The Brainwashing of America

[Guest guest]

A must see.

 

"Brainwashing America"

 

by Dr. Norman D. Livergood

 

http://www.hermes-press.com/brainwash1.htm

 

By the Author of the new classic "The New Enlightenment Anthology" read online at:

http://www.hermes-press.com/NEA_index.htm

 

 

Dr. Norman D. Livergood

 

Ph.D., Yale University, 1961, Philosophy

 

Ph.D., Union Institute, 1989, Artificial Intelligence

 

Masters equivalent in Psychology, 1967-69,

Washington University, Southern IllinoisUniversity

 

M.A., Yale University, 1959, Philosophy

 

M.Div., Yale Divinity School, 1958, Higher Education

[Guest guest]

Excellent articles, at least one by Sadaputa Das.

 

New Dawn

[Guest guest]

The Origins of the Overclass

 

By Steve Kangas

 

 

 

 

 

The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.

 

The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.

 

During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent — the highest level of inequality in the 20th century.

 

How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"

 

Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite.

 

By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation’s businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included:

 

Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity.

Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call.

Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA.

Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world.

Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government.

 

Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other.

 

How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding, top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts (for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations. The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their people.

 

The CIA’s alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one. Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of the CIA’s history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIA’s history of atrocity first.

 

The Crimes of the CIA

 

During World War II, the OSS actively engaged in propaganda, sabotage and countless other dirty tricks. After the war, and even after the CIA was created in 1947, the American intelligence community reverted to harmless information gathering and analysis, thinking that the danger to national security had passed. That changed in 1948 with the emergence of the Cold War. In that year, the CIA recreated its covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination. Its first director was Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities included

 

propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.

By 1953, the dirty tricks department of the CIA had grown to 7,200 personnel and commanded 74 percent of the CIA’s total budget. The following quotes describe the culture of lawlessness that pervaded the CIA:

Stanley Lovell, a CIA recruiter for "Wild Bill" Donovan: "What I have to do is to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and say to him, 'Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell. Come help me raise it.'" (1)

 

George Hunter White, writing of his CIA escapades: "I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?" (2)

 

A retired CIA agency caseworker with twenty years experience: "I never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what worked."

 

Blessed with secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, CIA operations became corrupt almost immediately. Using propaganda stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA felt justified in manipulating the public for its own good. The broadcasts were so patently false that for a time it was illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S. This was a classic case of a powerful organization deciding what was best for the people, and then abusing the powers it had helped itself to.

 

During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans began learning about the agency’s crimes and atrocities. (3) It turns out the CIA has:

 

Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other nations;

 

 

Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle.

 

 

Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others.

 

 

Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica and more;

 

 

Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines), "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Ziare), the "reign of the colonels" (Greece), and more;

 

 

Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others;

 

 

Helped run the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation and murder;

 

 

Used Michigan State "professors" to train Diem’s secret police in torture;

 

 

Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages;

 

 

Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia;

 

 

Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina;

 

 

Planted false stories in the local media;

 

 

Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political statements and embarrassments that they did not commit;

 

 

Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional law;

 

 

Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War;

 

 

Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaaners, Latin American death squad leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants;

 

 

Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide;

 

 

Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations;

 

 

Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia;

 

 

Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg –- other notorious examples include Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and Noreiga’s Panama.

 

 

Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers;

 

 

And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (4) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."

 

We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior to 1975, the agency answered only to the President (creating all the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIA’s activities were secret, the President rarely had to worry about public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings, Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives, businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel.

 

The Business Origins of CIA Crimes

 

Although many people think that the CIA’s primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly points out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didn’t help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary. The reason they overthrew so many democracies is because the people usually voted for policies that multi-national corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment.

 

So the CIA’s greatest "successes" were usually more pro-corporate than anti-communist. Citing a communist threat, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mussadegh government in Iran in 1953. But there was no communist threat — the Soviets stood back and watched the coup from afar. What really happened was that Mussadegh threatened to nationalize British and American oil companies in Iran. Consequently, the CIA and MI6 toppled Mussadegh and replaced him with a puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran and his murderous secret police, SAVAK. The reason why the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979 was because the CIA had helped SAVAK torture and murder their people.

 

Another "success" was the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Again, there was no communist threat. The real threat was to Guatemala’s United Fruit Company, a Rockefeller-owned firm whose stockholders included CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the company, albeit with generous compensation. In response, the CIA initiated a coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed the murderous dictator Castillo Armas. For four decades, CIA-backed dicatators would torture and murder hundreds of thousands of leftists, union members and others who would fight for a more equitable distribution of the country’s resources.

 

Another "success" story was Chile. In 1973, the country’s democratically elected leader, Salvadore Allende, nationalized foreign-owned interests, like Chile’s lucrative copper mines and telephone system. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) offered the CIA $1 million to overthrow Allende — which the CIA allegedly refused — but paid $350,000 to his political opponents. The CIA responded with a coup that murdered Allende and replaced him with a brutal tyrant, General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of leftists, union members and political opponents as economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman installed a "free market" economy. Since then, income inequality has soared higher in Chile than anywhere else in Latin America.

 

Even when the communist threat was real, the CIA first and foremost took care of the elite. In testimony before Congress in the early 50s, it artificially inflated Soviet military capabilities. A notorious example was the "bomber gap" that later turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Another was "Team B," a group of hawkish CIA analysts who seriously distorted Soviet military data. These scare tactics worked. Congress awarded giant defense contracts to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

 

And not even the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of American defense contracts have stopped the CIA from serving the elite. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes:

 

Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been abuzz with talk about using the CIA for economic espionage. Stripped of euphemism, economic espionage simply means that American spies would target foreign companies, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda, and then covertly pass stolen trade secrets and technology to U.S. corporate executives. (5)

If this isn’t bad enough, a worse problem arises in that the CIA doesn’t hand over this technology to every American auto-related company, but only the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

 

In a 1975 interview, Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee summed up his personal observations of the agency:

 

To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account"…

 

American multinational corporations have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you also find the CIA… The multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease…

 

Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big Business has a vested interest in the Cold War. (6)

 

Domestic Recruitment

 

The CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting life. Between 1948 and 1959, more than 40,000 American individuals and companies acted as sources for the U.S. intelligence community. (7) Let’s look at each area of recruitment, and see how they enabled the CIA to conduct its crimes:

 

Big Business

 

The CIA co-opted big business right from the start, beginning with the most famous billionaire of the time: Howard Hughes. Hughes had inherited his father’s million-dollar tool and die company at age 19. Anxious to expand his fortune, he made a conscientious decision "to go where the money is" — namely, government. With a few well-placed bribes, Hughes secured defense contracts to build military planes. The result was the Hughes Aircraft company. By 1940, he had also acquired a controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His government connections and international airline soon caught the attention of the CIA, and the two began a lifelong relationship. Hughes, whom the CIA dubbed "The Stockbroker," became the agency’s largest contractor. Not only did he let the CIA use his business firms as fronts, but he also funded countless CIA operations. Perhaps the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. Hughes’ right-hand security man, Robert Maheu, was a CIA agent who at one time represented the CIA in negotiations with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro.

 

The CIA’s contacts with big business quickly spread. The agency showed a preference for international companies, public relations firms, media companies, law offices, banks, financiers and stockbrokers. The CIA didn’t limit its activities to recruiting businessmen; sometimes the CIA bought or created entire companies outright. One benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to create a secret source of funds other than from government. With stock portfolios multiplying their profits, it’s impossible now to say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the Iran/Contra scandal.

 

By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control.

 

The Media

 

Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents. People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.

 

The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today’s publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post’s ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. (8)

 

MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:

 

Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)

William Paley (President, CBS)

Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)

Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)

Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)

Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)

Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)

James Copley (Copley News Services)

Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)

C.D. Jackson (Fortune)

Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)

ABC

NBC

Associated Press

United Press International

Reuters

Hearst Newspapers

Scripps-Howard

Newsweek magazine

Mutual Broadcasting System

Miami Herald

Old Saturday Evening Post

New York Herald-Tribune

Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation’s most right-wing dailies. Its location in the nation’s capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures. Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.

 

After Philip’s suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post. Seduced by her husband’s world of government and espionage, she expanded her newspaper’s relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated:

 

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political agenda behind the Post’s headlines.

 

Ben Bradlee was the Post’s managing editor during most of the Cold War. He worked in the U.S. Paris embassy from 1951 to 1953, where he followed orders by the CIA station chief to place propaganda in the European press. (9) Most Americans incorrectly believe that Bradlee personifies the liberal slant of the Post, given his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigations. But neither of these two incidents are what they seem. The Post merely published the Pentagon Papers after The New York Times already had, because it wanted to appear competitive. As for Watergate, we’ll examine the CIA’s reasons for wanting to bring down Nixon in a moment. Someone once asked Bradlee: "Does it irk you when The Washington Post is made out to be a bastion of slanted liberal thinkers instead of champion journalists just because of Watergate?" Bradlee responded: "Damn right it does!" (10)

 

It would be impossible to elaborate in this short space even the most important examples of the CIA/media alliance. Sig Mickelson was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda.

 

The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan’s CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC.

 

For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media. Here is but one example:

 

In 1996, The San Jose Mercury News published an investigative report suggesting that the CIA had sold crack in Los Angeles to fund the Contra war in Central America. A month later, three of the CIA’s most important media allies — The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times — immediately leveled their guns at the Mercury report and blasted away in an attempt to discredit it. Who wrote the Post article? Walter Pincus, longtime CIA journalist. The dangers here are obvious.

 

Academia

 

By the early 50s, CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale. (A disproportionate number of CIA figures, like George Bush, come from Yale’s "Skull and Crossbones" Society.) CIA recruiters also approached thousands of other professors to work in place at their universities on a part-time, contract basis. Not stopping at recruiting scholars, the agency would go on to create several departments at elite universities, including Harvard's Russian Research Center and the Center for International Studies at MIT.

 

Although most academics were supportive of the CIA in the 50s, most were unaware of its abuses. In the 60s, academia would become outraged to learn that anti-communist organizations like the National Student Association were actually creations of the CIA. The most audacious CIA front was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that attracted liberal, freethinking artists and intellectuals who nonetheless deplored communism.

 

By the late 60s and 70s, growing reports of CIA crimes and atrocities had deeply alienated academia. Scholars were further troubled to learn that the CIA had penetrated and disrupted student antiwar groups. Unlike business and the media, academia overwhelmingly denounced the CIA after the Vietnam era. This eventually forced the CIA to turn to new places to find their analysts and scholars. The most important source was the conservative think-tank movement, which it helped to create. More on this later.

 

The Roman Catholic Church

 

Although the CIA began as a mostly Protestant organization, Roman Catholics quickly came to dominate the new covert-action wing in 1948. All were staunchly conservative, fiercely anti-communist and socially elite. Just a few of the many Catholic operatives included future CIA directors William Colby, William Casey, and John McCone. Another well-known personality from this period was William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and gadfly host of TV’s Firing Line. Buckley, it turns out, served as a CIA agent in Mexico City, and his experiences there served as fodder for his Blackford Oakes spy novels.

 

There were several reasons for this influx of Catholic elites. First, Wisner (himself a Wall Street lawyer) had an extensive and glamorous circle of friends to recruit from. Second, Italy was in constant crisis in the 1940s, both during World War II and after. Throughout this troubled period, the American intelligence community’s greatest ally in Italy was the Roman Catholic Church.

 

The Roman Catholic Church, of course, is one of the most anti-communist organizations in the world. The Marxist doctrine of atheism threatens Catholic theology, and its equality threatens the Church’s strict tradition of hierarchy and authoritarianism. When Hitler invaded Communist Russia, the Vatican openly approved. Jesuit Michael Serafian wrote: "It cannot be denied that [Pope] Pius XII's closest advisors for some time regarded Hitler's armoured divisions as the right hand of God." (11)

 

But Hitler persecuted Catholics as well, and ultimately drove the Church to the Americans. In 1943, the Vatican reached a secret agreement with OSS Chief Donovan — himself a devout Catholic — to let the Holy See become the center of Allied spy operations in Italy. Donovan considered the Church to be one of his prize intelligence assets, given its global power, membership and contacts. He cultivated this alliance by sending America’s most prestigious Catholics to the Vatican to establish rapport and forge an alliance.

 

After the war, half of Europe lay under Communist control, and the Italian communist party threatened to win the 1948 elections. The prospect of communism ruling over the heart of Catholicism terrified the Vatican. Once again, American intelligence gathered their most prestigious Catholics to strengthen ties with the Vatican. Because this was the first mission of the new covert action division, the American Catholic agents acquired positions of power early on, and would dominate covert operations for the rest of the Cold War.

 

At a public level, the U.S. government sunk $350 million in social and military aid into Italy to sway the vote. On a secret level, Wisner spent $10 million in black budget funds to steal the elections. This included disseminating propaganda, beating up left-wing politicians, intimidating voters and disrupting leftist parties. The dirty tricks worked — the Communists lost, and the Catholic Americans’ success permanently secured their power within the CIA.

 

The Knights of Malta (12)

 

The Roman Catholic Church did not forget the American agents who had saved them from both Nazism and Communism. It rewarded them by making them Knights of Malta, or members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM).

 

SMOM is one of the oldest and most elite religious orders in the Catholic Church. Until recently, it limited its membership to Italians and foreign heads of state. In 1927, however, an exception was made for the United States, given its emerging status as a world power. SMOM opened an American branch, awarding knighthood or damehood to several American Catholic business tycoons. This group was so conservative that one, John Raskob, the Chairman of General Motors, actually became involved in an aborted military plot to remove Franklin Roosevelt from the White House. SMOM has also been embarrassed by knighting or giving awards to countless people who later turned out to be Nazi war criminals. This is the sort of culture that thrives within the leadership of SMOM.

 

Officially, the Knights of Malta are a global charity organization. But beginning in the 1940s, knighthood was granted to countless CIA agents, and the organization has become a front for intelligence operations. SMOM is ideal for this kind of activity, because it is recognized as the world’s only landless sovereignty, and members enjoy diplomatic immunity. This allows agents and supplies to pass through customs without interference from the host country. Such privileges enabled the Knights of Malta to become a major supplier of "humanitarian aid" to the Contras during their war in the 1980s.

 

A partial list of the Knights and Dames of Malta reads like a Who’s Who of American Catholicism:

 

William Casey – CIA Director.

John McCone – CIA Director.

William Colby – CIA Director.

William Donovan – OSS Director. Donovan was given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only been given to a hundred other men in history.

Frank Shakespeare – Director of such propaganda organizations as the U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Also executive vice-president of CBS-TV and vice-chairman of RKO General Inc. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank.

William Simon – Treasury Secretary under President Nixon. In the private sector, he has become one of America’s 400 richest individuals by working in international finance. Today he is the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, a major funder of right-wing think tanks.

William F. Buckley, Jr. – CIA agent, conservative pundit and mass media personality.

James Buckley – William’s brother, head of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

Clare Boothe Luce - The grand dame of the Cold War was also a Dame of Malta. She was a popular playwright and the wife

of the publishing tycoon Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine.

Francis X Stankard - CEO of the international division of Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller institution. (Nelson Rockefeller was also a major CIA figure.)

John Farrell – President, U.S. Steel

Lee Iacocca – Chairman, General Motors

William S. Schreyer – Chairman, Merrill Lynch.

Richard R. Shinn – Chairman, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

Joseph Kennedy – Founder of the Kennedy empire.

Baron Hilton – Owner, Hilton Hotel chain.

Patrick J. Frawley Jr. – Heir, Schick razor fortune. Frawley is a famous funder of right-wing Catholic causes, such as the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.

Ralph Abplanalp - Aerosol magnate.

Martin F. Shea - Executive vice president of Morgan Guaranty Trust.

Joseph Brennan - Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York.

J. Peter Grace – President, W.R. Grace Company. He

was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists and spies to the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in their service to the CIA.

Thomas Bolan – Of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan, the law firm of Senator McCarthy's deceased aide Roy Cohn.

Bowie Kuhn – Baseball Comissioner

Cardinal John O'Connor – Extreme right-wing leader among American Catholics, and fervent abortion opponent.

Cardinal Francis Spellman – The "American Pope" was at one time the most powerful Catholic in America, an arch-conservative and a rabid anti-communist.

Cardinal Bernard Law - One of the highest-ranking conservatives in the American church.

Alexander Haig – Secretary of State under President Reagan.

Admiral James D. Watkins – Hard-line chief of naval operations under President Reagan.

Jeremy Denton – Senator (R–Al).

Pete Domenici – Senator (R-New Mexico).

Walter J. Hickel - Governor of Alaska and secretary of the interior.

When this group gets together, obviously, the topics are spying, business and politics.

 

The CIA has also used other religious and charity organizations as fronts. For example, John F. Kennedy -- another anticommunist Roman Catholic who greatly expanded covert operations -- created the U.S. Peace Corps to serve as cover for CIA operatives. The CIA has also made extensive use of missionaries, with the blessings of many right-wing, anticommunist Christian denominations.

 

But the World Grows Wise…

 

It was only a matter of time before other nations caught on to these fronts. They learned that when the CIA comes to their countries to commit their crimes and atrocities, they come disguised as American journalists, businessmen, missionaries and charity volunteers. Unfortunately, foreigners are now targeting these professions as hostile. In Lebanon, terrorists held U.S. journalist Terry Anderson hostage for nearly seven years, on the not unreasonable assumption that he was a spy. Whether or not this was true is beside the point. The CIA has put all Americans abroad at risk, whether they are CIA agents or not. In hearings before the Senate in 1996, many organizations urged Congress to stop using their professions as CIA cover. Don Argue of the National Association of Evangelicals testified: "Such use of missionary agents for covert activities by the CIA would be unethical and immoral." (13)

 

From the Cold War to the Class War

 

As noted above, academia was the first major institution to denounce the crimes of the CIA. Why? One reason is that scholars conduct their own extensive research into world affairs, so naturally they were the first to learn the truth. This is the main reason why protest against the Vietnam War and the CIA erupted first among students on the nation’s campuses. By the end of the Vietnam War, the CIA had suffered a "brain drain" as its academic allies became its most articulate, passionate and eloquent critics.

 

The social revolutions of the 60s terrified the CIA. James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence and a truly paranoid man, was convinced the Soviets had masterminded the entire antiwar movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared his conviction. The CIA had always spied on student groups throughout the 60s, but in 1968 President Johnson dramatically stepped up the effort with Operation CHAOS. This initially called for 50 CIA agents to go undercover as student radicals, penetrate their antiwar organizations and root out the Russian spies who were causing the rebellion. Tellingly, they never found a single spy. The agents also began a campaign of wire-tapping, mail-opening, burglary, deception, intimidation and disruption against thousands of protesting American civilians.

 

By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies. (14) When academia learned of this, its outrage grew.

 

The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first was Watergate.

 

The CIA’s fingerprints were all over Watergate. First, we should note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." Nixon, for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic issues, enfuriating businessmen with statements like "We are all Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist, like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixon’s withdrawal from Vietnam and Détente with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldn’t stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up for Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was fighting at cross-purposes with the CIA and the nation’s elite.

 

As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixon’s dirty work. Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP. The team consisted of two CIA agents — E. Howard Hunt and James McCord — as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixon’s illegal campaign contributions.

 

The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of Nixon’s crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to know them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green light again to proceed again with their investigation.

 

Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIA’s main newspaper in America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nation’s highest secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixon’s activities. Many Watergate researchers consider one of Woodward’s old intelligence contacts to be a prime candidate for Deep Throat. (15)

 

Despite all the facts of CIA involvement, Woodward and Bernstein made virtually no mention of the CIA in their Watergate reporting. Even during Senate hearings on Watergate, the CIA somehow managed to stay out of the spotlight. In 1974, the House would clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate.

 

The CIA was not as lucky in 1974, when the Senate held hearings on James Jesus Angleton’s illegal surveillance of American citizens. These disclosures resulted in his firing. But that was nothing compared to the 1975 Church Committee. This Senate investigation looked into virtually every type of CIA crime, from assassination to secret war to manipulating the domestic media. The "reforms" that resulted from these hearings were mostly cosmetic, but the details that emerged shattered the CIA’s reputation forever. Interestingly enough, the two Senators who held these hearings — Frank Church and Otis Pike — were both defeated for reelection, despite a 98 percent reelection rate for incumbents.

 

The CIA wasn’t the only conservative institution that found itself embattled in the early 70s. This was a bad time for conservatives everywhere. America had lost the war in Vietnam. U.S. corporations had to cope with the rise of OPEC. The anti-poverty programs of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society were causing a major redistribution of wealth. And Nixon was making things worse with his own anti-poverty and regulatory programs. Between 1960 and 1973, these efforts cut poverty in half, from 22 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1976, the richest 1 percent had gone from owning 37 percent of America’s wealth to only 22 percent. (16)

 

At a 1973 Conference Board meeting of top American business leaders, executives declared: "We are fighting for our lives,We are fighting a delaying action," and "If we don’t take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy." (17)

 

The CIA to the rescue

 

In the mid-1970s, at this historic low point in American conservatism, the CIA began a major campaign to turn corporate fortunes around.

 

They did this in several ways. First, they helped create numerous foundations to finance their domestic operations. Even before 1973, the CIA had co-opted the most famous ones, like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. But after 1973, they created more. One of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his fortune to fight the "Soviet menace." (18) From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards he began donating millions to fund the New Right.

 

Scaife's CIA roots are typical of those who head the new conservative foundations. By 1994 the most active were:

 

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Carthage Foundation

Earhart Foundation

Charles G. Koch

David H. Koch

Claude R. Lambe

Philip M. McKenna

J.M. Foundation

John M. Olin Foundation

Henry Salvatori Foundation

Sarah Scaife Foundation

Smith Richardson Foundation

Between 1992 and 1994, these foundations gave $210 million to conservative causes. Here is the breakdown of their donations:

$88.9 million for conservative scholarships;

$79.2 million to enhance a national infrastructure of think tanks and advocacy groups;

$16.3 million for alternative media outlets and watchdog groups;

$10.5 million for conservative pro-market law firms;

$9.3 million for regional and state think tanks and advocacy groups;

$5.4 million to "organizations working to transform the nations social views and giving practices of the nation's religious and philanthropic leaders." (19)

The political machine they built is broad and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the political fight. It includes right-wing departments and chairs in the nation’s top universities, think tanks, public relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations that pressure Congress (irreverently known as "Astroturf" movements), "Roll-out-the-vote" machines, pollsters, fax networks, lobbyist organizations, economic seminars for the nation’s judges, and more. And because corporations are the richest sector of society, their greater financing overwhelms similar efforts by Democrats.

 

Besides creating foundations, the CIA helped organize the business community. There have always been special interest groups representing business, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and the CIA has long been involved with them. However, after 1973, a spate of powerful new groups would come into existence, like the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission. These organizations quickly became powerhouses in promoting the business agenda.

 

Their efforts clearly succeeded. With the 1975 SUN-PAC decision, corporations persuaded government to legalize corporate Political Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our government). By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all campaign contributions to political parties. (20) In two landmark elections — 1980 and 1994 — corporations gave heavily and one-sidedly to Republicans, turning one or both houses of Congress over to the GOP. Democratic incumbents were shocked by the threat of being rolled completely out of power, so they quietly shifted to the right on economic issues, even though they continued a public façade of liberalism. Corporations went ahead and donated to Democratic incumbents in all other elections, but only as long as they abandoned the interests of workers, consumers, minorities and the poor. As expected, the new pro-corporate Congress passed laws favoring the rich: between 1975 and 1992, the amount of national household wealth owned by the richest 1 percent soared from 22 to 42 percent. (21)

 

The CIA also helped create the conservative think tank movement. Prior to the 70s, think tanks spanned the political spectrum, with moderate think tanks receiving three times as much funding as conservative ones. At these early think tanks, scholars typically brainstormed for creative solutions to policy problems. This would all change after the rise of conservative foundations in the early 70s. The Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973, the recipient of $250,000 in seed money from the Coors Foundation. A flood of conservative think tanks followed shortly thereafter, and by 1980 they overwhelmed the scene. The new think tanks turned out to be little more than propaganda mills, rigging studies to "prove" that their corporate sponsors needed tax breaks, deregulation and other favors from government.

 

Of course, think-tank studies are useless without publicity, and here the CIA proved especially valuable. Using propaganda techniques it had perfected at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA and its allies turned American AM radio into a haven for conservative talk show hosts. Yes — Rush Limbaugh uses the same propaganda techniques that Muscovites once heard from Voice of America. The CIA has also developed countless other media outlets, like Capital Cities (which eventually bought ABC), major PR firms like Hill & Knowlton, and of course, all the Agency’s connections in the national news media. (22)

 

The following is a typical example of how the "New Media" operates. As most political observers know, the Republicans suffer from a "gender gap," in which women prefer Democrats by huge majorities. This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But, curiously enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits began popping up everywhere in the media. Hard-right pundits like Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham, Barbara Olson, Melinda Sidak, Anita Blair and Whitney Adams conditioned us to the idea of the conservative woman. This phenomenon was no accident. It turns out that Richard Mellon Scaife donated $450,000 over three years to the Independent Women's Forum, a booking agency that heavily seeds such female conservative pundits into the media. (23)

 

Conclusion

 

The most obvious criticism of the New Overclass is that their political machine is undemocratic. Using subversive techniques once aimed at communists, and with all the money they ever need to succeed, the Overclass undemocratically controls our government, our media, and even a growing part of academia. These institutions in turn allow the Overclass to control the supposedly "free" market. It doesn't win all the time, of course — witness Bill Clinton's impeachment trial — but it does score an endless string of other victories elsewhere, all to the detriment of workers, consumers, women, minorities and the poor. We need to fight it with everything we've got.

 

 

 

 

Endnotes:

 

1. Mind Manipulators, Scheflin and Opton. p.241.

 

2. Captain George White in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.

 

3. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum’s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997). Information about CIA drug running can be found at http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/cia/blum1.html and http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/cia/index.html.

 

4. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987.

 

5. Robert Dreyfuss, "Company Spies," Mother Jones. Website: http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dreyfuss.html

 

6. Philip Agee: The Playboy Interview. Website: http://www.connix.com/~harry/agee.htm

 

7. Lara Shohet, "Intelligence, Academia and Industry," The Final Report of the Snyder Commission, Edward Cheng and Diane C. Snyder, eds., (Princeton Unversity: The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, January 1997). Website: http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/snyder/academia.htm.

 

8. Website: http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn/cn9-35.

 

9. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great and the Washington Post, 2nd ed. (Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987)

 

10. "Forum for Ben Bradlee," Watergate 25. Website: http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/97/bradlee.htm.

 

11. Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (London and New York, 1964), pp. 249-250.

 

12. National Catholic Reporter, Jan 89, Mar 89, Apr 89, May 89, "Nazis, the Vatican and the CIA," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986, Number 25 Website: http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/knightsofmaltalist.html.

 

13. Anthony Collings, "Journalists tell Senate they want no CIA ties," CNN, July 18, 1996. Website: http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/18/spies.journalists/.

 

14. Morton Halperin, et al, eds., The Lawless State (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 153.

 

15. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA.

 

16. Edward N. Wolff, "How the Pie is Sliced" The American Prospect no. 22 (Summer 1995), pp. 58-64. Website: http://epn.org/prospect/22/22wolf.html.

 

17. Quoted in Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 44-47.

 

18. Karen Rothmyer, "The man behind the mask," Salon, April 7, 1998.

 

19. Study conducted by National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, July 1997, as reported by the National Education Association. Website: http://www.nea.org/publiced/paycheck/paychkf.html.

 

20. Center for Responsive Politics, Washington D.C., 1993.

 

21. Wolff.

 

22. For CIA involvement in Capital Cities/ABC, see Dennis Mazzocco, Networks of Power (Boston: South End Press, 1994). For CIA involvement in the PR industry, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You! (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 49-51,153,157,160-63.

 

23. Jonathon Broder and Murray Waas, [untitled] Salon, April 20, 1998. Website: http://www.salonmag.com/news/1998/04/20news.html

[Guest guest]

as in wish you were here. Great album, great group at the time, especially obscurred by clouds, animals, and the dude shakin hands while afire sums it all up.

 

mudmon (my floyd alias)

[Guest guest]

The 9/11 X-Files - A review of "The New Pearl Harbor"

 

by Sue Reid

London Daily Mail

Thursday, Jun 24, 2004

 

 

 

At the Cannes Film Festival last week, a predominantly American audience gave maverick film director Michael Moore a standing ovation for his controversial film, Fahrenheit 9/11. The movie, which won the coveted Palme D'Or, is a blistering critique of the Bush administration’s motives for the "war on terror," and even goes so far as to suggest that the Twin Tower atrocities provided a convenient mandate for America to invade Iraq.

 

Reaction to the film is one more sign of the growing cynicism over the President’s handling of the catastrophic events of 9/11. Yet the questions that Moore’s movie pose scratch only the surface. Now, an explosive book on the happenings of 9/11, which raises even more controversial issues, is about to be published. It will be damned in some quarters as nothing other than the irresponsible ramblings of conspiracy theorists or the wild rantings of anti-war activists. Much of what it says has been criticised, and flatly denied, by the White House and America's intelligence services.

 

Yet its findings have garnered an enthusiastic response from sections of America’s intelligentsia and a former British Cabinet Minister, the MP Michael Meacher, wrote the foreword of the book. In it he says: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. So many of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis, and so many of the key actors have put forward contradictory accounts only to be forced to retract or cover up later."

 

Whether he is right or not, the book is tellingly called The New Pearl Harbor, a pointed reference to the theory that President Roosevelt cynically allowed a Japanese assault on the U.S. fleet in 1941 to force America into World War II.

 

The book makes some deeply unpalatable - and frankly incredible - assertions, even querying if the Al Qaeda attacks would have happened without the complicity of America's most powerful politicians and policy-makers. Written by the academic author and American theologian, Professor David Ray Griffin of Claremont School of Theology, California, it challenges almost every official account of the day and among the disturbing questions it asks are . . .

 

Why were no military fighters scrambled from the nearest air force bases after the terrorists first struck? How could a rookie pilot - one of the terrorists - fly a 757 aircraft so precisely into the American defence headquarters, the Pentagon? Was it really an aircraft that pierced this well-protected building or a military plane or missile? And who made ten million dollars out of betting before 9/11 that shares in the two airlines of the hijacked planes were about to plummet?

 

To start to unravel this extraordinary story one must go back to September 11, 2001 as President George Bush flew into Florida, on Air Force One for what was intended as the perfect photo opportunity. It was just after 9am and the world's most powerful man was sitting among seven-year-olds at a school in Sarasota listening as they laboriously lisped from a favourite American school book, My Pet Goat. The President was in good humour, even cracking a corny joke and evoking laughter among the watching teachers, TV crews and his secret service men. Yet a terrorist maelstrom had already been unleashed.

 

A little over one hour earlier and 1,200 miles away on the Eastern seaboard, American Airlines Flight 11 had left Boston at 7.59. Fifteen minutes later its radio suddenly snapped off air. The first indication that it might have been hijacked. The time was precisely 8:14am. Flight 11 should have been immediately intercepted by fighter pilots sent up from nearby McGuire Air Force Base, in New Jersey, who could have made the journey to the World Trade Centre in three minutes.

 

Interception is a standard - and mandatory - emergency procedure in the U.S. in suspected hijacks and one that had been used routinely in 67 air scares over America in the nine months preceding 9/11. But, disturbingly, fighter jets were instead ordered out of an air base 180 miles away in Cape Cod. And they flew so slowly that they did not even arrive in time to stop the second hijack attack on the south tower of the Trade Centre. According to Griffin, "There are standard procedures for situations such as this . . . and if they had been followed American Airline Flight 11 would have been intercepted by fighter jets within ten minutes of any sign that it had been hijacked. Had the plane then failed to obey the standard signal to follow the fighter jets to an airport it would have been shot down."

 

The two Cape Cod F-15 fighters, one piloted by a Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy, set off at 8.52 when there were still 11 minutes to go before the second plane hit the World Trade Centre at 9:03am.

 

Lt-Col Duffy has since said that he was "on full blower all the way" - a top speed of more than 1850mph, which meant he could travel at 32 miles every minute. "Allowing the standard 2.5 minutes for them to get airborne and up to speed, the fighters should have reached Manhattan in about eight minutes, having a full three minutes left to shoot down the errant airline", writes Professor Griffin. And yet as United Airlines Flight 175, the second Boeing, crashed into the South Tower, the F-15s were still 70 miles away. It took the fighter pilots not eight minutes to reach downtown New York but 19 minutes. It seems that instead of flying at "full blower" they were travelling at a comparatively leisurely 700mph. If this seems extraordinary, Professor Griffin raises some other tantalising questions about events that day.

 

He records that the Pentagon was hit by the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 at 9.38am, The aircraft, with 58 passengers on board, had left Dulles Airport, in Washington DC at 8.20am and suddenly disappeared from radio contact at 8.46am. Astonishingly, no fighter jets from Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles from Washington D.C., were ever scrambled to intercept it. Instead fighters were ordered from 130 miles away at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. They finally arrived after the Pentagon crash had already happened. Thought to be flying towards Ohio, Flight 77 disappeared from radar screens for half an hour. But the plane astonishingly reappeared in airspace over Washington D.C. at 9:24am. It was then that the pilot executed a complex manoeuvre, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes to hit a wing of the Pentagon with perfect precision.

 

It was the sort of flying that you would expect only from a seasoned airman. Yet at the cockpit controls was a rookie, a terrorist named Hani Hanjour, who had been such a bad trainee pilot that managers at his flying school had reported him to aviation authorities five times.

 

"A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a puddle jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460 miles per hour," says Griffin.

 

It is a puzzle that may never be solved because, in another odd coincidence, no pictures exist of the moment the aircraft penetrated the building. Jose Velasquez, an employee at the petrol station opposite the Pentagon, has stated that security cameras there would have recorded the moment of impact. "But I’ve never seen what the pictures looked like. The FBI were here within minutes and took the film away," he told reporters.

 

But even more bizarre is the damning physical evidence which appears to show the Pentagon could never have been struck by a Boeing 757, with a wing span of 125ft. According to the White House, the Boeing penetrated the Pentagon with such ferocity that it went completely inside, disappearing from view before burning to almost nothing. Crucial photos taken just after the fire fighters arrived show a hole in the building’s facade of between 15ft and 18ft in diameter. It clearly reveals there was no damage above the hole or on either side of it.

 

So how did the giant Boeing aircraft fit into that hole? The official account claims that the wings folded back, or snapped, during the initial impact with the reinforced structure of the Pentagon. They were pushed inward towards the fuselage and then carried along with the plane into the building. But, insists Professor Griffin, this would be next to impossible. "For when the plane's forward motion was suddenly reduced as the nose hit the Pentagon, the wings could not have folded back - unless the laws of kinetic energy were momentarily suspended."

 

Instead the wings would have been propelled forward at great speed, damaging the building on either side of the main area of the point of contact of the plane. Even more bewildering is what happened to the Boeing's 40ft-high tail. "Did it obligingly duck before entering the building?" asks Griffin. "Whatever did hit the Pentagon it did not cause nearly enough destruction for the official story to be true. A Boeing 757, besides being so tall and having such a wide wingspan, weighs over 100 tons. Travelling at a speed of 250 to 440 miles per hour, it would have caused tremendous devastation, far more than was evident at the crash site."

 

But there is another intriguing element to this particular poser. If the official story is correct, if the hijacked aircraft did go right inside the Pentagon, where are the remains now? We know that fingerprints were taken from some of the dead passengers proving that some human remains at least had survived the resulting fire. Yet the fuselage, the tail, the wings and the engines of the enormous Boeing - made of heat-resistant aluminium and tempered steel - were all, according to the official version of events, destroyed. So, if the plane didn't hit the Pentagon, what did?

 

In what is the wildest of all the theories of The New Pearl Harbour, the suggestion is that the Pentagon wasn't hit by a plane at all but by a military missile or military aircraft. Certainly, several onlookers claim that it was a missile that so precisely pierced the Pentagon that day. One of them asserts it was making a shrill noise "like a fighter plane." But sent by whom? And if indeed it was a missile, what on earth happened to Flight 77, last thought to be heading for Ohio? No one knows.

 

There are only unanswered questions, such as that posed by Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband died in the World Trade Centre. She apparently told a television show: "I don't understand how a plane could hit our defence department (The Pentagon) an hour after the first plane hit the Twin Towers. I don't understand how that is possible. I'm a reasonable person. But when you look at the fact that we spend a half trillion dollars on national defence . . . I think there were procedures and protocols that were not followed on September 11."

 

One fact is certain about 9/11 and that concerns the stock market dealings before the tragedy. An extremely high volume of "put options" - a bet on the price of shares falling - were purchased for the stock of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, the international financiers which occupied 22 storeys of the World Trade Centre. Even more telling were the volume of "put options" on American and United Airlines, which owned the four aircraft hijacked by the terrorists. On these two airlines, and only these two, the level of share trade went up by 1,200 per cent in the three days prior to the catastrophe. As the shares dropped in response to the terrorism, the value of these options multiplied a hundred fold. Someone - and it may have been Bin Laden himself - had made ten million dollars in profit. So why weren't these dealings spotted?

 

"Any American intelligence officer looking at the stock market put option purchases in the early September of 2001 would easily have concluded that in the near future American and United aircraft were going to be involved in some disaster. And that the target was quite likely to be the World Trade Centre where Morgan Stanley Dean Witter had their offices," speculates Professor Griffin.

 

And then we must turn to the behaviour of George Bush junior himself. America's CNN network broke into its programming at 8:48 to report the first collision and Flight 11's demise. But the President, says the White House, was told of the horror at 9am when he arrived at the Sarasota school. By then, 12 minutes after the television announcement, millions of Americans knew of the crash and much of the world, too. Strangely, according to this official account, the President appeared to be one of the last to hear this shocking news. He reportedly told the principal of the school, "A commercial plane has hit the World Trade Centre and we're going ahead to do the reading thing anyway."

 

Then the Commander-in-Chief of the American military settled down to hear pupils recite My Pet Goat, only interrupted a few minutes later by a whispered message in his ear from an aide that a second aircraft had hit the World Trade Centre.

 

"He never asked if there had been any additional threats, where the attacks were coming from, how to best protest the country from further attacks. In the middle of a modern day Pearl Harbor he simply turned back to the matter in hand, the day's photo opportunity," claims Griffin. So why was the President not informed that something was possibly dreadfully amiss by his secret service personnel riding in his car and among his motorcade before he got to the school? Why, when learning of the second crash into the South Twin Tower - which transformed the events into a terror attack rather than a terrible accident - did he not leave the school immediately? He was on a pre-scheduled and well-publicised photocall. The school and the President, it might be assumed, were now Al Qaeda’s targets, too.

 

Instead Bush and his people dawdled at the school before leaving in their scheduled motorcade on their scheduled route to the airport. It was during that journey that they reportedly were informed that the Pentagon had been struck. Yet, mysteriously, still no military escort was ordered for the President. Air Force One took off without fighter jets to protect it.

 

"The implied question is, of course, a disturbing one," says Griffin. "Did the President, and at least the head of his secret service, know that he was not a terrorist target?" That is, of course, a theory that will rightly come in for the most heated criticism when the book is published here next month. But there is one more twist to the strange tale. It rests on a statement made by Bush himself about what he knew on the day of 9/11. He says that he was sitting outside the Sarasota classroom waiting for the start of the Pet Goat reading when he saw the first plane crash into the Twin Towers on a television monitor. "I saw the airplane hit the tower - the TV was obviously on and I used to fly myself," he was to explain later. The President recalls that he turned to his security men, joking: "There’s one terrible pilot."

 

He repeated the story more than once in the months after 9/11. Yet the footage of the first plane crashing into the Twin Tower did not emerge for another 13 hours (what millions of us saw was live footage of the second plane). Shots of the first plane, taken accidentally by a French documentary maker filming in Manhattan, were only released publicly for television the following day.

 

So, according to Professor Griffin, President Bush simply could not have seen that Flight 11 crash picture on television. Nor could he have seen the second plane crash, as he was in the classroom when it happened. But did something else happen? Did the President, sitting in the secure communications room set up by secret services at the school, view secret images of the crash; images transmitted by American intelligence onto the monitor in that room as the attack actually occurred?

 

It is an explosive theory, one that understandably will be dismissed as risible nonsense. For alarmingly, if U.S. intelligence did film the last moments of Flight 11 live, as it actually happened, it can only mean one thing: that the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the Al Qaeda terror assaults. This, of all the theories propounded by Professor Griffin in The New Pearl Harbor, is the one that will be condemned most aggressively by those who wield power in America today.

 

Yet we should not forget the words President Bush penned in his diary on the night of 9/11. Before going to bed he wrote: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." Will we ever know just what he meant?

 

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

 

A must see, Photo evidence that the Pentagon was not hit by an airliner.

 

http://killtown.911review.org/flight77/inside.html

 

For info on all aspects of the fake terro attack

 

http://killtown.911review.org/index.html

 

 

Here is a lecture by Mike Ruppert at the prestigious Commonwealth Club. He is an ex detective with the LAPD. He has investigated 9-11, and has written a book on his findings [must read].

 

in .PDF format

 

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/Commonwealth.pdf

 

in .DOC format

 

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/CWspeech.doc

 

About Mike Ruppert

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/about.shtml

 

[Guest guest]

The idea that Vedic society has it's cognate in modern conservatism/right wingism is ludicrous.

 

THESIS:

 

The modern conservative movement is a scam by Republican business oligarchs to utilize the gullible Christian masses into being supportive of their economic hegemony and imperialism over the third world.

 

 

 

The modern right wing conservative movement is based on restrictive and legal methodologies as a tool of government to appease the Bible Belt Americans in their desire to enforce their "morals" over the entire world, or at least the U.S populace. [in reality it is based on economic exploitation]

 

Vedic society was the exact opposite. There were no laws governing over what people could do with their bodies. There were no prisons where people who take drugs were left to rot. There were no laws enforcing "morality" on the populace. The governments job was to provide for the people and to protect them from violence and exploitation.

 

Today's conservative movement is the exact opposite, it's all about the dismantling of social safety nets, imprisoning anyone who rejects "morality" laws, and in general being a menace to society rather then it's protector and provider.

 

The Raja in Vedic society, had first and foremost the duty of making sure everyone was housed and fed and cared for.

 

The conservatives today want to make government nothing more then a "morality" police force and a prison system to jail all opposition to their hegemony. They believe that government should not be involved with social welfare, their ethos is "why should we be forced to help others". This is the opposite of the Vedic ethos which is "it is my duty to help others as much as possible".

 

The Vedic ideology is that there are no laws forcing people into prisons on account of their ideology. Gay marriage would not be outlawed in Vedic society, nor would drug consumption, nor would they enforce massive taxation for nothing more then paying off bankers, who print money which costs them 1 penny per bank note, who then lend it to the "government" at face value, plus interest.

 

The romantic delusion of modern conservatism being a bastion of religiosity was concocted by the moneyed elite in the 1960's. It was a carefully planned out strategy to capture the patriotism of the Christian right in america after their previous plan failed: undermining religious belief through the teaching of science. This has been called the ascent of "The scientific dictatorship".

 

This carefully laid out strategy was an attack on religious belief by the corporate elites of the 19th-20th centuries. Until the end of the 18th century, monarchies in league with Church hierarchies ruled over the populace. At that time a new power rose up, and overtime overthrew the existing power structures.

 

This was the oligarchy of business wealth. They overthrew the existing social order, which was feudalism, i.e rule by monarchy and nobility in league with the Church hierarchy.

 

The American and French revolutions were the beginning of the overthrow of the existing order. Cartels of business oligarchs took control utilizing democracies and empire building.

 

At the same time there was a protestant revival movement sweeping Europe and America. Slavery and Empire was the new ethos for the new business oligarchy. The protestant revival movement became the champions of human rights. They became activists in europe and America. They successfully forced the end of slavery, causing great consternation to the oligarchy who depended on it for their great fortunes. The protestants were also organizing for human rights in all spheres of society, both at home and in the colonies. This was viewed as a great problem.

 

Right at this time we find the advent of Darwinism and Marxism. They would dominate the socio economic planning of the elites for the foreseeable future.

 

A new ontological paradigm was being concocted and taught to the masses from then on. The goal was to undermine peoples faith in God through material scientism. The Christian revival was bad for business, so they decided to "kill God".

 

Darwinism was the cornerstone of this plan. The state run education system was created for the specific purpose of propaganda and creating a servile population, this is documented brilliantly at the online book "Underground history of American education" at: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

 

Thus the modern education system and it's ideology of a scientific epistemological autocracy was forced on most everyone through mandatory public education.

 

The goal was to undermine religious belief, and to create a servile patriotic populace who looked up to scientists as the new preisthood, and who saw their place as a "contributing" member/servant of society [which was arranged for the benefit of the oligarchy/controllers of the society].

 

This worked quite well in Europe. Devastating wars made it easy to undermine faith in a benevolent God. America was a different story. The success of the secularizing of society was only partial. There remained a large section of society resistant towards atheistic scientism.

 

A plan was concocted to co-op this mass of Christians into being vehement supporters of the state [ruled over by financial oligarchs].

 

This began in the 1960's and bore fruit in the 1980's with the rise of the bond between conservatism and the mass of American Christians.

 

Previous to that time conservatism was not intertwined with Religious ideology. It was based solely on economic concerns. It was the ideology of a section of oligarchs who were opposed to the competing section of oligarchs who believed in socialism, the conservative oligarchs believed that Fascism was superior.

 

These are the two sections of oligarchs who are still at odds today.

 

The socialist section believes in world government and a more paternal methodology of control over the masses. They sponsered the communist international and financed the various communist states, and they created and control the U.N. Although they themselves were and are financial oligarchs living in capitalist societies. Communism was an experiement run amok. They believe in population control through genocidal wars, disease, etc. Malthus and Darwin were the core teachings of their ideology.

 

The other section of oligarchs believe in Fascist Capitalism. This is where the state is an apparatus of the business elites. It is the philosophy of Darwinism and Malthus taken to an extreme. They believe in survival of the fittest, social darwinism, letting the disadvantaged fend for themselves and die off. They are opposed to social welfare programs because it allows the poor a chance to become a threat to the ruling class. They are pro population reduction through neglect and action i.e genocidal wars, disease, etc. The Nazi and Mussolini regimes were not born from their own countries, they were financed by American and English fascist oligarchs.

 

These two opposing sections of oilgarchs are not completely at odds with each other, and they are not divided into completely distinct camps. They are both born from the same political environment of the late 19th century, and the same economic spheres of influence, with the same exact goals. Sometimes they are more on one side of a specific issue, at other times they can be on a different side.

 

The Fascist side is behind the Republican party in America, the Socialist side is behind the Democrat Party.

 

This split into two distinct camps of oilgarchs happened in the early 20th century. Before that they had more or less the same Fascist ideology. And that was when the current materialistic "scientific" dictatorship, was thought up. Both sides agree with it and promote it.

 

The siding of the Fascist section with the American Christian community came about in the 1960's after Barry Goldwater lost to Johnson in the presidential race. There was a simultaneous revolution in the social milieu i.e the hippie new age counter culture.

 

This created a very clear divide in american society. Previously there was no great divide. The Democrats had been co-opting the populist political sphere since the 1930's, but had lost their power after WW2. In the 1960's they once again co-opted the resurgence of the populist mentality/liberalism [civil rights, womens, rights etc].

 

But simultaneously the social upheavels of the 1960's was of great concern to the American religious community, what would become called "The moral majority".

 

Noticing this, and their loss of power in the political realm to the socialists,[From Eisenhower/Nixon to Kennedy/Johnson] The fascists realized that they had a large untapped bloc of support from the increasingly hostile religious right in America. They were very upset with the 1960's and the counterculture revolution, civil rights, womens rights etc. Their strongholds in the bible belt were a negected section of voters which both Parties had never courted to any degree.

 

This set in motion a plan to co-opt the bible belt, by the Republican party, which was not seen as populist, and in fact was seen as the party of big business.

 

Today it is the exact opposite.

 

The Republicans are now seen by the bible belt as a populist party up against the decadent elites.

 

Which is a total lie.

 

Here is the person called the founding father of the modern conservative movement.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/weyrich/weyrich.php

 

The whole charade was to take back power from the Democrats and develop the image of being populists by using the support of the mass of Christians. They would build a network of interconnected think tanks, foundations, and preachers to accomplish this goal.

 

This history has been written about in many books, these articles give a couple of views on the history behind the scenes of the american politcal situation today:

 

http://watch.pair.com/heritage.html

 

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html

 

The point I am making is that the so called conservative movement in America is a tool of oligarchs, the fascist side. The socialist side and the fascist side are not religious, nor are they populists, nor are they moral.

 

They are all about building a better mousetrap. They are not fanatical about their ideology because their goal is the same, they just have different ideas of what may work best to consolidate their power and control. Sometimes they may support a conservative issue, othertimes a liberal issue, they are not ideologically driven, they use ideology to get support from their supporters.

 

Ultimately they live and socialize in the same financial circles, acting in different capacities depending on the specific matter at hand.

 

It should be noted that they are not conservative, nor are they liberal. They are all fascistic feudalists. To them the ends justify the means. They can promote any side of any issue, and will always support both sides of every issue, in this way they control all sides of every social and political movement.

 

They have two different roads of reasoning to get to the same destination, which is absolute rule by an elite circle of the ultra wealthy.

 

 

 

[AncientMariner]

To think this person went through this massive amount of energy writing this longwinded essay to prove that Vedic civilization supports gay marriage and he didn't even consult Prabhupada on the matter. Things that make you go Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

The Journey of Self-Discovery

 

Prabhupada: ".............But because people are already killing, the priest are afraid to present the commandment straightforwardly. Now they are even granting man-to-man marriage, what to speak of other things. The priests are sermonizing on this idea of man-to-man marriage. Just see how degraded they have become! Previously was there any conception like this, at least outside America? Nobobdy thought that a man could be married to another man. What is this? And the priests are supporting it. Do you know that? So what is their standard?"

[Guest guest]

The point is they don't make laws against personal issues. Nitwits, no offense, try and make the conservative and liberal issue about morality, which they then try and pass off conservatism as cognate with the Vedic view.

 

This is a con job perpetrated by morons. Vedic society made no laws and jailed no people for violation of some kind of personal "moral" choice.

 

Anyone who tries to equate Vedic society with modern police state society, in any of it's incarnations is foolish and needs an education.

 

Dharma was the rule in Vedic society. The people who try and represent Dharma as some kind of police state akin to American conservatism are ignorant.

 

Vedic society was not a police state.

 

Anyone who advocates laws against any kind of personal choice, whether you find them moral or immoral, is mandating Adharma, and they will be exposed as such...

 

The Vedic social justice system was not repressive against people, it was solely used to fight against injustice, it did not have a mandate beyond that.

 

Any kind of law that does anything but fight injustice, is Adharmic, and the people who enforce and propound that law are subject to karmic reaction...the end.

[AncientMariner]

So Americans are going to get a karmic reaction for rejecting gay marriage? Where exactly is your source for all these generalizations in regards to what Prabhupada taught? I understand that in Vedic civilization gays were to be respected and were given a place in society but homosexuality was not supposed to be viewed as normal or accepted as the normal method of sex life at least according to the article I read about it. Don't know for sure but from the quote from Prabhupada above it seems that Prabhupada was shocked that people would think it is alright for gay marriage. No offense but it appears that some of Prabhupada's own words are not consistent with what you are saying.

 

 

 

"So what is their standard." - Prabhupada

[Guest guest]

THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE ELECTION, THE TITLE OF THE ARTICLE IS MEANT TO BE PROPHETIC-shiva

 

 

How George W. Bush Won

the 2004 Presidential Election

By Sandeep S. Atwal

 

Purging voter lists is just the beginning: the U.S. has embraced a form of electronic voting that is unreliable, unverifiable and funded by the radical Christian right.

 

––––––––––––

 

ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia may not be household names like Enron or Arthur Andersen, but these three companies will decide America’s next president. In the 2004 presidential election, the full effect of electronic voting will be felt for the first time, and these are the companies that will report the majority of the results.

 

Despite assurances from the corporations that own these machines, the reliability of electronic voting is under intense criticism. One of the most comprehensive examinations of electronic voting fraud came from brothers James and Kenneth Collier. In their 1992 book, Votescam: The Stealing of America, the brothers detailed the long history of voting fraud over the past twenty-five years, with a special focus on voting machines. American politicians and large media outlets have ignored their book, and their charges remain unanswered.

 

Now, their concerns are being echoed by a new group of writers, journalists, and activists who have raised alarming and explosive details about electronic voting in America. While academics such as Professors Rebecca Mercuri and David Dill and organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery have carefully documented how voting systems are vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation, journalists Lynn Landes, Jerry Bowles, and Bev Harris are alerting Americans to an electronic coup d’etat in the making. If their charges are true, and there is little evidence to contradict their claims, George W. Bush has already won the 2004 election.

 

Florida’s Folly Goes National

 

“Given the outcome of our work in Florida and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country.”

– Martin L. Fagan, ChoicePoint Vice-President

 

To understand how George W. Bush will win the next presidential election, it helps to under­stand how he won the last one. While all public attention rested on hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and a skewed recount in the wake of the 2000 Presidential election, the root of the prob­lem has been overlooked. As investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovered, the state of Florida purged over 90,000 people from their list of eligible voters under the guise that they were felons. In fact, almost none of the disenfranchised voters were felons … but almost all were blacks or democrats.

 

Palast’s investigation revealed that at the heart of this ethnic cleansing of voter lists was the creation of a new centralized database for the state of Florida. In 1999, the state fired the com­pany they were paying to compile their “scrub” lists, and gave the job to Database Technologies (DBT, now ChoicePoint). DBT, a private firm known to have strong Republican ties, was paid $2.3 million to do the same job that had previously been done for $5,700.

 

The first list of felons from DBT included 8,000 names of felons from Texas supplied by George Bush’s state officials. The state government said they were all felons, and thus barred from vot­ing under federal law. Local officials complained about the list and DBT issued a new one, this time naming 58,000 felons. Palast discovered that the one county that went through the process of checking the new list name by name found it was 95% wrong.

 

Because of the way DBT compiled its erroneous list, Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons were barred from voting. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voters John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels.

 

DBT didn’t get names, birthdays, or social security numbers right, but they were matched for race, so a felon named Joe Green only knocked off a black Joe Green, but not a white person with the same name. There was no need to guess about the race of the disenfranchised: a voter’s race is listed next to his or her name in many Southern states, including Florida, because racial ID is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

DBT’s fee of $2.3 million was supposed to include verification that the individuals on their list were actually felons, but Palast’s investigation showed that DBT could not provide any evidence that they made a single phone call to verify the identity of the names scrubbed prior to the 2000 Presidential Election.

 

Unfortunately, nothing is preventing this purge from taking place again on a national scale. Due in large part to the attention paid to butterfly ballots and hanging chads in the fall of 2000, the new Help America Vote Act (HAVA) demands that every state replicate Florida’s system of centralized, computerized voter files before the 2004 election, presumably to avoid the paper-ballot confusion of the Florida recount. Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast recently co-authored a piece on the dangers of such databases, recalling the Florida debacle. Their conclu­sion: “Jim Crow has moved into cyberspace – harder to detect, craftier in operation, shifting shape into the electronic guardian of a new electoral segregation.”

 

ChoicePoint already has contracts with numerous states to provide electronic voter lists purged of supposed felons. They are a natural choice as one of the U.S.’s largest database companies. ChoicePoint provides information on federal criminal records by district for 43 states and also provides online access to more than 63 million criminal records for all fifty states. Who better to provide HAVA-mandated voter lists to state governments?

 

You Voted Republican, Trust Us

 

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”

– Tom Stoppard, 1972

 

Purged voter lists are only one method of pre-determining the outcome of an election. An even more serious problem lies inside the voting machines themselves. While representatives of Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia herald the benefits of their systems, not everyone shares their enthusiasm. Dr. Rebecca Mercuri is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bryn Mawr College and has been referred to as “the leading independent expert on electronic voting tech­nology.” Shortly before the 2000 Presidential election, Mercuri defended her Ph.D. dissertation on the subject of “Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks and Balances” at the Engineering School of the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Mercuri’s website, http://www.notablesoftware.com/, is an astonishing checklist of the lack of safeguards and other failings that plague the current crop of electronic voting systems. One of Mercuri’s primary concerns is that electronic systems provide no way for a voter, or election officials, to verify that a cast ballot corresponds to the vote being recorded. As Mercuri notes on her site, “Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result.” There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system. Companies such as Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, which manufacture the machines and provide the code that runs them, simply take a “trust us” approach.

 

Mercuri also reports that no electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer security standards such as the ISO Common Criteria, nor are they required to comply with such standards. Thus, no current electronic voting system is secure by the U.S. government’s own standards.

 

Electronic voting systems without individual printouts for examination by voters do not provide an independent audit trail. All voting systems can make mistakes and the ability to perform manual hand-counts of ballots is the only way to verify results. Computer glitches are already cropping up all across the United States. Numerous irregularities with electronic voting machines have already been reported:

 

In Georgia, which recently purchased 22,000 Diebold touch screens, some voters touched one candidate’s name on the screen and saw another candidate’s name appear.

A former news reporter in Florida discovered that votes were being tabulated in 644 Palm Beach precincts: but Palm Beach only has 643 precincts. An earlier court case in Florida found the same discrepancy. A reporter in New Jersey observed 104 precincts with votes in an area that has only 102 precincts.

Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman won the state of Alabama. However, the next morning, 6,300 of Siegelman’s votes disappeared and the election was handed to Republican Bob Riley. A recount was requested and denied.

In North Carolina, a software programming error caused vote-counting machines to skip over several thousand votes, both Republican and Democratic. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the election.

In Comal County Texas, an uncanny coincidence resulted in three Republican candidates winning by exactly 18,181 votes each. Two other Republican candidates outside Texas also won by exactly 18,181 votes.

In October, election officials in Raleigh, N.C., discovered that early voters had to make several attempts to record their votes on ES&S systems. Officials compared the number of voters to the number of votes counted and realized that 294 votes had been lost.

A report from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project states that an estimated 1.5 million presidential votes were not recorded in 2000 because of difficulties using voting equipment, and that electronic machines have the second highest rate of unmarked, uncounted and spoiled ballots in presidential, Senate, and governor elections over the last 12 years.

Federally mandated voting machines, almost exclusively manufactured by ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia, are being constructed and tested under obsolete Federal Election Commission recom­mendations. The US has authorized spending of over four billion dollars on new voting equipment, but as Mercuri notes, “failed to require or enforce adequate security, usability, reliability, and auditability controls over the products being purchased.” The numerous flaws cited above ably demonstrate Mercuri’s point.

 

Her concerns are echoed by Professor David Dill from Stanford University. He has created a resolution warning of the dangers of electronic voting machines. “Do not be seduced by the apparent convenience of “touch-screen voting” machines, or the “gee whiz” factor that accompanies flashy new technology,” he writes. “Using these machines is tantamount to hand­ing complete control of vote counting to a private company, with no independent checks or audits. These machines represent a serious threat to democracy.”

 

Chuck Hagel and Nebraska’s Upset

“If you want to win the election, just control the machines.”

– Charlie Matulka, Nebraska Senatorial Candidate

 

Chuck Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska in 1996. Electronic voting machines owned by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) reported that he had won both the primaries and the general election in unprecedented victories. His 1996 victory was considered one of the biggest upsets of that election. He was the first Republican to win a Nebraska senatorial cam­paign in 24 years and won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican.

 

Six years later Hagel ran again against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. He was re-elected to his second term with 83% of the vote: the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. Again, the votes were counted by ES&S, now the largest voting machine company in America.

 

While these victories could be dismissed simply as a Republican upset, a January 2003 article in the independent Washington paper The Hill revealed interesting details about Hagel’s business investments and casts a different light on his election successes. Chuck Hagel was CEO of ES&S (then AIS) until 1995, and he is still a major stockholder of the parent company of ES&S, McCarthy & Company. Hagel resigned as CEO of ES&S to run for the Senate and resigned as president of the parent company McCarthy & Company following his election (where he remains a major investor).

 

Today, the McCarthy Group is run by Michael McCarthy, who happens to be Chuck Hagel’s treasurer. Hagel’s financials still list the McCarthy Group as an asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million. Campaign finance reports show that Michael McCarthy also served as treasurer for Hagel until December of 2002.

 

ES&S also has a connection to the Bush family. Jeb Bush’s first choice as running mate in 1998 was Sandra Mortham, who was a paid lobbyist for ES&S and received a commission for every county that bought its touch-screen machines.

 

The Hill’s revelations of Hagel’s conflict of interest was disturbing enough to cause Jan Baran, one of the most powerful Republican lawyers in Washington D.C., and Lou Ann Linehan, Senator Chuck Hagel’s Chief of Staff, to walk into The Hill’s offices to “discuss” the story. According to the author of the article, Alex Bolton, nothing similar had happened in the three-and-a-half years he’s worked for the paper. It was, no doubt, a story Hagel would rather see go unreported.

 

Helping America Vote Right

 

“The Christian worldview is the answer. We need Christian statesmen who press for the Crown Rights of Jesus Christ in all areas of life. This isn’t political salvation or an overnight fix. It will take decades of mobilization and confrontation to undo a century of godless socialism. It must be a grassroots movement that starts in individual families and churches and then moves outward to take dominion. It must encompass every area of life and not just the political arena. Finally, it must start soon, for there isn’t much time left. The Florida elections have taught us that the Democrats with their liberal/socialistic worldview will stop at nothing to seize control of the government.”

– Dr. Val Finnell, published by the Chalcedon Institute

 

If the connections between Hagel and ES&S seem suspect, the origins of America’s largest elec­tronic voting machine companies may be just as distressing, especially for those who venerate the separation of church and state. The convoluted system of renaming and buyouts of Ameri­ca’s voting system companies is a complicated story. However, once the various corporate trails have been followed, a disturbing picture comes into focus.

 

Brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded American Information Systems. Bob is currently president of Diebold, and Todd Urosevich is Vice President of Aftermarket Sales ofor ES&S. (In 1999, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp to become ES&S.)

 

American Information Systems (AIS) was primarily funded with money from Ahmanson bro­thers, William and Robert, of the Howard F. Ahmanson Co. The majority stake in ES&S is still owned by Howard F. Ahmanson and the Ahmanson Foundation.

 

Howard Ahmanson belongs to Council for National Policy, a hard right wing organization, and also helps finance The Chalcedon Institute. As the institute’s own site reports, Chalcedon is a “Christian educational organization devoted to research, publishing, and promoting Christian reconstruction in all areas of life…. Our emphasis on the Cultural or Dominion Mandate (Genesis 1:28) and the necessity of a return to Biblical Law has been a crucial factor in the challenge to Humanism by Christians in this country and elsewhere....” Chalcedon promotes Christian Reconstructionism, which mandates Christ’s dominion over the entire world. The organization’s purpose is to establish Old Testament Biblical law as the standard for society.

 

Solutions and Alternatives

 

Few individuals who are trying to alert citizens to the dangers of electronic voting are against computer voting unequivocally. Rather, the complaints focus on the lack of a verifiable paper trail and the inability of the public to examine the code that runs the machines. Professor Me­rcuri’s October 2002 article, “A Better Ballot Box?“ provides a solution to these concerns. She also poses a series of questions that she believes must be answered in order to allay security concerns. Mercuri’s work is partly an attempt to design a machine in line with minimum stand­ards set by the U.S. federal government, unlike the voting machines currently being installed across America.

 

The New York State Assembly recently passed legislation that specifically requires that machines “produce and retain a voter verified permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity” (but fails to mention the code that runs the machines). Rep. Rush Holt has introduced federal legislation, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 with similar aims. The measure would require all voting machines to produce an actual paper record by 2004 that voters can view to check the accuracy of their votes and that election officials can use to verify votes in the event of a computer malfunction, hacking, or other irregularity.

 

Other solutions exist to ensure the integrity of voting machines and address the concerns of people like Professor Mercuri. Jason Kitcat is the author of the Free E-democracy project, an open source project that builds Internet voting software. Likewise, Australia makes the code for their machines available online whereas American companies jealously guard the code that runs their machines. It seems a fair question, considering the list of problems that currently plague voting equipment: why are none of these alternatives being investigated?

 

The 2004 election will be the first to use nation-wide electronic voting. With the purging of voter lists, secrecy surrounding voting machines, the lack of a verifiable paper trail combined with voting machine companies with strong Republican ties and funding from the radical right, a Bush victory is all but inevitable. Welcome to the machines.

[Guest guest]

Kerry Won

 

by

Greg Palast

 

 

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United

States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as

“spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are

inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s

discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the

state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672

votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded

votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

 

Greg Palast,

contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the

manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The

documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York

Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD

.

 

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

 

I know you

don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad.

But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that

messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell

you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday,

in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

 

Most voters in

Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll

showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to

47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male

voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted

in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

 

So what's going on here?

Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did

you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial,

question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't

know.

 

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most

voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of

these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable

and it was predicted. [see TomPaine.com,An Election Spoiled Rotten

 

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote

game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant

chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

 

The

election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by

something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States,

about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not

recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you

Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't

you believe it ... it has never happened in the United

States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent.

The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled

vote.

 

And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes,

say every official report, come from African American and

minority precincts. (To learn more,click here

 

We saw this in Florida in

2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least

50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's

because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris,

excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most

of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole

wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging

chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were

discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for

the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots

thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read

the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click (.PDF)here .)

 

And here's the key: Florida is

terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there

will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election)

will have been cast by African American and other minority

citizens.

 

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again.

Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio

to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes

(called "undervotes" in the voting biz).

 

Ohio is one of

the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling

punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J.

Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the

possibility of a close election with punch cards as the

state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like

calamity.”

 

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan

Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with

machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When

asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris,

Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat

in Congress.

 

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage

this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though

the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last

time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a

democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their

typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly

Democratic.

 

The Impact Of Challenges

 

First and

foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't

punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the

'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party

of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt

to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio,

Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers

to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never

used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger

individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The

Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits

targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge.

But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand

in the voting booth door.

 

In the end, the challenges were

not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently

resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional"

ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be

counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats

say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed

at minorities, no one doubts these are, again,

overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled

punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount),

and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly,

you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by

136,483 votes in Ohio.

 

Enchanted State's Enchanted

Vote

 

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if

all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the

election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by

several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot

has yet been counted."

 

How did that happen? It's the

spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

 

CNN said

George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the

network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent,

'100 percent' of ballots cast.

 

New Mexico reported in the

last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost

entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor

precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the

same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots

in the spoilage bin.

 

Spoilage has a very Democratic look

in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who

voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as

likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting

these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush

'plurality.'

 

Already, the election-bending effects of

spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where

we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by

Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the

"Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic

population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet

George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

 

I spoke

with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election,

and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics

simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their

minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these

brown people drive across the desert to register their

indecision in a voting booth.

 

Now, let's add in the effect

on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

 

"They were

handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee

Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were

given out. Who got them?

 

Santiago Juarez who ran the

"Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese

in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics,

whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed

the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given

provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost

religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was

the least question about a voter's identification. Some

voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

 

Your

Kerry Victory Party

 

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico

for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

 

But that won't

happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the

leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement

once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that

counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will

require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State,

Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and

provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to

step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to

permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic

leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party

for demanding a full count.

 

What now? Kerry won, so hold

your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it

may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under

PATRIOT Act III.

 

I used to write a column for the Guardian

papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will

again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second

time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My

country has left me.

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Voting Machine Fiasco:

 

SAIC a Bohemoth Military Contractor, Wants to Be inside Every Voting Machine; Three Way Scam on Diebold Review?

 

by Lynn Landes OpEdNews.Com

 

The voting machine wars are heating up and the implications of vote fraud in America are even more ominous.

 

Computer scientist Avi Rubin, whose Johns Hopkins University team found serious flaws in Diebold Election Systems software abruptly resigned from VoteHere, another election software company.

 

In a related story, on August 6th Maryland Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. ® gave a contract to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to review the Diebold Election System's software in preparation for elections in Maryland. The report is due in four weeks.

 

Avi Rubin announced today his resignation from VoteHere, an elections systems company. (Avi Rubin's statement) His statement reads: "Effective immediately, I am resigning from the Technical Advisory Board of VoteHere, and I am returning all stock options, which have never been exercised, and which are not entirely vested." Unexercised stock options may be the least of Rubin's problems.

 

Rubin's relationship with VoteHere was a surprise to many.

 

He does not list the affiliation on his website that features an extensive and detailed listing of his work. In fact, Rubin's announcement appears to be in response to an interview with this reporter regarding questions about his affiliation with VoteHere.

 

In his statement today, Rubin says, "...I had not had any contact with VoteHere since I signed on to their board over 2 years ago, and I simply did not remember nor think about it. In hindsight, that is very unfortunate."

 

And that, as they say, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

 

VoteHere is being sued by its former engineer, Dan Spillane, for wrongfully firing him in retaliation to his repeated warnings of potential defects in voting software applications and in the certification process.

 

SAIC is a behemoth military defense contractor with a shadowy, if not tarnished, reputation, while former SAIC executives also have ties to VoteHere. Why is that important? VoteHere is a growing company, which aspires to provide cryptography and computer software security for the electronic election industry.

 

Former President, Chief Operating Officer, and Vice Chairman of SAIC is Admiral Bill Owens, who is now Chairman of the Board for VoteHere. Owens also served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was a senior military assistant to Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney. Carlucci's company is Carlyle Group, while Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer is Halliburton.

 

Another former SAIC board member, also on the board of VoteHere, is ex-CIA director Robert Gates, a veteran of the Iran/Contra scandal.

 

VoteHere is already benefiting from the Diebold debacle, as it will be partnering with Sequoia Voting Systems, "to provide a new level of electronic ballot verification to customers of the AVC Edge touch screen voting system," according to the VoteHere website.

 

SAIC, which is supposed to vet Diebold's elections software, is itself in the elections business.

 

On a webpage of Diversified Dynamics (recently purchased by Northrop Grumman), a 1998 legal notice states, "Diversified Dynamics has brought the election process to the technological level of the new millennium by designing the world's most advanced electronic vote recording and election management system. We were supported in this effort by the engineering and software capabilities of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a world leader in systems development and integration."

 

All of the above companies are military defense contractors as well as information technology (IT) firms, whose clients include state governments and federal agencies.

 

Is it a conflict of interest when an industry insider reviews the software of a competitor?

 

Yes. However, these conflicts of interest may not necessarily discredit the Johns Hopkins report. The basic tenet of the report is true, say many computer experts who have reviewed Diebold's software. It is riddled with back doors that can be easily opened, an "open door" so to speak to vote fraud. It does, however, bring into question some of the conclusions of the report.

 

For example, computer voting expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has made it clear that although a machine may be used to produce a paper ballot, the ballot itself must be voter-verified and "hand counted" in order to ensure integrity to the voting process. In an interview with this reporter, Rubin said that he's "against" electronic voting. However, in the Hopkins report, the authors use language that indicates that they believe that paper ballots should be used for audits or recounts only.

 

It should be also noted that the handicapped are being used by the election services industry to push for mandated electronic voting, and the Hopkins report strongly supports this strategy, "A voting system must be comprehensible to and usable by the entire voting population, regardless of age, infirmity, or disability."

 

That's code for "electronic voting is the only way to go." Tell that to the Canadians and other countries around the world that hold elections, which include the handicapped, without a Pandora's Box of electronic wizardry.

 

Meanwhile SAIC is a piece of work all by itself.

 

"The federal government, its main customer, often doesn't want the public to know what the company [sAIC] is doing and, as one of the nation's largest employee-owned corporations, it escapes investor scrutiny," writes AP correspondent Elliot Spagat, in a July 26, 2003 article.

 

J. Robert Beyster founded SAIC on February 3, 1969, "with a couple of consulting contracts, one from Los Alamos and one from Brookhaven National Labs," according to the SAIC website. Today, SAIC has racked up more than $5.9 billion in annual revenues.

 

Bev Harris and her investigative team have dug up some interesting facts about SAIC. It seems that SAIC has had its share of legal troubles.

 

In a 1995 article in the Web Review, editor Stephen Pizzo paints a disturbing picture of SAIC. "In 1990 SAIC was indicted by the Justice Department on 10 felony counts for fraud in its management of a Superfund toxic cleanup site. (SAIC pleaded guilty.)

 

In 1993 the Justice Department sued SAIC, accusing it of civil fraud on an F15 fighter contract.

 

In May 1995, the same month SAIC purchased NSI (Network Solutions Inc.), the company settled a suit that charged it had lied about security system tests it conducted for a Treasury Department currency plant in Fort Worth, TX."

 

According to a January 1994 article in the highly regarded Crypt Newsletter, edited by George Smith, "In 1992 one of Scientific Applications (SAIC) government projects blew up in the firm's face when it was charged with fabricating environmental testing from toxic waste dumps. SAIC eventually conceded to false claims and paid $1.3 million in penalties, a small sum compared to the estimated $1.5 billion the firm is expected to earn in 1994.

 

The Los Angeles Times cites government officials declaring Science Applications (SAIC) guilty of the "largest environmental fraud . . . we've had here" and an example of "corporate greed."

 

On November 15, 2000, a joint venture between SAIC and Bechtel (Bechtel SAIC Company, LLC) was awarded the contract from the Department of Energy (DOE) to manage and operate the Yucca Mountain program and support extensive DOE studies of Yucca Mountain's geology, hydrology, and climate.

 

In a Nov 24, 2002 Associated Press reported, "Some workers at the Yucca Mountain Project said there were flaws in the process scientists used to determine whether the site was suitable for disposing the nation's nuclear waste. At least two workers claim they were either fired or transferred after raising concerns about the project's safety, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in its Sunday editions. Susana Navarro said an audit by a prominent law firm found "among other things, that Mr. Mattimoe's conduct as a program manager for SAIC was inconsistent with a safety conscious work environment."

 

SAIC is perhaps most notorious among Internet aficionados for buying the company, Network Solutions Inc (NSI), which received the no-bid no-compete monopoly contract to privatize the government agency which registered domain names.

 

John Dillon reports in MediaFilter.org, "Initially, the service was subsidized by the government. But, in May 1993, the National Science Foundation privatized the name registry (InterNIC - Internet Network Information Center) and paid NSI $5.9 million to administer it. In September 1995, NSI instituted the fee system. A few months earlier, it had been bought out by Science Applications International Corp (SAIC)."

 

SAIC's control over internet domain names set off alarm bells.

 

"The shadow ruling-class within the Pentagon," describes SAIC to a tee, according to the Crypt. SAIC has strong business ties to the military and intelligence communities.

 

Dillon quotes James Warren, an Internet civil liberties activist, "I don't want a spook corporation, particularly a private spook corporation, to be anywhere near a control point on the global cooperative Internet."

 

It should be remembered that the CIA has a decades-long track record of assisting in the brutal overthrow of democratically elected governments around the world.

 

Recently, SAIC got the contract to assist other corporations, including Northrop Grumman, in training of the Iraqi Army.

 

The specter of corporations, littered with ex-CIA types, that both control the voting systems and train the armies of countries around the world, is an emerging and frightening reality.

 

"Currently on SAIC's board is ex-CIA director Bobby Ray Inman, director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the CIA, and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to the OC (*Orange County) Weekly, "Inman worked at the highest levels of American intelligence during an era (President Ronald Reagan) when it displayed a stunning lack of it. Inman's achievements include: failing to predict the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union; prolonging violent, useless civil wars in Central America; and giving arms to terrorists in exchange for hostages (Iran Contra)."

 

"During the Bush administration, Inman, Perry and Deutch - while directors of Science Applications (SAIC), were also members of the National Foreign Intelligence Board (NFIB), an advisory group reporting to the President and the director of Central Intelligence, which deals with production, review and coordination of foreign intelligence," reports the Crypt. Both Inman and Deutch were former Directors of the CIA. William J. Perry was also a former Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration.

 

SAIC proudly lists DARPA in its annual report as one of its prime clients. DARPA is the controversial Department of Defense (DOD) subsidiary, which until recently employed Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame. Poindexter was forced to resign when it was revealed that DARPA was prepared to trade "futures" in terrorist attacks. DARPA has also developed a program to spy on American citizens, which has civil libertarians in an uproar.

 

So, what should Maryland's Governor Ehrlich do? Cancel the contracts with Diebold and SAIC, throw out all of the voting machines, and order a new batch of paper ballots. And most importantly, let the people count the votes.

 

[Guest guest]

If you want the whole sordid story of just who controls election in the U.S, from the machines to the counting to the regulators, this online book will blow your mind.

 

http://www.instinct.org/texts/black-box-voting/

[Guest guest]

This website shows who owns the voting companies.

 

http://ecotalk.org/VotingMachineCompanies.htm

 

Here is the beginning of the website

 

VOTING SYSTEMS ORGS AND COMPANIES

 

privatizing, monopolizing, & politicizing the voting process... around the world

 

 

The voting technology business is dominated by Republican-leaning U.S. and foreign corporations. Today, two Republican-controlled corporations, Election Systems and Software ( ES&S) and Diebold Voting Systems, and a British-based company, Sequoia, control about 80% of the vote count in the U.S.. But many other corporations are also involved in the elections industry (see below). Meanwhile, the long history of election upsets due to voting machine "glitches", that overwhelmingly favor Republican candidates, continues to grow.

[Guest guest]

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif,sans-serif>The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>By Larry Chin

</FONT><FONT face=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-2>Online Journal Associate Editor</FONT></P>

<P align=right><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-2></FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>November 5, 2004—Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>But to those who are “shocked” as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand “what happened” let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>It Is a Rigged Game</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, and cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They “make” law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>As Mike Ruppert writes in </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Crossing The Rubicon</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>: “That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in “democracy.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Criminals do not “permit” elections.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>It is foolish, then, to expend one’s energies in “clean” election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, “we make elections.” The 2004 presidential election was just one more “manufacture.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Greg Palast</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Then came the “black box voting” machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Bev Harris</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>.)</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In the </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>2002 mid-term elections</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, the Republicans “shocked” Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>&nbsp;“The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called ‘amazing’ upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale—a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote—was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient ‘glitches’ in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly ‘glitched’ local election went to court to have the computers examined—but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the ‘trade secrets’ of the private companies who make them.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Then what?</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as “spoilage,” intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Kerry Won</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>. And </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>here</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>.)</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Once again, criminals do not “permit” elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush’s Florida.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The Triumph of the Bush Machines</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Air America Radio’s </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Mike Malloy</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Wednesday, November 3, 2004</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, program [my links included-LC]:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>&nbsp;“The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Diebold</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>ESS</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Sequoia</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, and a fourth, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>SAIC</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an “amazing” 16 percent swing.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Diebold’s Walden O’Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio’s votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob’s brother, is a top executive at “rival” ES&amp;S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Council For National Policy</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Christian Reconstruction Movement</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.<A name=Editing></A></FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The four companies are interconnected; they are not four “competitors.” Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&amp;S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered “an amazing upset.” Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&amp;S.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Madison Dearborn</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, which is partner in the </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Carlyle Group</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>. (Also see </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>here</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>.)</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Meanwhile, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>SAIC</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> is referred to a “shadowy defense contractor.” They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC’s history of fraud charges and security “lapses” haven’t prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, ‘That sounds like a good idea!’) was a consortium of arms dealers including </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Northrup Grumman</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> and </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Lockheed Martin</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>When you hear people saying, ‘take a deep breath, we will pull through this,’ ‘we need to work harder,’ ‘we need to organize’—no. We will not. It’s over.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it’s their country. Not ours.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections—trust me—that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It’s gone.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it’s going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Until we get rid of the machines.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The people who put the software together—do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don’t deserve anything other than the lash.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over “what went wrong,” second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how “next time, we’ll work harder, and we’ll really get out the vote!,” and that “we’ll nominate even better candidates!”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren’t Walden O’Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Associated Press</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>John Kerry’s pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio—Diebold’s home state—was sickening.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Bush’s Skull &amp; Bones fraternity brother then spoke of “healing” and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore’s sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was “mah president.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, “without anger or rancor,” and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a “good cop-bad cop” theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the “war on terrorism” mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and “chase us down the street and lynch us” (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Sarah McClendon</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>)?</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We’re All Already Here.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>As sadistic Bush slurred in his “acceptance” speech, “a new term is a new opportunit.” If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora’s Boxes.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Webster Tarpley</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: “If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Peak Oil</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> (also see </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>From The Wilderness</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> and </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Richard Heinberg</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W’s first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Robert Lederman</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> wrote of Racicot: “Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees—potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot—have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia.” (See </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Murder and Drug Running in Montana</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>)</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In Robert Payne’s biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact,</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#008000 size=-1> </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>financed by the Bush family</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>): “For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: “Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Hitler himself wrote: “The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity.”</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>We cannot be fooled.</FONT></P>

 

 

<FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.</FONT></P>

[Guest guest]

Could the Associated Press rig the election?

 

By Lynn Landes

Online Journal Contributing Writer

 

 

 

October 23, 2004—The Associated Press (AP) will be the sole source of raw vote totals for the major news broadcasters on Election Night. However, AP spokesmen Jack Stokes and John Jones refused to explain to this journalist how the AP will receive that information. They refused to confirm or deny that the AP will receive direct feed from voting machines and central vote tabulating computers across the country. But, circumstantial evidence suggests that is exactly what will happen.

 

And what can be downloaded can also be uploaded. Computer experts say that signals can travel both to and from computerized voting machines through wireless technology, modems, and even simple electricity. Computer scientists have long warned that computer voting is an invitation to vote fraud and system failure. An examination of Diebold election software by several computer scientists, including Dr. Avi Rubin and his staff, proved that secret backdoors can be built into computer programs that allow votes to be easily manipulated without detection.

 

ES&S, the nation's largest voting machine company that will reportedly count 50 percent of all votes, describe on their website how "accessible" their results are: "At ES&S, we know election administrators and the public want fast and accurate election results. That is why we have developed several election management system software solutions to make the reporting process easier, more reliable, and more accessible." Diebold, the second largest voting machine company, advertises a similar service. Both ES&S and Diebold have close ties to the Republican Party.

 

But, can't the AP be trusted? Isn't it an objective nonpartisan news organization? Some say no. The AP is batting for a Bush presidency.

 

In Online Journal, Stephen Crockett and Al Lawrence, the hosts of Democratic Talk Radio, wrote, " . . . the Associated Press ran a story that was widely published in newspapers and on the Internet, headlined ‘Bush Leads Kerry In Electoral Votes,’ that could have been written by the Bush campaign. The assignment of states to candidates, the headline and the conclusions were all simply wrong. The Associated Press should print a retraction and work to see that it is widely published."

 

And WBAY TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin, ran an AP article reporting that Bush has won the election, weeks before the election is to take place. The AP reported, "At this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting." According to reports, the AP is now saying the article was a "test article," a never-heard-before journalistic practice.

 

Who is the AP? The Associated Press was founded in 1848. It is a not-for-profit news cooperative, some would say ‘monopoly,’ that rakes in about $500 million dollars a year. The AP is owned by its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members. Their board of directors is elected by voting ‘bonds.’ However, it is not clear who controls the bonds. AP spokespeople would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP leadership appears quite conservative.

 

Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)’s 7-member executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP to improve the wire service's performance," according to their website. APME vice president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose parent company owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S).

 

Many Americans believe that polling organizations and the broadcasters will raise the red flag on any election shenanigans. But others have their doubts.

 

The Collier brothers, authors of the book, VoteScam: The Stealing of America, wrote about vote fraud and the role the news media and polls played.

 

In 1970, Channel 7 in Miami projected with 100 percent accuracy (a virtual impossibility) the final vote totals on election day. When asked where they got their exit poll data, both Channel 3 & Channel 7 claimed that the League of Women Voters sent it in from the precincts. But, the League's local president tearfully denied it, say, "I don't want to get caught up in this thing." The broadcasters then told the Colliers that a private contractor used the data from a single voting machine to project the winners, but the contractor said he got the data from a University of Miami professor, who in turn denied this. In the end, the news broadcasters appeared to have got the polling numbers out of thin air.

 

One thing is clear. The air will be thick with distrust and doubt on Election Night 2004.

[Guest guest]

<DIV>

 

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif,sans-serif>Pacifying populations, 'making' elections</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>By Larry Chin

</FONT><FONT face=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-2>Online Journal Associate Editor</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>November 13, 2004—In the first speech following his second coup d'etat, the malignant and deeply criminal George W. Bush vowed that he "earned political capital," and that he "intended to spend it." His adminstration's first expenditures: the annihilation of Fallujah, mass slaughter in Iraq, and the destruction of what is left of democracy within the United States.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Fallujah</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>While the US corporate media continues to broadcast and publish Pentagon/CIA-sanitized, jingoistic and violent Bush administration </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>propaganda</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, front-line dispatches of independent reporter </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Dahr Jamail</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> (also available at </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Flashpoints (Pacifica Radio)</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, and the coverage of </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Al-Jazeera</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>The New Standard News</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Occupation Watch</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Empire Notes</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, and media outside of the US confirm that violence is spiraling out of control across Iraq.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Code named "Operation Phantom Fury" by the sadistic and demented war criminal </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Donald Rumsfeld</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> (who undoubtedly realized knew that the "fury" that would be inflicted upon Iraq would be anything but "phantom"), the genocidal Fallujah rampage begun by the Bush administration and its </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Allawi puppet government</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> is already a war crime of immense proportions.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Following aerial bombardment with (among other things) 1,000-pound and 500-pound "bunker busters," depleted uranium, "fleshette" shrapnel bombs, chemical weapons, napalm, cluster bombs, and artillery fire, 10,000 US troops swarmed into Fallujah for street by street, house by house, person by person slaughter. Iraq under martial law, with its borders closed, is a "turkey shoot." In a final insult to add to the humiliation, the Bush regime has delivered this gift of death, horror and atrocities during the holy period of Ramadan.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In a November 9, 2004 analysis of the assault, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>James Cogan</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, wrote:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"An Iraqi in Fallujah told the London Times before yesterday's attack began: 'The damage is so heavy the suburbs look like they were hit by an earthquake.'</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"An Agence France Presse correspondent covering the battle from the outskirts reported: 'the skies above Fallujah burned red as artillery, war planes and tanks pounded the Iraqi rebel bastion . . . Missiles rained down indiscriminately on the city, with the action most intense in the Askari district in the northeast and Jolan in the northwest. 'They are in the process of incinerating the section,' a Jolan local said.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"There is no reliable estimate of how many Iraqi fighters and civilians, or US soldiers, are already dead and wounded. Apart from scattered and limited reports, there will be virtually no independent media coverage of the offensive or the conduct of the American forces. Few journalists are inside or near the city.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Marine commander Major General John Sattler dehumanised Fallujah's defenders as 'mugs, thugs, murderers and intimidators.' Colonel Michael Shupp ordered his troops to shoot Iraqis attempting to surrender, 'because of the threat of suicide bombers." Army Colonel Pete Newell declared: "We're going to start at one end of the city and we're not going to stop until we get to the other. If there's anybody left when that happens, we're going to turn around and we're going to go back and finish it.'"</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In yet another case of Orwellian horror, George W. Bush stated in his "acceptance" speech, "I've been working on Middle Eastern peace since I've been president." Peace, in the form of murder.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Murder, Rock and Roll, and God</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>An untold number of Iraqi civilians have been butchered by </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>brainwashed and trigger-happy American teenagers</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>,</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> whipped into a frenzy of bloodlust and fanaticism by their superiors. Soldiers are being sent into the meat grinder with evangelical Christian rites, Christian rock music, and heavy metal, and told by officers that they are battling "the face of Satan", and "saving Iraq from rape, torture, and murder".</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Marine Colonel Gary Bradl glorified in the killing spree, declaring that 'the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in Fallujah and we're going to destroy him."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The disregard for human life being displayed by American troops has been widely reported outside of the US—and the atrocities of Abu Ghraib were just the tip of the iceberg. Sadism is operational policy, approved by the highest levels of the "moral" Bush administration.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>[One horrific story, lost amidst news of the presidential election, involved </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>"mercy killing"</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> .US soldiers gunned down innocent Iraqis unloading a garbage truck. Seeing that the Iraqis were not yet dead, the US soldiers finished the job, shooting the Iraqis dead like animals, to "put them out of their misery."]</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Humanitarian Catastrophe</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>A </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>humanitarian crisis</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> continues to mushroom. While NGOs and groups such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are unable to gain access to war-torn areas, the United States is not lifting a finger. In an article titled </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>"Screams Will Not Be Heard"</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, Madeline Bunting of the Guardian notes:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Assaults on cities serve symbolic purposes: they are set showpieces to demonstrate resolve and inculcate fear. To that end, large numbers of casualties are required: they are not an accidental byproduct but the aim. Only by the shores of that dusty lake in Dreamland would it be possible to believe that the ruination of this city will do anything to enhance the legitimacy of the US occupation and of the Iraqi government it appointed."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>It is no surprise that the first action taken by US forces after aerial bombardment (itself a massive war crime) was another war crime—the destruction and occupation of </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>hospitals</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> (also see </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>here</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>), in order to deny Iraqis from medical assistance, and to control the reporting of casualties and body count to the outside world. US forces destroyed Nazzal Emergency Hospital, and two adjacent medical facilities. Fallujah General Hospital was stormed and occupied. During the raid, medical staff and patients alike were held at gunpoint. Some 25 patients were arrested.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Dahr Jamail</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> reports the following:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"One of the doctors at said hospital that one of their ambulances was shot while attempting to leave the hospital, just like in April when I was in Falluja; all of the ambulances were targeted then as well.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Witnesses claimed that US troops opened fired sporadically in the city center after they were attacked, injuring civilians and destroying cars.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Allawi laid out six steps for implementing his "security law," which entails a 6pm curfew imposed on Falluja, all highways closed except for emergencies and government vehicles, General Institutions to be closed, a ban of all weapons in Falluja, the Iraqi borders with Syria and Jordan to be closed except for food trucks and vehicles carrying other necessary goods, and the closing of Baghdad International Airport for 48 hours. This is what freedom and democracy look like in liberated Iraq today."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In a report from the </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>New Standard News</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Dr. Al-Issawi told Agence France-Presse that Marines would not let him or other hospital staff move to another facility inside Fallujah in order to be of actual help to the people of the city.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Of the estimated 30,000 to 100,000 who remain in Fallujah after most of its 280,000-strong population left during October in an exodus of terror, many are presumed to be infirmed, impoverished, or otherwise unable to escape the offensive. The entire city must now rely on two or three small clinics, if they can reach care at all, to provide for the sick and wounded.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Another physician, Dr. Hashem Issawi, who works at a clinic inside Fallujah, reported that a lack of water, electricity and ambulances has made providing emergency care all but impossible, according to AFP. Dr. Issawi reported that his clinic's ambulance was destroyed during air strikes on Sunday. 'Ambulances have also been confiscated,' he said. 'We lack material and equipment.'</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Another doctor at Fallujah General, Sami Al-Jumaili, told Reuters: 'There is not a single surgeon in Fallujah. We had one ambulance hit by US fire and a doctor wounded.'"</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Meanwhile, Iraq's infrastructure remains in shambles. The Bush/Allawi talk of "rebuilding," an obvious farce. Unemployment among Iraqi men is approximately 70%, and what is left of the Iraqi economy is being set up for pillage and future control by Anglo-American corporate interests. The Bush regime's "glorious liberation" literally rips Iraq out from under the Iraqis left alive.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Bloodshed Spreads, Along With Hatred</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The continuing atrocities being committed by the United States and the Allawi puppet government promise to inflame and exponentially strengthen, not pacify, Iraqi resistance. Indeed, the Bush administration continues to provoke wholesale hatred across the Middle East, and across the world.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Larry Diamond, a former political advisor to the US occupation authority in Iraq, and a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, believes that "the prospect for a political breakthrough that would bring the Sunnis into the political process has utterly collapsed," and "rather than reduce the violence, this [the assault on Fallujah] is going to increase it."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Covering Fallujah for </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Truthout</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, Marjorie Cohn writes:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Twenty-six prominent Saudi scholars and preachers wrote in an open letter to the Iraqi people: 'The U.S. forces are still destroying towns on the heads of their people and killing women and children. What's going on in Iraq is a result of the big crime of America's occupation of Iraq.' They stressed that armed attacks by militant Iraqi groups on U.S. troops and their allies in Iraq represent legitimate resistance.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"'The attack on Fallujah is an illegal and illegitimate action against civilians and innocent people,' said the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni clerics group. 'We denounce this operation which will have a grave consequence on the situation in Iraq,' declared spokesman Mohammed Bashar al-Faidhi. [Note: as of this writing, US forces have arrested members of the ASM.]</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Baghdad University political science professor Salman al-Jumaili warns, 'What happens in Fallujah will spread out across other Sunni cities, including Baghdad.' Al-Jumaili expects the Fallujah offensive will spin out of control, with fighting hop-scotching from one town to the next."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Outraged and exasperated Iraqi citizens have told reporter </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Dahr Jamail</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"'Here in Baghdad, the martial law is genocide against the resistance in Iraq who are against the invasion. The theme of the law is to kill the resistance and to stop people even from thinking. Do you think they can limit how Iraqis think? Insh'alla (God willing) they cannot. We have to defend our religion and the resistance is legal, insh'alla, the resistance will do their job and rid us of the invaders.'</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Another man who asked to be referred to as 'Sabah,' speaking at the Al-Ambia'a mosque said, 'The Americans came thousands of kilometers to invade Iraq and kill people, and they should now be punished. Who gave them the right to kill us? We have an illegal interim government, so we have to have our revenge by our hands.'</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>According to Jamail, "most of the fighters have left Falluja and placed themselves in other cities. Baghdad, Ramadi, Samarra, Haditha, Khaldiya, you name it. Just like in April, we expect things to kick off all over Iraq before long."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>What population is next? </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Samarra?</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> Ramadi? </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Mosul?</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> Najaf? </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Baghdad?</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Kirkuk? Tikrit?</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>To bequeath Iraq with "elections," the Bush administration will exterminate the entire Iraqi populace.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"We're Making Progress in Iraq. We'll make Elections."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In his 1946 Politics and the English Language, George Orwell defined pacification as follows:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification." Modern pacification, exemplified by the US pacification of Iraq, is exponentially more brutal, almost beyond comprehension.</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>As noted by </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Bunting</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"Pacifying Falluja has become the key to stabilising the country ahead of the January elections. The 'final assault' is imminent, in which the foreigners who have infiltrated the almost deserted Iraqi city with their extremist Islam will be 'cleared, 'rooted out' or 'crushed.' Or, as one marine put it: 'We will win the hearts and minds of Falluja by ridding the city of insurgents. We're doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy.'"</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In one of his dispatches, Dahr Jamail notes:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"The growing fire of resistance has spread into the political realm in Iraq as well. The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) has called upon people not to vote in the upcoming election.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Dr. Harith al-Dhari, the secretary-general of the AMS, openly supports the Iraqi resistance to the occupation and has from the beginning. 'We have said we support the resistance since the occupation of this country began,' he said today, 'This is our right as Iraqis. Therefore, we don't need a fatwa on this issue as this matter is clear.'

&nbsp;</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>"'Iraq is pregnant with an American fetus,' he pauses for emphasis and says, 'And we need birth control pills.' He sits for a moment, and after making a toast with a soft drink adds, 'Long life to Falluja.'"</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>On November 9, the Sunni political party withdrew from the Iraqi interim government, and called for a boycott of the January elections.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>US Vote Challenge Intensifies, Officials Stonewall, Crack Down</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In bitter irony, the Fallujah crackdown follows in the wake of the psychological pacification of the US populace, by means of the electronic theft of the US election that stripped American voters of their hopes, wits and most precious democratic right.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Spearheading a wave of election challenges across the country, </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Black Box Voting</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> continues to uncover exhaustive proof of malfeasance. They filed a massive Freedom of Information Act request for 2004 election documents, the largest FOIA request in history. Black Box Voting's team has concluded, based on the evidence already compiled, that fraud took place through electronic voting machines (involving four companies, all deeply connected Bush—Diebold, ES&amp;S, Sequoia and SAIC) and this evidence continues to grow. It is a race against the clock.</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Many investigators believe that nationwide evidence of e-vote fraud, intimidation, polling place irregularities and Jim Crow thuggery will force a national challenge to the 2004 election results. States such as Ohio, Florida and New Mexico remain in play. As of this writing, provisional ballots in Ohio have still not been counted. There is also a lawsuit challenging the votes in Nevada. Ralph Nader filed a request for a recount in New Hampshire (which was denied on administrative grounds).</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Here are a few examples of the growing body of evidence proving that the election was stolen:</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Database of National Voting Irregularities (VotersUnite.org)</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Kerry Won (Greg Palast)</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Grand Theft Election: Rove's Turd Droppings</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>How Bush Stole the Election</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Surprising Florida Presidential Election Results</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Video Footage of Cleveland Vote (Intimidation)</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Evidence that Vote Was Hacked</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Palm Beach County Logs 88,000 More Votes Than Voters</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Warren, Ohio vote tally walled off</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Group finds vote irregularities in the South</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Mysterious 5% Bush advantage</FONT>

&nbsp;</P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Bush's "Incredible" Vote Tallies</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Help America Recount</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1></FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>ReDefeat Bush</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In a study conducted earlier in 2004, Dr. </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Avi Rubin</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>, a professor of computer science at John Hopkins University, obtained a copy of the Diebold software program. Rubin's students analyzed over 48,609 lines of source code that make up their voting software. They concluded that all Diebold machines utilized an encryption method that was broken in 1997, and is no longer used to secure programs—and that Diebold's machines could easily be unlocked and exploited.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>After a </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>weeklong investigation</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>by Raba Technologies, a firm hired by Maryland's legislative services department to hack voting systems manufactured by Diebold, computer experts concluded that the flaws in the machines could have easily permitted outsiders to steal the election. Raba Technologies' director, Michael Wertheimer, is a former National Security Agency code cracker.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>There is hope that exposing the election fraud will handicap Bush, blow apart any notion of a "mandate," and make e-voting the focus of criminal investigations and lawsuits.

&nbsp;</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>On a legal basis, the election challenges face an uphill battle. Reversing the 2004 election is only possible if the leadership of the neoliberal Democratic Party, and John Kerry, slink out from under their rock, openly fight Bush's neocon faction in earnest. But speaking out against voter fraud would carry an implicit challenge to the myth of American democracy, making such a move highly </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>unlikely</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>. And in a political and judicial system entirely controlled by Bush neocons, it is doubtful that even the strongest case will survive.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Kerry campaign's official position</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> is one of shameful surrender, in light of the fact that </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Kerry won the election</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Many Democrats have already self-immolated. Some have fallen directly into Karl Rove's trap—accepting fabricated election results as fact, and actually believing that "morality" was the central issue that re-elected Bush.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>''No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," according to Kerry advisor Jack Corrigan. ''I get why people are frustrated, but they did not steal this election," Corrigan said. ''There were a few problems here and there in the election. But unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Why the Kerry camp stubbornly insists that they "did not have the votes to win," even before the vote count in several states is still being disputed, is shameful and bizarre.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In January 2000, I wrote "It is nothing short of sickening that in the wake of the dirtiest election in American history, after an absolute rape of democracy, that these people we depend on for representation are doing nothing and saying nothing—at a moment in history that screams for someone, anyone, to speak the truth. The Democrats appear to have reduced themselves to simpering, obedient lap dogs for the Republicans to kick around." In four years, nothing has changed.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>This shellshock psychology has been further compounded by </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>"war on terrorism" indoctrination and fear</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>. The Bush pacification program is virtually complete.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Another Limited Hangout</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Meanwhile, there is a nationwide corporate media blitz under way to </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>dismiss and discredit e-fraud challenges</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> as "conspiracy theory" and "sour grapes." This effort is being helped by </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Bill Clinton</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> and leading Democrats. This time-honored method of crackdown on whistleblowing confirms, without a doubt, that investigators such as </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Bev Harris</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> have hit the nerve.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>To quell this disturbance, a House Committee has </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>requested a GAO investigation</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> into the "effectiveness of technologies used in the 2004 election." The very wording of the request, emphasizing "effectiveness" and "malfunctions,incompetence," etc. promises that there will be no real investigation of the central issue: how and if Bush-connected persons, groups and companies hijacked the election.</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The cover-ups of Enron and 9/11 may soon have a sibling.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The Police State Ramps Up</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>As the Bush administration marches towards full dictatorship, clear signs emerge that future opposition will be met with increasing brute force.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>At a November 8, armored tanks showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Los Angeles. According to reports, the tanks circled the block, and parked in the street and directly in facing the protesters.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The Washington Post reports that Bush's second inauguration will be framed by a combat brigade of up to 4,000 troops, and guests will be screened using new technology.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In the most ominous news of the week, the likely confirmation of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales as the new attorney general (to replace the just-retired John Ashcroft) promises new levels of violence, Bush political crime, and US-sponsored terrorism, within the US and overseas.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Gonzales, a long-time George W. Bush enforcer, is a key architect of the Bush administration's "anti-terror" policies. He wrote the notorious memo deriding the Geneva Conventions as "obsolete," and providing the legal basis for the torture and abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. He has argued aggressively for holding "terrorism" suspects without legal counsel for indefinite periods, for secret tribunals and other USA PATRIOT Act atrocities.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Gonzales served in several legal posts under George W. Bush in Texas. Scores of prisoners were executed on their watch. He is also a former partner of the Houston law firm of Vinson and Elkins, which represented Enron. He also received more than $6,000 in campaign funds from Enron during his tenure on the Texas Supreme Court.</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Members of Congress have already begun applauding the appointment. Some, including Democrats like Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), are ignorantly declaring that Gonzales is a "moderate" and "much better than Ashcroft."</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Gonzales' unsavory and bloody record is ignored by the corporate media, while his Mexican heritage has been the subject of blaring headlines.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>World as Crime Scene</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The world is littered, literally and figuratively, with the ghastly results of the Bush administration's endless and fanatical crimes. From the election "battleground" states, where US voters were deprived of their most precious democratic right, to the killing fields of Iraq, where Iraqi innocents and resistance fighters are being slaughtered.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>Against the backdrop of </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>Peak Oil</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>,</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> the imperative that has driven the "war on terrorism" itself, and the importance of monopolizing and controlling as much of this 11% of world oil supply as possible, the Bush neocon agenda is explicit and clear. The neocons cannot allow Iraq to become an Islamic state. Muslims who are not bought-and-paid-for US running dogs, or CIA assets, must be killed. Now. It is also nightmarishly desperate, and doomed to failure.</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>According to Stan Goff, "the Bush administration now finds itself locked inside its own burning automobile, with what might be a lake or mirage in the distance, and their only choice is to stamp down on the accelerator to try to get there in time to prevent their own immolation.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>In Covert Action Quarterly (Fall 2003), Doug Valentine writes that in Iraq, "the total victory Bush promised has translated into violent suppression of thousands of nationalists, not just Saddam's political supporters. Worldwide, the Bush regime has a blacklist of sixty nations it intends to invade, conquer and convert into quisling quasi-democracies through a series of "shock and awe" military campaigns, followed by endless, illegal dirty wars designed to eradicate the Bush regime's ideological opposition from the face of the earth. That's Manifesto Bush."</FONT> </P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The neocon </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>list of upcoming targets</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> include Iran, China, Russia and Latin America. A recent </FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif color=#000099 size=-1>New York Times</FONT><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1> editorial called for 40,000 more troops to be sent to the front lines. The draft is just around a corner that is fast approaching.</FONT></P>

<P align=left><FONT face=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif size=-1>The enemy has a face. It belongs to George W. Bush. Every decent, sane human being on this planet is an insurgent.</FONT></P></DIV>

[Guest guest]

We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies.

--

John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man - a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

20 years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title, "Conscience of an Economic Hit Men."

 

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

 

John Perkins goes on to write: "I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop."

 

But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins joins us now in our Firehouse studios.

 

 

John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described "economic hit man." He is the author of the new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

 

--

 

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins joins us now in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

 

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be here.

 

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Okay, explain this term, “economic hit man,” e.h.m., as you call it.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring -- to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

 

AMY GOODMAN: How did you become one? Who did you work for?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950's, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew of government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time's magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed -- well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn't have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Okay. Explain the company you worked for.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you're not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.” And today we're going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they’ve accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire. It's been extremely successful.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. You say because of bribes and other reason you didn't write this book for a long time. What do you mean? Who tried to bribe you, or who -- what are the bribes you accepted?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I accepted a half a million dollar bribe in the nineties not to write the book.

 

AMY GOODMAN: From?

 

JOHN PERKINS: From a major construction engineering company.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Which one?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Legally speaking, it wasn't -- Stoner-Webster. Legally speaking it wasn't a bribe, it was -- I was being paid as a consultant. This is all very legal. But I essentially did nothing. It was a very understood, as I explained in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that it was -- I was -- it was understood when I accepted this money as a consultant to them I wouldn't have to do much work, but I mustn't write any books about the subject, which they were aware that I was in the process of writing this book, which at the time I called “Conscience of an Economic Hit Man.” And I have to tell you, Amy, that, you know, it’s an extraordinary story from the standpoint of -- It's almost James Bondish, truly, and I mean--

 

AMY GOODMAN: Well that's certainly how the book reads.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, and it was, you know? And when the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over. I come from a very old New England family, Calvinist, steeped in amazingly strong moral values. I think I, you know, I’m a good person overall, and I think my story really shows how this system and these powerful drugs of sex, money and power can seduce people, because I certainly was seduced. And if I hadn't lived this life as an economic hit man, I think I’d have a hard time believing that anybody does these things. And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. In your book, you talk about how you helped to implement a secret scheme that funneled billions of dollars of Saudi Arabian petrol dollars back into the U.S. economy, and that further cemented the intimate relationship between the House of Saud and successive U.S. administrations. Explain.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Yes, it was a fascinating time. I remember well, you're probably too young to remember, but I remember well in the early seventies how OPEC exercised this power it had, and cut back on oil supplies. We had cars lined up at gas stations. The country was afraid that it was facing another 1929-type of crash–depression; and this was unacceptable. So, they -- the Treasury Department hired me and a few other economic hit men. We went to Saudi Arabia. We --

 

AMY GOODMAN: You're actually called economic hit men --e.h.m.’s?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.'s. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia–new cities, new infrastructure–which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn't work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren't able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had -- His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how Torrijos died?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama. Omar Torrijos had signed the Canal Treaty with Carter much -- and, you know, it passed our congress by only one vote. It was a highly contended issue. And Torrijos then also went ahead and negotiated with the Japanese to build a sea-level canal. The Japanese wanted to finance and construct a sea-level canal in Panama. Torrijos talked to them about this which very much upset Bechtel Corporation, whose president was George Schultz and senior council was Casper Weinberger. When Carter was thrown out (and that’s an interesting story–how that actually happened), when he lost the election, and Reagan came in and Schultz came in as Secretary of State from Bechtel, and Weinberger came from Bechtel to be Secretary of Defense, they were extremely angry at Torrijos -- tried to get him to renegotiate the Canal Treaty and not to talk to the Japanese. He adamantly refused. He was a very principled man. He had his problem, but he was a very principled man. He was an amazing man, Torrijos. And so, he died in a fiery airplane crash, which was connected to a tape recorder with explosives in it, which -- I was there. I had been working with him. I knew that we economic hit men had failed. I knew the jackals were closing in on him, and the next thing, his plane exploded with a tape recorder with a bomb in it. There's no question in my mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most -- many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country.

 

AMY GOODMAN: So, where -- when did your change your heart happen?

 

JOHN PERKINS: I felt guilty throughout the whole time, but I was seduced. The power of these drugs, sex, power, and money, was extremely strong for me. And, of course, I was doing things I was being patted on the back for. I was chief economist. I was doing things that Robert McNamara liked and so on.

 

AMY GOODMAN: How closely did you work with the World Bank?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Very, very closely with the World Bank. The World Bank provides most of the money that’s used by economic hit men, it and the I.M.F. But when 9/11 struck, I had a change of heart. I knew the story had to be told because what happened at 9/11 is a direct result of what the economic hit men are doing. And the only way that we're going to feel secure in this country again and that we're going to feel good about ourselves is if we use these systems we’ve put into place to create positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that. I believe the World Bank and other institutions can be turned around and do what they were originally intended to do, which is help reconstruct devastated parts of the world. Help -- genuinely help poor people. There are twenty-four thousand people starving to death every day. We can change that.

 

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, I want to thank you very much for being with us. John Perkins' book is called, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

 

[Guest guest]

 

Plunging the World

Into Despotism

 

 

By Norman D. Livergood

 

 

http://www.new-enlightenment.com/reactionism.htm

[Guest guest]

Liberals have been completely intellectually vanquished. Actually, they lost the war of ideas long ago. It's just that now their defeat is so obvious, even they've noticed. As new DNC Chairman Howard Dean might say, it's all over but the screaming.

 

In an editorial last week, the New York Times gave President Bush credit for democracy sweeping through the Middle East or, as the Times put it, "a year of heartening surprises." Yes, the Middle East's current democratization would come as quite a surprise to anyone who puts his hands over his ears and hums during the president's speeches.

 

Rolling Stone magazine is making fun of "moveon.org" for having no contact with normal Americans. Their Bush-hating cause has become so hopeless that moveon.org is on the verge of actually moving on.

 

Marking the first time Walter Cronkite and I have agreed on anything, Cronkite is ridiculing Dan Rather, saying he should have retired a long time ago.

 

No one, not even Chris Matthews, is defending the Italian communist who claims American forces intentionally shot at her in Iraq. (But to be fair, Keith Oberman has been on vacation this week.) She may have lost some credibility when she backed her claim that Americans were targeting her by quoting her kidnappers. She said her kidnappers had warned her to stay away from the Americans because they would only hurt her. And then my rapist said, "Whatever you do, don't cry out for the police! They won't help you!"

 

Consider that less than 20 years ago, ABC's Peter Jennings and CBS' Mike Wallace announced at an "Ethics in America" panel that they would not intervene to prevent the slaughter of American troops while on duty as journalists – especially during sweeps. As Wallace said: "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!" It almost makes you wonder if U.S. troops have ever targeted American journalists in the field during wartime. Maybe Eason Jordan would know something about that.

 

Now liberal journalists are pretending to support the troops. They hardly ever call them "baby killers" anymore, at least to their faces.

 

Democrats are even pretending to believe in God – you know, as they understand Her.

 

The only people liberals can find to put up a fight these days are ex-Klanners and other assorted nuts.

 

There's former KKK "Kleagle" and Democratic Sen. Bob Byrd, who compared the Republicans to Hitler last week. Byrd having been a charter member of a fascist organization himself, no one was sure if this was intended as a critique or a compliment.

 

Aspiring first lady Teresa Heinz claims the election was stolen through the machinations of a vast conspiracy involving Republican polling machine manufacturers. We eagerly await a Michael Moore documentary to flesh out the details. It's only a matter of time before Heinz announces that anti-Bush insurgents control most of the Red States, and that the sooner the U.S. pulls out of those quagmires, the better.

 

Howard Dean – chairman of the party that supports murder, adultery, lying about adultery, coveting other people's money, stealing other people's money, mass-producing human embryos for spare parts like an automotive chop shop and banning God – has called the Republican Party "evil." One Democrat in the audience, a preschool teacher no less, complained that Dean was soft-pedaling his message.

 

Teddy Kennedy's big new idea is to wheel out his 18th proposal to raise the minimum wage. He's been doing this since wages were paid in Spanish doubloons (which coincidentally are now mostly found underwater). Kennedy refuses to countenance any risky schemes like trying to grow the economy so people making minimum wage get raises because they've been promoted. Kennedy's going down and he's taking the party with him! (Recognize the pattern?)

 

I keep expecting the real Democrats to appear and drag these nuts out of the room, saying, Oh sorry, he's escaped again – don't worry, he does this all the time, and then Howard Dean will stand up and have no pants on.

 

So now, the entire country is ignoring liberals. I'm the canary in the coal mine. Twenty-six congressmen have signed a letter denouncing me for a column I wrote two weeks ago; for the past two weeks, I've been attacked on MSNBC and CNN, in the Detroit Free-Press and on every known liberal blog and radio show. (I especially want to thank Pacifica Radio in this regard.) I personally have shouted their complaints from the rooftops. Liberals had fallen into my trap!

 

But there was no point in responding because no one had heard about the liberal denunciations in the first place. It was like explaining a joke: OK, and then they said, "Call me a cab," and then I said, "You're a cab! Are you following this? ... Sorry, let me start over again."

 

This is like beating Dennis Kucinich in an untelevised presidential debate. That and $8.50 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbuck's. I'm tired of helping liberals publicize their attacks on me. Liberals are going to have to do better than that if they want a response from me.

 

It's not just that we're a divided nation, with liberals watching only CNN and conservatives watching only Fox News. I'm pretty sure liberals are aware of me, and I haven't appeared on CNN for months. It's liberals the country is ignoring. No one knows or cares what they're carrying on about in their media outlets. Liberals can't get arrested. They're even letting Martin Sheen off with a warning now.

 

I hate to sound selfish at such a great moment for the country, but this is nothing short of calamitous for completely innocent right-wing polemicists. Liberals are too pathetic to write about. I have nothing to do; my life is over. Where have all the flowers gone?

 

I'm confident they'll stage a comeback someday. In lieu of common sense, liberals have boundless energy. But I'm getting bored waiting. In the interest of good sportsmanship, I have some proposals for liberals. I think Democrats might want to drop the contract all Democrats apparently have to sign pledging to pretend to believe insane things. Also, if you could just get the base of your party to not participate anymore and maybe be a little less crazy, people might listen to you. Barring that, you're just going to have to scream a little louder.

 

 

 

[rand0M aXiS]

And my post.

[Guest guest]

I am always suprised when devotees succumb to the brainwashing of the fascist network. Why this happens is something I am curious about. Anyways, for a history of how things got to be the way they are today in the western world...

 

http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/menuhelp.html

[Guest guest]

From the above link

 

 

Timeline of Treason: The Bush Family Connections to the Nazis

 

1833:

Skull and Bones Society formed at Yale.

 

1897:

Union Pacific Railroad (UPR) bankrupted.

 

1898:

Union Pacific Railroad sold to Edward Henry Harriman & partner, Judge Robert Scott Lovett. The deal was managed by Kuhn Loeb brokerage of which Felix Warburg was a partner.

 

1902:

Paul and Felix Warburg immigrate to the United States.

 

1904:

German Alfred Ploetz founds the Archive for Racial and Social Biology, which becomes the chief journal of the German eugenics or race hygiene movement. Ernst Haeckel popularized eugenics in Germany.

 

John D. Rockefeller issues "Occasional Letter No.1" detailing plans to mold the people, reduce national intelligence to the lowest common denominator, destroy parental influence, traditional and customs, and eliminate science and real learning, "in order to perfect human nature".

 

Eugenics laboratory established at Cold Springs Harbor on Long Island constructed by Charles B. Davenport. Cold Springs Harbor was also the location of the estates of both Dulles brothers. Cold Springs facility is funded in excess of $11 million by the Harrimans and the Rockefellers.

 

1907:

Samuel Bush elected President of Buckeye Steel Castings Co. in Columbus, Ohio. For his entire career, Samuel Bush supplied Wall Street railroads with castings. Later Bush became a close advisor of President Hoover and was the first president of the National Manufactures Association. (NAM). NAM has a history of supporting fascism and later in the 1950s, members of NAM led by Robert Welch formed the John Birch Society.

 

Indiana passes the first eugenics law.

 

1909:

The Rockefeller Foundation was established. The Rockefellers supported the eugenics movement including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany.

 

1911:

John Foster Dulles joins Sullivan and Cromwell.

 

1913:

Federal Reserve Bank created. Paul Warburg served as a governor of the bank during WWI. At the same time, his brother Max was the head of the German Secret Service.

 

1914:

With war close at hand Percy Rockefeller took control of Remington Arms & appoints Samuel F. Pryor as CEO.

 

1915:

Dulles’ uncle Robert Lansing was appointed Secretary of State. Lansing recruited his nephew to go to Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama on the pretext of company business but in reality to sound out the Latin Americans on aiding the US war effort. Costa Rica was led by the vicious dictator Federico Tinoco. Dulles advised Washington to support the dictator, as he was anti-German. Dulles also encouraged the Nicaragua dictator Emianiano Camorro to issue a proclamation suspending diplomatic relations with Germany. In Panama, Dulles offered to let Panama waive the tax on its annual canal fee as long as Panama would declare war on Germany.

 

1917:

Prescott Bush joins the Skull and Bones. Both his son and grandson George and George W. likewise were Skull and Bones members. Brown Brothers & Harriman had an exceptional number of members during the 1930s.

 

1918:

Robert Scott Lovett elected president of Union Pacific. Samuel Bush appointed to facilities division of the US War Industries Board chaired by Bernard Baruch & his assistant, Clarence Dillon.

 

1919:

George Herbert Walker forms W.A.Harriman & Co. Walker is president and CEO.

 

Averell Harriman, son of Edward Harriman is the chairman. Averell would later serve as US Ambassador to the USSR 1943-1946 and as US Secretary of Commerce 1946-1948.

 

Dulles brothers involved in the treaty negotiations after the war.

 

1920:

Averell Harriman and George Walker gain control of German Hamburg-Amerika Line. The deal was arranged through the chief executive German Hamburg-Amerika, William Cuno, & Max Warburg of the shipping line’s bankers, M.M. Warburg. The name of the firm was changed to American Ship & Commerce Corp. Samuel F. Pryor of Remington Arms had been involved in the deal & now served on the board of the renamed corporation. Cuno was later a heavy contributor to Nazi Party funds

 

1922:

Averell Harriman opened a Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman. A U.S. government memorandum dated Oct. 5 1942 to the Executive Committee of the office of the Alien Property Custodian indicates that sometime prior to 1924 Harriman was in Europe and met with Thyssen. They agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. Additionally, the memorandum indicates Thyssen’s agent; H. J. Kouwenhoven traveled to New York before 1924 in regard to this connection.

 

The Model Eugenic Sterilization Law was published by Harry Laughlin. The law led to the sterilization of over 20,000 Americans and service as the basis of the Nuremberg laws adopted by the Nazis.

 

1923:

Fritz Thyssen begins to contribute to the Nazi party.

 

1924:

W.A.Harriman & Co invested $400,000 in setting up Union Banking Corp to act in partnership with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvart in Holland. Prescott Bush brought into the firm to manage Union Bank. Prescott was the son in law of George Walker and son of Samuel Bush. Union bank is now in the position to transfer funds back and forth for Thyssen’s United Steel.

 

Coinciding with the Dawes Plan, which is discussed elsewhere in this chapter John Foster, Dulles arranged a large loan for Krupp. For the loan Dulles had called Leland Harrison, assistant secretary of state on a Saturday to soft pedal the item in the news. Harrison was infuriated because the department had issued a circular asking to see foreign loans before American funds were exported. Dulles knew however, that Harrison had no authority to stop the loan. Dulles wanted to avoid the State Department’s scrutiny as to whether German factories were producing military hardware. Sullivan and Cromwell at Dulles behest accepted the assurances of Krupp that all military hardware had been destroyed.

 

Ethyl Corporation formed jointly by Standard Oil and General Motors.

 

1925:

By 1925, I.G. had established powerful allies inside the Republican administration. The then Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover appointed a nine-member board, Hoover's Chemical Advisory Committee. Seated on the committee were Walter Teagle (Standard Oil of New Jersey), Lammot du Pont, Frank Blair (President of Sterling) and Henry Howard (Vice-president of Grasselli). Despite the extensive ties the four had with I.G. they sat on a committee whose role was to help America's chemical industry fight off the I.G. cartel

 

1926:

Prescott Bush promoted to Vice-President of W. A. Harriman & Co. Clarence Dillon of Dillon Read, set up the German Steel Trust with Thyssen & partner, Fredrick Flick. According to the terms, Dillon Read would handle the Trust’s corporate banking in return for two Dillon Read representatives being on the board of the German Steel Trust. Albert Voegler was the chief executive of the German Steel trust was. Voegler was another industrialist that was instrumental in bringing Hitler to power. He also held directorships in Thyssen’s Dutch bank and the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Union Bank was not in partnership with Flick’s empire, Silesian Holding Co. Walker, Bush and Harriman owned a third of Flick’s holding company and called their share Consolidated Silesian Steel Corp.

 

American I.G. founded as a holding company controlling I.G. Farben assets in the United States. Some board members were Edsel Ford, Charles Mitchell (President of Rockefeller's National City Bank of New York), Walt Teagle (President of Standard Oil), Paul Warburg (Federal Reserve chairman and brother of Max Warbug, financier of Nazi Germany's war effort and Director of American I.G.) and Herman Metz, a director of the Bank of Manhattan, controlled by the Warburgs. Three other members of the Board of Governors for American I.G. were tried and convicted as German war criminals.

 

Allen Dulles joins Sullivan and Cromwell.

 

1927:

John Foster Dulles director of GAF Company (American I.G.) until 1934.

 

1929:

Standard Oil and I.G. Farben begin cartel negotiations

 

Harriman bank bought Dresser Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline couplers to Standard and other companies. Prescott Bush became a director and financial czar of Dresser, installing his Yale classmate Neil Mallon as chairman.

 

1930:

Dulles arranged for the wealthy Czech family, the Petscheks to sell their interest in Silesian Coal to George Mernane. Mernane was used merely to hidthe Petscheks interest. Dulles then sold the shares to his friend Schacht, the Nazi economic minister. After the sale, Dulles became director of Consolidated SilesianSteel Company. Its sole asset was a one third interest in Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company. The remainder of the shares was controlled by Fredrick Flick.

 

1931:

W.A Harriman merges with the British firm Brown Brothers. Thatcher Brown, Prescott Bush and the two Harriman brothers were the senior partners in the new firm of Brown Brothers and Harriman. Robert Lovett son of Robert Scott Lovett and a close friend of Prescott Bush became a partner in the new firm. Lovett would later serve as Asst. Sec. for Air during the war, as Under Sec. Of State 1947-1949, as Deputy Sec. of Defense 1950-1951 and as Secretary of Defense 1951-1953. Prescott Bush ran the New York office while the London office of the new firm was ran by Thatcher Brown. Montagu Collet Norman, governor of the Bank of England and close friend of Prescott Bush often staying with the Bush family on his visits to New York was a partner of Brown Brothers. He also was a well-known Nazi sympathizer. His grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers during the Civil war when Brown Brothers were directly responsible for shipping seventy five percent of the cotton from the south to England.

 

Precott Bush and George Walker hosted host of the Third International Congress of Eugenics. The purpose of the event was to call for the sterilization of fourteen million Americans.

 

Bank of International Settlements formed.

 

1933:

On January 4, 1933, Hitler was invited to the Schroeder Bank by a group of industrialists. The industrialists gave Hitler the money to overcome his financial problems in turn for a pledge to break the trade unions. Present at this meeting were two Americans John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles.

 

Hitler assumes power.

 

Max Warburg selected by Prescott Bush to be the American Ship & Commerce Line official representative on the board of the Hamburg- Amerika Line. Warburg was a long time advisor of Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi’s Economic Minister and an executive in the Reichsbank. Warburg was also a close friend with Montagu Collet Norman.

 

An agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America was reached in Berlin after negotiations between Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht & John Foster Dulles.As a result Oliver Harriman, Averell’s cousin formed a syndicate of 150 firms to conduct all business between Germany and the United States.

 

North German Lloyd Co. merged with Hamburg-Amerika Line in Hamburg. Christian Beck a long time Harriman executive was placed as manager of ‘freight & operations’ in North America for this newly merged company. Emil Helfferich, an ardent Nazi was appointed chairman of this new company called Hapag-Lloyd. Nazi security guards were now on all ships of the company.

 

William S. Farish was appointed chairman of Standard Oil by John D. Rockefeller. Farish was close friends with Hermann Schmitz, chairman of I.G. Farben. Farish hired Ivy Lee, to write pro-I.G. Farben and pro-Nazi propaganda and get it into the U.S. press. He hired Nazi German crews for Standard Oil tankers. In addition, he hired "Emil Helfferich," chairman of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, as chairman also of the Standard Oil Company subsidiary in Germany. Karl Lindemann, board member of Hamburg-Amerika, also became a top Farish-Standard executive in Germany. The interlock placed Farish and Prescott Bush in a small group of Hitler supporters. Both Emil Helfferich and Karl Lindemann were authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, on a special Standard Oil account. This account was managed by the German-British-American banker, Kurt von Schroeder. According to U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by author Anthony Sutton, Helfferich continued his payments to the SS into 1944, when the SS was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-I.G. Farben

 

Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied interrogators after the war that these were not his personal contributions-they were corporate Standard Oil funds.

 

1934:

The US Senate Nye Committee hearings revealed Samuel Pryor, chairman of Remington Arms & founding director of both the UBC & the American Ship & Commerce Corp. had joined in a cartel agreement with I.G. Farben. The committee also uncovered that the Nazis were armed with mostly American arms.

 

E. W. Webb, president of Ethyl Corporation was advised that Washington had learned of the intention of "forming a German company with the I.G. to manufacture ethyl lead in Germany. The War Department indicated that there was considerable criticism of this technological transfer. The Ethyl Company was then advised by the Army Air Corps that "under no conditions should you or the Board of Directors of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation disclose any secrets or 'know-how' in connection with the manufacture of tetraethyl lead to Germany.

 

With Hitler in solid control of Germany, the profits from the Thyssen-Flick union soared to over a hundred million. Both Union Bank and the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart were overflowing with money. Prescott Bush became managing director of Union Bank and took over the day-to-day operations of the German plan.

 

John Foster Dulles was publicly supporting the Nazi philosophy. In 1935, he wrote a long article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Road to Peace." He excused Germany’s secret rearmament as an action taking back their freedom. Knowing what he did about Inco and Germany’s munitions industry Dulles was misleading in asserting Germany’s, Italy’s, and Japan’s desires for peace. Later in the 1930s, Dulles helped organize the American First group. A month before Pearl Harbor he donated $500 to the group. Later he would claim no association with the group. Dulles continued his support of the Nazi line right up to the time Germany invaded Poland. Dulles excuse for the Poland invasion was much like blaming the victim for the crime.

 

1935:

Ethyl Corporation signed a joint production agreement with I.G. Farben in Germany to form Ethyl G.m.b.H. and with Montecatini in fascist Italy for the production of tetraethyl lead. The directors of Ethyl Gasoline Corporation at the time of this transfer: E.W. Webb, president and director; C.F. Kettering; R.P. Russell; W.C. Teagle, Standard Oil of New Jersey and trustee of FDR's Georgia Warm Springs Foundation; F. A. Howard; E. M. Clark, Standard Oil of New Jersey; A. P. Sloan, Jr.; D. Brown; J. T. Smith; and W.S. Parish of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

 

John Foster Dulles narrowly missed being indicted in a case of Union Electric Company of Missouri, a subsidiary of the North America Company. The SEC had discovered the company operated a slush fund to bribe legislators. The fund received kickbacks from its local lawyers and an insurance company. The firm had bribed the entire Missouri legislator. SEC general counsel Travis Lane cynically attributed the failure to the grand jury to indict Dulles was due to his charm.

 

Nuremberg Laws passed in Germany paving the way for the Holocaust.

 

1936:

The Schroeder Bank in New York merges with the Rockefellers to form Schroeder, Rockefeller & Company, Inc. Carlton P. Fuller of Schroeder Banking Corporation became president and Avery Rockefeller, became vice president.

 

1937:

By the end of January 1937, Dulles had merged all his cloaking activities into one client account, Brown Brothers Harriman-Schroeder Rock. Schroeder, of course, was the Nazi bank on whose board Dulles sat. The 'Rock' was the Rockefellers of Standard Oil, who were already coming under scrutiny for their Nazi deals. At the request of Prescott Bush Dulles had cloaked the Bush-Harriman dealings with the Nazis.

 

1939:

Hitler invades Poland the war starts in Europe.

 

Farish's daughter Martha married Averell Harriman's nephew, Edward Harriman Gerry.

 

Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was located near the Polish town of Oswiecim. When the plan to use Soviet prisoners as forced labor fell through, the Nazis began shipping Jews, communists, gypsies and other minority populations to the camp the Nazis had set up. This was the beginning of Auschwitz. The reason Auschwitz was located there was because of the abundant supplies of coal which could be processed into aviation fuel. I.G. Farben soon built a plant near Auschwitz to take advantage of not only of the nearby coal deposits but also of the slave labor supply available at Auschwitz. According to a Dutch intelligence agent, Prescott Bush managed a portion of the slave labor force in Poland.

 

1940:

Allen Dulles served on the board of the Schroeder bank. Johns Foster Dulles served as the legal counsel for Schroeder Bank. Schroeder Bank acted as a financial arm of the Nazis.

 

1941:

Pearl Harbor bombed and war is declared.

 

1942:

Leo Crowley, the US Alien Property Custodian ordered the seizure of all property of Hapag-Lloyd in Aug. In October, US Alien Property Custodian seized thestock shares of the Union Banking Corp. of New York, whose shareholders were: Chm./Dir. E. Rowland Harriman; Pres./Dir. Cornelis Lievense (banking functionary for the Nazis); Treasurer/Dir. Harold D. Pennington (of Brown Brothers Harriman); Dir. Ray Morris (of Brown Brothers Harriman); Dir. Prescott S. Bush; Dir. H.J. Kouwenhoven (Dir./Chief foreign financial exec. of German Steel Trust); Dir. Johann G. Groeninger (Industrial Exec. In Nazi Germany).

 

In the same month, the United States government seized two additional companies: Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. & Holland-American Trading Corp both ran by Union Bank.

 

In November, the Nazi assets of Silesian-American Corp were seized leaving the American partners to carry on with business. Seizure of the whole company would have been detrimental to the war effort.

 

On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced that William Stamps Farish had pleaded "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal manager of a cartel agreement between Standard Oil and I.G. Farben. The cartel built an industrial plant to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal at Auschwitz to take advantage of the slave labor.

 

The Deutsche-Amerikanische Petroleum A.G. (DAPAG), the Standard Oil subsidiary in Germany, was 94-percent owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Standard Oil of New Jersey was represented in the inner circles of Naziism by Karl Lindemann, director of DAPAG and member of Himmler's Circle of Friends and by board member Emil Helfrich, who was an original member of the Keppler Circle. Karl Lindemann connections extended into the international banking area as director of several banks, including the Dresdner Bank, the Deutsche Reichsbank, and the private Nazi-oriented bank of C. Melchior & Company

 

1945:

The Treasury Department revealed to congress that United Steel produced the following percentages of war munitions for the Nazis: Pig iron 50.8%; Pipe & tubes 45.5%; Universal plate 41.4%; Galvanised sheet 38.5%; Heavy plate 36%; Explosives 35%; Wire 22.1%. This is the same firm Prescott Bush acted, as banker for. In effect, Prescott was Hitler’s American banker.

 

Allen Dulles sought out a young Naval Officer that had been put in charge of some captured Nazi documents. If the documents surfaced it would have revealed Dulles as a traitor. In a deal to bury the documents, Dulles agreed to finance the young man’s first political race. This was the beginning of the political career of Richard Nixon.

 

Project Paperclip begins to import Nazis into the United States.

 

1946:

Nixon defeated Jerry Voohris for congress with the help of an influx of money from New York centered banks.

 

1947:

Following the war, authorities seeking to locate the Dutch Royal family’s jewelry discovered the transaction papers of the Silesian American Corporation in the books of Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart. The bank manager, H.J. Kounhoven came under intense scrutiny and was shocked by the discovery. Soon Kounhoven traveled to New York to inform Prescott Bush. Two weeks later, the otherwise healthy Dutch banker died of a heart attack.

 

1950:

Prescott Bush defeated in his political race due to his background association with the American eugenics movement.

 

1951:

Union Bank liquidated. The Bush family received $1.5 million from its interest in Union Bank.

 

1952:

Prescott Bush elected to senate.

 

Prescott Bush instrumental in the selection of Nixon as vice presidential candidate.

 

1953:

John Foster Dulles appointed Secretary of State.

 

Allen Dulles appointed Director of the CIA.

 

With money from Brown Brothers and Harriman, George Bush forms Zapata, a front for the CIA.

 

1954:

CIA under the direction of Allen Dulles help span a coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala to aid United Fruit. Schroeder Bank was partnered with United Fruit in the banana business. Allen Dulles was a sitting board member of Schroeder Bank. Both John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had investments in firms with heavy investments in United Fruit. In addition, the American ambassador at the UN was a stockholder of United Fruit and President Eisenhower's personal secretary was the wife of United Fruit's public relations director. The Dulles brothers convinced Eisenhower that Arbenz was a threat to American national security and got his appoval to develop a plan to get rid of the Guatemalan President.

 

1961:

C. Dillon appointed Secretary of Treasury.

 

The Bay of Pigs fiasco. Two of ships were named Houston and Barbara. The CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata. tying George Bush to the operation. Additionally in 1981 the year before George Bush was elected vice president all of the SEC records of Zapata between 1960 and 1966 disappeared.

 

John Kennedy fires Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs.

 

1963:

John Kennedy assassinated.

 

1964:

George Bush campaigns against the Civil Rights Act in his bid for election. He lost the election.

 

1966:

George Bush elected to congress.

 

1968:

Nixon elected President.

 

1969:

Zapata attempted to buyout United Fruit another company with strong ties to the CIA and involved in the overthrow of reformed-minded Central American countries.

 

1971:

George Bush appointed as ambassador to the United Nations.

 

1972:

Watergate scandal erupts during Nixon’s reelection campaign

 

George Bush appointed chairman of the Republican Party. Bush proceeds to set up the ethnic heritage groups in the party. In short, these groups are nothing more than a haven for Nazi émigrés from Eastern Europe. Members of the Republican Heritage Groups Council included Lazlo Paszor, Hungary Arrow Cross member, Radi Slavoff, Bulgarian fascist, Nicolas Nazarenko former SS officer in the Cossack Division, Florian Gaddu, Romanian Iron Guard member, Method Balco Slovakian fascist. Both Allen Dulles and Nixon believed these émigrés were useful in getting out the vote.

 

1975:

Colby reveals information about secret domestic operations by the CIA: Mokingbird, Mk-Ultra. Cheney seeks Colby's removal.

 

1976:

George Bush appointed CIA director by President Gerald Ford, a former member of the pro-Nazi group, American First.

 

George Bush allowed the execution of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier by the fascist regime of Pinochet. Bush was fully informed of the operation of the Chilean Operation Condor program to execute dissidents. Operation Condor was an extensive operation by several South American countries led by Chile to conduct assassinations world wide of dissdents to the fascist military regimes in South America.

 

1984:

Arbusto Energy Inc founded by George W Bush is sold after proving to be a failure.

 

1988:

Silverado Banking Savings & Loan shut down by regulators. Neil Bush son of the Vice President and candidate for President was a director. The seizure and investigation had been delayed to after the election.

 

Fred Malek, a well-known Nazi collaborator was part of Bush’s campaign for President. Malek would again serve Bush in his 1992 race for reelection. Several Bush campaign staffers forced to resign after it was disclosed they were ex-Nazi war criminals including Laszlo Pastor and Yaroslav Stetsko.

 

William Draper served as head of Bush’s campaign funding. Draper’s grandfather had founded the Pioneer Fund to promote eugenics.

 

1989:

George Bush takes oath of office as President. Places his assets in blind trust managed by William Farish, grandson of the Wiliam Farish that supplied Hitler with gas.

 

1990:

Following the Gulf War, Bahrain awarded an offshore drilling contract to Harken Oil; a firm affiliated with George W. Bush the son of the President. George W. sells his stake in Harken and one week later the share price collapses.

 

1992:

George Bush pardons all of the principal players in the Iran-Contra scandal.

 

1996:

Goerge Bush, the poppy praises Sun Myung Moon in Buenos Aires. The Moon organization is full of ex-Nazis and closely affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League which is also full of ex-Nazis.

 

2000:

George W. Bush appointed President by 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court.

 

2001:

Bush ordered military to stand down so the 9/11 attack could take place giving him a mandate to wage war and curtail freedom.

 

Patriotic Act passes restricting our constitutional freedoms at the urging of George W. Bush.

 

[rand0M aXiS]

as the radio waves are getting to you.

[Guest guest]

Why is it whenever a mouthpiece for the international fascist network is presented with data that supports the truth about their foolish supporting or people with demonic agendas, that they attempt to sidestep the facts with ad hominem diatribes?

 

When devotees who have very little education on these topics try and push their support of demons into the face of the Vaisnava community, I always wonder "what are they thinking? don't they know that most Vaisnavas will disagree with them and see them as misled and foolish?"

 

So when you quote Ann Coulter, and praise Reagan, I think who is next? Rush Limbaugh?

 

The uneducated supporter of the fascist billionaire boys club always complain about why academia is against them, they complain about "left wing professors" influencing our youth. What they don't seem to be able to do is put 1 and 1 together. Academics are the people who study topics in depth. Radio and T.V show host demagogues are paid shills for the Government, and politicians are paid shills for the big boys i.e the banking corporate elites.

 

Why any devotee would think that supporting the demonic elite will be seen as a good thing when presented to a group of vaisnavas always amazes me.

 

Anyways when presented with academic data, you call that "tin foil hat" stuff, yet you present Ann Coulter and Reagan as savants...My brain hurts.