'A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.'

[Octafish]

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.



Wall Street Lapel Pin

Consider what Congreff and the (P)residents have been doing with all those trillions:

Allow former Senator and UBS Vice Chairman Phil Gramm to take advantage of a deregulatory tax policy favoring the rich at the expense of the middle classes and poor he spearheaded into law.

Bailing out Wall Street, part of a fiscal policy favoring the rich warmongers at the expense of the middle classes and poor.

Totally insane NAZI foreign policy, basically how empires “make ends meet,” is visible in two illegal, immoral and unnecessary wars.

With the treatment afforded Gov. Don Siegelman by the Department of Justice, I’d say it safe to say we live under a NAZI domestic policy, as well.

I smell sulfur. Those unsure of what they smell will want to remember another adage from Solzhenitsyn:

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”

[snagglepuss]

1. K & R nt

[Octafish]

5. Power and the Semantics of Terrorism

I don't like terrorism, no matter the source. From Covert Action Information Bulletin:

Power and the Semantics of Terrorism

By Edward S. Herman
Covert Action Quarterly 26, Summer 1986

For the average citizen of the West, the idea of the United States as a sponsor of international terrorism ‑ let alone the dominant sponsor1 ‑ would appear utterly incomprehensible. After all, one reads daily that the United States is leading the charge against something it calls "terrorism," and it regularly assails its allies for dragging their feet in responding to terrorism. On the other hand, the U.S. government has organized a mercenary army to attack Nicaragua, and even provided it with a printed manual of recommended acts of sabotage and murder, which has been implemented by the proxy army, at the cost of well over a thousand Nicaraguan civilian lives. The U.S. government has given unstinting support to the apartheid government of South Africa, which has invaded, and organized its own mercenary armies, to subvert a string of frontline states, again at the cost of many thousands of civilian lives.2 The western media, however, never refer to the United States or South Africa as "terrorist states," even though both of them have killed vastly greater numbers than Qaddafi or the Red Brigades.3

The reason for the western misperception is that the powerful define terrorism, and the western media loyally follow the agenda of their own leaders. The powerful naturally define terrorism to exclude their own acts and those of their friends and clients.

"If I don't like it, call it terrorism."

The current administration in Washington has found it possible arbitrarily to designate any group or country which it opposes as "terrorist," and this will be transmitted to the public by the mass media without serious criticism or laughter. In his speech before the American Bar Association on July 8, 1985, President Reagan named five states as engaging in serious state terrorism‑North Korea, Libya, Iran, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The Soviet Union was presumably omitted because of the upcoming Summit meeting. The media reported that Syria had been spared as "a gesture of gratitude" to President Assad for his role in negotiating the release of 39 U.S. hostages in Lebanon!4 The press failed to discuss the fact that South Africa and Guatemala (among others) were omitted, that Nicaragua does not murder its own citizens as South Africa and Guatemala have done on a large scale, and that Nicaragua has not invaded other countries or organized subversive forces to destabilize other countries, as South Africa has done in many places and as the United States does quite openly to Nicaragua itself. The ludicrousness and hypocrisy of the United States calling Nicaragua a terrorist state was entirely unnoticed and without effect on the objective reporting by the U.S. press. With a compliant mass media, especially in the United States but also among its clients, terror is what the powerful U.S. government declares to be terror. As it is now using the concept with audacious and arbitrary abandon, it is employing the "If I don't like it, call it terrorism" definition of terrorism.

Exclusion of State Terrorism: Retail Versus Wholesale Terror

In its semantic manipulation of terrorism and related words, a number of devices are used by the United States and its intellectual spokespersons to differentiate friends and self from "terrorists." Perhaps the most important is to confine the use of the word to non‑state actors and actions; i.e., to define terrorism as the use of violence to oppose governments.5 This departs from standard and traditional usage, according to which terrorism is a mode of governing as well as of opposing governments by means of intimidation.6

By excluding governments, South Africa, Guatemala, and Israel are removed from the category of terrorist, while the African National Congress (ANC), rebel groups in Guatemala, and the PLO are automatically eligible. This is grotesque in terms of both numbers of victims and forms of violence employed by state and non‑state intimidators,7 but it is extremely convenient in terms of western priorities and interests. The governments protected by this word usage are allies, clients, and self; the groups automatically made "terrorists" oppose these clients and western defense of the status quo.8

To focus more sharply on the absurdity of this definitional system, I use the concepts of "retail" and "wholesale" terror: Dissident individuals and groups kill on a retail basis (that is, on a small scale, with limited technological resources to kill, and with small numbers of victims); states kill wholesale. This fairly obvious but neglected point is displayed dramatically on Table 1, which compares the numbers killed by state and non-state terrorists in recent decades. It can be quickly observed that single incidents of state terrorism frequently involve many more killings than multi‑year totals for non‑state terrorists (not to speak of the vastly greater numbers allocable to state terrorists on a multi‑year basis). In fact, one can see from this table that the multi‑year aggregates for the Baader‑Meinhof gang (a part of row 1), the Red Brigades (only a part of the relatively small Italian total on row 2),9 and the PLO (row 3) ‑ bogeymen of the western media‑even when taken together fall short of the totals for single episodes of violence by South Africa, El Salvador, and Israel. The table suggests that if we were to allow state (wholesale) terror to be included in our definition of terror and give it attention remotely proportional to numbers, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Israel and the United States itself would be pushed to center stage,10 the Red Brigades and PLO would recede to the background. But this would not conform to the demands of western power.

CONTINUED...

http://covertaction.org//content/view/167/75/

If only We the People had listened, back then, how different things would be today. Then, again, if only We'd heard.

Words! What a concept.

[Cleita]

2. K&R

[Octafish]

7. Even before 9-11, there always was money available for Wall Street and Warmongers...

The downside of peace, according to a small and wealthy minority, is there's no money in it.

Pentagon Spending Spree

The Wartime Opportunists on High Alert

by William Hartung
Multinational Monitor magazine, November 2001

Despite repeated assertions by President Bush and his top advisers that their global campaign against terrorism will be a "new kind of war," the biggest recipients of the new weapons spending sparked by the September 11 attacks will be the usual suspects: big defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Once emergency anti-terror funding and supplemental appropriations to finance the war in Afghanistan are taken into account, this year's Pentagon budget could hit $375 billion, a $66 billion increase over last year.

Most of this new funding will be used to bankroll long-standing pet projects of the military-industrial lobby, not to finance equipment or techniques designed for the fight against terrorism. As one Pentagon official told Defense News, much of the initial anti-terror funding "will have nothing to do with retaliation in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. The funding will go to the wish lists for things we'll have several years from now."

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD

The arms industry's biggest agenda item of recent years - a massive, across-the-board increase in military spending-has taken a giant leap forward in the wake of September 11. In October 2000, in the stretch run of the presidential campaign, the National Defense Industrial Association joined with other arms industry trade groups and the corporate-backed Center for Security Policy to finance a full page ad in USA Today touting a "4 percent solution" to the nation's defense needs. Their "solution" involved jacking up the Pentagon budget from 3 percent of gross domestic product to 4 percent, which would involve an unprecedented peacetime increase of $100 billion. The industry's rallying cry has since been taken up by the Project for a New American Century, a right-wing think tank founded by conservative luminary William Kristol of the Weekly Standard.

Candidate George W. Bush's hard-line rhetoric on defense issues raised high hopes among defense contractors. The industry rallied behind the Republican ticket, giving more than four times as much to the Bush campaign as they donated to Al Gore's presidential bid, and favoring Republican candidates for Congress by almost a two-to-one margin. But Bush dashed the arms makers' hopes for a quick payoff in February 2001 when he announced that he would not seek additional increases in Pentagon spending beyond those already recommended by the outgoing Clinton administration until Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had completed a comprehensive review of U.S. military strategy.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/PentagonSpendingSpree.html

Old news to you, my Friend. Something most Americans have never given too much thought towards, it seems.

[leftstreet]

3. K&R

The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
John Hay 1872

[Octafish]

9. Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict JFK's Assassins Has Led To Today's Crisis of Democracy

Wisdom from Joan Mellen:

How the Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict President Kennedy's Assassins
Has Led To Today's Crisis Of Democracy

BY JOAN MELLEN
January 24, 2006
Lecture Delivered at the Ethical Culture Society, New York City

http://nysoundposse.com/2006/01/event-who-planned-murder-of-jfk-who.html

The last time I was in this room was for the memorial service of a distinguished American author, J. Anthony Lukas, who wrote “Common Ground,” about race and class in Boston. During the course of his career, Tony came into conflict with an institution that I will discuss this evening, “The New York Times.”

“A Farewell To Justice” is about the Kennedy assassination. It opens as a biography of Jim Garrison, district attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, who remains the only public official ever to have brought anyone before the bar of justice for participation in the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. Garrison assumed that role when he discovered that the person framed for the crime, a low-level intelligence agent named Lee Harvey Oswald, resided in his jurisdiction between April and September of 1963. The Biblical metaphor is inevitable: that great harlot city New Orleans, destroyed by flood, with, among its many sins, incubating the Kennedy assassination.

After his suspect Clay Shaw was acquitted, Shaw the man whom the new evidence reveals was a CIA operative guilty of participating in the implementation of the murder of President Kennedy, Garrison was asked how he imagined that he could convict someone of conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy in a Louisiana state court. Garrison said: “I guess I thought I was living in the country I was born in.” He wasn't and we aren't.

I would like to suggest that the truth about the Kennedy assassination, far from being a matter of interest only to historians, and not even to most of them, will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people as respectable as New York attorney Martin Garbus are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. It's my belief that the present state of our political culture is a direct result of the fact that those responsible for the murder of President Kennedy have never been brought to justice.


To sum up: “A Farewell To Justice” suggests that the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination - that's easy to demonstrate from the four million documents now residing at the National Archives - but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty, this extraordinary fact, has been integrated over these forty-two years into the body politic. It has produced a political culture where the unthinkable has become accepted practice. Meaningful freedom of the press has fallen into serious jeopardy.

For a flagrant example of what we have come to, we might revisit the scantily reported exchange on December 1st (2005) between Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel and John Yoo, a former deputy assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, a participant in the writing of the Patriot Act, and now a Berkeley law professor.

The subject of the debate was the illegal expansion of presidential powers.

Professor Cassel asks, “If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?” And Yoo answers, “No treaty.”

Cassel follows up: “Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.” And Yoo replies, “I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.”

If Professor Cassel's hypothetical question seems melodramatic, we have Martin Garbus, alarmed by the twin expansion of Presidential and police powers, writing in the “New York Observer”: “This country is approaching a dangerous turning point,” and suggesting that the United States today bears some similarities to Weimar Germany where liberal democracy was not able to contend with the fascist onslaught.

In Miami a few weeks ago I was struck by the omnipresence, on the streets and restaurants, of police officers from a variety of law enforcement agencies. Famously, Benjamin Franklin replied to a question of whether this new land should be a monarchy or a republic with the line, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

What begins as surveillance moves to wiretapping, then COINTELPRO tricks, and finally to murder - a diagram of what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and why the illegal NSA surveillance is so alarming.

We have not been aided in understanding the meaning of the Kennedy assassination by the continued public silence of those closest to President Kennedy. One day I requested of Wilmer Thomas, one of Jim Garrison's law school classmates (Tulane School of Law, Class of 1949) to ask his acquaintance, Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom he believed was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Professor Schlesinger observed, quietly, “We were at war with the National Security people.”


That the CIA at its highest levels exacted its revenge on President Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963. A Gallup poll on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2003 found that twice as many people believed that the CIA was implicated in the assassination as there were who accepted the official fiction that Oswald had acted alone.

In 1963, people were already worried abut the CIA's extraordinary use of its powers. In the “New York Times,” Arthur Krock wrote in October 1963 that if ever there would be a coup in the United States, it “would come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.” The CIA, Krock wrote, was a “malignancy” on the body politic. It is difficult to imagine such words being printed in the “Times” today, so profoundly has our freedom of the press eroded since the time of the Kennedy assassination.

After the death of President Kennedy, ex-President Harry S. Truman, under whose watch the CIA was created in 1947, wrote on the front page of the “Washington Post,” that the CIA had been running a “shadow government,” becoming “operational.” Brazenly, Allen Dulles at one point even told a reporter to think of the CIA as “the State Department for unfriendly countries.” The CIA's policy-making also involved interference in the electoral process in Italy and France, funneling money to certain political parties - in Italy it was the Christian Democrats whom the CIA funded in an effort to prevent a coalition of socialists and Communists from taking power. The assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was connected to that CIA campaign.

At the time of the assassination, Charles de Gaulle remarked that John F. Kennedy, whom he admired, had died as a result of an intra-government conflict, a situation not uncommon in many countries. The documentation available since the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 overwhelmingly supports de Gaulle's view.

The rubber-stamping of the Warren Report by the press in 1964 seems to mark the moment when the mainstream press became “embedded” in official versions of events. Traces of that process have surfaced. In April 1967 the CIA issued a memo (available at the National Archives) instructing friendly reporters on how to reply to challenges to the Warren Report, recommendations that have resurfaced in the past few years in a renewed set of attacks on Jim Garrison, a decade after his death.

So it should come as no surprise that the “New York Times” for a year covered up the National Security Agency domestic surveillance of citizens with rubber-stamped search warrants issued under a “Foreign Intelligence Services Act” (FISA) run by the Pentagon, or with no warrants at all. Only when their own reporter was about to publish a book detailing the evidence did the “Times” run that story. It should be horrifying that the Congressional debate about the Patriot Act has not been over whether there should be such a government capability, but how long it should be extended.

CONTINUED...

http://www.joanmellen.net/NYC_2006article.html

Thank you, leftstreet. I very much appreciate you reminding us what President Lincoln's contemporary observed.

[autorank]

4. Beautiful k*r n/t

[Octafish]

13. The Terrorism Industry

We wuz warned, although I don't recall seeing this in The New York Times or on the ABCNNBCBSFixedNutNoiseworks.

Book Review:

The Terrorism Industry

By Jane Hunter
Covert Action Quarterly
#35, Fall, 1990

The "Terrorism" Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror by Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).

EXCERPT...

The terror industry's aim is not statistical or semantic accuracy. Launched in the late 1970s, it was all about fostering a climate; manufacturing a consensus that would permit the West to kill with even greater abandon.

The authors explain how the terrorologists are subsidized by institutions established to promote their own interests, among them: the RAND Corporation, sustained by military contracts; the Center for Strategic and International Studies, funded by corporations and rightwing foundations; the International Security Council, a front for the Unification Church (the Moonies); the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, which is attached to Tel Aviv University, but (as this reviewer learned when it was revealed during a Canadian immigration court hearing) gets consulting contracts from the Israeli government.

These quasi‑academic settings confer a patina of respectability on the terrorologists, who come not from academe but from intelligence agencies, the military, and the fringes of the far Right. The fancy imprimaturs on their publications help to conceal the fact that they are largely buttressed with citations of work by fellow terrorologists ‑which is often fraudulent.

Claire Sterling's trailblazing propagation of a Moscow-dominated world‑wide terror network and the Bulgarian "plot" to kill Pope John Paul II were based largely on CIA disinformation and forgeries. Before he was "parked" at the RAND Corporation, where he pushed the Bulgarian hoax, Paul Henze, say the authors, was a CIA propaganda specialist.

The industry's assertion (never mind that it was widely debunked) that the U.S.S.R. was the coordinator of international terrorism bolstered the massive Reagan military buildup. At the RAND Corporation, Brian Jenkins, a Green Beret turned terrorologist, co‑authored a report recommending "low intensity conflict" against Nicaragua through a proxy army. The terrorologists who helped Israel push the notion that the PLO (and Arabs in general) was synonymous with terrorism howled for action against "terrorist states" in the Middle East. Libya was bombed. The phony Iranian hit squad scare of 1981 buttressed proponents of domestic repression.

SNIP...

The national media outlets that the terrorologists attack as "liberal" receive them as academics, allowing them to make their outrageous assertions without facing challengers. This access to the corporate media, contend the authors, has enabled the terrorologists, to "validate themselves by echoing one another in an information market which they dominate."

Not only do the terrorologists sell fear, many of them also sell its putative antidotes. Herman and O'Sullivan cite examples of some who run consultancies providing "risk assessment" and others with links to the private "security" firms which specialize in protective services and union busting. Thus, these exemplars of the private sector have a vested interest in "menace inflation."

CONTINUED...

http://covertaction.org//content/view/153/75/

Happy New Years to You and Yours, Mr. Collins!

[glitch]

6. That is one of the most perfect pictures I have ever seen.

Wall Street has captured our flag and shot it up with steroids.

[Octafish]

14. The letters o'er the portal are gilded in gold.

Inspiration for the association of flag and business comes from MR, one of Detroit's finest actors.

[glitch]

15. Reality out-performs fiction every time.

Well, in tragedy and dark comedy anyway. Fiction may still rule in slapstick. Maybe.

[phasma ex machina]

8. Shades of Crassus.

[Soylent Brice]

10. K&R

[Echo In Light]

11. K&R

[HCE SuiGeneris]

12. Recommended.

Too damn true.

[varelse]

16. K&R

[Gabi Hayes]

17. Smedley Butler covered another side of the same coin with his quote of

many decades ago:



http://www.liverpooltimes.net/2008/06/22/9-british-soldiers-killed-so-far-this-month-in-afghanistan-war-racket/

[johnaries]

18. Not always true. Read Sun-tzu "The Art of War".

War can and has been used for domestic oppression, as we as a Country have experienced and anyone who has read Orwell should be aware of.

But, just as often, war has been imposed from without.

Granted, things would have been much different today if the US had not previously "meddled" in the Mid-East. We supported the sadistic, ruthless Shah of Iran which led to revolution. We placed Saddam in power in order to "check" Iran. It could be said that we created this nightmare.

Well, not really "we", but our fathers and grandfathers. And not even them, but ruthless people that deceived our fathers and grandfathers into believing them.

And now, the sins of the fathers are visited upon us.

But those seeking power need an "enemy" to rally their troops and coalesce their power. Bush did this with Saddam. But prior to that, Osama bin Laden did it with the "Great Satan", America. And not only al-Qaeda but the Taliban rallied behind him, because his rallying cry increased their power.

And so, innocent people were murdered.

The difference between "them" and "us" is that we target the combatants. They target the innocent.

Granted, that wasn't true with with the Bush Administration. Thank God we have a Leader who has a conscience, now.

Iraq was a mistake. The invasion of Iraq was wrong, and evil.

However, attacking those who have killed so many innocents and have proudly announced they intend to kill more and trying to thwart their murderous intent is more than justified - it is necessary.

To protect the innocent requires a multi-faceted approach. Diplomacy and so-called "police actions" are required. But, so is military action.

As distasteful and even evil as war is, it is sometimes necessary.

[G_j]

19. yep

got that right

[EFerrari]

20. And remember Negroponte handing out SEC wavers in 2006?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=5118451

[amborin]

21. agree! (already recommended this)

[G_j]

22. K