Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 2:39 pm Post subject: Fortis est veritas: inside the mind of the elitist psychos
Knowing the enemy is essential.
I'm starting this thread for us to gather some good bits of info around the political and philosophical thinking of the psychopathic elitists (I refuse to call these sick loveless losers 'elites').
What and who has influenced them? Where do they get their psychopathic totalitarian dreams from? Let's investigate.
Unsurprisingly, this guy got his kicks from Plato's ideas about the necessity for 'noble lies' and 'philosopher kings'.
In the universe of these guys, might is right.
Here's the man himself:
Leo Strauss wrote:
There are indeed three types of men: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar.
The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the "higher" pleasures.
The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating toward the conventions of their society - that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment's notice.
The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe".
Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed... Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united - and they can only be united against other people.
Those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the inferior... The people are told what they need to know and no more.
The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.
Like Plato, Strauss believed that the supreme political ideal is the rule of the wise. But the rule of the wise is unattainable in the real world. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, Plato realised this, and settled for the rule of law. But Strauss did not endorse this solution entirely. Nor did he think that it was Plato’s real solution – Strauss pointed to the “nocturnal council” in Plato’s Laws to illustrate his point.
The real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise. This covert rule is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them.
For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed. It is the age in which they have come closest to having exactly what their hearts desire – wealth, pleasure, and endless entertainment. But in getting just what they desire, they have unwittingly been reduced to beasts.
To be clear, Strauss was not as hostile to democracy as he was to liberalism. This is because he recognises that the vulgar masses have numbers on their side, and the sheer power of numbers cannot be completely ignored. Whatever can be done to bring the masses along is legitimate. If you can use democracy to turn the masses against their own liberty, this is a great triumph. It is the sort of tactic that neo-conservatives use consistently, and in some cases very successfully.
After Plato's philosopher kings and their 'noble lies', let's move on to a German philosopher whom many proponents of liberal democracy (e.g. Karl Popper) consider as one of the forefathers of totalitarianism: Hegel.
And here's the man himself:
Hegel wrote:
It must be understood that the State is the realization of Freedom, i.e. of the absolute final aim, and that it exists for its own sake.
It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses - all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.
...
The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth...
...
The State is the march of God through the World, its ground is the power of reason realizing itself as will.
...
We must ... worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on Earth.
...
War has the deep meaning that by it the ethical health of nations is preserved and their finite aims uprooted. And as the winds which sweep over the ocean prevent decay that would result from its perpetual calm, so war protects the people from the corruption which an everlasting peace would bring upon it. History shows phases which illustrate how successful wars have checked internal unrest and have strengthened the entire stability of the State. Not only do nations issue forth invigorated from their wars, but those nations torn by internal strife, win peace at home as a result of war abroad.
The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, August 11, 2009
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Dwight David Eisenhower, "Military-Industrial Complex Speech," 1961, [1]
"My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington."
Former SAIC manager, quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007[2]
"We make American military doctrine" Ed Soyster, MPRI[3]
The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur
In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.
Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence.
The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing "the Great Game," and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan.
Expanded by Karl Haushofer and other Germans into the alleged "science" of geopolitics, this doctrine helped to inspire Hitler’s disastrous Drang nach Osten, which in short order terminated the millenary hopes of the Nazi Third Reich. One might have thought that by now the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler would have subdued all illusions that any single power could command the "World Island," let alone the world.
Kissinger for one appears to have learned this lesson, when he wrote that: "By geopolitical, I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium."[6] But (largely because of his commitment to equilibrium in world order) Kissinger was swept aside by events in the mid-1970s, leading to the triumph of the global dominance mindset, as expressed by thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski.[7]
Brzezinski himself has recognized how his gratuitous machinations in Afghanistan in 1978-79 produced the responses of al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism. Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism, Brzezinski replied:
"Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'"
Nouvel Observateur: "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"
Brzezinski: "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
When he was asked whether Islamic fundamentalism represented a world menace, Brzezinski replied, "Nonsense!"[8]
In some ways, the post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power: he notably warned against the Gulf War in 1990 and also Vice-President Cheney’s agitations when in office for some kind of preemptive strike against Iran. But he has never retracted the Mackinderite rhetoric of his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which revives the illusion of "controlling" the Eurasian heartland:
For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power." (p. xiii)
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." (p.30)
"To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." (p.40)[9]
This kind of brash talk is not unique to Brzezinski. Its call for unilateral dominance echoed the 1992 draft DPG (Defense Planning Guidance) prepared for Defense Secretary Cheney by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby: "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."[10] It is echoed both in the 2000 PNAC Study, "Rebuilding America’s Defenses," and the Bush-Cheney National Security Strategy of September 2002 (NSS 2002).[11] And it is epitomized by the megalomanic JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020, "Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations."[12]
Such overblown rhetoric is out of touch with reality, dangerously delusional, and even arguably insane. It is however useful, even vital, to those corporations who have become accustomed to profiting from the Cold War, and who faced deep cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are joined by other groups (discussed below) that also have a stake in preserving the dominance mindset in Washington. These include the new purveyors of privatized military services, or what can be called entrepreneurial violence, in response to defense budget cuts.
The Real Grand Chessboard: Those Profiting from Enduring Violence
The delusional grandiosity of Brzezinski’s rhetoric is inherent above all in the false metaphor of his book title. "Vassals" are not chess pieces to be moved effortlessly by a single hand. They are human beings with minds of their own; and among humans an unjust excess of power is certain to provoke not only resentment but ultimately successful resistance. One can see this easily in Asia, from the evolution of anti-Americanism in Iran to the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) in Central Asia: although still ostensibly nonviolent, HT’s rhetoric is now more and more aggressively anti-American.[13]
The notion of a single chess player is equally false, especially in Central Asia, where dominant states (the U.S., Russia, and China) and local states are all alike weak. Here major multinational corporations like BP and Exxon are major players. In countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan they dwarf both local state power and also the U.S. governmental presence, whether official or covert. The true local powers are apt to be two which governments are notoriously inept at controlling: first, the "agitated Muslims" which Brzezinski insanely derided, and second, illicit trafficking, above all drug trafficking.[14]
Ultimately however Brzezinski is not constrained by his chess metaphor. The goal of a chess game is to win. Brzezinski’s goal is quite different: to exert permanent restraints on the power of China and above all Russia. He has thus sensibly opposed destabilizing moves like a western strike on Iran, while supporting the permanent containment of Russia with a ring of western bases and pipelines. (In 1995 Brzezinski flew to Azerbaijan and helped negotiate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijan to Turkey.)[15]
As I have argued elsewhere, Brzezinski (though he no doubt thinks to himself in terms of strategy) thus promotes a policy that very much suits the needs of the oil industry and its backers. These last include his patrons the Rockefellers, who first launched him into national prominence.[16]
In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration’s energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney's Energy Task Force.[17] The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq’s oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine "Exploration Blocks." One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney’s Task force would consider "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."[18] Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for "an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments."[19]
Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon’s neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon "rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda."[20] Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called "faith-based intelligence," became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted.
Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam’s WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.[21] Miller’s book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that "Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself."[22] Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.[23]
Private Military Contractors (PMCs), Whose Business is Violence for Profit
The inappropriateness of a military response to the threat of terrorism has been noted by a number of counterterrorism experts, such as retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich:
the concept of global war as the response to violent Islamic radicalism is flawed. We ought not be in the business of invading and occupying other countries. That's not going to address the threat. It is, on the other hand, going to bankrupt the country and break the military.[24]
Because of budgetary constraints, America has resorted to uncontrollable subordinates to represent its public power in these remote places. I shall focus chiefly in this essay on one group of these, the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25]
With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was "to buy reprieve by offering bribes."[27])
To offset the pressure on limited armed forces assets, Donald Rumsfeld escalated the increasing use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in the Iraq War. At one point as many as 100,000 personnel were employed by PMCs in the US Iraq occupation. Some of them were involved in controversial events there, such as the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the killing and burning of four contract employees in Fallujah. The license of the most controversial firm, Blackwater, was terminated by the Iraqi government in 2007, after eight Iraqi civilians were gratuitously killed in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion.[28] (After much negative publicity, Blackwater renamed itself in 2009 as Xe Worldwide.)
Insufficiently noticed in the public furor over PMCs like Blackwater was the difference in motivation between them and the Pentagon. Whereas the stated goal of Rumsfeld and the armed forces in Iraq was to end violence there, the PMCs clearly had a financial stake in its continuation. Hence it is no surprise that some of the largest PMCs were also political supporters for pursuing the ill-conceived "War on Terror."
Blackwater was the most notorious example; Erik Prince, its founder and sole owner, is part of a family that figures among the major contributors to the Republican Party and other right-wing causes, such as the Council for National Policy. His sister once told the press that "my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party."[29]
Private Intelligence Companies and the Provision of Violence
Blackwater has attracted the critical attention of the American Mainstream Media. But it was a mere knight on the grand chessboard, albeit one with the ability to influence the moves of the game. Far less noticed has been given to Diligence LLC. Diligence, a more powerful company, that unlike Blackwater interfaced heavily with Wall Street, "set up shop in Baghdad [in July 2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients."[30]
Certainly the political clout of Diligence outshone and outlasted Blackwater’s. Two of its founding directors (Lanny Griffiths and Ed Rogers) were also founders of the influential Republican lobbying team Barbour Griffiths and Rogers (later renamed BGR). Haley Barbour, the senior founder of BGR, also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997.
Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off:
Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31]
Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose purpose has been described by the New York Times as "a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects."[32] Its political clout was outlined in the Financial Times:
New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.[33]
The firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers was the initial funder of Diligence, which shares an office floor with BGR and New Bridge in a building four blocks from the White House. The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother.[34] When Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, resigned, he became a director of Diligence, and also joined Henry Kissinger to head, until 2008, Kissinger McLarty Associates.
Another Private Intelligence Contractor or PIC is Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), an $8 billion corporation involved in defense, intelligence community, and homeland security contracting. In the words of veteran journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele,
SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word "terrorism." SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government….[SAIC] epitomizes something beyond Eisenhower's worst nightmare—the "military-industrial-counterterrorism complex."[35]
(Later their article made it clear that SAIC is not a unified bureaucracy, but more like a platform for individual entrepreneurship in obtaining contracts: "at SAIC your job fundamentally was to sell your high-tech ideas and blue-chip expertise to [any] government agency with money to spend and an impulse to buy.")[36]
Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates was a member of SAIC's board of directors. SAIC personnel have also been recruited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA.
Scores of influential members of the national-security establishment clambered onto SAIC's payroll, among them John M. Deutch, undersecretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; Rear Admiral William F. Raborn, who headed development of the Polaris submarine; and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served variously as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the C.I.A., and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[37]
SAIC helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam’s WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq.
SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission's deputy director for review, a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC's sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA. David Kay, who later chaired the Iraq Survey Group (which showed that Hussein didn't possess WMD, thereby proving that the war was launched under false pretenses), is also an SAIC shareholder and former director of SAIC's Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.[38]
Needless to say, this SAIC-stuffed commission did not report that SAIC itself had been a big part of the problem. But according to Barlett and Steele, the same David Kay in 1998 told the Senate Armed Services Committee:
that Saddam Hussein "remains in power with weapons of mass destruction" and that "military action is needed." He warns that unless America acts now "we're going to find the world's greatest military with its hands tied."
Over the next four years, Kay and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis "are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a "military analyst." It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC's board of directors and a company stockholder….
9/11 was a personal tragedy for thousands of families and a national tragedy for all of America, but it served the interests of private intellience and military contractors including SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched its "Global War on Terror" (GWOT), whose chief consequence has been to channel money by the tens of billions into companies promising they could do something—anything—to help. SAIC was ready. Four years earlier, anticipating the next big source of government revenue, SAIC had established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. According to SAIC, the purpose of the new unit was to take "a comprehensive view of terrorist threats, including the full range of weapons of mass destruction, more traditional high explosives, and cyber-threats to the national infrastructure." In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.[39]
Barlett and Steele could have mentioned that SAIC senior analyst Fritz Ermarth, a long-time associate of Gates from his years in the CIA, is now an official of the Nixon Center. Commenting in 2003 on State Secretary Colin Powell’s briefing to the UN Security Council, Ermarth praised Powell for his charges (repeating one of Judith Miller’s false stories) about Saddam’s acquisition of aluminum tubing "for centrifuges and not rocketry." Ermarth faulted Powell however for not mentioning two matters: Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (a charge by Laurie Mylroie now generally discredited), and that "During the 1970s and 1980s…the USSR and its allies supported terrorists in Western Europe and in Turkey," (alluding to the false charges, promoted at the time by Robert Gates and Claire Sterling, about Mehmet Ali Agça’s attempted assassination of Pope Paul II).[40]
I certainly do not wish to suggest that SAIC single-handedly created the will to fight in Iraq. The combined efforts of defense contractors, oil companies, PMCs and PICs created a mindset in which all those eager for power were caught up, including, I have to say, career-minded academics. In Iraq as in Afghanistan and Vietnam a generation earlier, a sure ticket to consultations in Washington was support for interventions that ordinary people could see would be disastrous.
The yea-saying of academics has approved even the privatization of intelligence which we have just been describing. According to political scientist Anna Leander,
Private firms not only provide, but also analyse intelligence. Private translators, analysts and ‘interrogators’ are hired, as illustrated by the involvement of Titan and CACI in Abu Ghraib. Even more directly, private firms are hired in to assess threats and risks and suggest what to do about them. This involves constructing a security picture as done for example, by Diligence LLC and SAIC, two firms specialised in intelligence gathering and analysis….. This privatisation of intelligence has direct consequences for the relation between PMCs and security discourses. It places the firms in a position where they are directly involved in producing these discourses. They provide a growing share of the information that forms the basis of decisions on whether or not something is a security concern.
Leander concludes that this privatization is beneficial: it "empower[s] a more military understanding of security which, in turn, empowers PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts."[41]
Another political scientist, Chaim Kaufmann, has noted more critically that arguments for escalation and what he calls threat inflation against Iraq were not adequately disciplined by "the marketplace of ideas." He gives five reasons for this failure, duly supported by other political scientists. But the obvious reason mentioned by Barlett and Steele – profit – is not mentioned.[42]
What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war.
The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors -- domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out.
“As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counterintelligence Field Activity office in 2002 and filled its staff with contractors from Booz Allen, BAE systems, SAIC, and other suppliers of cleared personnel. CIFA, as we’ve seen, was used against people suspected of harboring ill will against the Bush administration and its policies….At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts.... According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers.”[43]
These fusion centers, “which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.” [44] Responding to such criticisms, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated in March 2009 that the mandate of fusion centers was not to launch independent domestic surveillance operations but connect the dots between lawfully obtained information already in fragmented “siloed” databases.[45] She did not mention that some of this information was from private and even anonymous sources.
One SAIC contractor, Neoma Syke, worked at such a fusion center, wearing two hats:
During 2003-2004, she was "working for SAIC" as a force protection analyst with "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was "a contractor for SAIC", specifically, "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC's Crisis Action Center.[46]
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His latest prose books are The Road to 9/11 (2007) and his reissued and expanded War Conspiracy (2008). His new book of poems (including political poems) is Mosaic Orpheus, from McGill-Queen's University Press. Visit his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net/
[4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 7-9.
[5] Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919).
[6] Henry Kissinger, in Colin S Gray, G R Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography, and Strategy (Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999).
[7] For the events leading to the displacement of Kissinger see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 50-54, etc.
[8] Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Un ion, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Steerforth, 2007). Thus Brzezinski’s obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal.
[9] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: basic Books), xiii, 30, 40.
[14] Brzezinski was so unafraid of Islamic jihadism that when National Security Adviser he convened a working group to deliberately stir up Muslim dissatisfaction inside the Soviet Union (Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-71).
[15] He has since taken credit for persuading President Aliyyev of Azerbaijan to commit to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Geopolitically Speaking: Russia's `Sphere of Influence’ - Chechnya and Beyond," Azerbaijan International, Spring 2000, p. 24,
http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81 _brzezinski.html.
This pipeline, a favor to U.S. and British oil companies, makes geopolitical but not economic sense; and is further destabilizing an already tense region. See Pepe Escobar, "Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org/-Pepe-Escobar/3149.
[16] Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-79.
[17] Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, "Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force," Washington Post, November 16, 2005. This story noted that CEOs of three majors had falsely denied this: " A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate `to my knowledge,’ and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know. Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that 'gave detailed energy policy recommendations' to the task force."
[18] Scott, Road to 9/11, 188-89; citing Linda McQuaig, Crude Dudes," Toronto Star, September 20, 2004; Jane Mayer, "Contract Sport," New Yorker, February 16-23, 2004.
[19] Scott, Road to 9/11, 189; "Strategy Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century," Report of the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy and Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 40, emphasis added.
[20] Seymour M. Hersh, "Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?" New Yorker, May 6, 2003
[23] For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York, Basic Books), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166, etc. (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68-70 (Mylroie).
[24] Jon Wiener, "Obama's Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich," Nation, August 28, 2008,
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/350252/obama_s_limits_an_intervi ew_with_andrew_bacevich.
Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backwards when the U.S. invaded Iraq. "Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War," MSNBC, July 9, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8524679. Peter Bergen agrees: "Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11" (Bergen, "The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages," Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies, 246): "Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."
[25] I am not the first to notice the analogy. See e.g. Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, "The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications," U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002,
www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/02winter/smith.pdf, 104.
[26] Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 22.
[27] Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds.), Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286.
[29] "The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister -- married into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (`I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees" (Ben Van Heuvelen, "The Bush administration's ties to Blackwater," Salon, October 2, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/).
Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006).
[31] David Isenberg, "Myths and mystery," Asia Times, 5/20/04. While in CIA, Bruner negotiated the deal for Ahmad Chalabi and the CIA to work together (Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War [New York: Nation Books, 2009], 76). Bruner later joined BGR and in 2007 became the full time chairman of BKI Strategic Intelligence. In 2004 Bruner participated with BGR and an Israeli PMC operative in a scheme to help re-elect George W. Bush. (Laura Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street," Mother Jones, November 2008,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/11/kurdistan-k-street).
[32] Douglas Jehl, "Washington Insiders' New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq," New York Times, September 30, 2003.
[33] Financial Times, 12/11/03. Ed Rogers, Diligence's vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush's top assistants when he was US president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers used Adnan Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64).
[34] Ibid. Cf. Mother Jones, March/April 2004: "More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.'s ex-campaign manager to "take advantage of business opportunities" in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week."
[35] "SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war….[SAIC is] a "stealth company" with 9,000 government contracts, many of which involve secret intelligence work" (Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?cu rrentPage=1).
[36] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
[37] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow: "Mark A. Boster left his job as a deputy assistant attorney general in 1999 to join SAIC, and was already calling Justice three months later on behalf of his new employers—a violation of federal law. Boster paid $30,000 in a civil settlement." Yet another PIC for a while was Interop, combining former CIA director James Woolsey and former FBI director Louis Freeh with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom (Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street).
[38] Charlie Cray, "Science Applications International Corporation," CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17; cf. Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
[39] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
[41] Anna Leander, "The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies," Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2005; 33; 803, emphasis added. At the time the Observer reported from " sources in the Bush administration" an allegation that "members of the al-Qaeda network, detained and interrogated in Cairo, had obtained phials of anthrax in the Czech Republic" ("Iraq 'behind US anthrax outbreaks,’" Observer, October 14, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/terrorism.afghanistan6).
[43] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 344.
[44] Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_spy_who_billed_me_twice. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains phrases such as "It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 9:53 pm Post subject:
Brilliant magazine, really moving things forward.
All the mre reason for Rupert Murdoch to get internet users to pay for content... because people can get this stuff for free
ISSUE #11 – The Dark Hand of History
Republic Magazine
Have you ever wondered who the REAL puppet masters are and where they get their power? Republic Magazine exposes the secret societies that have run America and its politics from the birth of this nation and before. Uncover the sinister links to the top lawmakers and discover who is pulling the strings of the talking heads. Issue features include:Masonry – The Dark Hand of History, The Order of Skull and Bones, The Quigley Formula – G. Edward Griffin, The Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, The Bohemian Grove, The New World Order(NWO), Monthly Paul, Constitutional Discipline, Activist Profile, 60 Second Activism and more.
Joined: 31 Jan 2007 Posts: 296 Location: Halifax, West Yorkshire
Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 5:24 pm Post subject: Re: Fortis est veritas: inside the mind of the elitist psych
Good thinking:
acrobat74 wrote:
Knowing the enemy is essential.
I'm starting this thread for us to gather some good bits of info around the political and philosophical thinking of the psychopathic elitists (I refuse to call these sick loveless losers 'elites').
What and who has influenced them? Where do they get their psychopathic totalitarian dreams from? Let's investigate.
I had a discussion with David Shayler about six months before he became the Messiah, on the possible motivation behind these people. David thought it was religion, and I thought it was individualism. I think both lines of thought are flawed, though.
A religious motivation would imply some grand masterplan by all concerned. Individualism would imply no masterplan at all, and anyone over seventy just wouldn't care about world domination any more, especially if it was going to take more than a couple of decades to achieve.
I think people behave differently in groups than they would as individuals, and somehow they get brainwashed or obsessed by a certain antisocial way of thinking. I doubt whether they have a better life.
The information on privatisation of the military gives some insights into the mechanics of how it's all happening. But do people still have loyalty to companies after they have retired?
I think we're still missing something, but we're moving in the right direction!
Joined: 04 Dec 2007 Posts: 226 Location: Buckinghamshire
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 3:31 pm Post subject:
I too have given some consideration to this topic and believe the answer in it's most basic form is to be found within the old adage, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Quote:
From Original:Lord Acton 1887:I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did not wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lord_Acton
There are few that used their power of influence to strive for the benefit of others, a few of Britain's early Prime Ministers and US Presidents perhaps, of later times Gandhi, Mandella maybe Kennedy but so very few. And now, I can think of none for now it is pragmatism within party politics and not principle which dictates the action of men and women in political life? Only when we the people demand that politicians we elect speak and act first and foremost for themselves on behalf of those who elected them, and not judge success on what compromised positions they may achieve within party systems can we hope end corruption. In short their highest achievement should be that they represent the electorate and respect gained by acting on each issue through conviction alone.
Who holds power and influence? Predominantly those that gain it through privilege of birth, a few who by achievement, of these we must include such as Gates and Murdoch. By accident, no, rather those who ingratiate themselves to others who already hold power. And it is this later group for which is held the greatest contempt for such power is afforded to those prepared to devoid themselves of independent thought seduced by vanity and their own stupidity. Those that wrap themselves within inner circles from which they blind themselves to the suffering of the real world. This may be personified by the 'special relationship' which allows only that Brown to be first among leaders to shove his nose firmly up Obama's backside.
What does power and influence afford those who yield it? Wealth? certainly, the adoration of others (albeit false), perhaps, happiness? unlikely. It is argued the greatest advantage is the ability of those with power and influence to use it to achieve ever greater power and influence. What must be carried together with power and influence? distrust, paranoia, remoteness and detachment from consideration other than that of the maintenance of power and influence. This, it is submitted is true from the smallest social/business/religious groupings to the largest of global institutions, the greater the size the greater facets of power are extenuated until power and influence is inperseptably replaced by power and control and remoteness changed to arrogance and contempt.
We must also understand the tools by which unfettered power in the hands of a few remain unchallenged. The roots of which are to be found in the most laudable attributes, that of patriotism, duty, loyalty, faith, honour, for these are the very attributes that can so easily be manipulated to spawn ignorance, prejudice and intolerance. Through this means it is possible to instill fear and distrust and in such an atmosphere those speaking out against injustices are weakened through suspicion.
In summery, to recognise the enemy we need acknowledge human frailties to which we are all susceptible. And human frailties can only be fought by human strengths. There is no demon to fight, perhaps showing the dangers of blind ignorance and stupidity at every level of society (as is being done by certain members of truth movement) is the forward for all of us.
All a bit vague? agreed, it is offered as my opinion to invite the views of others.
I too have given some consideration to this topic and believe the answer in it's most basic form is to be found within the old adage, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
From Original:Lord Acton 1887:I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did not wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lord_Acton
Worth repeating.
I agree: the sick elitist scum get their kicks from power. The feeling arouses them sexually and gives a meaning to (their) existence.
Read Regina Louf's interviews (X1 witness in Dutroux case) about the hunting parties.
The sick elitists in the 'higher' echelons are psychopaths and would need extensive psychotherapy sessions. They are totally incapable of empathy, which is the most noble feeling and a prerequisite for any sort of insightful reflection. And those serving them are gutless, fearful, needy whores.
Pugwash wrote:
In summery, to recognise the enemy we need acknowledge human frailties to which we are all susceptible. And human frailties can only be fought by human strengths.
I also agree that these tendencies exist in us all: conditioned to scarcity in our environment we end up fearful of each other and seeking competition.
Pugwash wrote:
There is no demon to fight, perhaps showing the dangers of blind ignorance and stupidity at every level of society (as is being done by certain members of truth movement) is the forward for all of us.
Remember, the rule of the 'wise' can only be implemented thanks to the honourable gullibility and defeated acquiescence of 'the gentlemen':
Quote:
The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating toward the conventions of their society - that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment's notice.
Joined: 31 Jan 2007 Posts: 296 Location: Halifax, West Yorkshire
Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 11:59 am Post subject:
Pugwash's thinking is similar to mine on this. I think we need to understand brainwashing rather better.
I was struck by the phrase:
Quote:
Those that wrap themselves within inner circles from which they blind themselves to the suffering of the real world.
People behave differently in groups than they would as individuals. Suppose you were one of those who had wrapped themselves within inner circles, and were involved in some low-level operation to dismantle some social group or political group. If you're MI5 or MI6 then you probably find some way of justifying it, just as a member of other branches of the armed forces would justify to himself the invasion of Iraq to bring democracy to them.
But what if you're in some other group, involved in something like that, possibly linked directly or indirectly to the security services, but in any case, you know that it's a group which supports the establishment.
But you're 70. Why would you care? You're not looking to go up in the world. Why would you continue to take part in the dismantling of a membership society? Does your pension depend on it? Do you still have vested interests? Would there be consequences if you were to quietly slip out of the whole thing? Do you really believe in what you do? Do you carry on just out of group loyalty? Are you somehow brainwashed into being a robot or a puppet?
If it's brainwashing, then how would that work? Is it the same as religious brainwashing? In that case, both sides of the argument might merge together.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 8:01 pm Post subject:
An interesting thread this - but IMO the enemy of truth, justice and the rest is freemasonry and similar gangsterish activites within the police and legal profession.
Quote:
Judge bailed lover who then killed
(UK Press Association) – 22 December 2009
A judge who bailed a spurned lover who went on to murder his terrified ex-girlfriend just six weeks later has been named.
Judge Stuart Baker overruled a decision by magistrates to remand Alan Entwistle in custody over allegations that he falsely imprisoned Claire Atkinson, 31, in his car and threatened her with a knife.
Entwistle, 52, was freed on a number of conditions, including that he must not approach or contact the mother-of-two, but instead went on to stalk her in the weeks leading up to stabbing her to death in the passenger seat of his vehicle.
The former bouncer then tried to commit suicide as he rammed his car into the back of another with his victim's lifeless body still resting beside him.
Preston Crown Court heard he also overdosed on tablets prior to the brutal assault in Thornton Cleveleys, near Fleetwood, Lancashire, in April this year and had splashed petrol around the interior of his blue Hyundai.
A month earlier Entwistle appeared in court after his ex-partner of four years told detectives he had refused to let her out of his car during a journey to a DIY store and he had vowed to kill her.
Fleetwood magistrates opted to remand Entwistle in custody ahead of a pending trial after listening to the background of the case.
But Judge Baker decided otherwise five days later on March 12 after legal representatives for the father-of-five applied for a review of the decision at Preston Crown Court.
Entwistle, of Custom House Lane, Fleetwood, was jailed for life and told to serve a minimum of 21 and a half years after he pleaded guilty to murder.
Gets the male every time, dunnit? A good example of our basic programming as human animals.
Good thread too, at least until diverted into the parochial.
I'll take this opportunity to say farewell. ...'Could not find the text "Ezekiel"' in this thread but I would respectfully suggest a read of chapters 38 and 39 to get a handle on why the now US-controlled IAEA is spouting the same line BushCo did before Iraq II.
I'll take this opportunity to say farewell. ...'Could not find the text "Ezekiel"' in this thread but I would respectfully suggest a read of chapters 38 and 39 to get a handle on why the now US-controlled IAEA is spouting the same line BushCo did before Iraq II.
US-controlled? and in their interest?
Excerpt
Quote:
Ezekiel 13 (extract)
Because the "foolish prophets" (politicians) have seduced My people, saying peace; and there was NO peace and one built a wall (N.A.T.O. and U.N.O.) and others daubed it with untempered mortar (non-hardening / useless cement), say to them that it shall FALL.
Therefore you shall not see any more vain prophecies: for I will deliver My people out of your hands and you shall KNOW that I AM the Lord.
And My hand will be upon the politicians that prophecy lies: they shall NOT BE in the assembly of My people, neither shall they enter into the "New Jerusalem" or the New Age. IMPORTANT - SEE Luke 19 v 27.
Ezekiel 38 (extract)
Thus says the Lord God; behold I AM against you Gog the prince of Rosh (Russia) Meshech (Moscow) and Tubal (Tobolsk) - the Western and Eastern Capitols of the U.S.S.R. (now called the C.I.S.): I will turn you back (from seeking peace) and put hooks into your jaws (hunger), and I will bring you forth, with all your armed forces and Persia, Ethiopia, Libya, Gomer, Togarmah and ALL the earth with them against My people Israel (Britain and the British Commonwealth; America; Scandinavia; the Netherlands; the Baltic States; Northern France; Northern Spain and the Jews) to the lands of unwalled villages (walls of untempered mortar) without bars or gates (no defences because of defence cuts after the "so-called" peace dividend), when they (the politicians - foolish prophets) say peace, peace and there was NO peace.
Why is it all Hollywood films have us all waiting for or relying on a saviour? Surely they're not controlled by scripture? _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
What controls them is ----- who does not want people to Do what they should do. Like when so called Christians say love your enemies even when they do evil. Love your brother as their Soul turning the other cheek as Christ said (for smaller matters) [obviously not in such cases of self defence real and not imagined] does not mean letting people whose souls can't control their bodies commit murder en mass and then say that's ok, I love you so that's fine. Otherwise people will (can people agree?) just keep doing it (has this not come to pass in spades) And even Christians? cant understand this? Why?
Hebrews
8:7 For if that first [Covenant] had been [followed] faultlessly, then should no place have been sought for the second.
8:8 For finding fault WITH THEM, He saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a New Covenant with the House of Israel [ten "Lost" tribes] and with the House of Judah:
8:9 Not according to The Covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they continued NOT in My Covenant, and I regarded them not, saith the Lord.
8:10 For this [is] the Covenant that I will make with the House of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put My Laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people:
8:11 And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know Me, from the least to the greatest.
8:12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.
8:13 In that he saith, A New [Covenant], he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old [is] ready to vanish away [so revitalize it] (READ Revelation 15:3).
15:3 And they sing the "Song of Moses" (Old Covenant - Deut. 31) the servant of God, AND the "Song of the Lamb" (New Covenant), saying, Great and marvellous [are] Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true [are] Thy Ways, Thou King of the holy people.
15:4 Who shall not fear Thee, O Lord, and glorify Thy name? for [Thou] ONLY [art] Holy (Matt 19:17): for all nations shall come and worship before Thee; for Thy Judgments are made manifest.
David Pidcock’s View on the State of Islamic Money, Banking, and Finance.
By Thomas H. Greco
http://beyondmoney.net/2008/01/21/david-pi...ng-and-finance/
Having spent the last 32 years searching for the right country and the right “Sharia compliant” government – I can say that they do not exist – being as unlikely to find – indeed – as rare as hen’s teeth.
Pakistan – which was “allegedly” established as an Islamic State has never implemented a Sharia Friendly monetary system in the past 60 years. The Pakistani Economist / Senator Professor Kursheed Ahmed admitted as much in a seminar at the Islamic Foundation at Markfield, entitled THE DEATH OF RIBA/INTEREST : “we have all been cowards in this regard”
In a live show on ARY TV, Ken Palmerton, ask(ed) General Quraishi – a spokesman for the Musharaf/Busharaf government that now that the Sharia Court of Pakistan had issued its Fatwa condemning Interest – in that the banking system of Pakistan must become more “user” than “usurer friendly” – he snorted : “We are not a backward country!”.
Ken and I had already travelled (sic) to Pakistan to give evidence to Justice Taqi Usmani – which included a screening of THE MONEY MASTERS video –which convinced him that a just, workable monetary system could be established in the 20/21st century in any sovereign state regardless of it’s size – be it Large or Small.
Similar resistance is to be found everywhere in the so-called Islamic States/Countries including Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc, etc, etc. In a seminar at the Bank Feisal, Khartoum, some 10 years ago (I have a 3 hour video of the proceedings) we (the Islamic Party of Britain) addressed the entire banking establishment of the country – including the head of the Central Bank (appointed – we subsequently found out – by the Federal Reserve of New York) which had also appointed Sudan to host the Central Banker’s Conference that same year – Not bad, considering Sudan was already being categorised by the U.S. as being a “terrorist state”.
Usury is one of those concepts hard to grasp it seems. I’ll give it a go and keep it short and humble.
Diligent inflation was/is allowed as that gives provision for those who want-ed to work harder so they could earn more and could enjoy the rewards of their labour; but after seven years all monetary and/or goods debt (principle no interest is/was ever needed) was/is to be cancelled (no destroying of goods to fix prices) So no one could become Filthy rich (and abuse others) and no-one could become poor. [There has to be incentive otherwise, like the communist system, everything grinds to a halt and collapses.]
Also as to meet the agriculture policy which includes the laying the land “fallow” (all worked out to the seasons and what nature, animal, vegetation etc requires) a longer period was set for that purpose where enough land was shared out fairly to “All Families” [free and not traded for money] but also to provide provision for people not engaged in agriculture they could sell some of their share [not the actual land] to people who were engaged in agriculture. Should circumstances compel, it was permitted to sell the land (productive produce, for the land was God’s, Leviticus 25:23 but as God’s guests) but the price should be adjusted according to the number of years to the Jubilee. The price was not for the land itself, but for its produce. In the fiftieth, the Year of Jubilee, every family must return to its inheritance.
A major correction of the economic and agricultural/land/housing policy (Law, would be a better word than policy) with no need for complex mathematics really for the economics were/are never needed. Not needed now? But 56 counting post were used to keep track of the day, weeks, years and seasons, accurate to around 4 minutes and 17 seconds over a 50 year period for initiates and some further more complex maths in observing the equinox rise and sets for precise reckoning.
To our/my Muslim friends and brothers, where some say certain words were changed. Peace be upon you:
Where usury (not any old amount, but all worked out) was allowed was for example, where say the Egyptians were practising slavery and oppression and rather than having to defend against attack and to try to appease them, first it was permitted to use usury to purchase their slaves but only to graft them in to a just system where they would not then be slaves and oppressed. “To the end their be no poor among you” demonstrating to people who then would want that system for themselves which they then could join if they would observe and follow all the Just Laws.
This has caused so much suffering to this day and even many years before Egypt. All we have seen and known (as you know) is the opposite of this grating in (joining of a Just and Godly/Allah Covenant.
Whilst posting the above post and unaware of your post ,busy with mine, I found this interesting DD, Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2010 10:40 am
"I think I may have mentioned before but I do believe (have a hunch) Blair never wanted war but was told the plan behind closed doors.
That would explain his laughable peace mission but my opinion more importantly the massive PR campaign against the Royalty when Labour took office Surprised
It was telling from my point of view when 2million+ took to London streets to back the Queens golden jubilee http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/windsor/windsor2002/jubilee/index.html and from that day forward spelling the end of the PR campaign.
Again could be just propaganda tactic to show how they are not linked to policy, who knows but that's my thoughts on the issue Wink"
Preparing for World War III, Targeting Iran
Part I: Global Warfare
by Michel Chossudovsky
Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. War preparations to attack Iran are in "an advanced state of readiness". Hi tech weapons systems including nuclear warheads are fully deployed.
This military adventure has been on the Pentagon's drawing board since the mid-1990s. First Iraq, then Iran according to a declassified 1995 US Central Command document.
Escalation is part of the military agenda. While Iran, is the next target together with Syria and Lebanon, this strategic military deployment also threatens North Korea, China and Russia.
Since 2005, the US and its allies, including America's NATO partners and Israel, have been involved in the extensive deployment and stockpiling of advanced weapons systems. The air defense systems of the US, NATO member countries and Israel are fully integrated.
This is a coordinated endeavor of the Pentagon, NATO, Israel's Defense Force (IDF), with the active military involvement of several non-NATO partner countries including the frontline Arab states (members of NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative), Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, among others. (NATO consists of 28 NATO member states Another 21 countries are members of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), The Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative include ten Arab countries plus Israel.)
The roles of Egypt, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia (within the extended military alliance) is of particular relevance. Egypt controls the transit of war ships and oil tankers through the Suez Canal. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States occupy the South Western coastlines of the Persian Gulf, the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman. In early June, "Egypt reportedly allowed one Israeli and eleven U.S. ships to pass through the Suez Canal in ....an apparent signal to Iran. ... On June 12, regional press outlets reported that the Saudis had granted Israel the right to fly over its airspace..." (Muriel Mirak Weissbach, Israel’s Insane War on Iran Must Be Prevented., Global Research, July 31, 2010)
In post 9/11 military doctrine, this massive deployment of military hardware has been defined as part of the so-called "Global War on Terrorism", targeting "non-State" terrorist organizations including al Qaeda and so-called "State sponsors of terrorism",. including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan.
The setting up of new US military bases, the stockpiling of advanced weapons systems including tactical nuclear weapons, etc. were implemented as part of the pre-emptive defensive military doctrine under the umbrella of the "Global War on Terrorism".
War and the Economic Crisis
The broader implications of a US-NATO Israel attack on Iran are far-reaching. The war and the economic crisis are intimately related. The war economy is financed by Wall Street, which stands as the creditor of the US administration. The US weapons producers are the recipients of the US Department of Defense multibillion dollar procurement contracts for advanced weapons systems. In turn, "the battle for oil" in the Middle East and Central Asia directly serves the interests of the Anglo-American oil giants.
The US and its allies are "beating the drums of war" at the height of a Worldwide economic depression, not to mention the most serious environmental catastrophe in World history. In a bitter twist, one of the major players (BP) on the Middle East Central Asia geopolitical chessboard, formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, is the instigator of the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Media Disinformation
Public opinion, swayed by media hype is tacitly supportive, indifferent or ignorant as to the likely impacts of what is upheld as an ad hoc "punitive" operation directed against Iran's nuclear facilities rather than an all out war. War preparations include the deployment of US and Israeli produced nuclear weapons. In this context, the devastating consequences of a nuclear war are either trivialised or simply not mentioned.
The "real crisis" threatening humanity, according to the media and the governments, is not war but global warming. The media will fabricate a crisis where there is no crisis: "a global scare" -- the H1N1 global pandemic-- but nobody seems to fear a US sponsored nuclear war.
The war on Iran is presented to public opinion as an issue among others. It is not viewed as a threat to "Mother Earth" as in the case of global warming. It is not front-page news. The fact that an attack on Iran could lead to escalation and potentially unleash a "global war" is not a matter of concern.
The Cult of Killing and Destruction
The global killing machine is also sustained by an imbedded cult of killing and destruction which pervades Hollywood movies, not to mention the prime time war and crime TV series on network television. This cult of killing is endorsed by the CIA and the Pentagon which also support (finance) Hollywood productions as an instrument of war propaganda:
"Ex-CIA agent Bob Baer told us, "There’s a symbiosis between the CIA and Hollywood" and revealed that former CIA director George Tenet is currently, "out in Hollywood, talking to studios." (Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham, Lights, Camera… Covert Action: The Deep Politics of Hollywood, Global Research, January 31, 2009).
The killing machine is deployed at a global level, within the framework of the unified combat command structure. It is routinely upheld by the institutions of government, the corporate media and the mandarins and intellectuals of the New World Order in Washington's think tanks and strategic studies research institutes, as an unquestioned instrument of peace and global prosperity.
A culture of killing and violence has become imbedded in human consciousness.
War is broadly accepted as part of a societal process: The Homeland needs to be "defended" and protected.
"Legitimized violence" and extrajudicial killings directed against "terrorists" are upheld in western democracies, as necessary instruments of national security.
A "humanitarian war" is upheld by the so-called international community. It is not condemned as a criminal act. Its main architects are rewarded for their contributions to world peace.
With regard to Iran, what is unfolding is the outright legitimization of war in the name of an illusive notion of global security.
A "Pre-emptive" Aerial attack directed against Iran would lead to Escalation
At present there are three separate Middle East Central Asia war theaters: Iraq, Af-Pak, and Palestine.
Were Iran to be the object of a "pre-emptive" aerial attack by allied forces, the entire region, from the Eastern Mediterranean to China's Western frontier with Afghanistan and Pakistan, would flare up, leading us potentially into a World War III scenario.
The war would also extend into Lebanon and Syria.
It is highly unlikely that the bombings, if they were to be implemented, would be circumscribed to Iran's nuclear facilities as claimed by US-NATO official statements. What is more probable is an all out air attack on both military and civilian infrastructure, transport systems, factories, public buildings.
Do you think dramatic tension should be resolved ... by committee?
Disco_Destroyer wrote:
Why is it all Hollywood films have us all waiting for or relying on a saviour? Surely they're not controlled by scripture?
No but Groups and Team play also gets things done
*Edit* what I mean mostly is there is nothing empowering to the individuals struggle in the bulk of Hollywood movies they concentrate on sense of worthlessness and vulnerability _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
Quote lifted from FB but wow what alot of info in a small place
Much of this rings true to me but like all info...
Quote:
freeman
Canada
2/3/2008 11:43 AM
Report Abusive Post YOUR SLAVE NAME
Quote
When the parents or parent has a child in a hospital, the nurses bring you a REGISTRATION OF LIVE BIRTH/registrar. The mother fills it out. The mother and or father name the child.
This is or was the lawful Christian name or surname & given name.
The State or Province take that name & capitalize it. If the state or province is in debt, the name is entirely capitalized, if the state or province is not then just the last name is capitalized.
Parents name the child: John, Doe.
Gov't copies the name: DOE, John. (Non bankrupt gov't).
Gov't copies the name: DOE, JOHN. (bankrupt gov't).
john = bathroom, doe = female deer.
John, Doe = words capitalized on by parents to create a label or name. Freeman-on-the-land.
DOE, John = Officer or agent of the Gov't who recieved the benefit of citizenSHIP. Maritime Admiralty law. You now reside on the corporateship. RESIDENT. PASSPORT, passing from the port to another ship. PORT AUTHORITIES anyone?
DOE, JOHN or JOHN DOE = slave, no more God given rights just priviledges granted & taken away by the gov't which requires licences & permission to do anything.
The gov't takes the birth certificate and deposits it in its TREASURY, and then takes out a BOND based on future taxes that can be collected. This allows the bankrupt gov't to borrow money from the IMF, international monetary fund.
The freeborn child is sold into slavery UNKNOWINGLY by its parents in exchange for benefits like child tax credit, welfare, free health care, school, etc. There are ROMAN MAXIMS of LAW that state he who accepts the benefit must bare its burden.
The freeborn child has the right to contract out of this when they turn the AGE of MAJORITY usually 18 but 14 in some countries. (People used to only live to 35yrs, there was no such thing as a teenager, boy then man).
So the sneaky gov't gets you to voluntarily fill out a social security/social insurance form to get an EMPLOYEE number for the IRS/CRA.
You need this number to access benefits like unemployment insurance or student loans.
You become an employee of the IMF/federal gov't which is slave to its lender. (National debt).
All birth certificates are written on EXCHEQUECHER bank note paper owned by the CROWN. Even Americans. The corporation of the United States is registered at the Inner City of London England a Roman Enclave of the Vatican.
Canada & Australia are registered on the United States Security & Exchange (SEC).
You were born free, you are now a slave by choice. You gave up your birthright for a mess of pottage. You filled out all the forms & applications of your free will.
Jesus said his people destroy themselves through lack of knowledge. Knowledge is power. When teenagers have the chance to contract themselves out of the system (90 days) they are too busy caught up in the manufactured rock & roll, hip hop, extended childhood with booze & drugs & skateboards & videogames.
The gov't created Identification is property of the government. The State or province created the document, it has the intellectual property rights claim to it.
It is the BEAST's name that you accepted. It is your SLAVE name. You are its authorized representative, its agent in commerce. Read the fine print on your checks signature.
Free people use an autograph, agents use a signature. Everything you own & have is registered in that slave name, not your name your parents give you.
However all of this was done in fraud and you can contract your way back out if you search for the knowledge in a law dictionary & your gov'ts statutes & codes.
Why can Nelson Rockefellar testify before congress that he pays no income tax? Cause he's a freeman and you are not.
Did you ever watch the mini series ROOTS? What did they do to the slaves? Beat them until they identified with the slave masters name, not their birth name. They went from Kunta Kintai to Jason Washington.
The slave master had to keep a record of his property and it was written in his name not the Africans.
The civil war didn't free the slaves it turned all Americans into property of the corporation of the United States. It has been a slow long process but the Jesuits have patience.
Before the civil war Americans owned their children as biological property, they owned their own land in alloidal with absolutely no property tax. A mans labour could not be taxed so they captured you on paper and made you volunteer to be a HUMAN instead of a man.
Look up the LEGAL definition of HUMAN in a 1948 Ballantine Law Dictionary.
HUMAN: see monster.
MONSTER: lower form of man, not of blueblood, unfit to own property, a barbarian even if created through the lawful union of marraige.
Color of law through defacto usuped authorative legislation is what is known as a privately owned legal system of the CROWN. LEGAL is not LAWFUL.
Then their is color of man. HUE: aura or color.
Human-hueman.
When people get married its called HUSBAND & WIFE.
When ROYALTY get married its the monarch & consort.
Queen Elizabeth doesn't have a husband, she has a CONSORT. Prince Phillip is a consort, not a husband.
When a cattle farmer or rancher breeds livestock its called ANIMAL HUSBANDRY.
We are cattle, or chattel property, goy! We are a human resource, a product of the STATE.
Now you know some more of your HER-IT-AGE, and HIS-STORY.
Sell everything you own!
Get 3 friends or witnesses, make up your own identification, get it notarized, post it in court houses, serve it to your local police departments, tell them who you are before you get into trouble, stop borrowing money, close you bank accounts, de-register everything in that old name, don't be a voter, become an ELECTOR & lawful land owner, tell the county or rural municipality to state their interest in your property. Fire them, you don't need them to hold your property in trust therfore removing you from having to get a permit to build something on your own land
surrender all your gov't identification back to it creator, stop identifying withit, become your original name.
Jesus said not to celebrate your birth into this world. This doesn't mean He hates cake & icecream, He's warning you not to swear an oath of jurisdiction or affidative that allows ROME to usurp God's authority by creating a property label/gov't slave name with a birthdate.
Jesus said the body is a temple for the spirit.
The Vatican wants you to beleive it is a vessel on the unholy SEE/SEA to enforce maritime admiralty merchant law.
_________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
Man mixes with man, horse mixes with horse, ass mixes with ass. The kinds mix with those of like kind. So also spirit is wont to mix only with spirit and the Word to consort with the Word and the Light to consort with the Light. If thou become man men will love thee. If thou become spirit the Spirit will be joined to thee. If thou become (and not just speak) the Word, it is the Word which will mix with thee. If thou become Light, it is the Light which will consort with thee. If thou become one of those who belong above, those who belong above will find their rest in thee. If thou become horse or ass or bull or dog or goat or any other animal of those outside and those below (or as in the case of some people all of them), then neither man nor Spirit, nor the Word nor Light, nor those above nor those within will be able to love thee. They will not be able to find rest in or with thee and thou hast no part in them.
He or she who is a slave against his or her will will be able to become free. He who has become free by the favour of his master and has sold himself again into slavery to his master's enemy will no longer be able to be free. (Seven devils enter the clean house and he is worse then than he was in his first state).
Faith - In the theological ladder, the explanation of which forms a part of the instruction of the First Degree of Masonry, faith is said to typify the lowest round. Faith, here, is synonymous with confidence or trust, and hence we find merely a repetition of the lesson which had been previously taught that the first, the essential qualification of a candidate for initiation, is that he should trust in God. In the lecture of the same Degree, it is said that "Faith may be lost in sight; Hope ends in fruition; but Charity extends beyond the grave, through the boundless realms of eternity." And this is said, because as faith is "the evidence of things not seen," when we see we no longer believe by faith but through demonstration; and as hope lives only in the expectation of possession, it ceases to exist when the object once hoped for is at length enjoyed, but charity, exercised on earth in acts of mutual kindness and forbearance, is still found in the world to come, in the sublimer form of mercy from God to his erring creatures.
"Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When through the process of law the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2010 12:21 am Post subject:
After decades of writing and research about American intelligence, Joseph Trento has written the most authoritative indictment of CIA splinter groups, two generations of Bush family involvement in illegal financial networks, and the funding of the agents of terror. Prelude to Terror reveals the history of a corrupt group of spymastersled by Ted Shackleywho were fired when Jimmy Carter became president, but who maintained their intelligence portfolio and used it to create a private intelligence network. After this rogue group helped engineer Carter's defeat in 1980 and allied with George H. W. Bush, these former CIA men planned and conducted what became the IranContra scandal and, through the Saudis, allied the U. S. with extreme elements in Islam. The CIA's number-one front man, Edwin P. Wilson, was framed by Shackley and his cohorts so that Wilson's operations could be taken over. For the first time the story of how CIA director George H. W. Bush was recruited into this network, and brought it into the bosom of the Saudi royal family, is told in detail, as well as how this group's manipulation of the CIA bureaucracy allowed Osama bin Laden's fundraising to thrive as al Qaeda flourished under Saudi and CIA protection.
"We were the first to cry among the masses of the people the words 'Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity.' The stupid Gentile poll parrots flew down from all sides on to these baits, and with them carried away the well-being of the world.
The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, August 11, 2009
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Dwight David Eisenhower, "Military-Industrial Complex Speech," 1961, [1]
"My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington."
Former SAIC manager, quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007[2]
"We make American military doctrine" Ed Soyster, MPRI[3]
The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur
In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.
Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence.
The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing "the Great Game," and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan.
Expanded by Karl Haushofer and other Germans into the alleged "science" of geopolitics, this doctrine helped to inspire Hitler’s disastrous Drang nach Osten, which in short order terminated the millenary hopes of the Nazi Third Reich. One might have thought that by now the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler would have subdued all illusions that any single power could command the "World Island," let alone the world.
Kissinger for one appears to have learned this lesson, when he wrote that: "By geopolitical, I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium."[6] But (largely because of his commitment to equilibrium in world order) Kissinger was swept aside by events in the mid-1970s, leading to the triumph of the global dominance mindset, as expressed by thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski.[7]
Brzezinski himself has recognized how his gratuitous machinations in Afghanistan in 1978-79 produced the responses of al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism. Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism, Brzezinski replied:
"Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'"
Nouvel Observateur: "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"
Brzezinski: "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
When he was asked whether Islamic fundamentalism represented a world menace, Brzezinski replied, "Nonsense!"[8]
In some ways, the post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power: he notably warned against the Gulf War in 1990 and also Vice-President Cheney’s agitations when in office for some kind of preemptive strike against Iran. But he has never retracted the Mackinderite rhetoric of his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which revives the illusion of "controlling" the Eurasian heartland:
For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power." (p. xiii)
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." (p.30)
"To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." (p.40)[9]
This kind of brash talk is not unique to Brzezinski. Its call for unilateral dominance echoed the 1992 draft DPG (Defense Planning Guidance) prepared for Defense Secretary Cheney by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby: "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."[10] It is echoed both in the 2000 PNAC Study, "Rebuilding America’s Defenses," and the Bush-Cheney National Security Strategy of September 2002 (NSS 2002).[11] And it is epitomized by the megalomanic JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020, "Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations."[12]
Such overblown rhetoric is out of touch with reality, dangerously delusional, and even arguably insane. It is however useful, even vital, to those corporations who have become accustomed to profiting from the Cold War, and who faced deep cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are joined by other groups (discussed below) that also have a stake in preserving the dominance mindset in Washington. These include the new purveyors of privatized military services, or what can be called entrepreneurial violence, in response to defense budget cuts.
The Real Grand Chessboard: Those Profiting from Enduring Violence
The delusional grandiosity of Brzezinski’s rhetoric is inherent above all in the false metaphor of his book title. "Vassals" are not chess pieces to be moved effortlessly by a single hand. They are human beings with minds of their own; and among humans an unjust excess of power is certain to provoke not only resentment but ultimately successful resistance. One can see this easily in Asia, from the evolution of anti-Americanism in Iran to the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) in Central Asia: although still ostensibly nonviolent, HT’s rhetoric is now more and more aggressively anti-American.[13]
The notion of a single chess player is equally false, especially in Central Asia, where dominant states (the U.S., Russia, and China) and local states are all alike weak. Here major multinational corporations like BP and Exxon are major players. In countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan they dwarf both local state power and also the U.S. governmental presence, whether official or covert. The true local powers are apt to be two which governments are notoriously inept at controlling: first, the "agitated Muslims" which Brzezinski insanely derided, and second, illicit trafficking, above all drug trafficking.[14]
Ultimately however Brzezinski is not constrained by his chess metaphor. The goal of a chess game is to win. Brzezinski’s goal is quite different: to exert permanent restraints on the power of China and above all Russia. He has thus sensibly opposed destabilizing moves like a western strike on Iran, while supporting the permanent containment of Russia with a ring of western bases and pipelines. (In 1995 Brzezinski flew to Azerbaijan and helped negotiate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijan to Turkey.)[15]
As I have argued elsewhere, Brzezinski (though he no doubt thinks to himself in terms of strategy) thus promotes a policy that very much suits the needs of the oil industry and its backers. These last include his patrons the Rockefellers, who first launched him into national prominence.[16]
In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration’s energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney's Energy Task Force.[17] The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq’s oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine "Exploration Blocks." One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney’s Task force would consider "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."[18] Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for "an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments."[19]
Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon’s neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon "rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda."[20] Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called "faith-based intelligence," became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted.
Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam’s WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.[21] Miller’s book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that "Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself."[22] Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.[23]
Private Military Contractors (PMCs), Whose Business is Violence for Profit
The inappropriateness of a military response to the threat of terrorism has been noted by a number of counterterrorism experts, such as retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich:
the concept of global war as the response to violent Islamic radicalism is flawed. We ought not be in the business of invading and occupying other countries. That's not going to address the threat. It is, on the other hand, going to bankrupt the country and break the military.[24]
Because of budgetary constraints, America has resorted to uncontrollable subordinates to represent its public power in these remote places. I shall focus chiefly in this essay on one group of these, the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25]
With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was "to buy reprieve by offering bribes."[27])
To offset the pressure on limited armed forces assets, Donald Rumsfeld escalated the increasing use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in the Iraq War. At one point as many as 100,000 personnel were employed by PMCs in the US Iraq occupation. Some of them were involved in controversial events there, such as the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the killing and burning of four contract employees in Fallujah. The license of the most controversial firm, Blackwater, was terminated by the Iraqi government in 2007, after eight Iraqi civilians were gratuitously killed in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion.[28] (After much negative publicity, Blackwater renamed itself in 2009 as Xe Worldwide.)
Insufficiently noticed in the public furor over PMCs like Blackwater was the difference in motivation between them and the Pentagon. Whereas the stated goal of Rumsfeld and the armed forces in Iraq was to end violence there, the PMCs clearly had a financial stake in its continuation. Hence it is no surprise that some of the largest PMCs were also political supporters for pursuing the ill-conceived "War on Terror."
Blackwater was the most notorious example; Erik Prince, its founder and sole owner, is part of a family that figures among the major contributors to the Republican Party and other right-wing causes, such as the Council for National Policy. His sister once told the press that "my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party."[29]
Private Intelligence Companies and the Provision of Violence
Blackwater has attracted the critical attention of the American Mainstream Media. But it was a mere knight on the grand chessboard, albeit one with the ability to influence the moves of the game. Far less noticed has been given to Diligence LLC. Diligence, a more powerful company, that unlike Blackwater interfaced heavily with Wall Street, "set up shop in Baghdad [in July 2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients."[30]
Certainly the political clout of Diligence outshone and outlasted Blackwater’s. Two of its founding directors (Lanny Griffiths and Ed Rogers) were also founders of the influential Republican lobbying team Barbour Griffiths and Rogers (later renamed BGR). Haley Barbour, the senior founder of BGR, also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997.
Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off:
Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31]
Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose purpose has been described by the New York Times as "a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects."[32] Its political clout was outlined in the Financial Times:
New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.[33]
The firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers was the initial funder of Diligence, which shares an office floor with BGR and New Bridge in a building four blocks from the White House. The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother.[34] When Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, resigned, he became a director of Diligence, and also joined Henry Kissinger to head, until 2008, Kissinger McLarty Associates.
Another Private Intelligence Contractor or PIC is Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), an $8 billion corporation involved in defense, intelligence community, and homeland security contracting. In the words of veteran journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele,
SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word "terrorism." SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government….[SAIC] epitomizes something beyond Eisenhower's worst nightmare—the "military-industrial-counterterrorism complex."[35]
(Later their article made it clear that SAIC is not a unified bureaucracy, but more like a platform for individual entrepreneurship in obtaining contracts: "at SAIC your job fundamentally was to sell your high-tech ideas and blue-chip expertise to [any] government agency with money to spend and an impulse to buy.")[36]
Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates was a member of SAIC's board of directors. SAIC personnel have also been recruited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA.
Scores of influential members of the national-security establishment clambered onto SAIC's payroll, among them John M. Deutch, undersecretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; Rear Admiral William F. Raborn, who headed development of the Polaris submarine; and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served variously as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the C.I.A., and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[37]
SAIC helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam’s WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq.
SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission's deputy director for review, a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC's sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA. David Kay, who later chaired the Iraq Survey Group (which showed that Hussein didn't possess WMD, thereby proving that the war was launched under false pretenses), is also an SAIC shareholder and former director of SAIC's Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.[38]
Needless to say, this SAIC-stuffed commission did not report that SAIC itself had been a big part of the problem. But according to Barlett and Steele, the same David Kay in 1998 told the Senate Armed Services Committee:
that Saddam Hussein "remains in power with weapons of mass destruction" and that "military action is needed." He warns that unless America acts now "we're going to find the world's greatest military with its hands tied."
Over the next four years, Kay and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis "are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a "military analyst." It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC's board of directors and a company stockholder….
9/11 was a personal tragedy for thousands of families and a national tragedy for all of America, but it served the interests of private intellience and military contractors including SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched its "Global War on Terror" (GWOT), whose chief consequence has been to channel money by the tens of billions into companies promising they could do something—anything—to help. SAIC was ready. Four years earlier, anticipating the next big source of government revenue, SAIC had established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. According to SAIC, the purpose of the new unit was to take "a comprehensive view of terrorist threats, including the full range of weapons of mass destruction, more traditional high explosives, and cyber-threats to the national infrastructure." In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.[39]
Barlett and Steele could have mentioned that SAIC senior analyst Fritz Ermarth, a long-time associate of Gates from his years in the CIA, is now an official of the Nixon Center. Commenting in 2003 on State Secretary Colin Powell’s briefing to the UN Security Council, Ermarth praised Powell for his charges (repeating one of Judith Miller’s false stories) about Saddam’s acquisition of aluminum tubing "for centrifuges and not rocketry." Ermarth faulted Powell however for not mentioning two matters: Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (a charge by Laurie Mylroie now generally discredited), and that "During the 1970s and 1980s…the USSR and its allies supported terrorists in Western Europe and in Turkey," (alluding to the false charges, promoted at the time by Robert Gates and Claire Sterling, about Mehmet Ali Agça’s attempted assassination of Pope Paul II).[40]
I certainly do not wish to suggest that SAIC single-handedly created the will to fight in Iraq. The combined efforts of defense contractors, oil companies, PMCs and PICs created a mindset in which all those eager for power were caught up, including, I have to say, career-minded academics. In Iraq as in Afghanistan and Vietnam a generation earlier, a sure ticket to consultations in Washington was support for interventions that ordinary people could see would be disastrous.
The yea-saying of academics has approved even the privatization of intelligence which we have just been describing. According to political scientist Anna Leander,
Private firms not only provide, but also analyse intelligence. Private translators, analysts and ‘interrogators’ are hired, as illustrated by the involvement of Titan and CACI in Abu Ghraib. Even more directly, private firms are hired in to assess threats and risks and suggest what to do about them. This involves constructing a security picture as done for example, by Diligence LLC and SAIC, two firms specialised in intelligence gathering and analysis….. This privatisation of intelligence has direct consequences for the relation between PMCs and security discourses. It places the firms in a position where they are directly involved in producing these discourses. They provide a growing share of the information that forms the basis of decisions on whether or not something is a security concern.
Leander concludes that this privatization is beneficial: it "empower[s] a more military understanding of security which, in turn, empowers PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts."[41]
Another political scientist, Chaim Kaufmann, has noted more critically that arguments for escalation and what he calls threat inflation against Iraq were not adequately disciplined by "the marketplace of ideas." He gives five reasons for this failure, duly supported by other political scientists. But the obvious reason mentioned by Barlett and Steele – profit – is not mentioned.[42]
What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war.
The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors -- domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out.
“As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counterintelligence Field Activity office in 2002 and filled its staff with contractors from Booz Allen, BAE systems, SAIC, and other suppliers of cleared personnel. CIFA, as we’ve seen, was used against people suspected of harboring ill will against the Bush administration and its policies….At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts.... According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers.”[43]
These fusion centers, “which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.” [44] Responding to such criticisms, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated in March 2009 that the mandate of fusion centers was not to launch independent domestic surveillance operations but connect the dots between lawfully obtained information already in fragmented “siloed” databases.[45] She did not mention that some of this information was from private and even anonymous sources.
One SAIC contractor, Neoma Syke, worked at such a fusion center, wearing two hats:
During 2003-2004, she was "working for SAIC" as a force protection analyst with "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was "a contractor for SAIC", specifically, "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC's Crisis Action Center.[46]
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His latest prose books are The Road to 9/11 (2007) and his reissued and expanded War Conspiracy (2008). His new book of poems (including political poems) is Mosaic Orpheus, from McGill-Queen's University Press. Visit his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net/
[4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 7-9.
[5] Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919).
[6] Henry Kissinger, in Colin S Gray, G R Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography, and Strategy (Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999).
[7] For the events leading to the displacement of Kissinger see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 50-54, etc.
[8] Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Un ion, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Steerforth, 2007). Thus Brzezinski’s obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal.
[9] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: basic Books), xiii, 30, 40.
[14] Brzezinski was so unafraid of Islamic jihadism that when National Security Adviser he convened a working group to deliberately stir up Muslim dissatisfaction inside the Soviet Union (Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-71).
[15] He has since taken credit for persuading President Aliyyev of Azerbaijan to commit to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Geopolitically Speaking: Russia's `Sphere of Influence’ - Chechnya and Beyond," Azerbaijan International, Spring 2000, p. 24,
http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81 _brzezinski.html.
This pipeline, a favor to U.S. and British oil companies, makes geopolitical but not economic sense; and is further destabilizing an already tense region. See Pepe Escobar, "Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org/-Pepe-Escobar/3149.
[16] Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-79.
[17] Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, "Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force," Washington Post, November 16, 2005. This story noted that CEOs of three majors had falsely denied this: " A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate `to my knowledge,’ and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know. Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that 'gave detailed energy policy recommendations' to the task force."
[18] Scott, Road to 9/11, 188-89; citing Linda McQuaig, Crude Dudes," Toronto Star, September 20, 2004; Jane Mayer, "Contract Sport," New Yorker, February 16-23, 2004.
[19] Scott, Road to 9/11, 189; "Strategy Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century," Report of the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy and Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 40, emphasis added.
[20] Seymour M. Hersh, "Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?" New Yorker, May 6, 2003
[23] For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York, Basic Books), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166, etc. (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68-70 (Mylroie).
[24] Jon Wiener, "Obama's Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich," Nation, August 28, 2008,
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/350252/obama_s_limits_an_intervi ew_with_andrew_bacevich.
Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backwards when the U.S. invaded Iraq. "Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War," MSNBC, July 9, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8524679. Peter Bergen agrees: "Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11" (Bergen, "The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages," Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies, 246): "Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."
[25] I am not the first to notice the analogy. See e.g. Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, "The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications," U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002,
www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/02winter/smith.pdf, 104.
[26] Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 22.
[27] Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds.), Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286.
[29] "The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister -- married into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (`I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees" (Ben Van Heuvelen, "The Bush administration's ties to Blackwater," Salon, October 2, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/).
Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006).
[31] David Isenberg, "Myths and mystery," Asia Times, 5/20/04. While in CIA, Bruner negotiated the deal for Ahmad Chalabi and the CIA to work together (Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War [New York: Nation Books, 2009], 76). Bruner later joined BGR and in 2007 became the full time chairman of BKI Strategic Intelligence. In 2004 Bruner participated with BGR and an Israeli PMC operative in a scheme to help re-elect George W. Bush. (Laura Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street," Mother Jones, November 2008,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/11/kurdistan-k-street).
[32] Douglas Jehl, "Washington Insiders' New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq," New York Times, September 30, 2003.
[33] Financial Times, 12/11/03. Ed Rogers, Diligence's vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush's top assistants when he was US president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers used Adnan Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64).
[34] Ibid. Cf. Mother Jones, March/April 2004: "More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.'s ex-campaign manager to "take advantage of business opportunities" in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week."
[35] "SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war….[SAIC is] a "stealth company" with 9,000 government contracts, many of which involve secret intelligence work" (Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?cu rrentPage=1).
[36] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
[37] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow: "Mark A. Boster left his job as a deputy assistant attorney general in 1999 to join SAIC, and was already calling Justice three months later on behalf of his new employers—a violation of federal law. Boster paid $30,000 in a civil settlement." Yet another PIC for a while was Interop, combining former CIA director James Woolsey and former FBI director Louis Freeh with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom (Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street).
[38] Charlie Cray, "Science Applications International Corporation," CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17; cf. Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
[39] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
[41] Anna Leander, "The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies," Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2005; 33; 803, emphasis added. At the time the Observer reported from " sources in the Bush administration" an allegation that "members of the al-Qaeda network, detained and interrogated in Cairo, had obtained phials of anthrax in the Czech Republic" ("Iraq 'behind US anthrax outbreaks,’" Observer, October 14, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/terrorism.afghanistan6).
[43] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 344.
[44] Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_spy_who_billed_me_twice. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains phrases such as "It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Sep 25, 2010 8:58 pm Post subject:
TonyGosling wrote:
For the first time the story of how CIA director George H. W. Bush was recruited into this network, and brought it into the bosom of the Saudi royal family, is told in detail, as well as how this group's manipulation of the CIA bureaucracy allowed Osama bin Laden's fundraising to thrive as al Qaeda flourished under Saudi and CIA protection.
A priest with a conscience, speaking out against the unsavoury practices of the Church. He has been working for about 15 years to expose crimes committed by the Church, via the Canadian Indian boarding school system, which essentially is a system of genocide.
This is not just about Canadian genocide, it's an international system of genocide. Canadian European settlers came to Canada to the New World as a result of trying to escape the persecution they were subjected to in the Old World and the genocide that had been happening in the Old World for Centuries. The reality is that the same forces that caused it then, are causing it now.
Kevin Annett and survivors organisations in five different countries established the International Tribunal on the Crimes of Church and State. The Pope has been served a public summons, that he has been charged with aiding and abetting within the Church, actually colluding in those crimes, and also for responsibility for the Indian boarding schools and in Ireland in the Catholic orphanage. It's a legal summons under International law people have a right to do that. He has until April 4rth to respond and can be tried in his absence if he doesn't respond.
_________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
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