere but Putin is showing he is not weaker than Medvedev,” the defence analyst Aleksandr Konovalov said. Some will see it as the latest issue on which differences are emerging between the two players in the leadership of Russia.

Mr Putin continues to steal the limelight, as illustrated by his high-profile tour around the Far East of Russia at a time when most of the country is winding down for 11 days of holiday at the start of the new year and Orthodox Christmas. Recently he was filmed flooring members of the Russian national judo team.

The Start treaty was signed shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union 18 years ago. It led to significant cuts in Russian and American arsenals but expired on December 5. Both countries agreed to extend it while talks on a replacement treaty continue.

Operation Northwoods

2009-12-29T06:04:00.000-08:00

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/northwoods.html

Operation Northwoods
US PLANNED FAKE TERROR ATTACKS ON CITIZENS
TO CREATE SUPPORT FOR CUBAN WAR

From BODY OF SECRETS, James Bamford, Doubleday, 2001, p.82 and following.
Scanned and edited by NY Transfer News.

...In [Joint Chief's chair] Lemnitzer's view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over. [JFK assassination legend has it some general presided over the fudgy JFK autopsy. --Mk]

For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. "The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike," said one report at the time. "President Kennedy was pilloried by the super patriots as a 'no-win' chief . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . Active-duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere."

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

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, 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. In the name of antiCommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

Operation Northwoods
Click images for full sized scans [Go to URL to see]

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

The idea may actually have originated with President Eisenhower in the last days of his administration. With the Cold War hotter than ever and the recent U-2 scandal fresh in the public's memory, the old general wanted to go out with a win. He wanted desperately to invade Cuba in the weeks leading up to Kennedy's inauguration; indeed, on January 3 he told Lemnitzer and other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would move against Castro before the inauguration if only the Cubans gave him a really good excuse. Then, with time growing short, Eisenhower floated an idea. If Castro failed to provide that excuse, perhaps, he said, the United States "could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable." What he was suggesting was a pretext a bombing, an attack, an act of sabotage carried out secretly against the United States by the United States. Its purpose would be to justify the launching of a war. It was a dangerous suggestion by a desperate president.

Although no such war took place, the idea was not lost on General Lemnitzer But he and his colleagues were frustrated by Kennedy's failure to authorize their plan, and angry that Castro had not provided an excuse to invade.

The final straw may have come during a White House meeting on February 26, 1962. Concerned that General Lansdale's various covert action plans under Operation Mongoose were simply becoming more outrageous and going nowhere, Robert Kennedy told him to drop all anti-Castro efforts. Instead, Lansdale was ordered to concentrate for the next three months strictly on gathering intelligence about Cuba. It was a humiliating defeat for Lansdale, a man more accustomed to praise than to scorn.

As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly "go soft" on Castro, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade Cuba quickly slipping away. The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro. "World opinion, and the United Nations forum," said a secret JCS document, "should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere."

Operation Northwoods called for a war in which many patriotic Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths, all to satisfy the egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their taxpayer financed homes and limousines.

One idea seriously considered involved the launch of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. On February 20,1962, Glenn was to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on his historic journey. The flight was to carry the banner of America's virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic.]"

This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans." Thus, as NASA prepared to send the first American into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to use John Glenn's possible death as a pretext to launch a war.

Glenn lifted into history without mishap, leaving Lemnitzer and the Chiefs to begin devising new plots which they suggested be carried out "within the time frame of the next few months."

Among the actions recommended was "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This included dressing "friendly" Cubans in Cuban military uniforms and then have them "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations."

The suggested operations grew progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they proposed; "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

There seemed no limit to their fanaticism: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," they wrote. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.

We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

Bombings were proposed, false arrests, hijackings:

*"Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government."

*"Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation."

*"Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Among the most elaborate schemes was to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."

Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs worked out a complex deception:

An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CJA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.

Finally, there was a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place.

In the final sentence of his letter to Secretary McNamara recommending the operations, Lemnitzer made a grab for even more power asking that the Joint Chiefs be placed in charge of carrying out Operation Northwoods and the invasion. "It is recommended," he wrote, "that this responsibility for both oven and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

At 2:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer went over last-minute details of Operation Northwoods with his covert action chief, Brigadier General William H. Craig, and signed the document. He then went to a "special meeting" in McNamara's office. An hour later he met with Kennedy's military representative, General Maxwell Taylor. What happened during those meetings is unknown. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use overt military force in Cuba.

Undeterred, Lemnitzer and the Chiefs persisted, virtually to the point of demanding that they be given authority to invade and take over Cuba. About a month after submitting Operation Northwoods, they met the "tank," as the JCS conference room was called, and agreed on the wording of a tough memorandum to McNamara. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future," they wrote. "Further, they see no prospect of early success in overthrowing the present communist regime either as a result of internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures. Accordingly they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist regime."

Lemnitzer was virtually rabid in his hatred of Communism in general and Castro in particular "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the United States can undertake military intervention in Cuba without risk of general war" he continued. "They also believe that the intervention can be accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN action." However; what Lemnitzer was suggesting was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S. military-controlled police state. "Forces would assure rapid essential military control of Cuba," he wrote. "Continued police action would be required."

Concluding, Lemnitzer did not mince words: "[T]he Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty."

By then McNamara had virtually no confidence in his military chief and was rejecting nearly every proposal the general sent to him. The rejections became so routine, said one of Lemnitzer's former staff officers, that the staffer told the general that the situation was putting the military in an "embarrassing rut." But Lemnitzer replied, "I am the senior military office--it's my job to state what I believe and it's his [McNamara's] job to approve or disapprove." "McNamara's arrogance was astonishing," said Lemnitzer's aide, who knew nothing of Operation Northwoods. "He gave General Lemnitzer very short shrift and treated him like a schoolboy. The general almost stood at attention when he came into the room. Everything was 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir.'

Within months, Lemnitzer was denied a second term as JCS chairman and transferred to Europe as chief of NATO. Years later President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer, a darling of the Republican right, to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lemnitzer's Cuba chief, Brigadier General Craig, was also transferred. Promoted to major general, he spent three years as chief of the Army Security Agency, NSA's military arm.

Because of the secrecy and illegality of Operation Northwoods, all details remained hidden for forty years. Lemnitzer may have thought that all copies of the relevant documents had been destroyed; he was not one to leave compromising material lying around. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle, for example, he ordered Brigadier General David W Gray, Craig's predecessor as chief of the Cuba project within the JCS, to destroy all his notes concerning Joint Chiefs actions and discussions during that period. Gray's meticulous notes were the only detailed official records of what happened within the JCS during that time. According to Gray, Lemnitzer feared a congressional investigation and therefore wanted any incriminating evidence destroyed.

With the evidence destroyed, Lemnitzer felt free to lie to Congress. When asked, during secret hearings before a Senate committee, if he knew of any Pentagon plans for a direct invasion of Cuba he said he did not. Yet detailed JCS invasion plans had been drawn up even before Kennedy was inaugurated. And additional plans had been developed since. The consummate planner and man of details also became evasive, suddenly encountering great difficulty in recalling key aspects of the operation, as if he had been out of the country during the period. It was a sorry spectacle. Senator Gore called for Lemnitzer to be fired. "We need a shake up of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" he said. "We direly need a new chairman, as well as new members." No one had any idea of Operation Northwoods.

Because so many documents were destroyed, it is difficult to determine how many senior officials were aware of Operation Northwoods. As has been described, the document was signed and fully approved by Lemnitzer and the rest of the Joint Chiefs and addressed to the Secretary of Defense for his signature. Whether it went beyond McNamara to the president and the attorney general is not known.

Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning "pretext" operations at least into 1963. Among their proposals was a deliberately create a war between Cuba and any of a number of .n American neighbors. This would give the United States military an excuse to come in on the side of Cuba's adversary and get rid of "A contrived 'Cuban' attack on an OAS [Organization of Americas] member could be set up," said one proposal, "and the attacked state could be urged to 'take measures of self-defense and request ice from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba."

Among the nations they suggested that the United States secretly were Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. Both were members of the Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war Castro. The report noted, "Any of the contrived situations de above are inherently, extremely risky in our democratic system in which security can be maintained, after the fact, with very great difficulty. If the decision should be made to set up a contrived situation it be one in which participation by U.S. personnel is limited only to the most highly trusted covert personnel. This suggests the infeasibility of the use of military units for any aspect of the contrived situation."

The report even suggested secretly paying someone in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area remaining for ration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo." The act suggested--bribing a foreign nation to launch a violent attack American military installation--was treason.

In May 1963, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze sent a the White House proposing "a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime." In the event Cuba attacked a U-2, the plan proposed sending in additional American pilots, this time on dangerous, unnecessary low-level reconnaissance missions with the expectation that they would also be shot down, thus provoking a war "[T]he U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident," said the plan. Nitze, however, did not volunteer to be one of the pilots.

One idea involved sending fighters across the island on "harassing reconnaissance" and "show-off" missions "flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action." "Thus," said the plan, "depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance." About a month later, a low-level flight was made across Cuba, but unfortunately for the Pentagon, instead of bullets it produced only a protest.

Lemnitzer was a dangerous-perhaps even unbalanced-right-wing extremist in an extraordinarily sensitive position during a critical period. But Operation Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.

In retrospect, the documents offer new insight into the thinking of the military's star-studded leadership. Although they never succeeded in launching America into a phony war with Cuba, they may have done so with Vietnam. More than 50,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese were eventually killed in that war.

It has long been suspected that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident-the spark that led to America's long war in Vietnam-was largely staged or provoked by U.S. officials in order to build up congressional and public support for American involvement. Over the years, serious questions have been raised about the alleged attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf But defenders of the Pentagon have always denied such charges, arguing that senior officials would never engage in such deceit.

Now, however, in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it at deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists in U.S. newspapers cause a helpful wave of indignation." One need only replace "Guantanamo Bay" with "Tonkin Gulf," and "Cuba" with "North Vietnam" and the Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage-managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.

Book epigram:

"The public has a duty to watch its Government closely and keep it on the right track." --Lieutenant Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, USAF, Director, NSA, _NSA Newsletter_, June 1997

More at ...

http://larouchepub.com/other/2001/2839operation_northwds.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.md.nsa24apr24.story

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/04/25/nsa

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662&page=1

Unconventional Warfare in the 21st Century : US Surrogates, Terrorists and Narcotrafficers

2009-12-26T05:04:00.000-08:00

https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Unconventional_Warfare_in_the_21st_century_:_US_surrogates%2C_terrorists_and_narcotrafficers

Unconventional Warfare in the 21st Century : US Surrogates, Terrorists and Narcotrafficers
Tom Burghardt
Wikileaks
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:58 EDT

On December 13, the whistleblowing site Wikileaks did investigative- and citizen- journalists a great service by release the US Army Special Operations Forces FM 3-05.130, titled Unconventional Warfare.

Published in September 2008, the 248-page document though unclassified, is restricted "to U.S. Government agencies and their contractors only to protect technical or operational information from automatic dissemination under the International Exchange Program or by other means." The Department of the Army urges recipients to "destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document." Wikileaks has guaranteed that the disappearance of this critical primary source into the bowels of the Pentagon will not occur.

Special Warfare's Nazi Provenance

Since the end of World War II, the United States has acted through proxies either to defeat leftist insurgencies or to subvert "hostile" governments, e.g. those states viewed by Washington and the multinational corporations they serve as ideological competitors.

Historically, U.S. unconventional warfare (UW) doctrine was derived from Nazi experiences in countering "partisan warfare" across Europe during World War II. As analyst and scholar Michael McClintock detailed in his essential study on the topic,
American special warfare doctrine would draw considerably on Wehrmacht and SS methods of terrorizing civilian populations and, perhaps more importantly, of co-opting local factions to combat partisan resistance. The Department of the Army's "A Study of Special and Subversive Operations" (November 1947) was an early assessment of the lessons learned from World War II in the context of Cold War imperatives. (Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, p. 59)

But the United States did more than translate captured Wehrmacht and SS documents: they recruited many Waffen SS veterans, often with an assist from high Vatican officials. Tens of thousands of war criminals were spirited out of Europe along "ratlines" into U.S. hands for clandestine war against the new enemy: the Soviet Union and the international left.

Pathological killers such as SS veteran Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, was instrumental when the CIA and the Argentine death-squad generals launched their 1980 "cocaine coup" in Bolivia. Barbie, along with operatives linked to the CIA, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and preexisting Nazi networks, "reorganized" Bolivia's intelligence services to reflect the Southern Cone's "changing realities." (For background, see Robert Parry's excellent series, Dark Side of Rev. Moon, The Consortium for Independent Journalism)

Even when the "competition" was peaceful and confined to the political-economic spheres, once the U.S. intervened, violence, civil war and chaos followed. This scenario was played out in Chile during the 1970s, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and El Salvador throughout the 1980s, in Yugoslavia and the Balkans generally during the 1990s, today in Bolivia and Venezuela and on a planetary scale under the rubric of the "global war on terrorism" (GWOT). The lesson for those who buck the global hegemon? U.S. political subversion and state terror will wreck havoc and halt independent development in its tracks.

And when the global Godfather's military forces directly intervene? Although the U.S. was defeated in Southeast Asia, target countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were destroyed by the United States in the process. Devastated economically and socially, decades later these nations have yet to fully recover from the depredations wrought by their American "liberators." However, the U.S. military did learn certain unique skills, not least of which was the application of selective violence against the communist National Liberation Front's civilian infrastructure.

The Phoenix Program, meticulously analyzed in researcher Douglas Valentine's definitive account, was launched in 1967 by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces as a means to win "hearts and minds." But from its inception, Phoenix operators worked in tandem with drug-linked South Vietnamese and Laotian "allies" and morphed into an assassination and torture program that killed thousands. Long after the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia, lessons learned through Phoenix and related programs such as Condor and Gladio, were "refined" during the 1970s-1980s in Afghanistan, Italy, Turkey and Central America, and now constitute the bedrock on which the Pentagon's unconventional warfare doctrine operates today.

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. power in proxy states was exercised through repressive police, intelligence agencies and by far-right civilian allies (referred to as "foreign internal defense," FID). Such forces, trained and funded by the U.S., combined a neofascist political outlook with organized criminal activities generally, though certainly not limited to, the international narcotics trade.

NATO's infamous "stay-behind" Operation Gladio networks in Italy and Turkey for example, worked directly with international narcotics syndicates and pro-fascist political parties such as the Italian Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard) founded by the terrorist drug trafficker Stefano delle Chiaie and the Turkish Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (National Action Party, MHP) and the drug-linked terror gang, the Grey Wolves, founded by Alparslan Türkeş, a German sympathizer during World War II.

With links to those nations' intelligence services, the CIA and the Pentagon, these organizations waged a relentless war against the left through terrorist bombings, murders and assassinations in a bid to destabilize their governments and spark a full-fledged military takeover. Along with the CIA, the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) have been instrumental in organizing and waging unconventional warfare with the express purpose of maintaining the economic-political status quo in target countries.

As long-time readers of Antifascist Calling are aware, among the more critical issues explored here are those relating to the intersection of corporate and military power and how those interactions play out on the contemporary political plane to subvert democracy and movements for social justice.

Indeed, reference is frequently made to what I have identified, following Peter Dale Scott and other analysts, as the corporatist deep state: that is, the objective interface amongst political elites, multinational corporations, the military, intelligence agencies and organized crime. Unlike Scott however, I contend these linkages do not "transcend" the left-right continuum, but rather are part and parcel of Washington's decades-long war against the left, social justice movements generally and in particular, democratic socialist movements from below.

As we will see in my analysis of FM 3-05.130, USSOCOM make these links explicit, arguing that "UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces."

As I averred, proxy forces, often aligned with far-right groups and organized crime-linked assets (for the most part interchangeable players) are the preferred "irregular forces" employed by Washington. USSOCOM states that this definition "is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW" and goes on to cite its "support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan." It doesn't get any more explicit than this!

Ideologically Coherent

The authors of FM 3-05.130, far from being militarist troglodytes are knowledgeable and erudite, presenting a broad and ideologically coherent narrative that is both informative and historically intriguing in its transparency and methodological purpose. In other words, unlike their political masters, they don't pull any punches.

Right up front they inform the reader that UW establishes a "litmus test" which is warfare conducted "by, with or through surrogates" and that their preferred assets are irregular forces:
Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political "undesirables." (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-3)

While "conventional warfare" is viewed as a conflict between states, Irregular Warfare (IW) and UW according to FM 3-05.130 is "about people not platforms." Irregular and unconventional warfare "does not depend on military prowess alone."
It also relies on the understanding of such social dynamics as tribal politics, social networks, religious influences, and cultural mores. Although IW is a violent struggle, not all participating irregulars or irregular forces are necessarily armed. People, more so than weaponry, platforms, and advanced technology, will be the key to success in IW. Successful IW relies on building relationships and partnerships at the local level. It takes patient, persistent, and culturally savvy people within the joint force to execute IW. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5)

Indeed, FM 3-05.130 explicitly states that its "strategic purpose [is] to gain or maintain control or influence over the population and to support that population through political, psychological, and economic methods." While both IW and UW seek to influence "relevant populations," UW in contrast to IW, "is always conducted by, with, or through irregular forces." In other words, local surrogates drawn from relevant far-right and/or organized crime-linked assets are the means of eliciting "influence" over "relevant populations."

In Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, "irregular forces" deployed during U.S./NATO destabilization operations in the former Yugoslavia included elements of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable intelligence assets, e.g. al-Qaeda, which have been linked to the CIA, Britain's MI6, Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as long-established drug, arms and human trafficking networks aligned with the Albanian and Turkish Mafias. Indeed, "irregular forces" such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) demonstrated all of these relationships in spades.

According to FM 3-05.130, the constituent elements of contemporary IW theory include: Insurgency; COIN (counterinsurgency); UW; Terrorism; CT (counterterrorism); FID (foreign internal defense); Stability, security, transition, and reconstruction (SSTR) operations; Strategic communication (SC); PSYOP; Civil-military operations (CMO); Information operations (IO); Intelligence and counterintelligence (CI) activities; Transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms dealing, and illegal financial transactions that support or sustain IW; and Law enforcement activities focused on countering irregular adversaries. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5)

Its but a short step as far as it goes, from citing the elements of UW to deploying the most dubious players as strategic assets in planetary-wide U.S. destabilization operations.

The Media's Role

Explicitly stated is the media's role in advancing the goals of United States national power. As recent exposés in The New York Times and elsewhere have documented, "message force multipliers" such as retired Pentagon officials and former high-ranking officers, often linked to corporate defense firms that rely heavily on Pentagon largesse, have leveraged their expertise and conducted illegal domestic psychological operations (PSYOPS) and information warfare, with the complicity and full knowledge of the giant media firms.

It is important for the official agencies of government, including the armed forces, to recognize the fundamental role of the media as a conduit of information. The USG uses SC to provide top-down guidance for using the informational instrument of national power through coordinated information, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the other instruments of national power. The armed forces support SC themes and messages through IO, public affairs (PA), and defense support to public diplomacy (DSPD). The armed forces must assure media access consistent with classification requirements, operations security, legal restrictions, and individual privacy. The armed forces must also provide timely and accurate information to the public. Success in military operations depends on acquiring and integrating essential information and denying it to the adversary. The armed forces are responsible for conducting IO, protecting what should not be disclosed, and aggressively attacking adversary information systems. IO may involve complex legal and policy issues that require approval, review, and coordination at the national level. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-2)

Indeed, as the authors aver, since UW consists of operations conducted "by, with or through irregular forces," engagement with the "human terrain" is "fundamentally a conflict of ideas"! In a nutshell, the "human terrain" explicitly includes the American public who are also the targets of Pentagon propagandistic "information operations." This is stated explicitly:
By contrast, USG-controlled specific instruments of informational power, while narrower in scope, can achieve specific and measurable results useful to prosecuting UW. ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] can work with DOS [Department of State] counterparts to identify and engage select TAs [target audiences] that are able to influence behavior within a UWOA [unconventional warfare operating area]. Such TAs may be inside the UWOA itself or outside but able to influence the UWOA. The USG can then subject these TAs, directly or indirectly, to a DOS public diplomacy (PD) campaign coordinated to support the UW effort. Similarly, since UW may be a long-duration or politically sensitive effort, ARSOF and its DOS partner, the Bureau of Public Affairs, can craft a PA campaign intended to keep the U.S. domestic audience informed of the truth in a manner supportive of USG goals and the effective prosecution of UW. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-3)
Economic Subversion

For the authors of FM 3-05.130, "properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW." Never mind that such "manipulation" can and did result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings in Iraq prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation as well as in a score of other nations that have defied the U.S.

The cases of Chile and Nicaragua are instructive in this regard, where the disgraced president, Richard Nixon, vowed to "make the economy scream," prior to the 1973 coup, or the crippling sanctions and economic embargo imposed on Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Various sanctions regimes unambiguously "can build and sustain international coalitions waging or supporting U.S. UW campaigns." A similar methodology is being applied today against Iran as "punishment" for its legal development of civilian nuclear power.

Like all other instruments of U.S. national power, the use and effects of economic "weapons" are interrelated and they must be coordinated carefully. Once again, ARSOF must work carefully with the DOS and intelligence community (IC) to determine which elements of the human terrain in the UWOA are most susceptible to economic engagement and what second- and third-order effects are likely from such engagement. The United States Agency for International Development's (USAID's) placement abroad and its mission to engage human groups provide one channel for leveraging economic incentives. The DOC's can similarly leverage its routine influence with U.S. corporations active abroad. Moreover, the IO effects of economic promises kept (or ignored) can prove critical to the legitimacy of U.S. UW efforts. UW practitioners must plan for these effects. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)

Indeed, ARSOF plans for waging UW take an integrated approach and assert that they "can and should exploit the active and analytical capabilities existing in the financial instruments of U.S. power." The application of financial warfare however, including the "persuasive influence" of state and nonstate "actors" regarding the availability and terms "of loans, grants, or other financial assistance" is predicated on towing the U.S. line. The authors aver that "such application of financial power must be part of a circumspect, integrated, and consistent UW plan." In other words, threats, bribery and economic subversion generally can work wonders in getting the attention of recalcitrant states not "on board" with the U.S.

Narcotrafficking Networks and the "Global War on Terror"

For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationship amongst international narcotrafficking syndicates, neofascist political groups, U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S. Special Forces in the war against leftist adversaries.

Dozens of books and hundreds of articles by journalists and writers such as Alfred W. McCoy, Peter Dale Scott, Henrik Krüger, Robert Parry, Gary Webb, Jonathan Marshall, Douglas Valentine, Daniel Hopsicker, Bill Conroy as well as exposés by former DEA investigators such as Michael Levine and Celerino Castillo III, have documented the long and bloody history of U.S. complicity in the global drugs trade.

While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into so-called drug eradication programs in target countries such as Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan and Mexico through ill-conceived projects such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, also know as Plan Mexico, recent reports, most notably by The Narco News Bulletin, have documented the close interrelationships amongst narcotraffickers, rightist extremists, political elites and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Indeed, investigative journalist Bill Conroy recently documented how a U.S. trained and equipped special operations group within the Mexican army (the Zetas) "is now assisting the Mexican military in its narco-trafficking operations along the border."

None of this however, phases the authors of Unconventional Warfare. And why should it. As they themselves describe the doctrine, unconventional warfare is "conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces," the next logical step in the equation is the utilization of transnational criminal networks to advance U.S. national power. The section, "Law Enforcement Instrument of United States National Power and Unconventional Warfare," states this explicitly: no tinfoil hat needed here!
Actors engaged in supporting elements in the UWOA may rely on criminal activities, such as smuggling, narcotics, or human trafficking. Political and military adversaries in the UWOA will exhibit the same sensitivity to official exposure and engagement because criminal entities routinely seek to avoid law enforcement. Sometimes, political and military adversaries are simultaneously criminal adversaries, which ARSOF UW planners must consider a threat. At other times, the methods and networks of real or perceived criminal entities can be useful as supporting elements of a U.S.-sponsored UW effort. In either case, ARSOF understand the importance of coordinating military intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) for specific UW campaigns with the routine intelligence activities conducted by U.S. law enforcement agencies. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)
During subversive operations by U.S. ARSOF soldiers in target areas, indigenous networks, many of whom are linked to far-right and narcotrafficking groups (Nicaragua, Bosnia, Kosovo), including "former" allies such as al-Qaeda, are referred to as "The Underground" and "The Auxiliary" in FM 3-05.130. Details however, are few and far between and the authors state unambiguously:
There is more SF participation in developing and advising underground [and auxiliary] elements than is widely understood or acknowledged. Most such participation is classified and inappropriate for inclusion in this manual. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)
Preparing the ground for U.S. attacks and/or subversive operations by proxy forces aligned with American goals are a key component of UW theory. Whether a population is "on-board" with U.S. geostrategic goals or the tactical modalities employed in such campaigns is irrelevant to the new cold warriors of the GWOT. When "persuasion" fails the muscle moves in to get the attention on the "natives."

Organization of the larger indigenous population from which the irregular forces are drawn--the mass base--must likewise be conducted primarily by the irregular organization itself under indirect guidance of SF. The primary value of the mass base to UW operations is less a matter of formal organization than of marshaling population groups to act in specific ways that support the overall UW campaign. The mass base, or general population and society at large, is recognized as an operational rather than a structural effort for ARSOF in UW. Elements of the mass base are divided into three distinct groups in relation to the cause or movement--pro, anti/con, and those who are uncommitted, undecided, or ambivalent. ARSOF, the underground, and the auxiliary then conduct irregular activities to influence or leverage these groups. These groups may be witting or unwitting of the UW nature of the operations or activities in which they are utilized. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)

In Colombia for example, U.S. "counterdrug" assistance to the corrupt Uribe government flowed directly to the narcotrafficking far-right death squad, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. Though designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, the Uribe government's military high command, directly advised by the Pentagon, funneled weapons and intelligence that was used by the narcofascists to murder union organizers, often after payment by U.S. multinational corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, of anyone the group identified as a "guerrilla."

In ARSOF parlance, AUC "influence"--dragging unsuspecting citizens off a bus and beheading them in front of their children, for example--is what is meant when corporate- or drug-linked death squads "conduct irregular activities" to "leverage these groups." But the international community has another term to describe these activities: state terrorism.

In 2004, as part of broad U.S. efforts to unseat Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities arrested some 100 AUC fighters who were planning to attack specially-selected targets in Caracas. According to published reports, several high-ranking American and Colombian military officers were implicated in the operation.

The parapolitical scandal which continues to rock Bogotá, revealed high-level involvement by Colombia's political and military elite with the narcofascist AUC. But the scandal also revealed the involvement of the U.S. 7th Special Forces Group and the 1st Psychological Operations Battalion in directly training and advising Colombian military units responsible for the worst human rights abuses.

Numerous reports have emerged that detail these linkages, including the 2007 disclosure by the National Security Archive that Colombian Army commander General Mario Montoya "engaged in a joint operation with a Medellín-based paramilitary group. 'Operation Orion' was part of a larger military offensive in the city during 2002-03 to attack urban guerrilla networks. The sweep resulted in at least 14 deaths and dozens of disappearances. The classified intelligence report confirmed 'information provided by a proven source,' according to comments from the U.S. defense attaché included in the document."

This is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however.

In Afghanistan, the world's number one producer and processor of opium and its finished "product" heroin, bound for European and U.S. markets, drug trafficking according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) in their 2008 World Drug Report, is "out of control." According to UNDOC, drug money is used as "a lubricant for corruption, and a source of terrorist financing: in turn, corrupt officials and terrorists make drug production and trafficking easier."

Indeed, since the 2001 U.S. invasion and occupation, opium production has skyrocketed some 1,000% and accounts for a large percentage of the country's gross domestic product. Tellingly, some of the staunchest U.S. allies in the area are directly tied to international narcotics organizations. According to UNDOC, the global increase in opium production "was almost entirely due to the 17% expansion of cultivation in Afghanistan, which is now 193,000 ha [hectares]" reaching 8,700 metric tons in 2007, accounting for a staggering 92% of global opium production!

Despite these horrendous statistics, the authors of FM 3-05.130 can asset that "the methods and networks of real or perceived criminal entities can be useful"! Indeed they can, as a seemingly limitless source of black funds earmarked for U.S. planetary subversion in the interest of expanding American corporate power.

According to a June 2008 report by The Times, after last year's bumper crop sent the price of opium spiraling downwards, the Taliban and U.S.-connected drug lords linked to Hamid Karzai's government, are stockpiling vast quantities of opium in order to induce a rise in world prices. And Time Magazine reported in October that the value of hoarded opium may be as much as $3.2 billion.

Celebrated by the Pentagon and the U.S. media as a "splendid victory," the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan quickly spiraled out of control and the country now faces a resurgent Taliban, a new base of operations for al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan and evidence of Pakistani ISI involvement in aiding the fundamentalist insurgents and the global drugs trade. But for American unconventional warriors, a full accounting of war crimes that ARSOF supervised and their Northern Alliance "allies" carried out have yet to be answered.

As Peter Dale Scott noted in 2002,
It's a bitter irony: The largely successful U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan is resulting in an increase of funds for terrorists around the globe.

It is true, as President Bush has insisted, that global terrorism is financed by the flow of illicit drugs. Yet by installing and rewarding a coalition of drug-financed warlords in Kabul, the United States has itself helped restore the flow of Afghan heroin to terrorist groups, from the Balkans and Chechnya to Tajikistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. ("Poppy Paradox: U.S. War in Afghanistan Boosts Terror Funds," Dissident Voice, August 3, 2002)

Indeed, among the staunchest U.S. allies in the region, characters such as Hazrat Ali and Gul Agha, "have been 'bought off' with millions in deals brokered by U.S. and British intelligence." But while America was happy to endorse a drug-linked status quo that relied on its so-called "warlord strategy" to "stabilize" Afghanistan, part of the blowback from these dubious alliances included allowing bin Laden to escape into Pakistan in 2001 after the "battle" of Tora Bora.

But for Pentagon proponents of unconventional warfare, the "price is always right" when it comes to strategic and tactical alliances with narcotraffickers and international terrorists. After all, since "UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces," everything is permitted.