Is Civil War Coming?

Following up on the last post about Judith Miller, Wayne Madsen has some interesting speculations as to the significance:

It is clear that Miller was the missing link in Fitzgerald's criminal probe of the leak that a number of CIA insiders have told this editor was "devastating" to the agency. Miller's attorney claimed that Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a target of the leak probe, had released her from a confidentiality pledge. But that agreement had already been reported months ago. Something has changed. A former Justice Department prosecutor told this editor that Fitzgerald is the type of prosecutor who starts low in the food chain and works his way up to nab the big fish. Fitzgerald is said to have, very early on in the case, "flipped" John Hannah, Libby's deputy.

One possible explanation for the sudden turn of events regarding Miller and Libby is
that Fitzgerald may have also "flipped" Libby as a witness. A promise of limited immunity to Libby would have cleared the way for testimony from Miller on what she discussed with Cheney's chief of staff. That means the ultimate target of Fitzgerald could be Cheney.

There's an interesting footnote to the Cheney family's recent activities. Lynne Cheney was recently spotted at a Washington, DC Pottery Barn buying items for the Cheney's new $2.7 million house in St. Michael's on the eastern shore of Maryland. The Cheneys will be close neighbors of the Rumsfelds.

Dick Cheney recently had surgery on two aneurysms behind his knees, thus taking him out of the public spotlight more than is the usual case. The Soviet leadership, which the Bush administration has striven so much to emulate, used to exile their sacked leaders to dachas in the countryside. Might the same thing be in store for a Vice President named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the CIA leak case? A quick resignation prior to the 2006 elections and replacement by a Rudy Giuliani or George Pataki, or [shudders] Jeb Bush? And, of course, in traditional GOP fashion, a presidential pardon of unindicted co-conspirator Cheney (a la Gerald Ford and unindicted Watergate co-conspirator Richard Nixon).

Interesting also is the unintended juxtaposition of Madsen’s previous post about Blackwater USA:

Blackwater USA represents a return to "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." According to a knowledgeable political insider in Washington, the private military contractor Blackwater USA has close ties to the Christian Right. … Blackwater's CEO and co-founder is Michigan-based Erik D. Prince, an ex-US Navy SEAL, an heir to an automobile parts corporate fortune, a former intern for President George H. W. Bush, and a contributor to such right wing Republicans as recently indicted Tom DeLay. Prince also has strong political links to Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, one-time GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer, a political action committee called "Restoring the American Dream," (whose board of directors included Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, Robert Bork, former Rep. Steve Largent, Domino's Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, North Carolina Rep. Sue Myrick [appointed to the Joint Congressional "Review" panel for Hurricane Katrina relief], and former Rep. J. C. Watts) and, more interestingly, current House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) chairman Peter Hoekstra, who has been pressuring the CIA to accept more intelligence from HPSCI sources. The close connection between Hoekstra and Blackwater, a company that advertises its own intelligence gathering services: "Our mission is to provide the client with veteran military, intelligence and law enforcement professionals with demonstrated field operations performance tempered with mature experience in both foreign and domestic requirements," should be of concern to non-politicized and career U.S. intelligence professionals.

Blackwater maintains the largest private military training facility in the United States. Located on an abandoned U.S. military base at Moyock, North Carolina on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp near the North Carolina-Virginia border, Blackwater's Security Consulting subsidiary attracts military and paramilitary trainees from around the country and the world. Former Chilean and Honduran military personnel have been trained at Moyock prior to deployment to Iraq. What is even more attractive for the Bush administration and Blackwater is the fact that, as a private company, Blackwater is far removed from oversight by government inspectors general, Freedom of Information Act requests, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and snooping reporters.

Let’s recap. The pieces on the chessboard are starting to surround Bush-Cheney, starting from the outside moving in. It now appears much more likely that Cheney will be indicted for the Plame scandal. As we mentioned in the previous post, there are even rumblings around the whole Diebold issue, which could be THE biggest scandal in American political history if it turns out that proof can be had that the last three elections were stolen. DeLay has already been indicted and Frist may be next.

Now, add this to the picture: Paul Craig Roberts today claims that Bush is planning to initiate nuclear attacks on Iran and maybe North Korea. One hopes that such plans will occasion horror in the uniformed Pentagon leadership. Add to that the overturning of Posse Comitatus occasioned by Katrina wherein the Pentagon will now take over control of internal policing, disaster control and state militias (the National Guard are supposed to be under the command of State Governors under the U.S. Constitution). That last fact points to a military coup. As the httpSigns of the Times speculated:

“Military officials told President Bush on Sunday that the U.S. needs a national plan to coordinate search and rescue efforts following natural disasters or terrorist attacks...” Now it isn't the Bush administration that wants federal coordination of relief efforts after major disasters, it's the military leaders who are requesting that power for their bosses in Washington.

Now the question becomes, who will control the military. Will the Bush Crime Family be the victims or the beneficiaries of the military coup? It is now seeming more likely that it will be the victim, since the Pentagon brass is furious about the Iraq War and the ineptitude and arrogance of the Neocons at the civilian leadership level, which makes the role of mercenary companies like Blackwater with their ties to the brainwashed religious right more scary. You can now see the Civil War scenario. The U.S. military, overthrowing Bush using the courts and the Congress if they can, and emergency powers if they can’t, with the hard-line religious right opposing them with private militia companies. Where will Israel come down?

Will Bush go quietly like Nixon did, or will he (they) resist? Remember Bush senior and Alexander Haig were very worried at the end of Watergate that some military units would remain loyal to Nixon and they instructed the military at the very end to ignore any commands from Nixon.

Is Something Happening?

Something seems to be happening.

You have now indictments against Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader for money laundering, investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission against the Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for serious insider trading crimes involving a family owned business from a supposedly blind trust, the announcement today that Judith Miller will testify before Patrick Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury about the Valerie Plame case, putting even more heat on Cheney and Rove, possibly.

That takes care of all the poles of government controlled by the Republican party (leaving aside the Supreme Court). The DeLay indictment is the tip of the iceberg for him. Even if he beats this, the investigations into the dealings of his close associate Jack Abramoff will be much more dangerous for DeLay. The accusations against Abramoff include much fraud and money laundering but also a gangster-style murder!

Finally, there is the mysterious drop in the stock price of Diebold, a company that enabled the theft of the last three elections for the Bush Crime Family, for illegal activities in Georgia where they stole the 2002 Senate race, which turned the Senate back to Republican control, thereby preventing any serious investigations into Bush crimes.

What do all of these things have in common? Well, first of all, they are moving forward in a way that suggests that some Powers are letting them move forward. That’s especially the case with Judy Miller, who always sucks up to whoevers powerful at the moment. If she flips, that says a lot. They are coming at a time as well when Bush’s political popularity has fallen through the floor.

The legal issues are serious, but so are the political ones since, when corruption charges pile up like this at a time of perceived political incompetence and failure, the public can turn on the party in charge viciously. Of course we have been living in a one-party state, so there is no opposition party to take advantage of this. In such states, what often happens in these circumstances is a coup backed by popular revulsion against the groups in power.

David Remnick Doing Boundary Maintenance Again

New Yorker editor David Remnick published a article in this week’s New Yorker about Hurricane Katrina. Like most of his pieces it starts out with promise but soon becomes profoundly disappointing. He begins with a description of Lyndon Johnson’s response to Hurricane Betsy, an obvious contrast to Bush’s reaction to Katrina. But then, in the section where Remnick becomes a reporter and interviews various victims of Katrina, he plays the role of establishment debunker in a clumsy way.

Interviewing African-American hurricane victims, Remnick is soon forced to confront the belief that the poor, black areas of New Orleans were deliberately flooded both in Betsy and Katrina. Remnick seems to believe that all he has to do to debunk any such claim is to label it “conspiracy theory.” Comparing Katrina to Betsy, Remnick writes:

The pattern in Katrina’s wake is similar. Everywhere I went in Louisiana and Texas to talk to evacuees, many of the poorest among them were not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act. (David Remnick, “High Water: What Bush Failed to Learn from L.B.J.,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2005: p. 53)

Now comes the time to calmly reassure the readers and begin to ridicule the accusers:

The link between conspiracy theory and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was the “silver lining scenario.” For most, it hardly seemed to matter that some wealthier neighborhoods in New Orleans, particularly Lakeview, did not escape damage. (p. 55)

That paragraph is odious. Remnick ignores the widely circulated statement by a certified member of the “white power structure,” James Reiss, in New Orleans published in the Wall Street Journal:

James Reiss, [is a] descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.

The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

That right there is proof of the motive for the conspiracy. Now you can’t tell me that David Remnick doesn’t read the Wall Street Journal.

Note the technique he uses: by lumping accusations of cannibalism among southern planters with the well-documented wish of the ruling class in New Orleans to have a cleaned up Las Vegas-style simulacrum of Bourbon Street New Orleans to attract tourists and corporate conventions, he deflects the reader from any rational historical look at the possibility that the accusations of the evacuees might be true. Here is another telling passage:

At the Houston Astrodome, for instance, people made statements and asked questions that mixed the logical and the conspiratorial. (p. 55)

Notice how here the opposite of logical is conspiratorial. Say what you want about conspiracy theorists, but they are always “logical.” They always posit a motive and a logical series of inferences based on evidence. Although the evidence is often murky, the process of coming to a “conspiratorial” conclusion is usually more logical than the thinking processes of “coincidence theorists.”

As for Remnick’s simultaneous ridiculing of conspiracy theories about Betsy, here’s Kurt Nimmo and Wikipedia:

In 1927, the so-called Great Mississippi Flood was used to ethnically cleanse African-Americans. “As the flood approached New Orleans, Louisiana 30 tons of dynamite were set off on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana,” explains Wikipedia. “This prevented New Orleans from experiencing serious damage but destroyed much of the marsh below the city and flooded all of St. Bernard Parish… During the disaster 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Over 13,000 refugees near Greenville, Mississippi were gathered from area farms and evacuated to the crest of an unbroken levee, and stranded there for days without food or clean water, while boats arrived to evacuate white women and children. Many African-Americans were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts… The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities.” (Emphasis added.)

Remnick, if he is sincere and not engaging in disinfo and psyops (he was an American “journalist” in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, if you catch my drift), seems to think either that “They wouldn’t do THIS,” or THEY wouldn’t do this.” In other words, although history is replete with horrible acts of planned genocide and ethnic cleansing, the accusations in New Orleans go beyond what that particular ruling group would do or that that group is not as bad as all the other ruling groups in history. So who’s logical now?

Many earnest white people have wondered why African-Americans believe in more conspiracies than other U.S. citizens. Maybe it is because they have never been allowed to have any illusions about the nature of the rulers.

Psyops and Disinfo in New Orleans

Here is how the disinfo boys and girls work. In an article in the Los Angeles Times, we now find out that all those lurid stories about rampages, rapes and murders in the Superdome are not true.

But by now the damage is done. The reports were circulated by the media, confirming white folk's fears of rampaging blacks. Fascist talk radio and blogs picked it up and ran with it for weeks so that now it is part of accepted mythology. The mythology works for the Powers that Be on several levels. Once again, any possibility united front of average people against a psychopathic power structure is prevented by pitting whites against blacks using deep subconscious fears. It makes U.S. citizens seem "foreign." It also is designed to make people welcome military takeovers in "emergency" situations, with the definitions of 'emergency' no doubt becoming broader and broader as time goes by.

Then, weeks later, it turns out that none of it was true. But will the media blast that news everywhere like the erroneous reports were? Of course not. NPR, the L.A. Times and a few elite outlets will run one-time pieces, a few op-ed columnists will comment on it and that will be it. Don't hold your breath for Drudge, Limbaugh or O'Reilly to retract anything. So, unlike the L.A. Times, I don't think that this happened by accident. It has the earmarks of a psyops disinfo operation.

Here is some of the L.A. Times article:

Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy

Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong.

By Susannah Rosenblatt and James RaineyTimes Staff Writers

September 27, 2005

BATON ROUGE, La. — Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane.

The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans' main evacuation shelter. Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports."

It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Bush said Monday of the Superdome.His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified "rapes," and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of "scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials."

Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.

The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement."

It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."

Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

The New York Times repeated some of the reports of violence and unrest, but the newspaper usually was more careful to note that the information could not be verified.

British Caught Red-Handed in False Flag Operation

I am nearly at a loss for words at the news out of Basra. Seldom has a false flag operation been so completely exposed in the mainstream media. I will quote the editors of Signs of the Times and Rigorous Intuition's Jeff Wells since they said everything that needs to be said about this.

Here's Signs of the Times:

There is a saying of sorts that "if you are going to do something, do it well", and given the serious consequences, nowhere is that more true than when you plan to engage in criminal activity. Today in Basra, Southern Iraq, two members of the British SAS (Special Ops) were caught, 'in flagrante' as it were, dressed in full "Arab garb", driving a car full of explosives and shooting and killing two official Iraqi policemen.

This fact, finally reported by the mainstream press, goes to the very heart of and proves accurate much of what we have been saying on the Signs of the Times page for several years.

The following are facts, indisputable by all but the most self-deluded:

Number 1:

The US and British invasion of Iraq was NOT for the purpose of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqi people, but rather for the purpose of securing Iraq's oil resources for the US and British governments and expanding their control over the greater Middle East.

Number 2:

Both the Bush and Blair governments deliberately fabricated evidence (lied) about the threat the Saddam posed to the west and his links to the mythical 'al-Qaeda' in order to justify their invasion.

Number 3:

Dressed as Arabs, British (and CIA and Israeli) 'special forces' have been carrying out fake "insurgent" attacks, including 'car suicide bombings' against Iraqi policemen and Iraqi civilians (both Sunni and Shia) for the past two years. Evidence would suggest that these tactics are designed to provide continued justification for a US and British military presence in Iraq and to ultimately embroil the country in a civil war that will lead to the breakup of Iraq into more manageable statelets, much to the joy of the Israeli right and their long-held desire for the establishment of biblical 'greater Israel'

Coming not long after the botched London bombings carried out by British MI5 where an eyewitness reported that the floor of one of the trains had been blown inwards (how can a bomb in a backpack or on a "suicide bomber" INSIDE the train ever produce such an effect), more than anything else today's event in Basra highlights the desperation that is driving the policy-makers in the British government.

British intelligence would do well to think twice about carrying out any more 'false flag' operations until they can achieve the 'professionalism' of the Israeli Mossad - they always make it look convincing and rarely suffer the ignominy of being caught in the act and having the faces of their erstwhile "terrorists" plastered across the pages of the mainstream media.

Here's Jeff Wells:

Damn the blind eyes of anyone who still can't see after Basra.

How it began:"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.

Here are the two while in Iraqi police custody. Reuters appended a note to each photo over the wire: "ATTENTION EDITORS - THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTS THAT THE IDENTIFICATION OF THIS MAN IS NOT REVEALED, EITHER VIA PIXELLATION OF THEIR FACES OR BY NOT PUBLISHING THE PHOTOS."

As you probably know, they didn't remain in custody for long:

British forces using tanks broke down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra late Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos, who had been arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.

Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled the jail.

Violence flared earlier in the day as demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks; at least four people were killed.

The British Defense Ministry spun, but found it difficult to maneuver with its pants about its ankles. "We‘ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison," a defense ministry spokesman in London said. "We understand there were negotiations." When it found some equilibrium, it changed its story to better comport with the undeniables: "We understand that the authorities ordered their release. Unfortunately they weren't released and we became concerned for their safety and as a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke down the perimeter wall in one place."

These hard men, likely SAS ops, must have had some stories to tell, otherwise tanks would not have negotiated their way through the prison walls of Britain's reputed hosts so soon after their capture.

Walking into the untidied mess of this astonishing and grotesque and predictable story feels a bit like the British detective catching the killer red-handed: "Well well well, what have we here?" We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.

It doesn't make sense? Only if you haven't been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy: blow up the Hajis and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game, and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.

I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we won't forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.

The German Elections

The negotiations after the German elections show the true futility of electoral democracy, even with a multiparty system (we already knew a two party system was worthless, see the U.S. and U.K. elections where both parties supported the Iraq War, while most people opposed it—the most important issue by far in both elections).

While the results were a clear defeat for the globalizers since their candidate was clearly the CDU’s Angela Merkel, the forces of capital have managed to prevent a left coalition from even being considered in Germany even though left of center parties got a majority of the vote. How did they manage that?

Here is what AFP newswire says about the options:

But provisional official results gave the Christian Democrats 35.2 percent, one of their worst scores since World War II, and only narrowly ahead of the Social Democrats (SPD) at 34.3 percent.

The Free Democrats scored a surprisingly strong 9.8 percent, but not enough for Merkel to form the center-right majority she said she needed to rejuvenate the economy and help 4.7 million jobless back to work.

The Greens, partners in the current ruling coalition, tallied 8.1 percent -- too little to save the government in its current form.

But the Social Democrats' dramatic comeback after weeks trailing badly in the polls prompted the charismatic Schroeder, 61, to stake a claim for a third term as chancellor.

The audacious move was starting to look more plausible as it became clear that Merkel would also have a tough time finding viable partners.

Three main options emerged as parties weighed their options.

- An unwieldy left-right "grand coalition" grouping Social Democrats and Christian Democrats -- a choice Merkel had labeled as a recipe for gridlock.

- A center-left alliance bringing together the Social Democrats, Greens and the Free Democrats, known as the "traffic light coalition" for the party colors red, yellow and green.

- A left-center-right alliance linking up the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens. Wags have dubbed this the "Jamaica coalition" as its party colors would match the Caribbean country's flag.

What option is missing? A left coalition, headed by Schroeder, joining the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party (or PDS, the Party of German Socialism). That would have a clear majority, since the Left Party, headed by a popular former leader of the SPD, Oskar Lafontaine, got 8.7% percent of the vote. Note that the Left Party’s results were not even included in the AFP article quoted above, nor was a left coalition even mentioned. The left coalition would have a majority of the vote, 51.1%, so there is still a clear left preference in Germany in spite of the bad economy.

The establishment is willing to consider all kinds of left-right Frankenstein coalitions instead of the natural left coalition (the right does not have a majority, so in order for the CDU to form a government they would have to bring in the Greens (not exactly a natural coalition partner), shredding what little credibility the Green Party has left, or try to form a unity government with the SPD. Now Schroeder right from the start ruled out bringing in the Left Party. Why?

Granted there is a lot of bad blood between Lafontaine and Schroeder, but one would think raw ambition would pave the way for a left coalition. But here’s the rub. The Left Party came into being by attracting disaffected Social Democrats who didn’t like the “reform” approach Schroeder was taking. By “reform” we mean making Germany more hospitable to the interests of global capital. The Left Party wanted Germany to keep it’s labor-friendly, social welfare policies intact. But Schroeder, nominally a socialist (the SPD is a socialist party, although the non-German press calls them Social Democrats because socialism is a bad word in the Anglo-American world), has committed himself to “reforming” German socialism by taking rights and benefits away from workers and citizens. The Left Party opposes that choice.

But Schroeder is a “New Social Democrat” just like Blair is a “new Labor” PM and Clinton was a “New Democrat.” These politicians could put a friendlier, more human face to the vicious, predatory policies of global, corporate late capitalism. But they all, at some point, were told that they could not have power if they ever turned away from the dictates of their masters. Blunting the popular forces of reform in the interests of the owning class was always the role of the Democratic Party in the United States, but for some reason we expect better of the world’s oldest socialist party, the German Social Democratic Party.

It looks like the only place that there is a real choice for voters is in Venezuela.

Climate Change and Control Plans

According to scientists quoted in an article in the Independent:

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

From today's Signs of the Times on the supposed "incompetence" of the federal response to Katrina:

Suppose... leaders are well-aware that the past due date on modern civilisation expired at the turn of the millennium and that we are living as it were on borrowed time? What if they were aware that the changes in climate are irreversible, that ever greater disasters, disasters that will make Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Southeast Asia seem tame in comparison, are inevitable?

Rather than the fruit of ineptitude and contempt, might we not find their policy borne of calculation and contempt? (You didn't think we'd leave the contempt out of the equation, did you?)

We think that this is in fact was is happening. Leaders like Bush and those pulling his strings know very well that Katrina is not an isolated incident. They are expecting worse. In order to prepare, they are locking down the planet in order to be able to control the population, to contain the damage that they, themselves, will suffer while buried deep in their bunkers and underground cities as they ride out of storm.

To fall for the explanation of ineptitude is to react as they are planning, as they are hoping, because as long as we fool ourselves into thinking they are bumbling idiots, we will not see the truly sinister plans their tom-foolery is hiding. As with 9/11 where we were fed the line that it was an "intelligence failure", once more we are being told that these men are "disconnected". Yes, they are disconnected in the sense that they are psychopaths who are incapable of feeling anything for another human being. But these people are not disconnected from reality. They may have a better view on reality than most of their critics because they know what is coming, and they are actively preparing for it while the "opposition" is lost in the illusion that things haven't changed, that the ground-rules are the same.

Whether or not global warming is the result of human action or is a natural cycle, it is here and it is having an effect. We think that even if human action may play a role, it is not the only cause, and some of the causes are things over which we have no control. Think changes in the cosmos. Think meteors falling like rain.

Our leaders know that this is what is on the way. We can see how they are reacting, how they are preparing.

Don't Forget about Iraq

Let’s not let Katrina make us forget Tal Afar. Not only does Bush govern from disaster to disaster, as Jeff Wells puts it, with each new disaster wiping out the memory of the last one, but when a really big one like Katrina happens, they can use the cover to conduct another massacre, experiment with banned weapons, and complete the destruction of a historic city (Tal Afar) like they did with Faluja. See this by Xymphora, and this by Mike Whitney

They have committed so many crimes that we are in danger of becoming numb to it until a new one happens.

911, Katrina and Psychopaths

One obstacle I find often when talking to people about the possibility that 911 was an inside job is the fact that for people who have a conscience it is hard to imagine that others could be so amoral. Ran Prieur put it nicely:

September 11. I'm reading speculation that the levee in New Orleans was purposely blown up. I have no doubt that the rulers would do it -- it's a great way to kill the poor and wipe the city "clean" for their utopia. But just because they would, doesn't mean they did. Motive is not evidence.

If you don't think they would, I'm sorry, but the odds are not with you in these times. I'll say it again: unless you can get yourself in a mind space of having zero empathy (and come back from it), you will never understand your enemies, and they will destroy you. You actually have the advantage -- inside you is a reptile brain ready to teach you how psychopaths think, while they have no way to understand how you think.

David Ray Griffin's "The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571 Page Lie"

The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571 Page Lie
by Dr. David Ray Griffin

In discussing my second 9/11 book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I have often said, only half in jest, that a better title might have been "a 571-page lie." (Actually, I was saying "a 567-page lie," because I was forgetting to count the four pages of the Preface.) In making this statement, one of my points has been that the entire Report is constructed in support of one big lie: that the official story about 9/11 is true.

Another point, however, is that in the process of telling this overall lie, The 9/11 Commission Report tells many lies about particular issues. This point is implied by my critique's subtitle, "Omissions and Distortions." It might be thought, to be sure, that of the two types of problems signaled by those two terms, only those designated "distortions" can be considered lies.

It is better, however, to understand the two terms as referring to two types of lies: implicit and explicit. We have an explicit lie when the Report claims that the core of each of the Twin Towers consisted of a hollow steel shaft or when it claims that Vice President Cheney did not give the shoot-down order until after 10:10 that morning. But we have an implicit lie when the Commission, in its discussion of the 19 alleged suicide hijackers, omits the fact that at least six of them have credibly been reported to be still alive, or when it fails to mention the fact that Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed. Such omissions are implicit lies partly because they show that the Commission did not honor its stated intention "to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11." They are also lies insofar as the Commission could avoid telling an explicit lie about the issue in question only by not mentioning it, which, I believe, was the case in at least most instances.

Given these two types of lies, it might be wondered how many lies are contained in The 9/11 Commission Report. I do not know. But, deciding to see how many lies I had discussed in my book, I found that I had identified over 100 of them. Once I had made the list, it occurred to me that others might find this summary helpful. Hence this article.

One caveat: Although in some of the cases it is obvious that the Commission has lied, in other cases I would say, as I make clear in the book, that it appears that the Commission has lied. However, in the interests of simply giving a brief listing of claims that I consider to be lies, I will ignore this distinction between obvious and probable lies, leaving it to readers, if they wish, to look up the discussion in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. For ease in doing this, I have parenthetically indicated the pages of the book on which the various issues are discussed.

Given this clarification, I now list the omissions and claims of The 9/11 Commission Report that I, in my critique of that report, portrayed as lies:

1. The omission of evidence that at least six of the alleged hijackers - including Waleed al-Shehri, said by the Commission probably to have stabbed a flight attendant on Flight 11 before it crashed into the North Tower of the WTC - are still alive (19-20).

2. The omission of evidence about Mohamed Atta - such as his reported fondness for alcohol, pork, and lap dances -- that is in tension with the Commission's claim that he had become fanatically religious (20-21).

3. The obfuscation of the evidence that Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner into the Pentagon (21-22).

4. The omission of the fact that the publicly released flight manifests contain no Arab names (23).

5. The omission of the fact that fire has never, before or after 9/11, caused steel-frame buildings to collapse (25).

6. The omission of the fact that the fires in the Twin Towers were not very big, very hot, or very long-lasting compared with fires in several steel-frame buildings that did not collapse (25-26).

7. The omission of the fact that, given the hypothesis that the collapses were caused by fire, the South Tower, which was struck later than the North Tower and also had smaller fires, should not have collapsed first (26).

8. The omission of the fact that WTC 7 (which was not hit by an airplane and which had only small, localized fires) also collapsed - an occurrence that FEMA admitted it could not explain (26).

9. The omission of the fact that the collapse of the Twin Towers (like that of Building 7) exemplified at least 10 features suggestive of controlled demolition (26-27).

10. The claim that the core of each of the Twin Towers was "a hollow steel shaft" - a claim that denied the existence of the 47 massive steel columns that in reality constituted the core of each tower and that, given the "pancake theory" of the collapses, should have still been sticking up many hundreds of feet in the air (27-28).

11. The omission of Larry Silverstein's statement that he and the fire department commander decided to "pull" Building 7 (28).

12. The omission of the fact that the steel from the WTC buildings was quickly removed from the crime scene and shipped overseas before it could be analyzed for evidence of explosives (30).

13. The omission of the fact that because Building 7 had been evacuated before it collapsed, the official reason for the rapid removal of the steel - that some people might still be alive in the rubble under the steel - made no sense in this case (30).

14. The omission of Mayor Giuliani's statement that he had received word that the World Trade Center was going to collapse (30-31).

15. The omission of the fact that President Bush's brother Marvin and his cousin Wirt Walker III were both principals in the company in charge of security for the WTC (31-32).

16. The omission of the fact that the west wing of the Pentagon would have been the least likely spot to be targeted by al-Qaeda terrorists, for several reasons (33-34).

17. The omission of any discussion of whether the damage done to the Pentagon was consistent with the impact of a Boeing 757 going several hundred miles per hour (34).

18. The omission of the fact that there are photos showing that the west wing's façade did not collapse until 30 minutes after the strike and also that the entrance hole appears too small for a Boeing 757 to have entered (34).

19. The omission of all testimony that has been used to cast doubt on whether remains of a Boeing 757 were visible either inside or outside the Pentagon (34-36).

20. The omission of any discussion of whether the Pentagon has a anti-missile defense system that would have brought down a commercial airliner - even though the Commission suggested that the al-Qaeda terrorists did not attack a nuclear power plant because they assumed that it would be thus defended (36).

21. The omission of the fact that pictures from various security cameras - including the camera at the gas station across from the Pentagon, the film from which was reportedly confiscated by the FBI immediately after the strike - could presumably answer the question of what really hit the Pentagon (37-38).

22. The omission of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's reference to "the missile [used] to damage [the Pentagon]" (39).

23. The apparent endorsement of a wholly unsatisfactory answer to the question of why the Secret Service agents allowed President Bush to remain at the Sarasota school at a time when, given the official story, they should have assumed that a hijacked airliner might be about to crash into the school (41-44).

24. The failure to explore why the Secret Service did not summon fighter jets to provide air cover for Air Force One (43-46).

25. The claims that when the presidential party arrived at the school, no one in the party knew that several planes had been hijacked (47-48).

26. The omission of the report that Attorney General Ashcroft was warned to stop using commercial airlines prior to 9/11 (50).

27. The omission of David Schippers' claim that he had, on the basis of information provided by FBI agents about upcoming attacks in lower Manhattan, tried unsuccessfully to convey this information to Attorney General Ashcroft during the six weeks prior to 9/11 (51).

28. The omission of any mention of the FBI agents who reportedly claimed to have known the targets and dates of the attacks well in advance (51-52).

29. The claim, by means of a circular, question-begging rebuttal, that the unusual purchases of put options prior to 9/11 did not imply advance knowledge of the attacks on the part of the buyers (52-57).

30. The omission of reports that both Mayor Willie Brown and some Pentagon officials received warnings about flying on 9/11 (57).

31. The omission of the report that Osama bin Laden, who already was America's "most wanted" criminal, was treated in July 2001 by an American doctor in the American Hospital in Dubai and visited by the local CIA agent (59).

32. The omission of news stories suggesting that after 9/11 the US military in Afghanistan deliberately allowed Osama bin Laden to escape (60).

33. The omission of reports, including the report of a visit to Osama bin Laden at the hospital in Dubai by the head of Saudi intelligence, that were in tension with the official portrayal of Osama as disowned by his family and his country (60-61).

34. The omission of Gerald Posner's account of Abu Zubaydah's testimony, according to which three members of the Saudi royal family - all of whom later died mysteriously within an eight-day period - were funding al-Qaeda and had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks (61-65).

35. The Commission's denial that it found any evidence of Saudi funding of al-Qaeda (65-68).

36. The Commission's denial in particular that it found any evidence that money from Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa, went to al-Qaeda operatives (69-70).

37. The denial, by means of simply ignoring the distinction between private and commercial flights, that the private flight carrying Saudis from Tampa to Lexington on September 13 violated the rules for US airspace in effect at the time (71-76).

38. The denial that any Saudis were allowed to leave the United States shortly after 9/11 without being adequately investigated (76-82).

39. The omission of evidence that Prince Bandar obtained special permission from the White House for the Saudi flights (82-86).

40. The omission of Coleen Rowley's claim that some officials at FBI headquarters did see the memo from Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams (89-90).

41. The omission of Chicago FBI agent Robert Wright's charge that FBI headquarters closed his case on a terrorist cell, then used intimidation to prevent him from publishing a book reporting his experiences (91).

42. The omission of evidence that FBI headquarters sabotaged the attempt by Coleen Rowley and other Minneapolis agents to obtain a warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer (91-94).

43. The omission of the 3.5 hours of testimony to the Commission by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds - testimony that, according to her later public letter to Chairman Kean, revealed serious 9/11-related cover-ups by officials at FBI headquarters (94-101).

44. The omission of the fact that General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency (the ISI), was in Washington the week prior to 9/11, meeting with CIA chief George Tenet and other US officials (103-04).

45. The omission of evidence that ISI chief Ahmad had ordered $100,000 to be sent to Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11 (104-07).

46. The Commission's claim that it found no evidence that any foreign government, including Pakistan, had provided funding for the al-Qaeda operatives (106).

47. The omission of the report that the Bush administration pressured Pakistan to dismiss Ahmad as ISI chief after the appearance of the story that he had ordered ISI money sent to Atta (107-09).

48. The omission of evidence that the ISI (and not merely al-Qaeda) was behind the assassination of Ahmad Shah Masood (the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance), which occurred just after the week-long meeting between the heads of the CIA and the ISI (110-112).

49. The omission of evidence of ISI involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Reporter Daniel Pearl (113).

50. The omission of Gerald Posner's report that Abu Zubaydah claimed that a Pakistani military officer, Mushaf Ali Mir, was closely connected to both the ISI and al-Qaeda and had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks (114).

51. The omission of the 1999 prediction by ISI agent Rajaa Gulum Abbas that the Twin Towers would be "coming down" (114).

52. The omission of the fact that President Bush and other members of his administration repeatedly spoke of the 9/11 attacks as "opportunities" (116-17).

53. The omission of the fact that The Project for the New American Century, many members of which became key figures in the Bush administration, published a document in 2000 saying that "a new Pearl Harbor" would aid its goal of obtaining funding for a rapid technological transformation of the US military (117-18).

54. The omission of the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, who as head of the commission on the US Space Command had recommended increased funding for it, used the attacks of 9/11 on that very evening to secure such funding (119-22).

55. The failure to mention the fact that three of the men who presided over the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks - Secretary Rumsfeld, General Richard Myers, and General Ralph Eberhart - were also three of the strongest advocates for the US Space Command (122).

56. The omission of the fact that Unocal had declared that the Taliban could not provide adequate security for it to go ahead with its oil-and-gas pipeline from the Caspian region through Afghanistan and Pakistan (122-25).

57. The omission of the report that at a meeting in July 2001, US representatives said that because the Taliban refused to agree to a US proposal that would allow the pipeline project to go forward, a war against them would begin by October (125-26).

58. The omission of the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book had said that for the United States to maintain global primacy, it needed to gain control of Central Asia, with its vast petroleum reserves, and that a new Pearl Harbor would be helpful in getting the US public to support this imperial effort (127-28).

59. The omission of evidence that some key members of the Bush administration, including Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, had been agitating for a war with Iraq for many years (129-33).

60. The omission of notes of Rumsfeld's conversations on 9/11 showing that he was determined to use the attacks as a pretext for a war with Iraq (131-32).

61. The omission of the statement by the Project for the New American Century that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein" (133-34).

62. The claim that FAA protocol on 9/11 required the time-consuming process of going through several steps in the chain of command - even though the Report cites evidence to the contrary (158).

63. The claim that in those days there were only two air force bases in NORAD's Northeast sector that kept fighters on alert and that, in particular, there were no fighters on alert at either McGuire or Andrews (159-162).

64. The omission of evidence that Andrews Air Force Base did keep several fighters on alert at all times (162-64).

65. The acceptance of the twofold claim that Colonel Marr of NEADS had to telephone a superior to get permission to have fighters scrambled from Otis and that this call required eight minutes (165-66).

66. The endorsement of the claim that the loss of an airplane's transponder signal makes it virtually impossible for the US military's radar to track that plane (166-67).

67. The claim that the Payne Stewart interception did not show NORAD's response time to Flight 11 to be extraordinarily slow (167-69).

68. The claim that the Otis fighters were not airborne until seven minutes after they received the scramble order because they did not know where to go (174-75).

69. The claim that the US military did not know about the hijacking of Flight 175 until 9:03, when it was crashing into the South Tower (181-82).

70. The omission of any explanation of (a) why NORAD's earlier report, according to which the FAA had notified the military about the hijacking of Flight 175 at 8:43, was now to be considered false and (b) how this report, if it was false, could have been published and then left uncorrected for almost three years (182).

71. The claim that the FAA did not set up a teleconference until 9:20 that morning (183).

72. The omission of the fact that a memo by Laura Brown of the FAA says that its teleconference was established at about 8:50 and that it included discussion of Flight 175's hijacking (183-84, 186).

73. The claim that the NMCC teleconference did not begin until 9:29 (186-88).

74. The omission, in the Commission's claim that Flight 77 did not deviate from its course until 8:54, of the fact that earlier reports had said 8:46 (189-90).

75. The failure to mention that the report that a large jet had crashed in Kentucky, at about the time Flight 77 disappeared from FAA radar, was taken seriously enough by the heads of the FAA and the FBI's counterterrorism unit to be relayed to the White House (190).

76. The claim that Flight 77 flew almost 40 minutes through American airspace towards Washington without being detected by the military's radar (191-92).

77. The failure to explain, if NORAD's earlier report that it was notified about Flight 77 at 9:24 was "incorrect," how this erroneous report could have arisen, i.e., whether NORAD officials had been lying or simply confused for almost three years (192-93).

78. The claim that the Langley fighter jets, which NORAD had previously said were scrambled to intercept Flight 77, were actually scrambled in response to an erroneous report from an (unidentified) FAA controller at 9:21 that Flight 11 was still up and was headed towards Washington (193-99).

79. The claim that the military did not hear from the FAA about the probable hijacking of Flight 77 before the Pentagon was struck (204-12).

80. The claim that Jane Garvey did not join Richard Clarke's videoconference until 9:40, after the Pentagon was struck (210).

81. The claim that none of the teleconferences succeeded in coordinating the FAA and military responses to the hijackings because "none of [them] included the right officials from both the FAA and the Defense Department" - although Richard Clarke says that his videoconference included FAA head Jane Garvey as well as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, the acting chair of the joint chiefs of staff (211).

82. The Commission's claim that it did not know who from the Defense Department participated in Clarke's videoconference - although Clarke's book said that it was Donald Rumsfeld and General Myers (211-212).

83. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that he was on Capitol Hill during the attacks, without mentioning Richard Clarke's contradictory account, according to which Myers was in the Pentagon participating in Clarke's videoconference (213-17).

84. The failure to mention the contradiction between Clarke's account of Rumsfeld's whereabouts that morning and Rumsfeld's own accounts (217-19).

85. The omission of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony, given to the Commission itself, that Vice-President Cheney and others in the underground shelter were aware by 9:26 that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon (220).

86. The claim that Pentagon officials did not know about an aircraft approaching Pentagon until 9:32, 9:34, or 9:36 - in any case, only a few minutes before the building was hit (223).

87. The endorsement of two contradictory stories about the aircraft that hit the Pentagon - one in which it executed a 330-degree downward spiral (a "high-speed dive") and another in which there is no mention of this maneuver (222-23).

88. The claim that the fighter jets from Langley, which were allegedly scrambled to protect Washington from "Phantom Flight 11," were nowhere near Washington because they were mistakenly sent out to sea (223-24).

89. The omission of all the evidence suggesting that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77 (224-25).

90. The claim that the military was not notified by the FAA about Flight 93's hijacking until after it crashed (227-29, 232, 253).

91. The twofold claim that the NMCC did not monitor the FAA-initiated conference and then was unable to get the FAA connected to the NMCC-initiated teleconference (230-31).

92. The omission of the fact that the Secret Service is able to know everything that the FAA knows (233).

93. The omission of any inquiry into why the NMCC initiated its own teleconference if, as Laura Brown of the FAA has said, this is not standard protocol (234).

94. The omission of any exploration of why General Montague Winfield not only had a rookie (Captain Leidig) take over his role as the NMCC's Director of Operations but also left him in charge after it was clear that the Pentagon was facing an unprecedented crisis (235-36).

95. The claim that the FAA (falsely) notified the Secret Service between 10:10 and 10:15 that Flight 93 was still up and headed towards Washington (237).

96. The claim that Vice President Cheney did not give the shoot-down authorization until after 10:10 (several minutes after Flight 93 had crashed) and that this authorization was not transmitted to the US military until 10:31 (237-41).

97. The omission of all the evidence indicating that Flight 93 was shot down by a military plane (238-39, 252-53).

98. The claim that Richard Clarke did not receive the requested shoot-down authorization until 10:25 (240).

99. The omission of Clarke's own testimony, which suggests that he received the shoot-down authorization by 9:50 (240).

100. The claim that Cheney did not reach the underground shelter (the PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center]) until 9:58 (241-44).

101. The omission of multiple testimony, including that of Norman Mineta to the Commission itself, that Cheney was in the PEOC before 9:20 (241-44).

102. The claim that shoot-down authorization must be given by the president (245).

103. The omission of reports that Colonel Marr ordered a shoot-down of Flight 93 and that General Winfield indicated that he and others at the NMCC had expected a fighter jet to reach Flight 93 (252).

104. The omission of reports that there were two fighter jets in the air a few miles from NYC and three of them only 200 miles from Washington (251).

105. The omission of evidence that there were at least six bases with fighters on alert in the northeastern part of the United States (257-58).

106. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that NORAD had defined its mission in terms of defending only against threats from abroad (258-62).

107. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that NORAD had not recognized the possibility that terrorists might use hijacked airliners as missiles (262-63).

108. The failure to highlight the significance of evidence presented in the Report itself, and to mention other evidence, showing that NORAD had indeed recognized the threat that hijacked airliners might be used as missiles (264-67).

109. The failure to probe the issue of how the "war games" scheduled for that day were related to the military's failure to intercept the hijacked airliners (268-69).

110. The failure to discuss the possible relevance of Operation Northwoods to the attacks of 9/11 (269-71).

111. The claim - made in explaining why the military did not get information about the hijackings in time to intercept them - that FAA personnel inexplicably failed to follow standard procedures some 16 times (155-56, 157, 179, 180, 181, 190, 191, 193, 194, 200, 202-03, 227, 237, 272-75).

112. The failure to point out that the Commission's claimed "independence" was fatally compromised by the fact that its executive director, Philip Zelikow, was virtually a member of the Bush administration (7-9, 11-12, 282-84). 113. The failure to point out that the White House first sought to prevent the creation of a 9/11 Commission, then placed many obstacles in its path, including giving it extremely meager funding (283-85).

114. The failure to point out that the Commission's chairman, most of the other commissioners, and at least half of the staff had serious conflicts of interest (285-90, 292-95).

115. The failure of the Commission, while bragging that it presented its final report "without dissent," to point out that this was probably possible only because Max Cleland, the commissioner who was most critical of the White House and swore that he would not be part of "looking at information only partially," had to resign in order to accept a position with the Export-Import Bank, and that the White House forwarded his nomination for this position only after he was becoming quite outspoken in his criticisms (290-291). I will close by pointing out that I concluded my study of what I came to call "the Kean-Zelikow Report" by writing that it, "far from lessening my suspicions about official complicity, has served to confirm them. Why would the minds in charge of this final report engage in such deception if they were not trying to cover up very high crimes?" (291)

George Bush's Microexpression

Microexpressions are the flashes of facial expression that form instantly and which persist for a split second before the person can compose the face they want to show to others in reaction to something, particularly something that surprises them.

If you ever look at George Bush’s microexpressions you are sure to be chilled to the bone. The look of evil glee when he speaks about executing or killing people, the hateful look he gives if someone questions him in any way, all these things are right on the surface in plain sight, but only for a fraction of second.

Just as a microexpression is the first, instinctive reaction that shows the person’s true character, so Bush’s initial reaction (or lack of reaction) to Hurricane Katrina shows his true colors. Watching him scramble, nearly a week later, to react and show he “cares,” is like watching someone compose the intended reaction face after a microexpression.

The State Department, Depleted Uranium and Conspiracy Theory

Included in this page from the United States Department of State's website (motto: It's never the wrong time to shop for shoes. ) where they try gamely to debunk conspiracy theories:

Highly controversial issues

AIDS, organ transplantation, international adoption, and the September 11 attacks are all new, frightening or, in some ways, discomforting topics. Such highly controversial issues are natural candidates for the rise of false rumors, unwarranted fears and suspicions.

Another example of a highly controversial issue is depleted uranium, a relatively new armor-piercing substance that was used by the U.S. military for the first time during the 1991 Gulf War.

There are many exaggerated fears about depleted uranium because people associate it with weapons-grade uranium or fuel-grade uranium, which are much more dangerous substances. When most people hear the word uranium, a number of strongly held associations spring to mind, including the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, nuclear reactors, radiation illness, cancer, and birth defects.

Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples’ minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world “uranium.” For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is. (More details on depleted uranium in English and Arabic.)

If you click on the link (very nice of them to translate it to Arabic) you will find this:

U-235 and U-234 are the highly radioactive isotopes in natural uranium, extracted to make nuclear fuel or enriched weapons-grade uranium. Depleted uranium is what is left over after much of these highly radioactive isotopes have been removed. Depleted uranium is actually 40% less radioactive than the natural uranium in the environment around us, and much less radioactive than fuel-grade or weapons-grade uranium. Unfortunately, most people confuse depleted uranium with these dangerous substances.

Don't you feel better now? There is nothing to worry about. Depleted uranium has 60% of the radioactivity of natural uranium. I'd like to see Condoleezza Rice breath in a cloud of it. That would reassure me.

Katrina commentary

Don't have too much to add to all the commentary on Hurricane Katrina. The significance of this event is pretty much on the surface for all to see. For a good summary of the commentary, look at today's Signs of the Times. Rigorous Intuition and Xymphora are good on Katrina. Here's Xymphora:

The U. S. State Department drifts into stand-up comedy with helpful hints on how to identify conspiracy theories. You want a conspiracy theory? Here's a conspiracy theory found on Boing Boing, from Ned Sublette (my emphasis in bold):

"The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number - 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources - meaning, the political will - weren't there to get them out."

They wanted to make New Orleans into Disneyland, but the black people ruined everything. Now all the stories in the mainstream media are about how all these 'animals' are murdering, raping and looting, and how the police now have orders to shoot to kill. You really have to wonder about whether FEMA, turned by the Bush Administration from rescue management experts into Big Brother, and now in charge of managing personal freedoms, allowed those levees to break on purpose.

Mike Whitney also connects the dots:

Rumsfeld's behavior has been identical everywhere across the country. He is determined to undermine the National Guard and limit the states' ability to protect themselves against attack. His intention is to smash America's internal defenses, which are currently under control of the states' governors, and introduce the military into homeland security. It is a clear attempt to centralize authority and further militarize the country.

By weakening America's defenses, Rumsfeld has paved the way for deploying troops and aircraft within the country and setting the precedent for a permanent military presence within the nation. It is one giant step towards direct military rule.

There is no other conceivable reason for weakening national defense during a period when there is an increased likelihood of a terrorist incident.

Rumsfeld's conduct is hardly surprising. He has a long history of support for military regimes. Just months ago he was coaching South American leaders to resume their use of the military in domestic policing activities to undercut the Leftist political movements that are at the forefront of change throughout the region. It's clear that he has something similar in mind for the American people.

Are we talking about the possibility of martial law?

White people "find" things, Black people "loot"

white people

black people