NO DOUBT ABOUT 'DOUBT'

Doubt is undoubtedly one of the finest motion pictures playing today. In 2 mesmerizing performances - Philip Seymour Hoffman as the unjustly accused priest whose very compassion for the underdog makes him a target, and Meryl Streep as the hateful CUNT accusing him, supremely certain of her case, and willing to 'step away from God' (i.e. lie and fabricate evidence) to 'fight wrongdoing' - the movie (even though set in 1964 Boston) shows the hideously corrupt society we live in today, where modern-day 'witches' with mouths more toxic than their anuses, spewing venom that destroys lives and reputations, run amok - with the eunuchs and John Bobbitts of our male establishment not only unwilling to counter them, but often conniving with such evil in order to prove their 'political correctness'.

In olden days witches were burned at the stake, sometimes even innocent ones. Today too many guilty 'witches' are being left untouched...

IT'S NOT SARAH PALIN'S FAULT

The knives came out quickly in the wake of McCain's defeat, even though he won a staggering 48% of the vote, as Americans continued to demonstrate they are the most ignorant people on this planet. Someone had to be blamed and Palin was the obvious choice. But it's not really her fault - she is not an outstanding political personality - not even close - and her flaws and errors have filled American news - with interviewers barely concealing their disdain for Sarah in their post-defeat interviews with her.

But the fault lies with that liar, wannabe war-criminal, and hypocrite - John McCain - who chose Sarah Palin as running mate. He must have thought he would win a greater share of female hearts than Obama who had dropped the talented if unscrupulous Hilary Clinton, by picking a woman to run alongside him. As did his lies about publicly funded health care in his first televised debate with Obama, this ill-considered and cynical choice also demonstrated his belief in the fundamental stupidity of Americans. The degree of his commitment to womens' causes may be gauged by the rapidity with which his aides have 'leaked' details of Sarah's indiscretions - wardrobial or other.

Sarah Palin was as poor a choice as McCain could have made, and the blame for that choice rests squarely on the shoulders of the idiot who made it.

A RESULT THE WORLD DESIRED, BUT....

Obama's historic victory was deservedly cheered the world over, if less so in American Republican circles. For the time being at least it is an end to Republican lies, fear-mongering, and proclamation of war-crimes to come.

Now for the hard part, after a brief period of honeymoon, will Obama bring in changes to American foreign policy? And domestically, will the decades of Republican lying about publicly funded health-care (being 'Commie' in nature, resulting in state-imposed choice of doctor, etc.) be set aside for a more humane, inclusive and affordable system of care for Americans?

In foreign policy will Obama end decades of fraudulent 'peace summits' for the Middle East, and bring genuine hope for Palestinians? Or will he stick to the odious and contemptible promises he made to Florida's Jewish voters to see that Jerusalem is never divided and so on.. (without a share of Jerusalem, no Palestinian state can survive, lacking a cultural and spiritual centre)...

Will he let the hawkish-on-Iraq Biden decide American policy in Iraq? What about Iran? Will the President-elect follow through on his declared intent to meet with its leaders without pre-conditions, but not just that, will he initiate a new phase of cooperation with the Iranians, who have been victims of American and British terror and war-crimes since 1950?

It is difficult to be optimistic about Obama's chances on all of the above...

Still, no harm in keeping fingers crossed, but no reason to hold one's breath.....

BAILOUTS - $700 BILLION FOR WALL ST., NONE FOR KATRINA VICTIMS

During the horrors inflicted on New Orleans by Katrina, Barbara Bush commented rather barbarically (if unwittingly) that the victims were relatively safe in the sports stadium where tens of thousands of them had been holed up while waiting for federal aid that never came......later it was revealed how the toilets had filled to overflowing from the oral, anal and urinal excretions of those trapped souls.....

Wall Street bankers who jeopardised the economy with greed-induced policies of overflowing credit, who deserved a serious dose of 'market-discipline' were not subjected to such horrors....

The bailout they did not deserve was approved in quick order...

These are the realities of the 'capitalist' 'free-market' America.....

JULIE COUILLARD - 'LA PAUVRE NAIF'..

Wow! What a story! A woman who has had several lovers, including some in biker gangs, now portrays herself as a naive woman used by the evil Tories.....of course she (the poor thing..) never did anything to attract the young lusty Maxime Bernier (who is clearly more foolish than Machiavellian) ......no - she was the pawn in his overpowering seduction for nefarious political purposes.....

Only in the grotesque make-believe of post-feminist North America where feminist ideology has been swallowed whole - hook, line and sinker - can such balderdash make headlines....Everybody is required by the law of political correctness to be - or at least pretend to be - a supporter of 'helpless, abused' women.

He 'destroyed her life'....????? How about she helped 'destroy his political career' and now wants to shamelessly and ruthlessly profit from it as well....huh?

People need to read history more, or perhaps the Bible...how long ago did Delilah live? .... Or Sheba ...?

DION OPENS PANDORA'S BOX - MORE ON AMERICA'S FAKE WARS ON DRUGS AND TERROR

Shown below is the text of the blog by Liberal candidate Lesley Hughes, which led to her firing as a Liberal candidate by Stephane Dion...motivated by his need to 'appease' the powerful Jewish lobbies in Canada who found such text (true or not) objectionable....No investigation of such politically-incorrect matters is safe....

Wittingly or not, Dion re-opened Pandora's box on a litany of matters that have never been giving due attention by the American media...but the box was immediately slammed shut by our media who found it more relevant to report on the tales of a biker gang moll....instead of delving further into the hastily bludgeoned blog..

The text below has many revelations - most stunning of which is that the US government and cohorts-in-crime on Wall Street actually use massive amounts of drug money to finance a number of 'covert' activities including keeping Wall Street afloat.....

If that seems improbable, consider what could conceivably have kept the world's greatest armed force from invading Colombia and other countries where cocaine is allegedly sourced....instead of the fake and seemingly never-ending 'war on drugs' by the DEA....

An America that invaded North Korea, South Vietnam and so many other countries for dubious ideological reasons and Iraq for 'installing democracy' and selling 'freedom fries'.....why hasn't it attacked a tiny nation in its neighbourhood to simply end the drug problem by destroying the drug farms and cocaine factories? The US already gave itself 'permission' to be the 'Don' in the region with its 'Monroe Doctrine' ..or at least Teddy Roosevelt's 'Corollary' to it...We see in the Hughes blog the solution to this mystery....  

In the brilliant Agatha Christie mystery "Why Didn't They Ask Evans', a rich man is murdered and impersonated at a fake will ceremony witnessed by a stranger unfamiliar with the testator...Evans would have seen through the fraud......no one in the Western media seems too keen to ask the question "Why Hasn't America Destroyed Colombia's Drug Farms'....

Of course the use of 'drug-money' to enrich one's empire is not new... the "Great" British did it in the 19th-century to China with great aplomb with opium grown in India, using their gunboats to bludgeon the Chinese into opium addiction and even extorting massive reparations including territories such as Hong Kong, when the Chinese dumped a shipment of opium into the seas....still - the Americans are different in that they allow their own population to be addicted to coke...

(As with British gunboats, so with America's weapons of mass destruction - the ability to intimidate, invade, and destroy other nations is an essential element of international gangsterism, or what historians call imperialism.... that is why it is also essential to 'anoint' oneselves the 'keepers of the faith', and denounce others who seek weapons as terrorists...)

No matter how improbable and insane it sounds, more and more information is coming that the CIA knew about 911....and it certainly makes sense that allowing the attacks to take place would make it much easier for the administration to pretend it faced threat from Iraq, to criminally invade and occupy that country rich in oil and poor in friends.......which had been Bush Jr.'s number one agenda item the day he assumed office in 2000. 

And while we in North America including in Canada weep crocodile tears over the handful of North Americans who are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, no one cares that three-quarters of a million Iraqi citizens have been murdered by 'Christian' America, and high numbers no doubt in Afghanistan as well. 

The specific text in Hughes' blog which led to her firing is a reference to sources who claim that Jewish occupants of the twin towers had advance warning and 'broke their leases' in consequence.....Muslims have been alleging this ever since the attacks took place....

One thing that is certainly strange, though not mentioned in the blog below is the relatively small number of people in the towers at the time of the attacks......which started at 8.30 am on a workday. The towers normally occupied some 50,000 people and by the time the first plane crashed, one would normally have expected at least a third or half of that population to have entered the buildings........one can dismiss this as a conspiracy theory, an inexplicable coincidence, a 'miracle', or perhaps regard this as circumstantial evidence that huge numbers had been pre-warned....?

Other 'nuggets' to note is that the US gave $43 million in 'aid' to the Taliban after the 911 attacks, to resume opium production which the fanatically Islamic Taliban had virtually wiped out.....and that Osama Bin Laden was allowed to get treatment (presumably dialysis) for kidney disease at the 'American' hospital in Dubai last summer...

Something is definitely rotten in the 'forcibly united' States of America, the F.U.S.A......



Below is the full text of the blog entry for Stephane Dion asked Lesley Hughes to step down as a Liberal candidate. The controversial text printed in red. 

Note that she was only citing the work of certain web journalists who use and share "only published and sourced news stories from world media, and official documents of various governments either leaked or available under freedom of information acts..." 

Get the Truth -by Lesley Hughes Last week Canada revealed itself once again as a truly unique nation. In a world where dead warriors are commonplace and taken for granted, this country stopped, paid attention, lowered the flags and gave full military honours to four soldiers, who died inexplicably and tragically at the hands of our allies. We all felt the shock and the sorrow. The corporate media, privately owned newspapers, television and radio chains lingered especially on the pain and dignity of their survivors. 

This was hard to swallow, coming from the same media that, in a fit of Me-Too-ism, couldn't wait to send young Canadians into a war on terrorism, which they hardly bothered to investigate; the same media that show every willingness to sacrifice more lives and families without pausing to confront the most basic question Canadians want answered about Afghanistan. What, exactly, are we doing there?

Truth may have been the casualty of war in former ages, but this war is different. While major media busy themselves waving flags, a global network of independent journalists, who have no interests to protect, no secrets to hide, are tracking and documenting its development on a daily basis. Among the best: the Web site The Emperor's New Clothes (www.tenc.net) and Mike Ruppert, editor and publisher of From the Wilderness newsletter out of California (www.copvcia.com) . Using and sharing only published and sourced news stories from world media, and official documents of various governments either leaked or available under freedom of information acts, these journalists have assembled a disturbing picture, which suggests CIA foreknowledge and complicity of highly placed officials in the U.S. government around the attacks on the World Trade Center Sept. 11. 

Many official sources are claiming to have warned the American intelligence community, which spends $30 billion a year gathering information, about the attacks on the twin towers on that heartbreaking day. German Intelligence (BND) claims to have warned the U.S. last June, the Israeli Mossad and Russian Intelligence in August. Israeli businesses, which had offices in the Towers, vacated the premises a week before the attacks, breaking their lease to do it. 

About 3000 Americans working there were not so lucky. Ironically, the stock market was also warning anyone who cared to notice that something peculiar was afoot: in the week prior to Sept. 11, unknown speculator(s) were suddenly betting that the stocks of United Airlines and American Airlines were going to fall in value; the trades were placed through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm formerly managed by Buzzy-Krongard, now executive director of the CIA. So far, no one has been bold enough to claim $2.5 million in profits. No serious search for the speculator is under way. 

More important to Canadians, the facts uncovered by Internet journalism suggest that the war in Afghanistan has little to do with the attacks of Sept.11; that it's the result of lengthy failed negotiations between American businessmen and the Taliban over access to drugs and oil. Mike Ruppert, a former LAPD narcotics officer turned journalist, maintains that Wall Street, (from whom the CIA gets its strategists and directions) is heavily dependent on laundered drug money, which helps keep the Fortune 500 and the stock market afloat.

The IMF recently estimated that about $1.5 trillion goes through the world's banks every year, at least $500 billion of it from drugs. His documents show that in January, 2001, the Taliban destroyed their opium crops, which normally supply 70 per cent of the world's heroin. In May, the U.S. gave the Taliban $43 Million in mysterious aid. Sept. 11 was a turning point. The U.S. bombed, invaded, captured the Taliban, and opium farms are now back in business. 

The Financial Times has reported that the next harvest will be a record breaking 4,500 tonnes, much of it headed to the U.S.A. Ruppert and others have tracked the progress of an urgent pipeline, which American oilmen have been trying to build through Afghanistan since 1991. They stated publicly that they could not do it without a sympathetic Afghan government in place. Newly installed prime minister Hamid Karzai is a former employee of Unocal Oil. Negotiations on the Central Asian pipeline resumed in October and an agreement to proceed with it was announced in February. 

Ruppert also notes that Osama Bin Laden was treated for his chronic kidney disease at the American Hospital in Dubai last summer. Although wanted for the bombing of two U.S. embassies and eligible for execution by American agents, he flew away undisturbed. The sole coverage of these events in Canada has come from Barrie Zwicker, media critic at Vision TV. If the work of Internet journalists is correct, then the war is neither a holy war, not a grand clash of civilizations between East and West, and our soldiers were lost to us and to their families to keep drugs and oil profits flowing in the U.S. Until we know the truth, we should refuse to add one more Canadian body to the pile of dead in Afghanistan. Not one. Canada should get the truth or get out. Lesley Hughes is a freelance writer and broadcaster in Winnipeg. Reprinted with permission. Since Lesley’s column on May 1, the mainstream media have at last also "discovered" elements of this deeper, more sinister, story.

STANDARD OPERATING REPORT FROM THE MILGAARD 'INQUIRY'

Shocking, shameful, an offense to society, a whitewash....these epithets are all justified here but they don't go far enough.

This report is actually par for the course for a corrupt justice system which is better called an injustice system.....we have seen Supreme Court judges behave with blatant corruption in 2000 in the USA, giving the Presidency to Bush Jr. who inflicted the worst war-crimes in recent memory in Iraq.....those 'Supreme Court' judges are now accomplices after the fact in the murder of 700,000 innocent Iraqi civilians...

Let there be no illusion that our highest judges and institutions in Canada - including the Supreme Court and the Judicial Council - are much better....

This is standard operating procedure.....deflect attention away from one of the most disgusting, embarrassing abuses of justice, by blaming the victim.......I suppose we should be grateful the judge did not conclude that David Milgaard had brought the whole thing on himself by having been a hippie.....this is how investigations in the federal government bureaucracy also work....they must have a Manual somewhere on how to dismiss problems by obfuscation, denial, outright lies, and going on the counter-attack....

There is a reason why we will never have judicial immunity from suit removed ...because our DisHonours know just how many of them would face lawsuits for negligent, malicious and corrupt actions.....

In rare instances like the Somalia inquiry of several years ago where an honest judge has the courage to deviate from the standard pre-authorized conclusion "The system failed, but individuals are not responsible', the government in question will simply sweep findings under the rug, and even - as the Liberals under Chretien did - dismiss findings that witnesses had lied under oath, as 'allegations'....

The TV series 'Yes Minister' once made a humorous though sadly accurate reference to the use of inquiries.....'Inquiries are not commissioned because the government wants to do something.....governments have full authority to do whatever they want.....inquiries give them the excuse to do nothing pending the result...'....In our 'liberal democratic' societies of 'make believe', unfortunately we are more likely to find 'truth' in fictional TV series than in official investigations...

This judge ruled that Mrs. Milgaard delayed her son's release.....her son would never have been released if it were not for irrefutable DNA evidence which showed the 'justice' system and its processes to be a sham, motivated by prejudice against a hippy lifestyle and prejudgment...where evidence was cooked and exculpatory evidence ignored ....'"honestly'''. The 'honesty' of our justice system would never have been exposed without the DNA evidence.....Mrs. Milgaard could not speed up or delay this incontrovertible fact.....but then our royal Dishonours have a history of not letting facts and evidence get in the way of their preconceived conclusions.....

A TV reporter said the Milgaard family was willing to let this report be the final word after 40 years of fighting......this is perfectly understandable and undoubtedly was a prime reason for the judge's dastardly ruling against Mrs. Milgaard....of all the people this judge should have blamed, only the victim's mother was responsible for wrongdoing...

(Having caused the 'justice' system so much embarrassment, she had to be punished, didn't she?)

But someone out there should carry on this fight on behalf of the Milgaards - this trashy report should be attacked every which way possible, and given this judge's operating method here - attacking Mrs. Milgaard - would it be unjust to blast the judge personally, investigate his private and public record and leave no stone unturned, or unthrown....?

BRAVO, AHMADINEJAD!

Today's Toronto Star has this - the Iranian President's defiant speech at the UN, including a thumbs-down to Bush's speech, a prophecy about the 'end of days' for the American empire around the world, and of a growing abyss for the Zionist land-grab of Palestine, for which he presented to the UN Secretary-General a plan for a referendum to settle the Mideast horrors....

This is the same plan he has been trying to sell for the past few years, but the liars in North America including McCain and his Oxford-Harvard 'advisor' Niall Ferguson, Bush and his lunatic fringe of the GOP, Hilary Clinton wanting to out-Bush Bush, and most of the criminal American establishment have malevolently misrepresented as Iran's plans to wipe Israel off the map....

No amount of prayers and best wishes for such a plan to succeed will be sufficient, however, since the still-powerful American-Israeli axis will never let it....at least not in the near future......a few decades in the future things may be different...




Olivia Ward
Foreign Affairs Reporter

Taking a high moral tone, Iran's gadfly president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ridiculed the United States as a spent force in a speech to the United Nations yesterday, railing against Israel, and insisting that his country's disputed nuclear program was purely peaceful.

Ahmadinejad, whose visit to New York was marked by angry demonstrations, appeared calm and relaxed, wearing a grey tailored suit and a stylishly trimmed beard as he faced his critics across the podium.

Earlier in the day, he shrugged off a speech by U.S. President George W. Bush – who had named Iran as a supporter of terrorism – while turning a visible thumbs-down at the American leader, whose final UN exit lines were overshadowed by America's financial crisis.

"The American empire in the world is reaching the end of the road," Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly. "And its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders."

Ahmadinejad's speech, with a rambling theme of God, justice and morality, stressed Iran's peaceful nature and love of "creativity, mercy, kindness, wisdom."

But he broke into a bitter condemnation of Israel similar to speeches made in the past: "Today the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters."

And he said, he would submit a "peace plan" to the UN Secretary General to solve the problems of the Palestinians. It would include "a free referendum under the supervision of international organizations," allowing them to decide on the type of government they want. Ahmadinejad dismissed the American occupation of Iraq as a failure. But he also aimed ridicule at Canada and other NATO countries in Afghanistan.

"NATO troops in Afghanistan are an expanding presence," he told reporters after his speech. "Ever since they arrived, illicit drug production and extremism have increased."

"Even if they increased military forces they wouldn't succeed," he added. "They are going into a well with their heads down. I feel sorry for them."

Although a confrontation looms over Iran's uranium enrichment program, which Western countries believe may lead to the production of nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad smiled at suggestions that it was anything but peaceful.

Answering accusations by the U.S. and the UN's atomic energy watchdog that Iran was holding back on vital information on its nuclear program, he retorted that "as far as we are concerned it is resolved. The rest is propaganda."

Foreign ministers for six nations negotiating on Iran's nuclear program were scheduled to meet tomorrow. But Russia, one of the six, said that the week of speeches by world leaders at the UN was too packed "to make us toss everything else aside and urgently meet to discuss the Iranian nuclear issue."

Iran has benefited from the tensions between Russia and the U.S. over Moscow's invasion of Georgia last month – as well as Washington's economically weakened state and the end of Bush's term in power.

Russia said it opposed new sanctions against Iran for failing to accept a deal to halt its enrichment program in exchange for economic and energy aid. But it called on Tehran to co-operate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a statement echoed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a speech earlier in the day.

During his UN appearance, Ahmadinejad repeatedly denied Iran was in a race for a nuclear bomb.

"A few bullying powers have sought to put hurdles in the way of the peaceful nuclear activities of the Iranian nation by exerting political and economic pressures against Iran, and also through threatening and pressuring the IAEA," he said in his speech.

And he told reporters: "People who seek the use of nuclear weapons are backward. The time for the atomic bomb has come to an end. Whoever seeks it will lose in that pursuit."

But he warned threats against Iran would be disastrous, saying, "If there is a hand raised against our nation ... it would be cut immediately."

Responding to accusations of supporting terrorism, Ahmadinejad took a more tranquil tone, saying that "anyone who is ready to fight terrorism will find the Iranian people their partner."

Since Ahmadinejad made his first visit to the UN, he has become more confident and relaxed, chatting amiably with reporters and seemingly at home at the podium. In an earlier appearance in New York, he had brusque exchanges with the media and appeared tense and ill at ease.

"We seek relations based on justice and mutual respect," he told reporters yesterday. "Force is not a relationship, but an imposition."

And he said, the door was not closed to dialogue on Iran's nuclear program. "We are in favour of dialogue and talks, but we will not accept the language of force."

With files from the Star's wire services

LATIN AMERICANS REBEL AGAINST THE US.... BAD NEWS OR GOOD?

Shown below is an appeal by the Venezuela Solidarity Network for North Americans and others to write to newspapers and magazines about their concerns for the escalating tensions between Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American countries and the US, which are described below.

Personally while I share the concerns I think the request is misguided. For two reasons...firstly most newspapers and magazines in North America are corrupted, or as Dr. Chomsky puts it, servilely obedient to the American powers that be...and are unlikely to print such letters or give them much attention. More importantly though, the seeming 'bad news' is actually good news in disguise as it indicates a growing hardening of resistance in Latin America to centuries of American bullying, intimidation and war-crimes in their continent......The Latin Americans are finally standing upto the US and telling it to go fuddle its own duddle......

While this may lead to shorter term problems for them as the American government will undoubtedly retaliate against any efforts to sabotage such American acts of 'democracy-promotion' as attempted assassinations of the leaders of Venezuela and Bolivia or the fixing of elections to suit American corporate interests - in the long term the Latinos can only win as the Americans face increasing defiance not only in Latin America but in Asia and the Pacific as well....Old foe Russia is also in an oil-generated resurgence...

The beginning of the end of American domination of the world is now seemingly at hand......this can only bode well.....

The Empire will strike back at Latin America and other 'rebel forces', but its days are numbered.....its 'enemies' grow stronger, its strength is ever drained by its crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ones it has recommenced in Iran....




Latin America Rebelling Against US Interference Now

**Venezuela Solidarity Network**


*September 12, 2008*


*EMERGENCY RESPONSE NETWORK*

*Latin America Rebelling Against US Interference Now!*


*We are in a very dangerous and fluid period regarding US-Latin America relations.**
*Over the last few days a number of serious incidents have occurred, some related and possibly all related:*
*1. A civil rebellion led by right-wing separatists in the Bolivian prefecture of Santa Cruz have taken at least eight lives and caused millions of dollars of economic damage.*
*2. Bolivia expelled US Ambassador Philip Goldberg for his support of the uprising*
*3. The US declared persona non grata Bolivia's ambassador to the US*
*4. A coup plot against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was exposed including video showing three military officers plotting the coup.*
*5. Venezuela expelled US Ambassador Patrick Duddy, giving him 72 hours to leave the country.*
*6. The US declared the Venezuelan ambassador to the US persona non grata in retaliation.*
*7. The US Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) cited two current and one former high Venezuelan official for allegedly providing weapons and material support to Colombia's Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.*
*8. Russian military jets visited Venezuela.*
*9. Today Honduras told the new US ambassador not to enter the country. Will other Latin American countries follow suit?*
* *
*This is an escalation of worsening relations with Latin America that include US support for the failed 2002 coup against Venezuelan President Chavez, an attempted assassination, attempt involving shots fired into a caravan that was supposed to have been carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales, and more recently a suspicious fatal helicopter crash of the helicopter in which Morales usually flies.*
* *
*This is on top of electoral interference in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and currently El Salvador. US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are the two agencies primarily responsible for the US efforts to manipulate other countries' elections. Bolivia is the greatest recipient of USAID money in Latin America and was expelled by one prefecture (state) a few months ago after civil society groups complained of its support for the right-wing and frequently racist's opposition. USAID and NED are investing heavily in Venezuela and Nicaragua's upcoming local elections and is deeply involved in El Salvador's presidential campaign in an effort to stop the election of FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes who has a commanding lead in the polls. Visit www.cispes.org and www.respect4democracy.org for more information.*
* *
*These incidents are the result of centuries of US policy toward Latin America and specifically the result of reckless policies of the George W. Bush regime. We need to demand that the US government take no further action to exacerbate what are already dangerous situations that could easily spin out of control involving tragic losses of life and spiking oil prices as we in the North enter the heating season.*
* *
*The Venezuela Solidarity Network calls on you to be prepared to take action in the coming days. Immediately we ask you to call your Congress person and Senators to demand that the US not escalate the crisis and that it stop intervening in other countries sovereign affairs. The Capitol Switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. Demand that your elected representatives find out and reveal the extent of US payments to Bolivian opposition groups as advocated today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.**

*Write letters to the editor pointing out that this crisis is the result of seven years of reckless and immoral foreign policy initiatives of the Bush regime as well as making the point that the US government should not escalate these crises. For additional background information visit*



*http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/index.html and http://soaw.org/article.php?id=1678 *

*http://www.vensolidarity.org *







/This ERN Action Alert was prepared by the Venezuela Solidarity Network. The basic purpose of the Venezuela Solidarity Network is to increase communication among groups that oppose US intervention in Venezuela, support the right of the Venezuela people to self-determination, and support the Bolivarian revolution. The Venezuela Solidarity Network also seeks to enlist additional progressive groups into Venezuela solidarity work, and to facilitate our ability to unite in joint actions. /

HOW THE AMERICAN MEDIA AND ACADEMIA LIE FOR AMERICAN CRIMES

Nobody does it better.....and I'm not talking about James Bond, that fictional British terrorist who we have accepted as a hero.....but the example of James Bond is a good one to understand just how lies, deceit and fabrication are the structure of our supposedly 'free' democratic society......if a similar hero from a state designated as an enemy of the US or the UK or Israel were to commit similar acts of terror (called covert operations or black ops) against the US, UK or Israel, we would immediately regard such a 'hero' as a terrorist. But because James Bond acts for the countries we have come to regard as the 'good guys', he is our hero.....

No I am talking about Noam Chomsky....nobody describes better than he the mechanisms of deceit, lies and fabrications that the leading lights of the Western media and academia employ to perpetrate their propaganda....to brainwash the masses of the West to accept Western crimes as acts of 'democracy-promotion', 'freedom', and so on.

As children we heard the tale of the Emperor's new clothes....it was no tale, but an allegory most real and relevant....as the Master explains...

So here it is, from the great Master himself...


What the World is Really Like: Who Knows It -- and Why
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from The Chomsky Reader, 1983
QUESTION: You've written about the way that professional ideologists and the mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken -- in some places you call it a "Cartesian common sense" -- of the commonsense capacities of people. Indeed, you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours? For example, you've written that within a highly competitive, fragmented society, it's very difficult for people to become aware of what their interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?

CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.

In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used -- would be used -- under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.

There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I'm not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.

So take simple cases. Take the Russian invasion of Afghanistan -- a simple case. Everybody understands immediately without any specialized knowledge that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That's exactly what it is. You don't debate it; it's not a deep point that is difficult to understand. It isn't necessary to know the history of Afghanistan to understand the point. All right. Now let's take the American invasion of South Vietnam. The phrase itself is very strange. I don't think you will ever find that phrase -- I doubt if you'll find one case in which that phrase was used in any mainstream journal, or for the most part, even in journals of the left, while the war was going on. Yet it was just as much an American invasion of South Vietnam as it is a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. By 1962, when nobody was paying any attention, American pilots -- not just mercenaries but actual American pilots -- were conducting murderous bombing raids against Vietnamese villages. That's an American invasion of South Vietnam. The purpose of that attack was to destroy the social fabric of rural South Vietnam so as to undermine a resistance which the American-imposed client regime had evoked by its repression and was unable to control, though they had already killed perhaps eighty thousand South Vietnamese since blocking the political settlement called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords.

So there was a U.S. attack against South Vietnam in the early sixties, not to speak of later years when the United States sent an expeditionary force to occupy the country and destroy the indigenous resistance. But it was never referred to or thought of as an American invasion of South Vietnam.

I don't know much about Russian public opinion, but I imagine if you picked a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They're defending Afghanistan against capitalist plots and bandits supported by the CIA and so on. But I don't think he would find it difficult to understand that the United States invaded South Vietnam.

Well, these are very different societies; the mechanisms of control and indoctrination work in a totally different fashion. There's a vast difference in the use of force versus other techniques. But the effects are very similar, and the effects extend to the intellectual elite themselves. In fact, my guess is that you would find that the intellectual elite is the most heavily indoctrinated sector, for good reasons. It's their role as a secular priesthood to really believe the nonsense that they put forth. Other people can repeat it, but it's not that crucial that they really believe it. But for the intellectual elite themselves, it's crucial that they believe it because, after all, they are the guardians of the faith. Except for a very rare person who's an outright liar, it's hard to be a convincing exponent of the faith unless you've internalized it and come to believe it. I find that intellectuals just look at me with blank stares of incomprehension when I talk about the American invasion of South Vietnam. On the other hand, when I speak to general audiences, they don't seem to have much difficulty in perceiving the essential points, once the facts are made accessible. And that's perfectly reasonable -- that's what should be expected in a society set up as ours is.

When I talk about, say, Cartesian common sense, what I mean is that it does not require very far-reaching, specialized knowledge to perceive that the United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality, that's not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise. It just happens that they exercise them in analyzing what the New England Patriots ought to do next Sunday instead of questions that really matter for human life, their own included.

QUESTION: Do you think people are inhibited by expertise?

CHOMSKY: There are also experts about football, but these people don't defer to them. The people who call in talk with complete confidence. They don't care if they disagree with the coach or whoever the local expert is. They have their own opinion and they conduct intelligent discussions. I think it's an interesting phenomenon. Now I don't think that international or domestic affairs are much more complicated. And what passes for serious intellectual discourse on these matters does not reflect any deeper level of understanding or knowledge.

One finds something similar in the case of so-called primitive cultures. What you find very often is that certain intellectual systems have been constructed of considerable intricacy, with specialized experts who know all about it and other people who don't quite understand and so on. For example, kinship systems are elaborated to enormous complexity. Many anthropologists have tried to show that this has some functional utility in the society. But one function may just be intellectual. It's a kind of mathematics. These are areas where you can use your intelligence to create complex and intricate systems and elaborate their properties pretty much the way we do mathematics. They don't have mathematics and technology; they have other systems of cultural richness and complexity. I don't want to overdraw the analogy, but something similar may be happening here.

The gas station attendant who wants to use his mind isn't going to waste his time on international affairs, because that's useless; he can't do anything about it anyhow, and he might learn unpleasant things and even get into trouble. So he might as well do it where it's fun, and not threatening -- professional football or basketball or something like that. But the skills are being used and the understanding is there and the intelligence is there. One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people's attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.

QUESTION: I asked a while ago whether people are inhibited by the aura of expertise. Can one turn this around -- are experts and intellectuals afraid of people who could apply the intelligence of sport to their own areas of competency in foreign affairs, social sciences, and so on?

CHOMSKY: I suspect that this is rather common. Those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person lacking any special training who takes the trouble to learn something about them. Commentary on public affairs in the mainstream literature is often shallow and uninformed. Everyone who writes and speaks about these matters knows how much you can get away with as long as you keep close to received doctrine. I'm sure just about everyone exploits these privileges. I know I do. When I refer to Nazi crimes or Soviet atrocities, for example, I know that I will not be called upon to back up what I say, but a detailed scholarly apparatus is necessary if I say anything critical about the practice of one of the Holy States: the United States itself, or Israel, since it was enshrined by the intelligentsia after its 1967 victory. This freedom from the requirements of evidence or even rationality is quite a convenience, as any informed reader of the journals of public opinion, or even much of the scholarly literature, will quickly discover. It makes life easy, and permits expression of a good deal of nonsense or ignorant bias with impunity, also sheer slander. Evidence is unnecessary, argument beside the point. Thus a standard charge against American dissidents or even American liberals -- I've cited quite a few cases in print and have collected many others -- is that they claim that the United States is the sole source of evil in the world or other similar idiocies; the convention is that such charges are entirely legitimate when the target is someone who does not march in the appropriate parades, and they are therefore produced without even a pretense of evidence. Adherence to the party line confers the right to act in ways that would properly be regarded as scandalous on the part of any critic of received orthodoxies. Too much public awareness might lead to a demand that standards of integrity should be met, which would certainly save a lot of forests from destruction, and would send many a reputation tumbling.

The right to lie in the service of power is guarded with considerable vigor and passion. This becomes evident whenever anyone takes the trouble to demonstrate that charges against some official enemy are inaccurate or, sometimes, pure invention. The immediate reaction among the commissars is that the person is an apologist for the real crimes of official enemies. The case of Cambodia is a striking example. That the Khmer Rouge were guilty of gruesome atrocities was doubted by no one, apart from a few marginal Maoist sects. It is also true, and easily documented, that Western propaganda seized upon these crimes with great relish, exploiting them to provide a retrospective justification for Western atrocities, and since standards are nonexistent in such a noble cause, they also produced a record of fabrication and deceit that is quite remarkable. Demonstration of this fact, and fact it is, elicited enormous outrage, along with a stream of new and quite spectacular lies, as Edward Herman and I, among others, have documented. The point is that the right to lie in the service of the state was being challenged, and that is an unspeakable crime. Similarly, anyone who points out that some charge against Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, or some other official enemy is dubious or false will immediately be labeled an apologist for real or alleged crimes, a useful technique to ensure that rational standards will not be imposed on the commissars and that there will be no impediment to their loyal service to power. The critic typically has little access to the media, and the personal consequences for the critic are sufficiently annoying to deter many from taking this course, particularly because some journals -- the New Republic, for example -- sink to the ultimate level of dishonesty and cowardice, regularly refusing to permit even the right of response to slanders they publish. Hence the sacred right to lie is likely to be preserved without too serious a threat. But matters might be different if unreliable sectors of the public were admitted into the arena of discussion and debate.

The aura of alleged expertise also provides a way for the indoctrination system to provide its services to power while maintaining a useful image of indifference and objectivity. The media, for example, can turn to academic experts to provide the perspective that is required by the centers of power, and the university system is sufficiently obedient to external power so that appropriate experts will generally be available to lend the prestige of scholarship to the narrow range of opinion permitted broad expression. Or when this method fails -- as in the current case of Latin America, for example, or in the emerging discipline of terrorology -- a new category of "experts" can be established who can be trusted to provide the approved opinions that the media cannot express directly without abandoning the pretense of objectivity that serves to legitimate their propaganda function. I've documented many examples, as have others.

The guild structure of the professions concerned with public affairs also helps to preserve doctrinal purity. In fact, it is guarded with much diligence. My own personal experience is perhaps relevant. As I mentioned earlier, I do not have the usual professional credentials in any field, and my own work has ranged fairly widely. Some years ago, for example, I did some work in mathematical linguistics and automata theory, and occasionally gave invited lectures at mathematics or engineering colloquia. No one would have dreamed of challenging my credentials to speak on these topics -- which were zero, as everyone knew; that would have been laughable. The participants were concerned with what I had to say, not my right to say it. But when I speak, say, about international affairs, I'm constantly challenged to present the credentials that authorize me to enter this august arena, in the United States, at least -- elsewhere not. It's a fair generalization, I think, that the more a discipline has intellectual substance, the less it has to protect itself from scrutiny, by means of a guild structure. The consequences with regard to your question are pretty obvious.

QUESTION: You have said that most intellectuals end up obfuscating reality. Do they understand the reality they are obfuscating? Do they understand the social processes they mystify?

CHOMSKY: Most people are not liars. They can't tolerate too much cognitive dissidence. I don't want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don't think that's the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception. I think there's also a selective process in the academic professions and journalism. That is, people who are independent minded and cannot be trusted to be obedient don't make it, by and large. They're often filtered out along the way. [...]

QUESTION: You wrote that Henry Kissinger's memoirs "give the impression of a middle-level manager who has learned to conceal vacuity with pretentious verbiage." You doubt that he has any subtle "conceptual framework" or global design. Why do such individuals gain such extraordinary reputations, given what you say about his actual abilities? What does this say about how our society operates?

CHOMSKY: Our society is not really based on public participation in decision-making in any significant sense. Rather, it is a system of elite decision and periodic public ratification. Certainly people would like to think there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about the questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we're not taking in deciding what's going on. I think that's a factor. But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues; they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs. In fact, power is very highly concentrated, decision-making is highly concentrated in small interpenetrating elites, ultimately based on ownership of the private economy in large measure, but also in related ideological and political and managerial elites. Since that's the way the society effectively functions, it has to have political theology that explains that that's the way it ought to function, which means that you have to establish the pretense that the participants of that elite know what they are doing, in our interest, and have the kind of understanding and access to information that is denied the rest of us, so that we poor slobs ought to just watch, not interfere. Maybe we can choose one or another of them every few years, but it's their job to manage things, not ours. It's in this context that we can understand the Kissinger phenomenon. His ignorance and foolishness really are a phenomenon. I've written about this in some detail. But he did have a marvelous talent, namely, of playing the role of the philosopher who understands profound things in ways that are beyond the capacity of the ordinary person. He played that role quite elegantly. That's one reason why I think he was so attractive to the people who actually have power. That's just the kind of person they need.

QUESTION: Does the business elite have an accurate perception of how our system operates?

CHOMSKY: Yes, quite commonly. For example, in business schools and in business journals, one often finds a fairly clear perception of what the world is really like. On the other hand, in the more ideological circles, like the academic social sciences, I think you find much more deep-seated illusion and misunderstanding, which is quite natural. In the business school, they have to deal with the real world and they'd better know what the facts are, what the real properties of the world are. They are training the real managers, not the ideological managers, so the commitment to propaganda is less intense. Across the river from the business school in Cambridge, you have a different story. You have people one of whose functions is to prevent understanding on the part of others. Again, I don't want to overdraw the lines, but I think there are tendencies in these directions. There are some cases where it has even been investigated, though this is not a popular topic in the ideological disciplines. For example, some years ago, there was a review in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, which I have quoted now and then, of research into the relation of corporations and foreign policy. This was not done by any radicals. It was done by a mainstream political scientist named Dennis Ray. It wasn't a very far-reaching study, but some of the remarks that he makes are quite correct and to the point. He reports a survey of some two hundred works drawn from what he calls "the respectable literature on international relations and U.S. foreign policy." In this "respectable literature," he found no reference at all to the role of corporations in U.S. foreign relations in 95 percent of the books surveyed, while in less than 5 percent he found passing mention. This was in 1972 -- there may have been a slight shift since as a result of the challenge to strict orthodoxy in the 1960s. This is quite remarkable. This is a marvelous example of the way the taboo system operates. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of these matters knows that there's a very significant relation between corporations and foreign policy. It's perfectly obvious, and for good reasons. How strong corporate influence is and how it is manifested, one could debate. But that it's a strong and major influence, no serious person could deny. Nevertheless, the academic profession had succeeded in essentially eliminating this central topic from consideration.

Now the relevant point is this. Ray said he was excluding from his study two categories: one, what he called "radical and often neo-Marxist analyses," which presumably means anything critical of the corporate role, anything dissenting from the standard religious doctrines; and two, statements of corporate executives and business school professors. In both of these categories, there is discussion of the role of corporations in U.S. foreign policy. Ray concludes from his own investigation that the role is significant, as of course it is, but those who point out these obvious and important facts are not admitted into the "respectable literature," just as those who avoid the obvious do not lose "respectability" thereby.

I think this illustrates something which is fairly standard; that the real world is much more easily understood among people who really have to deal with the facts than among those one of whose functions is the creation of ideological cover and support for the doctrines of the faith.

QUESTION: Yet the business community can turn out an enormous literature about development and modernizing other lands -- not to speak of the good life here at home.

CHOMSKY: That is certainly correct. The business community in the United States has demonstrated a high degree of class consciousness and an understanding of the importance of controlling what they call "the public mind." The rise of the public relations industry is one manifestation of this concern for "the engineering of consent," the essence of democracy according to Edward Bernays, the leading figure in this system of business propaganda. Part of this effort has been to create a certain conception of "the good life" at home, as you say, a conception that happens to conform to the needs of the wealthy and privileged sectors that dominate the economy as well as the political and ideological systems. They have also favored a particular form of "development and modernization" which happens to conform to the interests of American investors. These are very important matters which merit more attention than they receive.

But there are other elements of the picture worth considering, too, apart from the vast stream of propaganda aimed directly at control of the public mind and ensuring that public policy will conform to the needs of the privileged. The favored conception of development, for example, is commonly presented in terms of the alleged benefits to the indigenous population, not the interests of American investors and corporations or their local clients and associates. The belief that what you are doing is helpful to the peasants of northeastern Brazil doesn't harm your business operations, but just makes it psychologically easier to continue to act in your own interest. But a failure to recognize how state policy is and must be determined, fantasies about pluralist interactions and popular sovereignty -- these could be an impediment to real world operations. It is important to keep a firm grasp on reality in this domain. The propaganda may be what it is, but dominant elites must have a clearer understanding among themselves. We can see what this understanding is from documents that are not intended for the general public, for example, the very illuminating report on the "Crisis of Democracy" to the Trilateral Commission -- liberal elites in this case -- explaining the need to return the general population to passivity and obedience, reversing the threat of democratization posed during the 1960s as normally irrelevant sectors of the population actually attempted to become organized for political action and to enter the political arena, threatening the domination of business-based elites.

But alongside of such frank internal discussion of the need to reverse the democratic thrust of the sixties, to ensure that there is no tampering with the institutions responsible for "the indoctrination of the young," to muzzle potentially dissident elements of the media, and so on -- alongside of this we commonly find the construction of a system of beliefs that justifies what one is doing as right and good. That is natural enough, and is just as common in business circles as elsewhere. [...]

QUESTION: Do you have a deep faith in reason?

CHOMSKY: I don't have a faith in that or anything else.

QUESTION: Not even in reason?

CHOMSKY: I wouldn't say "faith." I think... it's all we have. I don't have faith that the truth will prevail if it becomes known, but we have no alternative to proceeding on that assumption, whatever its credibility may be. It's of more than a little interest that ideological managers act in ways that indicate that they share this belief. This is shown, for example, by the substantial efforts to conceal the obvious. After all, it would be easier just to tell the truth.

Why is it that the propaganda system is geared to suppressing any inquiry into questions such as the role of corporations in foreign policy? Or let's take contemporary history. Why isn't the terrible history of U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean a staple of the curriculum, so that everyone learns, for example, that there are people living under conditions of virtual slavery in Guatemala because land reform was stopped by a CIA coup in 1954, and subsequent interventions under Kennedy and Johnson helped maintain a terror-and-torture state with few counterparts in the modern world? Why isn't it a staple of modern history that in Greece in the late 1940s the United States, with a degree of fanaticism, organized a murderous counterinsurgency campaign, putting tens of thousands of people into reeducation camps where they were tortured and killed, backing the expulsion of tens of thousands of others, destroying the unions and the political system and carrying on massacres? Why doesn't everybody know that? It's really important to know. Look at Vietnam. What about that? Why is so much effort undertaken to ensure that the basic facts about the attack on South Vietnam will not be known, will not be investigated, or if investigated, will be dismissed or swept into a corner, and certainly won't enter the mainstream of academic interpretation or education? Why such efforts to conceal the real history with fables about the awesome nobility of our intentions, flawed only by blunders arising from our naivete and simpleminded goodness, which is unique in history? I think there's a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore, it's important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them. Correspondingly, the other side of the coin is that it's extremely important to try to bring out the truth about these matters, as best we can. Maybe if people knew the truth, they would still support the same policies. Well, that could be. Certainly the ideologists of the propaganda system do not believe that. [...]

QUESTION: At times it's a system that seems to have extraordinary strength and other moments there's a question of vulnerabilities that are evident in the unease, the fear...

CHOMSKY: Well, it's extremely unstable because of the reliance on lies. Any system that's based on lying and deceit is inherently unstable. But, on the other hand, it does have enormous resilience and very little challenge, limited enough and sufficiently marginalized so that the impact of the propaganda system is powerful and pervasive.

QUESTION: Is not debate limited by a general lack of belief in alternatives to how we live?

CHOMSKY: Well, it's very hard to get to the point where you can even discuss alternatives until you first peel away layer after layer of myth and illusion. Friends who share my interests and concerns have often criticized the work I do, maybe rightly, because they say it's much too critical of superficial phenomena, in a sense. A lot of what I have written and speak about has been devoted to particular atrocities in Vietnam, in Latin America, in the Middle East, in East Timor, things like that, and to the web of deceit that has been constructed about them. Now these are matters that have enormous human significance, but they're superficial in a sort of technical sense; that is, they are the end result of much deeper, central factors in our society and culture. The criticism is that I ought to pay more attention to the central factors and to ways of changing them, to revolutionary strategy, for example. Well, I've been resistant to that, rightly or wrongly, but I see the point, certainly. I mean, suppose that we could, say, induce the United States to stop supporting massacre and repression in East Timor. It would be very important for the Timorese, if they survive. But it would be like putting a Band-Aid on a cancer. It's just going to show up somewhere else.

To the extent that one can reach the general public on these issues -- it's very limited because the media and journals don't really permit it -- but to the extent that one can, well, East Timor or Vietnam are topics you can talk to people about in a way that is meaningful to them, whereas talking to them about institutional change and the possibility that they might play a role in changing the institutions is like talking to them about Mars. I don't know how you get to the point where those kinds of questions can be raised. Certainly not just by talk. Those are things that people have to live; aspirations and understanding have to grow out of experience and struggle and conflict.

For example, take a runaway plant. At the time when the plant is being removed from Connecticut to Taiwan, it's quite possible that questions about, say, workers' decision-making, worker control, can be raised in a way which would seem exotic and academic when the system is functioning. I have a lot of respect for the people that are doing it. There are plenty of opportunities to raise issues for thinking and consideration that are somehow related to the actual options that people have, that are not just abstract and esoteric, like, could an alternative society work? It's very hard to think about abstractly. It's just too remote from the options that people actually have for them to even pay any attention to that. But I think these are the kinds of questions that ultimately have to become central to the concerns of the great mass of the population if we are going to be able to do anything more than put Band-Aids on cancers.

THE DISTURBING BIDEN FACTOR

OBAMA + BIDEN = MCCAIN

A very disturbing article (below) about the man Obama has chosen as running-mate…..one of the Democratic Party’s supporters of the invasion of Iraq and one who wants it partitioned.......

But then Obama's intention to betray his principles first became clear when he 'broke all records for fawning' to Florida's Jewish voters some weeks back, promising them Jerusalem would never be divided and so on. As I noted in my blog at the time, "Political realities may allow one the audacity to hope, but not apparently the audacity to act on that hope".

Perhaps Obama cannot or believes he cannot be elected without betraying his principles, but one thing is for sure - no changes of note in American foreign 'policy' (read wanton aggression, terrorism and war-crimes whenever it suits its interests) will come under Obama. Instead of a Texan buffoon playing the role the behind-the-scenes industrial-military-politico-bureaucratic-complex's string-pullers want played, we may have a non-white who can make impressive speeches play that role.

The other tragedy is that if Obama loses his bedrock support because of Biden, it is McCain - another blood-thirsty murderer who wants to 'bomb Iran and kill Iranians' who will be elected.

We have just entered no-win territory....a likely war-criminal will be elected regardless of which side wins.





Biden, Iraq, and Obama's Betrayal

Stephen Zunes | August 24, 2008

Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org

Incipient Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's selection of Joseph Biden as his running mate constitutes a stunning betrayal of the anti-war constituency who made possible his hard-fought victory in the Democratic primaries and caucuses.

The veteran Delaware senator has been one the leading congressional supporters of U.S. militarization of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, of strict economic sanctions against Cuba, and of Israeli occupation policies.

Most significantly, however, Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the lead-up to the Iraq War during the latter half of 2002, was perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration's decision to invade that oil-rich country.
Shrinking Gap Between Candidates

One of the most important differences between Obama and the soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee John McCain is that Obama had the wisdom and courage to oppose the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Obama and his supporters had been arguing correctly that judgment in foreign policy is far more important than experience; this was a key and likely decisive argument in the Illinois senator's campaign against Senator Hillary Clinton, who had joined McCain in backing the Iraq war resolution.

However, in choosing Biden who, like the forthcoming Republican nominee, has more experience in international affairs but notoriously poor judgment, Obama is essentially saying that this critical difference between the two prospective presidential candidates doesn't really matter. This decision thereby negates one of his biggest advantages in the general election. Of particular concern is the possibility that the pick of an establishment figure from the hawkish wing of the party indicates the kind of foreign policy appointments Obama will make as president.

Obama's choice of Biden as his running mate will likely have a hugely negative impact on his once-enthusiastic base of supporters. Obama's supporters had greatly appreciated the fact that he did not blindly accept the Bush administration's transparently false claims about Iraq being an imminent danger to U.S. national security interests that required an invasion and occupation of that country. At the same time Biden was joining his Republican colleagues in pushing through a Senate resolution authorizing the invasion, Obama was speaking at a major anti-war rally in Chicago correctly noting that Iraq's war-making ability had been substantially weakened and that the international community could successfully contain Saddam Hussein from any future acts of aggression.

In Washington, by contrast, Biden was insisting that Bush was right and Obama was wrong, falsely claiming that Iraq under Saddam Hussein – severely weakened by UN disarmament efforts and comprehensive international sanctions – somehow constituted both "a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security" and was an "extreme danger to the world." Despite the absence of any "weapons of mass destruction" or offensive military capabilities, Biden when reminded of those remarks during an interview last year, replied, "That's right, and I was correct about that."
Biden Shepherds the War Authorization

It is difficult to over-estimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible. More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on August 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the America public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.

As Scott Ritter, the former chief UN weapons inspector, noted at the time, "For Sen. Biden's Iraq hearings to be anything more than a political sham used to invoke a modern-day Gulf of Tonkin resolution-equivalent for Iraq, his committee will need to ask hard questions – and demand hard facts – concerning the real nature of the weapons threat posed by Iraq."

It soon became apparent that Biden had no intention of doing so. Biden refused to even allow Ritter himself – who knew more about Iraq's WMD capabilities than anyone and would have testified that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament – to testify. Ironically, on Meet the Press last year, Biden defended his false claims about Iraqi WMDs by insisting that "everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them."

Biden also refused to honor requests by some of his Democratic colleagues to include in the hearings some of the leading anti-war scholars familiar with Iraq and Middle East. These included both those who would have reiterated Ritter's conclusions about non-existent Iraqi WMD capabilities as well as those prepared to testify that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would likely set back the struggle against al-Qaeda, alienate the United States from much of the world, and precipitate bloody urban counter-insurgency warfare amid rising terrorism, Islamist extremism, and sectarian violence. All of these predictions ended up being exactly what transpired.

Nor did Biden even call some of the dissenting officials in the Pentagon or State Department who were willing to challenge the alarmist claims of their ideologically-driven superiors. He was willing, however, to allow Iraqi defectors of highly dubious credentials to make false testimony about the vast quantities of WMD materiel supposedly in Saddam Hussein's possession. Ritter has correctly accused Biden of having "preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts and . . . using these hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq."
Supported an Invasion Before Bush

Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration's lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of "weapons of mass destruction" years before President George W. Bush even came to office.

As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of that oil rich country. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq's WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job. During Senate hearings on Iraq in September of that year, Biden told Ritter, "As long as Saddam's at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam's program relative to weapons of mass destruction."

Calling for military action on the scale of the Gulf War seven years earlier, he continued, "The only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone," telling the Marine veteran "it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down."

When Ritter tried to make the case that President Bill Clinton's proposed large-scale bombing of Iraq could jeopardize the UN inspections process, Biden condescendingly replied that decisions on the use of military force were "beyond your pay grade." As Ritter predicted, when Clinton ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in December of that year and followed up with a four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, Saddam was provided with an excuse to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. Biden then conveniently used Saddam's failure to allow them to return as an excuse for going to war four years later.
Biden's False Claims to Bolster War

In the face of widespread skepticism over administration claims regarding Iraq's military capabilities, Biden declared that President Bush was justified in being concerned about Iraq's alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Even though Iraq had eliminated its chemical weapons arsenal by the mid-1990s, Biden insisted categorically in the weeks leading up to the Iraq war resolution that Saddam Hussein still had chemical weapons. Even though there is no evidence that Iraq had ever developed deployable biological weapons and its biological weapons program had been eliminated some years earlier, Biden insisted that Saddam had biological weapons, including anthrax and that "he may have a strain" of small pox. And, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1998 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted Saddam was "seeking nuclear weapons."

Said Biden, "One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power." He did not believe proof of the existence of any actual weapons to dislodge was necessary, however, insisting that "If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late." He further defended President Bush by falsely claiming that "He did not snub the U.N. or our allies. He did not dismiss a new inspection regime. He did not ignore the Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation."

In an Orwellian twist of language designed to justify the war resolution, which gave President Bush the unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world at the time and circumstances of his own choosing, Biden claimed that "I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur."

It is also important to note that Biden supported an invasion in the full knowledge that it would not be quick and easy and that the United States would have to occupy Iraq for an extended period, declaring, "We must be clear with the American people that we are committing to Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after."
Biden's Current Position

In response to the tragic consequences of the U.S. invasion and the resulting weakening of popular support for the war, Biden has more recently joined the chorus of Democratic members of Congress criticizing the administration's handling of the conflict and calling for the withdrawal of most combat forces. He opposed President Bush's escalation ("surge") of troop strength early last year and has called for greater involvement by the United Nations and other countries in resolving the ongoing conflicts within Iraq.

However, Biden has been the principal congressional backer of a de facto partition of the country between Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia Arab segments, a proposal opposed by a solid majority of Iraqis and strongly denounced by the leading Sunni, Shia, and secular blocs in the Iraqi parliament. Even the U.S. State Department has criticized Biden's plan as too extreme. A cynical and dangerous attempt at divide-and-rule, Biden's ambitious effort to redraw the borders of the Middle East would likely make a violent and tragic situation all the worse.

Yet it is Biden's key role in making possible the congressional authorization of the 2003 U.S. invasion that elicits the greatest concern among Obama's supporters. While more recently expressing regrets over his vote, he has not formally apologized and has stressed the Bush administration's mishandling of the post-invasion occupation rather than the illegitimacy of the invasion itself.

Biden's support for the resolution was not simply poor judgment, but a calculated rejection of principles codified in the UN Charter and other international legal documents prohibiting aggressive wars. According to Article VI of the Constitution, such a rejection also constitutes a violation of U.S. law as well. Biden even voted against an amendment sponsored by fellow Democratic senator Carl Levin that would have authorized U.S. military action against Iraq if the UN Security Council approved the use of force and instead voted for the Republican-backed resolution authorizing the United States to go to war unilaterally. In effect, Biden has embraced the neo-conservative view that the United States, as the world's sole remaining superpower, somehow has the right to invade other countries at will, even if they currently pose no strategic threat.

Given the dangerous precedent set by the Iraq war resolution, naming one of its principal supporters as potentially the next vice president of the United States has raised serious questions regarding Senator Obama's commitment to international law. This comes at a time when the global community is so desperately hoping for a more responsible U.S. foreign policy following eight years of Bush.

Early in his presidential campaign, Obama pledged to not only end the war in Iraq, but to challenge the mindset that got the United States into Iraq in the first place. Choosing Biden as his running mate, however, raises doubts regarding Obama's actual commitment to "change we can believe in."


Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

MORE ON THE US PROPAGANDA AND THREATS VS. IRAN

This article by Noam Chomsky (as many others on his website) shows how ruthlessly corrupt, murderous and criminal the American media and political leadership is against Iran. Note in particular:

1. US General Lee Butler's reference to the dangers of Israel's ownership of perhaps hundreds of nuclear weapons, and the wilful disregard of this vital fact in the rhetoric of the US media and leadership, including Barack Obama who is quite willing to do 'everything in his power' to stop Iran's nuclear energy efforts.....

2. McCain's jokes about bombing Iran and killing Iranians.

3. The reckless dismissal by the American media and political leaders of the support for Iran's nuclear energy efforts by the majority of peoples in the world, American and non-American.

4. The blatant use of threats ("all options are on the table") in violation of the UN Charter.

5. The similar falsification of facts as was done in 2002-3 against Iraq, including references to Iran as a 'scary superpower' despite the Mossad's own appraisal of Iran as a 'paper tiger'; the claim that 'every intelligence agency' in the world has concluded that Iran is pursuing nuclear energy for weapons, when that claim is only by the Israelis, and even the US's own national intelligence estimate in 2007 had declared with 'high confidence' that Iran had abandoned its efforts for nuclear weapons....

6. Repeated plans by the Americans to attack or bomb Iran, and the commencement of American terrorist acts against Iran, euphemistically called 'covert ops'.

This article should leave no doubt about who the world's greatest war-criminals, terrorists and aggressors really are....






All options on the table?
Noam Chomsky
Khaleej Times, August 6, 2008
NUCLEAR threats and counter-threats are a subtext of our times, steadily, it seems, becoming more insistent. The July meeting in Geneva between Iran and six major world powers on Iran's nuclear programme ended with no progress.
The Bush administration was widely praised for having shifted to a more conciliatory stand -- namely, by allowing a US diplomat to attend without participating -- while Iran was castigated for failing to negotiate seriously. And the powers warned Iran that it would soon face more severe sanctions unless it terminated its uranium enrichment programs.

Meanwhile India was applauded for agreeing to a nuclear pact with the United States that would effectively authorise its development of nuclear weapons outside the bounds of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with US assistance in nuclear programmes along with other rewards -- in particular, to US firms eager to enter the Indian market for nuclear and weapons development, and ample payoffs to parliamentarians who signed on, a tribute to India's flourishing democracy.

Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Stimson Center and a leading specialist on nuclear threats, observed reasonably that Washington's decision to "place profits ahead of nonproliferation" could mean the end of the NPT if others follow its lead, sharply increasing the dangers all around.

During the same period, Israel, another state that has defied the NPT with Western support, conducted large-scale military manoeuvres in the eastern Mediterranean that were understood to be preparation for bombing Iran's nuclear facilities.

In a New York Times Op-Ed article, "Using Bombs to Stave Off War," the prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that Iran's leaders should welcome Israeli bombing with conventional weapons, because "the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland."

Purposely or not, Morris is reviving an old theme. During the 1950s, leading figures of Israel's governing Labor Party advised in internal discussion that "we will go crazy ("nishtagea") if crossed, threatening to bring down the Temple Walls in the manner of the first "suicide bomber," the revered Samson, who killed more philistines by his suicide than in his entire lifetime.

Israel's nuclear weapons may well harm its own security, as Israeli strategic analyst Zeev Maoz persuasively argues. But security is often not a high priority for state planners, as history makes clear. And the "Samson complex," as Israeli commentators have called it, can be flaunted to warn the master to carry out the desired task of smashing Iran, or else we'll inflame the region and maybe the world.

The "Samson complex," reinforced by the doctrine that "the whole world is against us," cannot be lightly ignored. Shortly after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which left some 15-20,000 killed in an unprovoked effort to secure Israel's control of the occupied territories, Aryeh Eliav, one of Israel's best-known doves, wrote that the attitude of "those who brought the 'Samson complex' here, according to which we shall kill and bury all the Gentiles around us while we ourselves shall die with them," is a form of "insanity" that was then all too prevalent, and still is.

US military analysts have recognised that, as Army Lt. Col. Warner Farr wrote in 1999, one "purpose of Israeli nuclear weapons, not often stated, but obvious, is their 'use' on the United States," presumably to ensure consistent U.S. support for Israeli policies -- or else.

Others see further dangers. Gen. Lee Butler, former commander-in-chief of the US Strategic Command, observed in 1999 that "it is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so." This fact is hardly irrelevant to concerns about Iran's nuclear programmes, but is off the agenda.

Also off the agenda is Article 2 of the UN Charter, which bars the threat of force in international affairs. Both US political parties insistently proclaim their criminality, declaring that "all options are on the table" with regard to Iran's nuclear programmes.

Some go beyond, like John McCain, joking about what fun it would be to bomb Iran and to kill Iranians, though the humour may be lost on the "unpeople" of the world, to borrow the term used by British historian Mark Curtis for those who do not merit the attention of the privileged and powerful.

Barack Obama declares that he would do "everything in my power" to prevent Iran from gaining the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. The unpeople surely understand that launching a nuclear war would be "in his power".

The chorus of denunciations of the New Hitlers in Teheran and the threat they pose to survival has been marred by a few voices from the back rooms. Former Mossad Chief Ephraim Halevy recently warned that an Israeli attack on Iran "could have an impact on us for the next 100 years."

An unnamed former senior Mossad official added, "Iran's achievement is creating an image of itself as a scary superpower when it's really a paper tiger" -- which is not quite accurate: The achievement should be credited to US-Israeli propaganda.

One of the participants in the July meetings was Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who outlined "the Arab position": "to work toward a political and diplomatic settlement under which Iran will maintain the right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes" but without nuclear weapons.

The "Arab position" is that of most Iranians, along with other unpeople. On July 30, the 120-member Nonaligned Movement reiterated its previous endorsement of Iran's right to enrich uranium in accord with the NPT.

Joining the unpeople is the large majority of Americans, according to polls. The American unpeople not only endorse Iran's right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes but also support the "Arab position" calling for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone in the entire region, a step that would sharply reduce major threats, but is also off the agenda of the powerful; unmentionable in electoral campaigns, for example.

Benny Morris assures us that "Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian programme is geared toward making weapons." As is well-known, the US National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 judged "with high confidence that in fall 2003, Teheran halted its nuclear weapons programme." It is doubtful, to say the least, that the intelligence agencies of every country of the NAM disagree.

Morris is presumably reporting information from an Israeli intelligence source -- which generalizes to "every intelligence agency" by the same logic that instructs us that Iran is defying "the world" by seeking to enrich uranium: the world apart from its unpeople.

There are rumblings in radical nationalist (so-called "neocon") circles that if Barack Obama wins the election, Bush-Cheney should bomb Iran, since the threat of Iran is too great to be left in the hands of a wimpish Democrat. Reports also have surfaced -- recently from Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker -- on US "covert operations" in Iran, otherwise known as international terrorism.

In June, Congress came close to passing a resolution (H. Con. Res. 362), strongly supported by the Israeli lobby, virtually calling for a blockade of Iran -- an act of war, that could have set off the conflagration that is greatly feared in the region and around the world. Pressures from the anti-war movement appear to have beaten back this particular effort, according to Mark Weisbrot at Alternet.org, but others are likely to follow.

The government of Iran merits severe condemnation on many counts, but the Iranian threat remains a desperate construction of those who arrogate to themselves the right to rule the world, and consider any impediment to their just rule to be criminal aggression. That is the primary threat that should concern us, as it concerns saner minds in the West, and the unpeople of the rest of the world.

TORSUN ARTICLE OF JULY 27, 2008 ON JUDICIAL IMMUNITY

ALAN SHANOFF'S ARTICLE DEFENDING JUDICIAL IMMUNITY

Mr. Shanoff raises the issue of judicial wrong-doing, but his argument in favor of judicial immunity is hardly convincing, perhaps on purpose. His recommendation for a 'Judicial Inquiries Compensation Fund' to compensate civil litigants who did not receive justice in civil cases is entirely laudatory, as this may provide some remedy – compensation – for those litigants who have been cheated out of what they should have got from the judicial process by judges who (as Mr. Shanoff puts it) may have acted 'negligently, with gross negligence, maliciously or corruptly (emphasis added).

There is no remedy currently to deal with judges who abuse their statutory authority by negligently or deliberately misrepresenting (really falsifying) the facts, law and case-law in civil cases (or criminal ones for that matter). As Mr. Shanoff knows or should know, the Judicial Council will only intervene if the judge has behaved improperly – example shown up drunk in court, or made a politically incorrect comment - and there too only when the complainant is or is backed by, a powerful interest group such as feminist or Jewish lobby groups.

The simple fact is that the Judicial Council is a public-relations organization created to protect the image of the judiciary, and not to correct or even limit injustice. I speak from personal experience that a complaint alleging judicial obstruction – the deliberate falsification of facts and law – will simply be dismissed by the Judicial Council on the grounds that 'it is not a Court'. (A shameless passing of the buck...on a flimsy technical excuse.)

And even appeal courts are very reluctant to overturn what they consider 'findings of fact' by lower courts, even if they may have been blatant falsifications. And when they do order new trials in certain cases, (which place additional burdens and delays on the already aggrieved litigants as Mr. Shanoff points out), there is no action taken against the judge(s) concerned. The judges are never held personally accountable and that is why they can and do continue to act 'negligently...maliciously or corruptly'.

In addition to police officers, doctors, engineers, lawyers 'or any other professional' who can currently be sued, today even 'sovereign immunity' has been removed. There is simply no justification for allowing judges this extraordinary and exclusive protection, especially given the high rate of 'miscarriages of justice' that have taken place and will continue to do so.

What Mr. Shanoff fails to acknowledge is that the simple threat of being sued and the ensuing publicity, would force judges to exercise greater diligence.

Removing judicial immunity would also have the additional benefit of resulting in a more equitable balance of power between the legal profession and the judiciary, which is currently so deferential that no lawyer would dare accuse a judge of falsifying facts or law. 

Our judges have not demonstrated honour, and are not worthy of such exclusive protection.

TURNING GAS-GUZZLING AMERICA AROUND

The drastic rise in oil prices which is expected to continue to at least $200/barrel (from the current $139) is going to force gut-wrenching changes in the American economy, as indeed in the world economy. Is this all a giant conspiracy to block the rise of 'Chindia' - the China-India phenomenon which is expected to dwarf the US economy in a few decades - by starving those two rising global powers of the oil needed for their enormous growth?

Apparently not. What seems to be the problem is that the world has reached the so-called ' topping-point' - the point at which half the world's proven oil reserves have been exhausted, after which - according to a geologist named Hubbert- world oil production will inevitably decline. Hubbert's 'Law' has already been proven to be correct in American oil-fields - once half-depleted - their output only declines...

Warnings about this crisis have been coming for decades but the inability of the existing oil producers to match the increase in demand caused by Chindia have finally lent credence to those pleas.

Unless the world moves away from its dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels which are now half-depleted - the topping-point having been reached in 2008 by one estimate - and makes massive investments in renewable energy from wind, tides, the sun..... as well as in nuclear, tar-sands and other options considered undesirable or costly.....drastic consequences can ensue....For example the awesome network of American highways and the great automobile industry and its derivatives......could - at least in theory - end up as abandoned and obsolete....as useless as dinosaur skeletons.

Similarly the world's greatest armed force - the American one - so heavily dependent on gasoline - could be severely handicapped - or be forced to become marauders for oil like those murderous gangsters in the Mad Max film series. Come to think of it - isn't that what the American armies already are...with their criminal occupation of Iraq and plans against Iran?

Oil-marauding has hardly proven to be cheap for America - they have already spent close to $1 trillion in Iraq according to Nobel-winning economist Stiglitz - and may have at least another trillion or two to spend/lose between domestic macro-economic effects and on health-care and disability for returning Iraq veterans. Perhaps the money is better spent on developing alternative energy...?

DISHONEST BROKER IN THE MIDEAST

There is no more hypocrital government than the USA....despite all the 'peace summits' the US does not really want the Palestinian question resolved. Their purpose is to use Israel's occupation of Palestine as an excuse to be in the region - directly as in military bases in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, but also indirectly through the massive ($4 billion annual) 'aid' to Israel - to keep their rapacious hands on the Grand Prize - the oil in the region.

But a massive armed robbery of Arab and Iranian oil does not make for a good cover story - delivering the Jews their 'promised land' is a much better option, and one which sells easily to the Christian fundamentalists and Bible-thumpers in America, who nonetheless remain convinced that the ultimate destination of the Jews is an altogether different one from those few blood-stained miles in the desert..... Go figure....

Just how massive is the aid to Israel? As comparison, the US gives the entire continent of Africa - perhaps the poorest region in the world - $5 billion annually.

For a fully researched analysis with overwhelming proofs, check out Noam Chomsky's writings, particularly 'Fateful Triangle'. Despite capitulations on virtually every issue by the desperate Palestinians, the American-Israeli 'axis of evil' have defeated every attempt by them to achieve any state - even one that is 'tiny, disarmed, fragmented, and utterly dominated by Israel'.

By ruthlessly defeating the Palestinian moderates who want peace at almost any cost, the Americans and Israelis themselves have fostered and provoked radical reactions from the Palestinians. This has in turn allowed them to retaliate in incomparably worse fashion, while continuing to delude the world that Palestinian 'terrorism' and suicide-bombings are the reason there is no settlement in the region.

Iran is the bad guy because it defies this deceitful American-Israeli policy.....like Saddam Hussein did.