Control By Fear

Cars, Riptides, Lightning -- All More Likely to Kill You Than Terrorists

2010-02-16T13:17:00.000-08:00

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
February 14, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145672/

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006. And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was killed.)

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived. Had the inept Abdulmutallab actually succeeded, the death toll would not have equaled the 324 traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008; while the destruction of four Flight 253s from terrorism would not have equaled New York State’s 2008 traffic death toll of 1,231, 341 of whom, or 51 more than those on Flight 253, were classified as “alcohol-impaired fatalities.”

Had the 23-year-old Nigerian set off his bomb, it would have been a nightmare for the people on board, and a tragedy for those who knew them. It would certainly have represented a safety and security issue that needed to be dealt with. But it would not have been a national emergency, nor a national-security crisis. It would have been nothing more than a single plane knocked out of the sky, something that happens from time to time without the intervention of terrorists.

And yet here’s the strange thing: thanks to what didn’t happen on Flight 253, the media essentially went mad, 24/7. Newspaper coverage of the failed plot and its ramifications actually grew for two full weeks after the incident until it had achieved something like full-spectrum dominance, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the days after Christmas, more than half the news links in blogs related to Flight 253. At the same time, the Republican criticism machine (and the media universe that goes with it) ramped up on the subject of the Obama administration’s terror wimpiness; the global air transport system plunked down millions of dollars on new technology which will not find underwear bombs; the homeland security-industrial-complex had a field day; and fear, that adrenaline rush from hell, was further embedded in the American way of life.

Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so much.

The few Americans who, since 2001, have died from anything that could be called a terror attack in the U.S. -- whether the 13 killed at Fort Hood or the soldier murdered outside an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas -- were far outnumbered by the 32 dead in a 2007 mass killing at Virginia Tech University, not to speak of the relatively regular moments when workers or former workers “go postal.” Since September 11th, terror in the U.S. has rated above fatalities from shark attacks and not much else. Since the economic meltdown of 2008, it has, in fact, been left in the shade by violent deaths that stem from reactions to job loss, foreclosure, inability to pay the rent, and so on.

This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely convulsed by, and that can’t seem to get enough of, fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.

Institutionalizing Fear Inc.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, which had the look of the apocalyptic, brought the fear of terrorism into the American bedroom via the TV screen. That fear was used with remarkable effectiveness by the Bush administration, which color-coded terror for its own ends. A domestic version of shock-and-awe -- Americans were indeed shocked and awed by 9/11 -- helped drive the country into two disastrous wars and occupations, each still ongoing, and into George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror, a term now persona non grata in Washington, even if the “war “ itself goes on and on.

Today, any possible or actual terror attack, any threat no matter how far-fetched, amateurish, poorly executed, or ineffective, raises a national alarm, always seeming to add to the power of the imperial presidency and threatening to open new “fronts” in the now-unnamed global war. The latest is, of course, in Yemen, thanks in part to that young Nigerian who was evidently armed with explosives by a home-grown organization of a few hundred men that goes by the name al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The fear of terrorism has, by now, been institutionalized in our society -- quite literally so -- even if the thing we’re afraid of has, on the scale of human problems, something of the will o’ the wisp about it. For those who remember their Cold War fiction, it’s more specter than SPECTRE.

That fear has been embedded in what once was an un-American word, more easily associated with Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany: “homeland.” It has replaced “country,” “land,” and “nation” in the language of the terror-mongers. “The homeland” is the place which terrorism, and nothing but terrorism, can violate. In 2002, that terror-embedded word got its own official government agency: the Department of Homeland Security, our second “defense” department, which has a 2010 budget of $39.4 billion (while overall “homeland security” spending in the 2010 budget reached $70.2 billion). Around it has grown up a little-attended-to homeland-security complex with its own interests, businesses, associations, and lobbyists (including jostling crowds of ex-politicians and ex-government bureaucrats).

As a result, more than eight years after 9/11, an amorphous state of mind has manifested itself in the actual state as a kind of Fear Inc. A number of factors have clearly gone into the creation of Fear Inc. and now insure that fear is the drug constantly shot into the American body politic. These would include:

The imperial presidency: The Bush administration used fear not only to promote its wars and its Global War on Terror, but also to unchain the commander-in-chief of an already imperial presidency from a host of restraints. The dangers of terror and of al-Qaeda, which became the global bogeyman, and the various proposed responses to it, including kidnapping (“extraordinary rendition”), secret imprisonment, and torture, turned out to be the royal road to the American unconscious and so to a presidency determined, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others liked to say, to take the gloves off. It remains so and, as a result, under Barack Obama, the imperial presidency only seems to gain ground. Recently, for instance, we learned that, under the pressure of the Flight 253 incident, the Obama administration has adopted the Bush administration position that a president, under certain circumstances, has the authority to order the assassination of an American citizen abroad. (In this case, New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, who has been linked to the 9/11 plotters, the Fort Hood killer, and Abdulmutallab.) The Bush administration opened the door to this possibility and now, it seems, a Democratic president may be stepping through.

The 24/7 media moment: 24/7 blitz coverage was once reserved for the deaths of presidents (as in the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and public events of agreed-upon import. In 1994, however, it became the coin of the media realm for any event bizarre enough, sensational enough, celebrity-based enough to glue eyeballs. That June, O.J. Simpson engaged in his infamous low-speed car “chase” through Orange County followed by more than 20 news helicopters while 95 million viewers tuned in and thousands more gathered at highway overpasses to watch. No one’s ever looked back. Of course, in a traditional media world that’s shedding foreign and domestic bureaus and axing hordes of reporters, radically downsizing news rooms and shrinking papers to next to nothing, the advantages of focusing reportorial energies on just one thing at a time are obvious. Those 24/7 energies are now regularly focused on the fear of terrorism and events which contribute to it, like the plot to down Flight 253.

The Republican criticism machine and the media that go with it: Once upon a time, even successful Republican administrations didn’t have their own megaphone. That's why, in the Vietnam era, the Nixon administration battled the New York Times so fiercely (and -- my own guess -- that played a part in forcing the creation of the first “op-ed” page in 1970, which allowed administration figures like Vice President Spiro Agnew and ex-Nixon speechwriter William Safire to gain a voice at the paper). By the George W. Bush era, the struggle had abated. The Times and papers like it only had to be pacified or cut out of the loop, since from TV to talk radio, publishing to publicity, the Republicans had their own megaphone ready at hand. This is, by now, a machine chock-a-block full of politicians and ex-politicians, publishers, pundits, military “experts,” journalists, shock-jocks, and the like (categories that have a tendency to blend into each other). It adds up to a seamless web of promotion, publicity, and din. It’s capable of gearing up on no notice and going on until a subject -- none more popular than terrorism and Democratic spinelessness in the face of it -- is temporarily flogged to death. It ensures that any failed terror attack, no matter how hopeless or pathetic, will be in the headlines and in public consciousness. It circulates constant fantasies about possible future apocalyptic terror attacks with atomic weaponry or other weapons of mass destruction. (And in all of the above, of course, it is helped by a host of tagalong pundits and experts, news shows and news reports from the more liberal side of the aisle.)

The Democrats who don’t dare: It’s remarkable that the sharpest president we’ve had in a while didn’t dare get up in front of the American people after Flight 253 landed and tell everyone to calm down. He didn’t, in fact, have a single intelligent thing to say about the event. He certainly didn’t remind Americans that, whatever happened to Flight 253, they stood in far more danger heading out of their driveways behind the wheel or pulling into a bar on the way home for a beer or two. Instead, the Obama administration essentially abjectly apologized, insisted it would focus yet more effort and money on making America safe from air terrorism, widened a new front in the Global War on Terror in Yemen (speeding extra money and U.S. advisors that way), and when the din from its critics didn’t end, “pushed back,” as Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote, by claiming “that they were handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did.” It’s striking when a Democratic administration finds safety in the claim that it’s acting like a Republican one, that it’s following the path to the imperial presidency already cleared by George W. Bush. Fear does that to you, and the fear of terror has been institutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of society.

9/11 Never Ends

Fear has a way of re-ordering human worlds. That only a relatively small number of determined fanatics with extraordinarily limited access to American soil keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvious. What the fear machine produces is the dark underside of the charming Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, “A View of the World from 9th Avenue,” in which Manhattan looms vast as the rest of the planet fades into near nothingness.

When you see the world “from 9th Avenue,” or from an all-al-Qaeda-all-the-time “news” channel, you see it phantasmagorically. It’s out of all realistic shape and proportion, which means you naturally make stupid decisions. You become incapable of sorting out what matters and what doesn’t, what’s primary and what’s secondary. You become, in short, manipulable.

This is our situation today.

People always wonder: What would the impact of a second 9/11-style attack be on this country? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pin-prick terror events blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up to a second, third, fourth, fifth 9/11 when it comes to American consciousness.

So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Republicans go postal, the media morphs into its 24/7 national-security-disaster mode, the pundits register red on the terror-news scale, the president defends himself by reaffirming that he is doing just what the Bush administration would have done, the homeland security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust devil and say:

Hold onto your underpants, this is not a national emergency.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

Beyond a Culture of Fear

2010-02-10T14:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.earthlight.org/2002/essay47_deboer_pff.html

by K. Lauren de Boer
EarthLight Magazine #47, Fall/Winter 2002/03

Fear is the cheapest / room in the house.
I’d like to see you / in better living conditions.
– Hafiz

Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story.
– Barry Glassner

"It’s a campaign of fear and consumption," states rock star Marilyn Manson, "Keep people afraid and they’ll consume." This lucid insight into the connection between our mass media news diet, the incitement of fear, and consumerism emerged in an interview with Manson in the recent film, Bowling for Columbine. Manson was the brunt of criticism by many community members and the media for somehow inciting the kind of violence that led to the tragic 1999 incident in Littleton, Colorado where two Columbine High School students killed twelve students and a teacher using handguns.

Why direct blame toward Manson? Because of the rock lyrics he writes. And yet, asks Manson, who has more influence on violent behavior, [former] President Clinton, who was shooting bombs overseas, or himself, just a guy singing some rock and roll songs?

On the same day of the shootings at Columbine, the film’s maker Michael Moore points out in his interview with Manson, President Clinton ordered the heaviest bombing assault yet in Kosovo.

"What would you say to the kids who did the shooting at Columbine," asks Moore. Manson responds: "I wouldn’t say a thing. I’d listen to what they have to say. That’s what no one did."

Bowling for Columbine is a gutsy, often disturbing probe into the absurd cycle of fear prevalent in American culture today. Our obsession with guns, suggests the film, is the same irrational obsession driving the U.S. war economy. Our violent, fear-filled society is one marked, not coincidentally, by addictive over-consumption. Not long after September 11, George W. Bush evoked the fear of terrorism and the virtues of being a good consumer practically in the same breath.

The phenomenon of misplaced fear in American culture is not uncommon, asserts sociologist Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. From overblown crime statistics to exaggerated germ scares to plane wrecks, a wide array of groups–including businesses, advocacy organizations, religious sects, and political parties–benefit and profit from promoting fear. Glassner’s book, at its essence, raises important questions about how misbegotten fears find their way into the public psyche through a process driven by power and money. He writes: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, ‘In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.’ Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: ‘People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.’ That principle, which guided the late president’s political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well." Glassner’s book continues with an exploration of how the "vendors of fear tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes." (1)

The kind of insecurity and fear exploited by the current U.S. administration may be good for business in the short run, but it’s bad policy in the long run. Human energy, when manipulated by fear, can become distorted and destructive. Fear can incapacitate and paralyze us, keeping our energy in check. But when the energy does assert itself, it can do so in horrendous ways. Addictive consumerism, adherence to narrow beliefs about the nature of reality, and desperate clinging to what deadens us are some of those. Conformity to fabricated and obsolete worldviews, such as one that sanctions the bombing of other countries to protect our hegemony over resources like oil, is another. Giving in to despair is yet another.

HEROES AND VILLAINS

The heroes we choose and those we vilify can define us in powerful ways. We live in a country where Al Qaeda and Sadaam Hussein have taken on mythic proportions as villains, and where violent characters like Rambo and Dirty Harry are the touted heroes of presidents. In a revealing essay from Mennonite Life (December, 2001) entitled "The Original Peacemakers: Native America," author James C. Juhnke points out that U.S. history textbooks highlight the warriors, not the peacemakers of the original Americans, despite the fact that, like all human communities, Native Americans were people of both peace and war."The notable Indians in the master narrative of American history are the military heroes–men such as Pontiac, Tecumseh, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull," writes Junhke. "Sherman Alexie, popular Native-American novelist and poet, put a cogent question in the mouth of one of his characters: ‘When are the Indians ever going to have heroes who don’t hurt people? Why do all of our heroes have to carry guns?’" White Americans, the article points out, build historical monuments for the Indian warriors, not for the peacemakers. (2)

In some respects the emergence of a character such as good child-wizard Harry Potter as a hero in these times seems like a good sign. By depicting a world where good triumphs over evil, one recent Op-Ed states, the Harry Potter books give us strength to face real enemies.

Yes, maybe. However, a story motif of good triumphing over evil can as easily justify a campaign to invade Iraq as it can inspire one to do battle with a carefully discerned internal demon or, say, the destructive impact of voter apathy on democratic society. A tale doesn’t automatically impart wisdom simply because it depicts the triumph of good. In fact, many traditional myths depict not the decimation of evil, but its transformation. Good and evil are interconnected forces in the cosmos; their encounter is part of a dialectic that ultimately brings about the overall restoration of the whole.

THE TRUE FACE OF EVIL

Not surprisingly, one such story comes from Native America, the original peacemakers and arguably the earliest practitioners of participatory democracy on the planet (see story, page 10). Part of an epic Iroquois legend, the story of the Great Peacemaker, speaks powerfully to our current situation, both in terms of the disturbing fervor for war and the need for hope in people with a conscience of peace. Furthermore, the legend has added power and relevance in that it looks to our past as a nation, to the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy on its founders.

Philosopher Jacob Needleman provides a stirring rendition of the legend in his recent book The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. The following passage is a condensation of Needleman’s account, which draws on an unpublished retelling of the Onandaga story of Creation by Maril Rianna Blanchard.

The part of the legend we are most concerned with begins at a time when human beings cannot live in peace. There is strife and contention between nations. In Needleman’s words,"There is no place, no structure, no condition within which the forces of Earth and of the human can confront each other in a way that allows a harmonizing, uniting, and peacemaking force to act from within."

The Creator sends the Great Peacemaker to aid the human beings. The Great Peacemaker sets out on a quest to end violence among human beings with the message of "peace that is power." He is said to bring a "New Mind" to the nations. This is something they readily accept, Needleman elucidates, because they "glimpse something infinitely more honorable than war…the field of life in all its vibrancy, a call to serve what is far greater than oneself."

But there is one very powerful chief, Atotarho, who does not accept the message. Atotarho is an intimidating figure who "eats human beings," whose body is crooked in seven places, and who has snakes in his hair. He utters a great bloodcurdling cry: Hwe-do-ne-e-e-e-e-eh–!, which means "When will this be? It has not come yet!"

"The actual identity of Atotarho," writes Needleman, "and the story of the struggle with him throw astonishing light on the meaning of the democracy created by the Iroquois Confederacy and on the mystical pragmatism that lies at the root of our own American democracy."

Atotarho represents a concept of evil that the Western mind is at odds with, one which speaks, not to the age-old battle between good and evil, but to the human propensity to defeat peace by giving into despair. "Atotarho is not the figure of evil who simply opposes out of an irredeemable black heart," writes Needleman, "[He] is evil as inability–incapacity to hope, incapacity to try...When he is defeated, he is defeated by being awakened to his own power of love and wisdom...Human evil is goodness acting under a wrong thought; human evil is love acting under a wrong fear, a wrong striving; human evil is the power of the spirit under the yoke of a despairing master."

True to the matrilineal nature of Iroquois society and to their Constitution, the delivery into the world of the Great Peacemaker’s message is mediated by a woman. Women have equal participation in Iroquois governance. And it is the women–the clan mothers–who appoint the chiefs of the nations and who have the power to depose them. Because the woman is the first to accept and understand the message of the "peace that is power," the Great Peacemaker gives her a new name: Jigonhasasee, meaning "New Face." "It is in your countenance," he tells her, "that the New Mind is manifest."

Having the blessing of Jigonhasasee, the Great Peacemaker then goes to none other than Hiawatha, perhaps the most well-known figure of Iroquois legend. Hiawatha is a "weak and degraded figure" when he finds him. Like Atotarho, he eats human beings. Hiawatha is given a "New Mind," as the nation chiefs, when he looks at his own reflection in a kettle of water and sees the Great Peacemaker instead. Hiawatha sees his own greater potential in the Great Peacemaker, and commits himself to bringing the message of peace to Earth. Eventually, Hiawatha and the Great Peacemaker go to confront Atotarho, who continues to utter the great cry of despair. Atotarho alone stands in the way of the Great Peace.

Hiawatha, whose name means He Who Combs, must comb the snakes from Atotarho’s hair. Atotarho, who has been consistently cynical, hears the words of the Great Peacemaker when he says that peace, justice, and health will only come when humans are ready to accept them. Hiawatha, with the aid of the Great Peacemaker, is able to break through Atotarho’s considerable resistance as they deliver to the evil chief the Great Law of Peace. They are able to awaken within Atotarho his own sense of power and wisdom. Hiawatha combs the snakes from Atotarho’s hair and his mind is made straight; despair has been defeated.

The Great Peacemaker plants the Great Tree of Peace, a white pine, whose roots extend throughout the world. All the nations bury their weapons of war beneath it. Peace reigns when Atotarho, now with a New Mind, goes on to become the great chief of all five Iroquois nations. (3)

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO GIVE UP

Ultimately, the Great Peacemaker legend provides a basis for faith, for moving us past despair. To give into despair is to succumb to fear, the ultimate source of all human violence. Evil is the incapacity to hope or to try, we learn from the story, and so the question becomes: Do we continue to utter Atotarho’s cry of despair or do we use the energy of dark times to renew our inner commitment to a peace for all life, to inner peace, to peace in all directions, as the roots of the Great Tree of Peace depict? How we bring about peace in our own lives, how we choose to be exemplars of a planetary sustainable peace is the "radical" (from Latin, radicalis, for "root") action which lays the foundation for a transformation of collective consciousness.

In our time when we are at war with the planet itself, the tale of Hiawatha, Atotarho, and the Great Peacemaker has meaning not just as a tale of peace between nations, but for peace with the Earth. We are "cannibalizing the Earth" through our over-consumption and resource extraction and require a "new mind" to bring about Pax Gaia.

New Mind refers not just to calm passivity, but to "peace as power," which means we are in right relationship not only to our inner nature, but to the energies of Earth and Cosmos, even to their more troubling aspects of chaos and uncertainty. This requires faith of a kind which can only come to us from a desire for justice for the entire Earth Community.

Coming from such a place of power, how might we move beyond a culture of fear in dark times?

>> A vibrant and functional democracy depends on the honest dissemination of information. The corporate media, in its rightward drift and easy compliance to political power, is failing the general populace. Citizens groups might start running interference and holding the corporate media responsible for perpetrating violence and consumerism under the guise of news and entertainment. We can start by being conscious of just what they are serving up as our media diet. We can boycott toxic news and demand that they stop creating a culture of fear.

>> Don’t let consumption define who we are. True peace is to see ourselves as citizens, not simply consumers. We are human beings in a communion of Earth’s subjects.

>> Develop our powers of listening–to young people, to Earth, and to our inner sense of peace. We also need to believe in the wisdom of our young people. In The Soul of Politics, Jim Wallis tells the remarkably hopeful story of the Gang Summit in Kansas City in 1993 where warring barrio gang members came together on their own initiative, listened to each other, and not only worked out a truce, but talked about "transformation and rebuilding." "New visions will require new visionaries," writes Wallis, "And they will most likely come from ordinary people who are willing to become a part of the changes they seek for the very ordinary circumstances of their lives and their society. And that will be the extraordinary thing." (4)

All lasting change begins with people talking to each other, with public square diplomacy, with community.

>> Have faith that alternatives to the corporate political parties are not only possible, but that the time is right. Paul Ray, in a paper entitled "A New Political Compass," states that there are a group of "new progressives" constituting 36% of the population who are not yet truly represented by a political party (see page 16). Dennis Kucinich, while a Democrat, is one Washington politician who represents the "political north"(see page 17). Ray characterizes the political north as the Wisdom Culture Paradigm.

>> Practice a spiritual ecology of peace. This practice gives us the basis for moving beyond a world of fear, violence, and war because it is a practice based in the embrace of all life and an acceptance of the forces of ecology at work in our lives. This includes chaos, uncertainty, and surprise. Spiritual ecology, through a practice of quieting and attuning our mind to rhythms outside language brings peace because we are in accord with the present moment. Fear of the future falls away.

>> We need stories. The Peacemaker legend is one story of a particular people which has some potential for our time. However, telling our sacred Universe Story, seeing ourselves in a meaningful role within that unfolding, is a powerful force for peace within. We are the heroes of that story, the source for peace in the world. Accessing that source and creating in ourselves a New Mind is the Great Work of our time.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable." If we commit ourselves to creating peaceful change by not giving into despair and a culture of fear, we practice the spiritual ecology of peace. We take the step of faith that will make violence and war obsolete as solutions to conflict.

K. Lauren de Boer is a Bay-area writer (www.terravitabooks.net) and was for many years Executive Editor of EarthLight Magazine. [updated 2009]

1. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, (Basic Books, 1999), p. xxviii.

2. James C. Juhnke, "The Original Peacemakers: Native America," (Mennonite Life, December 2001), vol. 56 no. 4.

3. Jacob Needleman, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders, (Tarcher/Putnam, 2002), pp. 215-236.

4. Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics: Beyond the "Secular Left" and the "Religious Right", (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995), p. 295.

The Terror Card: Fear is the Key to Obedience

2010-02-02T14:52:00.000-08:00

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17299

Rev. Richard Skaff
Global Research
Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:02 EST

The Terrorism Industrial Complex (TIC)

Definitions of terrorism
Webster's dictionary defines terrorism as the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.1

However, the United States code defined terrorism as "(An) act of terrorism means an activity that (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any state, and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population: (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping."2

This is an official congressional definition of terrorism that applies only to other nations. However, the psychological end results of terror, is always fear that eventually leads to resignation and submission. Fear and terrorism are interconnected, therefore, we should discuss their connection in order to understand their impact on our behavior, and their use to control people. Fear has been the glue that has kept people attached to their dictators and to their gods. It is worth our time to take a brief look at this phenomenon that rules our existence.

Fear is the key to obedience

Man's self-awareness is the progenitor of his alienation, fear, egocentrism, and anxiety; therefore, the unexamined life is worth living for the human herds, because it gives them a sense of false security and pseudo-belonging. Fear is the ulcer of the masses that cripples their psyche and vanquishes their freedom.3

Biblically speaking, fear was always used by the clergies to ensure that people would obey the rules that were allegedly bestowed by God upon humanity to avoid burning in hell. These rules were actually written by men to control the masses and to perpetuate the power of the religious leaders. As a result, telling the truth and challenging the establishment will only lead to ridicule, crucifixion, and death.

Unfortunately, fear is the driving force and the main psychological component of terror. Fear incapacitates people and renders them impotent. Fear is conducive to regressive behaviors by responsible adults, where people become dependent on an illusory parent figure like the government or a corporation per example, in order to protect them from the evildoers. So they become willing to relinquish their most intimate and sacred rights in order to feel safe.4

How governments perpetuate fear through the use of the media

Americans have been living in fear since 9-11. However, the reality behind our fears has been set out by our own corporate media who has been the main culprit in spreading it like a disease. Our media has terrorized our hearts and minds for years through their subliminal violent programming, and sensational coverage of their own version of the distorted truth.

Sensationalism and misinformation are the essence of the modern media! Angry talk shows are the dish of the day, where the host abuses, yells, belittles, terrorizes his guests to ensure that their opinions are not heard, and only the host's scripted ideas emerge as the winners, so his or her master's agenda is served.

The media has been spreading terror for years in the hearts of the American public, in order to force them to watch their trivial programming. Just as in Orwell's Oceania , the airwaves are bombarded with 24 hours news channels that would resort to any twisted strategy to keep their distorted coverage going. "If it bleeds it leads. The airwaves are also inundated with shows and stories that promote fear, exaggeration of situations, twisting of the truth, psychological propaganda, bloody and gory stories, and buzz words (i.e. flesh eating bacteria, shark attacks on our shores, weapons of mass destruction, SARS, West Nile virus, carjacking, hijacking, war of the sexes, violence, epidemics, pandemics, child abductions, gay marriages, bird flu, H1N1, and so forth and so on). All designed to frighten, brainwash, manipulate, create conflict, confuse, liberalize, and mesmerize their audiences into watching their programs where anything is acceptable. "Instill fear in them and they shall watch and follow". This is a policy of terror not of democracy.3

The terror card

Just as in the case of the Nazi Germany and the Israeli State, terror has been the ace in the hole for the US government. They have even adopted Israel's model of safety. They totally ignore that the US is not under occupation as the Palestinian people are in Palestine , and that the alleged terrorism in the Holy Land is simply a reaction against unholy brutal occupation.

The US Homeland Security (the Orwellian ministry of lies) would like to use the Israeli anti-terror system, which is usually financed by American tax payers (US government gives Israel $7 to $8 billion dollars a year in money for being our friend besides the free military equipments, nuclear technology, and contracts).

As our proxy in the Near-East, an Israeli company has developed a system that matches high technology up with and behavioral psychology. It's called WeCU, short for "We See You" (the same way Big Brother sees you). It projects images on a wall and monitors reactions of people. "If you strolled through an airport and saw a picture of your mother, you couldn't help but respond."

Or if you were a terrorist, the logic goes, you'd respond to a terror group logo or other familiar imagery. The reaction to these images could be a darting of the eyes, an increased heartbeat, a nervous twitch or faster breathing, said company CEO Ehud Givon. If the system observes suspicious behavior, a person is detained and interrogated. "One by one, you can screen out from the flow of people those with specific malicious intent," Givon said. U.S. officials are considering the Israeli model for airport security. Israel practices ethnic profiling at Ben-Gurion Airport . Jewish Israelis typically pass through smoothly, while others like their Palestinian cousins may be taken aside for closer interrogation or even strip searches." In other words, if you are an Arab or a Palestinian, you will be strip searched and be subjected to body cavity searches.4

Of course the intimidation process that triggers anxiety, fear, and false positives doesn't count, because the system is not designed to work but to harass and intimidate the identified victims just as the Stasi did in East Germany, or the Soviets in the Soviet Union. The Israelis' self-hatred for being Jews combined with their desperation to be identified as Europeans (especially German) has continuously obfuscated their judgment and forced them to project their self-hatred against their Arab cousins and re-enact their persecution on their Palestinian brothers whom they occupy and slaughter on a daily basis, even though the Christian Europeans have persecuted, burned and murdered millions of Jews throughout history.

Purpose of terrorism

According to Herman and O'Sullivan, terrorism has served other purposes in the West beyond mobilizing of populations in support of counterinsurgency operations in the provinces. It created a generalized fearfulness and irrationality that give leaders greater freedom of action. Per example, the Reagan administration needed a terrorism threat tied to a foreign enemy to justify its enormous arms buildup of the early 1980s and to distract attention from its regressive economic and social and social policies.5 Thorstein Veblen (American economist and social critic) pointed out in 1904 that militarization to combat a foreign enemy is the natural and best hope of the American elite as "a corrective for 'social unrest' and similar disorders of civilized life" and as the route to "popular submission and squalor."6 Therefore, opponents of militarization and harsh measures against dissident minorities are paralyzed by terrorism propaganda, and it is very difficult to do something that demagogues can interpret as "helping terrorists."

Ironically, the alleged underwear/Christmas Nigerian bomber who was listed in our intelligence data base as a terrorist and who had no coat during his trip to the United States (despite freezing temperatures) or luggage, had a one way ticket, and was aided by a professional mystery man who helped him get on the plane, was easily granted a visa by the US embassy to the United States.

Are our embassy employees so inept that they keep making the same errors over and over again?

Or incompetence is always a better strategy than complicity and treason?

This Christmas day incident created a major distraction during the holidays, revived the existence of the mythical Al Qaeda, and was used as a state propaganda tool to drum up fear in the public.

Sure enough few days later, a fabricated audio tape of the late Osama Bin Laden conveniently surfaced to corroborate the link of the Nigerian bomber to Al Qaeda.

This event has set the stage for the next level of terror propaganda that will pave the way for additional loss of liberty and multi-million dollar contracts for the Terrorism Industrial Complex that will be providing the airports of the world with body scanning machines to protect the herds from terrorism. Let's remember that using intermittent fear mongering through contrived incidents is a great marketing strategy to sell expensive security gadgets and to erode freedom. No wonder that most Americans favor ethnic profiling and body scanning in airports, according to a recent poll conducted by a government mouth piece/newspaper USA Today.7 As I mentioned in a previous article that people will always give up their liberty for their safety, and that Mr. Obama has quickly learned that the permanent war on terror card is the inherent ingredient to maintain his power, and to guarantee himself a second term.

Consequently, the TIC public-private partnership will continue to promote more technology for safety. Per example, Iris scanning technology in airports provided by L1-ID solutions a company that George Tenet former head of the CIA benefited greatly as a major shareholder and a previous director of Viisage that was acquired by L-1 ID solutions will eventually be implemented.8 Or next time you decide to fly, Homeland security and their subdivision the TSA (the thought and behavior police) might slap on you a shocking bracelet that would serve as your boarding pass, and would track your lost luggage, set off an alarm in area that you are not allowed to be in, awaken you with an electric jolt if you fall asleep and helps you not to miss your flight. Subsequently, a stewardess can shock you and/or immobilize you if you get out of line. Of course this bracelet is designed to ensure your safety and the safety of your luggage from being lost. A top government official expressed interest in these safety bracelets in 2006. However, as of today it remains unclear if this is the trend of future air travel.9,10

Racism as a tool to promote terrorism and suspend natural rights

Give up your freedom or die! That is the logo that most Americans believe in at this point of time as told by their government. What is a loss of a few sacred rights when we can keep you safe and alive, our government asks? In addition, our government implies that they are not discriminating against you, but they are only targeting a specific ethnic and/or racial group who doesn't look like you and who wants to kill you. It's our holy (Jihad) war against the evil dark skinned man versus the good and pure white Christian man (even though purity is a myth and humanity is a pool of mutt who has shagged each other for thousands of centuries). The government will also tell us that they will use the terrorists' violent tactics to eradicate as taught by our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the dogma of our alleged born again U.S. Christian government.

Historically, every dominant race and culture has appointed itself as the supreme one and the rest had to follow. In contrast to the bible, the meek shall not inherit the earth, but shall perish like an insignificant cockroach. Racism like hate and destructiveness is part of the human character. It is definitely a great political tool to create division among the masses in order to dominate them; in addition, down-grading people justifies their eradication. The establishment has the ability to define a race and to alter that same definition based on the political climate of the day. The illusion of belonging to a superior group helps compensates for the person who feels like a flee, and in lieu the group membership leads him to feel like a giant by appealing to his or her narcissistic biases. Group narcissism is a key factor in racism. It is fueled and perpetuated by politicians. Racism and fear go hand in hand. Fear is a natural response for self-preservation. By connecting fear to racism and artificially inducing it in people, weakens the masses and divides them, fabricates consent, and makes racism a mechanism of pseudo self-preservation.3

A brief view of The Terrorism Industrial Complex (TIC)?

According to Herman and O'Sullivan, the terrorism industrial complex consists of security agencies closely connected to the government. Many of their employees are previous government employees from the intelligence community and the military.

The private sector terrorism experts in the west who reaches the mass media are generally affiliated with the terrorism industry institutes and think tanks. A large fraction of these experts also has revolving-door relationships with governments and government intelligence agencies, and many are connected with private security firms.

They therefore reflect official views and a state agenda, and they rarely depart from the assumptions of the western model of terrorism. Some of the experts have a material interest in "threat inflation."5 The security industry serves business and government; it therefore approaches "terrorism" from the standpoint of its employers and principals. Some segments, especially those providing security services and recruiting and training mercenaries, are often arms of the government that carry out covert actions for which the government does not want to admit responsibility.

Leaders of the security business organize and participate regularly in conferences, hearings, and seminars on terrorism, and are experts consulted by the media to explain and show how to cope with the terrorist threat. Because of their structural position and role, members of the security industry look at terrorism strictly within the frame of the Western model. And they have a material interest in inflating the threat of terrorism in order to elevate, their own importance as supplier of counterterrorism services. Since the West engages in and supports a primary terrorism under the guise of responding to the violence of others, the security industry naturally gravitates to the support of and participation in real terrorism, as exemplified by advising the Guatemalan and Honduran military on apprehending and interrogating so-called terrorists and aiding the Nicaraguan contras. In the West this is all known as counterterrorism.5

The industry naturally excludes the terrorism of the West and its clients from the terrorism agenda, and in fact, makes primary terrorist like the governments of South Africa and El Salvador victims of terrorism engaging in counterterrorism. The press follows closely in the terrorism industry's wake. Thus Abu Nidal, loosely affiliated with Libya and Syria , merits great attention as a terrorist; the leaders of RENAMO, whose killings of unarmed civilians exceed those of Abu Nidal by a factor of many hundred but who are surrogates of a Western client and ally, South Africa , are rarely placed on official and expert lists of terrorists and are given slight attention and inspire little indignation in the mass media. Even after the State Department itself issues a report documenting RENAMO killings on a staggering scale, mass media attention was fleeting and their indignation was restrained (in contrast with their reaction to the killing fields of distant Cambodia ). Even traditional terrorists like Orlando Boschand Luis Posada Carriles, who blow up civilian airliners and engage in multiple assassinations, do not attract substantial media attention. As long as they only attack the citizens, facilities, and friends of enemy states, the terrorism industry and media display little interest in their activities. This pattern is pervasive, and the choices have nothing to do with the substance of terrorism - in fact, they commonly involve emphasis on a lesser terrorism and simultaneous aversion of the eyes from wholesale terror. The choices are simply tailored to the political and propaganda needs of the West. If it is true that a substantial part for anti-Western terrorism is a response to western terrorism, then the solution to the terrorism problem for the West is clear: Stop doing it! The U.S. media rely almost exclusively on the government and private sector of the terrorism industry for their identification of terrorists, model of terrorism, facts, and proposed solutions.5

Manufacturing terrorism

There are several forms of manufactured terrorism. One is the inflation of the menace on the basis of modest and not very threatening but conceivable real actions (as with the weather underground and the West German Kurds). Another is the false transfer of the responsibility for a terrorist act to a convenient villain, as in the case of Agca's shooting of the pope. The spate of terrorist bombings in western Europe during the early and mid-1980s had the earmarks of being, at least in part, manufactured terrorism. The bombings were all too convenient for Western propaganda needs; many of them, especially those directed against NATO installations , were symbolic and ineffectual.5The examples of manufactured terrorism are innumerable, and will continue to go on and on to advance Western governments political agendas. Terrorism is also manufactured in the private sector to incriminate union leaders, activists, and political enemies, sometimes in collusion with agents of the state. In addition, the West has produced an industry of institutes and experts who formulate and channel analysis and information in accordance with Western demands. These institutes as part of Terrorism Industrial Complex are designed to give authoritative status to experts who will confirm and reinforce state propaganda, to occupy the informational space that might otherwise be used by dissident voices, and thus to ensure closure of fact and opinion. The government and corporate wealthy nourish the institutes and think tanks that service and sponsor suitable intellectuals and journalists who will convey the proper messages. The function of experts is merely to clarify and elaborate on pre-established truths, which reflects an effective propaganda system.5

Terrorism as a tool for power and for grand theft of public money

As we have seen, there are several factors that influence terrorism and they're all connected and manipulated to serve political purposes, in order for the elite to increase their wealth, power, and global domination. The key ingredient to take away people's money, long standing systemic privileges, and their natural rights such as freedom is for governments to snatch it in increments through what social psychologists call the inoculation effect. Per example, you don't take away people's social security privileges overnight, instead you will surreptitiously do it in small doses by regularly and gradually reducing these benefits to nothing, while the herds become totally desensitized to the idea of losing it. Like religious leaders, our public-private partnership (PPP) democratic governments have consistently and regularly robbed the proles of their money. Through taxation and inflation (indirect tax) induced and justified by deliberate and profligate spending to finance their alleged political agendas, they have transferred the wealth of nations to themselves and to their other half in the global private industry. Meanwhile, contrived terror will continue to be a great tool of control and wealth for the elites who have rendered their mercenaries and bandits into famous terrorists and global stars.

Notes
Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary

The United States Congressional and Administrative News, 98th congress, Second session, 1984, Oct 19, volume 2; par 3077, 98 STAT, 2707 (West publishing Co. 1984).

R. Skaff, (2007), The Human Manifesto, PA, Maryland.

Michael Tarm, (January 8, 2010). Associated Press, 'Mind-reading systems could change air security.'

E. Herman, G. O'Sullivan (1984), The "Terrorism" Industry: The experts and institutions that shape our view of terror, Random House Publishing, New York.

Throstein Veblen, The theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner, 1904), pp. 393-94.

Thomas Frank , USA Today (01-11-2010), 'Most OK with TSA full-body scanners'

Shorrock, T. (05-07, 2007). George Tenet cashes in on Iraq, Salon.com

Youtube, 2010. 'DHS Showed Interest in Shock Bracelet for Airline Passengers'

Worldnet Daily (July 8, 2008) Latest buzz: Shock bracelets for all airline passengers 'Just when you thought you've heard it all'

The sanctity of military spending

2010-01-30T05:01:00.001-08:00

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/26/defense/index.html

JAN 26, 2010
The sanctity of military spending
BY GLENN GREENWALD

Salon/Reuters
(updated below - Update II)

Administration officials announced last night that the President, in tomorrow's State of the Union address, will propose a multi-year freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs. This is an "initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit," officials told The New York Times.

But the freeze is more notable for what it excludes than what it includes. For now, it does not include the largest domestic spending programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And all "security-related programs" are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid. As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos. What possible rationale is there for that?

The facts about America's bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China. Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's. As one "defense" spending watchdog group put it: "The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six 'rogue' states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion." To get a sense for how thoroughly military spending dominates our national budget, consider this chart showing where Americans' tax revenue goes:

Since much of that overall spending is mandatory, military spending -- all of which is discretionary -- accounts for over 50% of discretionary government spending. Yet it's absolutely forbidden to even contemplate reducing it as a means of reducing our debt or deficit. To the contrary, Obama ran on a platform of increasing military spending, and that is one of the few pledges he is faithfully and enthusiastically filling (while violating his pledge not to use deceitful budgetary tricks to fund our wars):

President Barack Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned.

In sum, as we cite our debtor status to freeze funding for things such as "air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks" -- all programs included in Obama's spending freeze -- our military and other "security-related" spending habits become more bloated every year, completely shielded from any constraints or reality. This, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible for the U.S. to make meaningful progress in debt reduction without serious reductions in our military programs.

Public opinion is not a legitimate excuse for this utterly irrational conduct, as large percentages of Americans are receptive to reducing -- or at least freezing -- defense spending. A June, 2009 Pew Research poll asked Americans what they would do about defense spending, and 55% said they would either decrease it (18%) or keep it the same (37%); only 40% wanted it to increase. Even more notably, a 2007 Gallup poll found that "the public's view that the federal government is spending too much on the military has increased substantially this year, to its highest level in more than 15 years." In that poll, 58% of Democrats and 47% of Independents said that military spending "is too high" -- and the percentages who believe that increased steadily over the last decade for every group.

The clear fact is that, no matter how severe are our budgetary constraints, military spending and all so-called "security-related programs" are off-limits for any freezes, let alone decreases. Moreover, the modest spending freeze to be announced by Obama tomorrow is just the start; the Washington consensus has solidified and is clearly gearing up for major cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with the dirty work to be done by an independent "deficit commission." It's time for "everyone" to sacrifice and suffer some more -- as long as "everyone" excludes our vast military industry, the permanent power factions inside the Pentagon and intelligence community, our Surveillance and National Security State, and the imperial policies of perpetual war which feed them while further draining the lifeblood out of the country.

UPDATE: I just saw this scary headline on MSNBC, became very frightened, and have changed my mind, as I now realize we need to massively increase our military spending to Stay Safe!!!

The Washington Post is hyping the same report. Apparently, it's breaking news -- meriting screaming red-alert headlines -- that Al Qaeda would like to ("aims to") acquire WMDs and use them against the U.S. But we should all try to remain a little calm, at least. I'm sure if we just buy some more fighter jets, create some better underground bombs, invade a few more Muslim countries, keep more Muslims imprisoned forever with no charges, give the Pentagon, the CIA and their private contractors a lot more unaccounted-for cash and stay out of their way, expand our domestic spying networks even further through private sector telecom contracts, pour tens of billions of dollars more into the coffers of our Middle East client states, and kill a few more civilians with drones, this problem will be handled. It's just a matter of making sure we bulk up our military budget -- and Look Forward, not Backward to what was done in the past -- and we'll be able to Stay Safe from this Terrorist-WMD menace.

As for the deficit, no need to worry about that. We can just freeze programs for national parks and cut Social Security and Medicare.

UPDATE II: Thankfully, some among us will be spared the pain of these budgetary freezes and imminent cuts:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates hosted a meeting with the nation's top defense company executives Wednesday, stressing the need for a closer partnership with them and pledging to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time, according to his spokesman. . . .

Gates's meeting was part of a day-long session between Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter and the Aerospace Industries Association, the top trade group for American aerospace firms. The heads of the nation's top two defense firms -- Lockheed Martin and Boeing -- attended, said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

Did they mention that Al Qaeda aims to get WMDs and attack the U.S. with them?

Zinn Said "Largest Lie" Was "War On Terrorism"

2010-01-30T04:33:00.000-08:00

Terrorism is control by fear!

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1001/S00188.htm

Sherwood Ross
Scoop.nz
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:58 EST

The "largest lie," wrote historian Howard Zinn who died yesterday at age 87, is that "everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a 'war on terrorism.'"

"This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people's homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security."

In an article published previously in The Long Term View magazine of the Massachusetts School of Law, Zinn said that in the Fallujah area of Iraq Knight Ridder reporters found there was no Ba'athist or Sunni conspiracy against the U.S., "only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops."

Zinn, popularly known as the people's historian, pointed out that the U.S. may have liberated Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein but afterwards it became Iraq's occupier. He noted this is the same fate that befell Cuba after the U.S. liberated it from Spain in 1898. In both nations, the U.S. established military bases and U.S. corporations moved in to profit from the upheaval.

Zinn recalled the words of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the NATO ministers in Brussels in June, 2002, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" of weapons of mass destruction. "That explains why this government, not knowing exactly where to find the criminals of September 11, will just go ahead and invade and bomb Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals are," Zinn wrote.

"This explains why the government, not really knowing what weapons Saddam Hussein is hiding, will invade and bomb Iraq, to the horror of most of the world, killing thousands of civilians and soldiers and terrorizing the population," he continued.

The historian pointed out that even if the U.S. experienced few battle casualties in its invasion of Iraq, casualties would mount afterwards in the occupying army from sickness and trauma, which took a high toll both in Vietnam and after the Gulf War. In the 10 years after the Gulf War, 8,000 veterans died and 200,000 veterans filed complaints about illnesses incurred "from the weapons our government used in the war."

Zinn predicted accurately that once the American public realized President Bush had lied to them about Iraq they would turn against the government. "When it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days are numbered," he said of the Bush administration.

Writing of his personal feelings, Zinn said, "I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over... I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President (George W. Bush) who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water, the air. And I wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit."

Zinn called on his readers "to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal to us. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress. We find ourselves today at one of those critical points."

The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is a non-profit law school purposefully dedicated to the education of students from minority, immigrant, and low-income households who would otherwise not have the opportunity to obtain a legal education. Zinn's article in The Long Term View first appeared in The Progressive magazine.

Like Sheep To the Slaughter

2010-01-18T11:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.guerillapost.com/2010/01/like-sheep-to-slaughter.html

Pete Muldoon
The Guerilla Post
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:51 EST

From a story on the uselessness of the terror alert system come this pearl:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, at a Reuters Washington Summit in mid-October, acknowledged problems with the advisory system.

"The problem is a color code, or a number, or whatever, without information to people as to what it means, and what they're supposed to do, that's really where the frustration is," Napolitano said at the summit. "The code itself, absent a connection with real information, doesn't have much utility."

But that's just the point, really, isn't it? Americans aren't supposed to learn or care about what kinds of terrorist threats there are, nor why any of these threats exist. We're supposed to see a sign with pretty colors, and then react like sheep, get scared, and let the government take away a few more of our precious American civil liberties.

This is not hyberbole. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was pressured to use the terror alert system to scare the public into voting for Bush, who used this victory to continue the destruction of the rule of law and US civil liberties.

Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

This worked pretty well for a while. But now Americans are beginning to question why we are supposedly facing a never-ending existential threat from people who just don't like our movies or taste in music. They want details. They want to know why we are sacrificing American ideals and spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting wars we can't win against people who shouldn't hate us.

Authoritarian rulers love to scare the people. But they're going to have to come up with something better than this pretty soon.

This Is How the Media Amplify Our Terrorism Fears

2010-01-15T14:57:00.000-08:00

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on January 12, 2010, Printed on January 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/145118/

I'm going to run the risk of a take-down order from an AP lawyer and reprint this entire (brief) story so you can see just how Onion-ish it is:

TSA: Unruly Northwest Flight Passengers Questioned

ROMULUS, Mich. -- The Transportation Security Administration says unruly passengers on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit were interviewed by Customs and Border Protection officials after the plane landed.

But the TSA says the passengers were released and no arrests were made.

Air Lines spokeswoman Susan Elliott says the crew of Northwest Flight 243 requested that authorities meet the plane Tuesday after it landed because four passengers didn't follow their instructions. She says nobody was injured but wouldn't describe what the passengers were doing.

Tuesday's disturbance comes less than a week after a Nigerian man pleaded not guilty to trying to blow up a Northwest flight from Amsterdam as it was preparing to land in Detroit on Christmas.

Got that? Some people were "unruly" -- didn't jump when the flight attendant told them to? -- and cops asked 'em a couple of questions. Without knowing the details, it'd be a safe bet that this was a case of drunken obnoxiousness, just like the overwhelming majority of passenger disturbances. They weren't arrested, the terminal wasn't locked down, flights weren't backed up -- that's the whole story.

This almost could have been headlined, "BREAKING TERROR NEWS: Amsterdam-Detroit Flight Arrives Without Incident!"

I'm on a deadline and don't have time for more than a quick point here. And that is: people don't evaluate risk in any rational way -- they don't base their sense of danger on the actual statistical likelihood of being harmed by a given activity.

There are 2-pack-a-day smokers who are absolutely terrified of dying in a terror attack, which is less likely than being killed by lightning (for Americans). Many people ignore routine maintenance on their cars and then brave the daily commute to work without a second thought but are scared shitless about super-safe commercial air-travel. That kind of thing.

Risk-perception is influenced by many factors, and one of them is "media amplification."

When the AP reports every hiccup a drunk passenger has on an airplane, and in so doing reminds people that it's been "less than a week [since] a Nigerian man pleaded not guilty to trying to blow up a Northwest flight," it only amplifies people's perception of the threat. It's certainly not "news."

PS: that link above leads to the AP story on Fox News, but never fear: Talking-Points Memo is on the case too.

Update: That's just the professional media. The right-bloggers are going nuts over this story, claiming that these passengers were al Qaeda operatives on a "dry run." Hilarious.

Update: Ok, look at this CNN story about a fork-lift operator accidentally puncturing a container full of high explosives as it was being loaded at a North Carolina seaport. It doesn't seem to be anything more than an industrial accident (albeit a very dangerous one, according to the report):

[A port official] said the people who transport "any highly flammable explosive devices" have to and did notify the port and local emergency and police officials. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Chris O'Neil said the substance has industrial and medical uses.

"Being an international port, we handle highly flammable explosive material all the time. Jet fuel comes through here all the time, gasoline, propane. So it's not unusual to have explosive material coming through Morehead City," he said.

Those two paragraphs come at the very end of the piece, and are the only indication that this story, however scary, probably has nothing to do with national security.

But long before that, the journo who penned the article thought it necessary to tell us the following trivia about the explosive substance in the container -- not once, but twice:

PETN was allegedly one of the components of the bomb concealed by Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, accused of trying to set off an explosion aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approached Detroit, Michigan, on December 25.

That was right at the top. Then, further down ...

Jones confirmed that the material in the containers is PETN, allegedly one of the components of the bomb concealed by Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, accused of trying to bomb Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam on December 25.

I hear he was also wearing undies at the time, but it'd be weird if I thought about airplanes exploding in midair every time I pulled a pair of boxers on in the morning.

This is why terrorism is such an effective tactic: even if you fail miserably with your attack, the media will do your work for you -- the terrorizing, not the killing -- for weeks and months to come.

The specter of fear and dread hangs over America

2010-01-06T18:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-specter-of-fear-and-dr-by-michael-payne-100105-345.html

January 6, 2010
The specter of fear and dread hangs over America
By michael payne

This America in which we live is not the country it once was. Our military is fighting wars in foreign lands to, supposedly, protect us. And yet the American society is beset by a growing feeling of fear and dread. How can the people who live in the most powerful nation in the history of the world not feel safe?

I have previously written about the fear that has been planted into the American psyche. The art of spreading fear through a constant barrage of propaganda was perfected and taken to new heights during the deceitful Bush administration. The problem is that even though those architects of perpetual fear and war have departed, the great fear machine in Washington continues without missing a beat. It continues with its message, only the faces and voices are different.

Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister of Propaganda for Germany in the buildup to World War II said: "Propaganda is a means to an end. Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow it to willingly and without internal resistance devote itself to the tasks and goals of a superior leadership. If propaganda is to succeed, it must know what it wants. It must keep a clear and firm goal in mind, and seek the appropriate means and methods to reach that goal."

I'd say that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney must have read and absorbed nearly every word ever uttered by Goebbels, the all-time champion promoter of propaganda that was used to spread fear into the people of Germany. Rove and Cheney, the modern-day promoters of propaganda and fear are not the equals of Goebbels, the best in history, but they successfully used his teachings to promote constant fear for eight very stressful and painful years. But all that should have come to an end when the Obama team came on board; it didn't.

The recent thwarted effort to set off a bomb on Northwest Airlines flight #253 bound for Detroit on Christmas provides a striking example of the fear mentality that has become a fixture within our society. No sooner had this event taken place than it was picked up by every element of the media in America. Cable TV; CNN, Fox News and MSNBC filled the air waves with a 24/7 schedule of non-stop reporting of how the suspect known as Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, who said he was acting on Al-Qaeda's instructions, had tried but failed to set off an explosive device on a plane headed for Detroit.

Day after day, the reports of this event went on non-stop with nearly every anchor on every show. These anchors, together with military analysts and security experts issued grave warnings about terrorists and the failure of airport security and governmental agencies. The propaganda machine to frighten America went into high gear to plant yet more fear into our society.

What Osama Bin Laden initially planned for America has worked brilliantly for him but, unfortunately, not for the American people. Osama's strategy was to plan and carry out a horrific attack in America that would set off a massive military response by the U.S. government; that he did with the tragedy of 9/11. He used 9/11 as the starting point from which following random terrorist attacks would draw America into quagmires around the world. This was a part of his overall strategy by which he wanted to undermine and destroy the very fabric of our economic, social and political system. He made capitalism his enemy and vowed to destroy it.

Osama's strategy has turned into a nightmare for America. The Bush administration took the bait offered by him and reacted just like a raging bull; exactly as Osama expected. As a result, our military is now sinking into the quagmire of Afghanistan while, at the same time, we remain mired down in a very costly occupation in Iraq. The strategy Osama set is still working very well as any incident such as the bomb threat by the Nigerian suspect results in increased concern over terror throughout America. Whether it's the departed Bush or Mr. Obama in charge, the fear of potential terror attacks hangs over America like a dark, ominous cloud.

Headline! Obama blames Al-Qaeda for flight 253 Christmas attack. What a stunning, surprising revelation for Americans. Here's an American president blaming Al-Qaeda for another cowardly attack. Well, Saddam's gone so he can't be blamed so Mr. Obama tells America that the culprits are, without a doubt, Al-Qaeda based in Yemen and so we are given our next injection so we can continue with our addiction to fear and terror. Before long we will be getting accounts of military strikes in Yemen by U.S. Special Forces and, most certainly, an escalation of the drone missions that have been going on there for some time.

So, is this going to dictate the future for America? After a Nigerian flying into Detroit tries to set off a bomb, we immediately get ready to launch attacks on Yemen, the nation "said" to be involved. Then, perhaps, another incident follows with a suspected terrorist from Somalia; do we then attack Somalia? Maybe Sudan or Nigeria after that? Suppose we feel that other suspected terrorists based in Britain, Spain or Germany are planning an attack on America. Might we decide to use our Special Forces or drones to wipe them out? Could this situation go so far that we, at some point, even violate the borders of our allies?

Our leadership in Washington, namely, Mr. Obama and the military, apparently still do not understand that the greatest military machine in history, using the most advanced weapons, cannot defeat insurgents who fight by completely different rules; who use stealth and hide in the shadows before striking back with their own terrible form of payback on those who occupy their country. They should have learned this lesson from the disastrous, tragic experience of the Vietnam War, but they have not. A new day in warfare has dawned and it is time that our leadership awoke from its deep slumber.

Even though, thank God, that the bomb on flight #253 did not go off, this will go down as a win for the bad guys. The damaging psychological effect that it has had on this society is evidenced by the fact that, since it happened on Christmas day, it is still the primary issue being discussed in the media nearly two weeks later; and you can bet it will not go away any time soon.

America is caught up in a deadly, vicious circle. Osama and/or his successors are still out there pulling the strings and, if we continue to react like enraged bulls, then they will have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They will have taken America closer and closer to the collapse that they had envisioned.

How They Win

2010-01-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-They-Win-by-Kathy-Malloy-100105-114.html

January 5, 2010
By Kathy Malloy
The joke about the Department of Homeland Security used to be that is was like a roll of lifesavers -- lots of pretty colors with a great big hole in the middle. After the recent (continuing) airline threats, it's not so humorous anymore.

Can somebody explain what the massive, expensive Department of Homeland Security actually does? We don't even get to see the pretty charts anymore. In the panic and confusion following 9-11, the Bush Crime Family moved into hyper-drive to implement a far-reaching (and possibly premeditated) plan to clamp down on our individual rights and freedoms (USA Patriot Act, TIPS, FISA amendments, FOIA denials, indefinite detention, etc.) and centralize and strengthen their surveillance and phony counter terrorism efforts under one big, new, fascist tent.

We forfeited our privacy rights and ability to carry more than a teaspoonful of liquid onto airplanes for the promise that Big Brother Bush & Co. would smoke out those swarthy heathens who were hiding in our playgrounds, rose bushes, and transportation hubs. We cracked the government surplus safe left by Clinton and dumped all our tax dollars on Cheney's kitchen table and allowed him to design (and it was Cheney's plan) this ginormous new government entity that was -- allegedly -- our only protection against Osama and his advancing hoards.

The Department of Homeland Security cost billions to form, billions to sustain, and apart from the once-mildly-entertaining candy-color-coded terror charts blank-eyed Tom "Rainbow" Ridge trotted out to let us know when it was safe to go to Target without first donning our Kevlar vests, what have they accomplished? What mysterious dots are being connected to make us safer? The "terrorists" are still infiltrating our airports with their exploding shoes and underwear. It's like a nonstop Hogan's Hero's marathon, with bumbling US security officials replacing the uber-stupid Nazis. So, we head to the terminals and endure privacy-robbing full body scanners, uncomfortable and time-consuming shoe searches, confiscations of baby formula and nail clippers . . .and it turns out we're being protected by idiots that make Larry the Cable Guy look like a Rhodes Scholar.

Deadeye Dick Cheney would have us believe that the Obama administration is responsible for the near-Christmas tragedy in Detroit because it is too soft on terror and isn't responding rapidly enough (to. . .what?).Guess he hoped for a nuclear response.Spokesmodels for the Bush Crime Family like Dana Perino even have the dim-witted temerity to state -- unchallenged -- that there was no terrorist attack during the Bush administration's eight (illegal) years in office. Either they all suffer from collective amnesia and exist in some psychic fugue state, or hope that we do and will forget that the most devastating terror attack in the last 50 years occurred on their watch. Or better still, that we'll blame Clinton. Or Jimmy Carter. And despite the incredible centralization of security efforts and forfeiture of civil liberties they demanded, we're no safer today than we were on 9-10-2001. Worse, actually, since the Bush Crime Family's anti-Muslim crusades have turned the U.S.into one giant al Quaeda recruiting poster.

The real cost of Homeland Security hits us harder in our psyches than our bank accounts. It institutionalizes fear, plays on our anxiety about vaguely-defined "others," and allows the Glenn Becks of the world to run rampant with white boards and maniacal ravings about syphilis and the Rockefeller Center in NYC without being immediately sedated and carted to a well-padded room in a secure location.Government has increased our collective mental insecurity while doing nothing to promote our actual physical security.

Tell me, Dick, how is that making us safer? Seems to me, that's exactly how the terrorists "win."

Billions in Recent Yememi Investments and The Underwear Bomber’s Daddy. It’s a Small World Ain’t It?

2010-01-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/billions-in-recent-yememi-investments-and-the-underwear-bombers-daddy-its-a-small-world-aint-it/

Billions in Recent Yememi Investments and The Underwear Bomber’s Daddy. It’s a Small World Ain’t It?
Posted on December 30, 2009 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton

Did Daddy Warbucks sell Little Orphan Umar to the CIA?

Daddy Warbucks

Why are we attacking the people of Yemen? Because some kid is alleged to have sewn a big fire-cracker into his underwear then sat on it in a plane over Detroit? Nope. Not even close. If you want to know what this is all about, follow Daddy’s money all the way to the IMF and Jaiz Bank.

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t brave soldiers used to throw themselves on grenades back in the day to absorb the shock and therefore save their fellow soldiers. Isn’t there a saying about “throwing yourself on a grenade” to that end? So the big “terrorist” plot here is to get a small amount of PETN onboard a plane and then SIT ON IT, thus absorbing the relatively small explosion… with his ass and his 150lb body?

That’s the “plan” that requires, as President Obama blusters, “every element of national power” to fight? I don’t think so. You gotta look a little closer than a singed pair of tightie-whities if you want to know why President Obama is going to kill more people in Yemen. I have. Take a look.

The other day I wrote about President Obama’s attempt to assassinate a witness in Yemen as well as the IMF and World Bank connections related to that nation as the probable reason the US feels compelled to invade. The premise was, that with all the free-market “reforms” being forced on the people of Yemen by these privately owned international banking institutions, the poor of that nation were rising up against the corrupt government and it looks like without our help, there will be a regime change. I wrote about the involvement of the Kuwait Energy company and their connections with the World Bank as it relates to the multiple ongoing oil and LNG pipelines running throughout the country. Basically, I estimated based on information from the websites and publications from the World Bank, IMF, and Kuwait Energy websites that there was about a quarter of a billion dollars at stake and that it was that money that was the reason President Obama chose to attack the people of Yemen.

Once again, Obama and his adminstration are serving the banks interests first.

Well, hold onto your hats folks… I was wrong. Yes, you heard that right. Scott Creighton (willyloman) is admitting he was wrong. My research was incomplete and I missed the mark by quite a bit.

Instead of having a quarter of a billion dollars of foreign investment on the line… it’s more like 5 billion dollars.

Yemen’s foreign debt has increased from $8.9 million to $5.9 billion since July 2009, according to the report on banking and currency developments issued by the Yemen Central Bank.

The IFC’s institutions topped Yemen creditors, with Yemen owing them about $3 billion, including $2.2 billion for the International Development Foundation.

The rest of the debt was for the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the International Fund for Agriculture Development IFAD, the Islamic Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OPEC and the EU.

Yemen’s debt for the Paris Club Members came second by about $1.8 billion, with $1.3 billion in Russian loans.

Many outstanding loans come from Japanese, U.S., French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Dutch and German sources.

The country’s debt for other creditors came in the third place with Yemen owing Saudi, Kuwaiti, Chinese, Algerian, Korean, Polish and Iraqi funds about $836 million. The debt for unidentified sources reached $195.7 million by July. YOB Sept. 2009
Since July of 2009, money has been pouring into Yemen fast and furious; money that may never be recovered were there to be a revolution and subsequent regime change in that nation. President Obama can’t allow that to happen. But how is he going to go to the American people and tell them that foreign investors and international banks are worried about their billions in investments in the “reforms” of Yemen’s socioeconomic system? That wouldn’t be an easy sell to a post TARP Bill nation now would it?

Be Afraid!

Enter Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his ridiculous “underwear bomb”.

Now, all this time after the terrorist attack on Flight 253 (and I will call it that because whether it was done by one “lone gunman” or the state, it’s still an attempt to effect change through the use of fear so it is terrorism) what do we really know about Abdulmutallab? Well, we have been told by an agency that has lied to us many, many times that he has “confessed” to the attack because he was “radicalized” and that he received help from terrorists in Yemen. All too convenient of a story isn’t it? Billions on the line in Yemen, Obama tries to assassinated a guy there killing scores of innocent people instead, and ALL OF

A SUDDEN we have this guy coming out of the woodwork with his silly “underwear bomb”.

After scouring though all his emails (I told you they keep every single comment and email forever) the only “radical” thing the media can say about him… is he’s lonely. Imaging that; a lonely student.
Well, what isn’t the MSM and President Obama telling you about Abdulmutallab that is relevant to the story? Let me fill in some blanks.

1. The Underwear Bomber’s IMF and World Bank indebted Father
Abdulmutallab’s father is indeed a banker just as the MSM has said. The interesting thing is, he’s not JUST a banker, he is THE banker in Nigeria. According to a recent Times story, Abdulmutallab’s father, Umaru Mutallab is one of the wealthiest men in Africa; that says a lot in a continent as corrupt as Africa.
In Nigeria, the nation Umaru Mutallab lives in, according to the World Bank, 53% of the population lives on less than $1 per day. Abject poverty is rampant in Nigeria and so are human rights violations. Kinda has to be that way to keep the super wealthy in control of the population.

On February 25, police killed approximately 50 persons, burned nearly 100 homes, and destroyed more than 150 market stalls in Ogaminana, just outside Okene, Adavi local government area, Kogi State.

On November 27, in Jos, ethno-religious violence erupted during the vote tabulation for the Jos North Local Government Area elections resulting in the deaths of approximately 300 persons. Credible reports indicate the police and military used lethal force during attempts to quell the violence, killing approximately 100 civilians.

Police officers were not held accountable for excessive or deadly force or for the deaths of persons in custody. Police generally operated with impunity in the apprehension, illegal detention, and sometimes execution of criminal suspects. 2008 US State

Department Report on Human Rights Violations in Nigeria

How did Abdulmutallab’s father become so wealthy in the first place? Umaru Mutallab was the Nigerian Minister of Economic

Development in 1975. He then spent a decade as the Managing Director and CEO of United Bank for Africa. For the last ten years, Umaru has been the chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria.

So, Abdulmutallab’s father was instrumental through his government position in facilitating the World Bank and IMF’s entrance into the Nigerian economic system. He then goes on to head up several banks making himself filthy rich while the vast majority of Nigeria is impoverished to unprecedented degrees all the time and kept in check by ruthless police and military oppression.

That’s the “underwear bomber’s” “banker” father; a corrupt Nigerian banker with excessive connections to the IMF and the World Bank and who OWES everything he has to them.

So far what we know about Daddy Warbucks is this; he went to the State Department (U.S. Embassy) and then he went to the CIA offices in Nigeria supposedly to “warn” them about his “radicalized” son. Yet, no emails or web comments appear to make Abdulmutallab look very radical. So why was Daddy Warbucks with his deep IMF and World Bank connections really meeting with the State Department (US Embassy) and CIA? Why is it that after the supposed “warnings” Abdulmutallab was STILL able to get on that flight with all the warning signs and red flags? Hmm?

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father in Nigeria reported concern over his son’s “radicalization” to the U.S. Embassy there last month (Nov. 19th), intelligence officials in the United States deemed the information insufficient to pursue. Washington Post

Abdulmutallab’s father Alhaji Uma Abdulmutallab, a prominent banker, was said to have had one face-to-face meeting with a CIA official in Nigeria (just 5 weeks ago) and several contacts by telephone. Telegraph

2. The Underwear Bombers Mother
Abdulmutallab’s mother isn’t talked about much. Ever wonder why that is? Well, I’ll tell you; it’s because she is from Yemen. That’s right. Yes, Abdulmutallab went to Yemen. But is it possible he went to visit his mother or other relatives there and NOT “al-Qaeda” operatives? It’s hard to figure out, because everything about his mother is being scrubbed up on the net. Very little is being said about her and who she is. But this much I know, she is from Yemen and may live there, or may not. I will continue looking into it.

Now, here is what we have learned;

Yemen increased its national debt to the tune of 5 billion dollars from July to September of this year (they may have borrowed more since Sept). The IMF, World Bank, and Paris Club members are on the hook for that money if the revolution in Yemen is successful.

A World Bank and IMF indebted super wealthy “free-market” reformer in Nigeria goes to the State Department and then to the CIA in Nigeria to talk about his son.

That same son, for reasons unknown decides “out of the blue” to sit on a small amount of explosives in a plane in Detroit. The CIA somehow misses the warning signs.

The FBI announces immediately that the son “confessed’ that it was all Yemen’s fault.

After the attack, all the banking controlled congressmen and the Obama administration announce we will attack “the terrorists” in Yemen and thus help “stabilize” the current corrupt government of that nation.

Now, one more thing… this one is funny actually that no one else caught it.

Daddy Warbucks, Umaru Mutallab (remember, one of the wealthiest men in Africa, banker extraordinaire) played a major role in introducing Islamic banking into Nigeria. Islamic Banking is represented and organized globally by what is called the Islamic Development Bank which is deeply involved with Nigeria now (thanks in part to Umaru Mutallab) mainly through a bank called Jaiz Bank.

Umaru Mutallab sits on the board of Jaiz Bank and is in fact it’s chairman.

This year, however, should see the launch of Nigeria’s first Islamic bank. A holding company called Jaiz International, has been set up in the country to launch what will eventually be called Jaiz Bank International. It is being supported in its endeavours by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), which is helping to ensure that the launch of Jaiz is a success and that the bank complies with international banking regulations and Nigerian laws. All Business 2007
Well look at that. Jaiz Bank, headed up by the “underwear bombers’ father is in fact supported financially by the Islamic

Development Bank (IDB).

Now remember what I first put up in this article, the IDB is also heavily invested in the neoliberal reforms of Yemen’s economy which are at this very moment, under serious risk of the ongoing revolution in that country.

Daddy Warbucks, whose banking ties are under threat of serious set-backs, goes to the State Department and then the CIA and all of a sudden his lonely, college drop-out, populist son, ends up getting on a flight and setting his nuts on fire and the good-old U.S. of A can now come running in to the rescue to save all those precious investments in Yemen that are directly tied to, you guessed it, the underwear bomber’s daddy. A small world, ain’t it?

I hope that clears things up a little bit.

Either that or they just “hate us for our freedom”. Take your pick.

The war on terror has been about scaring people, not protecting them

2010-01-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jan/03/yemen-anti-terrorism-rendition-security

The war on terror has been about scaring people, not protecting them
The ease with which the plane bomber could operate exposes the vacuity and recklessness at the heart of the US response to 9/11

Gary Younge
3 January 2010

So there was no ticking time bomb. No urgent need ever arose to torture anybody who was withholding crucial details, so that civilisation as we know it could be saved in the nick of time. No wires had to be tapped, special prisons erected or international accords violated. No innocent people had to be grabbed off the street in their home country, transported across the globe and waterboarded. Drones, daisy-cutters, invasions, occupations were, it has transpired, not necessary.

Indeed, when it actually came down to it, to forestall a near-calamitous terrorist atrocity in the US the authorities didn't even have to go in search of information or informants. The alleged terrorist's father came to the US embassy in Nigeria of his own free will and warned them that his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had disappeared and could be in the company of Yemeni terrorists.

Meanwhile the National Security Agency had heard that al-Qaida in Yemen was planning to use an unnamed Nigerian in an attack on the US. If that were not enough, then came Abdulmutallab himself, a 23-year-old Nigerian bound for Detroit who bought his ticket in cash, checked in no bags and left no contact information. For seven years the American state manipulated the public with its multicoloured terror alerts. But when all the warning lights were flashing red, it did nothing.

To brand this near miss a "systemic failure", as Barack Obama has done, is both true and inadequate. It reduces the moral vacuity, political malevolence and enduring strategic recklessness that has been the enduring response to the 9/11 attacks to a question of managerial competence.

"Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," explains Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. During the Bush years that terror was routinely leveraged for the purposes of social control, military mobilisation and electoral advantage. Meanwhile, the administrative processes that might prevent the next attack were tragically lacking. In short, Bush's anti-terror strategy was not about protecting people but about scaring them.

To galvanise the nation for war abroad and sedate it for repression at home, the previous administration constructed a terror threat that was ubiquitous in character, apocalyptic in scale and imminent in nature. Only then could they counterpose human rights against security as though they were not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.

Al-Qaida was only too happy to oblige. In such a state of perpetual crisis both terrorists and reactionaries thrive. Terrorists successfully create a climate of fear; governments successfully exploit that fear to extend their own powers.

"I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it," said former vice-president Dick Cheney.

The trouble is that even by their own shabby standards, none of these "extraordinary measures" have ever worked. No new laws were necessary to stop 9/11. If the immigration services, the FBI and the CIA had been doing their jobs properly, the attacks could have been prevented.

Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the US government undertook the "preventative detention" of about 5,000 men on the basis of their birthplace and later sought a further 19,000 "voluntary interviews". Over the next year, more than 170,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea were fingerprinted and interviewed in a programme of "special registration". None of these produced a single terrorism conviction.

This set the pattern for the years to come: wiretapping, rendition, torture, secrecy. Those who otherwise rail against the inefficiency of government argued for more extensive, intrusive state power even as it produced little in the way of results. When confronted with this lamentable record, their only defence was the threat of the next attack. "The next time, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud" said Condoleezza Rice, adding. "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time." Over the last week even once in a while would have looked good.

There are precious few partisan points to be made here. Responsibility for Abdulmutallab lies with Obama. He has been in power longer than Bush was when he received the FBI memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US". The Bush administration may have been more alarmist and belligerent, but, despite his more emollient tone, Obama has kept most of the repressive apparatus that Bush constructed intact. Obama has expressed his support for trying Guantánamo prisoners under military commissions, while his CIA chief has expressed his desire to keep extraordinary rendition. Meanwhile, photographs of torture and documents describing videos of these "enhanced interrogations" remain under lock and key.

"Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place," a former CIA officer told the Washington Post. Casting the escalation of the Afghanistan war as a central front in the war on terror is a potent illustration of how this delusion has continued. Al-Qaida is now more likely to be found in Pakistan, an American ally, than in Afghanistan and the latest threat came via Yemen. Terrorism is a strategy, not a place – attempts to carpet-bomb it or occupy it or conquer it will inevitably fail.

Given the nature of terrorism another attack can be predicted with grim certainty. Before 9/11 there was Oklahoma City and before that there was the World Trade Centre. In a nation where the shooting of innocents in schools, colleges, churches and coffee shops is relatively commonplace, it goes without saying that one disturbed individual, with a lethal weapon and with or without an agenda, can inflict a substantial amount of human carnage. If they are working in a team and well resourced, the damage could be huge. All the state can reasonably expect to do is limit the odds.

The US has actually done the opposite. Thanks to war and torture it has swelled the number of people who might want to do it harm. Much has been made of Abdulmutallab's radicalisation in London. But there had to be something to radicalise him with. In Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah and elsewhere, the US has provided plenty of material.

Meanwhile the institutional stasis within the agencies that are supposed to combat terrorism means that when a potential terrorist actually does rear their head they appear on every radar and yet somehow, all too often, go undetected.

So instead of reducing the odds politicians instead invoke them. "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon," Cheney once said, "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response". But it's precisely because their analysis has been so deeply flawed that their response has been so faulty. Until things improve there is a much higher chance that America's anti-terror efforts will repeat themselves: first as farce and then as human tragedy.

Fear Decade: Since 9/11, We've Embraced Our Inner Coward

2010-01-02T06:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/31

Ted Rall
CommonDreams.org
Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00 EST

Home of the free and the brave. Live free or die. Shoot first; ask questions later. Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out. These were the mottos of a brash, impetuous, audacious-to-a-fault nation.

That nation is dead.

Once we Americas did brave things: We sat on boats, crossing the English Channel, knowing that most of us would die on the beach in Normandy. We sat at the lunch counter in the Deep South, waiting for white goons to beat us up. We also did brave things that were stupid: When the president sent us to Vietnam, some of us went, risking death. Others went to Canada, sacrificing everything for principle. We bungee jumped. We tried New Coke. Bravery can be dumb.

But it's still brave.

Then came 9/11/01. It was the defining event of the decade that ends today, a fin-de-siècle moment for a previously proud nation's once glorious history.

The Fear Decade had begun.

Bin Laden wanted the destruction of the World Trade Center to smack oblivious Americans' upside their collective heads, to draw their attention to their nation's toxic foreign policy (especially in the Middle East), maybe even to demand that the U.S. stop propping up dictators. It didn't work.

Rather than prompt them to reassess their government's behavior, Americans got angry. Anger, as any shrink will tell you, comes from fear. And fear makes you do stupid things.

Fear of future attacks. Fear of Muslims. Of anyone wearing a turban. Foreigners. The next thing we knew, the paranoid delusionals leading us convinced us that fearful people and things were everywhere. Mail full of anthrax. Gas stations stalked by snipers. Threat levels: orange, red, etc. (but it's always orange). Avian flu. Eeek! Stop these things! Do whatever it takes!

Throwing innocent Muslim men in prison? It was worth it to (possibly, probably not) prevent one attack. Torture? We couldn't take any chances--what if the victim knew that a bomb was about to go off? Because one lunatic tried to blow up his joke of a shoe bomb on a flight from Paris to Miami, America's 800 million air travelers are ordered to take off their 1.6 billion shoes every year. Because a half-dozen Brits thought about trying to blow up planes using hair peroxide and Tang (yes, really), millions of nursing mothers were told to dump bottles containing thousands of gallons of breast milk into trashcans at airport security checkpoints. Never mind the scientists who said such plots couldn't work. And now, the most fearsome fear of all: the Paris-to-Detroit underwear bomber. Airport security is about to turn really ugly.

Governments act stupid and mean. That's normal. What the Fear Decade made different was us. It made us let the government do whatever it wanted.

Fear is irrational. As I pointed out at the time, Iraq's longest-range missiles couldn't reach Europe, much less the United States. In other words, it didn't matter if Saddam had had WMDs. It didn't matter to us, anyway. Yet we destroyed our economy and murdered two million people to invade Iraq.

I watched a legless vet, humiliated and detained by a TSA agent as he repeatedly explained why the metal detector kept going off: his body was full of titanium, courtesy of the Iraqi insurgency. I watched. So did other passengers. We said nothing.

We were afraid.

Not just at the airport. We were afraid at work. Unions were deader than dead, the government was in the hands of gangster capitalists, and the economy started tanking the instant Bill Clinton began packing his bags. We were over leveraged, maxed out and one paycheck away from losing everything. Ask for a raise? Demand longer vacations? Are you crazy, brother? Like Jews assembled in the freezing courtyard of a concentration camp, we stared straight ahead, terrified, hoping not to be noticed, to live to see the next "selection."

Fear everywhere! National Guardskids, all of 20 years old and decked out in their best Kevlar, brandishing automatic weapons taller than they are at women and children as they came out of commuter rail stations. Annoying, sure--but what if...what if...what if something happened? We heard that the government was listening to our phone calls and reading our email but instead of summoning up outrage at this brazen and illegal violation of privacy we took cold comfort in that hoary chestnut: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

But we were afraid. We all were. We still are.

Then we elected Barack Obama. We didn't vote for him because he was accomplished. He wasn't. Or because we liked his ideas. He hardly had any. We voted for him because he seemed so calm.

But he was afraid too. More than that, he wanted us to keep being scared--of the same exact stuff Bush had had us so frightened of! Lions and tigers and Muslims, oh my! The Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, even though the Pentagon said there were fewer than 100 Al Qaeda guys in the whole country! Iraq, still, although he couldn't quite explain why, and the bad guys who didn't do anything wrong at Guantánamo, just in case.

Now it's all fear, all the time. Fear of diseases (H1N1). Fear of evil banks (feed them or they'll go away, which would somehow be worse). We were arrogant once, loud and silly and funny and crazy as hell, and we were Americans.

Now we're timid and pissy and pissed off, and I don't recognize, much less like, what we've become.

Have We Learned Anything from the Bush Years?

2009-12-31T11:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Have-We-Learned-Anything-f-by-George-Washington-091230-527.html

December 30, 2009
Have We Learned Anything from the Bush Years?
By George Washington

Fear makes people stupid.

It makes us unable to think straight. And it makes us give up our power to tough-talking authoritarians.

War Is Stupid

And since the "war on terror" is now being expanded to Yemen, it is worth remembering that experts state that the "war on terror" has been counterproductive for keeping us safe. For example, a leading advisor to the U.S. military, the hawkish Rand Corporation, released a study in 2008 called "How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida".

The report confirms what experts have been saying for years: the war on terror is actually weakening national security (see this, this and this).

As a press release about the study states:

"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism."

Torture Is Stupid

And, purportedly, some are again pushing torture in response to the underwear bomber.

As president-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Roy Eidelson, points out - most Americans supported the use of torture because they were deceived into thinking that it works and was a necessary tool in a life-or-death war on terror.

In fact, overwhelming evidence and the opinion of the top experts in the field prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that:

Torture does NOT work to produce intelligence or prevent terrorist attacks

Torture HARMS national security

Most of those tortured were INNOCENT

(For religious people, you could thus say that torture is evil, as it inflicts harm for no beneficial purpose. For Christians, fear also goes against the basic teachings of Jesus).

The Repeal of Constitutional Rights Is Stupid

Finally, the Bush administration claimed that we needed spying on Americans, the loss of basic constitutional rights, and more presidential power because of 9/11. In truth:

The government's spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here)

The Patriot Act was written before 9/11

Cheney advocated strengthening the powers of the White House to the point of monarchy before 9/11

Incidentally, both the Iraq war - which we now know was wholly unnecessary (see this and this) - and the Afghanistan war were planned before 9/11 as well.

Have We Learned Anything?

Remember the words of one of America's founding fathers and one of the fathers of philosophy:

Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither. -Thomas Jefferson
Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others. -Aristotle

As Ryan Sager points out:

Terrorism is not now, and has never been, an existential threat to the United States. As we've discussed, the threat of dying in a terrorist attack is far smaller than the threat of being hit by lightning. No one's arguing we shouldn't be vigilant against terrorism -- and airline security in particular is a farce, a problem that must be solved, and (frustratingly enough) a problem that can be solved. As is the problem we seem to have of keeping people -- even people who've been flagged by their own families -- on the proper watch lists. But these are law-enforcement problems and intelligence problems. They are not a war.

The war is in our minds, between being scared of our shadows and keeping the true threat in perspective. It's not easy of course -- I'm a New Yorker, every day I get on a subway that could be bombed, that rumbles under what used to be the World Trade Center. But is there any true solution other than to keep a stiff upper lip?

Fear is a powerful weapon -- and there's no reason the American president should act as a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.

And as professor Scott Atran notes:
To terrorize and destabilize, terrorists need publicity and our complicity. With publicity, even failed terrorist acts succeed in terrorizing; without publicity, terrorism would fade away ... By amplifying and connecting relatively sporadic terrorist acts into a generalized "war," the somewhat marginal phenomenon of terrorism has become a primary preoccupation of our government and people. This transformation puts the lie to the constant refrain by our same leaders that "terrorists will gain nothing."
Have we learned anything from the revelations that the Bush administration lied us into the need for a war in Iraq, lied about the need for torture, lied about the reason for spying, loss of constitutional rights, and an overwhelmingly powerful executive branch?

Have we learned anything from the discovery that unnecessary war, torture and panic over sporadic terrorist attacks create more terrorism and reduce national security?

Or will our fear of the underwear bomber and other terrorist acts scare us into stupidity again, as it did so many people during the Bush years?

My Fellow Americans: Why There Are No Terrorists Seeking To Bring Down Our Country

2009-12-30T07:54:00.001-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/199955-My-Fellow-Americans-Why-There-Are-No-Terrorists-Seeking-To-Bring-Down-Our-Country

SOTT Reader
SOTT.net
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:01 EST

Listening to the local ClearChannel AM news radio station on the way to work this morning, I heard a famous local pundit ranting about how the Christmas Day underwear bomber's "terror attack" was a stark warning that terrorists are out to kill Americans and bring down the country. He angrily accused the public of foolish laziness for not urging their leaders to use every resource at the U.S. government's disposal to lock down America and purge it of the many homegrown terrorists scheming to murder us all!

Presumably with a straight face, he squawked about how lucky we were because the failure of this near-disaster could be chalked up to yet another "terrorist" who turned out to be bumbling and inept, like the "shoe bomber" and a string of others. Yet, still, we should all be having nightmares about this suicidal "gang who couldn't shoot straight" because they represent a clear and present danger to the lives of all Americans!

This commentator is of the highly articulate, smart-sounding, yet profoundly ignorant type who claims free thought and independence from partisanship, but would immediately join the Xenophobic Jingoist Authoritarian party if one officially existed. He seems to believe that entire nations of people are "crazy" and that vast populations "hate freedom" (which makes about as much sense as "hate breathing," if you think about it).

As he reinforced the media's "official truth" that suicidal Muslim terrorists lurk and plot in every dark corner of America, it was about the saddest display of naive credulity I'd heard in, oh, at least a week. His thinking is apparently so shallow that it would never even occur to him to ask why someone would need to explode an airliner mid-flight to bring about the end of this country. I've never heard him question why "Muslim terrorists" are so needlessly, pointlessly obsessed only with air travel, nor why the destruction of airliners mid-flight is apparently such an essential first step to "bringing down America," nor why these masterminds can't seem to succeed, yet never revert to far simpler means of achieving their alleged objectives!

Still, it's clear that he wanted us to feel afraid, even though any given American is statistically more likely to die from a zillion things other than terrorist doings, including, for example, drowning. Are we foolish, then, not to insist that the government regulate every drop of water and supply it to us only in doses small enough to make drowning impossible?! It would save lives, after all -- right? Where's the fear and outrage over drowning?!

We, the public, have been told again and again that the goal of "Muslim terrorists" is to destroy, or bring down, or wreck the economy, or otherwise wreak havoc on America. Our government plainly says so. Well, what's so difficult about that? We are pretty easily frightened! The fact is, any half-wit could come up with far simpler ways to terrorize and disrupt on a large scale than messing around on airplanes. I'm darned if it wouldn't be simple as heck to wreak the desired chaos in a jiffy if some organized group actually made it their goal. Come on, people, you must know this is true!

Fact Number One: the federal government's own estimate is widely reported -- there are over 200 million guns in America. Everyone knows that they are dead simple to obtain, without even needing to provide identification, and it's probably even easier to get them illegally. The very same goes for all the stuff needed to create explosive devices, for anyone who cares to learn, so we're told. Heck, they've told us for years that ordinary, impoverished Iraqis and Afghans can whip these things up with the utmost facility every day.

Fact Number Two: We have been shown in film after book after article after documentary after news story that so many of America's "targets," both hard and soft are underprotected or not protected at all. Anyone with intent can walk into and create an incident in an airport, shopping mall or cinema -- these places are public -- or on a highway, bridge or toll booth. We've seen that power, chemical, water-treatment and other plants, refineries, etc., not to mention busy highways, bridges, toll booths, trains and boats are all easily breached, even by people who are not resigned to committing suicide in the course of their dedication to create chaos.

Fact Number Three: We've been told there are "terror cells" throughout America, and our intelligence agencies even claimed to have broken some up, but to create the goal of chaos, there doesn't even need to be such cells. There is no problem at all, for anyone with half a brain, to enter the country, legally or illegally, then do the dirty work all on his own!

Consider the estimate of at least ten million illegal aliens, from every corner of the world, presumably with no greater intelligence than the average person, who have entered the country and continue to reside unharrassed for years, even generations. How much easier would it be to enter and remain undetected for only long enough to carry out a mission to create havoc. Entering the country is obviously no great feat; it's not even necessary to enter via airports. It should certainly be even less of a problem for anyone with a burning desire to "destroy America" -- and especially for an organized group with an allegely endless supply of willing suicide victims who will do anything for their cause.

Folks, come on now: put simple facts One, Two, and Three together, would you please?! I don't have to spell it out. I am not violent. I have never touched a gun. I would never advocate violence. Even so, I, to whom such ideas are alien, have no problem seeing quite clearly how easy it would be for anyone to create a really big scare, and even do real damage. Anyone with the alleged goal of creating chaos, wrecking the economy, and instilling nightmarish fear in people could easily accomplish, in virtually no time, and with barely any expense, these goals, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how! Come on!!

I'm not giving "the terrorists" ideas. I'm not "enabling" them. I'm not sympathizing with them. I'm just saying that there is nothing particularly clever about easy and obvious methods of making an ugly mess! With an allegedly endless supply of suicidal, weapon-loving followers willing to die for their alleged cause, an organization of even minimum capability would be able to create an incident every single day. Forever. Easily.

It isn't even necessary that attacks go on constantly. Think about it. It would take just a week or two to stop flights, stop rail and water travel, stop shopping, knock out electrical power, snarl traffic on major roads and bridges, probably even to crash the stock market. Heck, even terrorists with just telephones and a few frightening words could scare every public works department, school, hospital, hotel, restaurant, theater and department store in any city out of business in no time. Of course they could. Have you asked yourself why they don't?

You must surely have realized by now that if these allegedly determined terrorists existed, they would have accomplished their goal long ago and with great ease, never bothering with the difficult, risky, and needless business of smuggling bits of dangerous material onto airplanes! Had these monsters really existed, they would by now have had years to bring in people, make plans and acquire all they need. Yet nothing much has happened. The whole idea that our leaders and compliant media are selling us is perfectly ridiculous and you must know it by now!

Even just one year on from 9-11 there was wailing that America's "targets" were still unprotected, and hardly a thing has been done in the seven years since! Do you really think this would be true if the "threat" was real, if there were an organization actually trying to accomplish the goals our leaders and media tells us about? For instance, would our ports and borders really still be wide open if our government was doing all in its power to stop the alleged "terrorist threat?" Come on, please! Who are they kidding?!

If you've woken up a bit, your next step might be to discover the plentitude of reasons why and how it is that factions within governments, namely the intelligence services (who have the know-how, the resources, and the desire to carry out false-flag terrorist attacks, independently and often without the approval or awareness of their official paymasters within the bureaucracy), have throughout history devised these fear campaigns and then taken them to whatever extremes they think are necessary to maintain control of a population.

They do this by convincing you to concede power and money to your "trusted" authorities. This is what SOTT.net and scores of other sources have been explaining for many years. Alternatively, you could read some of many testimonies first-hand from insiders. For example, The Secret Team. This scam of scaremongering a nation behind inflated or non-existent enemies is as old as the hills, and ignorance of it is what truly brings nations down.

Cause and Effect in the 'Terror War'

2009-12-30T07:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/29/terrorism/index.html

December 29, 2009 by Salon.com
Cause and Effect in the 'Terror War'
by Glenn Greenwald

"In all their alleged allegedness, this Administration has an allergy to the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy and war aims" -- Supreme Tough Guy Warrior Mark Steyn, National Review, yesterday.

"The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan" -- New York Times, December 4, 2009.

"In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen" -- New York Times, yesterday.
_______

Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries -- or, to use the NYT's jargon, "five fronts" in the "Terror War" (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, "we will continue to use every element of our national power"). Add to those five fronts the "crippling" sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even "harsher" than the prior ones, and it's almost easier to count the Muslim countries we're not attacking or threatning than to count the ones we are. Yet this still isn't enough for America's right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of "an allergy to the concept of war."

In the wake of the latest failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines, one can smell the excitement in the air -- that all-too-familiar, giddy, bipartisan climate that emerges in American media discourse whenever there's a new country we get to learn about so that we can explain why we're morally and strategically justified in bombing it some more. "Yemen" is suddenly on every Serious Person's lips. We spent the last month centrally involved to some secret degree in waging air attacks on that country -- including some that resulted in numerous civilian deaths -- but everyone now knows that this isn't enough and it's time to Get Really Serious and Do More.

For all the endless, exciting talk about the latest Terrorist attack, one issue is, as usual, conspicuously absent: motive. Why would a young Nigerian from a wealthy, well-connected family want to blow himself on one of our airplanes along with 300 innocent people, and why would Saudi and Yemeni extremists want to enable him to do so? When it comes to Terrorism, discussions of motive have been declared more or less taboo from the start because of the dishonest equation of motive discussions with justification -- as though understanding the reasons why X happens is to posit that X is legitimate and justifiable. Causation simply is; it has nothing to do with issues of morality, blame, or justification. Yet all that is generally permitted to be said in such situations is that Terrorists try to harm us because they're Evil, and we (of course) are not, and that's generally the end of the discussion.

Despite that taboo, evidence always ends up emerging on this question. As numerous reports have indicated, the Al Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula has said that this attempted attack is in "retaliation" for the multiple, recent missile attacks on Yemen in which numerous innocent Muslim civilians were killed, as well as for the U.S.'s multi-faceted support for the not-exactly-democratic Yemeni government. That is similar to reports that Nidal Hasan was motivated to attack Fort Hood because "he was upset at the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan." And one finds this quote from an anonymous Yemeni official tacked on to the end of this week's NYT article announcing the "widening terror war" in Yemen -- as though it's just an afterthought:

"The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary -- but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda."

As always, the most confounding aspect of the reaction to the latest attempted terrorist episode is the professed confusion and self-righteous innocence that is universally expressed. Whether justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim world. We do not see it very much, but they certainly do. Again, independent of justification, what do we think is going to happen if we continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and enable others to do so? Isn't it obvious that our five-front actions are going to cause at least some Muslims -- subjected to constant images of American troops in their world and dead Muslim civilians at our hands, even if unintended -- to want to return the violence? Just look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think we're unleashing from a decade-long (and counting and increasing) multi-front "war" in the Muslim war?

There very well may be some small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself.

New Restrictions Quickly Added for Air Passengers

2009-12-30T06:37:00.002-08:00

On Christmas Day, some manchurian candidate, zombie type tried to ignite himself into some kind of strange human bomb on a Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan. Everyone is sooo tired of this terrorist shit and this wacko (who should have never been let on an airplane) was used to tighten down the screws on the rest of us. When I heard of this 'terrorist' attack gone awry, I instantly knew that there would be more restrictions for travelers and sure enough, check out the article below. These new procedures won't do a fucken thing to keep the dangerous people off the planes. These new procedures are designed to program us for more lost freedoms and rights. That's how the creep of fascist cancer works!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27security.html

December 27, 2009
New Restrictions Quickly Added for Air Passengers
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and LIZ ROBBINS

In the wake of the terrorism attempt Friday on a Northwest Airlines flight, federal officials on Saturday imposed new restrictions on travelers that could lengthen lines at airports and limit the ability of international passengers to move about an airplane.

The government was vague about the steps it was taking, saying that it wanted the security experience to be “unpredictable” and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport — a prospect that may upset airlines and travelers alike.

But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

Overseas passengers will be restricted to only one carry-on item, and domestic passengers will probably face longer security lines. That was already the case in some airports Saturday, in the United States and overseas.

The restrictions will again change the routine of air travel, which has undergone an upheaval since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in September 2001 and three later attempts at air terrorism.

Soon after the attempt on Friday, travelers at airports around the world began experiencing heightened screening in security lines. On one flight, from Newark Liberty International Airport to Little Rock, Ark., flight attendants kept cabin lights on for the entire trip instead of dimming them for takeoff and landing.

The limits, which brought to mind some of the most stringent policies after the 2001 attacks, come at a difficult time for the airline industry.

Travel has declined about 20 percent since 2008 because of the economy, and airlines have been dealing with numerous delays in the past week because of snowstorms on the East Coast and in the Midwest.

Airline industry executives said the new steps would complicate travel as vacationers return home from holiday trips and could also cause travelers to cancel plans for flights in 2010.

But the government seemed to discount those concerns. The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said in a statement Saturday that new measures were “designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same thing everywhere.” She said passengers should proceed with their holiday plans and “as always, be observant and aware of their surroundings and report any suspicious behavior or activity to law enforcement officials.”

The Transportation Security Administration, which governs security at airports and on airplanes in the United States, had no immediate comment on the steps. There also was no statement from the Air Transport Association, the trade group for American carriers.

Two foreign airlines, Air Canada and British Airways, disclosed the steps in notices on their Web sites. The airlines said the rules had been implemented by government security agencies including the T.S.A.

“Among other things,” the statement on Air Canada’s Web site read, “during the final hour of flight customers must remain seated, will not be allowed to access carry-on baggage, or have personal belongings or other items on their laps.”

The suspect in the Friday attempt, identified as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, tried to ignite his incendiary device in the final hour of the flight while the plane was descending into Detroit.

On its Web site, American Airlines said the T.S.A. had ordered new measures for flights departing from foreign locations to the United States, including mandatory screening of all passengers at airport gates during the boarding process. All carry-on items would be screened at security checkpoints and again at boarding, the airline said. It urged passengers to leave extra time for screening and boarding.

In effect, the restrictions mean that passengers on flights of 90 minutes or less would most likely not be able to leave their seats at all, since airlines do not allow passengers to walk around the cabin while a plane is climbing to its cruising altitude.

The new restrictions began to be instituted Saturday on flights from Canada and Europe to the United States. Air Canada said it was waiving fees for the first checked bag, and it told passengers to be prepared for delays, cancellations and missed connections because of the new limits.

At airports Saturday, travelers recounted the immediate differences they experienced. Though passengers arriving from Frankfurt passed speedily through customs at Kennedy Airport in New York, they said that in Germany the security was intensified.

“I really was surprised,” one passenger, Eva Clesle, said about the level of scrutiny in Frankfurt, adding that officials had inspected backpacks by opening “every single zip.”

In Rochester, N.Y., a passenger waiting in a security line said she had seen other passengers removed for additional screening.

Many of Air Canada’s flights in and out of La Guardia Airport in New York were canceled or delayed, and ticket agents blamed new security screenings.

Sarah Maslin Nir in New York contributed reporting.

One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists

2009-12-30T06:37:00.001-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_day_well_all_be_terrorists_20091228/

December 28, 2009 by TruthDig.com
One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists
by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges

Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.

This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com . On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.

The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial.

Hashmi, who if convicted could face up to 70 years in prison, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 2½ years. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material. Hashmi is not allowed to attend group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. He must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. He can write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation in a cage. His “proclivity for violence” is cited as the reason for these measures although he has never been charged or convicted with committing an act of violence.

“My brother was an activist,” Hashmi’s brother, Faisal, told me by phone from his home in Queens. “He spoke out on Muslim issues, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His arrest and torture have nothing to do with providing ponchos and socks to al-Qaida, as has been charged, but the manipulation of the law to suppress activists and scare the Muslim American community. My brother is an example. His treatment is meant to show Muslims what will happen to them if they speak about the plight of Muslims. We have lost every single motion to preserve my brother’s humanity and remove the special administrative measures. These measures are designed solely to break the psyche of prisoners and terrorize the Muslim community. These measures exemplify the malice towards Muslims at home and the malice towards the millions of Muslims who are considered as non-humans in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi is a form of psychological torture, far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees. It is torture as science. In Germany, the Gestapo broke bones while its successor, the communist East German Stasi, broke souls. We are like the Stasi. We have refined the art of psychological disintegration and drag bewildered suspects into secretive courts when they no longer have the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves.

“Hashmi’s right to a fair trial has been abridged,” said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights . “Much of the evidence in the case has been classified under CIPA , and thus Hashmi has not been allowed to review it. The prosecution only recently turned over a significant portion of evidence to the defense. Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention have impacted his mental state and ability to participate in his own defense.

“The prosecution’s case against Hashmi, an outspoken activist within the Muslim community, abridges his First Amendment rights and threatens the First Amendment rights of others,” Ratner added. “While Hashmi’s political and religious beliefs, speech and associations are constitutionally protected, the government has been given wide latitude by the court to use them as evidence of his frame of mind and, by extension, intent. The material support charges against him depend on criminalization of association. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities.”

Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations can now become a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.

“Most of the evidence is classified,” Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who taught Hashmi, told me, “but Hashmi is not allowed to see it. He is an American citizen. But in America you can now go to trial and all the evidence collected against you cannot be reviewed. You can spend 2½ years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantánamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi.”

Hashmi was, like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, briefly a poster child in the “war on terror.” He was apprehended in Britain on June 6, 2006, on a U.S. warrant. His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read “Terror Trail” and “Web of Terror.” He was held for 11 months at Belmarsh Prison in London and then became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited by Britain. The year before his arrest, Hashmi, a graduate of Brooklyn College, had completed his master’s degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University. His case has no more substance than the one against the seven men arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, a case where, even though there were five convictions after two mistrials, an FBI deputy director acknowledged that the plan was more “aspirational rather than operational.” And it mirrors the older case of the Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, now under house arrest in Virginia, who has been hounded by the Justice Department although he should legally have been freed. Judge Leonie Brinkema, currently handling the Al-Arian case, in early March, questioned the U.S. attorney’s actions in Al-Arian’s plea agreement saying curtly: “I think there’s something more important here, and that’s the integrity of the Justice Department.”

The case against Hashmi revolves around the testimony of Junaid Babar, also an American citizen. Babar, in early 2004, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. In his luggage, the government alleges, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks, which Babar later delivered to a member of al-Qaida in south Waziristan, Pakistan. It was alleged that Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call conspirators in other terror plots.

“Hashmi grew up here, was well known here, was very outspoken, very charismatic and very political,” said Theoharis. “This is really a message being sent to American Muslims about the cost of being politically active. It is not about delivering alleged socks and ponchos and rain gear. Do you think al-Qaida can’t get socks and ponchos in Pakistan? The government is planning to introduce tapes of Hashmi’s political talks while he was at Brooklyn College at the trial. Why are we willing to let this happen? Is it because they are Muslims, and we think it will not affect us? People who care about First Amendment rights should be terrified. This is one of the crucial civil rights issues of our time. We ignore this at our own peril.”

Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaida, also faces up to 70 years in prison. But he has agreed to serve as a government witness and has already testified for the government in terror trials in Britain and Canada. Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial. Since there is very little evidence to link Hashmi to terrorist activity, the government will rely on Babar to prove intent. This intent will revolve around alleged conversations and statements Hashmi made in Babar’s presence. Hashmi, who was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun as a student at Brooklyn College, has made provocative statements, including calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world,” but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in acts of state terror is a historical fact.

There will be more Hashmis, and the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up in 2006 a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two arsons at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.” All calls and mail—although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials—are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation, replicating the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo. If detainees are transferred from Guantánamo to the prison in Thomson, Ill. , they will find little change. They will endure Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.

Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism.

The Lap Bomber Mystery

2009-12-30T06:26:00.000-08:00

This just gets weirder and weirder. It's a set-up so people will lose more of their rights; so they won't see the corruption of government and economics right in front of them!

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/12/27/the-lap-bomber-mystery/

The Lap Bomber Mystery
Posted By Justin Raimondo On December 27, 2009

It just wouldn’t be Christmas in the age of terror if we didn’t have a visitation, ostensibly from al-Qaeda, now would it? ‘Tis the season, and all that. Recall Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," arrested on December 22, 2001, for trying to blow up American Airlines flight 63, coming into Miami from Paris. As in the current case involving one Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, the explosive used was PETN, also known as pentaerythritol: Reid, like Umar, was subdued by passengers and airline attendants, and, to add yet another touch of déjà vu, Reid’s stunt led to the imposition of the take-off-your-shoes rule at airport security, just as Umar’s midair antics have now inspired the Transportation Safety Authority to inaugurate a spate of new regulations: nothing in your lap, please, and no getting up from your seat for a solid hour before landing.

Also please note the timing: the Reid incident occurred at a volatile moment, right after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and just as the Bush administration was ramping up to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq. Umar, the lap bomber – so called because he apparently had his explosive device hidden in his pants – also leaps onto the international stage at a sensitive time, when President Obama is launching a major offensive in Afghanistan and the US has "assisted" Yemen in its air strikes on the alleged al-Qaeda stronghold in that country – where Umar, we’re told, received "training" and the actual explosive device.

Yes, the parallels are certainly eerie – but so what? After all, these terrorists are seemingly a simple-minded lot, if the behavior and demeanor of, say, Richard Reid is any indication. How many different explosive substances are available for such a "job," and, at any rate, what else can one expect from the TSA in response except a bunch of useless and needlessly intrusive regulations that have little relevance to what happened? And, of course, the US, it seems, is always launching some new attack or military campaign, somewhere, so the timing is pure chance. Right?

What’s more, the pattern fails when we take into account our own mindset, eight years after the Shoe-na’bomber affair: back then, we were all too frightened out of our wits to really question anything the government told us, and the news media reported. We took it all at face value, and trusted in the gods that we wouldn’t all be blown to smithereens in the next attack, which – for all we knew – could have come at any time.

Eight years later, our mental processes have been quickened, through bitter experience, and a growing cynicism which leads us to notice – and question – several seeming anomalies, such as: why, when Umar’s own father – a prominent banker – contacted the US embassy, and met with the CIA as well as the Nigerian intelligence agency, and warned them his son might pose a danger, was Umar allowed on a plane entering the US? Authorities tell us that he was in a database, consisting of over half a million people, said to pose a risk, but not on the "no fly" list, in spite of his own father’s warning.

How could this happen? Inquiring minds want to know.

Another break in the Shoe’na-bomber pattern is Umar himself, whose life of wealth and privilege stands in stark contrast to Reid’s. While Reid was the poor son of a jailbird, a nobody with an apparently limited mental capacity, Umar is the son of Dr. Umaru Mutallab, former economics minister in the Nigerian government and one of the country’s most prominent bankers: schooled at the exclusive British International School in Lome, Togo, and an aspiring mechanical engineer, he had a bright future ahead of him, and if any single word could be used to characterize his life prior to the Christmas day incident, it would be access.

Access not only to the best schools and opportunities, and to his posh London digs, but also access to planes without the proper documents, as one Kurt Haskell, who was on the same flight with Umar, testifies:

“I was on this flight today and am thankful to be alive. My wife and I were returning from an African safari and had this connecting flight through Amsterdam. I sat in row 27, which was 7 rows behind the terrorist. I got to see the whole thing take place and it was very scary. Thanks to a few quick acting people I am still alive today.

"…I was next to the terrorist when he checked in at the Amsterdam airport early on Christmas. My wife and I were playing cards directly in front of the check in counter. This is what I saw (and I relayed this to the FBI when we were held in customs):

"An Indian man in a nicely dressed suit around age 50 approached the check in counter with the terrorist and said ‘This man needs to get on this flight and he has no passport.’ The two of them were an odd pair as the terrorist is a short, black man that looked like he was very poor and looks around age 17(Although I think he is 23 he doesn’t look it). It did not cross my mind that they were terrorists, only that the two looked weird together. The ticket taker said ‘you can’t board without a passport.’ The Indian man then replied, ‘He is from Sudan, we do this all the time.’. I can only take from this to mean that it is difficult to get passports from Sudan and this was some sort of sympathy ploy. The ticket taker then said ‘You will have to talk to my manager,’ and sent the two down a hallway. I never saw the Indian man again as he wasn’t on the flight. It was also weird that the terrorist never said a word in this exchange. Anyway, somehow, the terrorist still made it onto the plane. I am not sure if it was a bribe or just sympathy from the security manager."

This goes way beyond weird, all the way to sinister. Perhaps we should take Janet Napolitano’s assurance that “right now we have no indication that it is part of anything larger” with a gargantuan grain of salt. Not only that, but maybe we should simply make a new rule, as follows: anything Madame Napolitano or any government official says about this or any other similar incident should be considered, at the outset, an outright lie. Assuming deception as the default, we might be better off believing the exact opposite. This argument is especially compelling in light of what Mr. Haskell has to say about the aftermath of the Christmas bomb attempt:

"FBI also arrested a different Indian man while we were held in customs after a bomb sniffing dog detected a bomb in his carry on bag and he was searched after we landed. This was later confirmed while we were in customs when an FBI agent said to us ‘You are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. Read between the lines. Some of you saw what just happened.’(The arrest of the other Indian man). I am not sure why this hasn’t made it into any news story, but I stood about 15-20 feet away from the other Indian man when he was cuffed and arrested after his search."

Why isn’t the "mainstream" media reporting this? Well, perhaps they just don’t know about it: or it could be they do know and have been asked to keep a lid on it by the authorities, not the first time such a thing has happened when it comes to the dissemination of "sensitive" information.

In any case, given the veracity of Haskell’s account, it is clear that, contrary to news reports, Umar was no "lone nut," but had at least one accomplice with him on board the plane. Furthermore, both of his accomplices – the one who got him on the plane without a passport, and the one nabbed by the bomb-sniffing dog – may have been Indians.

What India has to do with all this is sheer speculation. While India’s foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), stands accused by Pakistanis of being behind much of the sectarian strife that riles the region, it’s unclear – to me, at least – what interest they would have in stirring the pot in faraway Yemen, the supposed source of the plot. If, however, it should suddenly be discovered that the "real" source of all this lies in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where Washington insists Osama bin Laden & Co. have set up their world headquarters, the Indian connection would make sense.

Haskell concludes his account as follows:

"What also didn’t make the news is that we were held on the plane for 20 minutes after it landed! A bomb could have gone off then. This wasn’t too smart of security to not let us off the plane immediately.

"You can see what time I am writing this as I am having a hard time sleeping tonight. Just thought some of you would like to know what I saw, Merry Christmas."

A telling note of authenticity there: clueless bureaucrats keep him on a plane that might be about to explode, and a Merry Christmas to all – and to all a good night!

No wonder the poor guy couldn’t sleep. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t sleep for a week. And if, somehow, I did manage to take a cat nap or two, I’d dream of Umar being led onto the plane, passport-less, escorted by his mysterious helpers, including several demonic figures lurking in the background, chortling and rubbing their hands together in gleeful anticipation.

We are asked to believe that a highly privileged young man, with everything to live for, was suddenly seized with a desire to commit suicide as an act of jihad: that he disappeared from his life of ease, on a street lined with Mercedes Benzes and Ferraris, in a fashionable district of London, and traveled to Yemen, where he received what may have been a defective bomb, which was sewn into his underwear by his jihadist trainers. This bomb then went undetected in Amsterdam airport, where the security arrangements are said to be tight (and a personal interview is conducted), and where he was let on a plane headed for the US in spite of explicit warnings given by his own father.

I’m not buying it, and, furthermore, in the context of Haskell’s testimony, another narrative seems just as likely: that this was a staged incident, a false flag operation, launched by those who have everything to gain by ramping up the atmosphere of hysteria and fear that regularly precedes America’s wars. This – admittedly speculative – scenario, of which I am equally skeptical, is buttressed, however, by the testimony of Jasper Schuringa – the passenger who leapt out of his seat on the other side of the plane, put out the fire, and secured Umar in a headlock – who says of the alleged terrorist:

“He was shaking. He didn’t resist anything. It’s just hard to believe that he was trying to blow up this plane. He was in a trance. He was very afraid.”

He didn’t resist? This hardly seems like the behavior one might expect of some fanatic jihadist bent on destruction and meeting those virgins in the afterlife.

The simplistic narrative that took shape as the news broke is already beginning to break up into something a bit more complicated, as additional information comes out, including this brief news item that just came across the wires:

"A passenger aboard the same Northwest Airlines flight that was attacked on Christmas Day was taken into custody here Sunday after becoming verbally disruptive upon landing, officials said.

"A law enforcement official said the man was Nigerian and had locked himself in the airliner’s bathroom. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

"Delta Air Lines spokeswoman Susan Elliott said crew members requested that security remove the man from Flight 253 after he became disruptive. The remaining 255 passengers got off safely, she said.

"Airport spokesman Scott Wintner said it was the same flight on which a man tried to set off an explosive on Christmas Day.

"’The pilot requested emergency assistance upon arrival,’ he said. Security and airline personnel are on edge since the attempted terror attack on Christmas Day, and the law enforcement official said that lesser incidents had been reported on other flights arriving in Detroit, but the incident with the Nigerian man had sparked the most concern."

Whether Nigerian, or Indian, something is up here, and it seems to have little to do with al-Qaeda, which – breaking its past habit of promptly taking "credit" – has yet to claim responsibility for the attempted attack. More grounds for suspicion: allegations that the Detroit incident was planned and carried out by al-Qaeda in Yemen can be traced back to "IntelCenter," a mysterious private contractor with a dubious reputation [.pdf] (see frames 89-100) that does business with the intelligence community.

Another shoe is bound to drop – the arrest of this other "Nigerian" may be it, along with the surprising news that Detroit, for some reason, seems to be the latest "terrorist" target – and when it does, I’m wondering how much closer to the truth we’ll get. One thing is certain, however, and it is this: look on the pronouncements of government officials with a very jaundiced eye.

Already Joe Lieberman and several Republicans are calling for more preemptive strikes on targets in Yemen, and it’s not hard to see that the US is very close to opening up yet another "front" in our eternal "war on terrorism." Deeper into the quagmire we go – and those demons in my dreamscape are chortling ever louder.

Flight 253 Passenger: Sharp-Dressed Man Aided Terror Suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab Onto Plane Without Passport

2009-12-30T06:17:00.001-08:00

Now how in the fuck can someone get on an international flight without a passport unless they are a Manchurian Candidate or of that similar ilk? THINK PEOPLE, THINK!!! The evil elite puppet masters want to start a war with Yemen and this whole episode of the 'Underwear Terrorist' has to be scripted by those in power to get their war while at the same time, take away more rights and liberties from the common man! It's a good thing that some of the passengers of the plane subdued the man or otherwise, it could have crashed! This is totally false-flag stuff!

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_says_at_l.html

Flight 253 Passenger: Sharp-Dressed Man Aided Terror Suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab Onto Plane Without Passport
Sheena Harrison
MLive.com
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:22 EST

A Michigan man who was aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 says he witnessed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab trying to board the plane in Amsterdam without a passport.

Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday.

Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.

Kurt and Lori Haskell are attorneys with Haskell Law Firm in Taylor. Their expertise includes bankruptcy, family law and estate planning.

While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. "The guy said, 'He's from Sudan and we do this all the time.'"

Mutallab is Nigerian. Haskell believes the man may have been trying to garner sympathy for Mutallab's lack of documents by portraying him as a Sudanese refugee.

The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn't see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane.

Haskell said the flight was mostly unremarkable. That was until he heard a flight attendant say she smelled smoke, just after the pilot announced the plane would land in Detroit in 10 minutes. Haskell got out of his seat to view the brewing commotion.

© Kurt Haskell
Lori and Kurt Haskell
"I stood up and walked a couple feet ahead to get a closer look, and that's when I saw the flames," said Haskell, who sat about seven rows behind Mutallab. "It started to spread pretty quickly. It went up the wall, all the way to ceiling."

Haskell, who described Mutallab as a diminutive man who looks like a teenager, said about 30 seconds passed between the first mention of smoke and when Mutallab was subdued by fellow passengers.

"He didn't fight back at all. This wasn't a big skirmish," Haskell said. "A couple guys jumped on him and hauled him away."

The ordeal has Haskell and his wife a little shaken. Flight attendants were screaming during the fire and the pilot sounded notably nervous when bringing the plane in for a landing, he said.

"Immediately, the pilot came on and said two words: emergency landing," Haskell said. "And that was it. The plane sped up instead of slowing down. You could tell he floored it."

As Mutallab was being led out of the plane in handcuffs, Haskell said he realized that was the same man he saw trying to board the plane in Amsterdam.

Passengers had to wait about 20 minutes before they were allowed to exit the plane. Haskell said he and other passengers waited about six hours to be interviewed by the FBI.

About an hour after landing, Haskell said he saw another man being taken into custody. But a spokeswoman from the FBI in Detroit said Mutallab was the only person taken into custody.

More Fear Mongering: Man Flew Into LaGuardia With Firecracker

2009-12-30T06:13:00.001-08:00

http://wcbstv.com/breakingnewsalerts/laguardia.airplane.explosive.2.1393663.html

More Fear Mongering: Man Flew Into LaGuardia With Firecracker
HDTV
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:18 EST
Passenger Taken Into Custody After Device Found Wedged Between Seats On Piedmont Airlines Flight Into LaGuardia

A passenger who flew into LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night was questioned by FBI agents after allegedly boarding the flight with an explosive device in his possession, CBS 2 has learned.

Officials confirmed Monday that a crew member on board Piedmont Airlines flight 4126, originating from Baltimore Washington International Airport, was cleaning the plane after it landed in New York around 7:30 p.m. when he found a large firecracker-like device wedged between two seats. Port Authority officials contacted FBI agents, and the passenger from that seat location, identified as 67-year-old Thomas Ouelette, of Bonita Springs, Fla., was tracked down and taken into custody.

Ouelette was planning on taking a connecting flight to Fort Myers, Fla. from New York.

Authorities did not release details on the kind of device discovered other than saying it was a 4-inch-long, three-quarter-inch-wide explosive pyrotechnic.

Federal officials said they did not believe terrorism was involved, but that Ouelette already had two outstanding warrants in Florida for "unlawful flight."

There is no word yet as to whether Ouelette was charged with a crime, however he was issued a summons by the FBI. Sources said the man claimed the firecracker fell out of his bag and he didn't even know he had it.

Piedmont is a subsidiary of US Airways.

The latest incident comes on the heels of the alleged Christmas day attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit from Amsterdam.

The federal court in Detroit says a hearing scheduled for Monday has been delayed until Jan. 8. No reason was given.

Prosecutors want a DNA sample from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He's charged with attempting to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approached Detroit on Friday. Courageous passengers pounced on him.

Meanwhile, CBS News has learned the State Department system designed to keep track of active U.S. visas twice failed to reveal Abdulmutallab had been issued an active visa allowing him multiple entries into the United States.

According to a law enforcement source, the first failure came on Nov. 19, 2009, the very same day Abdulmutallab father's, Dr. Umaru Mutallab, a prominent banking official in Nigeria, expressed deep concern to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abjua, Nigeria, that his 23-year-old son had fallen under the influence of "religious extremists" in Yemen.

The second failure to flag an active visa belonging to Abdulmuttalab occurred the very next day in Washington, after Mutallab's concerns were forwarded to officials there. It was only after the Christmas Day terror attack in Detroit that U.S. officials learned that Abdulmuttalab had been issued a visa by the U.S. Embassy in London valid from June 16, 2008, through June 12, 2010.

America the Traumatized: How 13 Events of the Decade Made Us the PTSD Nation

2009-12-30T06:03:00.000-08:00

Control by Fear Traumatizes!

America the Traumatized: How 13 Events of the Decade Made Us the PTSD Nation
By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
Posted on December 30, 2009, Printed on December 30, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144791/

It's been one helluva decade, even though we've reached the end without knowing what to call it. Some have tried "the aughts," others the "double-Os." I'm content to simply call it over. To mark its location in the great march of history, I've taken to calling it the millennial decade, after the great numerological transition it heralded. Yet for describing its character, nothing comes closer than the Decade of Trauma -- American trauma, that is.

Here in the home of the brave, we've endured a decade that shattered nearly every notion of what it meant to be an American, whether you live on the left or the right. And so we shout. Or hide. Or startle too easily.

In America today, it seems we all have a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder, as evidenced by our increasingly vitriolic political environment, where reality is denied and histrionics run riot. Anger, we're told, is the natural reaction to trauma; in people with PTSD, the anger is out of control. By that measure, the millennial decade has brought us 10 years of PTSD politics -- with no end in sight.

From the Tea Party madness, the unwillingness of Republicans in Congress to vote for any piece of legislation drafted by Democrats, the misuse of the filibuster in the Senate to all but break the institution, and the outsized rage on the left toward the Obama administration for simply behaving as politicians do, our national politics have moved beyond the bounds of extreme partisanship into the realm of mental illness.

This breaking of the national psyche was bound to happen; it's been decades in the making. American exceptionalism -- the idea that we are somehow better and more blessed than any other people on the face of the earth by dint of our own hard work, ingenuity, innate goodness and superior democracy -- was bound to fail as our nation, like every other before it, found itself caught in the grinding wheels of history.

Rooted in denial, the doctrine of American exceptionalism edits out of the American story the sins against humanity that created our nation: the genocide of the people who were here before the Europeans came, and the building of the nation on the backs of involuntary laborers who were tortured, abused and even killed for their trouble. Once you ditch that, it becomes easier to look past the other unpleasant realities of our history, be it our neo-colonialism throughout the world, which helped to build our economy, or the enduring practices of racism and sexism. But denial almost invariably leads to trauma, when on one day, or in one decade, the decay that denial fostered summons home the demons set loose through willful ignorance to do their fright dance before one's very eyes.

The 2000 election, 9/11, Enron and WorldCom, Afghanistan, Iraq on a lie, Abu Ghraib, the USA Patriot Act, Guantánamo, Katrina and near economic collapse: each of these -- and many, many others -- challenged our sense of national identity, giving the lie to who we thought we were, and compromising a sense of safety, however delusional, that we once enjoyed. No longer were Americans exempt from the perils that face other nations.

Even the decade's great culminating moment, the election of Barack Obama, beautiful though it was, rocked the nation, provoking revulsion on the right and an unsustainable ecstasy on the left -- extremes of emotion that do not speak well to the emotional stability of a people.

The decades that led us here were fraught with their own traumas. The '60s were convulsive; the '70s unnerving. The '80s and '90s brought a backlash against the changes wrought by the two previous decades. People of my generation saw, as children, three of our greatest national leaders gunned down. We saw dogs and fire hoses turned on people peaceably assembled to petition the government for redress. Women took to the streets, demanding a reordering of society, and ultimately, a reconfiguration of the family. We watched our nation at war in close-up video while young people filled the streets in protests. Gay people made themselves visible in vigils and rallies shown on the nightly news and in adorably cute sitcoms. We viewed it all in wood-paneled family rooms, our Swanson dinners before us on TV trays.

We saw a president resign in disgrace, and the taking of American hostages by an Islamic state. Yet, despite the upheaval, at the passing of each crisis we managed to stuff the genie back in the bottle -- or so we thought. Our belief in our democracy somehow prevailed in our thinking. Civil rights, centuries too late, were eventually won through the legislative process. The Vietnam War ended. Women emerged from the confines of the home. The assassination of one president and the resignation of another were succeeded by orderly transfers of power.

History being history, the story of the millennial decade is, in many ways, about the very same things that characterized the decades that ushered it in: racial strife, the renegotiation of gender roles, our nation's place in the world, declining economic fortunes, ugly wars and unconstitutional actions by the government. But this decade offered one critical difference; the disorderly world was no longer contained within a glass tube in a wood-paneled bunker. It sneaked up behind us and whacked us in the head.

The Numerology of the End-Times

It didn't help that the 2000s came upon us with a handicap conferred by Western numerology. Throughout the Christian Bible, three is a heavy number, and here we are, at the dawn of the Third Millennium, measured from the presumed date of the birth of Jesus the Christ, who is one-third of the Holy Trinity, who died at the age of 33, only to rise again on the third day.

It really doesn't matter what religion you were raised in, or whether you were raised in one at all; America is culturally Christian, and this numerology is written into the DNA of all Christian nations. Hence the popularity of religio-conspiracy tales such as The DaVinci Code and "National Treasure," or the apocalyptic fantasies of the Left Behind book series.

The new decade made its entrance under the threat of a terrorist act planned for the United States. Two weeks before New Year's Eve, authorities arrested Ahmed Ressam at a Canadian border crossing, where customs officials found bomb-making materials in his car. Ressam's target, intelligence officials said, was Los Angeles International Airport. Other cites, it was said, were in the terrorists' sights, as well. The Millennium Plot, they called it.

Celebrations for the great turning of the millennial wheel took place amid a backdrop of jitters; city officials across the nation talked of suspending New Year's events. In Washington D.C., a debate took place over whether a planned fireworks display was appropriate, in light of the threat.

The brave decided to party like it was 1999.

Win, Lose or Draw

The millennial decade got underway in America in the midst of a presidential campaign. Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, both scions of political families, faced off in a hard-fought contest that appeared to end in a draw. When the polls closed, the electoral college map featured several states that offered no clear winner, an outcome that had never occurred in the television age.

The drama dragged on for more than a month, culminating in an action by the Supreme Court that history will likely judge to have been unconstitutional.

The impact of this election on the American psyche was, I believe, profound; regardless of one's political orientation. A large part of the narrative of American exceptionalism hinges upon our belief that we are a self-governing people. However weak we may have felt in the face of corporate malfeasance or government overreach, we still clung to the notion of our collective power as a people through the use of the ballot box.

After the 2000 election, the ballot box was exposed as an arbitrary measure, its verdict determined by hanging chads and poorly organized ballots. Still, however imperfect, it was the expression of our will -- until the Supreme Court stepped in and ordered a halt to the recount taking place in Florida, the last state to determine a winner.

The Supreme Court essentially overruled the State of Florida's right to see its disorderly election to a conclusion, throwing the election to Bush and stomping on the states' rights conservatives so championed until the high court intervened to grant them the presidential candidate of their choice. A subsequent study found that Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes.

Powerlessness, writes Dr. Judith Herman of Harvard Medical School, is the central experience of trauma. The source of our power as a people is our electoral system, which was revealed to be either broken or a joke. Even those who supported Bush likely experienced something deeply unsettling in the six weeks before the Supreme Court rendered its verdict, when Republican congressional staffers were sent to the Sunshine state to disrupt the recount with riotous tactics, and chaos reigned in the political sphere.

When the decision finally came on December 12, 2000, it came not from the people, but from the very judiciary the right so despises.

And we weren't even through the decade's first year.

Terror From the Skies

If the American people weren't traumatized by the breakdown of our democracy in 2000, they surely were by the events of September 11, 2001, when four commercial aircraft were commandeered by al Qaeda terrorists, successfully taking down the World Trade Center in New York City -- the leading symbol of America's domination of the global economy -- and leaving a gaping hole in the Pentagon, the symbol of America's military might. The fourth plane, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field, was apparently headed for the U.S. Capitol building, the symbol of America's representative democracy.

More than 3,000 people were killed in the attacks. In New York, bodies tumbled from the sky as workers in the Trade Center towers leaped to their deaths in order to escape the flames.

Any people subjected to such a fearsome sight would rightly be traumatized. But America's trauma was exacerbated by the myth of our own exceptionalism -- the belief that such things don't happen here -- as well as the media's endless repetition of the video loops of the planes hitting the Trade Center towers. In the mind of a traumatized person, the reliving of traumatic events often recurs in regular flashbacks, keeping alive the terror and sense of powerlessness caused by the original event. In the wake of 9/11, we didn't need our own minds to hit the replay button; the media did it for us, setting us up for a decade of unconstitutional horrors that went virtually unchecked with the acquiescence of our traumatized populace.

We didn't think twice when our nation invaded Afghanistan; after all, the reasoning went, al Qaeda, a non-state actor, was based there. We barely blinked when the USA Patriot Act -- a legislative repudiation of the Bill of Rights -- passed with the votes of Democrats and Republicans alike, allowing the federal government to detain, without charges or warrants, virtually anybody it cared to, all in the name of national security. Only one Democratic senator voted against the bill: Russell Feingold of Wisconsin.

In 2002, amid revelations about the role of the Roman Catholic Church in a massive cover-up of sexual crimes against children by a number of priests, and the Enron and WorldCom corporate scandals, the Bush administration began banging the drum for an invasion of Iraq. Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, we were told, that an unscrupulous dictator was bent on using against us.

Very few in the political opposition actually believed the claims made by President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell in early 2003, but almost no one dared to defy them. In March, the United States invaded Iraq, with the permission of congressional majorities in both political parties. Only a few would dare, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on America's "homeland," to risk looking like wimps.

Suffering neglect at the hands of one's caretaker, psychology textbooks tell us, can sometimes result in psychological trauma. If you view our elected officials as caretakers of a sort, we were indeed neglected.

Our own dissociation from the passage of the USA Patriot Act speaks to our collective trauma; even those of us who were hell-bent against it failed to organize a fight. As our constitutional rights were put through the shredder, we threw up our hands.

It wasn't until the country went to war that the left organized massive protests. But the media's failure to fully report on the widespread anti-war sentiment served to further demoralize many. The only ones not looking away, it seemed, were the Bush administration and the organs of the permanent government, such as the FBI and the National Security Agency.

Play It Again, Uncle Sam

April 2004 brought us the horrifying images of prisoner torture--some of it highly sexualized -- by U.S. soldiers and contractors of detainees held at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and the destruction of any real claim to America's moral superiority among nations. Photographs leaked to the news media included one of a pyramid of naked male prisoners and one of a naked male prisoner with a leash around his neck, held by a small, female soldier, Private Lynndie England. One of the most infamous photos depicted a prisoner outfitted in a hood and made to stand on a box with wires attached to his extremities, part of a psychological torture scheme to make him believe he was about to be electrocuted.

America's sins were now exposed to the world, and to her own people, compounded by the fact that our leaders lied to us with assurances that the U.S. did not torture its detainees.

We were now completely unmoored from the safe harbor of our belief in our fundamental goodness as a nation, with no one trustworthy in charge of anything that mattered. We were utterly abandoned.

In the midst of another presidential election, we grappled with this truth. With the 9/11 attacks still fresh in our minds, we remained a traumatized people, now broken and stripped of our identity.

In its bid to retain power, the Bush administration played what the media termed the politics of fear or the politics of terror, but in truth it was the politics of trauma. The 9/11 attacks were invoked repeatedly, most notably at the Republican National Convention, held in a locked-down New York City, where an entire evening was devoted to a 9/11 tribute designed to manipulate convention-goers and TV viewers into seeing the current president as heroic in the face of attacks whose probability he had been warned of, a warning he did nothing to address at the time he received it.

At the time, I chafed at the media's description of Bush's campaign tactics, writing:

The politics of fear is based around ideas such as these: that homosexuals are out to recruit your children, that God will punish the nation for its sins, that the family is broken when women have power, that membership in the United Nations demands the surrender of our nation's sovereignty. In short, the politics of fear exploits the trepidation innate in humans when facing change of any kind, and tweaks it to a twitchy pitch in times of great social change.
The politics of trauma is another beast entirely, based as it is, not on fear of the unknown, but the exploitation of something atrocious that has already occurred, the fear that it will happen again, and the psychological toxins produced by experiencing the atrocity.
Put another way, our 9/11 trauma was invoked as a means of disempowering us. And it worked -- well enough, anyway.

Just as the media looked away when hundreds of protesters were rounded up in New York that week and illegally detained in a makeshift jail on the Chelsea Pier, they also lost their nerve after the election returns rolled in, leaving behind their own reports of shenanigans at the polls and in the counting-rooms of Ohio, where another election may have been stolen. Had Ohio been called for Democratic candidate John Kerry, he would have won the election.

Even Democrats wanted no part of an inquiry into the long lines at polling places in Ohio that served African-American neighborhoods, or the eviction of the media from a county building where votes were being counted. Only Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., dared to conduct an inquiry, which was promptly ignored.

Such was the defeat of the American people that we allowed this to happen with barely a passing glance. This is the way traumatized people behave at the hands of an abuser -- by playing dead, dissociating, or slipping into denial at the injustice that has been done to them.

By the year's end, reports began to surface of torture at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But George W. Bush and his meglomaniacal Vice President Dick Cheney would have another four years to prostrate a nation that was already on its knees.

Hurricane Katrina and the Lie of Racial Comity

One tenet of American exceptionalism is that it claims to worship the heterogeneous nature of our society, and the belief that anyone can make it in our nation if he or she just tries hard enough. Along the way, after the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, we told ourselves that we were on the path to redemption for a past rife with racism.

After Hurricane Katrina barreled up a man-made waterway in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, yet another myth -- one fundamental to our own self-concept -- was battered. Despite warnings that the levies protecting one of America's oldest cities were about to give way, the president looked away. The federal government failed spectacularly to respond to a city under water, a city inhabited largely by African Americans.

The ugliness of our nation's racialized past is never far from the surface in New Orleans, an ancient trading post that was a major port of entry for African slaves, who were sold at its markets. The rhythms of New Orleans are distinctly African, and it is the birthplace of America's highest form of indigenous music -- jazz. The religion of the place is laced with voodoo, a syncretization of West African and European Christian beliefs. For these reasons -- all reminders of the involuntary labor that built this nation -- more than a few wouldn't mind seeing New Orleans fall into the Gulf of Mexico.

Within days after Katrina hit, it became apparent that something was terribly wrong. There was no food or water in the Morial Convention Center, where as many as 20,000 had gathered for refuge at the direction of city officials. Television captured the desperation: children begging for help, mothers begging for food for their children. If national television crews could find their way there, we wondered, then why couldn't federal emergency responders?

You know the rest of the story. I retell just enough to remind you of what it felt like to watch that: helpless. It's hard to imagine a sensation more disempowering than helplessness. And powerlessness, you'll recall, is the central experience of trauma.

We'll never know how many people died on the Gulf Coast as a result of Hurricane Katrina: many bodies are believed to have washed out to sea. In February 2006, documented deaths were tallied at 1,300, with another 2,300 reported missing.

Economic Meltdown

An ancillary to the doctrine of American exceptionalism is the belief that every generation of Americans will do better economically than their parents did before them. It's a ridiculous notion if you really think about it -- the cycles of economic history utterly defy it -- but one that enables the American propensity for building economic bubbles. In the 2000s, we built a big one, and today we suffer the effects of its bursting with a mighty pop.

The apparent prosperity of the early years of the decade was built on a lot of fake money (what we call credit), much of it invested in real estate, which was said never to lose value. (Did anybody bother to phone back to the '80s, when real estate values took a dive?) The deregulation of the financial industry, begun under President Bill Clinton, encouraged the creation of all manner of financial instruments -- some that were gambles animated by complicated formulas, others that allowed you to use the equity in your home as a line of credit, still others that were mortgages with adjustable rates on homes granted to buyers who could not afford them. The junky mortgages were then unloaded by their creators, lapped up by other financial entities eager to take on those debts for their promised returns.

By 2006, housing values began to dip, and the returns on that debt began to slide. By 2007, the housing bubble was on the verge of bursting. In 2008, in the midst of yet another presidential campaign, it did.

An Historic Vote

And what an election it was. The contest for the Democratic nomination lasted far longer than any in recent memory, with the two candidates left standing after Super Tuesday each representing a potential "first" for the country: If the Democrats won, the next president would either be a white woman or an African-American man. The contest drew a division between the party's two most stalwart activist constituencies, the feminist and civil rights movements. Many black women felt themselves both ignored and torn between the two candidates.

When Barack Obama emerged as the Democrats' pick, American exceptionalism both found expression in his story and a test in his candidacy. The narrative of American exceptionalism, begun in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, hinges on the idea of our nation as one hospitable to immigrants. Yet Obama's exotic name provoked an hysterical conspiracy theory based on right-wing allegations that he was not born in the U.S., and was therefore ineligible for the presidency. This theory lives on today, even though authorities and reporters have authenticated his Hawaii birth certificate.

In September 2008, the stock market crashed, all but ensuring the election of America's first black president, as his Republican opponent, John McCain, was associated in the public mind with all that had gone wrong under George W. Bush. Our traumatized republic had at last reached its tipping point. While Obama's core supporters were wild about him, his majority was secured by many who voted for him reluctantly.

Before we had an African-American president, it was easier to believe we had, as a nation, largely put that old racist past to bed. Obama's election hit the nation like a thunderclap, shaking the nuts from the trees. For those on the right, the election of America's first black president was yet another trauma added to the string that had piled up over the course of the decade. On the left, the elation felt by a constituency traumatized by the authoritarian and oligarchical excesses of the Bush years was bound to deflate when the new president was revealed to be both human and a politician.

Take a Deep Breath

So, here we find ourselves, on the brink of a new decade, traumatized, at odds with each other, constituencies shattering within constituencies. Just when you thought the Republican Party could move no further to the right, the Tea Party movement emerges, its adherents full of rage and convinced that their way of life will be brought to an end with the election of the new president, whom they see as foreign and threatening. And so he is given the same attributes as threats of the historical past: He's a socialist, a fascist, a communist.

"The thoughts or beliefs that people have to help them understand and make sense of their environment can often overexaggerate threat," reads a brief from the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. "Often the individual is not fully aware of these thoughts and beliefs, but they cause the person to perceive more hostility, danger, or threat than others might feel is necessary."

The left is no less traumatized, its various constituencies now at odds over the health care bill, with some turning their sense of threatened destruction back on the president with an exaggerated sense of betrayal.

Whether denying the reality of the president's birth certificate or the votes required by a filibuster-happy Senate, both sides in our political dialogue are at work creating their own, closed-universe realities.

Untreated PTSD, according to Raymond B. Flannery, a clinical psychology professor at Harvard Medical School, can lead to "increased industrial accidents, social and community disorganization, lost productivity, and intense psychological distress. The toll in human suffering is enormous..." In other words, unless we deal with this, America's Decade of Trauma may just be the opening act to a cataclysmic century.

I recommend we begin the new decade with a sort of national intervention, where we stop and breathe for a minute, slowly and evenly, and then review the events of the last decade, and think about how each of them made us feel. That's what the therapists would have us do.

But wait -- there's more. According to the sages at Helpguide, PTSD therapy also entails "identifying upsetting thoughts about the traumatic event -- particularly thoughts that are distorted and irrational -- and replacing them with more a balanced picture." Of course, all this hinges on admitting we have a problem and wanting to address it.

Never mind. We're Americans. Problem? Who's got a problem?

Reign of Terror

2009-12-28T17:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/world/47673-reign-of-terror

Reign of Terror
The Malaysian Insider/The Sunday Times
Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:00 EST

President George W. Bush issued this ultimatum to the world days after the terror attacks on the United States on Sept 11, 2001.

"Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

That statement was objectionable at the time, and remains so today.

No internationally recognised government gave al Qaeda assistance. Few countries needed lessons from the US about the menace of terrorism. And it was counterproductive - if not outright silly - to divide the world in such crude terms.

Nevertheless, it is now largely forgotten that when Bush uttered those words in 2001, he was cheered to the rafters by all politicians in Washington.

The US focus on the fight against terrorism dominated the entire decade. And it is likely to continue doing so for many years to come.

This is a battle in which the protagonists frequently change their operational methods and objectives. Sadly, however, it also remains a struggle in which tactics overshadow a long-term strategy, and in which "victory" means just a brief respite.

Terrorism - the use of violence in order to generate fear and coerce people to do something against their will - is, of course, hardly a new concept. Many rich and supposedly stable countries have confronted terrorist organisations decades before the US experienced it.

Still, the Sept 11 crimes were unique. Most previous terrorist organisations pursued clear objectives, such as the liberation of people or territories, or the overthrow of governments. Often, their demands were unreasonable and their methods unjustifiable. However, at least in theory, a political solution was possible.

But what accommodation can be reached with an organisation like al Qaeda, which wants nothing from the "infidel" apart from death, and seeks to destroy the world order established over hundreds of years?

The Sept 11 attacks, which killed more than 2,700 people, also raised the threshold for future violence. Most previous terrorist campaigns harmed relatively small numbers of people, over a long period of time. But al Qaeda's technique was to go for big, carefully planned suicide strikes on iconic targets, with the aim of killing thousands in one go.

Furthermore, al Qaeda was an organisation which blended the antiquated with the ultra-modern. A handful of self-proclaimed preachers led a hermit- like existence in tents and caves, but its recruits were Internet-savvy, and its foot soldiers communicated through satellite phones.

High-tech means were used in a fight against modernity. This was not a showdown between the rich and the disposed: most of the suicide bombers were middle class and led a comfortable existence. Nor was it a confrontation fed by ignorance: some of the most successful al Qaeda operatives were Western-educated or at least exposed to Western ways of life.

It was obvious from the start that the elimination of al Qaeda would take a long time, partly because its tentacles ran deep, but also because the organisation's deeds inspired other similar movements. And so it proved.

About a year after the attacks on the US, it was the turn of Indonesia to experience mass terrorism. On Oct 12, 2002, Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terrorists, who had ties with al Qaeda, struck Bali, killing 202 people.

The militants who carried out the bombings - Imam Samudra, Mukhlas and Amrozi - were executed last year.

As for the two masterminds, Azahari Husin, who provided the bomb-making expertise, was shot dead in November 2005, while Noordin Top, who raised funds for the blasts, was killed in September this year after eluding arrest for seven years.

Less than two weeks after the Bali bombings, armed Chechen militants took hundreds of people in a Moscow theater hostage. The Russian hostage crisis ended three days later with about 200 deaths.

Spain became a target on March 11, 2004, when a set of coordinated bombings on commuter trains killed 191 people, injuring a further 1,800.

Russia experienced another tragedy with the Beslan hostage crisis in September 2004, when 330 people were killed, 186 of them schoolchildren.

Barely a year later, London was hit by coordinated blasts on the city's transport network which killed 52 people.

In India, bombs went off on Mumbai's trains on July 11, 2006, killing nearly 200 people. In November last year, Mumbai was again targeted when a small group of heavily armed Islamic militants rampaged through the city, killing more than 160 people.

Then, there are the tragedies which were averted through good intelligence work or just sheer good luck.

A terrorist network was dismantled in Singapore in December 2001 before it could cause destruction on a massive scale at Changi Airport and other points throughout the country.

Mas Selamat Kastari, the leader of the cell and the head of JI in Singapore, was recaptured in Johor in April this year after more than a year on the run following his escape from a detention centre in Singapore. He is now detained in Malaysia.

There was also Richard Reid, the "shoe-bomber" who would have killed hundreds of people had he detonated the device on board the aircraft as it flew over the Atlantic on Dec 22, 2001.

And in August 2006, three British men were minutes away from boarding separate planes, armed with liquid explosives. Had they succeeded, hundreds more lives would have been lost.

These were not just a few isolated incidents. Between 2004 and 2008, al Qaeda claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in 3,010 deaths.

However, as a recent study compiled by the Combating Terrorism Centre at the US Military Academy indicates, the main victims of this violence were invariably the Muslim believers whom al Qaeda claims to protect. Statistically, Muslims remain 38 times more likely to be killed by terrorists than any Western citizen.

All governments vowed that terrorists "will not be allowed to change our way of life". But this was only an aspiration. For our way of life has changed - for good.

Intrusive airport security checks, bans on the carrying of liquids on planes, cumbersome form-filling at border crossings, CCTV cameras at street corners and laborious restrictions on the transfer of cash: all these measures were introduced during this decade.

Behind the scenes, tens of thousands of security officers regularly scan Internet chatrooms and e-mail messages. Every flight a person takes generates at least 30 pieces of separate personal information, and these are stored for years. And any producer of chemical ingredients which can be used in the manufacture of bombs is now kept under watch.

Some may argue that this panoply of measures is self-defeating. It cannot prevent single individuals from continuing to kill in the name of religion, and it does not answer the grievances - imaginary or real - which persuade young people in various countries to engage in violence. Furthermore, Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, is still at large.

But this criticism ignores the fact that, overall, the fight against international terrorism has been remarkably successful.

The US has not experienced another massive attack since Sept 11. Osama's video tapes - once a phenomenal media scoop - are now seen for what they are: boring tirades from a deluded criminal.

The clash of civilizations, the epic struggle between Islam and the world which Osama dreamt about, has not happened. No government in any Muslim country was overthrown as a result of al Qaeda's actions. And Saudi Arabia, Osama's birthplace, has pioneered one of the most successful anti-terrorism campaigns: it has reintegrated into society no fewer than 4,000 men of violence during this decade, with only a few mishaps.

None of this means that the fight is over. A Western military failure in Afghanistan or the internal collapse of Pakistan could give al Qaeda plenty of opportunities to regroup. The enduring tragedy of the Palestinians, the continued violence in Iraq or a potential military showdown between the US and Iran could all breed new terrorist organisations.

Meanwhile, anti-terrorism measures still need to be improved. There is no global definition of the crime, and national legal jurisdictions are still incapable of dealing effectively with cross-border violence. Technological innovations are also years away from relieving us of the burden of intrusive anti-terrorism checks: for instance, it may be 2014 before suspicious liquids can be checked automatically at airports.

Politically motivated violence is here to stay. But it is worth remembering that the world has experienced similar waves of violence in the past. For much of the 19th century, various anarchist organizations terrorized Europe. They also had no clear ideology or logic, apart from sowing murder and destruction. But they ultimately petered out in the face of determined international action.

There is no reason why al Qaeda and its copycat killers today could not meet a similar fate.

There may be no "victory" in this confrontation. But no defeat is conceivable either.

The Objects of Our Devotion: Spiritual-Need Marketing

2009-12-18T15:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Objects-of-Our-Devotio-by-Judith-Acosta-091217-229.html

December 17, 2009
The Objects of Our Devotion: Spiritual-Need Marketing
By Judith Acosta

"I totally don't know what it means. But I want it." Jessica Simpson

A survey was just conducted to gauge the religious and spiritual propensities of Americans. As one might have guessed without having spent all the money and time, we are a fairly religious country. Diversely so, but religious nonetheless. The vast majority of Americans believe in a Supreme Being or higher power whom they call God.

So where did the road bend and twist? When did Americans go from a devotion to God to a devotion to things? In advertising circles, which is essentially the crank shaft of our economy, it is a truism that the American is a demanding consumer. "Give us what we want," is the credo. But it appears that what they want is a product. We have gone from one nation under God to one nation under Wal-Mart. We worry about extending youth and bodily life instead of considering the importance of making our limited time here meaningful. And the worst part as I see it and the point of this article is that we have come to believe that meaning and having are, if not entirely equal, then at least run parallel. This is a profound and pervasive delusion that is also both simultaneously destructive and systematically distracting. So much so that corporations have put their billions into marketing campaigns that specifically target and capitalize on these delusions.

The delusions are:

1) The product can save me.

2) The product has meaning and therefore can give my life meaning.

3) The product can help me belong to a tribe.

4) The product or service or brand can make me lovable.

Of course, none of the products on the market today and none of the products anyonecan possibly conceive of will ever meet the deeper needs of a human being (which are distinguished from basic needs such as food, shelter, clean air and clean water) because those deeper needs are for love, belonging, and meaning. Who in their right mind would consciously believe that a pair of shoes or a car or a skin cream could ever do that? Yet, we buy and behave as if we did believe it.

Naturally, the marketing experts know this. They reach into our hearts to pull on the strings of our deepest longings so that we buy what they have to sell, knowing it will never satisfy those longings, secretly happy in that knowledge because it means we'll have to keep buying, scooping up more and more in a fruitless search for salvation that can never, ever come from this world. Ever.

I am not a theologian. I'm a psychotherapist near Albuquerque, NM. But I think this is idolatry in the purest sense of the word. In watching and treating people who suffer from profound anxiety, ennui and depression, I have come to the conclusion that God did not forbid idolatry because He was petty or needy. An Omnipotent Being does not need our worship or devotion. He prohibited idolatry because it is, in fact, delusional, and it will make us miserable. It will never satisfy us or make us happy in the way He wants us to be deeply happy, which could never be accomplished with a short shot of dope. If my assumption is true, then what we are missing is not just happiness but a contentedness and emotional sure-footedness that is bone-deep and fills us with joy on each inhalation. What we are accepting in exchange for this soul satisfaction is a house full of gadgets we have no time to use, closets full of designer labels and lives littered with broken relationships.

But we keep saying "no" to joy and "yes" to stuff. It is more than ironic. It is befuddling and tragic. But it is true and made possible by an exceedingly savvy and complex understanding of human nature in marketing executives who keep leading us into their stores and away from the Promised Land. I would like to make clear, here, that I do not believe that devotion to God and a healthy economy are mutually exclusive. I think an economy based on deception and delusion, however, is.

How do they do it? There are principles that apply almost universally in board rooms around the world. Marketing a new product is approached in just about the same way whether the group is meeting in Tokyo or New York.

Become the atmosphere: This is a phrase used to describe the infusion of brand recognition into our culture, to surround people with "Nike," for instance, so that when they think they need new sneakers, the first thing they'll think of is that brand. It has unfortunately become increasingly difficult to take command over the general economic "atmosphere" because of the quantity of clutter in the environment. There are so many products and so many messages, we are surrounded by such a huge amount of information that the task for marketing managers and creative directors is now much more sophisticated and complex.

One woman in the documentary, The Persuaders, said "Consumers are like roaches. You spray them and spray them and spray them." Eventually, she explained, they become inured so you have to do something radically different to make them roll over.

Advertisers are shameless creatures. I know this not only because of their general reputation but because I worked as a copywriter. They are willing to do almost anything to break through the clutter of advertising and product promotion that they themselves created, fabricate any plausible untruth to attract our attention, take advantage of any scandal so long as it shocks and sells. That is the bottom line.

Create a culture of need: This is market-ese for inventing a culture around a product, an image that not only creates a pseudo-need, but promises a new way to meet it. That brand new ailment restless leg syndrome is a perfect example of that. Who in human history has not experienced some restlessness due to stress, lack of exercise, too much exercise or overtiredness? It is a newly identified "syndrome" that people are easily convinced is a real disease that they must have because they're restless, too, and now they must convince their doctors to prescribe the only drug that actually treats this new condition. And so it goes.

Give products texture and life: By imbuing ordinary toiletries and household products with emotional energy (happiness, softness, kindness, sexuality, sensuality, friendliness, availability, etc") the advertisers are able to make that product resonate with people's emotional lives and secret needs. What differentiates one product from another now is not for the most part quality or some massive technical advantage. How much difference is there between high-end hiking boots or between a pair of jeans made by Levi's and one made by Wrangler's? Besides the occasional issue of fit, it is hugely emotional. It's not what the product does. It's what it means and by extension what it says about us to the world.

Create a culture of fear: The media (news, editorial and advertising) has been promoting viral fear for many years, both subtly and overtly. We are told to be afraid of attack, mega-volcanoes, being unattractive, body odor, illness, death, asteroids, wrinkles and social rejection (to name but a few). If we are sufficiently afraid and are presented with a possible solution, a way to banish the demons of anxiety and self-doubt, we'll buy it. Many of us become so afraid we are willing to put ourselves into irreversible debt to deflect it. And the thing we are most afraid of not belonging, being shunned, being seen as inferior or unworthy is precisely that which they are best at manipulating by making the product an extension of the self, thereby giving the illusion of value to a fragile and porous self that must continually seek out external buttresses to give it cohesion.

I used to think this use of fear to send us careening into retail stores was a manifestation of abject sociopathy, that the conscious manipulation of viral fear was intentional, malicious and controllable. But the other day I realized something that literally made me run into the other room for my pen and paper (yes, I still use them). These advertisers and marketers honestly can't help themselves any more than they can help selling fear because they're fearful. They are as much a product of the culture they created as everyone and everything else. (This reminds me of something I wrote in The Worst is Over: Be careful what you say. You're listening.) They sell fear because that's what they buy. Advertisers can't stop spreading viral fear because, in one marketer's words, they're terrified of being eaten alive by the competition. It doesn't get more limbic than that, does it?

Market to the American soul: It might amuse you to know that marketers actually use the term "Pseudo-spiritual marketing." What does this mean? Here are some terrific examples of spiritual marketing strategies and creative concepts that were illuminated in the documentary, The Persuaders. Nike: mystical transcendence through sports and sports attire. Starbucks: community similar to the one we see in the show, Cheers, not home and not work, yet sympathetic, warm and companionable. Benetton: diversity and cheerful coexistence. When they sit around a table banging out strategies and campaign slogans, they use expressions like "making a spiritual bond with a product" and "channeling the inner brand." The brand becomes the church and the product the icon.

Give the product an IMAGE: This means that campaigns will skillfully and persuasively present the product as more than it is. It's not a bitter tasting drink, it's a social lubricant. It's not a just a washer/dryer, it's a part of your real sophisticated yet practical self. It's not just a car, it's an integral demonstration of your personal narrative, which may translate thus: I drive a Hummer, therefore I am"And I am successful, tough, yet refined. A complex being, I am, I am. Such a complex being I am. The product is no longer a product but redefined as mystery, as intimacy, as meaning, as cult, as success, as comfort, as our due.

Facilitate entitlement, no matter what a person's financial means: Offer loans, no pre-payment options, leases with hidden clauses, no interest deals for three years, no payments for two years. Make it easier than it should be to buy luxury items for which they have no real need and make the consumer feel they not only need the product, but that it is their right to have it. If a product is identified with the "self" then it we don't have far to go to feel fear about not having that product.

Entitled to be Happy: The Pursuit of the Ridiculous.

One of the most significant of the American pathologies is our confusion over the American creed. We have taken "pursuit of happiness" to mean the right to "be" happy. Since Romanticism's debut on the American intellectual game board and the Utopian notion that perfection is possible here on this earth, we have been entranced with a false sense of mortal power and, subsequent to that, of entitlement. If we can have it, then shouldn't we? Because we've additionally confused products with self and having with happiness, we find ourselves in the mess we are now in. We are so entitled and so afraid of not getting that to which we believe we're entitled we go into debt to get it. Or we steal. Or we sue.

There is an expression that goes something like, "that which you gaze upon, you become." This is certainly true in motorcycling, where it is understood at least in racing circles that you (and your bike) go where your eyes are pointed. I remember many years being warned by a friend, "If you ever see me go down, keep your eyes on the road and pull over slowly. Don't let yourself watch an accident." I never forgot that and have applied it to all areas of my life. What we see all day at the supermarket checkout, on packaging, on television, on cable and in movies is fame, beauty and money. A study was done with young people to find out what was most important to them and they reported the results we should have expected and hardly needed to go to all that trouble studying: fame, beauty and money.

There are two problems as I see it:

1) Americans don't just want what they see, they covet it. As a result they feel they should have it, that it is their right to have it and if they don't have it then something is vitally wrong with them. Their fear, once again, is that someone will find out they are "less than" ( less than perfect, less than expected, less than beautiful, successful or sexy) and that they will then be shunned, chased out of the pack and left for dead.

2) It has become an iconic need, a substitute for meaning, God and love.

We are saturated with more distraction than any other creature in history. We are surrounded by more cures, more opportunities, more checkouts and more choices than ever before. We are told that this, that or the other thing is the answer we've been waiting for. Until the next one comes along. But instead of answering our questions or satisfying our needs, all that they have succeeded in getting us to do is avoid the first and most important question of all: What does it mean and why do we want it? I sincerely doubt that Nike has anything to offer on that score.

A pervasive war mentality has invaded and occupied America

2009-12-13T17:23:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-pervasive-war-mentality-by-michael-payne-091212-367.html

December 12, 2009
A pervasive war mentality has invaded and occupied America
By michael payne

It's as if a giant octopus has wrapped its tentacles around the body of America and is smothering any attempts at honest dissension, rejection or even debate over the never-ending promotion of war. That octopus, the ultra powerful military-industrial complex, is the tight-knit combination of the U.S. government, the armed forces and the industrial sector.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his farewell address in 1961, warned that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

This was a Republican president and the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe that achieved victory over Hitler's powerful war machine in World War II. This famous general, because of his long military career, might have been thought to be a war hawk but he certainly was not. He was a brilliant war strategist but he knew from personal experience the horrors of war and that it was not a thing to take lightly.

Eisenhower also knew all about the military-industrial complex from his experience in the military and in leading our nation and our government. He knew exactly the dangers it posed as evidenced by his very strong, emotional remarks in that farewell address almost 50 years ago. He was issuing a warning about the perils of this massive war-making machine, fearing that, without proper restraints and controls, it would evolve into exactly the highly influential, powerful forces that it is today.

In this regard, we need to examine how the tragedy of 9/11 and the attacks on the World Trade Center have drastically changed America. As I see it, there were two separate effects that the tragedy of 9/11 had upon the people of America and subsequent actions by our government.

The first effect in the aftermath of 9/11 was the shock and horror that it brought to all Americans. This was an extremely traumatic event, like no other ever experienced within our shores. That a group of terrorists (most all, by the way, were Saudi Arabian citizens) could so brazenly enter our country and wreak such damage and suffering on this nation was unthinkable. But, while we must not and will not forget this tragic event, we cannot let it dominate our lives or our future.

And, yet, that is exactly what I believe has been happening. Ever since 9/11, our government in Washington D.C., together with the subservient national media, has aggressively promoted the war on terror and the threat of another terrorist attack to justify future military actions. The Bush administration used this strategy of fear as the basis for the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Rudy, aka 9/11 Giuliani, used it in a shameful, pandering manner to try to become the GOP candidate for president. It is currently being used as the prime reason for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

I'm afraid that the implantation of fear into the American mind has been very successful. Just think about how many times throughout any given day, whether on the radio, cable TV channels or in newspapers, you hear and read comments about terrorists, insurgents or some potential threat to our security. It is almost non-stop and appears to have been woven into the mental fabric of America.

The military-industrial complex has fed off this tragedy for years. It has made massive profits from the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan as a result. And you can bet that it will continue to use many elements of our national media to maintain that sense of fear in the minds of Americans.

Has anyone heard of any unemployment problem among the top defense contractors; Lockheed Martin, Boeing Co., General Dynamics and others? Of course not. The massive defense industry is like no other in America as it continually feeds off the dollar pipeline that extends from the Congress and transports hundreds of billions into its coffers. Workers in the defense industry, unlike millions of their fellow Americans, can sleep peacefully at night as they are almost guaranteed lifetime jobs.

There are those who say that we are now on a course that can never be reversed, that we will be involved with a never-ending progression of wars because of the terrorist threats we face. And that, of course, typifies the drum beat of constant fear that is being promoted as a means to justify war.

But then there is the opposite view that this entire war mentality and progression of war will come to an end when the trillions of dollars that have fueled war will dry up as America is driven closer and closer to economic collapse. The irony of that possibility is this; that unnecessary war which is so very costly and damaging to our economic stability will be the very vehicle that destroys itself in the end. Should that take place the natural result will be the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals. And a return to reasonable and rational strategies and actions for the defense of America.

This nation and our society must come to the realization that we no longer can live under a constant cloud of fear and apprehension; that is a course leading to disaster, not just in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, but here within America itself. Somehow, some way we must cleanse ourselves of this pervasive war mentality.

President Eisenhower stated, "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." We Americans must not let President Eisenhower's worst fears become a reality.

Land Of The Puppet People

2009-12-13T11:41:00.000-08:00

A culture of fear creates puppet people! Fear from constant propaganda and fear mongerig by the media paralyzes people from thinking rationally and then the puppet masters move in to push their will on everyone!
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Land Of The Puppet People
By Manuel Valenzuela
2-17-6

It oftentimes boggles the mind to try and understand the ease with which the Establishment can manipulate the American citizenry into another warmongering escapade..yet it is easy to comprehend this phenomenon, for we live inside the United States of Amnesia, a country where all semblance of the yesterday becomes but a haze of blatant forgetfulness and convenient whitewash.
American Heroin

It oftentimes boggles the mind to try and understand the ease with which the Establishment can manipulate the American citizenry into another warmongering escapade, this time an ominous foray into the Persian lands of Iran, a nation rich in history, culture, location and most importantly to the Evil Empire, oil and gas. Yet upon further inspection it is easy to comprehend this phenomenon, for we live, as Gore Vidal has labeled it, inside the United States of Amnesia, a country where all semblance of the yesterday becomes but a haze of blatant forgetfulness and convenient whitewash, a black hole of Alzheimer's-like darkness from where no recollection of past lessons, mistakes, errors or history can be seen or touched.

We live in a nation of gluttonous stupor and comfortable surroundings, easily distracted by the cocktail of materialism that lines our homes. We are trained to live to work, not work to live, sacrificing love of life for love for the Almighty dollar, becoming worker bees and soldier ants, selling our souls to the demons of capitalism in exchange for the happiness and stress-free lives of yesteryear, needing pharmaceutical drugs to escape the depression of our daily lives, willingly choosing to indebt our present and future in order to possess the vast array of adult toys marketed to manipulate our emotions, wrongly thinking this or that product will reincarnate lost happiness. America is the land of plenty, where waistlines expand, stress increases, mental problems grow, work hours increase and vehicles get bigger and bigger, a land addicted to the devil's excrement, like a heroin user injecting black gold into its ever thirsty veins, becoming a violent, warmongering junkie when the perpetual case of cold turkey arises.

Never before has a society been afforded the wealth and excessiveness that we possess, yet neither has a citizenry been subjected to the consequences invariably arising in order to achieve those ends. Unhappiness, depression, financial hardship, stress, inner demons, anger, dislike, psychological problems, undisciplined and unreared children are some of the costs of maintaining our standards of living. The escapism needed to forget the madness of these costs, accumulated year after year, in daily life, work, finances and society, stands like an idol ready to be worshipped in the middle of our homes, its dark screen awakened with the push of a remote control.

It is the television, that drug of mental escapism and intellectual erosion, the invaluable purveyor of fantasy and fiction, that serves to distract, distort and alleviate the stresses of a life made exceedingly harder by the continued growth of the corporatist state, where profit will always supercede people and the interests of the corporation will always trump those of the People. Yet in the television we also see the greatest tool of mass manipulation ever created, in the last few decades discovered by government and corporate interests for the incredible power emanating from its warm glow. In the span of a couple of decades it has transformed human society, acting as the corporate and governmental invasion of our homes, and into our brainwaves, affecting both the innocent and the old, indiscriminately penetrating the minds of black and white, male and female.

The propaganda emanating from its waves and the fiction produced by its owners has mutated American society into one of slouching couch potatoes, dumbed down ignoramuses, lazy and indifferent citizens, unthinking drones and brainwashed primates, turning a citizenry of creativity, vision, imagination and intelligence into one devoid of each, eroding the minds of experience and altering those of innocence, slowly catapulting America into the precipice of intellectual and knowledge collapse. It is the television that has created the amnesia running rampant from Pacific to Atlantic, saturating us with the brain manipulations of the corporatist world, creating a population needing the sensationalist programming designed to dumb down and distract, feeding into our minds senseless garbage of celebrity adoration and idol worship, introducing us to wave after wave of scheming advertisements and the thoughts and opinions the Establishment want us to incorporate as our own.

Television is the greatest addiction we face, a malignancy that controls entire populations, becoming a drug infiltrating all regions of the brain, altering brainwaves in children, thoughts in adults, creating a population easily controlled and programmed, becoming, over the course of a lifetime, the human antenna receiving the endless stream of propaganda disseminated by government and corporate entities. The effects of television on the human brain have become quite clear after only sixty years in existence. At no other time in human history had our primitive minds been subjected to the rapid imagery, fictionalized programming, brainwashing techniques, ceaseless propaganda, video capabilities and sound distortions of television.

We can now see the results of a decades old experiment, and Americans of today, as the people that most watch the monitor on a daily basis, with our rapid intellectual decline, loss of knowledge, extinction of logic and analytical reasoning, erosion of free thought and our propensity to absorb as our own anything aired on television, are the end result.

Leapfrogging Towards War

Our masters can today do with us as they wish, using the television as the instrument used to implant corporatist propaganda into our minds, knowing that millions upon millions of Americans no longer think for themselves, certain that the anemic education prevalent throughout the nation is succeeding in molding loyal sheep conditioned to obey, consume and produce. Our thoughts are being homogenized; our minds now linger in the assembly lines of corporate propaganda, robbing us of individuality, of different personalities, of various tastes and wants. We are the pawns in the front lines of the corporatist takeover of our nation and most importantly, our minds, with those in power toying with us, making us marionettes whose strings are easily manipulated by the few who control television.

Behind the magic curtain of power we can see that once again America is going on the warpath, getting herself ready for another imperialist offensive preemptive attack, disguised in the full spectrum of colors that are coordinated to hide the real reasons for war. Thus, the conditioning of the War Culture has for a few months now been set in motion with a media blitzkrieg engineered to prepare the nation's consciousness for further conflict. Gently, slowly, systematically and methodically propaganda is being delivered into our comfortable homes on a daily basis that is designed to mold us into hating another nation, another people, using the same mold as before to deceive and manipulate an always gullible citizenry. The powers that decide the destiny of the nation have very little challenge in brainwashing the American public.

Knowing that Americans have perfected the art of amnesia, easily forgetting yesterday in a haze of distraction and escapism, possessing the attention spans of gnats and the enlightenment existing during the Dark Ages, ignorant to the world beyond our bubble of excessiveness, finding us addicted to television, videogames and prescription pills, relying on ten second sound bites and the subjective drivel of talking heads for information, our minds made distorted by the fantasy and fiction we watch incessantly, with free thought now made extinct by the massive abandonment of reading books, with mental lethargy now the rule rather than the exception, the Establishment can recycle long used and recently implemented blueprints to steer the nation towards the acceptance of illegal offensive war and further crimes against humanity.

The warmonger rulers realize that with such a dumbed down populace, readily accepting as true everything told them by their government, believing everything their television generates, no lie is too big or outlandish, no deception will ever be rebelled against and no whitewash will ever be questioned. Using television, which is today but an instrument furthering corporate control of our lives, spewing only what is of interest to the corporatist world, Americans are bombarded with the propaganda that will manufacture an enemy out of Iran. Without the television, able to reach hundreds of millions of people, able to penetrate our psyches and minds, able to affect our emotions and behaviors, getting our full attention as we sit glued to the set, listening to talking heads and government lackeys, the brainwashing of the masses by the government and the corporatist world would be a much harder endeavor. With it, however, the mobilization of minds is a relatively easy accomplishment, and the conditioning of hundreds of millions of citizens becomes cheap, efficient and successful.

With the same manual as that used to mobilize us for the war on Iraq, the warmongers begin instilling fear into our minds, repeating lie after lie, over and over again, that the new enemy is a threat to America, our way or life, our freedoms and democracy. They realize that most people do not want war, so they must be cajoled into supporting what is already a predetermined inevitability. Thus, exploiting our mammalian emotions and behaviors, using our own animal instincts against us, the warmongers in power envelope us with the fear factor, repeating the perceived threat enough times, in so many different ways and mediums, that most people instinctively begin to believe what their "trusted" leaders are telling them. With Iraq it was the threat of mushroom clouds, of WMD, of terrorists. Similarly, the mirage that is the Iranian threat has been marketed to penetrate our deepest fears, scaring us into believing that Iran seeks nuclear weapons, with the inherent lie that as our enemy, they would not hesitate to bomb one or more of our cities.

War marketers understand fully that rationality and common sense vanish in the wake of introduced fear and hatred. Therefore, the use of fear and terror to condition the masses into believing that only through war can their lives be made safer will once again be used, conveniently attaching the illusion of George W. Bush as the one man that will insure their security. Over the next few weeks and perhaps even months, the propaganda used to vilify Iran will intensify, just as it was prior to the Iraq War. We will be forced to hear, repeatedly, the evils of the regime, the wicked intentions of the new president and the manufactured threat to our security. We will be told over and over again how Iran has been a pariah on the world stage, that they overthrew our puppet dictator a few decades back, held America's embassy hostage, support most of the world's terrorists, are a tyrannical regime, want to destroy Israel, are a clear and present danger to our national security and, if we are lucky, that they even harbor the bogeymen of the moment, Al-Qaeda.

The newspapers of importance and prestige, those in New York and Washington, will be used to conjure up false intelligence and bogus news reports, most manufactured by the war marketers using cherry-picked intelligence, the false reporting of reporters with vested interests, concocted documents and reports from foreign intelligence services, and the false accusations by so-called Iranian dissidents and defectors. These newspapers, whose weight is heavy in the media world, will begin pasting on the front pages articles of deception regarding Iran's nuclear energy program, making us believe in the imminent threat to our security and that of certain Middle Eastern nation whose interests are well protected by the newspapers' editors.

Stories unfavorable to Iran will appear, making it look like the member of the Axis of Evil, making it hated in the mind of Americans. President Ahmadinejad will become the new Osama, Zarqawi and Saddam, a new evildoer extraordinaire, becoming the new poster child for the perpetual, and fictional, war on terror, just the latest incarnation of America's enemy. Again, fear and hatred will be used to cloud reason and logic; terror will be introduced to exploit both our emotions and still-fragile post 9/11 psychology.

The lies, deceptions and propaganda first outlined in print will invariably make their way to the televised media, where they will be disseminated far and wide, their content picked apart and dissected by talking heads and media hacks whose only purpose in life is to become the stenographers of the corporatists, as always pushing the idea of war into the mind of the viewer. Partisan talking heads from certain think tanks, many with the interests of foreign nations at heart, will make the rounds, chatting without stop in support of preemption, appearing incessantly in a barrage of subjective opinion and prepared propaganda, as always offering only the views for war and preemptive attack, as always appearing without dissenting views and opinion. Along with partisan talking heads, certain influential politicians, those carrying the mantra of deceived trust, will also appear incessantly on television, making the case for war and preemption using the same failed logic and manipulated lies used to sell the Iraq war, again without dissenting views present to contradict and debate the push for attack.

Like an advertising campaign, where the entire organization at a company's disposal is used to sell the product, the push to sell the American people into accepting an attack on Iran will be all-encompassing, reaching hundreds of millions of Americans through the television, radio and printed media. The public relations campaign run out of the White House will be relentless and assiduous, in the end convincing millions that an American attack is in the best interests of the nation. Already, for example, over 50 percent of the public has made it known that they would have no problem if Bush attacked Iran, a figure that perhaps reflects the ignorance, mass amnesia and incomprehensible idiocy of half the population. This figure represents a high percentage favoring attack, even before the campaign of propaganda, lies and deceptions even heats up. The percentage will only rise once the campaign hits its peak.

Iran will be made out to be a lawless nation at odds with the rest of the world. Of course diplomacy will be designed to fail, as it was prior to the Iraq war. While shouting that the UN must act, thereby being able to claim legitimacy, America will maneuver its vast system of control and inevitably lead the charade of the UN to fail, granting Bush the excuse to attack. Terror threats will be manufactured, danger to us will be reborn and, in the end, Iran will be attacked and crippled, killing tens of thousands, escalating tensions, creating insecurity, perpetuating an already never-ending war and unleashing human violence upon the globe. Using the naiveté and ignorance of the citizenry to its advantage, the military industrial energy complex will claim to fight for freedom, democracy and an end to tyranny, again jumping on the fictional war on terror bandwagon to excuse its offensive attacks for imperial aspirations and control of the world's remaining oil fields.

The threat of nuclear attack by Iran will of course be exaggerated, as will its failure to comply with international law and its use of nuclear technology. Orwellian newspeak and doubletalk will permeate the airwaves; news reports will be manipulated to fit the predetermined storyline. Facts and figures will be contorted and altered, their true meanings erased, their mirror image twisted. And it will all be repeated, over and over and over again, designed to manipulate, condition and steer us toward accepting further death and destruction in the Muslim world. The plethora of broken UN resolutions of a certain Middle Eastern nation will never be mentioned, nor its possession of 200 nuclear missiles, nor the fact that Iran would be committing suicide if it attacked with nuclear weapons either America or Israel, nor the fact that any nation under the intense threat faced by Iran will inevitably seek to defend itself through nuclear weapons, nor the fact that every nation is entitled to sovereign creation of civilian nuclear technology for energy purposes, nor the fact that Iran possesses roughly thirteen percent of the world's available fossil fuels, nor the fact that its new oil bourse threatens the stability of the US dollar, nor the fact that we are in the age of resource wars, already engaged in clandestine battle with China, Russia, Europe and India, nor the fact that America has over 700 bases worldwide, including four new permanent bases in Iraq, wishing for a few more in the geopolitical treasure that is Iran, nor the fact that this rebranded offensive strategy and attack is nothing more than pursuit of strategic oil fields close to Iraq, containment of a very potent rival, control over oil and, as always when America interferes in the Middle East, proxy wars benefiting Israel.

Using the bully pulpit afforded the President, George W. Bush will release the hounds of his administration, parading known liars and immoral miscreants, each shouting loudly the case for war. Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Goss, Chertoff, Hadley, the nest of neocons festering in Washington and Bush himself will be given a podium and a microphone from which to preach the virtue of offensive warfare, as usual manipulating our instincts and emotions, as always resurrecting 9/11 to engender fear, hatred and anger amongst the populace. They will grace our television monitors, given all the airtime they desire, their lies and deceptions heard around the nation, never to be contradicted, always to be believed.

It will not matter that they lied, deceived and manipulated the case for war against Iraq. It will not matter that they took America to war on false pretenses, creating a wasted debacle in Mesopotamia. It will not matter that their incompetence, arrogance, ignorance and immorality have made us less safe, not more, creating more terrorists, not less, endangering our "way of life" more by their actions at home than by their ineptitude abroad. It will not matter that their potential actions could engulf an entire region in violence, conflagrating the Eurasian land mass in a very dangerous and long-lasting new Cold War against potent rivals. It will not matter that with each new attack or act of humiliation upon the Muslim world the fire of hatred continues to boil inside the minds of one billions Muslims, threatening to destabilize the entire planet. Of course it will not matter that these warmongers seek to perpetuate the vicious cycle of Muslim killing Westerner and Westerner killing Muslim, thereby giving rise to the perpetual war on terror, now remarketed "Long War," for they have been wishing for this for a very long time, finally giving rise to their "clash of civilizations," thus birthing their self-fulfilling prophesy. None of the above will matter, for all has been forgotten and disregarded, for we live in the United States of Amnesia.

Land of Paradoxes and Certainties

This is the America of the early 21st century, a land of paradoxes and of certainties, at once the richest nation on the planet yet offering anemic and dilapidating educations to the bearers of its future torch; a nation rich in technology yet its people dumbed down to the point that ignorance of both the natural world and human civilization prevails; a nation industrialized and modern yet a place where tens of millions remain captive to the theologies and beliefs more in tune to those of the Middle Ages; a country once enlightened by creativity and imagination now eviscerating both through the incessant illumination every night of that disseminator of fiction, fantasy and propaganda called television; a people once shining bright, allowed innumerable freedoms and rights, now extinguished by the same system they protect and defend; a citizenry once active, loud and knowledgeable now made indifferent and servile thanks to the comforts inherent in mass consumerism and materialism; a people at one time questioning and seeking accountability of government now transformed into the acquiescent and complicit serfs of corporatism; a land once fighting for the rights of workers now a land fighting for the rights of slaves; a nation of, by and for the People mutated into a country of, by and for the Corporate World.

Such is the state of affairs inside the borders of the War Culture, with almost 300 million human beings conditioned from birth to become subservient instruments of war aiding and abetting the war machine of the Pentagon. Thanks to the military industrial complex and its vast instruments of control, they have become a nation of warmongers and xenophobes, clandestinely cheering the rumbles of tanks and the cracks of guns, the dropping of bombs and the sadistic torture of Arabs. Like Pavlovian dogs, hundreds of millions of American citizens drool at the sounds of the trumpets of war blasted into their minds by the television monitor, eager to satisfy the destructive cravings of inner conscious propagated throughout the citizenry by an ingenious mechanism of mass manipulation.

When the drums of war commence their thunderous beat the inbred thirst for bloodshed and violence is unleashed, with the population instinctively aware that the Empire's addiction to war will soon be satisfied. Half of Americans, at once eager to smell the blood of brown-skinned humans, their hidden xenophobia and bigotry having a chance to finally rise to the surface, ingratiated by the sounds of destruction, mesmerized by the pyrotechnics and concussions of military might, are quick to march in lock step behind the tanks and battalions of the Empire, becoming an army of chickenhawks, yellow elephants and armchair generals, as always extolling war yet living in cowardice, preaching Jesus yet practicing Satan, preferring the safety of jingoism rather than the bravery of service, hiding behind the Flag and the charade of 9/11, made deaf by the hymns of that fantasy called American exceptionalism, becoming members of the cult which follows White House incompetence and ineptitude, all the while basking in their debt-ridden comforts and toys of escapism while the less fortunate among us fight their wars and battles.

At the first hints of military mobilization by the state, this half of the population, otherwise decent and law abiding people, jump at attention, ready to become the clandestine storm troopers that will blindly follow those in power into battle, never questioning the reasoning behind the push for war, never wondering why America must again go to battle and never thinking for themselves as to whose interests are being furthered and what ramifications will arise from mass murder and destruction. Without thinking and rationalizing tens of millions of citizens will support the military industrial complex and its sinister designs without ever knowing what the military industrial complex is.

At the sound of war drums these millions blindly align themselves behind the President, regardless of the incompetence, the ineptitude, the chicanery, the criminality, the illegality and the immorality. To these sheeple, the herd mentality is in full effect, in essence eagerly following a wolf dressed in shepherd's clothing, unable to see the horizon, unable to see the journey, unable to think independently, blinded by fear, needing the diapers of bed wetters and the pacifiers of security, eager to follow and be led to the slaughterhouse disguised as so-called security and protection, unable to see anything except the blind manifestation of ignorant loyalty.

The other half of America, meanwhile, talk the talk but rarely, if ever, walk the walk, preferring instead to protest and dissent from the comfort and security of their keyboard or through the messages on their car bumper, as if that alone grants them entitlement to call themselves self-proclaimed anti-war activist, with many placing more interest and exerting more energy in the asinine, non-important, relatively insignificant news regarding the quail hunting adventures of Dick Cheney than in the much larger issues affecting the nation, with many unwilling to sacrifice time, effort and energy to fight for the future of the country.

They criticize without remorse but cannot bring it upon themselves to mobilize and take to the streets in protest, preferring losing freedoms and rights than being bothered into joining a mass movement. >From their pajamas they proclaim vitriol at the chicanery of the Bush Administration yet refuse to take the direct action those that came before once did, voicing their frustrations at the direction America is taking through Internet message boards and simple family gatherings.

Merrily this half proclaims undying and blind loyalty to the impotent and spineless minority party, unwilling to see, thanks to the denial so prevalent among diehard Democrats, that their beloved party is but the lesser of two evils, naïve in their belief that this side of the army of corrupt politicians will ever again have their interest at the forefront, their ideology acting to mask the fact that their cherished heroes are but the prostitutes of corporatism and that their party is an illusion designed to convey the mistaken belief that an opposition exists.

Gone from their core, thanks to the comfortable and pampered existence they have been granted and the conditioning that has enveloped them from birth, is the fire that once lit brightly during the time of another American debacle, thriving inside the youth of a now vanished generation, a fire that granted radiance to bravery and warmth to courage, transforming a nation and a time, bringing truth to power and justice to criminality.

The fire that engulfed the sixties has been extinguished by consumerism, materialism and the glow of television, by an indifference that gives complacency a welcome embrace, by a collective amnesia that forgets yesterday and fails to recognize today, by videogame distractions and unenlightened passivity, and by the dark covers that have virtually eliminated from our consciousness the lost war in the Middle East, with millions of armchair protesters made placid to the cries of an America hemorrhaging to death, unwilling to create a movement, unable to leave the comfortable warmth of their homes, preferring to protest on the Internet, unable to mobilize more than a minute and insignificant number of souls while the nation rots and fascism grows.

Gone are the massive marches, campus insurrections, the defying solidarity, the movement that altered history. A giant tsunami of change that once brought the upper echelons of government to its knees has given way to those who have sold out to principles once held dear, no longer to be bothered by truth, justice and peace, and to younger generations suffering the laziness and ignorance spawned by the excessiveness of living in America. Gone is the military draft and the threat of conscription, once a tinderbox that fed fuel to the peace movement's fire, for without it middle class America, white America, has no real vested interest in protesting, no loved ones to bring home, no friends to fight for, no sons and fathers to protest over, no funerals to attend, no threat of them being drafted.

In Iraq it is not their sons or fathers or brothers or daughters being maimed and dying. It is not their relatives or friends being psychologically damaged; they do not see the devastation done and the demons spawned. This is a war that does not hit middle class America close to home or inside their sphere of existence, where the heart is, where emotion flows and anger grows. To the great majority, the Iraq war remains an abstract reality, seen in images and in articles, not in the flesh or in immediate suffering. As such, and as long as the lower castes of American society are made to "volunteer" for war, with those from urban jungles or of rural regions comprising the armed forces, as long as middle class America is not conscripted, there will not exist a massive peace movement, the kind that once moved mountains and introduced fear into the halls of power. This the Bush Administration knows all too well, which is why they avoid it at all costs, while at the same time manipulating the system in a myriad of ways to assure itself of enough cannon fodder to continue its war of imperialism and occupation.

Warmongers One and All

The War Culture we are called, birthed from the first images of cartoons our innocent minds are bombarded with, their entire content based on conflict, aggression, violence and destruction, our brainwaves slowly manipulated and altered to suit the ways of war. Conditioned from infancy to accept the sounds of gunfire, the dropping of bombs, the violence of war, the violent conflict of man versus man, we in time become immune to death and violence, suppressing inside us feelings of horror and revulsion. As we begin getting older we are introduced to the magical world of Hollywood, full of pyrotechnic wonder and digital artistry, making us awe and gawk at exploding bombs and reverberating waves of thunderous booms, becoming wide-eyed by the destruction unleashed by the weapons of war and the heroes we fantasize about.

Transfixed by Dolby digital sounds, the concussions of bombs exploding in our ears, the whizzing of bullets flying by, mushroom clouds of fire and smoke emanating on screen, blood and guts spilled throughout, we are made to accept war and violence and destruction as inherent mechanisms of conflict resolution. Slowly but surely we are conditioned to believe that the brutality of man killing man is not as severe as we believe it to be, that blood and guts are but movie magic, that death and injury are as fictional as that seen in the movies. We are made to love mayhem; we are made to love weapons; we are made to accept violence; we are made to believe death is nothing more than the role an actor must play.

In our deluded minds, thanks to years of watching television and movies, lies the ingrained propaganda that everything the military does is benevolent and altruistic, as always fighting for "freedom and democracy," for "human rights," for the salvation from "tyranny." In our distorted view of human reality, the US military is always the good guy fighting the enemy, who is always evil, a dreaded evildoer. This black and white view of the world has been firmly planted into our minds by the happy ending, good-guy always wins bull manure manufactured by the fictional geniuses in Hollywood, where America is always the winner and where the evildoer of the moment always gets killed or caught. In a war such as the present debacle in Iraq, therefore, where reality is hidden and truth suppressed, our instinct will always be to blindly believe, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that the US military has been sent to Iraq for good, altruistic and noble intentions.

The truth, though, is altogether different, as evidenced by the devastation unleashed by the American military inside Iraq. The sadistic images that emerged from Abu Ghraib, the crimes against humanity being committed in Guantanamo and other such clandestine gulags, the death of perhaps 200,000 innocent Iraqis, the complete devastation of Iraq's infrastructure, the indiscriminate shooting of civilians, the immeasurable level of suffering created as a result of occupation, the destruction of Fallujah missile, bomb and use of white phosphorus, the lack of electricity, sewage, fuel and adequate drinking water, the ongoing dropping of bombs and an increase in the aerial war are but a few examples of the wickedness exported into Iraq by America's illegal and immoral invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. The complete collapse of society and unfettered chaos in the streets, the civil war now raging and expanding, the insecurity prevalent throughout the nation and the deep seated anger and hate brewing in Iraq are all a result of what our cherished military, at the behest of George W. Bush, has helped birth in a nation once tranquil and secure.

Yet to millions of Americans who either do not care or will never know reality, what we have done in Iraq is bringing "freedom and democracy," even though women now have fewer rights than before invasion, freeing a nation from its tyrant, even though America has become the new tyrant, that they hate us for our freedoms, when in reality they hate us for our foreign policies, our imperialism and our support of ruthless tyrants, and "fighting them over there so we do not have to fight them over here," even though there were no terrorists in Iraq before but now it has become a training ground for thousands who will one day use their expertise in order to inflict blowback at the United States.

Lost from the memory of tens of millions of Americans, whether conveniently or from the general amnesia now prevalent throughout society, are the myriad of excuses used to justify the illegal invasion and occupation, from WMDs, mushroom clouds, connections to 9/11 and Al-Qaeda. Lost is the reality that we are the invading Red Coats fighting against American Revolutionaries in the Iraqi version of the Revolutionary War and War for Independence, that the truth behind the Iraq war is freedom fighters trying to cleanse their lands of the imperial invaders intent on dehumanizing Iraqis, raping their women, killing and brutalizing their children, conquering their oil fields and possessing their geostrategic lands. We cheer freedom fighters in expensive Hollywood productions, yet not when we are the invaders and occupiers. Such is the power of propaganda. Thanks to incessant propaganda, however, tens of millions of Americans will continue to live in the illusion that we are fighting the so-called war on terror against Al-Qaeda, that Iraq is the central front in this mirage, that we are the defenders of humanity, pursuing evildoer bogeymen with no interest in controlling the vast oil fields deemed vital to the continued expansion both of our economy and the coffers of the military-industrial-energy complex.

After years of propaganda and conditioning, and thanks to continued and incessant brainwashing by the mainstream media, we readily accept war as an institution, as a product re-introduced every few years for the benefit of the state. War thus becomes a necessary component that we inherently associate, perhaps subconsciously, with the continued health of the nation and its economy. By association, then, war is good not only for the country but for us as individuals, assuring our children of continued excessiveness. Inside our minds exists the charade that without war we would not possess the vast wealth we have or the comfortable lifestyles we live in.

Yet we also know that without war, without our reckless grab for land and exploitation, the nation would stutter and cease to be the power that has allowed us to dominate the globe, pillaging the world's people and their resources in the process, in wanton fashion exacerbating misery, regional wars, global warming, poverty and thus further imperiling the security of the planet. It is this reality that we are fully aware of yet refuse to accept or openly talk about, becoming the ugly truth that must never be allowed to escape its dark closet. It is better to live in denial and in hypocrisy than in the shantytowns exclusively reserved for billions of our fellow human beings.

Millions of us know we owe our fruitful and gluttonous lifestyles to war, to the suffering of billions and the imperialist mechanisms controlled by us, yet many of us refuse to change our ways, refusing to act in opposition to the Empire, refusing to acknowledge that our lifestyle was born in sin, in human misery and in the invasion and colonization of alien lands. Living inside the belly of the beast, using and exploiting its many riches, living its comfortable reality, yet refusing to alter our standards of living or our comfortable existence, refusing to amend our crimes and stop our exploitation of the planet, we remain, as always, fully complicit in the crimes and destruction and misery unleashed by our government. Remaining silent, indifferent and ignorant to this reality does not absolve any of us.

Through silence we merely acquiesce to everything done in our name. Our failure or unwillingness to alter our ways, our inability or refusal to change the direction of this nation and the continued indifference or complicity to the plight of billions has unmasked us all. This hidden truth lies at the heart of us all, making us a nation of warmongers, one and all, of amnesiacs, one and all, of pampered and spoiled primates, one and all, a citizenry unapologetic in its complicity and acquiescence to imperialism, war and destruction through our excessiveness, comfortable lifestyles and deafening silence.

We are a nation asleep at the wheel, drunk off our self-exceptionalism and gluttony, ramming head on into the massive trunk of unthinking self-destruction, our arrogance blinding us to the giant cancer in our midst, addicted to materialism and television, every day dumbed down further, unwilling to learn about the world outside our infallible bubble, creating a snowball rolling downhill, gaining momentum and growing in size, in its path eviscerating the dreams and hopes of the future as well as an American past that once offered humanity a glimmer of hope in an ever-dwindling and myopic world.

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet columnist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel made available at most online book sellers.

http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com

Blackburn calls Dems plan a 'nightmare'

2009-12-13T11:13:00.000-08:00

First of all, I don't trust the poll mentioned below and if it was right, then Americans have been terrorized to support the 'crap and trade' bills. THINK ABOUT IT: If such a law passed, the genocidal World Bank would handle the money. More, this money would go to support a world government plus tens of millions of third-world people would starve to death because the cost of food would double. This legislation will bring death and suffering to countless!

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

Blackburn calls Dems plan a 'nightmare'
Posted: December 12th, 2009 02:33 PM ET

Washington (CNN) – Rep. Marsha Blackburn blasted President Obama and his fellow Democrats 'cap and trade' energy legislation Saturday, calling it a "bureaucratic nightmare" for small businesses and households across the country.
In the weekly Republican radio and Web address, Blackburn said the Presidents plan for energy efficiency will only push the country toward a deeper economic recession.

"If President Obama has his way, the Copenhagen conference will produce mandatory emissions limits that would destroy millions of American jobs and damage our economic competitiveness for decades to come," the Tennessee congresswoman said.

While in Copenhagen, Denmark, next week, Obama is expected to set a goal of reducing emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels over the next decade.

"Just think of what will happen to small businesses and manufacturers hit with these skyrocketing energy bills," Blackburn added. "With Americans already facing double-digit unemployment, there could not be a worse time to unilaterally disarm our engines of job creation and economic growth."

According to the latest CNN Opinion Research Corporation poll, six in 10 Americans support a "cap and trade" proposal to cut pollution.

Touting her proposed bill H.R. 391, which aims amend the Clean Air Act so greenhouse gases are not subject to the act, Blackburn emphasized the Republicans aren't opposed to energy efficiency.

"Republicans are all for clean water, clean air, and clean energy," Blackburn said. "We just don't think we have to tax people out of their house and home to get there. That's why we have proposed an 'all of the above' energy strategy that says, let's put every clean, responsible energy option on the table so we can create jobs, ease the strain on family budgets, and clean up our environment."

Fear Based Marketing and the Cervical Cancer Vaccine

2009-12-13T07:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027196_cancer_cervical_cancer_cancer_vaccine.html

October 8 2009
Top researcher who worked on cervical cancer vaccine warns about its dangers (update 1)
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) One of the key researchers involved in the clinical trials for both Gardasil and Cevarix cervical cancer vaccines has gone public with warnings about their safety and effectiveness. This highly unusual warning against these vaccines by one of Big Pharma's own researchers surfaced in an exclusive interview with the Sunday Express in the UK over the last few days. There, Dr. Diane Harper openly admitted the vaccine doesn't even prevent cervical cancer, stating, "[The vaccine] will not decrease cervical cancer rates at all."

This is astonishing news. The whole push behind the cervical cancer vaccines is based on the belief that they prevent cervical cancer. That belief, it turns out, is a myth.

Editor's note: This story has been updated since first being published. The Sunday Express story originally quoted here has been pulled. We suspect the intimidation of Dr. Harper to retract her statements may be a factor. Read full details in this updated report: http://www.naturalnews.com/027225_c...

Dr. Harper also warned that the cervical cancer vaccine was being "over-marketed" and that parents should be warned about the possible risk of severe side effects from the vaccine. She even concluded that the vaccine itself is more dangerous than the cervical cancer it claims to prevent!

Hysteria over genital warts?

In a New York Times article published last year, Dr. Harper spoke about the fear-based marketing of Gardasil by Merck:

"'Merck lobbied every opinion leader, women's group, medical society, politicians, and went directly to the people -- it created a sense of panic that says you have to have this vaccine now..."

This behavior by drug companies -- using fear tactics to promote a particular disease in order to sell the "treatment" -- is called disease mongering. Most of the pharmaceutical profits generated today are based on precisely this tactic: Spread the fear, then sell the treatment. Read more about disease mongering here: http://www.naturalnews.com/disease_...

You can also toy around with the NaturalNews disease mongering engine, where you can invent your own diseases at the click of a button: http://www.naturalnews.com/disease-...

Why is disease mongering so important to the profits of the drug companies? They figured out many years ago that selling drugs only to those people who are sick was a very limited income opportunity. To rake in the real profits, they needed to devise a way to sell drugs to healthy people (i.e. people who don't need them). That's what cervical cancer vaccines really are: A scheme to sell vaccines to people who aren't suffering from any disease at all.

That one of the industry's own researchers is willing to speak out against this is not just highly unusual; it's also highly courageous. It makes you wonder: Who, exactly, is this Dr. Harper?

Dr. Diane Harper

Dr. Harper is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studied additional courses at Stanford and received her medical degree from the University of Kansas. She was a key researcher in both Gardasil and Cervarix vaccines, and she's one of the most experienced researchers in the world on HPV-related diseases. She's done work for both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline.

Dr. Harper's warnings about cervical cancer vaccines are especially relevant considering her expertise in the cost/benefit analysis of vaccines. Her conclusion is that cervical cancer vaccines aren't worth the risks, nor are they worth all the effort being put into hyping them to the public. "This may not be the best use of our resources at this time," she said in a Washington Post article.

So why do cervical cancer vaccines continue to be pushed by doctors and health authorities across the US, UK and other first-world nations? Because Big Pharma is the great corporate puppeteer that's pulling the strings of legislators. With enough money and lobbyists, you can always overcome scientific thinking with fear-based marketing and under-the-table deal-making. Science-based medicine has no place in a world where disease is big business.

There's a ridiculous amount of money to be made by pushing vaccines onto people who don't need them. If I had ten bucks for every teenage girl that's been injected with a cervical cancer vaccine, I'd be... well... GlaxoSmithKline.