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David Ray Griffin v. Cass Sunstein
By Steve Lendman
David Ray Griffin v. Cass Sunstein
Griffin is Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA where he’s still co-director of the Center for Process Studies.
He’s authored and/or edited three dozen books, mainly in his field, but notably and heroically on 9/11 truth, Osama bin Laden, and his newest titled, “Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.” More on it below.
Cass Sunstein is a well-known University of Chicago and Harvard Law School Professor before being appointed Obama’s Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, in charge of “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,” among other duties.
Distinguished Law Professor, activist, and international law and human rights expert Francis Boyle said this about both law schools and the University of Chicago’s political science department, steeped in neo-con Straussianism:
“Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like (Paul) Wolfowitz and (John) Ashcroft. The University of Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool,” referring to its political science department and law school. Its extremist economics department is much the same, indoctrinating students with predatory capitalist ideology.
Boyle’s “Harvard’s Gitmo Kangaroo Law School: The School for Torturers” article advised:
“Do not send your children or students to Harvard Law School where they will grow up to become racist war criminals! Harvard Law School is a Neo-Con cesspool.”
“Harvard is to Law School as Torture is to Law.”
Commenting on Sunstein when he was mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee, Boyle, calling him a “Neo-Con,” said he’d be a “lethal” choice.
Professor Emeritus James Fetzer, Founder, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, took sharp issue with Sunstein’s attempt to discredit its proponents, saying his “Conspiracy Theories” report (discussed below) is a “corrosive approach” and “massive blunder” to believe they’re “obviously false!” In fact, “No one can know which theories are true or false without investigating them.” That a Harvard Law professor would suggest it “is simply stunning,” yet unsurprising given the source.
Sunstein is a notorious neo-con, abhorrent of First Amendment and other democratic freedoms, believing the rule of law is best served by subverting it.
Glen Greenwald’s “The Horrible Prospect of Supreme Court Justice Cass Sunstein” article said:
“From the beginning of the War on Terror, Cass Sunstein turned himself into the most reliable Democratic cheerleader for Bush/Cheney radicalism and their assault on the Constitution and the rule of law.” He also supports military commissions, illegal surveillance, and “mock(ed) the notion that Bush had committed crimes while in office.”
One of his former students added:
“I think (he’s) an extremely ambitious man (who’d) run over his grandmother for a seat on the Supreme Court.”
Apparently over the country as well, trashing it and the public interest for power, clearly the aim of his “Cognitive Infiltration” proposal.
In January 2008, he and Adrian Vermeule published a controversial report titled, “Conspiracy Theories,” they define as “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”
“Many millions of people hold (them); they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event.”
Citing 9/11 truth, the reason for their report, they say believers “may create serious risks, including risks of violence….rais(ing) significant challenges for policy and law….The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be.”
His solution – debunk and undermine them by “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” his modern-day version of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s infamous 1960s and 1970s counterintelligence program to neutralize political dissidents, including the American Indian Movement, Black Panthers, and communists, as well as anti-war, human and civil rights activists, among others.
Rebranded, COINTELPRO flourishes more than ever against new targets, including Muslims and others in the “war on terror;” environmental and animal rights activists, and supporters of democratic freedoms over despotism and imperial wars, among others.
Sunstein wants conspiracy advocates neutralized, using “independent groups to supply rebuttals, and by cognitive infiltration designed to break up the crippled epistemology of conspiracy-minded groups and informationally isolated social networks.” In other words, destroy them by conspiring against them from within, using illegal and extralegal tactics.
“Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”
In June 2009, Sunstein and Vermeule updated their scheme in The Journal of Political Philosophy titled, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.” The cause – psychological conditions. The cure – elimination by cognitive infiltration, including with “independent experts with information and perhaps prod(ding) from behind the scenes….(but not) too close (to avoid being) self-defeating” if exposed.
In fact, what Sunstein proposed is illegal under statutes prohibiting internal government propaganda, aimed at the public, though legal technicalities have never before been a deterrent.
Nonetheless, according to a March 21, 2005 Congressional Research Service report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) defines “publicity or propaganda” as either official self-aggrandizing, partisan activity, or “covert propaganda,” the latter government-originated, disguised to appear otherwise, including by enlisted journalists, corrupting their profession by accepting cash to cooperate, a practice used by the Bush and earlier administrations as well as the CIA and perhaps FBI.
Griffin’s New Book – A Powerful Truth Antidote
His new book is an invaluable analysis of Sunstein’s proposal to undermine democratic freedoms, airbrush truth, impose censorship, and criminalize individuals who challenge official versions of patent lies, specifically 9/11, the seminal one of our time.
Critics agree, including Professor Peter Phillips, President of the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored saying:
Griffin’s book should be “entitled ‘the Courage of David Ray Griffin’ (for) His continuing efforts to speak truth to power regarding issues” as vital as 9/11. Project Censored strongly recommends it at a time our democratic freedoms are at risk, including dissent, what Howard Zinn called “the highest form of patriotism.”
Professor Emeritus Peter Dale Scott called Griffin our “preeminent (9/11) expert….his research….consistently careful, thorough, and objective.” His new book provides “a patient, point-by-point and much needed refutation” of Sunstein’s dangerous proposal. “He relentlessly shows how (he’s) guilty of the very mentality he warns against: close-mindedness and refusal to debate. Those who seek to prevent 2010 from becoming 1984” must read this invaluable book.
Professor Emeritus Richard Falk said Griffin wrote “a devastating critique, (using) his formidable philosophical and theological skills.”
Cyril H. Wecht, past President, American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American College of Legal Medicine called the book “brilliantly written….a scholarly dissection of (Sunstein’s) sociopolitical proposal….,” one essential to expose and oppose.
Discussing Sunstein’s 10 theses, Griffin deconstructs their flaws, contradictions, and dangers to a free society. He also explains the legitimacy of 9/11 truth, and Sunstein’s inability to refute it by disinformation, lies, suppression of facts, stifling debate, and attacking proponents.
What Obama did on September 23, calling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 9/11 truth comments to UN General Assembly:
“hateful (and) inexcusable, particularly for him to make the statement here in Manhattan, just a little north of Ground Zero, where families lost their loved ones, people of all faiths, all ethnicities who see this as the seminal tragedy of this generation….”
Others attacked the comments as “abhorrent and delusional,” no matter that millions around the world share them (including Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth), calling the event a crime, debunking the official account as deceitful, untrue, and destructive to democratic freedoms.
Ahmadinejad, in fact, suggested “three (possible) viewpoints:”
1. “That a very powerful and complex terrorist group” successfully circumvented US intelligence, Washington’s position.
2. “That some segments within the US government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime.”
He said most Americans “as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view.” European polls suggest it. US ones vary and have largely ducked the issue by not asking precise questions.
3. “It was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Ahmadinejad “proposed that the United Nations set up an independent fact-finding group….” He also criticized Washington for using the attack as a pretext for war against Iraq and Afghanistan. These views are verboten in the West, those expressing them pilloried as unpatriotic or worse.
Griffin is one, the preeminent 9/11 truth proponent and consummate scholar. Using his masterful skills, he demolishes Sunstein’s arguments, ones based on disinformation, deceit, and bad analysis, not up to the standards of an accomplished liar, and no match for Griffin.
Thomas Fletcher summed it up saying:
Griffin’s book “is a lucid and compelling exposure of the contempt held by the official (9/11 myth) defenders for dissenters who have seen through their Big Lie.” They also fear truth that reveals their ugly agenda. “These officials expect that no one will be able to penetrate the murk of Sunstein’s latest defense of the pretext for the US wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, now covertly expanding” globally. Truth is a powerful disinfectant, what government conspiracists most fear.
Some Final Comments
On September 12, Professor Denis Rancourt titled an article, “Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the intelligentsia,” saying:
Many on the left share guilt with the right by “vehemently attack(ing) and ridicul(ing) ‘conspiracy theories’ such as the present 911 Truth movement.”
Why, he asks? “Is that not the modus operandi of power? Is it so difficult to believe that (the 911 attack) was not orchestrated by….religious zealot(s)? Or that those who measurably benefitted” had everything to gain? “What ever happened to ‘war is a racket’ and ‘follow the money?’ ”
At issue is that “power owns the media, (and) more importantly….our jobs” and lives in other respects. Even more important than truth is how it’s used – to “rebel, actually rebel and individually take back power over (our) lives.” Instead, too many of “the intelligentsia” protect themselves and “the system” by being “a visceral opponent of 911 Truth….in order for power to save face.”
Let others fight the good fight they may feel, but unless enough do, putting a lot on the line, wrong will prevail over right and squeeze harder for even more of what they want.
Perhaps the next “9/11” will be a mushroom-shaped cloud or other comparable state-sponsored “disaster,” again blamed on foreign adversaries as a pretext for more war. Why not, given America’s permanent war agenda, a topic addressed in an earlier article, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/americas-permanent-war-agenda.html
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
Retribution for a World Lost in Screens
By Chris Hedges
Retrubution for a World Lost in Screens
Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.
Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.
We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.
We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.
To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.
In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.
We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.
A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.
Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.
The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.
The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods.
The Ballad of the Fleas
By John Walker Lindh
It’s said that black death spread by fleas
On backs of rats they rode
One fateful autumn thus they came
With vengeance as their code
Like blight they spread from crags to plains
To hilly dusty turf
To rocky lunar landscapes ‘neath
The rooftop of the earth
They hid behind the highest clouds
To fly as swift as sound
With daisy cutters cluster bombs
And spies upon the ground
*
Their leader stepped out swaggering
Declaring a crusade
He called the world to follow him
And most of them obeyed
For wolves may foam and bark and bite
And gnash and gnaw and hiss
But if a sheep should dare bite back
He’d be a terrorist
The knights of Malta raised their spears
The knights Templars came next
The rabble cheered them in the streets
Priests quoted Bible texts
*
Their quislings all crawled out to them
Each kneeled to give his oath
They squealed and cried “Islam is peace”
But disbelieved in both
They ushered ashen donkeys forth
Jackasses bearing scrolls
They brayed in fervent fever pitch
For dollar bills in rolls
The words they spoke those days were such
That had he known their name
Old Abdullah Ibnu Ubayy
Would cringe and blush in shame
*
They send their drones to level homes
And blow up wedding feasts
They heap more arms in warlords’ hands
To spread democracy
They roam at night to break down doors
To search and strip and rape
To bind and kidnap anyone
To shoot those who escape
With muzzles full of lofty talk
Free speech and human rights
They drive out millions from their land
And say it’s worth the price
*
An aid worker clerk or farmer
Sold like a modern slave
Gets beaten by their boots and guns
And thrown into a cage
He’s sat upon and spat upon
Broke by the brave and free
By brave crusaders brave and bold
As brave as brave can be
If they but knew that with each act
Of torture and abuse
Around the neck of Uncle Sam
They tighten up the noose
*
Mirages in the distance glow
Lads line up in the queue
As one more body bag comes back
Hid from the public view
A blistered bloated jarhead face
Deep purple findernails
A smell seeps out that’s foul enough
To cleanse a man’s entrails
Their rulers lurch and boast and strut
But keep far from the fray
They swoon and quake from fear to tread
Where lurking lions lay
*
As tawheed’s caravan moves on
And marches in the dusk
The crimson wound of one of them
Emits the scent of musk
To rule God’s earth by God’s own law
They sacrifice their lives
They spill their lifeblood willingly
Until God’s help arrives
Although victory entices them
What soothes them even more
Is hope to enter gardens lush
With honey milk and hur
*
Where stars and stripes and Union Jacks
And NATO flags once flew
Black banners rise in Khurasan
In hands of every hue
Just as how warsteeds’ coats are cleaned
And purged of lice and fleas
The cavalcade of martyrs fights
An empire to its knees
All praise and thanks are due to God
To Him alone they bowed
And peace be on His messenger
Whose face beams in his shroud
Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi
Detainee #001
Ramadan 1431
This item was first posted at http://www.cageprisoners.com
The Collapse of Western Morality
By Paul Craig Roberts
The Collapse of Western Morality
Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.
In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel’s genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.
I don’t mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.
And we have what appears to be a new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war to murder civilians. Recently American troops were arrested for murdering Afghan civilians for fun and collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls.
This revelation came on the heels of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s alleged leak of a US Army video of US soldiers in helicopters and their controllers thousands of miles away having fun with joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan civilians. Manning is cursed with a moral conscience that has been discarded by his government and his military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying the law and reporting a war crime to the American people.
US Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for Manning’s execution. According to US Rep. Rogers it is an act of treason to report an American war crime.
In other words, to obey the law constitutes “treason to America.”
US Rep. Rogers said that America’s wars are being undermined by “a culture of disclosure” and that this “serious and growing problem” could only be stopped by the execution of Manning.
If Rep. Rogers is representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don’t need.
The US government, a font of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the “threatened” US Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US if they were in Iraq.
When other countries attempt to enforce the international laws that the Americans established in order to execute Germans defeated in World War II, the US government goes to work and blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the Spanish Senate, obeying its American master, limited Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction in order to sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair,and Gordon Brown.
The West includes Israel, and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of them you are declared to be an anti-semite. I only mention them in order to prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Goldstone, who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to be “a self-hating Jew,” and the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the Goldstone Report to the UN.
As the Israeli official said, we are only doing to the Palestinians what the Americans did to the American Indians.
The Israeli army uses female soldiers to sit before video screens and to fire by remote control machine guns from towers to murder Palestinians who come to tend their fields within 1500 meters of the inclosed perimeter of Ghetto Gaza. There is no indication that these Israeli women are bothered by gunning down young children and old people who come to tend to their fields.
If the crimes were limited to war and the theft of lands, perhaps we could say it is a case of jingoism sidetracking traditional morality, otherwise still in effect.
Alas, the collapse of morality is too widespread. Some sports teams now have a win-at-all-cost attitude that involves plans to injure the star players of the opposing teams. To avoid all these controversies, let’s go to Formula One racing where 200 mph speeds are routine.
Prior to 1988, 22 years ago, track deaths were due to driver error, car failure, and poorly designed tracks compromised with safety hazards. World Champion Jackie Stewart did much to improve the safety of tracks, both for drivers and spectators. But in 1988 everything changed. Top driver Ayrton Senna nudged another top driver Alain Prost toward a pit wall at 190 mph. According to AutoWeek (August 30, 2010), nothing like this had been seen before. “Officials did not punish Senna’s move that day in Portugal, and so a significant shift in racing began.” What the great racing driver Stirling Moss called “dirty driving” became the norm.
Nigel Roebuck in AutoWeek reports that in 1996 World Champion Damon Hill said that Senna’s win-at-all-cost tactic “was responsible for fundamental change in the ethics of the sport.” Drivers began using “terrorist tactics on the track.” Damon Hill said that “the views that I’d gleaned from being around my dad [twice world champion Graham Hill] and people like him, I soon had to abandon,” because you realized that no penalty was forthcoming against the guy who tried to kill you in order that he could win.
When asked about the ethics of modern Formula One racing, American World Champion Phil Hill said: “Doing that sort of stuff in my day was just unthinkable. For one thing, we believed certain tactics were unacceptable.”
In today’s Western moral climate, driving another talented driver into the wall at 200 mph is just part of winning. Michael Schumacher, born in January 1969, is a seven times World Champion, an unequaled record. On August 1 at the Hungarian Grand Prix, AutoWeek Reports that Schumacher tried to drive his former Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, into the wall at 200 mph speeds.
Confronted with his attempted act of murder, Schumacher said: “This is Formula One. Everyone knows I don’t give presents.”
Neither does the US government, nor state and local governments, nor the UK government, nor the EU.
The deformation of the police, which many Americans, in their untutored existence as naive believers in “law and order,” still think are “on their side,” has taken on new dimensions with the police militarized to fight “terrorists” and “domestic extremists.”
The police have been off the leash since the civilian police boards were nixed by the conservatives. Kids as young as 6 years old have been handcuffed and carted off to jail for school infractions that may or may not have occurred. So have moms with a car full of children (see, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AaSLERx0VM ).
Anyone who googles videos of US police gratuitous brutality will call up tens of thousands of examples, and this is after laws that make filming police brutality a felony. A year or two ago such a search would call up hundreds of thousands of videos.
In one of the most recent of the numerous daily acts of gratuitous police abuse of citizens, an 84-year-old man had his neck broken because he objected to a night time towing of his car. The goon cop body-slammed the 84-year old and broke his neck. The Orlando, Florida, police department says that the old man was a “threat” to the well-armed much younger police goon, because the old man clenched his fist.
Americans will be the first people sent straight to Hell while thinking that they are the salt of the earth. The Americans have even devised a title for themselves to rival that of the Israelis’ self-designation as “God’s Chosen People.” The Americans call themselves “the indispensable people.”
© Copyright Paul Craig Roberts, Global Research, 2010
Murderers, Cowards, Morons and Thieves: Portrait of an Empire in a Political Season
By Chris Floyd
Murderers, Cowards, Morons and Thieves: Portrait of an Empire in a Political Season
Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com continues his lonely vigil of documenting the carnage being inflicted upon civilians in Pakistan by the increasingly frenzied drone missile attacks ordered by the Peace Laureate in the White House.
Almost every day, Ditz has fresh hell to offer up on the story of this remarkably brazen campaign of outright war crimes. Most of his pieces draw on foreign sources; there is almost nothing in the American press about this literally inhuman invasion of the sovereign territory of a nation allied to the United States. It is truly a bizarre situation; then again, in a militarist system whose pervasive moral depravity has long reached lunatic proportions, murdering the children of your allies is perhaps not so unusual. Certainly, the guardians of our public discourse don’t consider it newsworthy in any way.
The latest update from Ditz captures many of the main features of Barack Obama’s ruthless robot war on Pakistan: mass killings, murky motives and missed targets:
Pakistan’s remote tribal agencies of North and South Waziristan are in a state of virtual panic tonight as US drones continue to loom in the air and three attacks against separate towns across the region killed at least 28 people and wounded an unknown number of others.
The Daily Times story that Ditz links to goes on to describe the “great panic among the locals” as the American drones continued to hover over the defenseless towns even after the attack. No one could be sure when or if the robots would fire again. There was no way to stop the machines; they were impervious, implacable, just floating there, groaning in the sky, their “pilots” sitting safely and comfortably before computer screens thousands of miles away. You couldn’t get away, you couldn’t hide, you couldn’t protect your children.
This is raw terrorism, pure and simple, nothing but terrorism, terrorism on the grandest of scales, terrorism without end – no one-time “spectacle,” but a grim, steady, relentless, mechanical process. It is also the terrorism of cowards, murdering at a vast distance, by remote control, in sneak attacks against defenseless people.
Ditz’s story also includes what has become a familiar motif in the American way of Terror War: attacking communal gathering of civilians – weddings, funerals – and slaughtering the participants.
Officials have so far failed to identify any of the targets of the attacks, but reports from the ground suggest that one of the US drones attacked a funeral procession that was carried out for people killed in a previous attack.
Nor was this the only Standard Operating Procedure at play in the latest raid. There was also the familiar “provocative attacks which destroy local peace-making efforts and ensure the continuation of violent conflict” scenario, coupled with one of the overarching themes of the entire Terror War: missing the ostensible targets of a raid and killing civilians instead.
Reports suggested that the targets hit were related to one of the militant factions which has an existing ceasefire with the Pakistani government, and it does not appear that any of the victims of the attacks were “high value” targets.
This is in so many ways a portrait in miniature of the entire bloody and misbegotten enterprise in Central Asia. For viewed in this light – that is, by the declared aims of the American-led coalition of occupation — what is the entire “Af-Pak” war but a gargantuan failure to capture or kill a handful of “high value” targets, who somehow, miraculously, always manage to escape, while civilians are killed by the thousands?
But of course these “high value targets” are not the true aim of the war. The war itself is the aim of the war: the continuation of perpetual – and profitable – conflict, and the expansion of the power and privilege and corrupted wealth that accrues to the bipartisan operators (and lickspittle apologists) of a militarist empire.
Even the perpetrators of these war crimes no longer to pretend that these conflicts have any real purpose; the War Machine’s own “intelligence analysts” regularly report that the wars are exacerbating the very problems they are ostensibly designed to quell: violent extremism, divisive tribalism, ignorance and poverty, repression of women, political instability in strategic regions, fear and insecurity at home, etc. But none of this matters – not to the Peace Laureate and his party of spineless corporate servitors, nor to the Republicans and their cretinous Tea Partiers, nor, it seems, to the vast majority of the American public who follow these blood-soaked factions of ruthless, third-rate gangsters, bagmen, morons and courtiers.
And now another election season is upon us. The massive acts of state terrorism committed by the United States will fall even further beneath the media radar (if that’s possible). “Progressive” forces will furiously debate the best way to rouse the “base” to support their admittedly disappointing champion, if only to keep the drooling hordes of zealous Know-Nothings at bay. They will put aside the daily murder of innocent people by their champion in order to play a few “savvy” hands of partisan politics – as if they were living in some kind of ordinary, open political system, instead of a phantasmagorical Grand Guignol of state terror, state murder and corporate rapine, a rigged game where the only outcome is more and more and more of the same.
As for me, I am long past caring about the political fortunes of murderers and cowards – and of those who want to take their places and be murderers and cowards too. I can only repeat – for the nth time – the words of Henry David Thoreau:
“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”
CLIMATEGATE: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
Blog Editor: Michael Rivero has written a thorough essay on the facts surrounding the historical antefixes surrounding not just the Anthropogenic Global Warming political scandal and perception, but a extensive history of propaganda that has led us up to this day. Here is a portion of that essay with a link to its entirety.
By Michael Rivero
CLIMATEGATE: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken (1918)
7: This is a Street Brawl for Truth and Freedom
It is clear that government, the media, corporatized science, have quite literally bet the farm on selling the illusion of human caused global warming as justification for global taxes and global government. In order to bring about global government simultaneous with creating the illusion of a need they have to destroy the credibility of the regional governments and we have seen a great deal of this lately. Now the oligarchs face an awkward choice. They have set the stage for a collapse of the national governments in the global government they wish to install in its place may be collapsing right along with the myth of global government.
Various governments and the media are so heavily invested in selling the illusion of human caused global warming, that if that hoax is exposed, if the public becomes aware of the monstrous fraud involved, those institutions of government and media could very well be destroyed and by their own hands.
Already we are seeing the organizers and perpetrators of this fraud trying to limit the damage from this exposure in several ways. The media is already hard at work attempting to dump the blame and scandal solely on the climate scientists, who after all were only doing what they were paid to do. This is not to say the scientists are not guilty. Quite the contrary, they deserve to be pilloried publicly and humiliated for their betrayal of the public trust. To say that their careers should be ended is an understatement. But in our haste to punish the scientists who assisted in the lies to the world, we must not forget that the scientists were working for somebody; for politicians such as Al Gore, for an agenda called global government, and for those who wanted to get rich by selling a fictitious product called carbon credit.
Yet another tactic being employed to limit the damage from climate gate, is to insist that even though the scientist responsible for the climate warming data have been exposed as holsters that the validity of the data itself must remain above question above reproach. This of course is nonsense. If you hire a contractor to build a home, and discover afterwards that the contractor has a history of using substandard materials and sloppy workmanship, do you continue to believe the home he has built you is solid and durable and safe? Of course not. And yet the global warming cultists are demanding exactly this kind of naïveté from the public at large.
The latest spin is that if one questions the dogma of Anthropocentric Global Warming, then one must be in favor of destroying the Earth. There is no middle ground. Another common propaganda tactic is to accuse those who question the veracity of the Global Warming Cultists is to accuse them of receiving paychecks from oil companies. When one points out that the proponents of Anthropocentric Global Warming are being paid for their work, one gets a “hurrumph” of indignation. It’s apparently acceptable for their side of the argument to be well-funded, because in their eyes they are the “good guys.” Finally, there is the much-ballyhooed “Precautionary Principle” which states that one should never take any action that might cause harm even if that potential harm cannot be demonstrated or proven. In theory such a prohibition should extend to any actions undertaken in support of the Precautionary Principle itself, but such suggestions get the usual “Hurrumph” of indignation. The cultists are really good at that.
So is climate gate a fraud? Is climate gate a scientific scandal? No. Climate gate is first and foremost a political scandal. More than that it is a global political scandal that involves governments, media, institutionalize science, the banks, universities, indeed a vast cross-section of our ruling classes. It is more than a scandal; climate gate is a crime against humanity. And this is not an exaggeration. The goal of climategate was to extract money from every human being on planet Earth in exchange for a nonexistent salvation from a nonexistent threat. The goal of climate gate was to trick every human being on planet Earth into accepting the yoke of a global oligarchy with no more legitimate claim to power than those who ruled by divine right.
We are at a watershed moment. We may well see a transition to a new and better political structure for the entire world. But it will not be the one that has been designed for us. If nothing else, the ability for government and media to lie to the population of the world on such a vast scale is forever destroyed. Climategate will relegate all of the official stories of the governments of the United States and Great Britain and indeed every government that took part in the human caused global warming hoax to the same level of credibility as Ramses carvings showing his victory over the Hittites. It will be seen as an historic joke by future generations.
But we are not there yet. The forces that have enslaved us with deception and fraud and hoax are desperate to hang onto their power and authority. They are busy coming up with new hoaxes and frauds to scare us back into obedience. And the media well aware that they cannot report on the lies of climate gate without reporting their own complicity are working hand in glove with government to reassert their ability to control what you think and when you think it.
So, what we, the free people of planet Earth, need to do in the coming weeks is become the new mainstream media. The TV networks and other corporate media have been handed their marching orders to resell the illusion of human caused climate change in any way shape or form that will convince you to accept new taxes and the loss of your freedoms. The only way the rest of the world is going to find out about climate gate is if you tell them. Because the TV and news magazines won’t. If it’s mentioned at all, it will be to trivialize and dismiss it and assure the world it really doesn’t matter. BBC is still reporting climate gate as just another computer crime. This is like reporting Watergate as just another burglary!
We have collected together a vast body of evidence calling into question the legitimacy of the claims of human caused global warming. We have collected together a vast body of evidence proving fraud and deception on the part of the global warming cult. Please forward this information to everybody you know. Time is of the essence. Barack Obama as already indicated that he will not be swayed by the exposure of the fraud in the CRU/NWIA data, and fully intends to go to Copenhagen to sign away our national sovereignty as “penance” for our contribution to global warming.
Other observers have commented that the moment president Obama signs that Copenhagen Treaty his credibility as president of the United States will be destroyed. For him to sign away sovereignty of our nation on the basis of a known lie should enrage all Americans and make it clear that the federal government is not working in the interests of the American people any more, but in service to this emerging globalist socialistic empire. Remember; global government is what Hitler wanted. Global Government is what Napoleon wanted. Global Government is what Alexander the Great wanted. Global Government is what the Roman Caesars wanted.
Climategate may well prove to be the final fight in the war between those who would rule us with lies and those who wish to live with truth. Climategate makes it clear that yes, there really are massive conspiracies between government and the media to mislead the general public. You cannot pretend they don’t exist; one is right there before you staked out naked on the ground, exposed for all to marvel at! I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide how many other such deceptions form what we think we know of the world and of history.
There are two paths into the future. Along one lies freedom and truth and prosperity for the people. Along the other lies a socialist dictatorship, born in deception, unable and unwilling to tolerate dissent, and dedicated to robbing the poor to give to the rich.
You need to decide which future you wish to live in.
And you need to decide what you will do about it.
Read entire essay: CLIMATEGATE: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
Caught! Mossad Paid by U.S. to Spy on “Dissident,” Tea Party, Environmentalist
By Gordon Duff
GORDON DUFF: CAUGHT! MOSSAD PAID BY U.S. TO SPY ON “DISSIDENTS,” TEA PARTY, ENVIRONMENTALISTS
TAXPAYERS FUNDING ISRAELI DATABASE OF AMERICAN CITIZENS
Did you know that attending a meeting to organize a bake sale for new band uniforms can put you on a terrorist watch list? You don’t have to join a peace group or protest oil drilling to be considered dangerous. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hired ITRR, the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Jerusalem based company owned by the Mossad and tied directly to the Israeli Ministry of Defense to track “dissidents” and “activists.” In the process, they managed to find the most dangerous terrorist organization of all, the governor’s own non-profit organization, one supporting school funding initiatives. From ITTR’s website:
“All of the information ITRR’s staff creates is sent to its monitoring center in Jerusalem, where it is analyzed”
Governments, states, cities and even rural towns, believing they are participating in a Homeland Security initiative, have contracted with this and other organizations under foreign control, read “Israeli,” tracking organizations as diverse as the Tea Party and the Sierra Club. Reports submitted by ITTR showed them spying on nearly every organization they could find, no matter how innocent, patriotic or public minded. Organizations tied to Jewish causes, however, managed, somehow, to slip under the radar.
Those that were included are so comprehensive that it would be nearly impossible for an American to escape having confidential files, collected under government authority and financing, paid for by American taxpayers, held by Israeli intelligence agencies. In fact, databases include every organization, regardless of its membership or policies, with personal information on members being stored in databases in Israel.
Never has a nation funded a foreign spy organization’s efforts to catalog potential intelligence assets, operatives and, at the same time, take over the job of watching themselves. This is one of the greatest intelligence coups in history. Combine this with control of America’s airport security and total control of America’s communications networks, everything, mobile, internet, even landlines….we might as well pull down the flag and roll over.
Governor Rendell expressed shock at the gross violation of constitutional rights involved in hiring this company, one that is said to be working for state and local governments across the United States. Rendell said he was “stunned” when he learned about the spying relationship, one he characterized as “ludicrous.” From Governor Rendell’s apology to the people of Pennsylvania at a capitol news conference this week:
“I am deeply embarrassed and I apologize to any of the groups who had this information disseminated on their right to peacefully protest”
As early as December 2001, not long after the 9/11 incident, Fox News investigated Israeli spying on the United States. However, not long after airing the Carl Cameron Report with Brit Hume as Host, not only did the show itself disappear but all transcripts as well, at least “almost all.”
BRIT HUME, HOST: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for the Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence.
At first, Israeli leaders claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but later took responsibility for his work. Now Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have known things they didn’t tell us before September 11. …
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.
There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are “tie-ins.” But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, “evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.”
Numerous classified documents obtained by Fox News indicate that even prior to September 11, as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States. Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a working group that’s been compiling evidence since the mid ’90s. These documents detail hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country that investigators say, “may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity.”
The first part of the investigation focuses on Israelis who say they are art students from the University of Jerusalem and Bazala Academy. They repeatedly made contact with U.S. government personnel, the report says, by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork. Documents say they, “targeted and penetrated military bases.”
The DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, and even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. The majority of those questioned, “stated they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and or explosive ordinance units.”
Why would Israelis spy in and on the U.S.?
A GAO investigation states: “According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of (Israel) conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. …It aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target.” The document concludes: “Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives.” (END VIDEO CLIP)
And in the days ahead, we’ll take a look at the U.S. phone system and law enforcement’s methods for wiretaps. And an investigation that both have been compromised by our friends overseas.
HUME: Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?
CAMERON: It’s very explosive information, obviously, and there’s a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected — none of it necessarily conclusive. It’s more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is how could they not have know?
These Fox News revelations from 2001, long dead and gone, buried in the archives never to be heard from again, tell a story, not of betrayal by a “friend” or “ally” but one of America’s national obsession with memory loss, almost as though the “hard drive” meant to represent America’s common sense was “wiped,” reformatted after picking up a virus from opening one of those nasty emails we are all warned about. The virus, of course, is the mainstream news media itself.
The Pennsylvania spying story was never reported nationally. It couldn’t be, there is a “blackout” on any news critical of Israel, real forced censorship, part of the official policy of the Obama administration, as it was of the Bush administration, cheerfully adhered to by media owned and operated by Israel itself.
The Fox News report of 2001, showing America’s counter-terrorism organizations hot on the trail of Israel, was the last report of its kind on any major network. Not one word spoken of by Cameron or Hume has been repeated in nine long years. Not one lead has been followed up, not one more question asked, the entire thing, forgotten, forgiven, overlooked or perhaps something darker and more threatening.
Related:
December 1, 2009: Flashback: Israel Did 9/11
[includes Fox series mentioned in article]
Jericho Rendezvous 