By the light of a burning bridge: A permanent goodbye to the U.S.

[donsu]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1120.shtml




“Sometimes you get your best light from a burning bridge” – Don Henley, “My Thanksgiving”

August 16th 2006, 11:45 AM – CARACAS – It was about a week before I left the United States forever that I watched Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tell Charlie Rose something all of us already know in our hearts. “Today,” he said, “the United States is hated around the world far worse than it was at the height of the Vietnam War.” I remember the Vietnam War. I will never forget it.

-snip-

Now it seems the American people won’t even risk their credit ratings, student loans, the next piece of ass, or a sideways glance from people who look at them like AIDS patients for daring to deviate from the corporate, media-instilled norm. We have come a long way backward. Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along” has become the modern day theme song for the surrender of America’s character, and the L.A. Rebellion of 1992 was probably the last flame of will to fight injustice in American history.

This new quiescence comes at a time when US crimes are far worse and more far-reaching than they were in 1970; certainly in the eyes of the world. In 2001 the US government both facilitated and executed the attacks of 9/11 against its own people, killing thousands of its citizens as an excuse to launch a neo-imperial conquest for energy. A few Americans held small rallies, organized some ineffective groups, bought a few hundred thousand books and DVDs, listened to a few radio programs and lectures, and then quietly lined up to have their bags, emails, credit histories, minds and bodies searched. Critical mass was never achieved as Executive Orders along with the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts shredded the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments to our Bill of Rights.

-snip-

My country is dead. Its people have surrendered to tyranny, and in so doing, they have become tyranny’s primary support group; its base constituency; its chief defender. Every day they offer their endorsement of tyranny by banking in its banks and spending their borrowed money with the corporations that run it. The great Neocon strategy of George H.W. Bush has triumphed. Convince the American people that they can’t live without the “good things,” then sit back and watch as they endorse the progressively more outrageous crimes you commit as you throw them bones with ever-less meat on them. All the while, lock them into debt. Destroy the middle class, the only political base that need be feared. Make them accept, because of their own shared guilt, ever-more repressive police state measures. Do whatever you want.

No amount of mind control spin can absolve any of us from acknowledging this ugly truth about the US and its crimes today. It lurks invisibly behind every corporate news broadcast, every commercially-made television show, every infomercial, every new magazine ad, and almost every new popular song that leads Americans deeper into ever-less-satisfying consumption, self-indulgence and debt. It stands grinning behind every report on the world’s rapacious financial markets and every new automobile, shampoo, or other product that promises to give the world larger and more potent sexual organs, bigger (more ridiculous) breasts, a better love life, and peace of mind.
-snip-
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yes, our country is dead - murdered by stealth

where are the homicide cops? bound and gagged, stuffed in a closet?

[LARED]

1. See'ya later, bye, Sniff

Michael Ruppert will not be missed

[chaska]

2. Yes, he will.

[donsu]

3. yes he will

nt

[SpiralHawk]

4. yes he will

nt

[Deja Q]

6. I agree. His whole letter seems disingenuous...

Never mind that he of all people would be let out by Homeland Security, that strikes me as odd.

But then, I am odd. :rofl:

[NoPasaran]

5. Don't let the door hit your paranoid, yellow ass!

Scratch one drama queen.

[seemslikeadream]

7. he'll be missed

Winds of ChangeWinds of ChangeTroubled Waters Ahead for the Neo-Cons
by
Wayne Madsen
The Bush-Cheney campaign is racing toward November.But it isn't only running toward the raw power it loves. It's running away from the punishment it fears. In this late-breaking story, FTW's Wayne Madsen maps out the lines of force in the current Plame and Chalabi scandals,showing them to be nodes of interpersonal influence andcompromise that may soon crack the administration inhalf. The neocons' dark alliance with the right wing of Is-raeli politics has brought them enormous power. But it's unstable power, vulnerable to legal sanction and dueprocess at the right pressure points. As Watergateproved decades ago, even a dying legal infrastructurecan still throw a few jabs once in a while - if the CIA wants it to. --JAH]August 11, 2004 0800 PDT (FTW) - The winds that havefavored the neo-cons and their political and financial masters since George W. Bush's ascension to powermay now be turning against them at gale force strength.There is a reason why Richard Perle and his American Enterprise Institute (AEI) friends, including "Second Lady" Lynne Cheney and former Reagan National Secu-rity Council staffer Michael Ledeen, were uncomfortablewhen Iraq con man and Iraqi Governing Council memberAhmed Chalabi's offices in Baghdad were raided thispast May by Iraqi police, FBI and CIA officers. The Bagh-dad money trail may soon lead to Washington, DC. The sinewy links between the neo-cons, Ariel Sharon's Likud government, and the Chalabis should be a definite cause for concern by some Bush administration officials, andparticularly troubling for Mrs. Cheney, who reportedly sits upon a $125,000 AEI fellowship funded by Likud Party interests. The Chalabi files recovered by U.S. intelligence and lawenforcement provided enough information for the FBI tobegin a criminal investigation of a Baghdad-Jerusalem-Washington syndicate that is profiteering from America'smisguided invasion and occupation of Iraq. The investi-gation led to shadowy Israeli-owned firms registered in Delaware and Panama that were fraudulently obtaining contracts and sub-contracts to provide everything from cellular phones and VIP security to the interrogation ofIraqi prisoners using seconded members of Israel'sfeared Unit 1391 "special techniques" interrogation cen-ter. Not only were these firms operating in Iraq with theconcurrence of the neo-cons in the Pentagon but some U.S. government officials were personally benefiting from the contracts.(Cont’d on page 7)Any story, originally published in From The Wilderness more than thirty days old may be reprinted in its entirety, non-commercially, if, and only if, the author’s name remains attached and the followingstatement appears. “Reprinted with permission, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilder-ness Publications, www.copvcia.com, P.O Box 6061 – 350, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413, [phone]. FTW is published monthly; annual subscriptions are $65 per year.” THIS WAIVER DOES NOT APPLY TO PUBLICATION OF NEWBOOKS. For reprint permission for “for profit” publication, please contact FTW. For Terms and conditions on subscriptions and the From the Wilder-ness website, please see our website at: www.fromthewilderness.comor send a self-addressed stamped envelope with the request to the above address.
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Page -3- (Cont’d from page 1) In the past three weeks, Jimmy Carter's former nationalsecurity advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has been making the interview circuit to inaugurate a high level resistanceto the apparent intent of the Bush administration to es-calate - perhaps even to the point of armed aggression -its demonstrated hostility toward Iran. The emerging fight between the "realists" and the neo-cons will only serve to further muddy the waters on the question of what the neocons are up to… and what therealists are up to as well. The so-called 9/11 Commission report, that has shame-lessly identified the wrong scoundrels (the intelligence agencies) for the September 11 attacks (since they arealready the goats for Iraq intelligence "failures"), is amirror image of the obfuscation now being generated by the realist-neocon debate. In every case, these publicexchanges are designed to camouflage the real forces behind US policies. The US already has a track record for regime change in Iran, when the CIA orchestrated a coup d'etat against Mohammed Mossdegh. Most political history buffs know this story, and the American Left is quick to cite it as a kind of passion play to demonstrate official hypocrisy onthe question of democracy. But like many anecdotal ac-counts of history, this ignores a larger process and itobscures the relation of class forces that were the pri-mary actors in many of these dramas. This essay will try to trace not only the development of a uniquely US imperialism and the danger that system faces in the present conjuncture, amplified and acceler-ated by its engagement in Southwest Asia, but the inter-play of Anglo-American relations throughout the 20thCentury that accounts for the Bush-Blair relation we see today. Iran is former Persia, and it is inhabited primarily by people who consider themselves Persians. This ethno-cultural group is to be specifically contrasted with Arabs, as I will explain. Persian civilization, like all "Old World" societies, underwent a series of often violent transfor-mations that eventually led to a somewhat stable com-munity that shared a language and a culture. Persians had their own religion, Zoroastrianism, which enduredas the state religion until the mid 7th Century, whenArab armies swept over Persia and forced the conver-sion to Islam. Nevertheless, the Persians amalgamatedtheir own distinct beliefs into Islam, creating a heterodox form of the religion as a cultural weapon against the op-pressive Arab rulers. That form became Shia. And while the Persians adopted the Arabic script, they reclaimed their own language, an Indo-European tongue (related to a wide range of languages from India to Ireland - in-cluding English) which we now call Farsi.In the 19th Century Great Britain established itself in Iran, when the venal Qajar monarchy parceled Iran out to foreign con-cessionaires at fire sale prices. The first British interest to gain a foothold there was the British Tobacco Com-pany. The other great nation that coveted Iran was Rus-sia, and it invaded Iran in 1826 seeking a warm waterport to its south. In 1856, Great Britain attacked Iran andforced her to surrender what is now Afghanistan. Throughout the second half of the 19th Century, GreatBritain and Russia would share Iran. It was at the turn of the century, in 1900, that a Britishcompany would stake its claim on a comparatively minorcommodity, the petroleum of Southwest Iran, whichwould in short order become the most important com-modity in the world. That company was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Russians had begun taking oil from the north, around Baku. With the introduction of the automobile, the airplane, and mechanized warfare, by the time World War I broke out, Iran had captured the interest of the all the GreatGamesmen. Russian and British interests converged ina combined struggle against the Ottoman Turks, whoalso shared a border with Iran and were equally covet-ous of Iranian oil. In 1920, an Iranian cavalry officer, Reza Shah, led arebellion against the Qajar dynasty, and five years later Reza crowned himself. This was troublesome but not critical to the British and the Russians… yet. Between the two world wars, however, Reza opened upseveral new trade partnerships. One was with Germany.By the time World War II broke out, over half of Iran'strade was with Germany, now controlled by Hitler's NaziParty. Reza had embarked on an industrialization pro-gram to more effectively exploit Iran's oil, and most of its new machinery was German. Iran declared itself neutral in WWII, but the reality wasthat the British needed the oil, and the now-Soviet Unionneeded the warm water port and a rail line to receivesupplies from the Americans and English, and both Sta-lin and Churchill had strong reasons to doubt the neu-trality of Reza, so the British and the Soviets conducteda concurrent military occupation of Iran in 1941, that lasted through all of WWII. This led to deep consternation in the United States, which, while allied with the Soviets and the British, had designs of its own - not the least of which was the Brit-ish Empire itself. The US, as the dominant financial part-ner in the Allied enterprise, prevailed on Britain and the USSR to accept Reza's son (whom the British and
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Page -4- Goldner, "to transform politics into management by ex-perts." They set about exposing a host of social ills that afflicted the various sectors of their emerging base -poor southern whites, western farmers, and northern industrial workers - and offered federal solutions. This was the policy essence of the New Deal. Its political essence was the control-driven bureaucratization of the Democratic Party in or-der to protect it from undue grassroots pressure. In foreign policy, these technocrats preferred this jujitsu to the karate of the gunboat, too. That didn't mean they were averse to military power projection, but they weresensitive to the ebb and flow of international power poli-tics and they understood that sometimes you bend soyou don't break. In today's inescapably international, interdependent world, isolationism is no longer an option. But the pre-disposition of the federalist technocrats - like Brzezinski - is to move through the room without breaking theChina (no pun intended). There is still a strong apprecia-tion of the danger lurking in the grassroots. This is the danger that they believe the neocons - who haveadopted Jeffersonian decentralism for their racist do-mestic agendas - are ignoring. On that account, they may be right.At any rate, the technocratic tradition was inherited by Harry Truman after the war, where it was combined withthe emerging Cold War in Iran. Shah Pahlavi became the unquestioned autocrat of Iran after the Soviet withdrawal in 1946. He presided overtwo nations. One was the semi-feudal countryside, where the Majlis - the big landowners - subjected mil-lions of peasants. The other was a growing urban Iran, where the oil business was articulating its own industrial proletariat. In 1949, Mao Zedong stunned the world when his Peo-ple's War succeeded in seizing state power over themost populous nation in the world, even in the face of massive US assistance to Mao's nemesis, Chiang Kai-shek. Truman's advisors noted that the system and con-ditions that engendered the Chinese Revolution weresimilar in many respects to the situation in Iran, and that Iranian industrial workers were filling the ranks of the Tudeh, the new Iranian communist party. They advised - being veteran technocrat federalists - assistance formodernization and land reform. But Truman was so spellbound by the phenomenon in China that he stag-gered into a proxy war with the Chinese on the Koreanpeninsula only a year later. The Iranians were in fact watching China, and the resis-tance to the Shah accelerated. Soviets had themselves appointed as a figurehead) as the legitimate post-war ruler of Iran, and secured the promise of both occupiers that they would dismantletheir military presence there upon cessation of hostili-ties. The British left immediately after the war, and the suspi-cious Russians (for good reason, as it turned out) hungon until 1946, when they too departed.The Roosevelt administration that oversaw the entry intoWorld War II was a new government imbued with a newphilosophy of capitalist imperial governance. It's impor-tant to digress for a moment to describe that philosophy,because it goes to the heart of the tension between theneocons and the realists today. From 1860 until 1933, the Republican Party dominated American politics. This was a period of the rapid expan-sion of national capitalism. The Civil War not only brokethe political power of the formerly predominant slave-holding South, it engendered a period of rapid techno-logical innovation alongside the concentration of capital into the first big US corporations. Its ideology was lais-sez faire, and its practice was expansion, economic andterritorial. This resulted in rapid industrialization, which led to inevi-table conflicts between capitalists and labor. It was no accident, for example, that the military occupation of theSouth that was Reconstruction was officially ended in the same year, 1877, that the US saw its first wave ofnationwide strikes. This open class antagonism lasted all the way into the first year of the FDR administration. The Republican Party was the party of labor suppres-sion, but also the party identified with manumission and Reconstruction; they were centralizers, identifying them-selves with Hamiltonian federalism; and they tended tosupport a strong and activist central government. The Democratic Party was avowedly white supremacist, andidentified with the more decentralist South, which hadassociated the struggle to preserve Slavery with "states rights," the more Jeffersonian political tradition. A challenge to both parties erupted in the 1890s with the Populist movement, which in the South even forged po-litical alliances between Black Republicans and white Populists, the Fusionists. This movement was violently suppressed in the South by the Democrats, including a virtual coup d'etat against a Fusion government in North Carolina in 1898. This led to the development of an elite political move-ment of "progressive" federalists who sought to containthe turbulence of grassroots politics, and to co-opt social movements. These "reformers" included Franklin Roo-sevelt. Their philosophy was, in the words of Loren
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Page -5- This was a top-down program of reform called the White (as opposed to Red) Revolution. Land reform was im-plemented, and there was massive improvement in health and (secular, male/female) universal education. This led to ten years of relative stability, that blunted the nationalist charges of "US puppet" that continued tocome from the Tudeh on the left, and from the anti-modernization clerics on the right, one of whom was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Richard Nixon took office in 1968, inheriting the hair-raising collapse of the US Treasury Department's goldreserves and the unwinnable war in Vietnam that hadcaused it. In 1969, the Nixon administration started hinting to key allies that US oil production was about to peak and then go into irreversible decline. This and the destruction of the gold pool had everyone's thinking caps on, and the one weapon that the US had in its economic arsenalwas the-dollar-as-international-currency. There is strong circumstantial evidence that suggests the Nixon administration then colluded with Saudi Ara-bia and Iran in the so-called Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. The Nixon administration had completed is abandon-ment of gold and fixed exchange rates, allowing a 20% devaluation of the dollar that hammered European andJapanese creditors. They were also facing the growingthreat of autarkic national liberation movements in LatinAmerica (Chile was overthrown that same year by the Nixon administration.) and Africa. Since oil payments were denominated in dollars, the jump in the price of oil from the embargo was a destabilizing jump in the price for Europe, Japan, Africa, and Latin America. The US,on the other hand, owned the printing press for dollars. By recycling the oil crisis, via petrodollars, through theseregions, the US effectively killed several birds with onestone. By all accounts, Nixon's relationship with Pahlavi was very warm. They had been personal friends since Nixonwas Eisenhower's vice president. William Safire, Nixon'sformer speech-writer, once stated that Pahlavi was Nixon's favorite head of state. Nixon offered to sell Pah-lavi's regime any weapon they needed, short of nuclear.That offer was not rescinded during the ostensibly hos-tile oil embargo in 1973-4, and Iran continued to make outlandish weapons procurements from the US. Those procurements coincided with the jump in oil prices, and the combination completely destabilized Pahlavi's Iran. Lightning inflation ensued, and with it mass migration into the cities, followed by housing shortages (compounded by inadequate urban infrastruc-ture) and a re-expanding chasm between the richest and the poorest. Grassroots agitation, from almost every There were two powerful sectors who opposed him: the Majdi, who controlled the parliament, and who weren'tkeen on the land reform program being suggested bythe United States, and the industrial workers, who also saw Pahlavi as an Anglo-American puppet. It was this theme, that Pahlavi was a puppet of the US, which reso-nated with both sectors, and so the resistance devel-oped - as had the Chinese Revolution - as a struggle for national independence. The National Front that developed was led by the Majdi, Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1951, under great grass-roots pressure, the Shah appointed Mossadegh primeminister. Mossadegh was a good choice from the per-spective of the peasants as well, because like the rest of the xenophobic Majdi he opposed US influence. And hesupported land reform, which he said could be financedwith oil revenues, much of which would go to paying off the Majdi for the land they would cede.For the Americans and for the British, this raised the specter of nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Com-pany. They were right. Mossadegh signed the expro-priation order in March, 1951. This action - wildly popu-lar in Iran - ignited a prairie fire of grassroots activity that threatened to become revolutionary. When the next US president, Dwight Eisenhower, man-aged to cut free the Korean anchor around the US neck, it was 1953, and his CIA Director, the infamous Allen Dulles, told him, "If Iran succumbs to the Communists,there is little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the world's oil re-serves, will fall under Communist control." This fear was "confirmed" in its own self-fulfilling way,when the US engineered a trade embargo against Iran, forcing Mossadegh to sign a trade agreement that same year with the only nation that had the inclination or abil-ity to violate the embargo - the Soviet Union. A month later, the Shah abdicated. By August, with substantial aid and direction from the CIA, monarchists in the Iranian army staged a coup, andthe Shah was restored. Dulles - himself a crafty technocrat - was running policy in Iran by then, and he badgered Eisenhower to pushPahlavi into social reforms as soon as possible to pre-clude another build-up of grassroots resistance. But Ei-senhower dithered with studies and policy pronounce-ments, kept the money flowing to Pahlavi, and thenturned the whole mess over to John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was aggressive to the point of pissing off Pah-lavi, but by 1963 he prevailed on Pahlavi to begin aprocess of modernization and reform.
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Page -6- This foreign policy kept at least one partner stable within the region, tacking back and forth between the tides andcurrents. It developed a partnership with Zionist Israel as a surrogate US military in the region, and the result has been a relatively stable American hegemony overthe area for the last sixty years. But such a policy causes pressurized violence in the imperial periphery, the kind that eventually burst into the imperial center onSeptember 11th, 2001. It came not from Iran, and notfrom Iraq, but from Saudi Arabia and tangentially fromPakistan in response to the basing of military troops in Saudi Arabia, home to the holiest sites in Islam. The general outcry in reaction to 9/11 was for retaliation,with very little understanding of the provocations and machinations that led to the attacks, and less notice still that the US actually withdrew its troops from Saudi Ara-bia shortly after 9/11, clearly recognizing that the Wa-habbist grievance, as stated, was the provocation, and not some generalized "hatred of freedom and democ-racy." It was this recognition - that there was a real threatgrowing in the streets of places like Riyadh, as politicalIslam had come to give voice to mass grievances in theplace of the very nationalism that Islamism had beendeployed to crush - that gave the sense of urgency tothe entire US ruling class to re-establish control overthis key strategic region. The only argument was overthe method, which does not speak to the issue of whether it was or is possible to contain the social crisis in Southwest Asia. The Bush doctrine in the region is certainly powered by immense hubris and the apparent belief that the US can simply impose its will directly, and thereby restructure the global economy by dint of arms. This is, in the eyes of the realist-technocrats, a gravemiscalculation. Whether the technocrats have an alter-native solution to the underlying crisis that is driving the neocons' assault on Southwest Asia is an open ques-tion. But their fears may be very well founded. Under the largest trade deficit in world history, the dollaris propped up by dollar-denominated Saudi oil sales onone side and by American bullets on the other. That system of monetary-military imperialism is tottering with contradictions, and the only question is where and whenthe catalyst will come that tips it over. If the military fail-ure in Iraq caused consternation, talk of attacking Iran is setting off alarm bells… for some. sector now, resumed. Then in 1978, in neighboring Afghanistan, the Washing-ton-approved strong man Mohammed Daoud Khan be-gan arresting the leaders of the influential People's De-mocratic Party, a pro-Soviet political formation that had substantial support within the Afghan army. As it turnsout, this was an action that Washington was fomenting in order to provoke a Soviet response - hoping to trapthe Russians in a guerrilla struggle in Afghanistan. The author of this plot was none other than arch-realist/technocrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's nationalsecurity advisor. It worked. The leftist officers organized a coup against Daoud and shot him, establishing a secular socialist government. The CIA began funneling support to right-wing clerical opponents of the regime inside and outside Afghanistan, and the Soviets were eventually drawn into a protracted and destructive military occupation of Afghanistan. As part of this fight against the left, the Shah in neighboring Iran increased his repression of left secular forces inside Iran, driving them back into a tactical alli-ance with Iran's own clerical right-wing, and this alliance poured into the streets in 1978. That security crisis ex-acerbated the existing economic and political crisis that broke Pahlavi's power. Carter's Ambassador in Tehran,William Sullivan, tried to warn the administration of the impending revolution. A contingency plan was even or-ganized for a US military takeover of Iran that was later rejected as unlikely to succeed. In 1979 the Shah was overthrown; the clerical forces had suppressed the secular left; and fifty-two Americans were taken hostage inside the US Embassy in Tehran. For the US, this was an utter debacle, and it led to Jimmy Carter's defeat in the 1980 election. When Reagan's people took power, they turned to the one leader in the region who might be able to confrontPersian-clerical Iran: Iraq's Arab secular nationalist, Saddam Hussein, even as the administration was col-luding behind the scenes with Iran to finance its illegalwar in Nicaragua. Massively supported by the US, Saddam's Iraq inaugu-rated a grueling eight-year, high-attrition border war withIran that chewed up around a million human beings. Onthe other side of Iran, in Afghanistan, the US was pro-viding massive materiel and training support to the Sunni jihadists who would eventually constitute the Tali-ban government of Afghanistan and the network associ-ated with Osama bin Laden. This element operated outof Pakistan for more than a decade, and came to exert atremendous social and political influence on large sec-tors of Pakistan, including its intelligence service andmilitary.
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Page -7- fense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz were benefiting from windfall profit contracts in Iraq, Shaw decided to go to Iraq himself to find out what was going on. When Shaw was denied entry into Iraq by U.S. military officers (yes, a top level official of the Defense Depart-ment was denied access to Iraq by U.S. military person-nel!), he decided to sneak into the country disguised asa Halliburton contractor. Using the cover of Cheney's old company to get the goods on Cheney's friends' illegalactivities was yet another masterful stroke of genius by Shaw. But it also earned him the wrath of the neo-cons. They soon leaked a story to the Los Angeles Timesclaiming that Shaw actually snuck into Iraq to ensurethat Qualcomm (on whose board sat a friend of Shaw's)was awarded a lucrative cell network contract. But nothing could be further from the truth. Shaw, whoworked for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, represented the Old Guard Republican entity that in Au-gust 2003 set up shop in the Pentagon right under thenoses of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith to investigate the neo-con cabal and their illegal contract deals. The entity, known as the International Armament and Tech-nology Trade Directorate, was soon shut down as a re-sult of neo-con pressure. Not to be deterred, Shaw con-tinued his investigation of the neo-cons. Although the neo-cons told the Los Angeles Times that the FBI was investigating Shaw, the reverse was the case: the FBI was investigating the neo-cons, particularly Perle and Wolfowitz, for fraudulent activities involving Iraqi con-tracts. And in worse news for the neo-cons: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was giving the InspectorGeneral's and Shaw's investigations a "wink and a nod"of approval. The financial stakes for the Pentagon are high - the Iraqi CPA's Inspector General recently revealed that over $1billion of Iraqi money was missing from the audit books on Iraqi contracts. For Shaw and the FBI, it was a mat-ter of what they suspected for many years - that Perle, Wolfowitz, and their comrades were running entities that ensured favorable treatment for Israeli activities - whether they were business opportunities in a U.S.-occupied Arab country or protecting Israeli spies operat-ing within the U.S. defense and intelligence establish-ments. Shaw certainly must have recalled how, during the Reagan administration, an Israeli spy named JonathanPollard was able to steal massive amounts of sensitive U.S. intelligence over a long period of time and hand it over to his Israeli control officer, a dangerous anddeadly agent provocateur named Rafael "Rafi" Eitan. That had disastrous effects on U.S. intelligence opera-tions throughout the world because some of the docu-ments were handed by the Israelis to the Soviets in re-turn for letting more Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel.(Cont’d from page 2)Peeling apart the Chalabi files demonstrated that the neo-con agenda for Iraq extended far beyond political ideology, into a realm where law enforcement can be most effective: fraud. According to Pentagon and Justice Department sources, U.S. investigators discovered that AhmadChalabi and his business partners were involved in fraudulently obtaining cellular phone licenses in Iraq. The Pentagon's Undersecretary of Defense for Interna-tional Technology Security John (Jack) Shaw smelled aneo-con rat when the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Author-ity (CPA), in late 2003, awarded cellular phone contracts to three companies - Orascom, Atheer, and Asia-Cell -with ties to Ahmed Chalabi. As with all those who chal-lenge the impropriety and illegal activities of the neo-cons, Shaw was, in turn, charged with improperly steer-ing Iraq cell phone contracts to Qualcomm and Lucent. However, it is Shaw, reported by his longtime col-leagues to be a solid and trustworthy public servant, who has the confidence of law enforcement, Pentagon investigators, and the military brass. Anything with Ah-med Chalabi's fingerprints on it also bears the finger-prints of his nephew Salem Chalabi. Salem, named asthe chief prosecutor in Saddam Hussein's trial, is a law partner of L. Marc Zell, a Jerusalem-based attorney whowas the law partner of Douglas Feith - the head of thePentagon's Office of Special Plans that concocted phony intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruc-tion and ties to Al Qaeda with the assistance of Likud operatives seconded by Ariel Sharon's government. The law firm of Feith & Zell, in concert with Perle, wasinstrumental in funneling hundreds of millions of dollarsfrom Arab and Muslim countries to the Bosnian govern-ment during that nation's civil war. While that effort wasostensibly designed to assist the Bosnians to purchaseweapons, officials familiar with its actual operation re-ported that some of the arms and money "spilled over"to Al Qaeda and Iranian Pasdaran forces in the Balkans. The neo-con attack on Shaw was predictable consider-ing their previous attacks on Ambassador Joe Wilson,his wife Valerie Plame, former U.S. Central Command chief General Anthony Zinni, former counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, CIA counter-terrorism agent Michael Scheuer (the "anonymous" author of Imperial Hubriswho has recently been gagged by the Bush administra-tion), fired FBI translator Sibel Edmonds (who likely dis-covered a penetration by Israeli and other intelligenceassets using the false flag of the Turkish AmericanCouncil and who also has been gagged by the Bush administration), and all those who took on the globaldomination cabal. But Shaw showed incredible moxie. When he decided to investigate Pentagon Inspector General Reports that firms tied to Perle and Deputy De
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Page -8- of the disastrous disclosures from Cheney's office. Thepolitical vendettas of the neo-cons in exposing Plame's dangerous work and retaliating against Wilson's revela-tions about Bush's use of bogus intelligence regarding a fanciful Iraqi uranium shopping spree in Niger ensuredthat America's military-intelligence complex was going to seek a final accounting with the neo-cons. And a final accounting they are getting, in spades. Adding insult to injury, neither the CIA nor FBI werehappy that Israeli spies operating under the cover ofIsraeli "art students' and moving van operators, and whowere picked up by federal agents and local "first re-sponder" law enforcement officers before and after 911,were quickly deported by immigration officers beforethey could be fully interrogated. The penetration of FBI and other federal law enforcement data networks anddatabases by Israeli software and telecommunications companies working under U.S. government contracts has also left a bitter taste in the mouths of federal lawenforcement and intelligence personnel. So now, it is payback time. The recent arrest warrants issued by the Iraqi government for Ahmed and Salem Chalabi (Ahmed's for counterfeiting Iraqi dinars and Sa-lem's for murdering an Iraqi Finance Ministry official)indicates that Shaw's instincts about the fraud engagedin by them and their neo-con friends in the Pentagonwere right on the money. Let us ponder that news again: the lead prosecutor against Saddam Hussein murders an official of the Iraqi Finance Ministry - an individualthat just may have known something about what hap-pened to $1 billion in missing Iraqi revenues. The ac-cused is a partner of an Israeli-U.S. lawyer who is a close colleague of leading neo-cons in the Pentagon(some of whom are also dual U.S.-Israeli citizens) and the nephew of a man who was supported bureaucrati-cally by a former CIA Director (James Woolsey), finan-cially by hundreds of millions of dollars from the budgetof the Defense Intelligence Agency, and politically by athink tank (AEI) that includes the wife of the Vice Presi-dent of the United States. Uncle Ahmed was also a per-sonal guest of George W. and Laura Bush in the VIP box at the 2004 State of the Union address. The Presi-dent and First Lady welcomed a person who now is nowan accused criminal to America's State of the Union ad-dress, a person whose nephew is now an accused mur-derer! John Le Carre could not have come up with a better international thriller scenario. The recent decision by the chief judge in the Plame leak to order NBC's Tim Russert to testify about just who it was at the White House that contacted him aboutPlame's identity, while troubling for First Amendment freedom of the press protections, is an indication that time is growing short for the leakers. Three months be-fore a U.S. presidential election, that could be a crucial windfall for John Kerry and the Democratic Party. Shaw must have also recalled that when a young Na-tional Security Council staffer named Douglas Feith was suspected of being an Israeli agent of influence, he was stripped of his job and security clearance by then- Na-tional Security Adviser Bill Clark but soon managed to find another job (and another top level clearance) underthen Deputy Defense Secretary Richard Perle. And it was certainly known that during Pollard's subse-quent appeal of his life sentence for spying for Israel, one of his attorneys was none other than right-wing stal-wart and neo-con friend, Ted Olsen, the former SolicitorGeneral of the United States under Ashcroft and theperson in charge of all U.S. attorneys. It was from Ol-sen's cadre of U.S. Attorneys that special prosecutorPatrick J. Fitzgerald was selected to investigate the Val-erie Plame / Brewster, Jennings White House leak to the media and perhaps other high crimes by neo-conofficials of the Bush administration. Fitzgerald continues to expand his case against the leakers of Plame's identity. But he may be getting more than he originally bargained for. As his investigation ex-panded into the bowels of the Pentagon, he was boundto discover that the treachery of the neo-cons was not merely confined to the leaking of the name of a covertCIA officer - disastrous in itself - but coupled with other activities that call into question the loyalties and financialdealings of those who swore an oath to the U.S. Consti-tution. With Ashcroft's deputy, James Comey, the person whoappointed Fitzgerald, finding himself increasingly frozenout of Ashcroft's inner sanctum deliberations, it is clearthat the neo-cons are worried about what Fitzgerald is discovering and how far his investigation will go. Also unusual was the fact that as Fitzgerald's case began togain steam - with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both retaining criminal defense attorneys - FBI DirectorRobert Mueller suddenly transferred the lead FBI agenton the Plame case, John C. Eckenrode, a well-seasoned 29-year veteran of the bureau, to head up the FBI's Philadelphia office. An FBI spokesman in Philadel-phia said that such sudden transfers, in the middle of major investigations, sometimes, just "happen." Make no mistake about it: the violation of the 1982 Intel-ligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 by the disclo-sure of Plame's identity and that of her non-official covercorporate umbrella organization (Brewster, Jennings & Associates) along with its official counterpart, the CIA's Nonproliferation Center - had a disastrous impact on the ability of the United States to track the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction around the world. At least one anonymous star (representing a covert U.S. agentkilled while working abroad) placed on the CIA's Wall of Honor during the past year was reportedly a direct result
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Page -9- ranging from contract fraud, to disseminating - via anItalian con man named Rocco Martino (a close confi-dant of Iran-contra Manucher Ghorbanifar with whom Ledeen rekindled a relationship in the lead-up to the Iraq fiasco) - Niger government documents known to be false, and leaking the name of a covert CIA agent andher proprietary firm, there may be a settling of accounts with Israel over the involvement of it and its agents of influence in the various scams that prodded the U.S. into a war in Iraq. Every recent Israeli Prime Minister - Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu,Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon - have demanded that Pollard be released by the United States and allowed togo to Israel. And every American administration - that of Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and up to now - Bush 43 -has refused. But it may be time for a deal with the Is-raelis - a deal that would, for once, favor U.S. nationalsecurity interests over those of Israel. As the influence of the neo-cons drastically falls, the idea of a Cold War-style agent swap is gaining momentum. If Israel wouldrelease the formerly jailed Israeli nuclear scientist andconvert to Christianity Mordechai Vanunu from a virtualhouse arrest in Jerusalem, the United States would re-lease Pollard, who was granted Israeli citizenship afterhis imprisonment. Pollard's breaches of U.S. security, while very serious, have been mitigated by further ad-vances in U.S. spy satellite and other surveillance tech-nology over the years. But Vanunu's knowledge could be very helpful to the United States - so much so that a former Mossad chief revealed that the Israeli spyagency actually contemplated assassinating the scien-tist rather than forcibly kidnapping him from London.One caveat on a deal - since when it comes to intelli-gence matters, Israel cannot be trusted to deal in goodfaith - Vanunu would be released and given a medical examination by independent American medical person-nel before Pollard is turned over to the Israelis. The U.N. checkpoint in divided Nicosia, Cyprus might serve asthe perfect "Checkpoint Charlie" for such a swap. Vanunu would be turned over to the Americans from theGreek side and into the relatively Israeli-Russian Mafia-free Turkish Northern Cyprus where he would be exam-ined and given a clean bill of health (meaning no sud-den "heart problems"), after which Pollard would behanded over to the Israelis on the Greek side. The United States, after suffering major losses in itsability to track the proliferation of nuclear weapons be-cause of the neo-con leaks and disinformation, wouldhave a new intelligence asset in Vanunu - someone whohad inside information about Israel's illegal acquisition ofnuclear technology for years. Even though he was jailed in 1986, some of the illegal international nuclear trade networks operating out of the The neo-cons hoped the focus of the election campaignwould be Saddam Hussein's trial. Instead, it may be thetrials of the Chalabis and potentially other members of the Iraqi National Congress, the entity that was nurturedby Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Woolsey. However, the Chalabis escaped from Iraq before they could be ar-rested. If they turn up in the United States or in a mem-ber country of the laughable "coalition of the willing," the Bush administration and the neo-cons will be caughtbetween a virtual rock and a hard place. If they refuse tohand over the Chalabis, their true motives will be on dis-play for the entire world to see. If they help to turn overthe Chalabis, they will be in a position to rat out their neo-con friends on the fraud already discovered byShaw, the IGs of the Pentagon and CPA, the FBI, andthe CIA. The neo-cons should never have underesti-mated by the CIA. When the agency came under attack, its allies were able to marshal all their impressive re-sources, including Bush 41 confidants C. Boyden Gray,Brent Scowcroft, James Baker III and even George H.W. Bush himself. The conflict between father and son now rivals that found in any Shakespearean tragedy. And the penetration of the Pentagon over the past three years by those with close connections to Likud interests cannot sit well with either former Reagan Defense Sec-retary Caspar Weinberger or former National Security Agency (NSA) Director and CIA Deputy Director Bobby Ray Inman, who ordered a severing of U.S. intelligence sharing with Israel after the Pollard affair and other Is-raeli penetrations of NSA signals intelligence programs through joint Israeli-NSA/CIA communications and satel-lite intelligence projects known as DINDI and PYREX, respectively. Those contracts were eventually canceled after Israeli engineers used friendly and sympathetic U.S. contract engineers working for RCA and Bendix Field Engineering to obtain Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) intelligence on NSA and CIA opera-tions in the Middle East and around the world, includingtechnical details of how the NSA intercepted microwave communications and information on a classified satellite intelligence system called MAROON SHIELD. The fact that Ahmed Chalabi, an ally of Pollard's old friends in the Pentagon, was recently caught passing on NSA cryptologic intelligence to Iran on the agency's ability to crack Iranian diplomatic and military codes must have served as a painful reminder to Weinberger, Inman, andother U.S. intelligence veterans who remember the du-plicity of the Israelis going as far back as the purposeful 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an NSA surveil-lance ship. It also ensured that the Republican Old Guard would continue to coalesce into a united front to ensure the ultimate routing of the neo-cons from theirparty. There may yet be a silver lining in the mess brought about by the neo-cons. In addition to possible indict-ments of Libby, Wolfowitz, and others for everything
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Page -10- former U.S.S.R. and Eastern bloc - which Israel used to its own advantage and as a supply pipeline to its ownDimona nuclear weapons plant - may yet yield important intelligence for the CIA's Nonproliferation Center. Let Valerie Plame, whose more recent expertise in international nuclear proliferation would complement Vanunu's prior knowl-edge of such activities, serve as his debriefing officer - with a commensurate promotion in rank. Vanunu may even be useful in the continuing FBI criminal investigations of Israeli intelligence activities directed against the United States inthe early 1980s - activities that continue to implicate senior members of the current Bush administration. In all, such a deal would be a major win for the national security of the United States.


reprint premission
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:zChV4xiy9s0J:www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/FTW-08_2004.pdf+Winds+of+Change:Troubled+Waters+Ahead+For+the+Neo+Cons&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

[Subdivisions]

8. I'm sure there are some points to be considered and

discussed in the text you posted, but do you think you could edit it and break it up a bit. Those long paragraphs are mind-numbingly long.

[seemslikeadream]

9. If you go to the link Texas Explorer

it is a much easier read :hi:

[Taxloss]

10. I couldn't care less. What a flake. n/t

[loudsue]

11. Michael Ruppert is, and has always been, my hero.

The guy has balls bigger than a mountain range, and I wish him well as an ex-pat.

He KNOWS how bad things are in the U.S., and he has given everything he had to try to get people to open their minds, and abide by the right we have to abolish a corrupt government.

He's right: those of us who have seen what is going on have shed little blood on the road to getting our government right again. My generation of college age kids did in the 60's & 70's. But the government has managed to "spin" us all into submission.

:hi: God speed, Mr. Ruppert!! :loveya: