In article <bps52b$11hm$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, davebunford@tinyworld.co.uk
says...

http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=82574&group=webcast

JFK, 9-11, and the REAL America: Tying It All Together
by Jon Phalen 3:10pm Sat Nov 22 '03
(Modified on 9:55pm Sun Nov 23 '03)
truthserum9@yahoo.com

An organic reconsideration of US history and major "conspiracy
theories" of the past 40 years, including those pertaining to the
9-11 attack, and how they shed light on America's present drift
into fascism.

Hijackers?

What makes you think you actually KNOW what happened on those planes?
All four were obliterated, along with everyone on board, remember?
No crime scene, no direct evidence, no recognizable remains, no
witnesses whatsoever -- it's a blank canvas. How convenient for any
party intent on launching a new era of global imperialism, and
willing to spin this tragedy into a viable excuse. Indeed, all of
the attack's consequences are far better explained by this agenda
than by Bin Laden's purported death wish. Those presuming to examine
this matter, i.e. ALL OF US, need to recognize that such trickery
is a timeless specialty of governments.

And yet from that very day we have allowed the government-media
complex to focus all attention on one rather thin explanation: Crazy
Arabs did it! George W. Bush and his cabinet have made it known to
us, in the most arrogant terms, that they will brook no discussion
of other possibilities -- an edict most Americans, in their desperation
to believe in this man, seem to have embraced. The Bush Administration
even withholds its "proof" of Al Qa'eda's guilt; clearly, it considers
mere citizens too unimportant to require full explanations, and
once again, we're just rolling over and taking it.

The phrases 'spiritually broken' and 'morally adrift' come to mind...

Until the full case against Al Qa'eda is made available for public
review, we have absolutely no assurance that this "proof" isn't
exactly like the "proof" of Iraq's weapons programs -- i.e., a big
fat lie from top to bottom. On these terms, wholesale acceptance
of the hijacker scenario will continue to be what it has always
been: a pathetic display of blind faith in this administration's
utterances, and in those of its media accomplices. At present, it
is astonishing that anyone places faith of any kind in either party:
by means of the "WMD" debacle, both have proven themselves amoral,
duplicitous, and utterly devoid of humanity. Indeed, why do we give
them so much as a moment of our attention? No one with a lick of
sense would do this.

A rigorous civilian investigation of 9-11 would help resolve such
doubts. If Bush and the rest were standing on firm ground, they
would fully support such a thing. Instead, they have worked to
thwart both its formation and its progress, using every resource
within their reach. Some time last year, they seem to have realized
they were only fueling suspicions this way, so Bush grudgingly
approved an "independent" investigation. The arrogance of this bunch
is so disabling, however, that they actually damaged their credibility
even further by naming Henry Kissinger to lead it. This is a man
whose dedication to "US interests" verges on homicidal psychosis
(see his treatment of Cambodians 1970, Chileans 1973, East Timorese
and Kurds 1975, MUCH more). He could only be expected to skew this
investigation accordingly, i. e., to omit and cover up any issue
not conducive to empire building. Ironically, even Henry had the
sense to admit he was an inappropriate choice, thus resigning from
this duty, whereupon Bush immediately returned to his original
tactic of stonewalling (1). Could the man possibly have something
to hide?

To appreciate the ugliest possibilities of the 9-11 attack, one
must first become aware of the continuous practice of such manipulations
by the entire progression of American politicians. The need to
cultivate this awareness is itself an enigma: if you have the honesty 
to see this pattern at all, its full enormity, emerging over time,
will at some point cause your previous ignorance to amaze you.
Imagine living your entire life with an 800-pound gorilla, then
realizing one day it's not a sofa, after all. At the same time,
finding this enlightenment is challenging, because the relevant
facts are usually withheld from the public for decades, seldom
appearing in mainstream discourse even after they become common
knowledge -- not because of some grand conspiracy, but because
legions of 'America Firsters,' including most of the famous and
powerful, simply don't want to hear it. The telling of these facts
is an affront to their most cherished political assumptions.
Invariably, they respond with hostile apologetics, ranging from
simple denial and ridicule to the claim that such incidents are
random and unrelated "mistakes." That they can sincerely believe
this 'unrelated' claim is remarkable, given the way it crushes into
dust under any burden of historical proof: America's state crimes
have been ethically monstrous, vast in both scale and number,
unilateral in their aggression, virtually uninterrupted in their
chronology, and very coherent in both motive and method. Certain
themes just keep popping up:

1) Greed, particularly for territory;

2) Supremacism, driven only partly by race, perhaps more so by
delusions of national grandeur allowed to ramify without limit;

3) An enthusiasm for "total war" -- i. e., the indiscriminate
butchery of entire populations. This seems most likely to happen
when "strategic" territories, resources, or victories are at stake.
That is, when those in authority feel they "must win," and so discard
principle to whatever extent is necessary;

4) The systemic corruption and antidemocratic functioning of every
level of American government, made abundantly clear by its relations
with sworn enemies of the public interest, namely corporations;

5) The bid for global empire that has all but defined the American
agenda since W.W.II, in flagrant violation of democratic principle.

This last "US interest," discussed openly by flacks and shills only
since 9-11 suspended all moral judgment on such matters, actually
represents the driving passion of our ruling elite, going all the
way back to the Revolution. Indeed, grasping the means of power,
beginning with sovereign domain, was their main motive for pursuing
revolution at all. Starting then and continuing ever since, they
have whipped the people up to support their warped appetites, even
as they have misrepresented them spectacularly. EVERY SINGLE TIME
we as a people have committed to a war of expansion, we have been
duped into doing so by their twin handservants, American politics
and American media:

1776 to 1890 innumerable 'Indian wars' In which the western frontier
was pushed through the territories of one Indian confederation after
another, all the way to the Pacific. An early and definitive example
is George Washington's post-revolutionary conquest of the Ohio
Valley, where the Washington Family held deeds to immense tracts
of prime real estate never actually ceded by the Indians. The lore
that George was a "surveyor" is a populist distortion; he was no
blue collar grunt, laying out property lines to earn a living. He
was in fact the most ambitious of an elite family of 'land speculators'
-- the colonial equivalent of venture capitalists -- and his toils
were in the service of his own family fortune. Already one of the
richest people in post-revolutionary America, he was determined to
get even richer through the sale of his Ohio holdings, and wasn't
about to be stopped by 'two-legged vermin' like the Shawnees and
Miamis. To this end, he abused his dominance of the early federal
government, arranging for Revolutionary War veterans (a battle-hardened
militia) to be compensated with "land warrants" deep in Ohio's
wilderness, far beyond his own holdings. He also encouraged the
issuance of large bounties, equivalent to several months' income,
for Indian scalps along the upper Ohio River. These were essentially
open murder contracts that targeted ALL Indians, regardless of age,
gender, or tribal affiliation. By this means, genocide was openly
subsidized for decades wherever intact Indian cultures presented
an obstacle to "progress." Primitive as media was, its role in all
this was crude but sufficient: posting the bounties while inflaming
the settlers' hatred with tales of Indian atrocities, real and
imagined. In the Ohio Territory, these tactics rapidly progressed
to open war, orchestrated by Washington against Tecumseh's Shawnee
Confederation, and then to the total extermination and westward
displacement of the Ohio tribes (2).

1846 to '48 The Mexican War: Beginning in 1818, when the Oregon
Territory was acquired, American imperialists developed an intense
interest in California. Simply adding it piecemeal to their territorial
inventory wouldn't have worked, however: it was too isolated, too
defensible by the Mexicans. To take California, all of northern
Mexico -- what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico,
Texas, and portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado -- would have
to be taken, requiring the invention of some PRETEXT for doing so.
In 1836, American "adventurers" (freelance political operatives)
instigated a regional coup in the Mexican province of Texas, splitting
it off to form an independent country, the Republic of Texas. Nine
years later, this nation was annexed as the 28th state. Immediately
afterward, President Polk made the predictable move of sending
belligerent military incursions into disputed lands along the new
border with Mexico. The Mexicans replied with patrols of their own,
and then clashes developed, leading to the "spilling of American
blood on American soil." Or so the press told it (their bias could
be summed up in a phrase they coined around this time: "Manifest
Destiny"). In fact, the soil in question was situated between the
Nueces and Rio Grande rivers, an area both governments held equal
claim to. But no matter -- the people eagerly accepted this distortion,
Polk got his dirty little war, and then proceeded to steal something
like 650,000 square miles of territory from our next-door neighbor.
Add to this the previous criminal acquisition of territory from
Mexico, i.e. the "Lone Star State," and the area usurped approaches
one-third of the contiguous 48 states, or HALF of what was originally
Mexico (3).

Some years later, a fantastic mineral strike in this stolen territory
-- the Comstock Lode -- would provide the Hearst Family with an
immense fortune, soon parlayed by William Randolph into an infamous
media empire.

1898 to '99 The Spanish-American War/Philippine Campaign: Though
still a colonial client of Spain during the 1880s and '90s, Cuba
was also a hotbed of insurrection, thanks to the efforts of Jose
Marti and others. By 1898, the Cuban independence movement had
Spain's colonial government on the ropes. The prominence of blacks
among the rebels made this situation alarming for fin de siecle
American royalists, among whom "Darwinist" (i.e. proto-Nazi) political
thought was at the height of its popularity. Also, having just
recently subdued the last free-roaming Indian tribes back home,
their passion for grabbing other people's land could now be expanded
into the Caribbean, Central America, and Pacific, via expanded
activities of that handy agency, the US military. So in the fall
and winter of 1897-98, the Hearst syndicate and other news organizations
were blasting Americans with "yellow journalism" on the subject of
Cuba -- sensational and often ludicrous accounts, custom made to
induce support of US military intervention. The public thus primed,
the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave
McKinley all the excuse needed to commence grabbing up not only
Cuba, but also Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It was in
the Philippines that the US military took "total war" beyond North
America for the first time. Encouraged by the Filipino's uncanny
resemblance to Native Americans, US troops mass-murdered something
like 25% of the civilian population. As imperial outrages go, this
was the equal of anything that's happened since (4).

A 1975 investigation led by Admiral Rickover determined that the
Maine's hull was breached by an explosion originating INSIDE the
ship. This could have been a spontaneous "coal-bin explosion," or
it could have been a bomb placed by an imperialist traitor. As with
9-11, this catastrophe neatly erased any inconvenient witnesses to
its real mechanics.

1917 to '18 World War I: Three years into the "Great War," it looked
as though Germany would defeat Britain and France, our primary
capitalist hosts in Europe. Big financiers like J. P. Morgan and
John D. Rockefeller, who between them had billions invested "over
there," weren't about to just sit back and watch this happen. They
barked orders to their underling, Woodrow Wilson, who then declared
war, using German interference with US shipping activities as a
feeble pretext. Leading up to this, the media minions whipped the
public into a war frenzy, basing their wildly manipulative propaganda
on incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania, two years earlier.
Funny thing about the Lusitania: it's hold contained a secret,
illegal, and massive cargo of ammunition and other materiel bound
for Liverpool, and its passengers were used as unwitting human
shields for this cargo by the US government, which is why they died.
Neither Wilson nor the media of the day ever admitted any of this
(5).

The dynamics behind America's entry into World War II were virtually
identical. Over 500,000 Americans died in these two wars, with
875,000 more wounded, and an additional and unknown number emotionally
shattered, all of which brought untold misery to their families and
communities. Given the choice between destroying all those lives
or allowing the likes of Morgan and Rockefeller to suffer the tragedy
of somewhat less obscene wealth, our "representatives" chose the
former as the lesser sacrifice.

1941 to '45 World War II: France already lying crushed beneath
Hitler's war machine, and Britain under a devastating siege, the
White House was once again compelled to intervene on behalf of its
capitalist masters, whose European investments had grown two
magnitudes since the close of W.W.I. Unlike Wilson, however, FDR
did a truly brilliant job of constructing a pretext. in September
of 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, a
treaty committing all three countries to counterattack against new
foes faced by any one of them. This gave Roosevelt a back door into
Europe via the Pacific. Beginning one month later, and fourteen
months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, he launched secret military
and economic operations against the Japanese Empire, obstructing
its only access to oil, rubber, and other strategic resources. The
Japanese response to this blockade -- open hostilities against the
United States, beginning with a crippling preemptive attack on the
Pacific Fleet -- was entirely predictable. In fact, it was Roosevelt's
whole purpose in setting up the blockade: Nearly unanimous
"isolationist" sentiment at home was his first military target, and
precipitating a "vicious sneak attack on US soil" was his deliberate
design for destroying that sentiment. For this reason, he concentrated
the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii as never before, where it would be seen
as an imminent threat by Japanese generals. He then withheld
intelligence of Japan's attack preparations from Pearl's top officers,
continuing to exclude them even when radio intercepts revealed the
movement of a Japanese carrier group toward Hawaii (6).

>From 1941 to '46, and again in 1995, Congress investigated "the

intelligence lapses that made this sneak attack possible" no less
than NINE TIMES. On all of these occasions, officials of the Roosevelt
Administration and the Office of Naval Intelligence perjured
themselves and concealed vast amounts of evidence to preserve the
historical fictions surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack. To this
day, the NSA claims "national security" as its basis for withholding
relevant material from the public. "National security" stands
revealed, then, as a euphemism for this government's ruthless grip
on power -- a thing that certainly would be threatened, were we to
become fully aware of the treacheries it spawns. This context
radically transforms "national security" rhetoric into an ideal
excuse for all sorts of betrayals and deceits, and this seems to
be it's actual interpretation among those who "safeguard" it.

The agonies of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc. under Hitler, not to
mention those of the Chinese and Koreans under the Japanese Empire,
were incidental at best to US motives for pursuing W.W.II, both
before and during. It was only afterward that the camps were seized
upon as a full-blown "pretext in retrospect" to maximize America's
apparent heroism. With each year that has passed since, this myth
has been more shamelessly advanced, so that now some stunning
percentage of Americans believe that "halting genocide" was their
government's main motive for waging war at all.

1945 to '89 The Cold War (a.k.a. W.W.III): was launched by the
closing episode of W.W.II, i. e. the atomic bombing of Japan.
President Truman's official rationalization for the bombing, trumpeted
ad nauseum by the media of the day, was that it was the only way
to end the war quickly, thus avoiding a horrific house-by-house
assault of the entire Japanese Archipelago. In fact, the Japanese
were already making conditional surrender overtures. Accepting their
terms, however, would have made Truman's victory conditional as
well, and he was determined to humiliate them. Even the total
surrender he insisted on was only a few months away, by all signs.
Meanwhile, the war in Europe having ended in May, the Russians were
now free to join the allied fight against this old enemy of theirs,
and were preparing to do exactly that. Given enough time to enter
the Pacific War, they would have claimed a portion of Japan upon
its surrender, just as they had recently claimed the eastern half
of Europe. To keep the Soviets from horning in on this pending crown
jewel of America's Pacific Empire, Truman needed his total victory
immediately, and The Bomb gave him an irresistible means by which
to secure it. As an early devotee of anti-Communist paranoia, he
was also confronting the Russians with a demonstration of America's
'invincible technological prowess.' Finally, his decision to vaporize
200,000 Japanese civilians was made easier by his avowed hatred of
the entire race (7).

The cover provided by the Cold War enabled the United States to
pursue its largest campaign of expansion by far, extending its
economic and strategic tentacles into every corner of the planet
and even into space by means of literally hundreds of "anti-Communist"
initiatives, interventions, and proxy wars. Our present "global
hegemony," a source of endless glee for Bush and other miscreants,
didn't "just happen" -- it was the overarching and unspoken goal
of US Cold War politics.

Another important thing to understand about the Cold War: the "War
on Terrorism" is directly adapted from it, just as the Cold War
itself developed directly from W.W.II, which was in turn a direct
consequence of W.W.I, which was Germany and Britain vying with one
another for world domination -- a contest America ended up winning.
What an epic of greed-crazed murderous lunacy! One that the present
regime seeks only to perpetuate, and for the same reasons as always:
expansion and consolidation of empire.

1950 to '53 The Korean War: To coerce public support for this war,
the press and the Truman Administration whipped up public hysteria
about the "Red Menace!" that was then "swallowing up" obscure Far
Eastern precincts. No mention, of course, that the mounting anti-US
sentiment in those precincts resulted entirely from collaboration
between US occupation forces and the Japanese fascists they were
supposedly there to remove. This collaboration ranks as one of the
most arrogant foreign policy blunders in US history. For people
throughout the Far East, it was an unbearable betrayal, as it
effectively prolonged what had already been one of the most gruesome
and protracted military occupations EVER. Similar dynamics had
already developed in mainland China, a hornet's nest so immense
that withdrawal quickly resolved as our only sane option. And also
in the Philippines, where US troops and Huk rebels started out
fighting side by side to expel the Japanese. Indigenous sovereignty
being the Huk's ultimate goal, the Americans began killing them,
too, as the Japanese were subdued. Two thousand miles from all these
places, in French Indochina, the exact tensions seen in Korea arose
AGAIN in response to brutal French/Japanese collaboration -- abetted
by American field agents, naturally (8).

In all four places, revolutionary leaders greatly admired America's
political tradition of anti-colonialism and self-determination, and
sought to claim these values for their own countries. They even
made earnest attempts to form friendships with the US; they thought
colonialism was a 'european thing,' so that we must therefore be
'the good guys.' For strategic planners back in Washington, all
this was at odds with their grand design for the Far East: now being
vacated by its previous colonial tenants, it was seen as a "power
vacuum," fairly begging for RE-colonization according to America's
obfuscated formula of puppet politics and corporate infiltration.

American society has yet to recover from the "Red Menace!" propaganda
barrage, which soon became a constant theme of international news
coverage, and remained so for the next 40 years. As a means of
inducing mass paranoia and public consent to limitless militarization,
the "Red Menace" lost its punch following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, necessitating its replacement with a more robust methodology
-- the "Terrorist Menace!" Nazi Germany and Israel being the great
innovators of this second method, America owes a great debt to both
of them.

1965 to '73 The Vietnam War: By way of manipulating Congress into
granting him war powers, LBJ reprised the "vicious sneak attack"
gambit with his brazen lies regarding such action by the North
Vietnamese against US Navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. Beginning
in 1969, Nixon and Kissinger expanded on this crime enormously,
adding Laos and Cambodia to North Vietnam as targets of a redoubled
'total war' initiative. Several million tons of cluster bombs were
then used to totally destroy vast civilian districts in all three
countries (districts simply crawling, mind you, with subsistence
farmers bent on global domination). All of which exactly repeated
the pattern of the Korean War -- right down to America not winning
(9).

As huge as the American effort against Vietnam was, it was just one
element of a yet more enormous strategy of military encirclement
(a.k.a. "containment") directed against mainland China. Other
elements were: the permanent and massive US military presence in
Japan; a similar presence in Thailand; unlimited military and
economic support to Chiang Kai-Shek's exile government on Formosa
(Taiwan); the Korean War and subsequent permanent US military
presence in Korea; a strong strategic interest in India, including
covert support of an otherwise preposterous nuclear weapons program;
also, a US-equipped and -trained covert army of Chinese "nationalists"
in eastern Burma, within what became known as the "Golden Triangle."
It was here that the CIA first learned of the marvels of the
international heroin trade.

To advance its "interests," the US government has manipulated the
affairs of every region of the planet on this same incredible scale,
and continues to do so. Other hotspots include Europe, the Middle
East, Central Africa, and all of Latin America and the Pacific.

1991 to 2003 The Gulf War / "No-fly Zones" / Sanctions: To con
Americans into backing this outrage, Daddy Bush and his media
bed-buddies told a couple real whoppers. First there was the one
about the satellite photographs of a massive Iraqi invasion force
assembling on the northern border of Saudi Arabia (10). Then there
was the Kuwait Incubator Hoax, an inventive revival of the childish
"babies on bayonets" propaganda of World War I -- as told by a
child, no less (11). As it turned out, Operation "Desert Storm" was
merely the opening episode of a ruthless destabilization program,
aimed primarily at hapless civilians, that would continue for over
a decade, killing no less than 500,000 Iraqis in a fairly obvious
attempt to turn them against their head of state. This fulfills any
sane definition of terrorism, and is probably the most grandiose
recent example of the state-sponsored variety. It was maintained
with enthusiasm by the Clinton Administration.

2001 to present The "War on Terror" (a.k.a. W.W.IV): Pretexts
include: 1) the 9-11 attack; 2) this Administration's single-minded
incrimination of Al Qa'eda (a CIA proxy), backed up with such things
as; 3) an obviously fraudulent videotape of Osama "confessing;" 4)
the conceit that Al Qa'eda's guilt justified a full-scale invasion
of Afghanistan (the combined strike force for which began building
up at least six months prior to 9-11, disguised as a "war game");
5) an implied equation between Al Qa'eda and Iraq's Ba'athite regime,
and; 6) the absurd fantasy that Iraq, a country left all but helpless
by the previous campaign, might pose a real threat to the world's
deadliest strategic power.

By rights, I should have included the Civil War in this run-down:
all the ingredients are there, with antidemocratic preservation of
domain being equivalent to expansion. Also, the fable that 'freeing
the slaves' was its entire purpose has to rank among the wildest
disinformation campaigns ever perpetrated upon Americans by our
"free press."

Though they never precipitated the full-scale wars their authors
had in mind, a few other nasty episodes are especially relevant to
9-11:

Operation "Northwoods" A Pentagon plan for a massive "false flag"
terror campaign against American citizens, the purpose being to
provide pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. If approved, it
would have entailed such things as sniper attacks on random US
citizens (a la the DC sniper), terrorist bombings, and a bogus
missile attack on an unmanned, remote-controlled US airliner in the
Caribbean, the plane's fictitious passengers to be reported as
"entirely lost." All of this was to be carried out by US intelligence
agents posing as Cuban operatives, whose dirty work would translate
directly into the sort of massive public manipulation campaign this
government always launches when it sees profit in war. The Northwoods
plan was called off by Robert McNamara only when it was submitted
for executive approval, having already been approved by every member
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (12).

Northwoods would never amount to anything more than a glimmer in
some agency psychopath's eye. In Europe, however, the CIA's most
deranged anti-leftist terror tactics were actually implemented ...

Operation "Stay Behind"; Operation "Gladio" As part of a larger US
withdrawal strategy following W.W.II, the CIA created underground
right-wing militias throughout Western Europe, to be activated as
guerilla armies in the event of invasion by the Soviets. These were
known as "Stay Behind" forces; they were a rogue's gallery of
mercenary scum, dominated by devout ex-Nazis recruited by SS-cum-CIA
agent Reinhard Gehlen. As the years passed and the Soviets failed
to provide the anticipated invasion, the Stay Behinds resorted to
other means of justifying their CIA paychecks. All across Europe,
beginning in the 1950s, they morphed into right-wing hit squads and
terrorist groups. They participated in massive CIA-NATO destabilization
efforts against the Soviet Bloc countries, assassinating Soviet
officials, sabotaging industrial plants and public infrastructure,
and generally terrorizing civilian populations. The pattern should
be familiar from similar terror campaigns against Cuba and Nicaragua.
In East Berlin, the activities of Stay Behind units were the primary
reason for the construction of the Berlin Wall. The Stay Behinds
did not limit their mayhem to the Soviet Bloc, however; as time
passed, their attention turned more and more to equivalent activities
within their NATO home countries. Throughout Western Europe,
particularly in Italy, leftist politics had a stronger following
than it has seen in the US since the 1930s, and the Stay Behinds
were the CIA's primary footsoldiers in its "dirty tricks" campaign
against this percieved enemy. In a psy-war effort to alienate the
public from the political left, they launched bogus left-wing terror
outfits (the "Baader-Meinhof Gang") or framed real leftist undergrounds
(the "Red Brigades") for atrocities they committed themselves. In
Italy, where the Stay Behind operation was code-named "Gladio,"
agents posing as left-wing extremists perpetrated many public
bombings during the '70s, killing at least 300 people. These
culminated in the August 1980 Bologna Train Station Bombing, which
killed 86. The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro was another
Gladio exploit. These activities had one purpose: to portray the
political left as public enemy number one, thus isolating it
domestically while building consent for military escalation and
NATO aggression against the Soviets (13).

* * * * * * * * *

So what's it all about, anyway, all this intrigue and stomping of
jackboots on distant shores? Thanks to its unrivaled military
strength and exceptional geographic isolation (oceans make bitchin'
moats), this country is all but perfectly invulnerable to invasion,
and repelling invaders would seem to be the only defensible function
of armies. No one's invaded this country since the War of 1812,
when British expeditions came out of Canada, Florida, and the Gulf
of Mexico. Don't expect a repeat anytime soon. Although a massive
one, the Pearl Harbor Attack was still just a raid, on what at the
time was this country's farthest-flung primary military base.

To keep the entire planet under its thumb, our government burdens
us with the gargantuan cost of the world's largest military, which
it mostly uses to crush pitiful rebellions in the remotest and
poorest corners of the world, places we truly have no business being
in. This is exactly like a bully swaggering around a schoolyard,
shaking down all the little kids. Is that really how you want your
government representing you to the rest of the world? Shouldn't
DOMESTIC policy take priority instead? Things like adequate health
care and effective primary education -- programs that would serve
the wants and needs of YOU, their citizen, whom they claim to be
their master. But this is not their priority, and never has been.
The geometric growth of this economy, by various forms of conquest,
is their abiding passion, with domestic policy being attended to
almost as an afterthought. To force our consent, they hypnotize us
with lurid visions of one boogeyman after another, maintaining
childish fear as our primary political sensibility, keeping us
dependent, trusting, stupid, distracting us from our own self-interests...

Why is that?

WHO BENEFITS??

The average American, who spends his or her life chained to the
machinery of wealth production, watching their share of its output
dwindle steadily, sure as hell doesn't. The stratum of society that
truly gains from all this just happens to be the same one that finds
employment in high-level intelligence positions: big-time spooks
like Kermit Roosevelt, the Dulles brothers, Nelson Rockefeller,
George H. W. Bush -- i. e. America's ruling families. In their
parlance, "US Interests" is just doublespeak for global empire and
corporate colonialism, and these have always been the real purposes
behind their warmongering.

All told, these wars killed over a million US soldiers, along with
many times this number of civilians and combatants in the lands
invaded, and this isn't even touching on the dozens of proxy wars
that have been the American Empire's main battle front for going
on sixty years. All of these millions of people, American and foreign
alike, were MURDERED by a government intent on advancing the interests
of a tiny minority while betraying the rest of humanity; a government
willing to wield its power in their service in any manner, including
technological and economic terror campaigns waged against entire
national populations. And yet this government has the audacity to
call itself a "beacon of hope to the world!" And the majority BELIEVE
THEM!! It simply amazes.

America's shadowy patricians were already too powerful before the
Cold War. And then decades of public hysteria borne of imminent
nuclear annihilation delivered them into the fabled realm of "absolute
power." This has been pretty obvious. Americans have avoided realizing
it only by actively pursuing a mental state of utter denial on this
subject, sort of like the three monkey icons of Shinto. Thanks to
this determined ignorance, keeping the rest of us in the dark has
been childishly easy for people like the Bushes. They can even be
incredibly brazen and sloppy and get caught red-handed, as with
Watergate. No biggy: just tell all the boobs it was Nixon acting
alone, assisted by his best buddies, who just happened to be, um,
CIA agents. Yah. They'll never notice this story's unbelievable
stench; they'll be too relieved at having any sort of excuse to NOT
think about it. You know, just like when the Warren Commission's
whitewash came out.

One hypothesis is particularly good for sending 'America Firsters'
into an apoplexy of denial: that the political culture now emerging
in Washington is actually a product of 40 years of covert penetration
into the Executive Branch. To substantiate this, one need look no
further than the lineage of our present "leader." His grandfather,
Prescott Bush, was a military spy during W.W.I, a key financial
collaborator with the Nazis, and a US Senator. His father, George
H. W. Bush, was heir to the CIA realm under our most infamous
presidential regime, a fixture in presidential politics for 20
years, and all in all one of the creepiest figures ever to darken
the American political stage. The 'quiet coup' that brought this
man to power traces back to the Eisenhower Administration, when the
utterly creepy "National Security" underworld first became a secret
and malevolent force in national politics -- a force whose power
is still nearly impossible to measure. There are ominous glimpses,
though: in 1960, Eisenhower's VP and political heir, Richard M.
Nixon, was shouldered aside by John F. Kennedy, who over the next
three years developed grave misgivings about this underworld and
its power. Then he ended up dead, and yes, his assassination DID
stink of black ops, as did the similar jobs on Malcolm X, Martin
Luther King, and his kid brother "Bobby," who would have been the
SECOND Kennedy to sour Nixon's presidential hopes, had he lived to
see the 1968 election...

Though the CIA denies it, several independent sources identify
George H. W. Bush as a high-ranking agent during the Kennedy
Administration, commanding covert operations against Cuba. The ships
used in Operation "Zapata" (the "Bay of Pigs" invasion) were named
by him, it is said, after members of his family. Those names indeed
correspond with those of his wife and children. Among the most
conclusive sources is an official memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover,
dated November 29, 1963, which refers to a "Mr. George Bush of the
Central Intelligence Agency" (14). The memo refers to Bush's
evaluation of emotional reactions to Kennedy's assassination among
Cuban exiles under his watch.

>From here, Bush the Elder went on to become a protege of Richard

Nixon's, was a mid-echelon member of his cabinet beginning in 1971,
had very interesting connections to CREEP, and somehow eluded
Congress's Watergate dragnet.

Watergate and a few other incidents proved that Nixon had a most
unwholesome relationship with the CIA. Once this scandal had
hemorrhaged to the point that Congress could no longer avoid taking
action, containing the damage could be seen as the main theme of
its response -- a hallmark of Congressional investigations. There
was far too much eagerness to examine this matter only in terms
narrowly relating to impeachment, thus leaving larger questions
wholly unexplored: did the Watergate break-in really happen on
Nixon's orders, or was the intelligence underworld acting on its
own, using 'dirty tricks' to prop up their man in the White House,
exactly as it has on countless occasions for entire puppet governments
all over the world? In the latter case, letting Nixon take the fall
would have been an extreme measure, but possibly the only sure way
to divert attention from an abhorrent and illegal power structure,
thus preserving it. Nixon himself would have been a likely author
of this tactic, as it was he who trumped Congress' investigation
by resigning, whence the entire matter was eagerly dropped.

Bone-tired of Watergate in any case, the public was predisposed to
accept Nixon's implied guilt as the final answer: "responsibility
can't go any higher than the President, right? Harry 'the buck stops
here' Truman said so." In reaching this conclusion, we were assisted
by major media organs, which immediately began spinning this as
Watergate's "final resolution." In fact, this conclusion resolved
nothing -- it left the most crucial questions hanging in mid-air,
soon to be shrouded in rhetoric by professional apologists from all
quarters. Its only definite outcome was the softening of a renewed
public spirit of scrutiny and resistance, which in turn allowed a
deadly authoritarian cancer to resume its march throughout our body
politic. After going underground for seven years, this cancer emerged
in full force as the Reagan Administration.

Dubya's announcement last April of another bogus 'conclusion' --
that of his Hitlerian conquest of Iraq -- had a strikingly similar
effect

 Once again, mounting vigilance was undone by a well-timed

lie, universally disseminated.

Following Nixon's resignation, Poppy finally hit the big-time when
Gerald Ford named him Director of the CIA. After toppling Carter,
he became VP himself, and for the next twelve years was at the
center of the Reagan era's continuous parade of treasonous covert
operations. A few highlights: 1) the campaign to prevent an "October
Surprise," in which Bush & Co. induced the Iranians to delay release
of the American embassy hostages, thus undermining Carter's re-election
bid; 2) an inhuman terror campaign against the people and government
of Nicaragua, even after Congress declared it illegal, at which
point the CIA was forced to devise covert funding arrangements such
as 3) "Iran-Contra" and 4) operation "Watchtower." This last episode,
which was going on around the time of Bush Senior's succession, is
easily the most incredible: the CIA was a major domestic smuggler
and distributor of "Crack" cocaine during the late '80s, when this
drug became an inner-city plague (15).

At this point, the CIA was contemptuously wiping its ass with the
Constitution, and got completely away with it. If this were truly
the America the Boy Scouts taught you to believe in, the exposure
of operation "Watchtower" would have destroyed the CIA.

Late in Reagan's second term, 60 minutes was granted a horrifying
personal interview with Ronnie and Nancy in the Oval Office.
Horrifying because, even though Reagan's Alzheimer's wasn't disclosed
for several more years, it was perfectly obvious the man was totally
gone. Faced with a steady stream of unscripted questions from Mike
Wallace, Reagan's usual patter rapidly degenerated into stark senile
mumblings. Desperate to conceal her husband's incoherence, Nancy
kept practically thrusting her face into the cameras. This is
consistent with puzzled accounts of writers and artists of the time,
who, as dinner guests of the Reagans, were mystified as to how such
an oaf could present himself so effectively on television.

All of which implies a striking parallel between the Reagan Presidency
and that of Bush II: in both cases, Bush Senior can be discerned
as the man behind the curtain, while the "president" is a mere
speech reader, whose real job is to keep the public distracted with
his amiable, vacuous, universally televised performances. Dubya's
main puppeteers -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell -- are all
Poppy's cronies, going all the way back to the Nixon Administration.
The five Supreme Court Justices who put Junior in power are also
Nixon/Reagan/Bush cronies, and their cancellation of democratic
process was a classic "installation," reminiscent of the CIA's
long-running antidemocratic escapades throughout the world.

It has Poppy's pawprints all over it.

If not for daddy's influence, Silver Coke-spoon Boy would be lucky
to find work fishing golf balls out of water hazards at the local
country club. This is obvious, and widely acknowledged. Most
Americans, however, aren't willing to examine the enormously sinister
ramifications, given Poppy's background, of the Bush Family's
dynastic grip on American politics. Most Americans, after all, are
a weak-minded lot -- though harassed by apparitions of unprecedented
corruption, they lack the courage needed to fix their gaze upon
them.

Which brings us to 9-11...

The most venerable means of transmitting control inputs from a
plane's cockpit to its various aerodynamic control surfaces (rudder,
ailerons, etc.) is via a system of cables, i.e. "aircraft cables."
With the introduction of huge planes during and after W.W.II,
unassisted human arms could no longer provide the force needed to
actuate proportionately huge control surfaces, and so hydraulic
assist devices and fully hydraulic control systems were developed.
The introduction of autopilots and landing guidance systems over
the next three decades layered yet another 'control system' over
this one, an electronic layer capable of manipulating the hydraulics
directly and thus flying the plane on its own. In the 757- and
767-series planes boarded by "the hijackers," Boeing expanded this
layer enormously, making it much more sophisticated and integral
to the continuous operation of these planes. For one thing, it
continuously monitors such things as attitude, acceleration, turn
rates, etc., and if necessary can assert exclusive control of the
hydraulics at any time, modifying or even overriding pilot decisions
that would otherwise result in drastic maneuvers, inappropriate for
passenger service. Though meant to provide an added margin of safety
in the event of gross pilot error, this arrangement introduces an
ominous new dimension: in a very real sense, the humans on the
flight deck have only tenuous control of flaps, rudder, etc.; the
computer, the arbiter between the two, allows them direct control
only on it's own immutable terms. If the computer can override the
pilot some of the time, a potential exists for it to override the
pilot ALL of the time. This is a vulnerable arrangement, as anyone
who has dealt with a virus should know. In other words, the advancing
dependency on avionic interfaces has brought with it an advancing
potential for the total electronic co-optation of those interfaces.
As they have grown exponentially in complexity, so too has the
number of entry points by which such co-optation might be effected.
All that was needed was for technologists to devise a "back door"...

Enter the US government and its defense contractors, who began joint
development of remote flight control and flight circumvention
technology at least two decades ago, using the full force of their
virtually infinite R&D resources. The existence of these programs,
and of the resulting technology, was verified soon after 9-11 by a
panel of commercial and military pilots participating in an independent
inquiry (16).

The existence of such technology IN ANY FORM raises intriguing
questions/possibilities about 9-11: 1) could the planes have been
hijacked via this technology alone? 2) Were they? 3) Remote hijacking
and on-board hijacking are not mutually exclusive scenarios; if
there were actual human hijackers on those planes, their plot may
have been remotely co-opted by another party they knew nothing
about, leaving them as horrified as anyone when the planes took
control of themselves and banked straight into buildings.

Photographic evidence and eye-witness accounts support the idea
that the override functionality of the planes' computers was somehow
defeated, allowing "the hijackers" to make prohibited maneuvers.
For example, there are multiple photographs and video clips showing
AA Flight 175 making an outrageously hard turn into the second
tower. According to official information, the plane that hit the
Pentagon also made aerobatic descent maneuvers worthy of a fighter
pilot. To have flown the planes in this manner, Atta and the rest
would have needed 1) advanced large plane skills, and 2) a way to
defeat the planes' avionic systems. Since that flight school they
attended in Venice, Fla. probably didn't offer a course titled
"Hot-dog Maneuvers with Airliners 101," they must have possessed
these abilities already, so why would they have bothered with flight
lessons at all? Any benefit they realized in terms of understanding
new control layouts would have been at the cost of increased exposure,
thus endangering their mission. On the other hand, if they were as
inexperienced as the presstitutes tell us ("I just want to learn
how to steer"), they couldn't possibly have flown the planes this
way at all, which means someone else must have.

However distasteful, there is a real possibility that remote
circumvention occurred on those planes, a possibility that any
credible investigation would hardly ignore. All the more so because
the necessary hardware isn't just a cockamamie theory: a fully
developed, totally programmable remote flight control platform
actually exists. Suggestively named the "Flight Termination System,"
it is manufactured by Systems Planning Corporation of Rosslyn,
Virginia, which maintains web pages devoted to the FTS and various
subsystems:

A system overview:

http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/FTS

The transmitter hardware:

http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/CTS

Related software:

http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/MkVSW

The CEO of Systems Planning's international division, Dov Zakheim,
is a long-time DoD and Republican Party insider, and a founding
member of the Neoconservative cult. While Bush was still Governor
of Texas, Zakheim became one of his closest advisers, counseling
him on defense technology and strategic aspects of Middle Eastern
affairs. After the 2000 "election," Rummy rewarded Zakheim with a
low-profile but strategically important position -- Comptroller,
i.e. head money man, of the Defense Department.

Zakheim also co-authored the Heritage Foundation's infamous tract,
"Rebuilding America's Defenses," in which the Bush Administration's
entire design for renewed global conquest was laid down a full year
prior to 9-11. On page 63, the authors note that timely implementation
of their ideas would require "some catastrophic and catalyzing event
-- like a new Pearl Harbor."

see for yourself:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

To identify the expansionist motive behind the "9-11 Wars," one
need look no further than this document. Echoing Ziggy Brzezinski's
thoughts in "The Grand Chessboard," the authors identify the Persian
Gulf / Central Asian region as the world's greatest geopolitical
prize, and recommend that decisive control of this region be made
a top strategic priority.

The remote control scenario also neatly punctures the 'yada-yada
objection' always employed by conspiracy theory critics: "It couldn't
have happened that way, because too many people would have known,
and someone would blab..." In fact, the most sensitive part of this
plot would be that of anticipating or enabling nineteen flesh-and-blood
"hijackers," and yet this part of the scenario is all but universally
accepted. Nineteen men backed by a larger organization schemed to
get on those planes and take control of them, and then they did;
everyone knows they did because CNN has stated this "fact" about
ten thousand times and counting. As for exactly WHICH organization
did the backing, well, there's a saying about 'dead men' ...

Once the patsies were in position, the rest of this scenario -- the
"really unbelievable part" -- could have been carried off in its
entirety by a tiny team wielding extravagant technical skills and
multimillion-dollar equipment. No larger conspiracy is necessary.
As for the apparent complicity of the entire government and media,
this is mostly just cynical opportunism and jello-brained obedience
rising to the occasion -- a response easily anticipated by the real
conspirators, for whom history provides a never-ending parade of
examples on which to base such expectations.

Mind you, this is not to say that remote circumvention is definitely
what happened. On its face, this scenario is wildly improbable.
Speaking of improbable, what about four airliners being taken over
simultaneously and used as missiles? Since this actually happened,
we have no choice but to consider fantastic scenarios, and since
the official scenario is itself an unsubstantiated "conspiracy
theory," competing scenarios should also receive serious attention.
Our reluctance to question official doctrine on this matter is a
symptom of the societal role most of us have been bred and trained
for: to be ever-faithful hounds, tails thumping the floor as we
contentedly slorp the hand of class authority. Such credulity also
becomes inevitable when the alternative is so unbearable: if someone
in Bush's position is capable of lying to us about something as
huge, as gut-wrenchingly horrible as 9-11, then everything we believe
about this country -- about the nature of civilization itself --
might just be childish nonsense...

Most people simply don't have the guts to go there.

Given a desperate enough need to sustain the childish belief in
government-as-benevolent-father, a person will adapt that belief
to any circumstance. The behavioral end result can resemble courage;
indeed, we are taught to regard it as the DEFINITION of courage.
Actually, it's one of cowardice's darkest moments. Even a casual
examination of Nazi Germany, where this phenomenon was rampant,
will drive this point home.

It's almost funny, the way people readily see the threat of
technological circumvention presented by Diebold's electronic voting
machines, yet when the subject switches to the "Flight Termination
System," which is every bit as real, and to the exactly parallel
possibilities it represents vis-a-vis 9-11, they suddenly retreat
into profound and combative denial. It's as if a threshold has been
crossed into a realm of possibilities too vile to entertain, so
they simply don't. Never mind that this country's operatives have
been traveling the world, perpetrating similar horrors, for all of
the past century. Rather than acknowledge the possibility of a
unifying pattern, Joe Average would much rather 'shoot the messenger.'

Every so often, such people establish a new high-water mark for
cowardice and facultative stupidity, and the present is definitely
one of those times. After all, the official 9-11 scenario they cling
to with such desperate faith comes from only one source: the Western
"intelligence community" -- the most brazen, systematic, resourceful,
and interlocked association of habitual liars this world has ever
seen. As should have been made clear by the 'British dossier' scandal
of last winter, the credibility of this bunch goes past zero into
the negative: pending airtight proof, anything they say should be
reflexively deemed a lie. You may remember that MI5 also provided
the identities of "the 19 hijackers" -- information that soon also
became quite suspect. At least six of the hijackers, possibly as
many as nine, are still alive in the Middle East -- a pretty good
alibi, considering. Several of these ex-suspects had their passports
or other IDs stolen from them over the years, and it's entirely
possible that all 19 hijackers had stolen identities, meaning they
could have come from anywhere, or been absent altogether. The US
media was pretty slack about acknowledging this at the time, and
since then has dropped this ball entirely (17).

Rather than allow the "intelligence community" to render every
detail of our comprehension on this matter, we would be much wiser
to carefully identify and discard every assumption they hand us.

Far from being a source of independent corroboration, our "free
press" is more like a public relations contractor for the spooks.
This is because the entire fourth estate AND the governments of the
West, including their intelligence services, are essentially employees
of a single entity: the US-dominated coalition of international
corporations -- by several magnitudes the largest concentration of
wealth in human history.

The subjugation of governments by such an entity is hardly
unprecedented. The Twentieth Century saw several extremely unsavory
examples. It's called Fascism. You don't need to take my word for
this -- just peruse the opinions of acknowledged experts:

Benito Mussolini:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it
is a merger of State and corporate power.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the
growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than
the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism -
ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling
private power. Among us today a concentration of private power
without equal in history is growing.

For many Americans, the word 'fascist' instantly evokes jackbooted
Germans wearing Swastikas and stuffing Jews into ovens. In fact,
that representation is a cardboard diorama, empty of nuance and
historically specific almost to the point of meaninglessness, which
is why the closet fascists who own the media keep force-feeding it
to you.

Fascism is certainly a violation of every noble and enlightened
political impulse. To advance their agenda, fascists must bring
about a mass rejection of egalitarian and democratic ideals, and
seem to get the best results by inflaming and feeding upon common
fears and popular bigotries -- racist, nationalist, classist,
religious, political, etc. ANY set of bigotries, suitably stimulated,
will provide fertile soil for fascism, and the incurably ignorant,
always a majority, are easily swayed by such methods -- fascism is
a dictator's fantasy formula for subverting democracy. Bigotry,
however, isn't fascism's whole essence; it's simply an expedient
means by which fascism's agents, classic political pragmatists,
consolidate the monolithic pattern of government corruption that
is their true calling -- a syndrome America has been sliding into
deeper and deeper throughout its history. Just look at the consistent
warnings from all the presidents who noticed this trajectory and
tried to alert a nation of groveling candy-asses:

Thomas Jefferson:

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a
trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Abraham Lincoln:

The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire
against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy,
more insolent than autocracy and more selfish than a bureaucracy.
It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or
throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern
Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the
one at the rear is my greatest foe.

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and
causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.  As a result of
the war, corporations have been enthroned ....  An era of corruption
in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to
prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people...
until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is
destroyed.

Theodore Roosevelt:

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible
government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the
unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is
the first task of the statesmanship of today.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial
element in the large centers has owned the government ever since
the days of Andrew Jackson.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his farewell address, 1961:

In the councils of government, we must guard against unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist.

John Kennedy took Eisenhower's warning to heart, apparently. During
the last year of his life, as he contemplated a second term and his
own final contribution to history, he resolved to reverse America's
moral and civic death-spiral, a.k.a. "the Cold War." His ideas
included: ending the CIA's freedom from oversight; abandoning the
country's rabid anticommunist stance, beginning with de-escalation
in Vietnam; normalizing relations with Cuba and Moscow; by doing
these things, redirecting Washington's immense weapons budget into
sweeping domestic reforms (18). What's more, Kennedy's popular
mandate was strong enough by this time that he probably would have
succeeded.

>From the viewpoint of the corporate capos that truly rule this

country, one aspect of the Cold War was all-important: it was a
pork barrel straight out of their wildest dreams of avarice. Watching
Kennedy plant his feet and reach for its plug, these 'absolute
power' addicts would have been sorely tempted to seek his removal
by any means. As it just so happens, several of them were also
supreme civilian commanders of the 'National Security' apparatus,
meaning they had direct control of the most suspect means of effecting
that removal (19).

Since Kennedy's death, dire warnings about corporate power have
been conspicuously absent from the pronouncements of American
presidents. Funny, huh? By daring to stand on his conviction that
it was he, not them, who held the reins of American society, Kennedy
quite possibly forced the financial elite to make an example of
him. Since that time, their supremacy has been unchallenged by
politicians.

It's as if democracy itself 'got whacked' by the Corleones and
Gambinos! Fortunately for them, Americans are kept too delusional
to notice.

* * * * * * * * *

On the strength of the fear-driven and essentially mindless popular
mandate that followed the 9-11 attack, the Bushes and their kind
are now concluding a plan they began formulating long before 1963:
transforming this country into an abomination, a clinically exact
violation of everything their core public THINKS it believes in.
The situation is a three-ring circus of ironies: People like the
Bushes, Ashcroft, etc., don't operate in a vacuum; they don't
suddenly and magically "seize power," any more than Hitler did.

The history of the Nazis holds many lessons of great value to
present-day Americans. Among the more important: political lunatics
become dangerous only when whole populations lose their marbles
enough to deliver them into real power. Truly, it's absurd to blame
amoral monsters who insinuate themselves into high places. OF COURSE
they're going to do that; it's why they were born. The sensible
object of that disgust is 'The People' who allow them to stay there;
who idly watch as other groups suffer, too stupid to realize that
tomorrow the guns will turn on them; The People, who hand these
scumbags ALL of their power by becoming eager footsoldiers in the
global mafias they create. Helen Keller knew this:

"Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!
Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other
tools of murder!  Strike against preparedness that means death and
misery to millions of human beings!  Be not dumb, obedient slaves
in an army of destruction!"

So did Emma Goldman:

"How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of
the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen."

No matter what label a government assigns itself -- democratic,
communist, etc. -- The People who live under that government, who
are its real repository of power, have an uncanny way of getting
exactly what they deserve. If a government has descended into utter
moral dissolution, and its people actually deserve better, they
will summon the courage to do what's right for themselves, as did
the French, the Russians, the Cubans. If a government is basically
sound, but its people are grotesque petulant infants gobbling at
giant tits of material excess, then it won't be long before that
government sees its opportunity to build jail cells around them.
Why not? Frantic tit-suckers aren't likely to notice, and if they
do, a jail cell isn't so unlike a womb. If by some bizarre chance
they should actually protest, they can simply be told it's for their
own safety. Infants are easily duped with such talk, which they
will regard as irrefutable when backed up with lurid cartoons showing
"The Enemy In Action!!"

This was the context in which Jefferson used terms like 'inalienable'
and 'self-evident.' People determined to discover their own power
will find a way. So will those determined to live as slaves. The
role of government is secondary. If the American people didn't
deserve this buffoon president and his panel of corporate handlers...
if this were other than a land of selfish tit-feeders, spoiled
insane... if "The Home of the Brave" didn't ring quite so false...
then the outrage of the 2000 "election" would have unleashed a
nationwide tsunami of riots, martial law would have been declared,
and the ruling class would have hastily dumped him before things
REALLY heated up.

As it stands, Dubya's sickening success is owed primarily to a
curious "political awareness," shared by a decisive majority of
Americans: intuitively, they know they're on the sugar-dumpling end
of the global economy. If staying there means everyone else gets
hurled at birth into a fuming acid bath, well that's okay, too --
just don't ask them to notice.

Just as rampant corruption is symptomatic of fascist governments,
this 'let them eat cake' mindset is also typical of the national
populations that sustain those governments through their complicity
and inaction. Corruption isn't just a disease of governments, elites,
etc. -- it's a creeping contagion that infects whole societies,
eventually reducing them to colonies of moral bacteria. If the
wealth of a society is large enough that this degeneracy can progress
long enough, its members become so drained of the essentials of
character that whatever 'Great Things' they've accomplished become
like marble temples built on a lake of pus.

America, for example, once had a heroic reputation among freedom-seekers
around the world. Starting many years ago, the keepers of that
legacy grew so arrogant, so artless, that their attempts to disguise
their selfish motives became transparent to the average ten-year-old,
so now America finds itself becoming an object of generalized hatred.
And deservedly: when an elite cult of villains and cowards waylays
all the governments of the world by holding a nuclear gun to their
heads, they SHOULD be hated, and that's exactly what this government
did while its subjects snoozed at the Big Boob these past five
decades. The aggrieved parties will of course be deemed "just
jealous" by the press, whose pronouncements are both source and
product of the tit-feeder mentality.

With Buffoon & Co., the pretenses are now so tissue-thin that even
Americans should have no trouble seeing through them. The one thing
stopping them is all-determining: they don't want to. This sort of
delusion even extends to self-described "liberals," who love to
vomit the platitude that "America's PEOPLE can't be held responsible
for the excesses of their GOVERNMENT."

I wish one of these nutless wonders would explain to me exactly how
this works; from where I sit, ultimate responsibility for the
criminal conduct of this government belongs to THEM. After all,
thirty years ago most of them were intensely aware of this government's
capacity for evil. Since then, they've been seduced by accumulations
of property, privilege, and mental lethargy, thereby settling into
America's most selfish middle class generation EVER. Watching them
recite fatuous denials to themselves, I'm reminded of the French
Court under Louis XVI. Their stock concept of 'political involvement'
-- filling in a ballot once a year -- hardly seems likely to fix a
goddamn thing, since the forces of wealth clearly have both major
parties in their pocket. By all indications, they don't even care;
the interests of wealth have become their own. If Bush's 2000
installation left any doubt about collusion between the two parties,
Schwarzenegger's triumph in California just removed it. The California
Democratic Party simply HAD TO KNOW that Gray Davis was history,
so why did they fail to put all their marbles behind ONE potent
alternative candidate? They can't strategize on their own behalf
worth a damn, but they sure do a bang-up job for the repugs. Is it
insane to wonder if they both get their marching orders from the
same place?

Voting should certainly be part of a larger strategy -- it may not
mean as much as we're told, but at least it's something. Real change,
however, would seem to require much more from us: open dissent and
resistance, civil disobedience, total rejection of bourgeois
sensibilities, including careerism, as this is the path taken by
most on their journey into apathy and selfishness. It's no wonder,
then, that causing each of us to nurture dreams of professional
glory has long been this country's most lavish "philanthropic"
project. Our unprecedented university system -- is it really about
giving us all a leg up, or is it a clever and utterly cynical social
engineering program? As they hand out huge endowments, what do the
bloodless billionaires really mean with all their malarkey about
"investing in the future." The working class is the true home of
the political left. Demographically and politically, it once dominated
this country, and thoughtful people didn't always have reason to
flee from it. Now it's a defeated mass of Bush-boosting, TV-mesmerized
morons. When class assignment at birth is an immutable life sentence,
intelligent members of an exploited class tend to become revolutionaries.
By its very nature, the "classless" careerist ethic solves this
problem by identifying the gifted among them as young as possible
and reassigning them to a separate social order, where they're
supplied with selfish reasons for staying quiet. Added together,
their class defections and betrayals make up the aforementioned
billionaires' "return on investment." Divide and conquer, divide
and conquer...

In so many ways, the true genius of American politics has been in
making sure the average slob has far too much to lose by rejecting
bourgeois temptations. The tragedy of this design is that it makes
us all full partners in the prevailing order of plunder and corruption.
During the Great Depression, poverty was so rampant here that this
formula began to unravel, prompting our keepers to feign benevolence
with an improvised Head Amputation Prevention System, otherwise
known as "the New Deal." Given the power of the information technology
now at their disposal, they seem to be preparing to let it unravel
again, this time to be replaced with an all-seeing electronic
security state. This is probably the real reason behind the USAPATRIOT
Act, rampant domestic spying, mounting repressive tactics and
nationalist propaganda, vast enlargements of prison infrastructure,
and so on. Kudos to all the technological utopians out there; far
be it from them to realize that those in power always pervert
emerging technology into a means of grabbing even more power.

The American political scene is now becoming so ominous that many
Americans are finally waking up, achieving real political awareness
for the first time in their lives. As they discover reality, they
are finding themselves in a horrifying predicament: this country
is but a few steps away from becoming an overt dictatorship, and
the Neo-cons seem determined to go the distance. All they need to
do at this point is arrange another "Pearl Harbor." Anything short
of massive, uncompromising civil disobedience seems unlikely to
stop them, and the vast majority of Americans are unlikely to engage
in any such thing. Incapable of even noticing how bountiful their
lives are, what could possibly induce them to reflect on the
malevolent work by which that bounty has been concentrated, or to
acknowledge the rights of people and other beings, living and dead,

>from whom it has been stolen? The hopelessness of the situation is

deepened by the relentless and all but inescapable onslaught of
commercial media, whose role of promoting this exact selfishness
and civic apathy is now performed with incredible audacity. Most
of these "Good Americans" just trudge along mindlessly in the rut
indicated by their message, willfully oblivious to its subtexts.

America's malaise isn't entirely a product of conscious effort, but
on the other hand, none of it is accidental. How is this possible?
The main thing people use "logic" for is to conceal even from
themselves the mediocre nature of their true motives. America's
corruption, like that of all nations, is an organic phenomenon, i.
e. it is neither orchestrated nor needs to be. It has been advanced
not by the lurking efforts of secret circles so much as by the main
thrust of American culture. Those frontiersmen in Ohio, for example,
scarcely needed the inducements Washington offered them; they were
eager to exterminate the Indians and steal their land. And so it
goes. By such means, the corruption of our entire civic culture has
been advanced by all of us, through habits of thought that lie
beneath the level of consciousness -- for example, in the sane and
humane alternatives we consistently choose to NOT consider. Again,
media's leadership in this area has been inestimable.

My gratitude to those who have protested and been civilly disobedient
over the years is beyond measure -- they are the true bearers of
Liberty's flame -- but I am doubly contemptuous of those among them,
seduced by privilege, who have ended up swinging to the other side.
They are the very soul of corruption, and traitors even to their
own dreams.

Here's the richest irony of all: Bush's most avid supporters are a
puritanical bunch. They attend church. They pray on streetcorners.
They bludgeon the unwitting with their sanctimonious talk of God,
Family, and the American Way. So convinced are they of their moral
superiority, they have no qualms about marching toward even greater
material gluttony over a pavement of charred corpses. In fact, they
seem to see this as a divine quest. You don't need a doctorate in
Theology to know that if Hell is real, its inmost pit has got to
be reserved for hypocrites such as these.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes:

1) Even now, the "independent commission" is shot through with
incredible conflicts of interest, exemplified by the present
chairman's financial ties to members of the Bin Laden Family. Such
a panel can hardly be expected to deviate from the gutless pattern
of past "investigative commissions": the Warren Commission, the
Rockefeller Commission, the Iran-Contra hearings, etc.

Chossudovsky, Michel. Who's Who on the 9/11 "Independent" Commission.
see http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO307B.html

2) Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and
Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1997) pp. 209 - 214

3) Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States, 1492 -
Present. (New York: Harper Collins, 1999) pp. 149-169

4) ibid, pp. 297-320

5) ibid, pp. 359-376

6) Stinnett, Robert. Day of Deceit: the Truth About FDR and Pearl
Harbor. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) See ALL

7) many historical documents support this analysis, including:

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific
War) (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946) p.26:
"Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing
attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient
pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the
need for invasion... Based on a detailed investigation of all the
facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese
leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior
to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November
1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not
been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if
no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

8) Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II. (Monroe, Maine, USA: Common Courage Press, 1995)
pp. 21-23, 39-43, 50, 51, 122-127

9) ibid, pp. 129-145

10) Heller, Jean. Public Doesn't Get Picture With Gulf Satellite
Photos. St. Petersburg Times, 1/6/1991

11) MacArthur, John R. Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in
the Gulf War. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) pp. 37-77.

12) Bamford, James. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret
National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a
New Century. (New York: Doubleday, 2001) pp. 82-91

13) Blum. Killing Hope. pp. 106-108

14) A scanned copy of this memo can be seen in
http://www.internetpirate.com/bush.htm -- scroll down

15) Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. San Jose mercury News, 9/18/1996
available online at:
http://home.attbi.com/~gary.webb/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html

16) de Grand Pre, Donn; Col. US Army (Ret.). The Enemy is inside
the Gates available online at
http://scribblguy.50megs.com/evidence.htm#THE%20ENEMY%20IS%20INSIDE%20THE%20GATES

17) multiple sources:

Kennedy, Dominic. Suicide Hijackers Hid Behind Stolen Arab Identities.
London Times, 9/20/01

MacFarquhar, Neil. A Nation Challenged: The Hijackers; Confusion
Over Names Clouds Identities of Attackers on Jets. New York Times,
9/21/01 available online at
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/21/international/middleeast/21IDEN.html

Jeffery, Simon. Special Report: Terrorism in the US. The Guardian,
9/21/01 available online at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,601550,00.html

Harrison, David. Revealed: the men with stolen identities. The Daily
Telegraph, 9/23/01 available online at
http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml

Author unknown. Hijack 'Suspects' Alive and Well. British Broadcasting
Corporation, 9/23/01 available online at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1559000/1559151.stm

18) Hepburn, James. Farewell America. (Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Frontiers
Publishing, 1968) see ALL.  Available online at
http://www.voxfux.com/Kennedy/farewell/farewell00.html

19) The most suspect parties here are Nelson Rockefeller and his
demonic lackeys, the Dulles brothers. The threads implicating
Rockefeller in Kennedy's death are explored rigorously in:

Colby, Gerard and Charlotte Dennett. Thy Will Be Done -- The Conquest
of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.
(New York, USA: HarperCollins, 1995)

Approaching this matter from different directions and supporting
their arguments with extraordinary historical documentation, the
authors of 'Farewell America' and 'Thy Will Be Done' arrive
independently at strikingly similar conclusions.