When Love Of Profits Clashes With The Love Of The Prophet(1)

[moeen yaseen]

THE REAL AGENDA OF THE GLOBAL ELITE IN SOMALIA

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, January 10, 2007

This week has seen the latest example of the US power elite bombing a broken-backed country in the name of the global 'war on terror'. The phantom menace of 'Al Qaeda' has again provided a pretext for the further destruction and destabilization of struggling state, this time Somalia, in order that the Western elite power-mongers can move in and control its valuable resources.

The Bush Administration is essentially asking us to expect to believe that it is bombing a country in an attempt to kill three terrorists– Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 225 people, and accomplices Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Abu Talha al-Sudani.

The Somali government has today claimed that four more airstrikes have been carried out, killing more innocent people. The US has denied this. Also today, a senior Somali politician said US troops were needed on the ground to fight a Muslim extremist threat.

Monday's strike reportedly killed around 200 people, including Canadian and British citizens.

Critics of the action have said it could misfire by creating strong Somali resentment and feeding Islamist militancy. Analysts fear that US interfering and backing of one Somali faction against another could ignite an Iraqi-style insurgency across a swath of East Africa.

There is no doubt that this is a part of the escalation of the wider war of aggression planned and executed by the neoconservatives who published their Project For the New American Century before they came to power.

"Before this, it was just tacit support for Ethiopia. Now the U.S. has fingerprints on the intervention and is going to be held more accountable," said Horn of Africa expert Ken Menkhaus. "This has the potential for a backlash both in Somalia and the region."



The truth is that, once again, the terror myth is being promulgated as an excuse to unleash violence against a largely innocent Muslim population, and one that has struggled for a peaceful existence for decades.

As prominent blogger Kurt Nimmo has stated:

"In other words, it was a turkey shoot, and the targets were not necessarily “al-Qaeda” but rather members of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), Muslims who not long ago ruled Somalia under the Shariah, or Islamic law. CBS does not bother to mention the fact ICU was popular in Somalia, a Muslim nation."

Last December, the popular ICU lost control of the country after a short lived form of peace. The UIC had controlled Mogadishu and other areas of the country after defeating several local warlords who held Somalia in the grip of terror since the collapse of central rule in 1991. The Islamists had succeeded in defeating the warlords primarily through rallying people to their side by creating law and order through the application of Shariah law, which Somalis universally practice.

15,000 Ethiopian troops, with U.S. backing, invaded in an illegal war of aggression and ousted the IUC leaders who fled to the southern-most tip of the country.

Many Somalis in areas controlled by the UIC welcomed the security and order that the Islamists brought to the country. The Bush Administration is playing on reports that the Islamists are 'Taliban like' and is lumping them in with 'Al Qaeda' terrorists.

But the UIC does not appear to be a monolithic organization and seems split between moderates who want peace and dialogue and more right wing Muslims who want to impose Muslim Sharia law. In any case neither have the means or the desire to commit an almighty Jihad against the West, they are simply concerned with creating some kind of law and order within Somalia.

The US response has been to provide major funding to the warlord groupings, via the Ethiopian army, that are opposed to the UIC. Before bombing the hell out of villages on Monday, the Bush Administration has long been providing backing to ruthless killers intent on keeping Somalia in civil strife because it benefits each warlord's plundering rule to keep the nation carved up.

These are the same marauding warlords who drove out American forces in 1993, killing and maiming 18 US troops in the streets then dragging their bodies around in celebration.



Many of these warlords were part of the puppet regime transitional "government" that had been organized in Kenya in 2004. But the "government" was so devoid of internal support that it had to turn to Somalia's arch enemy, Ethiopia, to maintain control.

So why are the US power elite funding sectarian warlords in Somalia and now bombing Islamist areas of the country?

Because the control of Somalia via puppet government, just like in Iraq, is a key factor in the Neocon plan to "shrink the non-integrating gap" of the new world order, as Thomas Barnett's 'New Map' of the world has it.

As with Iraq, the real agenda is to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region. The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich, and lies just miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through the Red Sea.


Click to enlarge

Not surprising then that multiple US warships and Ticonderoga-class cruisers are now stalking the coastline off Somalia and routinely sending intelligence-gathering flights over the country. The location is also prime in order to be able to instantly mobilize forces for any conflict with Iran at the drop of a hat.

The American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips also hold concession rights in Somalia. According to the Los Angeles Times, “corporate and scientific documents disclosed that the American companies are well positioned to pursue Somalia’s most promising potential oil reserves the moment the nation is pacified,” - i.e. kill the "Islamofascists" and install a weak and pandering government that could never control its own resources well enough to compete with the Western global elite.

“Somalia is of geostrategic interest to the Bush administration, and the focus of operations and policy since 2001,” writes Larry Chin. “This focus is a continuation of long-term policies of both the Clinton administration and the George H.W. Bush administrations. Somalia’s resources have been eyed by Western powers since the days of the British Empire.”

“A new US cleansing of Somalian ‘tyranny’ would open the door for these US oil companies to map and develop the possibly huge oil potential in Somalia,” notes F. William Engdahl. “Yemen and Somalia are two flanks of the same geological configuration, which holds large potential petroleum deposits, as well as being the flanks of the oil chokepoint from the Red Sea.”

Of course the American public will simply be told that we're after 'Al Qaeda' because of 9/11, and they will buy it again. No matter that operatives involved in the African bombings at the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were admittedly working for the CIA. Nah, that's a side issue, LOOK AMERICA, Al Zawahiri said Somalia is Islamofascist, so we gotta bomb the hell out of it and control it's oil - just get used to it.

[moeen yaseen]

BU$H's LEGACY : THE PRESIDENT WHO CRIED WOLF
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16152.htm


Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.

Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me” — only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran.

By Keith Olbermann -Anchor, 'Countdown'

01/11/07 Runtime 10 Minutes



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TRANSCRIPT

Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.

Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me” — only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran.

Only this president could extol the “thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group,” and then take its most far-sighted recommendation — “engage Syria and Iran” — and transform it into “threaten Syria and Iran” — when al-Qaida would like nothing better than for us to threaten Syria, and when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to be threatened by us.

This is diplomacy by skimming; it is internationalism by drawing pictures of Superman in the margins of the text books; it is a presidency of Cliff Notes.

And to Iran and Syria — and, yes, also to the insurgents in Iraq — we must look like a country run by the equivalent of the drunken pest who gets battered to the floor of the saloon by one punch, then staggers to his feet, and shouts at the other guy’s friends, “Ok, which one of you is next?”

Mr. Bush, the question is no longer “what are you thinking?,” but rather “are you thinking at all?”

“I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended,” you said last night.

And yet — without any authorization from the public, which spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November’s elections — without any consultation with a Congress (in which key members of your own party, including Sens. Sam Brownback, Norm Coleman and Chuck Hagel, are fleeing for higher ground) — without any awareness that you are doing exactly the opposite of what Baker-Hamilton urged you to do — you seem to be ready to make an open-ended commitment (on America’s behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran.

Our military, Mr. Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq that even a majority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissatisfied with your prosecution of the war.

It is so weary that many of the troops you have just consigned to Iraq will be on their second tours or their third tours or their fourth tours — and now you’re going to make them take on Iran and Syria as well?

Who is left to go and fight, sir?

Who are you going to send to “interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria”?

Laura and Barney?

The line is from the movie “Chinatown” and I quote it often: “Middle of a drought,” the mortician chuckles, “and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.!”

Middle of a debate over the lives and deaths of another 21,500 of our citizens in Iraq, and the president wants to saddle up against Iran and Syria.

Maybe that’s the point — to shift the attention away from just how absurd and childish this latest war strategy is, (strategy, that is, for the war already under way, and not the one on deck).

We are going to put 17,500 more troops into Baghdad and 4,000 more into Anbar Province to give the Iraqi government “breathing space.”

In and of itself that is an awful and insulting term.

The lives of 21,500 more Americans endangered, to give “breathing space” to a government that just turned the first and perhaps the most sober act of any democracy — the capital punishment of an ousted dictator — into a vengeance lynching so barbaric and so lacking in the solemnities necessary for credible authority, that it might have offended the Ku Klux Klan of the 19th century.

And what will our men and women in Iraq do?

The ones who will truly live — and die — during what Mr. Bush said last night will be a “year ahead” that “will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve”?

They will try to seal Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad where the civil war is worst.

Mr. Bush did not mention that while our people are trying to do that, the factions in the civil war will no longer have to focus on killing each other, but rather they can focus anew on killing our people.

Because last night the president foolishly all but announced that we will be sending these 21,500 poor souls, but no more after that, and if the whole thing fizzles out, we’re going home.



The plan fails militarily.

The plan fails symbolically.

The plan fails politically.

Most importantly, perhaps, Mr. Bush, the plan fails because it still depends on your credibility.

You speak of mistakes and of the responsibility “resting” with you.

But you do not admit to making those mistakes.

And you offer us nothing to justify this clenched fist toward Iran and Syria.

In fact, when you briefed news correspondents off-the-record before the speech, they were told, once again, “if you knew what we knew … if you saw what we saw … ”

“If you knew what we knew” was how we got into this morass in Iraq in the first place.

The problem arose when it turned out that the question wasn’t whether we knew what you knew, but whether you knew what you knew.

You, sir, have become the president who cried wolf.

All that you say about Iraq now could be gospel.

All that you say about Iran and Syria now could be prescient and essential.

We no longer have a clue, sir.

We have heard too many stories.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the director of national intelligence over to the State Department because he thought you were wrong about Iran.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly useful in an air war next door in Iran.

Your assurances, sir, and your demands that we trust you, have lost all shape and texture.

They are now merely fertilizer for conspiracy theories.

They are now fertilizer, indeed.

The pile has been built slowly and with seeming care.

I read this list last night, before the president’s speech, and it bears repeating because its shape and texture are perceptible only in such a context.

Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said nation-building was wrong for America.

Now he says it is vital.

He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control.

Last night he promised to embed them in Iraqi units.

He told us about WMD.

Mobile labs.

Secret sources.

Aluminum tubes.

Yellow-cake.

He has told us the war is necessary:

Because Saddam was a material threat.

Because of 9/11.

Because of Osama Bin Laden. Al-Qaida. Terrorism in general.

To liberate Iraq. To spread freedom. To spread Democracy. To prevent terrorism by gas price increases.

Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.

Because — 439 words in to the speech last night — he trotted out 9/11 again.

In advocating and prosecuting this war he passed on a chance to get Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

To get Muqtada Al-Sadr. To get Bin Laden.

He sent in fewer troops than the generals told him to. He ordered the Iraqi army disbanded and the Iraqi government “de-Baathified.”

He short-changed Iraqi training. He neglected to plan for widespread looting. He did not anticipate sectarian violence.

He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. He gave jobs to foreign contractors, and not Iraqis. He staffed U.S. positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.

He and his government told us: America had prevailed, mission accomplished, the resistance was in its last throes.

He has insisted more troops were not necessary. He has now insisted more troops are necessary.

He has insisted it’s up to the generals, and then removed some of the generals who said more troops would not be necessary.

He has trumpeted the turning points:

The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam. A provisional government, a charter, a constitution, the trial of Saddam. Elections, purple fingers, another government, the death of Saddam.

He has assured us: We would be greeted as liberators — with flowers;

As they stood up, we would stand down. We would stay the course; we were never about “stay the course.”

We would never have to go door-to-door in Baghdad. And, last night, that to gain Iraqis’ trust, we would go door-to-door in Baghdad.

He told us the enemy was al-Qaida, foreign fighters, terrorists, Baathists, and now Iran and Syria.

He told us the war would pay for itself. It would cost $1.7 billion. $100 billion. $400 billion. Half a trillion. Last night’s speech alone cost another $6 billion.

And after all of that, now it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Democrats, Republicans, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November and the majority of the American people.

Oh, and one more to add, tonight: Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Mr. Bush, this is madness.

You have lost the military. You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost most of the Iraqis. You have lost many of the Republicans. You have lost our allies.

You are losing the credibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself.

And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones. You are guaranteeing it!

This becomes your legacy, sir: How many of those you addressed last night as your “fellow citizens” you just sent to their deaths.

And for what, Mr. Bush?

So the next president has to pull the survivors out of Iraq instead of you?

[moeen yaseen]

LIBERALS AND NEOCONS KEEP THE SURGE CONFIDENCE GAME IN MOTION

Another Day in the Empire
Saturday, January 13, 2007

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” declares Strother Martin, playing the captain of Road Prison 36 in Stuart Rosenberg’s classic film, Cool Hand Luke. Martin, of course, was talking about the recalcitrance of his ward, Luke, played by Paul Newman, but the phrase works as well in another context—the corporate media failing to communicate reality, a common enough occurrence in Bushzarro world.

For instance, consider Craig Crawford, writing for that trusty enough war tool, the New York Times. For Crawford, the interaction between neocons, by way of their front man, George Bush, and docile house servant Democrats, translates into “yet another nuanced competition to inch the polls one way or the other, despite the flood of polling showing that about two-thirds of the public has decided the war has become folly.”

Folly is but another word for foolishness, and the Iraq “war,” actually an occupation tasked with destruction, is anything but foolish. It is part of a premeditated plan to reduce the Arab Middle East and Persia to the east into a social and cultural wasteland.

Mr. Crawford criticizes as a “symbolic gesture” the “ineffectuality of such a minor uptick” of troops, more than 20,000, the neocons will send into the Iraqi meat grinder in the coming weeks. “Even the president’s most ardent supporters on the war counseled that at least 40,000 more troops, possibly many more, would be needed to make any difference.”

In fact, as conventional wisdom dictates, in order to defeat an organized “insurgency,” the United States will need ten soldiers for every person who picks up a weapon or IED and resists. In other words, if conservative estimates of the numbers of the resistance are correct, the neocons need between 500,000 and a million boots on the ground, possibly more.

As Crawford rightly notes, the ludicrous “surge” idea was contrived in part by William Kristol and the neocon intellectuals, that is if you can call Straussian nihilists and armchair Malthusians intellectuals. “In a constitutional democracy that works as this one was designed to work, the Kennedy and Kristol forces would be forced to find common ground. But the leaders above their pay grade are not really talking to one other. They are only talking at one another.”

Thus the “failure to communicate,” not between the Democrats and the neocons, mind you, but between Crawford and his readers. But then we’re talking about the New York Times here, the “liberal” newspaper that served as an eager propaganda organ and staging ground for the lies and brazen fabrications used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, although we later heard a murmur of theatrical regret about this role, or rather a crocodile tear or so issued as Judith Miller, the servile neocon conduit, became an embarrassment for her role in the outing of the CIA operative Valerie Plame, vicious neocon retaliation for Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, writing an op-ed, published as well in the New York Times, calling the claim Saddam loaded up on Nigerian yellowcake uranium a big fat lie contrived by a gaggle of neocons.

Kristol and the Democrats need not find “common ground” because the differences between them are essentially stylistic. Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer telegraphed the message, within hours of the midterm elections (and in the case of Pelosi, before the election), that they would not investigate the neocons for war crimes or impeach Bush and would instead play along with the Israel First plan to make Iraq suffer interminably and then, according to the script, go after Iran, as the neocons and Israelis obnoxiously demand without rest or respite. Pelosi and Hoyer simply demand a new management team.

Crawford deems a mistake Bush’s refusal “to heed the Iraq Study Group’s call for diplomatic overtures to Iran and Syria.” Mr. Crawford would have us believe the ISG offered a radical departure from what the neocons continually insist, when in fact the “bipartisan task force” created by Congress was organized simply as an “official damage control apparatus,” as Larry Chin notes.

In fact, the ISG’s parent is none other than the US Institute for Peace. “Named in true Orwellian fashion, the US Institute for Peace is a harbor for elite managers of global warfare. Its former members have included the most notorious war criminals in modern history, among them Dick Cheney, Frank Carlucci, Caspar Weinberger, and Stephen Hadley,” writes Chin.

In Bushzarro world, where black is white and up is down, Craig Crawford is tagged a “liberal,” as he attempts to nudge us toward what is characterized a centrism and moderation, represented by the ISG, a nest of Iran-Contra criminals and neoliberal yesmen for the ruling elite.

It is, as usual, an oily shell game, not that most Americans notice, let along care. In the meantime, William Kristol, a scurrilous Straussian neocon and student of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, gets a gig at Time Magazine, the onetime home of CIA assets (under Operation Mockingbird) such as Charles Douglas Jackson, an expert on psychological warfare who served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II.

Finally, on the “conservative,” or rather neocon fascist, side of the equation, Kristol said during a Fox News “panel discussion” following Bush’s “surge” speech, “I wish there were a little more about winning the war and a little less about helping the Iraqis.”

Of course, the neocons are dedicated to destroying Iraqi society and culture, as should be obvious to an observant sixth grader, so Kristol was simply doing his bit to keep the shell game, the confidence trick—con, scam, grift, bunko, flim flam—in motion until the mission is accomplished.

[moeen yaseen]

THE SURGE IS A RED HERRING

Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16143.htm


01/12/07 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Bush’s “surge” speech is a hoax, but members of Congress and media commentators are discussing the surge as if it were real.

I invite the reader to examine the speech. The “surge” content consists of nonsensical propagandistic statements. The real content of the speech is toward the end where Bush mentions Iran and Syria.

Bush makes it clear that success in Iraq does not depend on the surge. Rather, “Succeeding in Iraq . . . begins with addressing Iran and Syria.”

Bush asserts that “these two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.”

Bush’s assertions are propagandistic lies.

The Iraq insurgency is Sunni. Iran is Shi’ite. If Iran is supporting anyone in Iraq it is the Shi’ites, who have not been part of the insurgency. Indeed, the Sunni and Shi’ites are engaged in a civil war within Iraq.

Does any intelligent person really believe that Iranian Shi’ites are going to arm Iraqi Sunnis who are killing Iraqi Shi’ites allied with Iran? Does anyone really believe that Iranian Shi’ites are going to provide sanctuary for Iraqi Sunnis?

Bush can tell blatant propagandistic lies, because Congress and the American people don’t know enough facts to realize the absurdity of Bush’s assertions.

Why is Bush telling these lies? Here is the answer: Bush says, “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

In those words, Bush states perfectly clearly that victory in Iraq requires US forces to attack Iran and Syria. Moreover, Bush says, “We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.”

What do two US aircraft carrier attack groups in the Persian Gulf have to do with a guerilla ground war in Iraq?

The “surge” is merely a tactic to buy time while war with Iran and Syria can be orchestrated. The neoconservative/Israeli cabal feared that the pressure that Congress, the public, and the American foreign policy establishment were putting on Bush to de-escalate in Iraq would terminate their plan to achieve hegemony in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq would mean the end of the neoconservatives’ influence. It would be impossible to start a new war with Iran after losing the war in Iraq.

The neoconservatives and the right-wing Israeli government have clearly stated their plans to overthrow Muslim governments throughout the region and to deracinate Islam. These plans existed long before 9/11.

Near the end of his “surge” speech, Bush adopts the neoconservative program as US policy. The struggle, Bush says, echoing the neoconservatives and the Israeli right-wing, goes far beyond Iraq. “The challenge,” Bush says, is “playing out across the broader Middle East. . . . It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” America is pitted against “extremists” who “have declared their intention to destroy our way of life.” “The most realistic way to protect the American people,” Bush says, is “by advancing liberty across a troubled region.”

This, of course, is a massive duplicitous lie. We have brought no liberty to Iraq, but we have destroyed their way of life. Bush suggests that Muslims in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine are waiting and hoping for more invasions to free them of violence. Did Bush’s invasion free Iraq from violence or did it bring violence to Iraq?

It is extraordinary that anyone can listen to this blatant declaration of US aggression in the Middle East without demanding Bush’s immediate impeachment.

Republican US Senator Chuck Hagel declared Bush’s plan to be “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” In truth, it is far worse. It is naked aggression justified by transparent lies. No one has ever heard governments in Iraq, Syria, or Iran declare “their intention to destroy our way of life.” To the contrary, it is the United States and Israel that are trying to destroy the Muslim way of life.

The crystal clear truth is that fanatical neoconservatives and Israelis are using Bush to commit the United States to a catastrophic course.



BU$H ADDRESS ON IRAQ
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6250687.stm

Here is the full text of US President George W Bush's televised address outlining a new strategy for dealing with the conflict in Iraq.

Good evening. Tonight in Iraq, the armed forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror - and our safety here at home.

The new strategy I outline tonight will change America's course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation.

The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement.

We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq - particularly in Baghdad - overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made.

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people - and it is unacceptable to me

Al-Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's elections posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis.

They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam - the Golden Mosque of Samarra - in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate.

Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads.

And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people - and it is unacceptable to me.

Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do.

Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

Need for change

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq.

So my national security team, military commanders, and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review.

We consulted Members of Congress from both parties, allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts.

We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group - a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton.

In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq.

And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits.

They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions.

Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people.

If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people - and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people

On 11 September 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities.

For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad.

Eighty percent of Iraq's sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles (48km) of the capital.

This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves, and shaking the confidence of all Iraqis.

Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people.

And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighbourhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents.

And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes.

They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.

'Strong commitment'

Let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital.

The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad's nine districts.

When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort - along with local police.

These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations - conducting patrols, setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.

This new strategy will not yield an immediate end to suicide bombings, assassinations, or IED [improvised explosive device] attacks

This is a strong commitment. But for it to succeed, our commanders say the Iraqis will need our help.

So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence - and bring security to the people of Baghdad.

This will require increasing American force levels. So I have committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.

The vast majority of them - five brigades - will be deployed to Baghdad.

These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations.

Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighbourhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not.

Here are the differences: In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighbourhoods of terrorists and insurgents - but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned.

This time, we will have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared.

In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighbourhoods that are home to those fuelling the sectarian violence.

This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter these neighbourhoods - and [Iraqi] Prime Minister [Nouri] Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.

I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended.

If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people - and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people.

Now is the time to act. The prime minister understands this.

Here is what he told his people just last week: "The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation."

This new strategy will not yield an immediate end to suicide bombings, assassinations, or IED [improvised explosive device] attacks.

Our enemies in Iraq will make every effort to ensure that our television screens are filled with images of death and suffering.

Yet over time, we can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad's residents.

When this happens, daily life will improve, Iraqis will gain confidence in their leaders, and the government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas.

Most of Iraq's Sunni and Shia want to live together in peace - and reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible.

Benchmarks

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations.

Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighbourhoods and communities.

So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November.

Al-Qaeda is still active in Iraq

To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.

To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10bn (£5.2bn) of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.

To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year.

And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws - and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

America will change our approach to help the Iraqi government as it works to meet these benchmarks.

In keeping with the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, we will increase the embedding of American advisers in Iraqi Army units - and partner a Coalition brigade with every Iraqi Army division.

We will help the Iraqis build a larger and better-equipped Army - and we will accelerate the training of Iraqi forces, which remains the essential U.S. security mission in Iraq.

We will give our commanders and civilians greater flexibility to spend funds for economic assistance.

We will double the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams.

These teams bring together military and civilian experts to help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen moderates, and speed the transition to Iraqi self reliance.

And Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq.

As we make these changes, we will continue to pursue al-Qaeda and foreign fighters.

Al-Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province.

Al-Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital.

A captured al-Qaeda document describes the terrorists' plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province.

This would bring al-Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq's democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders - and protecting the local population.

Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al-Qaeda.

As a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists.

So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops.

These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to step up the pressure on the terrorists.

America's men and women in uniform took away al-Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan - and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

Iran and Syria

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity - and stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge.

We will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq

This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq.

Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.

We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria.

And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East.

I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.

We will expand intelligence sharing - and deploy Patriot air defence systems to reassure our friends and allies.

We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border.

And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.

We will use America's full diplomatic resources to rally support for Iraq from nations throughout the Middle East.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States need to understand that an American defeat in Iraq would create a new sanctuary for extremists - and a strategic threat to their survival.

These nations have a stake in a successful Iraq that is at peace with its neighbours - and they must step up their support for Iraq's unity government.

We endorse the Iraqi government's call to finalize an International Compact that will bring new economic assistance in exchange for greater economic reform.

And on Friday, Secretary Rice will leave for the region - to build support for Iraq, and continue the urgent diplomacy required to help bring peace to the Middle East.

'Decisive conflict'

The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict.

It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time.

On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life.

In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy - by advancing liberty across a troubled region.

It is in the interests of the United States to stand with the brave men and women who are risking their lives to claim their freedom - and help them as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East.

From Afghanistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence, and want a future of peace and opportunity for their children.

And they are looking at Iraq.

The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve


They want to know: Will America withdraw and yield the future of that country to the extremists - or will we stand with the Iraqis who have made the choice for freedom?

The changes I have outlined tonight are aimed at ensuring the survival of a young democracy that is fighting for its life in a part of the world of enormous importance to American security.

Let me be clear: The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience, and they will make the year ahead bloody and violent.

Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue - and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties.

The question is whether our new strategy will bring us closer to success. I believe that it will.

Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved.

There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.

But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world - a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people.

'Crucial moment'

A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harbouring them - and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and grandchildren.

To step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear that country apart

Our new approach comes after consultations with Congress about the different courses we could take in Iraq.

Many are concerned that the Iraqis are becoming too dependent on the United States - and therefore, our policy should focus on protecting Iraq's borders and hunting down al-Qaeda.

Their solution is to scale back America's efforts in Baghdad - or announce the phased withdrawal of our combat forces.

We carefully considered these proposals. And we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear that country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale.

Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal.

'Quiet sacrifice'

If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.

In the days ahead, my national security team will fully brief Congress on our new strategy.

If Members have improvements that can be made, we will make them.

If circumstances change, we will adjust. Honourable people have different views, and they will voice their criticisms.

It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny. And all involved have a responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed.

Acting on the good advice of Senator Joe Lieberman and other key members of Congress, we will form a new, bipartisan working group that will help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror.

This group will meet regularly with me and my Administration, and it will help strengthen our relationship with Congress.

We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Marine Corps, so that America has the Armed Forces we need for the 21st Century.

We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilians to deploy overseas - where they can help build democratic institutions in communities and nations recovering from war and tyranny.

In these dangerous times, the United States is blessed to have extraordinary and selfless men and women willing to step forward and defend us.

These young Americans understand that our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary - and that the advance of freedom is the calling of our time.

They serve far from their families, who make the quiet sacrifices of lonely holidays and empty chairs at the dinner table.

They have watched their comrades give their lives to ensure our liberty.

We mourn the loss of every fallen American - and we owe it to them to build a future worthy of their sacrifice.


'Trying times'

Fellow citizens: The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve.

It can be tempting to think that America can put aside the burdens of freedom.

Yet times of testing reveal the character of a Nation.

And throughout our history, Americans have always defied the pessimists and seen our faith in freedom redeemed.

Now America is engaged in a new struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will prevail.

We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night.

[moeen yaseen]

BU$H SPEECH: FULL STEAM AHEAD ON IRAN ATTACK

Kurt Nimmo
Another Day In The Empire
Friday, January 12, 2007

Speaking through the unitary decider—sort of like a ventriloquist speaking through a dummy—the neocons have once again issued threats against Iran and Syria.

“In his speech to the American nation yesterday, President George W. Bush issued a warning to Iran and Syria, accusing them of taking deliberate action against U.S. forces in Iraq and enabling aid transfers to insurgents,” reports Haaretz.

“Bush said the U.S. intends to take action against Iranian proxies in Iraq, and vowed to find and destroy the networks supplying these groups with weapons and training.” In addition, and ominously if not predictably, Bush “also promised that the U.S. would work ‘with others’ in order to block Iran from developing nuclear arms and dominating the region.”

As if to underscore the importance and urgency of Iran’s prominent position on the neocon hit list, “American forces stormed Iranian government offices in northern Iraq,” essentially an act of war. “The soldiers detained six people, including diplomats, according to the Iranians, and seized documents and computers in the pre-dawn raid which was condemned by Iran. A leading UK-based Iran specialist, Ali Ansari, said the incident was an ‘extreme provocation’. Dr Ansari said that Mr. Bush’s speech on future Iraq strategy amounted to ‘a declaration of war’ on Iran,” reports the Independent.

“The United Nations adopted sanctions against Tehran on 23 December,” the Independent continues. “However, the economic measures adopted by the UN have failed to convince Iran to halt its uranium-enrichment programme which could lead to production of a nuclear weapon. The US is calling on allied states to adopt tougher unilateral sanctions.”

As Iran has a perfect right under the NPT to enrich uranium, and there is no evidence Iran is devolving nuclear weapons, as the IAEA and the CIA have concluded, these “economic measures,” in essence economic warfare leveraged against a sovereign state, amount to yet another act of war, this time with the complicity of the United Nations, basically a groomed lap dog for neocons. Indeed, like a trained show dog, the United Nations, in Pavlovian fashion, will once again jump through a flaming hoop on command, as it did the last time the neocons invaded a small country.

“President Bush appointed Admiral William Fallon to replace General John Abizaid as head of Central Command for Iraq and Afghanistan last week in a sign that change could be afoot. This week, Mr. Bush ordered a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, along with its support ships, which could be used to contain Iran,” a fact glossed over with little meaningful comment by the corporate media in this country. Of course, it makes absolutely no sense for the unitary decider to appoint an admiral to command land forces in Iraq, thus the only logical conclusion is that the neocons are preparing for sea-based air strikes against Iran.

However, at least a few corporate media shills are waking up to the inevitability of an Iran attack. For instance, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who “aggressively questioned [at least for a moment] White House Press Secretary Tony Snow about whether President Bush’s rhetoric last night was a ‘precursor for a rationale for an attack’ on Iran.”

Matthews said he feared the neocons would use a skirmish with Iranian fighters in Iraq as a reason to “bomb the hell out of them and hit their nuclear installations without any without any action by Congress. That’s the scenario I fear, an extra-constitutional war is what I’m worried about.”

Snow dismissed Matthews, saying “you have been watching too many old movies,” for instance a movie on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, or rather fabricated pretext.

Matthews, undeterred, interrupted. “No, I’ve been watching the war in Iraq, is what I’ve been watching.” Snow, however, admitted the dispatch of the latest carrier to the Gulf is related to actions against Iran:

MATTHEWS: …look at this. “I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.” Isn’t that about Iran?

SNOW: It, it—yeah, it is, in part, and what it is is it’s saying, look, we are going to make sure that anybody who tries to take aggressive action—but when Bill Clinton sent a carrier task force into the South China Sea after the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan, that was not as a prelude to war against North Korea. You know how it works.

Certainly, we know how it works, as we have endured seven long years of unitary decidership rule under the guidance of the murderous neocons, who are now taking an African side trip, killing Muslims, although few in the corporate media are outraged.

Matthews, to his credit, zaps Snow. However, in predictable fashion, Matthews backs down in short order, never mind the name of his television show:

MATTHEWS: No, I’m just concerned because, very much in the years, in the months building up to this war in Iraq, we heard a kind of a drumbeat of the dangers from Iraq and the nuclear weaponry and what we’re going to do about it, and then gradually we went to war. And I’m just wondering we’re looking here at the precursor for a rationale for an attack of some kind on—you say—I’ll take it at your word. If the president is not going to attack Iran, we’ll move on.

SNOW: Ok, but, let me just do a couple of things here. I think you understand and most Americans understand Iran is the foremost financier of global terror. It’s a problem. But you don’t deal with everything militarily, as you know. The United States exhausted all diplomatic options before going into Iraq, and I think what you’re doing if you’re trying to go down the road of speculation that is just way ahead of events. Right now, we’re working on making Iraq a success. One other thing about Iran, Chris. The Iranian public, most which of is young, is very pro-American.

In fact, the American people do not understand squat about Iran, unable to find the country on a map. Or do they realize Snow’s employer is the “foremost financier of global terror,” as is well enough documented.

It is a well known fact the neocons, before choosing Bush as their front man, planned to invade Iraq, a plan they presented to the Israelis back in the 90s, an idea that figures prominently in Zionist “strategic” literature.

It is entirely beside the point the “Iranian public, most which of is young, is very pro-American,” never mind the United States orchestrated the overthrow of a democratically elected and popular Iranian leader in 1953 and installed the Shah and his brutal Savak secret police. If not for the Shah and his crimes against the Iranian people, chances are good the revolution would have never occurred and the Ayatollah Khomeini would not have ruled Iran, ushering in the mullahs.

Naturally, the moment the neocons launch their inevitable shock and awe campaign, all the “pro-American” Iranians cited by Snow will metamorphosis into dedicated resistance fighters, taking on the Americans like their neighbors in Iraq now take them on.

One can only imagine the look of Snow’s face as oil tankers, hobbled by Iranian Sunburn missiles—and the more advanced SS-NX-26 Yakhonts missiles—shut down the Strait of Hormuz, thus sending fantastically dire economic reverberations around the world. We can only hope Snow, his boss, and the neocons will subsequently be rounded up, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and made to do the perp walk in orange jumpsuits.

Finally, even a few Democrats—months late and a few billion dollars short—are waking up to the inevitability of an attack against Iran, something we have talked out here for the last few years.

“President Bush appears to be setting the stage for a wider war in the region. He has blamed Iran for attacks on America. The President is vowing to disrupt Iran. He is going to add an aircraft carrier to the shores off the coast of Iran,” writes Dennis Kucinich, Ohio Democrat. “It is imperative that Congress step up to its constitutional responsibility to restrain this abuse of executive authority by notifying the President that we will no longer agree to fund the war in Iraq. The supplemental budget request of up to $100 billion would enable the president not only to continue the war against Iraq through the end of his term. It would give him the resources to attack Iran, in the name of defending Iraq and the region.”

Congress, replete with warmongers, will of course do no such thing. It will sit on its hands and abuse its obligation to the American people and the Constitution.

Finally, even if you believe there is no way Iran will be attacked, thus precipitating World War Four, as the neocons fondly call it, consider Condi the Destroyer on the Today Show:

SECRETARY RICE: The President is saying that we are going to make certain that we disrupt activities that are endangering and killing our troops and that are destabilizing Iraq.

QUESTION: If that includes attacks inside Iran and Syria is that on the table?

SECRETARY RICE: Matt, obviously the President is not going to take options off the table and I’m not going to speculate, but I will tell you this. Around Christmastime we did find a group of Iranians who were engaged in activities that were detrimental to our forces. We went, we took them, we then told the Iraqi Government that they needed to be expelled from the country and they were. The Iranians need to know, and the Syrians need to know, that the United States is not finding it acceptable and is not going to simply tolerate their activities to try and harm our forces or to destabilize Iraq.

As William Arkin notes, Rice originally said “Iraqis” but the State Department went out of its way to issue a correction, stating Rice meant Iranians.

Arkin predictably came down on the side of caution: “I’m still not saying that war with Iran (or Syria) is imminent, but clearly the Vice President’s office and the hardliners scored a major victory in conveying the threat rather than following a kinder, gentler diplomatic route.”

On the other hand, I say a war with Iran is indeed imminent, as the USS John C. Stennis strike group was not sent to the Gulf earlier this month to simply send a message—it was sent, bristling with warplanes and munitions, to attack Iran, as long planned by the neocons.

[moeen yaseen]

KEEPING ALL EYES FOCUSSED ON IRAQ WHILE BU$H AND ISRAEL PLOT ATTACK ON IRAN

Mike Whitney
Online Journal
Friday, January 12, 2007

Even a cursory review of Bush’s speech shows that the president is less concerned with "security" in Baghdad than he is with plans to attack Iran. Paul Craig Roberts was correct in his article Wednesday when he questioned whether all the hoopla over a surge was just "an orchestrated distraction" to draw attention away from the real war plan. ("Distracting Congress from the Real War Plan")

Apparently, it is.

As Roberts noted, "The US Congress and the media are focused on President Bush’s proposal for an increase of 20,000 US troops in Iraq, while Israel and its American neoconservative allies prepare an assault on Iran."

Roberts’ analysis is further supported by yesterday’s news that American troops stormed the "Iranian consulate in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil and arrested 5 employees." (Reuters)

Iran had set up the embassy at the request of the Kurdish governor-general who was not informed of US intentions to raid the facility and kidnap its employees. The American soldiers confiscated computers and documents just five hours after Bush had threatened Iran in his address to the nation.

Clearly, Bush is looking for a way to provoke a military confrontation with Iran. Now he has five Iranian hostages at his disposal to help him achieve that goal.

Will the mullahs overreact or will they show restraint and try to prevent a larger conflict?

Bush’s hostility towards Iran was evident in comments he made in Wednesday night’s speech:

"Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

"Seek and destroy"? Is that the plan?

A region-wide conflagration with results as uncertain as they are in Iraq?

So far, there’s no solid evidence that Iran is "providing material support for attacks on American troops." All the same, the administration has consistently used "material support" as the basis for preemptive war. In fact, the so-called Bush Doctrine is predicated on the assumption that the US is free to attack whomever it chooses if it perceives a threat to its national security. The normal rules of self-defense or "imminent danger" no longer apply.

Bush knows that if Iran were seriously involved in arming the Iraqi resistance, we’d be seeing the Russian-made, armor-piercing rocket launchers that were used so effectively by Hezbollah during their 34 day war with Israel. That hasn’t been the case. Iran is undoubtedly active in Iraq, but in ways that are much subtler than Bush claims. In fact, Bush’s great ally, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who runs the feared Badr Brigade out of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, has strong ties to Iran (having lived there for 20 years.) He is probably using the US military to remove his enemies (the Sunni-backed resistance and al Sadr’s Mehdi Army) before he turns his attention to his US benefactors.

Iran clearly has interests in Iraq, but it is the Bush administration’s reckless war that has assured that Iran will be the "default" superpower in the entire region. Bush has shattered the fragile balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites while eliminating Iran’s main adversaries in Afghanistan (Sunni-Taliban) and Iraq (Saddam-Ba’athist Party). Bush now seems to think that the only way he can challenge Tehran’s ascendancy is by launching a Lebanon-type assault on military and civilian infrastructure in Iran.

If Iran is set back 20 years, Bush assumes, then our trusted-friend Israel will be the prevailing power in the Middle East. That, of course, was the plan from the get-go.

To that end, Bush averred: "We’re taking steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing and deploy Patriot Air Defense Systems to reassure our friends and allies . . . And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region."

All the pieces are being put in place for a much larger and more destructive conflict.

It’s an ambitious plan, but it has no chance of succeeding. The United States is hopelessly bogged down in Iraq and its actions in Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine have only ensured that the US's days in the Middle East are quickly drawing to a close.

As for Iraq, Bush’s speech provided few details of how the miniscule and incremental increase in troop-strength (only 17,000 to Baghdad over a four-month period) was expected to quell the raging violence that has gripped the capital since the last major operation in August. Operation "Forward Together" turned out to be a complete disaster, precipitating a sharp boost in attacks on US troops as well as an increase in sectarian violence.

Bush has enlisted some support for his "escalation" plan by committing to the "clear-hold-build" strategy promoted by the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR has been pushing their "model for counterinsurgency" for three years, but have been largely ignored by the Bush administration.

Despite Bush’s feeble defense of the policy, he has no intention of putting it into practice. He is merely pacifying other members of the political establishment who are demanding that their voices be heard.

The reality of the present strategy is manifest in military operations currently underway in Baghdad. These operations are being conducted in a way that is reminiscent of Rumsfeld’s activities in Falluja two years ago. The attacks on alleged "insurgent strongholds" on Haifa Street, (which is just a few hundred yards from the Green Zone) show that the military has returned to the policy of using overwhelming force to subdue the resistance. In this case, the US pounded the area with helicopter gun-ships and F-16s, while ground troops went rampaging door to door. The civilian casualties in these scattershot operations invariably skyrocket and further alienate the local population. In one day alone, US forces killed an estimated 50 Iraqis in the predominantly Sunni "residential" area.

Another catastrophic "hearts and minds" operation.

Sunni leaders are now accusing the US military of carrying out ethnic cleansing operations at the request of the Shiite militias.

Is that the plan, purging Baghdad of the Sunnis?

It appears so.

Certainly, the lynching of Saddam was intended to send a message to the Ba’athist-led resistance that there would be no more efforts at negotiations or compromise. The US is now pursuing Cheney’s "80-20" plan -- a strategy to throw their support behind the Shiites while eradicating the Sunnis (20 percent of the population).

Bush hinted at this new approach in his speech when he said, "Our efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principle reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure the neighborhoods that have been cleared of terrorists and insurgents AND THERE WERE TOO MANY RESTRICTIONS ON THE TROOPS WE DID HAVE."

"Too many restrictions"? (The respected British medical journal Lancet reported 650,000 casualties in the conflict so far with over 2 million Iraqi refugees. Is that "Too many restrictions"? )

Bush’s comments suggest that the "gloves are coming off" and we can expect a return to the scorched earth policy that was so savagely applied in Falluja and other parts of the Sunni Triangle.

Bush also intimated that he would strike out at other "armed militias" in Iraq; an indication that US forces are planning an offensive against Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army. The Shiite cleric, al Sadr, is despised by the Washington Warlords and is described by the Pentagon as "the biggest threat to Iraq’s security." Even so, al-Sadr has operatives placed strategically throughout the al-Maliki government (and within the Green Zone) and attacking him now would only make the occupation more perilous. In fact, an attack on the Mehdi Army could create a situation where Shiite militias cut off vital supply lines from the south making occupation virtually untenable.

Bush has decided to abandon all sense of caution and blunder ahead taking on all adversaries without concern for the consequences. It is a prescription for disaster.

Bush’s "Victory Strategy": more force, but no political solution

Bush's speech invoked none of the flashy slogans that he typically uses and which normally appear in headlines the next day. Nor did he make any attempt to elicit support for his planned "escalation" of troops. That idea has already been thoroughly rejected by the Iraq Study Group, the Congress, and the American people. Instead, he reiterated the same worn bromides (of "ideological" warfare, 9-11, and terrorism) that have long since lost their power to move public opinion.

The Bush administration has run out of gas. They have no plan for "pacification," security, reconstruction, or regional stability. Their "one-size-fits-all" solution requires ever-increasing levels of violence for an intractable Iraqi Resistance and which is now fated to spread mayhem throughout the entire Middle East.

Carl von Clausewitz said, "War is not a mere act of policy, but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means."

Bush and his fellow-neocons are incapable of thinking politically, so America’s decline in Iraq is likely to be precipitous. The crackdown in Baghdad and the anticipated bombing of Iran will have no significant affect on the war’s outcome. America has lost its ability to influence events positively or to arbitrarily assert its will. We’re now facing "death by a thousand cuts" and the steady erosion of US power.

Brute force alone will not produce a political solution in Iraq. Those who think it will are bound to fail.

[moeen yaseen]

IMMINENT USRAELI ASSAULT ON IRAN

http://www.ziopedia.org/content/view/2969/58/

The drums of war are getting louder every day. What started several years ago in corporate media as a constant drizzle of libellous comments and blatant lies about the Iranian government, has developed into a torrent of utter hysteria. The infamous pro-Israel lobby groups AIPAC and AJC continue to use all their leverage to influence Western governments into war against Iran and Syria. Jewish controlled media all over the world are repeating again and again the same MEMRI lie that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had called for wiping Israel off the map, every time they write anything about the Iranian President.

see http://www.ziopedia.org/mambots/editors/content/view/1416/58/


Even mainstream media, who for years ignored rumours of American and Israeli plans to start a war against Iran, are now filled with reports on USraeli preparations for a nuclear assault against her nuclear facilities.

I’m always amazed by the grip that Israel and her lobby have over Western countries. Here we have two ‘democratic’ countries supposedly preparing nuclear strikes against another country because it is suspected, but never proven, to have secret plans to develop nuclear weapons. The only justification given for such a drastic response to that alleged nuclear programme, is the Iranian government’s attitude towards Israel and her refusal to abandon her civilian (!) nuclear programme, a programme perfectly within her rights under the international non-proliferation treaty. And there is no one of any significant influence in Western societies saying or doing anything about this madness.

Some commentators have been suspecting that neither the US nor Israel are serious about attacking Iran, but are merely trying to bully Iran into abandoning her nuclear plans. Even if this was correct, you got to ask which right they have to do so. Threatening another country with war, even with a nuclear attack, to influence its policies is criminal. It’s called blackmail. Those 116 non-aligned countries who during last year’s meeting in Havana spoke out in favour of Iran’s unalienable right to her civilian nuclear programme should show their protest by immediately suspending their membership with the useless United Nations.

The argument given by those ‘they can’t be serious’ commentators is that America’s financial and military capabilities are already stretched to the limit by the disastrous occupation of Iraq and that public opinion in the United States wouldn’t allow Bush to go to war with another country. In my opinion this reasoning is flaud. Firstly, Bush wants to go to war with Iran no matter what for a whole bunch of reasons. He wants Big Oil to get control over Iran’s huge oil reserves. He wants to restore international trust in his currency by stopping Iran from selling oil for Euro instead of US Dollars. He wants to be able to divide Iraq, which was always one of the prime goals of the Iraq invasion, along ethnic lines between a regime-changed Iran, Turkey and Israel. He wants every country in the world to know that his government will do whatever it takes to force them into submission to USraeli interests.

Bush doesn’t care about public opinion. Both Democrat and Republican party are fully behind the Ziocon plan for a ‘New Middle East’, given the Israel-first attitude of virtually all American politicians. More war means higher oil prices, that is higher profits for Jewish controlled Big Oil. More war means more military expenditure, that is more profits for the Jewish controlled military-industrial complex. And more war means more ‘Big Brother’, less impeachment pressure and an almost certain win of the Republicans at the next presidential election. No Western country, even with much less tightly controlled media such as in the US, has ever changed head of government as the result of a democratic election.

Bush doesn’t care about the impact for the US economy either. He has no qualms about ruining it, as years of obscene household and trade deficits perfectly demonstrate. If the economy – as many experts suspect – goes belly up, and America ends up with hyper inflation or a depression worse than in 1929, the people whose interests he serves are actually better of. They will be able to buy everything that is of any value in the United States and dependent economies for a fraction of its normal value in the biggest fire sale the world has ever seen. At the end of it all, the people behind the Federal Reserve Banking scheme, the likes of Rothschild and other prominent members of the Kosher Nostra, will own everything, and the gullible Goyim - who watched the Jewish cancer grow and grow without stopping them - will end up with no option but to become their slaves.


Andrew Winkler
Editor/Publisher
ZioPedia - All There Is To Know About Zionism

[Keith Mothersson]

[moeen yaseen]

Hi Keith,

Thanks for the compliments to this "epic" thread and it's significance. You have made some good points on what else might lay behind the surge
in US military deployment in Iraq. You also in particular mentioned your concern about the terminology of "Jewish cancer" used by Andrew Winkler in the post billed "Imminent USraeli assault on Iran". The fact
that I use many sources to get to the truth is deliberate as many people are focussing on different angles and dimensions- it is true that they often get carried away by a single issue such as secret societies, neocons,
bankers or Zionists as the case with Ziopedia. The fact that I have posted his article does not mean that I fully endorse 100% what he is saying. If you have a problem about the term "Jewish cancer" by all means feel free to write to him at Ziopedia. Andrew Winkler goes on to point the finger at the Jewish cancer.
On that point I wish to state for the record that I disassociate myself from the usage of that term as it can clearly be interpreted as anti-Semitic. Zionism and Judaism are NOT the same thing and are NOT interchangeable.
Furthermore as I have stated in a recent post on this thread to Abandoned ego I do not think that 9/11 and GWOT can be understood exclusively by pointing the finger at Zionists. I think I will NOT be far off the mark when I state that we are up against a Global network of SATANIC deceit and a DEMONIC cabal. Neither do I believe that we are going to be free by marching the TRUTH army up the hill and down again in order to get rid of BU$H and BLIAR.
Keep watching this space or if readers are interested in a more indepth treatment they are welcome to join my own website for the impending cosmic answer and by the way the future is maybe not exactly Orange.

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GEORGE W. BU$H: A SYMPTOM OF DISEASE

Charles Sullivan
01/12/07 "Information Clearing House"

Sometimes you look around and wonder how things could have gone so wrong so quickly. America has become the antithesis of everything she purports to be. We are the greatest purveyors of violence the world has ever known; the largest weapons dealers on earth; and death and misery are our principal exports. Everything is for sale here, even men’s tormented souls—at least, those who still possess them.

Our imperial leader, an impish little man with clear sociopathic symptoms, is incapable of empathy for the struggles of the common people, as those born into wealth and privilege often are. The man with his finger on the nuclear detonator is mentally ill, incapable of remorse—a fact that should terrify every world citizen. I do not say this out of malice or to demean the president; it is simply a statement of fact based upon quantifiable evidence that any student of psychology would easily recognize.

The fact that such a misfit could ascend to the presidency is testimony to the effectiveness of the capital system. Under capitalism, political power is not derived from the people, as would be the case in a democracy; nor does it not flow from the bottom up—it matriculates from the top down. It is really quite simple: The men and women who are in office were put there by people with immense wealth to represent the interests of the wealthy, to make money for them. And that is exactly what they are doing.

In many ways, George W. Bush is the perfect man for the job, if one understands what his real work entails as an emissary of the ruling class. He possesses all of the qualifications the vocation requires: callousness and indifference to the needs of others, the absence of conscience, truncated mental capacity; the inability to reason and to analyze; the incapacity to admit wrong doing; a penchant for cruelty that includes the enjoyment of inflicting pain and torture on others, as well as a powerful sense of nobility and entitlement that stems from being born into wealth and privilege. He is also a pathological liar.

From the president’s sickly perspective, the admission of failure is equivalent to a declaration of weakness and indecision, which explains his inability to change course, even if it means the destruction of America. Thus he has no guilt about sending thousands more men and women to kill and die in Iraq. You see, the president’s mind is defective. It does not work like the minds of normal human beings.

Corporate America placed George W. Bush in the White House to wage endless war; to bankrupt the federal treasury to the extent that few social programs will survive, and virtually all of our tax dollars will go into supporting the military industrial complex. The people who put him in office intend to end public ownership of the commons, as well as all government programs that do not directly benefit the wealthy.

Let me clarify what this entails. If Bush and his handlers prevail in the class struggle, all social programs of value to the middle class and the poor, including Social Security, will be privatized and run for profit. The National Parks, National Forests, and all public lands will be privatized, and divvied up to private vendors such as the Disney Corporation. The public school system, like the public airwaves, will become for profit entities to serve corporate interests. Educating our children will be of secondary importance to the profitability of the corporations managing the schools. Every public service will be transferred to the private sector in order provide more wealth to corporate America at public expense.

We see the foundations of privatization being laid in Iraq by the war profiteers. Billions of dollars in stolen wealth are being hauled out of Iraq by the very same corporations that lobbied for war. War is money and in America money is power to control the political process. It is a vicious cycle that will not end until the people recognize it for what it is and rise up against it.

Certainly no man of conscience or integrity could so easily betray the people of America he is sworn to serve. That is why George W. Bush is the right man for the job and he is abetted by a compliant Congress acting under the influence of corporate lobbyists. But the president and his accomplices in Congress are only symptoms of a more pervasive disease that deeply afflicts our political system—capitalism. Class war is being waged simultaneously on many fronts and the dough keeps rolling in.

Sources:

Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, Justin Frank, Harper Collins, 2004

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CULTURE OF WAR : SOURCE OF HUMAN SUFFERING AND DEATH

Charles Mercieca, Ph.D.
12/13/07 "Information Clearing House"

The New Webster Dictionary of the English Language describes culture as education, improvement by mental or physical training, the way of life of a people. The same dictionary describes war as hostility, a contest between nations or within the same nation, a state of violent opposition. And peace is described as tranquility, freedom from war, cessation to hostilities. Whereas peace is characterized by love and respect, war is characterized by hatred and revenge. Whereas peace leads to healing and life, war leads to human suffering and death.

History Dominated by War

During the last 6,000 years of recorded history we discover wars were the dominant focus of almost every historian. Peace seems to have taken always a marginal place. With few exceptions, every war has been waged by the leaders of the various involved nations or by the leaders of the various political factions within the same nation in the case of a civil war. People in general tended always to focus on the welfare of their children and their entire families that included relatives and friends. If there is one thing they never wanted was war.

This explains why former US President Eisenhower, in his farewell address to Congress uttered the famous words: Remember that all people of all nations want peace, only their government wants war. Since World War II ended in 1945 and the United Nations was established, there have been several wars across every continent. They were mostly instigated by governments or by the leaders of various political factions within the same country. No wonder why so many governmental leaders have been referred as criminals.

The waging of wars has evolved into a culture that forces the human mind to resort to violence when things do not go as desired. As stated earlier, culture is viewed as education, derived from two Latin words: e+duco – out of+lead. Hence, in education we have a process where we hopefully lead people from ignorance into knowledge, from confusion into clarity of mind. But in education we may also lead people the other way round. It depends on the educators themselves.

Those that were born and raised in the culture of war tend to look for the solution of every problem they encounter with the waging of wars, regardless of the tens of thousands of innocent people that may be killed in the process. By way of contrast, those that adhere to the culture of peace tend to look for the solution of every problem they encounter in the promotion of peace through the development of healthy and constructive dialogues. In the sphere of politics this amounts to sound diplomacy.

Assessment of Political Leaders

Consequently, we are in a position to judge fairly accurately the head of states and eventually the government of every single nation without exception. We may figure out who are those that are imbued in the culture of war versus those that are determined to promote the culture of peace. Since the year 2002, the eyes of the world were focused mostly on the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, this war did not start with a civil war, as it turned out to be today. It started with the United States’ invasion of Iraq. As the entire world has realized, the reasons given for the US instigation of such a war were all proven to be false.

Besides, the United Nations and respected personalities of the caliber of Pope John Paul II and Nelson Mandela condemned this US invasion as illegal and immoral. Shortly after the war started, the entire world did not hesitate to view this American invasion of Iraq as abusive and even criminal. More than 3,000 young Americans lost their lives and a few thousands more were maimed, not to mention those that committed suicide. More than 600,000 innocent Iraqis were brutally massacred while the infrastructure of their cities was destroyed.

If the US President was not born and raised in a culture of war, he would have never dreamt in a million years to invade a nation that posed no threat whatsoever to the United States. If he were born and raised in a culture of peace he would have resorted to a healthy, positive and constructive diplomacy. The tens of thousands of innocent people that were massacred would have still been here with us enjoying life with their beloved ones. Over the past 6,000 years of recorded history, the culture of peace has proven the truthfulness and wisdom of the traditional saying: One catches more flies with honey.

The culture of war is built purely on violence which tends to instigate and promote more violence. The military personnel were never trained to perform humanitarian work. On the contrary, those in the military have been trained to fight and kill anyone they come across, as US soldiers in Iraq confessed to their relatives in their letters. The military is the only organization in the world that can do what it likes without being held accountable.

By its very nature, the military is a negative and destructive force in spite of the nice and elegant uniforms it provides. It is brutal and inhuman when put into action. Surprisingly, the military is held accountable to no one for the enormous suffering it inflicts on people many of whom are sent to the grave so prematurely. To the amazement of every sensible and intelligent person, once the soldiers return from the battle ground after having destroyed a number of cities and killed mercilessly so many innocent people, they are received as heroes.

Perspective of War and Peace

The responsible government leaders that sent them to war would then congratulate returning soldiers for “having served their country so well!” Those that were born and raised in the culture of war like the current US President cannot comprehend that what goes around comes around. They cannot understand what the Master Teacher of Nazareth said: What you do to others it will be done to you afterwards. They reject categorically what the same Master Teacher of Nazareth said that he who kills by the sword will die by the sword.

We learn from history that the most powerful people on earth that exerted great influence and contributed toward a better and more stable world were all an integral part of the culture of peace. This consists of a philosophy that advocates positive and constructive approaches to every problem we encounter. The leaders of every religion managed to get millions of followers because they showed love and respect for everyone. As St. Augustine said, once you carry love in your heart you are equipped with the most powerful tool to literally conquer the world.

We may begin to realize with clarity why the United States, as long as it is guided by a belligerent President and war-minded government officials, can never serve as an instrument to bring about peace into the world. Instead of conducting a program of international disarmament and arms control, a program that would lead to the abolition of all nuclear weapons and landmines, the United States chose to embark on a program of world-wide rearmament that would retain nuclear weapons.

The current US War President is endangering our earthly community by trying to put many warheads orbiting in space over our heads. The Iraqi War is heading toward becoming another Vietnam War where the Americans would eventually leave after having had thousands of their young men and women massacred and after having inflicted tremendous crucial suffering and death on millions of Iraqis. However, all of this nightmare could change overnight if the USA were to have as its next President one who is well versed in the culture of peace of the caliber of Dennis Kucinich who is one of the presidential candidates.

Charles Mercieca, Ph.D. - President International Association of Educators for World Peace. Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education, Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament. Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University

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A TIME TO BREAK SILENCE BY THE GLOBAL TRUTH MOVEMENT



Speaking Truth To Power A Time to Break Silence

Rev. Martin Luther King
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm


By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

Audio mp3 of Address



Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:


O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:


End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War
Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.

[moeen yaseen]

WILL ANGLO-DUTCH USE STERLING TO BRING DOWN DOLLAR SYSTEMS?

Mary Burdman
http://www.larouchepac.com/pages/otherartic_files/2007/0117_pound_ster ling.shtml


The most remarkable fact about the following report on the menace to the United States from circles in the City of London, is that the U.S. government appears to be completely ignorant of such an immediate and massive present, potentially devastating strategic threat to the United States, from European Anglo-Dutch Liberal circles tied to U.S. President George W. Bush's closest European crony, the United Kingdom's Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Notably, this immediate strategic threat to the U.S.A., will not be surprising to anyone who has paid close attention to Lyndon LaRouche's warnings, this past Jan. 11 (see Feature in this issue), about the continuing threat from our republic's most ancient enemy, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal circles whose ancestors brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, and against which we fought our War of Independence, the War of 1812, and London's puppet known as the Confederate States of America.
On Jan. 5, EIR received a very interesting piece of intelligence from a senior City of London financial analyst. Asked about the risks posed by the ever-expanding real-estate bubble in the United Kingdom, the analyst responded that the housing bubble is not that important. The real financial issue, he said, is the potential that the pound sterling will fall sharply. Sterling is now, at about $1.95, at its highest rate against the U.S. dollar since the "Black Wednesday" crisis of Sept. 16, 1992.
"This assessment is correct; this is the issue," responded LaRouche immediately. This is a strategic matter, LaRouche said. What must be understood, is that a collapse of the pound would actually be used to create the conditions to pull down the dollar and the world financial system with it. Critical is the danger that the Anglo-Dutch financiers behind this operation, would try to do it now, in the coming few months, before the new Democratic Party-led Congress can really take charge of the U.S. government and U.S. policy.
One other critical aspect of this situation—one that Washington has to grasp—is that the Chinese government is continuing to support the dollar to prevent such a crash, knowing full well that a collapse of the dollar will bring down their economy.
British Imperial Finance
Using the pound against the dollar has been done before in history, most notably by the government of Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1967. Wilson's policies, taken from the ultra-liberal, actually fascist Fabian Society, destroyed the British economy. The resulting devaluation of the pound strained the already stretched post-war Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system, and brought on a crisis of the U.S. dollar, the world's reserve currency. By 1968, the process of devaluing the dollar was under way; this led directly to President Richard Nixon de-coupling the dollar from the gold reserve, in August 1971, and, a year later, to Treasury Secretary George Shultz's conference which took the world into the current floating-exchange-rate debacle. At the same time, the U.S. was discrediting itself politically, by pursing the disastrous war in Indo-China.
The parallels to the current situation are all too clear. While the Cheney-Bush regime is discrediting the United States internationally at a level never seen before, especially with their insane war policy in Southwest Asia, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financiers—the current generation of the British Empire—are threatening to bring down the dollar, at a time, LaRouche emphasized, when the dollar is "highly vulnerable." The whole world monetary system is based on the dollar; there is no alternative for international reserve calculations. If the dollar is brought down, say, to 80% of its current level, the whole world monetary system will go into a breakdown crisis. That is just what those pushing this pound operation are trying to do. If the largest single currency in terms of reserve potential—sterling and associated currencies in the British Commonwealth (Empire)—are taken down, this will set off a chain reaction which will crash the dollar and plunge the world financial system into collapse.
LaRouche pointed to the current fall of oil prices. To get together the liquidity needed to cover their own positions when they dump the pound, Anglo-Dutch financial interests are likely selling some oil contracts, affecting the price.
Vulnerable Sterling
The City of London analyst said that central banks outside Britain have been accumulating sterling as an alternative to dollars, but if the dollar continues to fall, they could dump their sterling to buy up cheap dollars. Sterling itself is vulnerable, since it has been sold to other central banks at the rate of some $5 billion per quarter for the last couple of years; Britain's net foreign and gold reserves are only about $20 billion. After almost ten years of Labour Party rule, Britain is also the most-indebted nation in the European Community, weighted down with a total personal debt of 1.27 trillion pounds in mortgages and unsecured loans; whatever industry was left standing by Margaret Thatcher, is now gone.
Over the course of the past two years, central banks have been buying sterling, leading financial commentators in London's conservative Daily Telegraph to exuberantly claim that "Britannia rules currency waves at the dollar's expense" and that "sterling is once again the queen of global currencies," as Damian Reece wrote on Dec. 1, 2006.
A series of articles in the Daily Telegraph from August-December 2006, based on reports from the Bank for International Settlements, reveal that "sterling accounts for a staggering 12% of foreign bank deposits [are] held by the world's governments," as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote on Nov. 9, 2006. The BIS quarterly report noted that the "share of sterling doubled between 1995 and 2006, from 5% of deposits to almost 12%." But the Swiss franc has "fallen out of favour," from 6% of deposits in 1980 to just 1% now, while the yen share has collapsed, because of the zero-interest-rate policy, the BIS reported.
The International Monetary Fund has reported that the British pound had overtaken the yen to become the world's third-biggest reserve currency, after the dollar and the euro. Known global reserves of the pound sterling have risen from 55 billion to 111.5 billion over two years.
Key players in this operation have been the Banca d'Italia, the Persian Gulf state oil-exporters, and some Asian central banks. Evans-Pritchard reported that there are more deposits held in the pound sterling than in the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen, Australian and Canadian dollars, and the Scandinavian currencies combined.
Already in 2004, the Swiss central bank had shifted 10% of its reserves to sterling, and in 2005, the Banca d'Italia changed a full 20% of its reserves from dollars into sterling bonds. Russia has also been buying sterling, the Telegraph reported. An official said the Italian central bank was making this move in advance of a dollar slide, adding: "There are not many places to go once you decide to get out of the dollar. Japan is always a question mark. At least the British economy is humming along okay and UK bonds offer a decent yield [4.63%]. At the end of the day, Britain is still the biggest single trading partner for the eurozone." The Banca d'Italia closely coordinates policy with the European Central Bank, the German Bundesbank, and the Banque de France, and it is possible that other eurozone banks were also selling dollars, although most of the rest do not reveal the exact breakdown of their foreign currency holdings.
The Uncertain Note
But then came the uncertain note. In mid-December, analysts of both Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs put out warnings that sterling could fall in 2007. Goldman Sachs has told some investors to take out a "short" position against the pound on derivatves markets: A client note stated that the "UK remains the largest current account deficit country in Western Europe, with a substantially overvalued currency—about 13% on a trade-weighted basis." Lehman Brothers' U.K. economist Alan Castle is saying that the pound would fall to $1.82 in 2007 and to $1.68 by the end of 2008, amidst concerns about the property market and Britain's current account deficit, which could "could widen to 4% of GDP in 2008."
While central bankers had been making sterling "a favourite choice for global central banks switching reserves out of dollars over the last two years," now, the British Office for National Statistics shows, private investors are the main foreign sterling buyers.

[moeen yaseen]

HEADS UP : U.S. WAR PLANS Vs IRAN UPDATED

Jeffery Steinberg
http://www.larouchepac.com/pages/press_releases_files/2007/0116_iran_w ar_plans.shtml


The following information has been provided by several Washington and Middle East sources, and should be assessed in light of President Bush's speech of Jan. 10.

First, a Pentagon public affairs officer has confirmed that the U.S.S. Stennis carrier group is headed towards the Persian Gulf and will arrive some time in mid-February, to supplement the U.S.S. Eisenhower carrier group already in the region (the Eisenhower group is temporarily off the coast of the Horn of Africa). At that point, the assets will have been put in place for a two-track provocation against Iran, intended to provide a justification for a U.S. or Anglo-American "retaliatory" strike against Iranian targets, including alleged secret nuclear weapons sites, according to one source.

The first track of provocations has already been initiated with the U.S. military action against Iranian officials visiting the Kurdish region of Iraq last week, and with bombings inside Iran that occurred around the same time. The second track, according to a Middle East source, will be initiated any time after the full U.S. Naval force has arrived in the Persian Gulf. Expect a U.S. Naval incursion into Iranian coastal waters, aimed at provoking an Iranian military action. This will be the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident (provoked, or, as in the original Gulf of Tonkin affair, fabricated) to justify an American military strike against Iran.
The sources emphasized that Vice President Cheney, in particular, is committed to a war with Iran, and, perhaps with Syria, before he leaves office.

Several Washington sources added further details. They noted that, beginning prior to Bush's Jan. 10, 2007 speech, unveiling the Administration`s "surge" plan, the Administration had shifted its propaganda line. White House claims about Iran's quest for nuclear weapons were deemed ineffective, given that the Administration had lied about Iraq's alleged WMD threat. Nobody, the source emphasized, is going to support a war against Iran on the basis of the discredited Bush-Cheney Administration's claims of "proof" that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, about to build a nuclear bomb. The new propaganda campaign will focus on Iran's involvement in arming insurgents inside Iraq with the anti-tank weapons ("improvised explosive devices"--IEDs) that are killing American and British soldiers. With the new rules of engagement under Bush's "surge" policy guaranteed to increase the number of American soldiers killed and wounded, the Administration plans to cynically build up this propaganda front, hoping to force Republicans in the Congress, and even some Democrats, to back its calls for action against Iran to punish it for its continuing role in the anti-American violence in Iraq.

Add to this the factor of the U.S. Naval buildup in the Persian Gulf, the sources warn, and the elements are all there for Cheney's new war.
One source emphasized that the Bush speech of Jan. 10th sent shockwaves through the U.S. establishment. While many details of the Bush "surge" plan had been leaked out and briefings given prior to the speech, the emphasis on Iran and Syria in the President's remarks came as a shock, and prompted many who felt the Administration's war schemes against Iran had been contained, to reassess the situation.

[rodin]

[rodin]

[quote="venceremos"][quote]

I like it. I have been reading the posts on this thread and they are well meant and striving for truth.

The illustration above is almost certainly a communist or socialist perpective of how the masses are opressed. Like they didn't kill 45 million of their own people...

More propaganda I am afraid. The Czar was murdered and his country raped by the same black hand that bankrupted Britain after Waterloo, created the Federal Reserve (with crypto-partners) and financed WW1 & 2.

[rodin]

I wondered how come this thread had grown to 20 pages already. I see latterly it is down to moeen's frequent cut and paste activity.

That said, I don't disagree with moeen's general thrust.

I see that even moeen has difficulty in breaking down the program - the one that tells us that criticism of Jews is antisemitic. What a great third line of defence against uncovering the greatest scam in humanity's living memory! The first line of defence is the right to create money (therefore inflation - basically the stealing of the fruits of your labour - a stealth tax of unfathomable proportions) and the second line of defence is complete control of movies, television, print media and music industry. Next up is coming complete control of what you eat (see Codex Alimentarius) and RFID tagging and DNA database for all.

So they will know EXACTLY where the child is who is a perfect organ donor match....

I have no fear in calling the 5 Israelis whose 'purpose was to document the event' Jews. I have no qualm about calling Larry Silverstein Jewish. Or Dov Zakheim. Or Michael Chertoff. Or the 200 'Israeli Spies' caught around the time of 911 (how many were not caught?). One thing I do have a problem with though is being called anti semitic.

Semitic Jews are in the vast minority. It is primarily Eastern European Ashekanzi Jews who run the following

media, porn, ecstasy (the CIA seems to have the opium franchise), money supply, wars, business, gold, silver, diamonds and oil

I mean, you all believe in the Mafia - 'the family'. This is because you are allowed to read and see films about it. But the Mafiya is never the subject of Hollywood despite being a much bigger and more 'now' operation, reverberations of which penetrate the globe, its tendrils reacing into English and even Scottish football. Nothing is not in their sights.

Israeli-Russian Mafiya is just one manifestation of a much bigger and even more ruthless 'family', one our corrupted governments and kings have put us in thrall to. I suspect they are the doormen for the G-dfathers, the Rothschilds. Zion's bankers. This 'family' would appear to be at the top of the geonimic food chain. They own 80% of Uranium mines, G-d knows what % of the gold (a small fraction of which our beloved chancellor sold to them @ knock-down price). One estimate put their real wealth at 55% of the WORLD - whatever that means. I guess when you include the national debts of all centrally-banked countries multiplied by compound interest it soon adds up.

We, the 'goy' may not be able to escape the terrible end they have planned for us, but we might at least know who our nemesis is.

Then again we could stand and fight...

[Justin]

A good post IMHO Rodin, but don't rule out the supernatural or, as I would rather call it, the coming together of Quantum Physics and the Ancient Wisdom of the Indigenous Peoples - ie the hidden and fogotten knowledge of all of us.

Religions, as I've said before - all of them including Christianity, Islam and Judaism - have been imposed upon us by the elite or illuminati. Yes, the basic message is beautiful and inspiring but the poison is just beneath the surface.

Have a look at this which I read today for the first time - how many good Catholics kneeling today know what is being done in their name. Take the time to read this - it really is appalling and this oath is still in use today. I have highlighted the very worst but please read it all.

http://www.thenazareneway.com/society_of_jesus_jesuits.htm


The Jesuit Order
The Society of Jesus (Jesuits)

The complete Oath of Extreme Induction


Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Library of Congress Catalog Card #66-43354, made public in 1883. This oath is still in effect, and is still
used today.


---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

The Jesuit order, otherwise known as the Society of Jesus (S.J.), has been the military enforcement arm of the Catholic Church since it was first founded by Ignatius of Loyola of Spain in 1534 during the reign of Pope Paul III, ostensibly to combat Protestant heresy. And while many feel that the Jesuits are only a sub-order of the Roman Catholic Church and are merely seekers and disseminators of knowledge, they have a much darker history that many people do not know about.

And while much can be said of the Jesuit Order, and much has been written, the oath speaks not only for itself, but speaks much of the Roman Catholic Church that has used and still uses the Jesuits for it's purposes while knowing full well the contents of the oath they bind themselves under. The Roman Catholic Church, while professing to holiness and claiming that there is no salvation outside of the Church, still harbors the Jesuit Order and commands them explicitly.

Below is the complete Oath of Extreme Induction taken by each Jesuit Priest upon his induction into the command ranks of the Jesuit Order, found in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Library of Congress Catalog Card # 66-43354, made public in 1883. This oath is still in effect, and is still used today.

On an interesting note, we often see the letters INRI on crosses and crucifixes, and are told that it represents the Latin words "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeum" or "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews", the Latin words that Pilate had written on a placard and nailed above Jesus' head at the crucifixion. However, as you will see below, the Jesuits use a far different set of words with the same letters. This invites the question, "Which is the real meaning of the 'I.N.R.I.' that we see displayed today?"


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INDUCTION AND EXTREME OATH OF THE JESUITS

When a Jesuit novice is about to be inducted into the higher levels of the Order, he kneels on a red cross before the Superior of the Order. Before him are two flags, the familiar yellow and white flag of the papacy, and the black flag with a dagger and red cross above a skull and crossbones, the flag of the Jesuit Order. On the Jesuit flag is written the words, IUSTUM, NECAR, REGES, IMPIOS. (It is just to exterminate or annihilate impious or heretical kings, governments, or rulers.) The Superior of the Order hands the novice a small black crucifix which he presses to his heart, and the Superior then presents to the novice a dagger. The novice grasps the bare blade and presses the point to his heart. The Superior, still holding the hilt of the dagger then speaks to the novice.

Superior
My son, heretofore you have been taught to act the dissembler: among Roman Catholics to be a Roman Catholic, and to spy even among your own brethren; to believe no man, to trust no man. Among the Reformers, to be a Reformer; among the Huguenots, to be a Huguenot; among the Calvinists, to be a Calvinist; among the Protestants, generally to be a Protestant; and obtaining their confidence to seek even to preach from their pulpits and to denounce with all the vehemence in your nature our Holy Religion and the Pope; and to descend so low as to become a Jew among the Jews, that you might be enabled to gather together all information for your Order as a faithful soldier of the Pope.


You have been taught to insidiously plant the seeds of jealousy and hatred between communities, provinces and states that were at peace, and incite them to deeds of blood, involving them in war with each other, and to create revolutions and civil wars in countries that were independent and prosperous, cultivating the arts and sciences and enjoying the blessings of peace. To take sides with the combatants and to act secretly in concert with your brother Jesuit, who may be engaged on the other side, but openly opposed to that with which you might be connected; only that the Church might be the gainer in the end, in the conditions fixed in the treaties for peace and that the end justifies the means.

You have been taught your duty as a spy, to gather all statistics, facts and information in your power from every source; to ingratiate yourself into the confidence of the family circle of Protestants and heretics of every class and character, as well as that of the merchant, the banker, the lawyer, among the schools and universities, in parliaments and legislatures, and in the judiciaries councils of state, and to "be all things to all men," for the Pope's sake, whose servants we are unto death.

You have received all your instructions heretofore as a novice, a neophyte, and have served as a coadjutor, confessor and priest, but you have not been invested with all that is necessary to command in the Army of Loyola in the service of the Pope. You must serve the proper time as the instrument and executioner as directed by your superiors; for none can command here who has not consecrated his labors with the blood of the heretic; for "without the shedding of blood no man can be saved." Therefore, to fit yourself for your work, and make your own salvation sure, you will, in addition to your former oath of obedience to your Order and your allegiance to the Pope, repeat after me.

I, M---------- N----------, Now, in the presence of Almighty God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the blessed Michael the Archangel, the blessed St. John the Baptist, the holy Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul and all the saints and the sacred hosts of heaven, and to you, my ghostly father, the Superior general of the Society of Jesus, founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Pontificate of Paul the Third, and continued to the present, do by the womb of the Virgin, the matrix of God, and the rod of Jesus Christ, declare and swear, that his holiness the Pope is Christ's Viceregent and is the true and only Head of the Catholic or Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by virtue of the keys of binding and loosing, given to his Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical kings, princes, states, commonwealths and governments, all being illegal without his sacred confirmation and that they may safely be destroyed.

Therefore, to the utmost of my power, I shall and will defend this doctrine and his Holiness' right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority, and all adherents in the regard that they be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome.

I do now renounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or state named Protestants or Liberals or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers. I do further declare that the doctrines of the churches of England and Scotland, of the Calvinists, Huguenots and others of the name Protestants or Liberals to be damnable, and they themselves damned and to be damned who will not forsake the same.

I do further declare that I will help, assist and advise all or any of his
Holiness' agents in any place wherever I shall be, in any other kingdom or territory I shall come to, and do my uttermost to extirpate the heretical Protestants or Liberals' doctrines and to destroy all their
pretended powers, regal or otherwise.

I do further promise and declare, that notwithstanding I am dispensed with, to assume any religion heretical, for the propagating of the Mother Church's interest, to keep secret and private all her agents counsels' from time to time, as they may entrust me, and not to divulge, directly or indirectly, by word, writing or circumstance whatever; but to execute all that shall be proposed, given in charge or discovered unto me, by you, my ghostly father, or any of this sacred convent.

I do further promise and declare, that I will have no opinion or will of my own, or any mental reservation whatever, even as a corpse or cadaver, (perinde ac cadaver,) but will unhesitatingly obey each and every command that I may receive from my superiors in the Militia of the Pope and Jesus Christ. That I will go to any part of the world whithersoever I may be sent, without murmuring or repining, and
will be submissive in all things commanded to me.

I furthermore promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed to do, to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, nor sex or condition; and that I will hang, burn, waste, spoil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants' heads against the walls, in order to annihilate forever their execrable race.

That when the same cannot be done openly, I will secretly use the poisoned cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poinard or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity, or authority of the person or persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed to do so by any agent of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Faith, of the Society of Jesus.

In confirmation of which, I hereby dedicate my life, soul, and all of my
coporeal powers, and with this dagger which I now receive, I will subscribe my name written in my own blood, in testimony thereof; and should I prove false or weaken in my determination, may my brethren and fellow soldiers of the Militia of the Pope cut off my hands and feet, and my throat from ear to ear, my belly opened and sulphur burned therein, with all the punishment that can be inflicted upon me on earth, and my soul to be tortured by demons in an eternal hell forever.

All of which I, M------ N------, do swear by the blessed Trinity and blessed Sacrament, which I am about to receive, to perform and on my part to receive inviolably; and do call all of the heavenly and glorious host of heaven to witness these my real intentions to keep this my oath.

In testimony hereof I take this most holy and blessed sacrament of the
Eucharist, and witness the same further, with my name written with the point of this dagger dipped in my own blood and sealed in the face of this holy convent.

Superior
You will now rise to your feet and I will instruct you in the Catechism
necessary to make yourself known to any member of the Society of Jesus belonging to this rank.

In the first place, you, as a Brother Jesuit, will with another make the
ordinary sign of the cross as any Roman Catholic would; then one crosses his wrists, the palms of his hands open, the other crosses his feet, one above the other; the first points with forefinger of the right hand to the center of the palm of the left, the other with the forefinger of the left hand points to the center of the palm of the right; the first then with his right hand makes a circle around his head, touching it; the other then with the forefinger of his left hand touches the left side of his body just below his heart; then the first with his right hand draws it across the throat of the other, and the latter then with his right hand makes the motion of cutting with a dagger down the stomach and abdomen of the first.

The first then says Iustum; the other answers Necar; the first then says Reges. The other answers Impios. The first will then present a small piece of paper folded in a peculiar manner, four times, which the other will cut longitudinally and on opening the name JESU will be found written upon the head and arms of a cross three times. You will then give and receive with him the following questions and answers.

Q: From where do you come?
A: From the bends of the Jordan, from Calvary, from the Holy Sepulchre, and lastly from Rome.

Q: Whom do you serve?
A: The Holy Father at Rome, the Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church Universal throughout the world.

Q: Who commands you?
A: The successor of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus or the Soldiers of Jesus Christ.

Q: Who received you?
A: A venerable man with white hair.

Q: How?
A: With a naked dagger, I kneeling on a cross beneath the banners of the Pope and of our sacred Order.

Q: Did you take an oath?
A: I did, to destroy heretics and their governments and rulers, and to spare neither age, sex or condition. To be as a corpse without any opinion or will of my own, but to implicitly obey my superiors in all things without hesitation or murmuring.

Q: Will you do that?
A: I will.

Q: How do you travel?
A: In the bark of Peter the fisherman.

Q: Whither do you travel?
A: To the four quarters of the globe.

Q: For what purpose?
A: To obey the orders of my General and Superiors and execute the will of the Pope and faithfully fulfill the conditions of my oath.

Go ye, then, into all the world and take possession of all lands in the name of the Pope. He who will not accept him as the Vicar of Jesus and his Viceregent on earth, let him be accursed and exterminated.


---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

[Keith Mothersson]

Strong stuff: I will file it under FRAT Control, and , so saying, share in this post the sense I make of how I frame and think about the good (wholesome) sides and the 'bad' (unskilful/harmful) sides of 'religion'.

My FRAT control folder has all sorts of other stuff about Skill and Bones, Freemasons, etc - all the absurd and deadly theatre which 'produces' once loyal and tender sons as 'Real Men' owing loyalty no longer to their Motherland (Mother, all loving relatives, their neighbours, their neighbour's neighbours, etc .... all around the world) but now to a different and dualistic 'reality principle' of scarcity, dictated by the big boys, who first bullied us, e.g. for not repudiating our sisters at break-time (not enough respect, not enough love, can't breathe easy, feeling tense, go and push her to mark myself off as different from her, maybe then the big boys will like me and I can feel safe.) Deep unconscious patterns, enshrined in tight breathing bodies, which lay the foundation for 'hegemonic masculinities'/'Real' 'men' and from which Empires, Parties and Churches develop.

Justin, I readily concede that your example proves that along with good teachings religions have extra layers of power stuff which attach to them, for their utility to the Rulers, and also simultaneously as an expression of the bit in all of us which, rather than working things out together with each other as a congregation, sangha, community of equals, settles for easy answers handed down from Above, who must be deemed Always Right, and who always has an itch to provoke Dramas of obedience and expansionism so we have to prove and reprove our acceptability to the Leader, e.g. by being willing to enter the lists against rival frats or even pick on peaceful 'motherlands' of peaceful community life - [which include all the Mother's children of all ages, sons as well as daughters, so nothing sexist about this formulation really].

One common way of putting this is to say we respect or experience or see the value of 'spirituality' but that we oppose religions' as nothing but control mechanisms (or even as 'the cause of all the trouble in the world' - another pint, mate?). I think that way of putting things isn't quite right and can be positively dangerous if accompanied by gratuitous insulting ridicule certain prominent conspiracy analysts sometimes indulge in - however well that plays among anti-religious fundamentalists (who maybe did some drugs a few years back so they are 'in favour' of spirituality), but can be very aggressive too, not just religious ones!

I feel that 'spirituality' and 'holiness' are at once natural properties of the world, life, nature, true community. And that they are socially encouraged or discouraged 'products', which can be driven under in the cauterising coarseness and anomie of Free-Market Frat-land, e.g. the poor lost souls in Big Brother who are set in a context of only one winner, and play games to make themselves more acceptable based on the notion that 'authenticity' and 'intimacy', largely reduce to physical sexuality, 'fancying' each other, etc.

What I am saying is that neither individual persons nor 'spirituality' can flourish in a social void. Therefore it is a mistake to say that every social norm, traditional ritual, myth, symbol, story, given practice, form, rule even, must necessarily be contested as 'patriarchal', 'imposed', 'arbitrary', 'indoctrination', etc and a 'restraint' on true human development, true freedom - e.g. a creation myth, a moment of prayer before eating at the table together, the key ethical precepts we can never break 'free' from (only unfree, enslaving ourselves to the karma and associates that killing, stealing, lying, practicing contempt, etc come bundled with, including shadowy frats who will snoop out and build on the vulnerability that breaking the matri-rules inherently incurs. Good social forms can be inculcated by example in homes and communities, it is wrong to see them as necessarily control mechanisms, even if they have a religious idiom, and even if linked to or promoted by nominally 'patriarchal' religions - because there can still be good energy being channelled, which will stand people in good stead to resist the 'haram' world of the Men's gangs, Frat-land ideologies. (Like G-d, Allah is without gender, so is Buddha nature/Emptiness, etc.)

By all means let us critique the social forms of 'religion' when they are Patri-/Fratri-athoritarian, based on notions of inherent sinfulness, moulding the bad child, etc - but where they provide a nurturing context for growth of persons and of 'spirituality' then let us try to encourage such faiths as bulwarks aginst the false-values conditioning of Mammon and Deceit, bulwarks which need to link up with each other to rescue the earth from the Empire of Brotherhoods of Hate, Secrecy and Deception.

(I should add that all true kindness, art and culture, even seemingly secular expressions, also help to vitalise Gaia and grow the mothersphere of Spirit, the 'Motherland'/Ummah of true faith. And conversely, even seemingly purely secular nonsense like the Primacy of the Market easily takes on a (fratri-)religious fanaticism (Fanum = temple in Latin) as nature abhors a vaccum and if we can't find wholesome expressions for all we care about most deeply, then unwholesome pseudo-'spiritual' energies creep in.)

In the end it isn't what creeds we claim to support or oppose that matters, but whether we are on a practical path - at once irreducibly individual and necessarily cultural/social - of opening our hearts to and with others. So rather than writing off all religious people or all atheists we all need a spirit of discernment to work with/learn from the best and avoid or if necessary restrain the less good, the stuck, the arrogant, the oppressive in all faiths and ideologies, including the non-faiths or anti-ideologies!

[rodin]

Aleister Crowley - 'Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law'

Scull n Bones - 'Cremation of care'

Catholics 'Confession - absolution'

F***ing get out of jail cards everywhere ya look....

[Keith Mothersson]

Hi Rodin,
This is a reply to your longer previous post, suggesting that for fear of being called anti-semitic we were too ready to shy off from drawing attention to ..... what? the Jewish ethnicity and/or Zionist politics of certain topmost power players, such as top banking families. So this is an attempt to both reply to and rise to your challenge but also challenge you if you are obsessive about focussing on Jewish PTB.

Of course I can't know what is in your heart concerning individual Jews. All I can go by is individual remarks, metapahors, arguments you offer. e.g.

I worry about your analogy of 'one operation with tendrils', which suggests an octopus, and this I conect in my mind with Nazi catoons. I think that while it is easy to ignore large-scale long-lasting agreements, it is also easy to exaggerate their unity (they often have lots of factions and arguments in play within them and shifting boundaries, unintended consequences due to the actions of other players, etc).

I really worry about where you were going with this bit:

[Bushwacker]

[Keith Mothersson]

Dear Bushwhacker - of course i didn't 'surely know' you blinking .....(words fail me), else I wouldn't have mentioned his work.

That said, i am grateful for the wiki reference which i will check out in due course.

[brian]

A Holocaust Revisionist Critique of the Thinking of Deborah Lipstadt

By Paul Grubach
copyright 2006



Preliminary Note: In the interest of fairness and accuracy, the following essay was emailed to Dr. Deborah Lipstadt prior to its publication on the CODOH web site. She was asked to identify any problems, errors, misinterpretations, falsities, etc. If need be, these would be eliminated or corrected. Paul Grubach and CODOH have no desire whatsoever to publish any false or misleading material. Quite predictably, she never responded.

I. The Importance of Deborah Lipstadt



Extract -

As the late Jean-Claude Pressac (widely considered to be an authority on the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers) has pointed out, in the blueprints, construction documents and work orders that trace the construction and subsequent use of the buildings that allegedly housed the “Auschwitz gas chambers,” there is no explicit reference to the use of gas chambers or Zyklon B for homicidal purposes.16 This was also reluctantly admitted at the Irving-Lipstadt trial in London.17

Notwithstanding the capture of literally tons of German documents after WWII, no documentary evidence of a wartime extermination order, plan or program has ever been found. Hilberg admitted as much during his testimony in the 1985 trial in Toronto of Revisionist activist Ernst Zundel.18 Lipstadt herself confirms there is no written order from Hitler authorizing the destruction of the Jews.19


One of the most important pieces of “evidence” traditionally adduced to “prove” the “Holocaust” is the testimony of Rudolf Höß , a commandant of Auschwitz. Lipstadt and Christopher Browning (a prominent Holocaust historian who was a part of her defense team at the Irving-Lipstadt trial) have admitted that Höß ’s confessions are unreliable, as he had been tortured by the British into confessing to a fantastic and unbelievable number of murders.20

Dr. Lipstadt insists “the existence of the Holocaust [is] not a matter of debate.”21 But as we have just pointed out, negating this viewpoint is the fact that all the necessary photographic, documentary, and scientific evidence needed to prove Lipstadt’s version of the Holocaust is missing.

Lipstadt adds this most revealing caveat to her claim that Holocaust revisionism is as absurd as flat earth theory: “However, in dramatic contrast to flat-earthers, they [Holocaust revisionists] can cause tremendous pain and damage.”22 This may be interpreted as an implicit admission that Holocaust revisionism has much more credibility that she cares to publicly admit. If Holocaust revisionism is inherently ridiculous and absurd, the equivalent of flat-earth theory, how could a public airing of it possibly cause “tremendous pain and damage?” A public airing of a belief system that is inherently stupid and foolish would be a golden opportunity for Lipstadt and her colleagues to expose its absurdity and subject its proponents to public humiliation, and ultimately, relegate the Revisionist movement to the dustbin of history. -

Full article -http://www.codoh.com/viewpoints/vppgdeblip.html

[rodin]

Lockerbie happened in my backyard - well sort of. I felt sick at the news.

The ground wasn't cold but the first jokes were doing the rounds.

'What were the pilot's last words?'

'Anybody want anything from the garage?'

We should be able to be as irreverential about the Holocaust. The protection racket being built up around this power-accumulator and cash-cow beggars belief.

Today US drafts Holocaust legislation & presents same to UN to be implemented in all countries.

Look - who controls all the press and television and entertainment industry? Is it the Blacks? The Catholics? Little green men from inside avocados? Is it a melting pot of all colours and creeds?

Or is it one group who have gained control of the levers of power?

The Rothschild percentages for wealth may be hearsay. I picked it up from decent people @ GIM & elsewhere. But there definitely is a control mechanism gripping this planet, based on debt, corruption, and lies. It really is all the same guys at the top of everything.

[Keith Mothersson]

Hi Rodin,
'Having the right' (abstractly) to be as irreverent as you like is one thing. It is another thing whether I and others will want to be linked on the same website as 'joking' remarks subtly referring to the Anti-Jewish bloodlibels of a thousand years of Christendom - which used to lead to horrible pogroms every easter, etc.

It is fair enough for people to say that perpetrator-guilt shouldn't be attributed down the centuries. For example some feminists - I did it too! - used to disseminate a wildly exaggerated 'six million witches burnt at the stake' Myth [cf 90,000] as a way of gaining the upper hand morally, rather than holding individual 'men' (sons) responsible for harmful things we may have done, or privileges being still held onto.

But nevertheless it isn't fair to say that descendants of victims and survivors of past atrocities should miraculously be able to overcome all the ways by which such atrocities might ramify down through history, as fears, sensitivities, constrictions, trans-generational PTSD one could say.

From this observation I am certainly NOT going to say that therefore the survivors and descendants of the Nazi persecutions should be entitled to dispossess the Palestinians, defy international law, etc. But I do say that out of compassion and a sense of our own self-interest (having an inclusive movement of all the talents from all the communities) we go very wrong if we allow such callow hurtful jeering to go unchecked on our website. For this reason, I hope the moderators will red card that particular passage in your previous post as an example of anti-semitism which our site repudiates.

If you wish to call me an 'authoritarian' so be it. What is 'liberatory' about joking about Jews cannibalising Christian children? How do such jokes help anyone? - least of all the Palestinians.

[rodin]

Keith.

What do you think of:

Benjamin Freedman

The Protocols Of (the elders of) Zion

The Talmud

The Rothschilds

The flag of Israel

The idea that Jews are the chosen race

The idea that the Goyim are cattle

God

The Holocaust

Here's what my internet research suggests

Benjamin Freedman - an insider who told it like it is

The Protocols Of (the elders of) Zion - supposedly a 'forgery' but offering a remarkably accurate picture of what actually has transpired since written

The Talmud - can't read Hebrew. Does it really condone pedophilia?

The Rothschilds - obviously kingmakers extraordinaire. Have a hand in writing history since Mayer changed his name

The flag of Israel - Rothschild star flanked by Nile & Euphrates

The idea that Jews are the chosen race - a given

The idea that the Goyim are cattle - is Goyim not Hebrew for Cattle?

God - or G-d. I am agnostic. Do Jews believe in an all-seeing divine God?

Holocaust - I am disturbed by the fact that researching the history of the Holocaust is taboo. It also seems that the Holocaust served a nefarious purpose by fulfilling a prophecy. As far as I am concerned prophecy is bunkum.

I am open to intelligent and civil debate on these matters.

dB

oh..

GIM is www.goldismoney.info

I got into all this rying to make sense of an illogical world

[Keith Mothersson]

Rodin, I can't keep up!

I accept that you are tring to make sense of things, but even so I would like you to reassure me (and perhaps others listening in) by accepting that using language which appears to indicate hostility to Jewish people across the board is a) wrong, and b) liable to alienate potential alalies, and c) liable to bring repression on us and discredit 911 activism.

That said , the rest of this post refers back to my initial long one in reply to you, where I think I went quite badly wrong, relying too much on a friend's research which he had been showing me, without checking it out myself.

Bushwhacker:
thanks for pointing me to Wikipedia on the Leuchter Report, etc. I should have checked it there myself - not that it is infallible, but it is often a good starting point.

Having done so I realised that the chemist Germar Rudolf seemed to be the currently strongest (best) advocate of the 'physical impossibility of the gas chambers' line.
http://vho.org/GB/Books/trr/index.html#toc

However he has since softened his stance, arguing that "chemistry is not the science which can prove or refute any allegations about the Holocaust 'rigorously' "

Rudolf's now seems to be clearly outgunned by the following article:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/not-the-science/ While there is a lot of politics I disagree with on this site, it is clearly a serious site which deserves study.

Accordingly I withdraw unreservedly my mention of the Leuchter report and apologise for setting this hare running. By the same token, I disassociate myself from the work of Ernst Zundel, even though I consider it mistaken and and sinister to attempt to ban the Holocaust revisionists or even 'deniers', or beat them up as has happened to not a few.

I continue to believe that we must struggle on both fronts at once: both against anti-semitism and against political Zionism, which is a racist ideology, and in Palestine is practicising an increasingly genocidal 'apartheid'.

I will go back into my previous post and red-paint the upsetting references with brief interjection why.

Thank Goddess the physics of building collapse is so much simpler than the chemistry of mortar and cyanide! After all the height of the towers and the speed of fall of the 3 buildings is not in serious dispute, nor are the laws of pyhiscs governing falling bodies, and these latter simply mirror what a ten year old can understand : Namely that stuff falls slower through stuff than through air.

[astro3]

One regrets that Keith has just backed down on his vital point about the Leuchter report. Chemically speaking there seems to be a difference of about three orders of magnitude between the extremely-low ferrocyanide levels present in walls of the alleged 'gas chambers' (around one part per million) of Auschwitz etc and the rather high levels in walls of the small de-infestation huts (around one part per thousand). Any cyanide gas used (from the Zyklon-B insecticide) will bond permanently with iron in the wall, provided that traces of damp are around. That is a stubborn chemical fact and, like it or not, the Holocaust debate now has to revolve around it. Germar Rudolf was a profesional chemist at the Max Plank Institute and was just completing his doctorate, and he decided to check up on Leuchter's trailblazing Report. He got the same results. His career is now in ruins and he's in jail, and he could have avoided all that if he had just backed off from the simple chemical data which he had found - but he didn't. What this shows, is that the Zyklon-B insecticide was used in the labour-camps as the Germans said it was used, viz for de-lousing mattresses, whereas it was not in fact used in 'gas chambers' (aka wash-rooms). The link that seems to impress Keith has slimy ad-hominem attacks on the persons who have done this pioneer work - who have got no reward, except the ruin of their lives; let's be clear that no-one who has replicated these cyanide measurements has failed to find this big differential.

This fact does dovetail in with others, eg that not a single diagnosis of death by cyanide poisoning is on record amongst the hundreds of thousands of Jews who really did die in a ghastly manner in those labour camps (as a consequence of the Allies' terror-bombing). See eg the testimony of forensic pathologist Charles Larsen sent over to the camps by the US Army in 1945, who diagnosed deaths from famine and typus, from the dreadful epidemics that swept thought the camps. One can sense that he was under pressure to report deaths due to cyanide poisoning - but, he wouldn't.

Well happy Holocaust Day everyone (27th January) - as the UN has last year decreed that all the world should honour it. Try to understand, Keith, that the German 'endlosung' ('final solution') always has the meaning, in all the many tons of Third Reich literature that has been examined, of export: Jews were to be exported, to Israel or Madagascar. That meaning never changed to 'extermination' in any scrap of that literature.

[astro3]

One regrets that Keith has just backed down on his vital point about the Leuchter report. Chemically speaking there seems to be a difference of about three orders of magnitude between the extremely-low ferrocyanide levels present in walls of the alleged 'gas chambers' (around one part per million) of Auschwitz etc and the rather high levels in walls of the small de-infestation huts (around one part per thousand). Any cyanide gas used (from the Zyklon-B insecticide) will bond permanently with iron in the wall, provided that traces of damp are around. That is a stubborn chemical fact and, like it or not, the Holocaust debate now has to revolve around it. Germar Rudolf was a profesional chemist at the Max Plank Institute and was just completing his doctorate, and he decided to check up on Leuchter's trailblazing Report. He got the same results. His career is now in ruins and he's in jail, and he could have avoided all that if he had just backed off from the simple chemical data which he had found - but he didn't. What this shows, is that the Zyklon-B insecticide was used in the labour-camps as the Germans said it was used, viz for de-lousing mattresses, whereas it was not in fact used in 'gas chambers' (aka wash-rooms). The link that seems to impress Keith has slimy ad-hominem attacks on the persons who have done this pioneer work - who have got no reward, except the ruin of their lives; let's be clear that no-one who has replicated these cyanide measurements has failed to find this big differential.

This fact does dovetail in with others, eg that not a single diagnosis of death by cyanide poisoning is on record amongst the hundreds of thousands of Jews who really did die in a ghastly manner in those labour camps (as a consequence of the Allies' terror-bombing). See eg the testimony of forensic pathologist Charles Larsen sent over to the camps by the US Army in 1945, who diagnosed deaths from famine and typus, from the dreadful epidemics that swept thought the camps. One can sense that he was under pressure to report deaths due to cyanide poisoning - but, he wouldn't.

Well happy Holocaust Day everyone (27th January) - as the UN has last year decreed that all the world should honour it. Try to understand, Keith, that the German 'endlosung' ('final solution') always has the meaning, in all the many tons of Third Reich literature that has been examined, of export: Jews were to be exported, to Israel or Madagascar. That meaning never changed to 'extermination' in any scrap of that literature.