Sunday 28 October 2007
Friday 19 October 2007
NSA Can Read Windows Software in Your Computer
Sooner or later, a country that spies on its neighbors will turn on its own people, violating their privacy, stealing their liberties.President Bush’s grab for unchecked eavesdropping powers is the culmination of what the National Security Agency(NSA) has spent forty years doing unto others.
And if you’re upset by the idea of NSA tapping your phone, be advised NSA allegedly can also read your Windows software to access your computer.
European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell claimed NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special "keys" in Windows software starting with versions from 95-OSR2 onwards.
And the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry also asserted NSA helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to France's Strategic Affairs Delegation report, “it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the (Microsoft) MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.
” That report was published in 1999.
The French reported a “strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates’ development teams.”
It noted the Pentagon was Microsoft’s biggest global client.
In the U.S., Andrew Fernandez, chief computer scientist with Cryptonym, of Morrisville, N.C., found Microsoft developers had failed to remove debugging symbols used to test his software before they released it.
Inside the code Fernandez found labels for two keys, dubbed “KEY” and NSAKEY”.
Fernandez, though, termed it NSA’s “back door” into the world’s most widely used operation system. He said this makes it “orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer.”
Microsoft called the report “completely false.”
Apparently, agenices of the military-industrial complex take on a life of their own. NSA, for example, has long engaged in commercial espionage eavesdropping on European businesses to benefit U.S. firms, according to William Blum, author of “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press).
NSA achieves this through ECHELON("E") – an intelligence cartel dominated by the U.S. with Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada as junior partners.
Launched in the 1970s to monitor Cold War data, “E” morphed into “a network of massive, highly automated interception stations covering the globe,” Blum said.
Using “E”, NSA has spied on German and French businesses which, as a result, have come off second best against their American competitors. Among companies targeted were Thomson S.A., of Paris, Airbus Industrie of Blagnac Cedex, France, and the German wind generator-manufacturer Enercon.
"We know this technology(“E”) is there and it is being used on us," Josef Tarkowski, former head of counter-espionage for the German government told The London Sunday Times Internet Edition.
"Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky," Blum documents, NSA’s continuously orbiting satellites “sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex…satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links…voice, text, images.”
These are then processed by high-powered computers at Ft. Meade, Md., NSA headquarters.
Billions of messages are sucked up daily, Blum writes, including those by presidents, prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, transnational corporation executives, and foreign embassies.
It’s been estimated “E” sifts through 99.9999 percent of all global communications to get at the 0.0001 percent that is of interest to it.
Each of the English-speaking partners, Blum asserts, “is breaking its own laws, those of other countries, and international law --- the absence of court-issued warrants permitting surveillance of specific individuals is but one example.”
“E” works by mining for key words that are extracted by computers and passed along to humans for evaluation. Some NSA activities came to light during the countdown to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
At the time, the U.S. listened in on the private conversations of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and on the deliberations about Iraq of all members of the UN Security Council.
It also spied on organizations such as Christian Aid and Amnesty International. Earlier, it was said to have spied on U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond(R.-S.C.)
Less well known has been E’s spying on foreign firms. In 1998, German wind generator-maker Enercon developed a cheaper way to generate electricity from wind power, but its U.S. rival, Kenetech, said it had patented a near-identical process, and got a court order to ban Enercon sales in the U.S., reporter Blum writes.
NSA’s role was exposed when one of its employees revealed he had stolen Enercon’s secrets by tapping telephone and computer links between its research and production units.
Again, NSA, with CIA aid, Blum and other sources say, obtained covert information from French Airbus Industrie that enabled its U.S. rivals Boeing and McDonnell Douglas to win a $1 billion contract. “The same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the U.S. in 1995 over auto parts trade,” Blum added.
The Sunday Times also reported Thomas-CSF, a French electronics maker, lost a $1.4 billion deal to supply Brazil with radar because the U.S. intercepted details of the negotiations and passed them to Raytheon, the U.S. firm that makes the Patriot missile. Raytheon won the contract.
“E” is headquartered on British soil on a 560-acre base at Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire, the largest listening post in the world, taken over by NSA in 1966. As well, the U.S. operates an enormous radar and communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich, that is also an NSA intercept station, and a dozen signals intelligence bases in Japan.
NSA also read other peoples’ mail by inking a secret agreement with Crypto AG, a Swiss maker of encryption technology, to rig their machines before sale so that when foreign governments used the random encryption key the enciphered message would be clandestinely transmitted to NSA.
The result: when Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia and more than 100 other countries sent messages to their embassies, trade offices, and armed forces around the world via telex, fax, and radio, NSA spooks could read them. NSA, by the way, employs some 30,000 workers and, if it were a private corporation, would rank among the top 50 on the “Fortune 500.”
Its budget, of course, is secret but it’s a bet NSA is cheerfully gobbling up umpteen billions of your tax dollars every year. Of course, other countries today emulate NSA’s activities.
China, for example, is said to have hacked into British defense and foreign policy secrets and the German weekly Der Spiegel recently reported German computers at the chancellery, and foreign, economic, and research ministries are infected by Chinese espionage programs.
Rather than shutting down or curbing NSA activities, President Bush is expanding NSA’s role.
Even if a rubber stamp Congress goes along, not everybody approves. The American Bar Association, our largest lawyer group, has denounced Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program.“The issue is whether the president can unilaterally conduct secret surveillance, taking into his hands the awesome power to invade privacy,”
ABA President Michael Greco said.Greco may be upset because the Bill of Rights declares:
“The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
But what did George Washington know compared to George Bush?
* Sherwood Ross is an American writer who covers political and military topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com; further information on Blum’s book, www.killinghope.org)
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_sherwood_071016_nsa_may_be_reading_w.htm
The Iraqi Genocide
(Oct 16, 2007) Why has not the Turkish parliament given tit for tat and passed a resolution condemning the Iraqi Genocide?As a result of Bush's invasion of Iraq, more than one million Iraqis have died, and several millions are displaced persons. The Iraqi death toll and the millions of uprooted Iraqis match the Armenian deaths and deportations. If one is a genocide, so is the other.
It is true that most of the Iraqi deaths have resulted from Iraqis killing one another. But it was Bush's destruction of the secular Iraqi state that unleashed the sectarian strife.
Moreover, American troops in Iraq have killed more civilians than insurgents. The US military in Iraq has fallen for every bit of disinformation fed to it by Al Qaeda personnel posing as "informants" and by Sunnis setting up Shi'ites and Shi'ites setting up Sunnis. As a result, American bombs and missiles have blown up weddings, funerals, kids playing soccer, and people shopping in bazaars and sleeping in their homes.
Not to be outdone, Bush's private Waffen SS known as Blackwater Security has taken to gunning Iraqi civilians down in the streets. How do Blackwater and Custer Battles killers escape the "unlawful combatant" designation?
One can only marvel at the insouciance of the US Congress to the current Iraqi Genocide while condemning Turkey for one that happened 90 years ago.
People seldom see the beam in their own eye, only the mote in the eyes of others. Every member of the Bush Regime is busily at work denouncing Iran for causing instability in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the US has invaded two countries, throwing them into total chaos, while beating the drums for war with Iran and conspiring with Israel to invade Lebanon and to attack Syria.
The indisputable facts are that the US and Israel have attacked four Middle East countries and are determined to attack a fifth. Yet, it is peaceful Iran, at war with no one, that Bush and Israel blame for causing instability in the Middle East.
Not content with its many wars in the Middle East, the Bush Regime is sponsoring wars in Africa and is setting up an African Command. The US government has been bombing and attacking other countries ever since the cold war ended. Instead of peace, the gang in Washington DC chose war.
Other than the Israel Lobby, the greatest supporters of Bush's wars are Christian evangelicals, specifically the "rapture evangelicals" and the "Christian Zionists."
I remember when Christianity was about saving one's soul. Today it is about bringing on Armageddon. While the various evangelical Christians preach war in the Middle East, they condemn Islam for being a "warlike religion."
Americans are so full of themselves that they are blind to their extraordinary hypocrisy.
The US government has broken every agreement with Russia by withdrawing from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, pushing NATO to Russia's borders, conniving to place missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, and buying governments in former Soviet republics and installing US military bases therein.
When Russian President Putin finally has enough and protests, the US Secretary of State blames Putin for being difficult and restarting the cold war.
Few Americans realize it, but they take the cake.
International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else. The rest of the world knows that the wars are about US and Israeli hegemony and that the US and Israel are prepared to engage in whatever acts of terror are necessary to achieve hegemony.
That is the bare fact.
When the US dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US empire will come to an abrupt end. Sooner or later the rest of the world will realize this and, in an act of self-protection, dethrone the dollar.
*** Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10162007.html
45 Republican Pedophiles
This is horrendous, but something we've known for a while. It's just nice to see a list like this to show to those that would deny it.
Remember, this is only pedophiles. Larry Craig isn't even on this list nor are the countless cases of "anti-gay" closet-cases in the Republican Party.
Please bear in mind, I'm an equal opportunity basher of both halves of our main political party and would like to take this opportunity to point out that having censured MoveOn.org, the Democrat controlled Congress has done more to silence war critics than to end the war, or at least give us a new direction in Iraq.
Also note that it is usually those who support the war who would like to spend time talking about people talking about the war (slandering war critics, usually) rather than talking about the war itself.
While Rush Limbaugh's recent comment about soldiers who oppose the war being "phony soldiers" was offensive to me personally, it didn't result in a censure of Rush, or nearly as much attention as the MoveOn.org ad about Petraeus.
I think they know that if they spent more time informing their viewers about what is actually going on in Iraq, they would be much more likely to disagree with them when they see for themselves how fucked up things are.
Courtesy of Lilia Adecer Cajilog
* Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida.
* Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison.
* Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation.
* Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bountyto anybody who murders an abortion doctor.
* Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.
* Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls.
* Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl.
* Republican racist pedophile and United States Senator Strom Thurmond had sex with a 15-year old black girl which produced a child.
* Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile.
* Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl.
* Republican activist Lawrence E. King, Jr. organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.
* Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.
* Republican Congressman Donald "Buz" Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail.
* Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos.
* Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.
* Republican activist Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child.
* Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female minor working as a congressional page.
* Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter.
* Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.
* Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped.
* Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. "Republican Marty"), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD.
* Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography.
* Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media.
* Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a
14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.
* Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl.
* Republican anti-gay activist Earl "Butch" Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.
* Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.
* Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl.
* Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy.
* Republican politician Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children).
* Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year old girl.
* Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.
* Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl.
* Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters.
* Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl.
* Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy.
* Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison.
* Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000.
* Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession.
* Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet.
* Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a "good military man" and "church goer," was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
* Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter.
* Republican director of the "Young Republican Federation" Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison.
* Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was charged with rape for allegedly paying a 15-year old girl for sex. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women.
http://kokesh.blogspot.com/2007/10/45-republican-pedophiles.html
Now thats what I call exposed!
Government adverts target gamers
Gamers who enjoy taking on the virtual role of spies and secret agents in computer games, beware - one of the government's leading intelligence agencies has you in its sights.
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GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, will embed job adverts within the online multi-player versions of many adrenaline-fuelled espionage games such as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Rainbow Six Vegas, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and the high-octane racing game Need for Speed: Carbon. The recruitment posters for the intelligence organisation will start to appear later this month on billboards and hoardings throughout the virtual environments of these games. The agency hopes to attract web-savvy applicants for high-tech roles at GCHQ, which works closely with the Foreign Secretary, MI5 and MI6 to provide signals intelligence (digital "eavesdropping"), and to protect government information systems from hackers. "This is all part and parcel of our wider recruitment campaign," said a GCHQ spokesperson. "We employ people with a wide range of skills, and one of the most important areas is the IT and technical side. This advertising campaign will appeal to an audience that has those kind of hobbies and interests." "The world of online gaming offers GCHQ a further route to target a captive audience," said Kate Clemens, head of GCHQ's digital strategy at TMP Worldwide, the intelligence service's rectruitment advertising advisers. "These gamers are loyal and frequent users of PC and console games and are particularly receptive to innovative forms of advertising." It's also an important part of plans to make the work of intelligence agencies less secretive and hidden. GCHQ has been holding open recruitment days for some time, and even MI6 has lifted the lid on its work, advertising for recruits on the side of London buses. "Although press advertising still plays an important role, it's now just one element of an integrated approach to recruitment that forward thinking clients like GCHQ are spearheading," says Laura Robertson, account director at TMP Worldwide. Creative advertising scenarios within games have already been used to promote global brands, including Coca Cola and Nokia. Independent research has shown that in-game advertising can increase brand familiarity by up to 64 per cent. But gamers who love the visceral thrill of embarking on covert operations, sniper missions and daring escapades probably shouldn't get too excited: GCHQ warns that most of the jobs will be largely desk-bound, working on developing GCHQ's internet-based operations at its Gloucestershire offices.
"It's certainly not in the James Bond mould of spy work," said a spokesperson for GCHQ.
Games with adverts
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent
You play Sam Fisher, American spy turned double-agent, now working in a "splinter cell" of the "black-ops" team at the US National Security Agency.
Need for Speed: Carbon
Thrills, spills and the smell of petrol in this urban street racing game where you drive hard and fast to win respect and power.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
First-person shooter set in the same sci-fi universe as the acclaimed Quake II and Quake IV, in which players embark on covert operations to defeat their alien enemy, the Strogg.
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“What Is Extremism?” - October 14th Speech - No More Wars For Israel Conference
Here is the text of the speech I delivered on Sunday, October 14th at the No More Wars For Israel conference in Orange County, California. This is not a word-for-word rendition of that talk since some editing, additions and deletions were made to the text. The ideas contained herein are even more relevant now than when I penned them, mainly because the ugly face of the Zionist Jewish criminal network, the ADL came out in force to violate our civil rights and our First Amendment freedoms. Working with local law enforcement, B’nai B’rith and their shylock lackeys lied (what a shock!) and tried to label our gathering as an “extremist event” that was linked up with “terrorism.” Thanks to this nefariousness, the Marriot Hotel violated the terms of our contract and we were forced to hold the conference in other facilities. But the Jews lost in the end because the conference was an overwhelming success. Of course the Antsy Defecation League (thanks Birdman) cannot abide the truth because they do the work of criminal Judaism. I would expect nothing less from the agents of the Zionist monster. Enjoy this talk.
-Patrick Grimm
Ladies and gentlemen, fellow speakers and guests. It is an honor and a privilege to be here at the No More Wars For Israel conference in sunny southern California. I was excited when Mark Glenn invited me to attend and speak to all the accomplished writers, academics and great patriots I see before me today.I must say I was quite amused to see the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith’s take on this gathering, this meeting which discusses both the role of Israel in determining America’s foreign policy and the role of what I have coined as “Big Jewry” in influencing both the United States and the rest of the world. The ADL, without hesitation and without qualification describes the No More Wars For Israel Conference as an “Anti-Semitic conference organized by Mark Glenn of the Crescent and Cross Web site.” [1]
Now this is hardly surprising, but I find it humorous nevertheless. I’m quite sure that as I speak, the ADL and its overbearing president Abraham Foxman are literally in a panic mode, trying to do damage control and cursing in Yiddish as millions in America and around the world wake up to the reality of what the Jewish supremacists are doing to manipulate them, lie to them and to brainwash them in their controlled media outlets. But thank God for the internet, I say, and that the benighted are slowly transforming into the enlightened on the Jewish Question. Thank God for all of you and for many more like you who were not able to attend this gathering.
Like the Sinatra standard which states “wrap your troubles in dreams, and dream all your troubles away” our Jewish overlords expect us to “grin and bear it” when it comes to their control over our media, our banking and economic system, our foreign and our social policy. For our indifference to their control and domination over the last few decades, we have reaped disaster. We have gained not progress, but open borders, broken schools, trash television and Zionist propaganda on the airwaves. We have a dollar that is essentially worthless and a reputation around the world that is in tatters.
And now to add insult to the injury they have caused us, the agents of Big Jewry have dared to declare those of us who even speak aloud about that which we see RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES, to be extremists, to be racists, to be dangers in OUR OWN COUNTRY. No ladies and gentlemen, this arrangement is not tolerable and the price for speaking up is high, but we must not remain silent.
I would almost call my own intellectual journey into the area of “Jewish issues” serendipitous. Like many Americans, I had a passing knowledge of the intense liberalism of the Jewish community and their support for often radical causes. Like some of you here, I was raised in a Christian church and Jews, when they were discussed, were referred to as “God’s Chosen People.” To attack Jewish motives, behavior or nobility was considered a particularly heinous act.
Yet always in the back of my mind I had a gnawing curiosity, questions I could never answer, and the whitewashed picture of the Jews given in church and in the Christian school I attended as a youth, did not gel with what I saw Jewish people actively DOING. During college as I studied leftist movements, I noticed one thing consistently. Every political cause that was weakening, damaging or defrauding this country seemed to have a multitude of Jewish-sounding names attached to it. The National Abortion Rights Action League was headed by Kate Michelman, a liberal Jewish woman. People For the American Way, a far-Left action group was founded by leftist Jewish TV producer Norman Lear. Tons of Communists and ex-Communists alike had Jewish names and were openly and proudly Jews. I once remarked to my friend Jayne Gardener before I had my complete awakening “Why are Jews always on the Left?” It wasn’t until later that I concluded “Jews aren’t on the Left, they ARE THE LEFT!”
My eyes were opened wide some two and a half years ago when I started to do an internet search on Jews and Judaism. What I found was interesting, and horrifying to a mind so conditioned in philo-Semitism. Jews didn’t just support Communism. They created Communism. They didn’t just support groups like NARAL. No, they were actively extending the unlimited abortion license into every nation on earth. I found a book on Jewish Tribal Review which completely chronicled a list of everything that Big Jewry had their hands in and it was frightening, almost daunting.
By this point, I wanted to learn everything I could. I then read Dr. David Duke’s excellent and well-footnoted book Jewish Supremacism and Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique and I was wholly convinced of the danger of organized Jewry. I realized that it was the single largest threat to our freedoms and to our sovereignty. After completing Jewish Supremacism, I knew, then and there that I could not remain silent about what I knew. My family, my friends, everyone I am close to, now knows the truth about Big Jewry and its nefarious activities.
I often say, echoing the Grateful Dead “What a long strange trip it’s been.” An all-American boy goes from criticizing those who oppose Israel, even chastising members of a Brethren Church for their anti-Zionist stance, to speaking at a conference condemning US wars waged for the Zionist state. This is why, as I read about the ADL mislabeling this conference as an “extremist event” I find it funny. Their Hollywood stereotypes of jack-booted, Nazi arm-band wearing skin-heads screaming epithets against Jews bears no resemblance to reality. Yet because of my own writings, I have been called “Jew-obsessed”, a “Nazi”, a hater and all the usual canards. I have been branded as an extremist for not wanting to be told what I can and cannot think, can and cannot read and can and cannot say.
No, my friends, I will not be silenced by those who wrongly believe that a tiny minority, a largely hostile minority, hostile to the traditions that you and I take for granted, should be able to husband up rights only for themselves and dispense and revoke them as they see fit. I say there will be no more silence, no more fear and no more capitulation!
Apparently attacking our religions is not enough to satisfy them. Breaking our borders and replacing us is not enough to satisfy them. Getting our young men and women to die in the sands of Iraq, spilling their very blood and laying down their lives for the Jewish criminal terrorist state of Israel is not enough to satisfy them. Bleeding our taxpayers dry to fund their spying and their lying for AIPAC is not enough to satisfy them. For you see, NOTHING we can do will EVER satisfy Big Jewry because they are INSATIABLE. Yet they call us extremists!
What is extremism?
You want to know what extremism is? Well, I’ll tell you. Extremism is organized Jewry literally lecturing the rest of the world on the joys of diversity and multiculturalism, which as Dr. Tom Sunic has pointed out is a misnomer. What the Jews want for Gentile nations is multiracialism. They want populations which are as heterogeneous as possible, thus making them easier to control from the top by Zionist Jews. Foxman in one of his usual chutzpah-laden rants literally had the nerve, the gall to chastise contemporary Germans on the hazards of xenophobia and welcomed the more open “liberal” immigration policies which were being pushed, of course, by organized Jews to dilute the native German population. Eva Herman lost her television job and was called a Nazi for simply suggesting that perhaps German women should have more children. The Jewish extremists have done the same in America, in England, in Canada, in France and in every other nation where they have gotten a foothold. They dare, DARE, to lecture us, demanding that we swing our gates open wide to the world. To even oppose ILLEGAL immigration is a moral crime in the eyes of the Jewsmedia.
All of this moralizing and pontificating comes from a group of people who support a state whose immigration policies are based on “blood purity” on a criteria for Jewishness that makes any Nazi policies look downright moderate. Yet, in typical Jewish extremist fashion, what applies to us NEVER applies to them. They can genocide, displace and literally enslave a whole nation, steal land, bulldoze homes, assassinate academics and poets and dissenters. They can grab family farms and close down Palestinian schools and circumvent the WILL OF THE WORLD as they conscript our money to pay for the whole thing. They can invade neighboring countries and use WHITE PHOSPHORUS ON CIVILIANS! Then they demonize any recalcitrant politicians, strip people of jobs and livelihood, make death threats on families if ANYBODY SPEAKS UP and even notes what is being done in our name. And yet we wonder why the world hates us, is ASTONISHED by our UNRESERVED funding and cheerleading of such a rogue and cancerous so-called nation in the Middle East named Israel.
What is extremism? Extremism is a power, world Jewry, so avaricious, so starved for the hard-earned wages of others that their banking power robs us of our livelihood, through interest, through counterfeiting, through what is barely disguised theft. I won’t pretend to be an expert on economics or banking, but it doesn’t take an economist to figure out that the Rothschild empire that has thrown its net over the world is a colossal swindle machine.
In Andrew Hitchcock’s excellent book The Synagogue of Satan the author makes several revealing points that were particularly poignant. Hitchcock states “Iraq is one of six nations left in the world which do not have a Rothschild controlled central bank.” [2] Afghanistan was also a nation with an economy and currency free of Jewish Rothschild control. Is it mere coincidence that these two countries were the first to be invaded under the auspices of a “War on Terror”? Baron Meyer Rothschild stated unashamedly “Give me control over a nation’s currency and I care not who makes its laws.” [3] If you own the currency, you own the nation-state. It’s as simple as that.
Which countries are still unmolested by the House of Rothschild? Here they are: “There are now only 5 nations in the world left without a Rothschild controlled central bank: Iran; North Korea; Sudan; Cuba; and Libya.” [4] Strangely enough, four out of the five are labeled as rogue states by the United States government and by Israel. In fact, Iran is at the top of the list to be toppled by our Zionist-Occupied Government. In the David Frum/Richard Perle neo-conservative handbook for endless war for empire, Iran, North Korea and Libya are countries that need to be “dealt with” meaning that either invasion or regime change are touted as desirable and in the case of Iran, imminent.
What is extremism? Extremism is an atavistic hatred of Gentiles so strong, that even sex slavery and human trafficking are permitted by the Talmudist branch of the Jewish community. It’s a sad reality, but Jews, some religious and some irreligious, are the leaders of the worldwide sex industry. Yes, we are all familiar with the Jewish penchant for hard-core pornography and the warped entertainment flowing out of Hollywood. But many people are woefully unaware of the fact that Israel is the world leader in sex slavery.
In the Old Testament book of Leviticus 25:44-46, the Judeans’ desert god tells them in no uncertain terms “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life..…” [5]
This is exactly what we see. Julie Lesser tells us:
“Human rights groups have long demanded actions against the trade in women in Israel. These women, many from the former Soviet Union, are working as prostitutes in a condition of virtual slavery. Many of the Russian women who have ended up in Israel’s brothels, some smuggled into the country from Egypt on the back of camels, expected to find jobs as cleaners and/or working in childcare. There are certain places where auctions are taking place. The Israeli police well know the names. They are nightclubs or regular bars. The women are brought there, buyers come and look at their bodies and their teeth, then the bidding starts. They are held by the pimps, beaten and totally isolated.”
It’s not enough that the Jewish extremists have stolen our economy, our currency, our sovereignty and our media. They also demand our women for their own lascivious illegal purposes. They like them blonde, blue-eyed and Gentile. The Israeli Jews, not content with the trouble they have caused with their Bolshevism, their Communism and their killing of millions upon millions of Russian Christians, must pile more injury atop more injury. They must defile European women, taking out their rage and hatred of Gentiles on these innocents who have been lured to Israel in hopes of finding honest employment. Not surprisingly, there is barely a peep about this travesty in our Jewish-run media machine, but if a single swastika is painted on a synagogue somewhere in the heart of Europe, it will make front page news. The wails for the US to do something, anything about rising worldwide “anti-Semitism” will reach a deafening crescendo. Yet “anti-Semitism” and Jewish behavior go hand-in-hand.
What is extremism? Extremism is believing that fanatical Jews have been tossed out of almost every country they have inhabited because there is something innately evil in the Gentile. What strange mental gymnastics it must require to believe such nonsense. Yet millions hold to just such lunacy. All of 79 countries have expelled Jews from their midst, some of them over and over again. Yet we are to believe that these Gentiles, spread across time and space, all possessed a mystical and completely unreasoning hatred of Jews that existed FOR NO REASON. Apparently the Jewish issue is the only issue of moment not subject to the laws of cause and effect. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so to speak, except for “anti-Semitism.” It arises from nothing, except perhaps psychosis and it is focused on one group to the exclusion of all others, again FOR NO REASON.
This type of solipsism on the part of Jewish extremists, that their negative behavior is not the cause of their historical woes is unique. In fact, it has a whole cottage industry that has grown up around it. This industry is always promoting the irrational notion that Jews are disliked only because of Gentile mental illness, only because of Gentile “projection” and jealousy or because of something lacking in Gentiles. In this way, by employing the fraudulent ideas of Sigmund Freud, Jews are never to blame for ANYTHING. To even have ill will towards an individual Jew for a palpable wrong done only means that you are in need of extensive therapy. It certainly can’t mean that the Jew in question is at fault.
Of course, the therapeutic model is now employed to censor almost every sort of politically incorrect speech, whether it be racial issues, crime statistics or the negative fallout of multiculturalism. Not only is the bringer of un-PC news seen as in error or a sinner against the new order of things. He is also very, very sick and in need of reprogramming, diversity training, brainwashing, in short, a therapy session. This is just one more way that the American mind has become Judaized, or to use the jargon of PC, Zionized.
I know of no other group so organized for their interests that they are able, with the full force of the media, the intelligentsia, entertainment and the mental health field to banish their critics so completely using the language of pathology. It began with Freud, evolved and grew more calculated with Marcuse and the Frankfurt School and now there is a whole field of Jewish psychoanalysts who write books and publish articles on the psychosis that is “anti-Semitism.” If this is not extremism for an ethnocentric end, then I don’t know what is.
When Mel Gibson made some drunken remarks saying that the Jews were behind all the wars, he wasn’t simply called drunk and disorderly. He wasn’t merely asked to apologize for his words. No, the ADL wanted Mr. Gibson to sit down with their appointed rabbis and “let the healing begin.” The implication was that he had a sickness, a mental disorder that needed to be cured. Gibson’s comments, inarticulate though they may have been, were accurate, as we see from the Jewish neo-conservative disaster in Iraq. Yet no mention was made about the accuracy or the inaccuracy of what he said. He had a sickness, a psychological problem called “anti-Semitism” and needed to get himself into therapy pronto. Talk about chutzpah. Talk about extremism. When B’nai B’rith refers to extremism, they refer only to themselves.
How can we fight extremism? Must we fight extremism with extremism? No, we only need two things: truth and bravery. We must tell the truth, in a simple, responsible and civil way, never conforming to the stereotypes created by our enemies in the media and in Hollywood. We also need bravery, courage to trumpet that truth, alert the world to the dangers of Jewish extremism. We must warn Jews who are not part of the problem about the hazards of remaining silent about the misdeeds of their treacherous leadership. We must not be afraid to say what needs to be said. To remain silent is not an option.
I will only leave you with this simple quote:
No one’s safe when freedom fails,
and good men rot in filthy jails,
and those who cried appease, appease,
are hung by those they tried to please.
—Author unknown
May we all stand for freedom, truth and justice for the American people, the European people, the Palestinian people, and indeed for every people. I thank you for your kind attention and for the opportunity to speak to you today about a few of the things on my mind. God bless.
[1] http://www.adl.org/learn/Events_2001/events_2003_flashmap.asp
[2] Hitchcock, Andrew The Synagogue of Satan
[3] http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/09/the-era-of-global-financial-instability/
[4] http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=195781
[5] http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Israel_Sex_Slavery.html
http://zionistwatch.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/what-is-extremism-october-14th-speech-no-more-wars-for-israel-conference/Salute and Disobey?
Did the Bush administration disregard military expertise before the Iraq war? Should military leaders have done more to protest in response?
THE MILITARY'S PLACE
Michael Desch's "Bush and the Generals" (May/June 2007) contains significant errors of fact and interpretation. One of us, Richard Myers, has direct knowledge and personal experience with the subject; the other, Richard Kohn, has been studying and observing American civil-military relations for 45 years.
Bush administration officials did not, as Desch charges, "overrule" the military "on the number of troops to be sent" to Iraq or "the timing of ... deployment." Both were the result of over a year of questioning and discussion back and forth, and the final plan contained contingencies for different numbers of forces depending on the course of the campaign. To be sure, the combatant commander often found the probing and questioning of plans by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff distasteful. But in the end, all involved supported the final plan regardless of the disagreements along the way.
Contrary to Desch's interpretation, the Kosovo intervention in 1999 was not evidence of poor civil-military relations. The Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense, and President Bill Clinton all agreed on limiting the application of force in Kosovo -- overruling the advice of General Wesley Clark, the supreme allied commander for Europe, as was legitimate in the civil-military relationship.
There was no "truce" between the military and civilians after 9/11 because there had never been a war. There was just the friction and distrust (never open but exacerbated by Rumsfeld's approach and style) inherent in U.S. civil-military relations.
Desch charges that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's "cavalier dismissal of troop-requirement estimates by General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff," was "the clearest display of civilian willingness to override the professional military on tactical and operational matters." But it is not true that Shinseki's offered advice was subsequently overruled. In his congressional testimony, Shinseki told senators that such estimates should come from the combatant commander, and he never offered these troop numbers to either the Joint Chiefs or to the president. Desch is correct, however, that criticism of Shinseki's testimony by senior civilian officials was not conducive to proper civil-military relations.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold -- another retired military official who has recently criticized the civilian leadership -- left the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2002, before planning for the Iraq campaign was complete or the military was informed of a decision to go to war. Newbold never made his views known to the chairman or the vice chairman, for whom he worked directly.
Desch also implies that senior military officers were intimidated into silence on the number of troops needed in Iraq during the occupation. The truth, however, is that General John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command from July 2003 until March 2007, and his commanders thought more U.S. troops would be counterproductive, and the Joint Chiefs agreed. Only following the deterioration of the situation several months after the 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra was there support for a rise in U.S. troop levels among some of the most senior military officers.
The recommendations that Desch draws from his faulty analysis are dangerous. Certainly, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates should "encourage, rather than stifle, candid advice from the senior military leadership." But to imply that Rumsfeld stifled candid advice is misleading. Some may have been intimidated by him, but he insisted that General Myers, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provide advice -- and General Myers always did so, candidly. (If the chairman's advice differs from that of the service chiefs, he is obligated by law to state their advice as well.)
Desch recommends returning to "an old division of labor" in which "civilians give due deference to military professional advice in the tactical and operational realms in return for complete military subordination in the grand strategic and political realms." In fact, that "old division of labor" never disappeared, even after nuclear weapons and limited and guerrilla war blurred the distinctions and injected civilians much more heavily into operations and tactics, largely through the setting of rules of engagement. But "due deference" does not mean automatic consent, as Desch implies: that clearly would negate civilian control of the military. Meanwhile, once military advice has been offered, automatic consent by the military in strategic and political matters is necessary -- regardless of whether or not the military advice is heard, listened to, and considered.
Desch questions "salute and obey" as the norm for the U.S. military, but he seems to base this on a misinterpretation of H. R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. (Kohn supervised McMaster's master's and Ph.D. theses, which became the book.) This misinterpretation is common in the military. In reality, the book argues and implies nothing other than this: during the Vietnam War, the Joint Chiefs should have spoken up forcefully in private to their superiors and candidly in testimony to Congress when asked specifically for their personal views, and they should have corrected misrepresentations of those views in private meetings with members of Congress.
Ultimately, there is no such thing as a "proper civil-military balance." What is necessary for effective policy, good decisions, and positive outcomes is a relationship of respect, candor, collaboration, cooperation -- and subordination. Nothing would undermine that relationship more than a resignation by a senior military officer. The role of the military is to advise and then carry out lawful policies and orders, not to make them. To threaten resignation -- taking disagreement public -- directly assaults civilian control of the military. Political and international strategic considerations are the responsibility of civilians, elected and appointed. No military officer, even at the very top, can know all that is involved in the highest levels of decision-making, which is inherently political (in the generic, not partisan, sense). In other walks of life, professionals can resign, but a military leader sworn to defend the country would be abandoning it, along with the people under his or her care or command.
There may be some extraordinary or dire situation in which an officer must for personal reasons ask to be relieved or retired: for example, when people would be slaughtered for no explicable or conceivable reason or the existence of the country jeopardized with no conceivable justification. But one individual's definition of what is moral, ethical, and even professional can differ from someone else's. There is no tradition of military resignation in the United States, no precedent -- and for good reason. Even the hint of resignation would encourage civilians to choose officers more for compliance and loyalty than for competence, experience, intelligence, candor, moral courage, professionalism, integrity, and character.
The fact is that the president and the secretary of defense have the authority and the right to reject or ignore military advice whenever they wish. That is the law, in accordance with the Constitution and consistent with U.S. historical practice. Even if Desch does not understand or accept that, the military does -- and so, too, do the American people.
RICHARD B. MYERS, Colin Powell Chair of Character, Leadership, and Ethics at the National Defense University and Foundation Professor of Military History and Leadership at Kansas State University, was first Vice Chairman and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between 2000 and 2005.
RICHARD H. KOHN is Professor of History and Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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FAILURE'S MANY FATHERS
Mackubin Thomas Owens
Desch is correct to observe that there is a troubling rift between the uniformed U.S. military and civilian leaders (although it is not as great as he suggests). But Desch errs when he blames most of the current problems on the Bush administration in general and on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in particular. In fact, the uniformed military deserves a significant share of the blame as well.
Desch charges the administration with willfully ignoring military advice, initiating the Iraq war with too small a force, ignoring the need for preparations for postconflict stabilization, failing to foresee the insurgency, and not adapting once things started to go wrong. This criticism is predicated on two questionable assumptions. The first is that soldiers deserve to have a voice in making policy regarding the use of the military -- indeed, that they have the right to insist that their views be adopted. The second is that the judgment of soldiers is inherently superior to that of civilians when it comes to military affairs -- and that in times of war, accordingly, civilians should defer to military expertise.
Both of these assumptions are questionable at best. They are also at odds with the principles and practice of U.S. civil-military relations, which subordinate the uniformed military to civilian authority even in what might seem to be the purely military realm. As Eliot Cohen demonstrates in Supreme Command, a book that Desch cites disapprovingly, successful wartime presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, "interfered" extensively and frequently with military operations.
Desch's first assumption rests on a misreading of McMaster's Dereliction of Duty. Many serving officers believe that Dereliction of Duty concludes that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should have more openly voiced their opposition to the Johnson administration's strategy of gradualism in Vietnam and then resigned rather than carry out the policy. But in fact, this is a serious misinterpretation that has reinforced the increasingly widespread belief that officers should be advocates of particular policies rather than simply serving in their traditional advisory roles.
Desch's second assumption -- that soldiers have better judgment than civilian policymakers on military affairs -- is called into question by a review of the historical record. Lincoln constantly prodded George McClellan to take the offensive in Virginia in 1862, while McClellan constantly whined about insufficient forces. During World War II, there were many differences between Roosevelt and his military advisers. General George Marshall, the greatest soldier-statesman since George Washington, opposed arms shipments to the United Kingdom in 1940 and argued for a cross-channel invasion before the United States was ready. History has vindicated Lincoln and Roosevelt.
Many in the military blame the U.S. defeat in Vietnam on civilians. But in fact, the operational approach in Vietnam was forged by the uniformed military. General William Westmoreland adopted the counterproductive strategy of emphasizing attrition of Peoples' Army of Vietnam forces in a "war of the big battalions" -- sweeps through remote jungle areas in an effort to destroy the enemy with superior firepower. By the time his successor could adopt a more fruitful approach, it was too late.
During the planning for Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91, General Norman Schwarzkopf, then the head of U.S. Central Command, called for a frontal assault against Iraqi positions in southern Kuwait followed by a drive toward Kuwait City. That plan would probably not have achieved the foremost military objective of the ground war: the destruction of the three divisions of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. Accordingly, the civilian leadership rejected it and ordered Schwarzkopf to return to the drawing board. The revised plan was far more imaginative and effective.
In the case of Rumsfeld, it is clear that he was guilty of errors of judgment regarding the conduct of the Iraq war. However, as case after case makes clear, Rumsfeld's critics were no more prescient than he. Rumsfeld failed to foresee the insurgency and the shift from conventional to guerrilla war, but so did his critics in the uniformed services. The army's official historian of the campaign has placed the blame for this failure squarely on the army. "Reluctance in even defining the situation," the historian writes, "is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissonance on the part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it."
Critics also charge Rumsfeld's Pentagon with shortchanging the troops in Iraq -- by, for example, failing to provide them with armored Humvees. But a review of army budget submissions even after the war had turned into an insurgency reveals that the service's priority was to acquire big-ticket items. It was only after the danger of improvised explosive devices became obvious that the army began to push for supplemental spending to "up-armor" the utility vehicles.
And although it is true that Rumsfeld downplayed postconflict stabilization operations, it is also true that he was merely ratifying the preferences of the uniformed military, which has a cultural aversion to such operations. The real villain in this case is the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine -- a set of principles long internalized by the U.S. military emphasizing the requirement for an "exit strategy." When generals are thinking about an exit strategy, they are not thinking about "war termination" -- how to convert military success into political success.
In retrospect, it is easy to criticize Rumsfeld for pushing General Tommy Franks, the combatant commander, to develop a plan for a force smaller than the one called for in earlier plans, as well as for his interference with the time-phased force and deployment list (TPFDL), which lays out the schedule for deploying forces. But that charge focuses on the consequences of the chosen path (attacking earlier with a smaller force) while ignoring potential drawbacks of the alternative -- for example, that taking the time to build up a larger force would have meant losing the chance for surprise.
The debate over the size of the invasion force must also be understood in the context of the state of civil-military relations at the end of Clinton's presidency. Rumsfeld was correct that civilian control of the military had eroded during the Clinton years. When the army did not want to do something -- as in the Balkans in the 1990s -- it would simply overstate the force requirements: "The answer is 350,000 soldiers. What's the question?" Accordingly, Rumsfeld was inclined to interpret the army's call for a larger force as another case of foot-dragging. In retrospect, Rumsfeld's decision not to deploy the First Cavalry Division was a mistake, but at the time it was not unreasonable to argue that the TPFDL (like the "two major theater war" planning metric) had become little more than a bureaucratic tool that the services used to protect their share of the defense budget.
Uniformed officers have an obligation to stand up to civilian leaders when they think a policy is flawed. They must convey their concerns to civilian policymakers forcefully and truthfully. If they believe the door is closed to them at the Pentagon or the White House, they also have access to Congress. But the U.S. tradition of civil-military relations requires that they not engage in public debate over matters of foreign policy, including the decision to go to war. And once a policy decision is made, soldiers are obligated to carry it out to the best of their abilities, whether their advice has been heeded or not.
MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS is Associate Dean of Academics and Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
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POLITICAL GENERAL
Lawrence J. Korb
Desch does an excellent job of analyzing one problem in civil-military relations during the Bush administration: the failure of civilians to give due deference to professional military advice in the tactical and operational realms. But he does not deal with a more serious problem: the way in which President George W. Bush and his appointees have used military professionals to support their political agenda. The problem is illustrated both by the conduct of General David Petraeus, the current commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, and by the White House's decision not to nominate General Peter Pace for a second two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
On September 26, 2004 -- approximately six weeks before a presidential election in which the deteriorating situation in Iraq was an increasingly important issue -- Petraeus, then in charge of training Iraqi security forces, published an op-ed in The Washington Post. He wrote glowingly of the progress the Iraqi security forces were making under his tutelage. According to the article, training was on track and increasing in capacity, more than 200,000 Iraqis were performing a wide variety of security missions, 45 Iraqi National Guard battalions and six regular Iraqi army battalions were conducting operations on a daily basis, and six additional regular army battalions and six Iraqi Intervention Force battalions would become operational by the end of November 2004. The Bush administration's policy at that time was "we will stand down when they stand up." Petraeus' article, accordingly, had the effect of telling the electorate that there was light at the end of the tunnel.
The op-ed was patently false and misleading, but that was not the worst part. If Petraeus wrote and published the article on his own initiative, he was injecting himself improperly into a political campaign. If he was encouraged (or even authorized) to do so by his civilian superiors, they were abusing military professionalism for partisan political purposes.
In his new role, Petraeus continues to be used by the administration -- willingly or unwillingly -- for partisan political purposes. When many Democrats and some Republicans criticize the president's latest strategy in Iraq, Bush and his political allies argue that the strategy is not theirs but that of General Petraeus -- and that by confirming him, the Senate essentially endorsed the current approach, obligating it to give "Petraeus' strategy" a chance to succeed. Whether Petraeus was in fact influential in getting the president to adopt the so-called surge is beside the point. The Senate confirmed Petraeus because legislators believed that he had the background and experience necessary to carry out policies decided on by the president in consultation with Congress. Regardless of where it originated, the current strategy in Iraq is Bush's strategy.
Desch is right that Rumsfeld's meddling approach contributed to the problems in Iraq and that the new secretary of defense, Gates, should give more deference to advice from military professionals. But at the same time, Gates must not encourage -- or allow -- military professionals to inject themselves into political campaigns or to be used to legitimize political decisions. The long-term ramifications of this abuse may be much worse than Rumsfeld's meddling. When Bush says that Congress must support Petraeus' strategy, Gates needs to remind him that it is the administration's strategy, and Petraeus needs to make clear that he will support whatever strategy the American people decide on -- and that unlike in 2004, he will be honest with voters and stay out of the next presidential election.
Unfortunately, by not appointing General Pace to a second two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gates has continued the Bush administration's policy of exploiting military professionalism to support its political agenda. Pace was the first chairman in over 40 years to be denied the customary two-year reappointment. This had nothing to do with his qualifications or a failure to act professionally on his part. (In fact, Gates earlier expressed a desire to reappoint Pace, and President Bush called him a good general.) Pace was denied his reappointment because he would have faced a contentious confirmation hearing. And why would the hearing have been contentious? Because it would have provided the Senate with another opportunity to cause political problems for the Bush administration by, once again, examining its failed policies in Iraq.
LAWRENCE J. KORB, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations, and Logistics from 1981 to 1985.
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DESCH REPLIES
Like Lawrence Korb, I deplore how the Bush administration has cynically used military professionals to advance its political agenda. The most egregious example of this is how after years of ignoring military advice it did not like, the administration now deflects calls from members of Congress to reduce troops in Iraq with the pious injunction that Washington ought not substitute "the opinions of politicians for the judgments of our military commanders," as President Bush put it after vetoing Congress' Iraq spending bill. I am not sure, however, that I share Korb's assessments of Generals Petraeus and Pace. I will withhold judgment of Petraeus' independence and candor until mid-September, when he delivers his report to Congress on the situation in Iraq. Unlike Korb, I do not think that Pace was denied a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs simply because his role in the Iraq war would have made his confirmation hearings contentious. I believe Pace's inappropriate public statements on nonmilitary issues -- his condemnation of homosexuality and his support for clemency for Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- also played a role in the decision.
The most important issue Mackubin Thomas Owens raises concerns the respective roles of military and civilian leaders in wartime decision-making. The best system is one that allows for substantial military autonomy in the military, technical, and tactical realms (how to fight wars) in return for complete subordination to civilian authority in the political realm (when and if to fight them). Admittedly, this approach is not perfect, but, like Samuel Huntington, I believe that it strikes the best possible balance between military effectiveness and civilian control. It is also consistent with Clausewitz's dictum that war has "a grammar of its own, but its logic is not peculiar to itself." Civilians should have the final say, in Clausewitz's view, not because they have any greater expertise than military officers in the narrow military realm (the grammar of war) but because the political rationale for war (its logic) should be paramount in guiding state policy.
This important distinction highlights just how radical a departure the Bush administration's approach to civilian control has been. That approach, which Owens endorses, is that civilians are more competent than military professionals not only in the larger political sphere (a point on which we all agree) but also in the narrower military realm. This latter argument defies common sense: professionals by definition have greater expertise in their particular fields than do those who deal with them in only part of their careers and then only episodically, as is the case for most senior civilian leaders in regard to the military.
There is not much evidence supporting the proposition that civilians make superior decisions in the narrow military realm than do military professionals. The single study that Owens cites -- Cohen's Supreme Command -- is flawed. Rather than looking at all the instances in which civilians "probed" into the military realm, Cohen chooses only a handful of cases, and only ones in which civilians did so successfully. And even among the handful of cases Cohen examines, the record of civilian strategists is mixed. Winston Churchill, whatever his heroic political leadership during World War II, pushed more than his share of harebrained military schemes that resulted in disaster (Gallipoli in World War I and Norway early in World War II) or would have had they been implemented (landings in the Balkans instead of western Europe).
General Richard Myers offers his "direct knowledge and personal experience" as reasons to accept his and Richard Kohn's remarkable claim that the intense civil-military "friction and distrust" in the run-up to the Iraq war was normal. Of course, throughout his tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Myers was a good team player for the Bush administration and put the best face on the increasingly bad situation in Iraq. If he thought that the war was going swimmingly, it is not surprising that he also thought that all was as it should be in civil-military relations.
The first evidence that civil-military relations were broken was the torrent of leaks that came out in the run-up to the war from senior officers within the planning process who were unhappy with Rumsfeld's numerous interventions into the details of the operation. At the time, Myers dismissed these stories as untrue and attacked the critics as unpatriotic. Subsequently, six retired generals who were intimately involved in either the Washington or the Iraqi side of the war's planning and execution issued calls for Rumsfeld's removal on the grounds that his meddling had crippled U.S. efforts. Perhaps Kohn can think of instances when U.S. civil-military relations have been worse over his 45-year career studying the subject, but I cannot, save perhaps for the later phases of the Vietnam War. And even if that period is comparable to the situation under Rumsfeld, it is hardly a ringing endorsement of the state of U.S. civil-military relations.
Myers and Kohn criticize my claim that professional military judgment was ignored on the matters of troop levels and deployment timing. Newbold, the former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits he should have spoken out sooner. But others did speak out before the war, including Shinseki. Myers and Kohn claim that Shinseki never offered advice on the matter of troop levels to the rest of the Joint Chiefs or to the president. But in his much-discussed congressional testimony in February 2003, Shinseki suggested that "several hundreds of thousands" might be needed to occupy Iraq, even if he ultimately deferred to General Franks' judgment. And in their book Cobra II, Michael Gordon and Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor report that at a White House meeting on January 20, 2003, Shinseki raised a number of issues, including troop numbers and the timing of their deployment, as qualifications of his endorsement of the war plan.
If taken at face value, Myers and Kohn's assertion that "in the end, all involved supported the final plan" is a damning indictment of the competence of the senior military leadership, including Myers himself, who assures us he had Rumsfeld's ear. I see it, instead, as an indication that after enough time and pressure, generals will eventually give their civilian bosses the answers they want. Otherwise, as the Shinseki affair so clearly demonstrated, other generals will be found to replace them. Although Myers and Kohn concede that Wolfowitz's public humiliation of Shinseki "was not conducive to proper civil-military relations," they understate the chilling effect this incident had on other senior officers who dissented from Rumsfeld's policies. The fact that Rumsfeld and his team were, through a year and a half of "probing and questioning" (which Myers and Kohn concede the combatant commander found "distasteful"), able to whittle the final troop number to less than half of the 380,000 the original war plans called for does not alter the fact that civilian views on force levels prevailed over the military consensus -- with disastrous results after the fall of Baghdad.
Kohn has chided me for years about my reading of McMaster's influential Dereliction of Duty, a misreading that according to him and to Owens, many military officers have made as well. But in defense of his interpretation of McMaster's argument as simply a plea that senior military leaders speak candidly, Kohn cites not the book itself but rather his own authority as McMaster's thesis adviser. I read McMaster's message as being that unqualified allegiance to the commander in chief needs to be rethought, based on a number of vignettes he presents involving senior military leaders who went, or should have gone, well beyond offering candid advice. Telling is McMaster's account of Army Chief of Staff Harold Johnson's despair when he realized that he "was to preside over the disintegration of the Army" because "he did not resign, resist, or object to the president's decision." Today, the turmoil inside the U.S. Army is so great that many junior officers reportedly believe -- and one, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, has publicly charged -- that the general officer corps is guilty of a similar dereliction of duty for going along with policies foisted on the military by intrusive civilian leaders. If one reader misconstrues an author's argument, the reader is probably at fault. When numerous readers all come to the same erroneous conclusion, the author was probably just not clear.
Finally, Myers and Kohn warn that my policy recommendations are "dangerous." My suggested civil-military division of labor implies, they charge, "automatic consent" to military preferences. And they claim that my suggestion that senior generals who protested Rumsfeld's Iraq policies would have been more effective had they resigned while on active duty undermines civilian control. In fact, I do not argue that civilian leaders should rubber-stamp military policies, even in the tactical or operational realms, so this charge is a red herring. The problem with civilian meddling in the run-up to the Iraq war was not that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz overruled the senior army leadership on the number of troops necessary for "Phase IV," or reconstruction, but that they did so claiming superior military expertise, rather than offering a compelling political reason for ignoring these military recommendations. I suspect that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had political reasons for reducing the size of the force -- public support for the war would likely have been less if it could not have been sold as a "cakewalk" -- but they were unwilling to subject their reasoning to critical scrutiny and wanted to confine the debate to the more esoteric realm of military strategy, on which most of the public was unlikely to challenge them.
Their second charge is based on the questionable assumption that the fear of senior officers' requesting retirement or relief of duty in protest against policies they found objectionable would lead civilians to appoint senior officers based on "compliance and loyalty." Myers and Kohn cannot seriously maintain that during the golden age when protest was rare, senior officers were never appointed for their pliability. Moreover, it does not follow logically that such behavior would undermine civilian control. Indeed, by raising the bar for military dissent, it would make it more likely that serving officers would "salute and obey" in response to orders with which they disagreed in all save the most extreme circumstances.
Myers and Kohn conclude that "what is necessary for effective policy, good decisions, and positive outcomes is a relationship of respect, candor, collaboration, cooperation -- and subordination." It is hard to characterize our Iraq policy in such positive terms. The civil-military relationship under Rumsfeld lacked respect, candor, collaboration, and cooperation. If the best we can say is that the U.S. military did not become openly insubordinate, that is damning with faint praise.
Source: Foreign Relations Magazine (September/October 2007)http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/war_on_terror/salute_and_disobey?/
Captains Speak Out on the War
When will we listen to the troops? I'm not talking about soldiers used as props for a George W. Bush photo-op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The military is disciplined and thus accustomed, from Gen. David Petraeus on down, to toeing the official line. But the Iraq war has also produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought. First, a group of sergeants came forward, and on Tuesday it was the captains' turn to speak out.
In "The War as We Saw It," an eloquent op-ed article published in The New York Times in August, seven Army sergeants summarized the futility of their 15 months fighting in Iraq: "To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched." After penning that cri de coeur, two of the soldiers died in Iraq, and a third was severely wounded.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post printed, "The Real Iraq We Knew," by 12 Army captains, all of whom served in Iraq, which begins: "Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.
"As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out."
How come those brave veterans know it's time to get out, but leading Democrats, who voted for the war to be authorized, are still pussyfooting about quickly removing the troops from this ever-deepening quagmire? They're jockeying for political advantage, knowing that drawing out the war hurts the Republicans.
It is a deeply cynical ploy that works only because, with our all-volunteer military, most Americans don't have to face the choice of sacrificing themselves or their loved ones in a futile and losing war.
Yes, it costs the taxpayers, but so do the "Halo 3" video games Americans are purchasing in record numbers, and for most, Iraq is a make-believe war. Even the cost seems unreal, as Bush is the first president in U.S. history to cut taxes in a time of war, with the result that more than a trillion dollars in long-term obligations will not come due while his administration has to foot the bills.
If there were a military draft, people would be in the streets demanding an end to this carnage, which now threatens to go on for decades. That is precisely why the neoconservative ideologues who got us into this mess built their fantasies on a volunteer force, supplemented by hundreds of thousands of contractors (including 50,000 mercenary troops like those from Blackwater) and the purchase of largely irrelevant but highly profitable high-tech weaponry — although they forgot about simple armor for the troops.
The most fraudulent neocon claim was that pro-Western, even pro-Israel, Iraqis, such as their favorite, the now totally discredited Ahmed Chalabi, would police the country as surrogates for the United States, and that Iraqi oil sales would pay for it all.
The 12 captains, who worked with the local Iraqi residents, are very clear as to the forlorn outcome of that plan. "And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq's oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq's reconstruction," they wrote.
As for that other ongoing illusion — that we are turning over power to Iraqi forces we have trained — the captains write: "Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we're gone."
Building an empire on the cheap and by proxy doesn't work. If you want one, and of course most of us shouldn't because only a few fat cats benefit from such imperial adventures, you need a vast conscript army. As the captains put it: "There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately." Enough said.
Source: Creators Syndicate
The show goes on ... and on
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| Palestinians hold photographs of incarcerated relatives as they attend a protest in front of Bethlehem's Nativity Church during a visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. (Luay Sababa, Maan Images) |
The "Middle East Peace Process" is like one of those big budget Broadway extravaganzas; they go on for years, but with each revival the cast changes. What may seem like a tired production to some nevertheless manages to remain fresh to the gullible throngs willing to hand over the price of admission.
Unlike a few hours of theatrical escapism, however, the producers of the Middle East Peace Process hope that the audience will actually believe that what they are viewing on stage, whether performed in Madrid, Oslo, London, Washington or Sharm al-Sheikh is real-life and even has the potential to end the conflict caused by a century of western-supported Zionist colonisation in Palestine.
In the latest revival, Condoleezza Rice plays the US secretary of state determined to bring the long-running conflict to a close with skilful diplomacy designed to put in a place a "process" eventually leading to a two-state solution. George Bush, tired of being typecast as a warmonger, tries on the role of lame-duck president who spent years enabling Israeli colonisation, but who, with an eye on his legacy, is now committed to peacefully ending the conflict once and for all.
Other key actors include Mahmoud Abbas, a colourless quisling whose only power base is the American and Israeli guns that keep him installed in his Ramallah Green Zone - filling in for the late Yasser Arafat as leader of the Palestinians, and Ehud Olmert, understudy to Ariel Sharon who left the stage unexpectedly.
Special guest star Tony Blair, who just completed a long and controversial run as prime minister of a marginal European power, hopes that by joining the peace process cast as "Quartet special envoy" he can breathe life into a flagging career.
Once in a while, reality bursts on to the stage to disrupt the show - and that has happened again just as the producers are getting ready to take it on tour to Annapolis , where President Bush plans to hold a meeting of key leaders some time this autumn.
Last week, just after Abbas's representatives met with Israeli counterparts to try to hammer out a "declaration of principles" to unveil at the Annapolis meeting, the Israeli army announced the expropriation of almost 300 acres of Palestinian land near occupied East Jerusalem for the purpose of expanding the already massive Jewish-only settlements which bisect the West Bank and render a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. Since the peace process began in 1993, Israel has confiscated an area equivalent to the size of Washington , DC , for the construction of Jewish-only colonies fully confident that none of the actors on stage will lift a finger to stop it.
Rice feigns frustration: "Frankly it is time for the establishment of a Palestinian state," she said at a press conference with Abbas. "We frankly have better things to do than invite people" to the Annapolis meeting "for a photo op". Yet she will be lucky if she even gets that. Already the meeting date is likely to be pushed back, not only because of accelerated Israeli colonisation, but because despite the spin there is no fundamental agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians on the details of what a two-state solution would look like. As I have argued elsewhere and in my book, One Country, peace through partition is an unachievable fantasy.
What's more, none of the players has the credibility or strength to negotiate on behalf of those whom they purport to represent. Abbas and his unelected cronies are seen by many Palestinians as petty collaborators determined to do all they can to retain their place at the master's table. Despite an overwhelming desire among Palestinians for unity, Abbas, blackmailed and bribed by the EU and US, refuses to talk to Hamas to heal the rifts caused by the efforts of Fatah militias armed and supported by Israel and the US to overturn the results of the January 2006 election won by Hamas. There can be no serious peace talks without Hamas on board.
Olmert, who is fending off multiple criminal corruption probes, heads a coalition that depends for its majority on Jewish racists who cannot countenance peace and equality with Palestinians under any circumstances. Last week, Tony Blair met with one of those coalition leaders, deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman who heads the proto-fascist Israel Beitenu party. According to Ha'aretz, Lieberman told Blair that any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "has to include Israel 's Arab citizens as well, when the basis for an agreement should be a land swap and a population transfer." In other words, there can be no peace without the expulsion of over one million Palestinian citizens of Israel . Lieberman has repeatedly promised to bring down the government if Olmert even discusses "core issues" at Annapolis such as borders, settlements and the rights of Palestinian refugees expelled by Israel .
Ha'aretz did not record Blair's reaction to this renewed call for ethnic cleansing from a senior Israeli official. (How would Blair have reacted if Ian Paisley had publicly declared that there could be no peace in Northern Ireland without the expulsion of all Catholics from the Six Counties so that Protestant supremacy could be perpetuated?) But it is a measure of how bankrupt the process is that EU and US officials meet willingly with avowed ethnic cleansers of Lieberman's calibre (presumably on the basis that he is elected) and yet refuse to deal with Hamas, the democratically-elected representatives of Palestinians under occupation. Hamas leaders have repeatedly offered Israel a long-term ceasefire and negotiations exactly on the Northern Ireland model that led to the Belfast Agreement of which Blair is so proud.
Blair is apparently unable to understand that what ended the conflict in Northern Ireland was not his charm, but the acceptance by all parties of the fundamental principle of equality among all people regardless of ethno-religious identity and the progressive reform of state institutions, like the police, that had been nothing more than sectarian militias in official uniforms, just as the Israeli police and army that steal land for Jews are nothing more than thuggish sectarian militias with uniforms.
In Palestine-Israel, this means abrogating all laws in Israel that systematically privilege Jews and harm non-Jewish citizens, ending Israel 's military tyranny in the Occupied Territories , and allowing refugees to return home. Nothing like that will be on the agenda in Annapolis which is why the effort will fail.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Nobel Hypocrisy
Alfred Nobel was a wealthy nineteenth century Swedish-born chemist, engineer, inventor of dynamite, armaments manufacturer and war profiteer who remade his image late in life by establishing the awarding of prizes in his name that includes the one for peace. This most noted award was inspired by his one-time secretary and peace activist, Bertha von Suttner, who was nominated four times and became the first of only 12 women to be honored.
Since it was established in 1901, the Peace Prize was awarded to 95 individuals and 20 organizations. Some recipients were worthy like Martin Luther King, Jane Addams and Albert Schweitzer but too many were not including this year's honoree. Al Gore joins a long list of past "ignoble" recipients like warrior presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and supporter of rogue regimes Jimmy Carter. He's also among the likes of genocidists Henry Kissinger and three former Israeli prime ministers - Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin - along with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who never met a US-led war he didn't love and support. So much for promoting peace and what this award is supposed to signify. More on this below.
Almost anyone can be nominated for the prize and look who were but didn't get it - Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and more recently George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Rush Limbaugh laughably. In contrast, one of the most notable symbols of non-violence in the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi, was nominated four times but never won. More recently, anti-war activist Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, now known as Voices for Creative Nonviolence, got three nominations but was passed over each time for less deserving candidates. Her "reward" instead was to be sentenced in 2004 to three months in federal prison for crossing the line into Fort Benning, Georgia in protest against the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation that's commonly called "the school of assassins."
Peace Prize Awards to War Criminals
Henry Kissinger was likely the most noted war criminal ever to win the Nobel Prize (in 1973 with Vietnam's Le Duc Tho who declined his award saying there was no peace in his country). The sheer scope of his crimes is breathtaking:
-- three to four million Southeast Asian deaths in the Vietnam war,
-- the bloody overthrow of a democratic government in Chile and support for Latin American dictators,
-- backed Surharto's takeover of West Papua and his invasion of East Timor killing hundreds of thousands,
-- supported the Khmer Rouge early on and its reign of terror rise to power,
-- backed Pakistan's "delicacy and tact" in overthrowing Bangladesh's democratically elected government causing a half million deaths, and much more around the world as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the world body he represented won their award in 2001 "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world." It wasn't for what Annan did in his various UN roles. Early on, he had a position in the Secretariat's services department in New York. He then got subordinate responsibility for the Middle East and Africa in the "special political affairs" department. There his support for Washington's call for troops to be sent to Somalia in the early 1990s helped put him in charge of all peacekeeping operations in February, 1993. In that role, he prevented measures from being taken to stop the impending Rwanda slaughter he was warned about in advance that caused around 800,000 deaths on his watch. He also kept the Security Council uninformed of what was coming.
At the behest of then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright and without consulting Secretary-General Boutras-Boutras-Ghali, Annan sided with the Clinton administration's authorization of NATO to illegally bomb Serb positions in Bosnia in 1995. It got him the Secretary-General's job in January, 1997 in which one observer noted he "courted the wrath of the developing world by rejecting anticolonialism in favor of moral principles cherished in the West."
Kofi Annan's Nobel award is a testimony to hypocrisy for a man whose ten years as Secretary-General failed to fulfill the mandate he was sworn to uphold: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish conditions (promoting) justice....equal rights of men and women (in all nations and respect for) international law (and) social progress....to ensure....armed force shall not be used."
During his ten year tenure in the top UN job, Annan:
-- supported Iraqi economic sanctions that caused around 1.5 million deaths including over one million children under age five;
-- backed the Bush administration's illegal 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation that's now taken an additional 1.2 million or more lives;
-- supported the illegal Afghanistan war and occupation;
-- remained mute on the possibility of a wider war with Iran even if it includes first strike nuclear weapons;
-- made no efforts to work for peace in the Middle East including in Occupied Palestine nor did he denounce Israel's 2006 war of aggression against Lebanon;
-- remained loyal to the West and ignored the plight of his own people throughout the African continent including the immiseration of South African blacks post-apartheid;
-- allowed thuggish paramilitary Blue Helmets to occupy Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sudan. More on UN peacekeeping below.
Kofi Annan's sole achievement was his uncompromising complicity with the Clinton and Bush administrations' worst crimes of war and against humanity. His loyalty earned him the Nobel award that signified nothing to do with peace he disdained.
UN Peacekeeping Forces got the Nobel award in 1988 for missions the UN defines as "a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace." Blue Helmets supposedly are sent to conflict and post-conflict areas to perform multiple services that include as top priority restoring order, maintaining peace and security and providing for the needs of people during transitional periods until local governments can take over on their own.
Most often, Blue Helmets end up creating more conflict than resolution and function mainly as unwanted paramilitary enforcers or occupiers. At other times, they become counterproductive or ineffective and end up doing more harm than good. Since 1948, over five dozen peacekeeping operations have been undertaken. Most were dismal failures including the first ever UNTSO mission during Israel's so-called "War of Independence." The operation is still ongoing after nearly 50 years, peace was never achieved, Blue Helmets are there but play no active role, and the world community is silent in the face of Israeli crimes of war and against humanity.
The same condition is true in Haiti where for the first time in UN history MINUSTAH peacekeepers were deployed to enforce a coup d'etat against a democratically-elected president. They disdain peace and stability and function instead as paramilitary occupiers indiscriminately terrorizing and killing unarmed civilians in service to Western capital.
Three former Israeli prime ministers also got Nobel Peace Prizes - Menachem Begin in 1978 and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994. All three men committed crimes of war and against humanity as did all other Israeli prime ministers since David Ben-Gurion took office May 14, 1948 after the new State of Israel declared it independence as an exclusive Jewish state. Nonetheless, the Nobel Committee awarded them its highest honor for furthering the cause of peace they disdained by using their position to inflict on the Palestinian people what Edward Said once said was Israel's "refined viciousness." Menachem Begin was a particularly virulent racist and Arab hater calling Palestinians "two-legged beasts" and saying Jews were the "Master Race" and "divine gods on this planet."
Then there's the current Nobel Peace Prize honoree, Al Gore. CounterPunchers Alex Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair wrote the book on him in 2000 titled "Al Gore: A User's Manual." It's a critical account of a "man whom his parents raised from birth to be president of the United States" and who always put politics over principle. He built his credentials for the high office around pro-business, pro-war, anti-union and phony environmental advocacy as no friend of the earth then so who can believe he's one now.
His 1992 book "Earth in the Balance" was more theater than advocacy. In it, he assessed the forces of planetary destruction that included air and water pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, overpopulation, ozone depletion and global warming. He highlighted the impact of auto emissions and need to phase out the internal combustion engine but made no effort in office to do it.
Then as vice-president he used his "green credentials" to sell the pro-business, anti-worker, anti-environmental NAFTA to the environmental movement. He also supported clear-cutting logging practices including in old-growth areas. He ignored an assessment that this practice risked the extinction of hundreds of species. He backed a 1995 spending bill "salvage logging rider" that opened millions of National Forest lands to logging and exempted sales of the harvest from environmental laws and judicial review for two years. He and Clinton further allowed South Florida's sugar barons to devastate thousands of Everglades acres and gave away consumer Delaney Clause protection that kept carcinogens out of our food supply.
Throughout his political life, Gore supported Big Oil and was tied to Occidental Petroleum Company and its "ruthless tycoon" chief, Armand Hammer. In return for supporting company interests, he got political favors and patronage from Hammer and his successor, Ray Irani who was a major DNC contributor and got to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom as a bonus reward. He's also been a shill for the nuclear industry that won't solve or even alleviate global warming and the threat it poses according to nuclear expert Helen Caldicott. Commercial reactors discharge huge amounts of greenhouse gases along with hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and other radioactive elements besides being sitting ducks for retaliatory terror attacks experts believe will eventually happen.
Earlier in the House (1977 - 1985) and Senate (1985 - 1993) and as vice-president Gore also shilled for the Pentagon and defense contractors. He "played midwife to the MX missile," opposed efforts to cut defense spending, and backed the Reagan administration's Grenada invasion and Central American wars. He partnered with Clinton's Balkan wars in the 1990s that destroyed Yugoslavia so NATO could expand into Central and Eastern Europe for its markets, resources and cheap, exploitable labor. In Kosovo, he collaborated with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) paramilitary thugs against Serbia and ignored their connection to organized crime. He earlier traded his vote for the Gulf war for prime time coverage of his speech.
He then backed ousting Saddam by coup or any other means and supported the most comprehensive genocidal sanctions ever imposed on a country that killed a likely 1.5 million or more Iraqis including over one million children under age five.
Cockburn and St. Clair fill in more blanks about a political opportunist who supported Big Tobacco, "exploited his sister's death and son's (near-fatal) accident for....political advantage; became a soul brother of Newt Gingrich; race-baited Jesse Jackson; pushed Clinton into destroying the New Deal; plotted to stop Democrats from recapturing Congress in 1996" so "his rival Dick Gephard" wouldn't become Speaker; "leached campaign cash from nearly every corporate lobbyist" in town, and, as already covered, lied about being a friend of the earth by disdaining environmentalism through his actions.
Does this man deserve a Nobel Peace Prize (let alone to be president) along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." The Nobel Committee ignored Gore's environmental record and went on to say "for a long time (he's) been one of the world's leading environmental politicians (through) his strong commitment, reflected in political activity, (that) strengthened the struggle against climate change." Contrary to his easily accessed public record, not his posturing, The Nobel Committee blindly added "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."
In point of fact, throughout his political life, Gore's actions betrayed the public's trust and still do. He and his wife live in two large energy-consuming homes: a 10,000 square foot, eight bedroom one in Nashville and a 4000 square foot one in Arlington, VA. The Gores also own a third home in Carthage, TN. In both Washington and Nashville, utility companies offer a wind energy green alternative to customers for a small per kilowatt hour premium. Gore can easily afford it, but public records show no evidence he's does it in either residence. Alex Cockburn gets the last word on a man who shills for privilege, has plenty for himself, and like George Bush disdains the public interest: "Al Gore distills in his single person the disrepair of liberalism in America today, and almost every unalluring feature of the Democratic Party" that's mostly indistinguishable from the other side of the aisle in a city where the criminal class is bipartisan.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.
Source: ZioPedia.org
