What's up with Senator Hagel?

What’s up with Senator Chuck Hagel? He is a prominent Republican who has been attacking the Bush administration as harshly as any Democrat. He is planning on running for president, which would be impossible as a Republican having crossed the vicious Bush machine UNLESS he sees that the Bush faction will be so completely discredited by 2008 that no Republican associated with them can hope to win.

Another interesting piece to the Hagel puzzle is his close ties with the Diebold voting-machine manufacturer (he used to run the company). See this , for example:

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.
"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka . "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Here’s what Hagel said about Iraq recently :

Hit by friendly fire
With his polls down, Bush takes flak on Iraq from a host of critics--including some in his own party
By Kevin Whitelaw

Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is angry. He's upset about the more than 1,700 U.S. soldiers killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Iraq. He's also aggravated by the continued string of sunny assessments from the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's recent remark that the insurgency is in its "last throes." "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

That's strikingly blunt talk from a member of the president's party, even one cast as something of a pariah in the GOP because of his early skepticism about the war. "I got beat up pretty good by my own party and the White House that I was not a loyal Republican," he says. Today, he notes, things are changing: "More and more of my colleagues up here are concerned."

Is he emboldened to take on Bush from within the party by his association with Diebold? He must know where those bodies are buried!

Donald Rumsfeld, Man of Truth

No one leaves me speechless as often as Donald Rumsfeld. It’s like he’s a compulsive truth-teller. He said that a missile hit the Pentagon on 911. He said the same people shot down Flight 93 that beheaded captives in Iraq. He told us at the start of the war that he would lie to us. He can’t help himself.

Now, he is saying that the U.S. won’t defeat the Iraq insurgency and that the insurgency will go on for as long as twelve years. Then, he said that the Coalition commanders meet often with the leaders of the insurgency!

Rumsfeld: Iraq Insurgency Could Last Years
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press WriterSun Jun 26, 9:14 PM ET
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday he is bracing for even more violence in Iraq and acknowledged that the insurgency "could go on for any number of years."

Defeating the insurgency may take as long as 12 years, he said, with Iraqi security forces, not U.S. and foreign troops, taking the lead and finishing the job.

The assessment comes on the heels of the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll showing public doubts about the war reaching a high point — with more than half saying that invading Iraq was a mistake.

The top U.S. commander in the Middle East appealed for public support of the soldiers and their mission. "We don't need to fight this war looking over our shoulder worrying about the support back home," Gen. John Abizaid told CNN's "Late Edition."

In a deadly week for U.S. forces, an ambush on a convoy carrying female troops killed four Marines, including at least one woman. At least 1,735 members of the U.S. military have died since the war started in March 2003, according to an AP count.

On Sunday, bombings in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq killed at least 38 people.
Rumsfeld, making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, said insurgents want to disrupt the democratic transformation as Iraqi leaders draft a constitution and plan for elections in December to choose a full-term government.

"I would anticipate you're going to see an escalation of violence between now and the December elections," the Pentagon chief told NBC's "Meet the Press." And after then, it will take a long time to drive out insurgents.

"Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years," Rumsfeld said on "Fox News Sunday."

"Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency," he said.

A British newspaper reported Sunday that American officials recently met secretly with Iraqi insurgent commanders north of Baghdad to try to negotiate an end to the bloodshed.

Speaking generally, Rumsfeld said those kind of meetings "go on all the time" and that Iraqis "will decide what their relationships with various elements of insurgents will be. We facilitate those from time to time."

Mini-Enrons and Little Eichmanns

The fact, which we manage to supress most of the time, that our world is run by flat-out psychopaths is getting harder and harder to avoid. A look at the top of the power pyramid (or as close to the top as we are allowed to see) shows this pretty clearly. Here is Joe Bageant :

Few of us believe that it is ordinary folks who sell a nation into hell, cast it in infamy. In a democracy, “the people” supposedly cannot be the problem. Right now some of the smartest people I know are more convinced that the problem is George W. Bush and the dysfunctional little Adams family he has created (or who created him, no one is quite certain). The problem being of course that they are a danger to human civilization and the planet. The fallacy, however, is believing they are more insane than the rest of us, although a couple of them probably are. Not many healthy, well-adjusted people look at Karl Rove or Donald Rumsfeld without a small flinch of horror and pity. The kind of fear one has of snakes and the kind of pity one has for people who appear congenitally deformed in character. Rather like the kid I knew in grade school that poured lighter fluid on baby birds and lit it. Now we know what such kids grow up to become.

Bageant goes on to say that this does not absolve those of us lower down the power structure of blame. We “good Germans” or ‘little Eichmanns.”

Yet a walk through an American suburb or one of our bland “office campuses” can throw a thinking person into a darker funk than Rummy or Karl “Toad of Darkness” Rove ever will. We should be far more worried about the Good Germans with orderly lives who populate all those office complexes here in the suburbs of our nation’s capitol. They are designers at the defense company in our building who create control systems for fighter missiles, or the government contracted psychologists in the building across the lawn who help write what are essentially military torture manuals and killing protocols . . . or, for that matter, all the people at my own magazine publishing office. We specialize in military history magazines that glorify all wars American and create the state sponsored mythology of our “heroes fighting for democracy around the world.” Meanwhile, company 401-Ks are invested in Halliburton, Raytheon, mass distributed mind suppressants such as Prozac and the like. Thus, from my building I can see the sprawling workplace of other “Little Eichmanns” of which Ward Churchill spoke, and cannot delude myself that I am not one of them.

When and if America is ever hauled before the tribunal it is so richly earning with every Iraqi child mangled and every soul it ships to Egypt to be tortured in unspeakable ways, out of sight of the world, what will be my excuse? Will it be: “I only generated the propaganda because I needed the health insurance that came with the job.” Will that be an acceptable answer before the world? Who among us is guilty and who is innocent? Is the person who makes the night goggles for the American sniper on a Baghdad rooftop guilty? Is the person who made Lynndie England’s CD player guilty, the one they played while leading those naked weeping men around on dog leashes and in hoods? What about American workers who make Kevlar vests? Are they saving lives, or are they enabling killers to do their work more safely? And this is to say nothing of the Americans who wipe the Doritos crumbs from their double chins, lean toward their televisions and cheer on the young “heroes.”

Good questions. When you think of the advantages the powerful psychopaths have over people of conscience, though, it may be unreasonable to fix too much blame on people who are just keeping their heads down hoping not to be noticed. And, if you think about the damage caused by garden-variety psychopaths at every level, the problem becomes even more difficult, particularly when the late-capitalist econonomic system’s characteristic entity of the corporation is a pure psychopathic form.

The New York Times had an article recently about what they called “A Mini-Enron on Every Corner” that provides an intimate case study both of how the economic system encourages and rewards psychopathic behavior and of how much damage psychopaths can cause to the social fabric, right down to the level of an individual family. The article, by Kurt Eichenwald, tells the story of two brothers, David and Greg Gordon:

On that Christmas day in 1998, life could hardly have seemed better for the Gordon brothers, David and Greg. They brought their wives to celebrate the holiday amid the festive décor of their parents' home in Conroe, Tex., a onetime oil boom town north of Houston. As family members relaxed, the brothers eagerly compared notes about their triumphs of the last year.

The stock market bubble was still expanding. For David Gordon, a corporate lawyer from Tulsa, that translated into a flourishing business helping companies go public or make acquisitions. For Greg Gordon, who ran a successful wholesale jewelry business with his wife, Lisa, the flood of market wealth had created a heated demand for the luxury items he sold.

Then, as they sat near the Christmas tree, David broached a thought. Why not combine their talents, linking some of the highflying businessmen he knew with Greg's thriving company, Con-Tex Silver Imports? It seemed the perfect path to even greater wealth and achievement for all the Gordons.

Instead, it ripped the family apart. Within years, Con-Tex was destroyed - the victim, according to a court-appointed examiner, of mismanagement and potential criminality. David and Greg, once so close, stopped speaking to each other as they battled in court. Their parents, too, were dragged into the dust-up, testifying on behalf of one son's interests - and against the other's.

How could it happen? How could a small company be wrecked so quickly amid myriad accusations of financial wrongdoing that went undetected until the whole place came tumbling down?

The answer is, it happens every day. The Con-Tex story is not just the tale of the downfall of one company or one family. It is a microcosm, a look at an underbelly of the investing and corporate worlds where hokey deals and mysterious webs of linked investors are part of the workaday business.

In the last few years, in the wake of the high-profile collapses of Enron, WorldCom and other onetime giants, steady attention has been focused on cleaning up the practices of companies at the top of the corporate pyramid. But the companies at the bottom - which make up the vast majority of corporate entities - still exist under the radar of public scrutiny, despite too often playing fast and loose with the rules.

While the article tries to remain objective and present the points of view of both brothers, it becomes clear, although the author of the piece does not use the term, that the more affluent and powerful brother is a psychopath. David Gordon, with no evidence whatsoever, accuses his more naïve brother of the very things he (David) did. This is typical of the psychopath. The ability to lie without a shred of remorse, is one of the advantages a psychopath has. The psychopath brazenly lies, accusing his or her accuser of the very deceit he or she is guilty of. Bystanders at some point give up, thinking that there must be some wrongdoing on both sides. Which is what I thought when I began reading the article, only to find out that the only thing Greg did wrong was to trust his brother:

For Greg Gordon, what happened is obvious: the brother he once trusted, he has argued in court filings, transformed Con-Tex into a public company solely to profit by manipulating the share price - and ultimately tried to take away more than 60 million shares he owned. "I had a real belief in my brother, but I was stupid," Greg said in an interview. "He's a crook."

For David Gordon, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing and denies having done anything improper, the real culprit is Greg. "You try to help your brother build a business, you think your brother is honest, has integrity, and then you find out he doesn't," he said in an interview. "I have watched my brother completely tear the family apart. This is a deal where he blew through $3 million and wanted to blame someone else."

The details of the Enron-like fraud that David Gordon set up are worth reading, but too involved to go into here. David Gordon specialized in these “mini-Enrons,” basically pump-and-dump schemes using a complicated system of empty corporate shells. What is interesting in the larger context is the environment that encourages psychopathy, the environment that would paint David as more successful. First there is the competitive selfish culture that we in the United States think is the natural order of things:

The Gordon family had always been competitive. The men - George David Gordon Sr., a prominent lawyer in Conroe; George Jr., who went by David; and James Gregory Gordon, or Greg - had been accomplished athletes. Family ski trips always included races, and the two brothers, both successful tennis players in college, could often be found battling it out on the courts.

More often than not, David was the victor. But Greg thought himself the better player. "He was my damned big brother," he said. "He was always playing mind games on me."

After college, David quickly seemed the one headed on to big things. He earned a law degree from the University of Tulsa, joined a law firm where he cut his teeth on securities work, and eventually hung out his own shingle.

Greg's career possibilities seemed more limited. After graduating from the University of Arkansas with a degree in physical education, he attended some junior college classes, learning gemology. He sold jewelry door to door, then found some success in handling jewelry road shows for the Sam's Club division of WalMart, but soon he was looking for his next step

But perhaps more important is the eroding or trust and the demoralization of the rest of the population who actually have consciences:

The unseen victims, though, are not just investors, but workers who saw their jobs evaporate. "I had 32 employees that, through no fault of their own, David cost them their life," Greg said. "One of them lost their home, their car." David, of course, blames Greg for that outcome.

But still, part of Greg can't let go of the brother he once loved. "Do I miss him?" he asked. "Yeah, in a weird way."

These days, he says, he spends a fair amount of time thinking about their childhood together, about their competitions, about their friendship. "I cherish those moments now more than I ever did," Greg said, "Because now they're gone forever."

The problem is that “the brother he once loved” was an illusion. Psychopaths can create the illusion of humanity, but they don’t have humanity. For more on this see Official Culture – A Natural State of Psychopathy by Laura Knight-Jadczyk.

A Humorous News Item

A humorous news item appeared today:

CIA has 'excellent' idea where bin Laden is -Time

Sun Jun 19, 1:28 PM ET
CIA Director Porter Goss said he has an "excellent" idea where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but the al Qaeda leader will not be brought to justice until weak links in counterterrorism efforts are strengthened, Time magazine reported on Sunday.

In his first interview since becoming head of the CIA last year, Goss also told the magazine the insurgency in Iraq was not quite in its last throes, but close to it.

Goss did not say where he believed bin Laden was hiding, but intelligence experts have said the al Qaeda leader who has evaded an extensive U.S.-led manhunt is probably in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?" Goss said in the interview.

"In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice," Goss said. "We are making very good progress on it."

He cited some of the difficulties as "dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play."

Goss added, "We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community."

This story is funny on a number of levels. First, I would like to point something out that has always amazed me. Why do we give any credence at all to something said by a CIA official, particularly someone who was involved in covert operations. These people are the best liars in the world. To say that is not an insult, that is a prerequisite for the job. They would consider that a compliment. Yet never once does a reporter write, “Professional liar Porter Goss claimed today that he knows where Osama Bin Laden is.”

Secondly, after claiming that he knows where OBL is, Goss stated that the reason the United States hasn’t captured him is the U.S.’s respect for other countries’ sovereignty. Now, if at this point you are not laughing so hard you are spitting coffee on your keyboard, you have not been paying attention.

Further adding to the fun, is the fact, unmentioned by our Mainstream Press, that OBL has always been a CIA asset. You do not stop being one, just as you do not resign from the mafia. It doesn’t work that way. So certainly Goss probably does know where he is. As Kurt Nimmo wrote today, he has most likely been dead for a while, kept alive in our imaginations to scare us little children and send us into the arms of the neocons for protection

The next installment in this comedy will come when the dead OBL starts communicating with the dead al-Zarqawi. Oops, I guess that already happened! (http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/3204250)

Who will bring them down?

There has been a lot of discussion recently in the 911 truth movement lately about how best to persuade the public in the United States that the official story isn’t true. There is the LIHOP vs. MIHOP dispute (Letting It Happen On Purpose vs. Making It Happen On Purpose) and the No Plane Hit the Pentagon vs. If We Say No Plane Hit the Pentagon They Will Think We Are Crazy dispute (NPHTP vs. IWSNPHTPTWTWAC? – see this by Joe Quinn). Some in the movement are so concerned with “what the neighbors will think” that they are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

If you notice, all these people in the discussion are from the United States. And what most of them forget is that world opinion is at least as important here as United States public opinion. And the rest of the world seems to have made up their minds. They seem to have little trouble thinking that 911 was an inside job conducted by elements of the Israeli and United States cryptocracy.

Remember, German public opinion never brought down Hitler, world public opinion, other competing empires, plus a lot of armies, did. The Bush administration does not care about American public opinion or world public opinion, but the latter may end up leading more to their downfall than the former. As with Watergate, public opinion won’t bring down the regime, but competing factions of the ruling class who feel threatened by overreaching madman can. This time those factions are as much outside the United States as inside.

A Crack in the Alliance?

Some shots across the bow are being fired against the Bush neocons this week: the indictment of Larry Franklin , the filing of a bill calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and, most importantly, an ex-Bush adminsration official calling the official story of 911 “bogus.” Interestingly, this story also appeared in the (moonie-controlled) Washington Times.

Ex Bush official casts doubt on cause of Sep 11 attacks
Greg Szymanski

Tuesday 14th June, 2005
A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

'If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling,' said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding that scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.

'It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7,' said Reynolds this week from his offices at Texas A&M. 'If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.

'More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right.'

However, Reynolds said 'getting it right in today's security state' remains challenging because he claims explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed to address the major evidence contradicting the official version of 9/11.

Now, as Kurt Nimmo wrote:

Are you surprised? The Morgan Reynolds story about nine eleven being an "inside job" has received nada coverage beyond the original UPI story—that is to say nada coverage in the corporate media (it was covered immediately by Conspiracy Planet and Collective Bellaciao and I'm sure other alternative news sites). Google news search results are pathetic. You'd think this would be a HUGE story—a former Bushite declaring it is distinctly possible America was attacked by its own government—but instead we get the following (posted on the KLAS TV site):

The Michael Jackson verdict is was the lead story across the world. The Jackson trial was found not just on tabloids but also more high-minded newspapers.

But the fact that it appeared at all, and in a major newspaper created by a fascist faction of the CIA and Korean intelligence in alliance with Rev. Moon, no less, raises some questions.

Is something going on here behind the scenes? The indictment of Franklin for giving secrets to Israeli intelligence, a Bush figure saying the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled demolition, the press referring to a growing rift between Israel and the United States over arms sales to China, leads to the question: Is there a backlash brewing against Israel in the upper reaches of the U.S. power structure? Is is coincidental that a lawsuit was filed by the survivors of the Israeli attack on U.S.S. Liberty?

The China arms sale by Israel issue is telling. It looks like Israel, after getting the U.S. and Great Britain to do their dirty work for them by attacking Iran, may be noticing that the U.S. Empire is about to crumble and may be beginning to tilt towards the new superpower: China. Here is Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/588863.html on the dispute:

Rice says U.S. irked by Israeli arms sales to China
By The Associated Press

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Thursday that the United States has a sharp disagreement with Israel over its sale of military technology to China.

Israel "has a responsibility to be sensitive" to U.S. concerns, Rice said, adding that American officials have had "difficult" discussions on the subject with the Israelis.

"I think they understand now the seriousness of the matter," Rice said at a news conference.

She noted that there is increasing concern in Washington about military modernization in China.

China must not be allowed to undertake a "major military escalation" before there are assurances that it will be a "positive force" on the international scene, Rice said.

According to Israeli officials and recent media reports, the United States has imposed a series of sanctions on the Israeli arms industry in recent months because of it sales to China.

The United States has halted cooperation on several projects, frozen delivery of sensitive equipment, and is even refusing to answer telephone calls from Israeli defense officials, Haaretz reported this past weekend.

And,

Last update - 12:29 16/06/2005
Report: PM nixed U.S. request for news conference with Rice
By The Associated Press

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has rejected an American request that he hold a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she visits Israel and the Palestinian Authority next week, Army Radio reported Thursday.

According to the report, officials in Israel are exhibiting a "lack of enthusiasm" regarding the impending visit, stemming from criticism by administration and by EU officials over the level of cooperation Israel is displaying toward the Palestinians.

Could it be that some officials in the U.S. power structure are offended that Israel, for whom the U.S. has gotten ensared in Iraq and who still wants the U.S. to invade Iran for them, is tilting to China? Could that be why they are indicting Larry Franklin for doing what has been standard practice for the Bush administration neocons? Could that be why they are allowing little cracks in the official story of 911 to appear? Are they threatening Israel with revealing Mossad’s complicity in the 911 operation? Is this why the U.S.S. Liberty story is back in the news with the filing of war crimes charges against Israel by the head of the Liberty veterans’ association (http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=11137&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported)?

Or, could it be that the two countries’ interests are diverging in Iraq. The United States has always wanted an Iraq under the control of a military strongman under the control of the United States. Israel, on the other hand, has always wanted Iraq broken into small, ineffectual pieces. See this comment from Signs of the Times http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/signs20050613.htm:

It is no secret that, in the early 1980's under Reagan, many of the same staunchly pro-Israel NeoCons that currently occupy positions of power in the Bush administration were, in league with their Israeli couterparts, calling for an extensive restructuring of the Middle East map.

An ambitious report entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," which appeared in the World Zionist Organization's periodical Kivunim in February 1982 disclosed a strategy aimed at making the whole of the Middle East a kind of "living space" for Israel. The report, drawn up by Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist and formerly attached to the Foreign Ministry of Israel, set out the scenario of the "division of Iraq" in these terms:

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria… Iraq is, once again, no different in essence from its neighbors, although its majority is Shi'ite and the ruling minority Sunni. Sixty-five percent of the population has no say in politics, in which an elite of 20 percent holds the power. In addition there is a large Kurdish minority in the north, and if it weren't for the strength of the ruling regime, the army and the oil revenues, Iraq's future state would be no different than that of Lebanon in the past… In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.

Israel Shahak, The Zionist Plan for the Middle East; from Oded Yinon's "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties" Published by the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. Belmont, Massachusetts, 1982 Special Document No. 1 (ISBN 0-937694-56-8);

In this case, the 9/11 attacks take on a whole new meaning. No longer can they be considered a freak occurrence, but rather as part of a decades-old plan, if not the core event that would open the door to the plan's full implementation.

There are a lot of questions and few answers at this point. This “dispute” between the United States and Israel could be all for show. Again, the Signs of the Times commented under the name Ignatius O’Reilly :

Ah, tis a hornet's nest in the pyramid of entropy: so many different factions competing for control. Who is at the top?

…Clearly there is a very strong influence of Israel in US foreign policy. The Jewish lobby is doing effective work. The article above suggests that this influence has not been "impacted" by the Franklin revelations.

However, the Jewish lobby is not the only force at work. There are other interests with views that do not always coincide with it. There is a jockeying for position and power in the upper echelons ranging from the use of personal contacts and contributions to political campaigns, to dirty tricks, disinformation, spying, blackmail and other illicit means. The oil industries support for Saudi Arabia appears to be one such bone of contention, and the efforts we have seen attempting to tie the Saudis to 9/11 by the likes of Michael Moore and Daniel Hopsicker may be shots fired by the Jewish lobby against the oil lobby.

Bob Woodward and Mark Felt

Some commentators are saying that the Deep Throat “revelation” was suspiciously timed to distract attention from the Amnesty International report and from Bush’s dismal performance in his mini-press conference. Very probable when you look at the timing. This story could have come out at any time. The Signs of the Times page quoted this account of watching the news that day:

What's really amazing to me is that it isn't already obvious [to everyone] that he's delusional. Oddly enough, a few moments after he abruptly called an end to the press conference, they came on with the news flash about the identity of "Deep Throat."

On the other hand, maybe it could also be a signal sent to the Bush regime by the establishment. Certainly Bush does not want to think, and does not want other people thinking, about the conforting myth of the two young Washington Post reporters bringing down a corrupt, murderous President. Of course, the Washington Post pushed hard for the Iraq War and was firmly in the Bush camp. Could it be that they are angry at him for losing the Iraq War, for prosecuting it so badly? Will they get rid of him? Can they? Will it be the “Bush is gay and had a male prostitute in the White House” that they will trot out to do him in? Of course they are checkmated if they want to bring down Bush because Cheney is Vice-President and you would be getting more of the same if Bush resigns.

Or is the whole establishment on board with the Neocon-Likud party scheme for a collapse of the American Empire, the explosion of the Middle East and the establishment of Greater Israel? Will they stick with Bush?

There are so many candidates for a major scandal for Bush: 911, lies leading to the Iraq War, the AIPAC spy scandal, the American Gulag and war crimes charges against the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis (now there’s an axis of evil!), the looting of the Treasury, the bankrupting of the government, etc. Most of those cut too deep for the elite media, so my bet is on the Bush gay thing being promoted. That would get the U.S. public’s attention!

Bob Woodward published an amazing piece on Mark Felt in the Washington Post Thursday. It is a fairly long piece, so you get to watch how a master propagandist and intelligence agent decides what to say and what not to say.

First, a little background. Many have pointed out the obvious connections Woodward has with Naval Intelligence. He also went to Yale (a few years before Bush). Many have also pointed out how odd it was that he appeared on the Watergate story at that paper at that time. Watergate was most likely a CIA-run setup of Nixon (George Bush senior hovers around this story at crucal moments-- not a good sign). The Washington Post, as heavily connected with the secret government than perhaps any other paper, doesn’t usually go around toppling U.S. leaders, they are associated with the ones who CHOOSE the leaders. Why did they do it to Nixon. Some think it was to prevent Nixon from ending the Cold War. Remember how miserable Bush I looked when Soviet Communism collapsed. He was watching the possible death of the golden goose (defense contracts and other Military-Industrial Complex stuff). The cabal that was to become the Neocons were active at that time, led by Richard Perle and Senator Henry Jackson, who was able to end détente with the Soviet Union. They may also have feared that Nixon was gathering too much power to himelf personally, and that he was not stable or predictable enough. In any case, it was true that the establishment brought Nixon down, not the people. It doesn’t matter what we think, they will tell us what to think.

Jeff Wells wrote:

If the deeper truths of Watergate lead past the White House to the CIA, then Nixon himself is a victim, and not just of his own animus. And that muddies the morality tale. McCord got to play flawed hero during the Senate Hearings, and his and Hunt's CIA pedigree were not explored by legislators and journalists smelling the blood of an unpopular president. Former intelligence briefer Bob Woodward obligingly led the investigation away from the intelligence community, as did "Deep Throat," whether or not he really was the FBI's Mark Felt.

Nixon's cover-up - spurred by the fear that Hunt's arrest could lead to the reopening of the "Bay of Pigs thing" (his euphemism for the Kennedy assassination) - helped close the case that the story began and ended at his office.

Certainly no innocent, but not exactly guilty as charged, either. Nixon was himself, at last, a patsy.

Now Woodward in today’s Post, feinting in the direction of dark truths, hints that Nixon ordered the assassination attempt on George Wallace in 1972. George Wallace was running a racist, right-wing populist third party campaign for the presidency. His votes would have come directly from Nixon’s vote, enough to sway the election toward McGovern. But then, typically, he moves back to the quintessential establishment dismissal of a political assassin, he was a lone nut. Interestingly Woodward says now that his source for that was Felt:

Wallace had a strong following in the deep South, an increasing source of Nixon's support. Wallace's spoiler candidacy four years earlier in 1968 could have cost Nixon the election that year, and Nixon monitored Wallace's every move closely as the 1972 presidential contest continued.

That evening, Nixon called Felt -- not Gray, who was out of town -- at home for an update. It was the first time Felt had spoken directly with Nixon. Felt reported that Arthur H. Bremer, the would-be assassin, was in custody but in the hospital because he had been roughed up and given a few bruises by those who subdued and captured him after he shot Wallace.

"Well, it's too bad they didn't really rough up the son of a bitch!" Nixon told Felt.

Felt was offended that the president would make such a remark. Nixon was so agitated and worried, attaching such urgency to the shooting, that he said he wanted full updates every 30 minutes from Felt on any new information that was being discovered in the investigation of Bremer.

In the following days I called Felt several times and he very carefully gave me leads as we tried to find out more about Bremer. It turned out that he had stalked some of the other candidates, and I went to New York to pick up the trail. This led to several front-page stories about Bremer's travels, completing a portrait of a madman not singling out Wallace but rather looking for any presidential candidate to shoot. On May 18, I did a Page One article that said, among other things, "High federal officials who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer."

It was rather brazen of me. Though I was technically protecting my source and talked to others besides Felt, I did not do a good job of concealing where the information was coming from. Felt chastised me mildly. But the story that Bremer acted alone and without accomplices was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.

Woodward is doing his typical thing here, intimating that we are governed by people who would kill people who get in their way, while deflecting attention away from the people who have ruled us since, I don’t know, 1947 or 1963 and pinning it on the evil Nixon. That’s what Watergate did, all the establishment criminality of the FBI and CIA in the post-war period was put on Nixon and people like Bush, Rockefeller, Rumsfeld, and the like could come out looking clean and the dirty business could go on behind the scenes as usual. It also was a diversionary tactic that kept attention away from the Kennedy assassination, which, after Watergate became a “historical” topic, not a current events topic.

Woodward also now credits Felt with attempting to bring down Spiro Agnew early by leaking the information about a bribery charge to Woodward:

In the spring, he said in utter confidence that the FBI had some information that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had received a bribe of $2,500 in cash that Agnew had put in his desk drawer. I passed this on to Richard Cohen, the top Maryland reporter for The Post, not identifying the source at all. Cohen said, and later wrote in his book on the Agnew investigation, that he thought it was "preposterous." Another Post reporter and I spent a day chasing around Baltimore for the alleged person who supposedly knew about the bribe. We got nowhere. Two years later, the Agnew investigation revealed that the vice president had received such a bribe in his office.

Getting Agnew out of the way was important if they knew they were going to bring Nixon down, then the person selected as Vice President (or the person who controlled him) would be crucial. It turned out to be Gerald Ford, but it is known that George Bush the elder was pushing hard for it then and then again when Ford picked his VP. Bush lost that one to Nelson Rockefeller. I guess some people outrank the Bushes!

As for the Watergate story itself, notice how Woodward does his deflection again here:

In July, Carl went to Miami, home of four of the burglars, on the money trail, and he ingeniously tracked down a local prosecutor and his chief investigator, who had copies of $89,000 in Mexican checks and a $25,000 check that had gone into the account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the burglars. We were able to establish that the $25,000 check had been campaign money that had been given to Maurice H. Stans, Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a Florida golf course. The Aug. 1 story on this was the first to tie Nixon campaign money directly to Watergate.

This is it in a nutshell. The scandal was built on the $25,000 check, not the $89,000 “Mexican” checks that could be traced to what Nixon called: “the Texans,” in other words, the Bush-Oil/Bay of Pigs-Cuban/CIA/Kennedy assassination faction. The scandal diverted us from that toward Nixon’s criminality (and there was a lot of that to look at!).

The Woodward article also gives a good glimpse of how an ambitious young member of the spook elite, rises by attaching himself to a powerful mentor. What is laughable is his pretending to be adrift, just another young Naval officer trying to find his place in the world:

In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.

One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly.

I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir."

"Mark Felt," he said.

Woodward explains how he could be both adrift and highly ambitious:

This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale, where I had a Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship that required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree.

That means the Office of Naval Intelligence.

During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international relations.

…Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned that this was called the "goon squad."

Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter -- one of the most important in my life -- I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session.

Well, it’s a nice story and you can read more about the courtship in the article itself. What’s amazing is that he expects us to believe this:

In August 1970, I was formally discharged from the Navy. I had subscribed to The Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colorful, hard-charging editor named Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked; it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was much more than law school. Maybe reporting was something I could do.

During my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to The Post asking for a job as a reporter. Somehow -- I don't remember exactly how -- Harry Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero -- zero! -- experience. Why, he said, would The Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it. We'll give you a two-week tryout.

Clearly he was placed there for a reason by Naval Intelligence.