Tribes with Flags to come, through Balkanization and Proxy Wars, to a country with no name...maybe Mossadistan

To paraphrase Voltaire: We are born free but insist on leading our lives chained to sectarian myths....

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20907

January , 2011 -- Through the deserts of Africa, and from Quetta to Darfur, hundreds of Tribes with Flags to come, through Balkanization and Proxy Wars, to a country with no name...maybe Mossadistan? Rothschildistan is already taken....

Albright's and Rice's dream comes true: a U.S. and Israeli footprint at the headwaters of the Nile....

http://sudanfaces.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/countdown-begins-on-referendum/

WMR's Middle East sources are pointing to a looming battle that will be waged for control of the life-sustaining waters of the Nile River when southern Sudan, or whatever it's name will be, achieves independence from Sudan following the ongoing charade of an independence referendum....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WK5V9oBoeyw

Independence for southern Sudan has long been a goal of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her god-daughter, current U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice. The splitting of Sudan has long been in the interests of Israel, which has yearned for a client state in southern Sudan that could put the squeeze on the supply of the Nile's headwaters to Egypt and northern Sudan. For Rice, a vitriolic hatred for Khartoum and its majority Arab population, has helped the cause of the southern Sudanese. Rice's views on southern Sudan and Khartoum were partly influenced by two members of the Israeli Lobby who had direct control over U.S. policy toward Sudan as counter-terrorism officials in the Bill Clinton National Security Council: Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin.

The late southern Sudanese leader, John Garang, was one of Albright's celebrated ex-Marxist "beacons of hope" for Africa, along with other U.S. client dictators in the region as Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. Congo's Laurent-Desire Kabila and Garang were among Washington's "red princes" until they got cross-wise with the CIA and U.S. corporate plans for their respective nations and were removed in assassinations plotted by Langley....

Southern Sudan has not even settled on a name for the new nation. However, any of the proposed names raises the specter of ambitions by the Israelis and other external actors vying for influence in central Africa. One name proposed is the Nile Republic but that would immediately send an alarm to Cairo and Khartoum concerning the long-term control of the Nile's waters by the new pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli government with its capital in Juba in southern Sudan. Another proposal would call the country "Nilotia," again, problematic, because of the reference to the Nile River.

Another proposed name, Cush, is taken from the Jewish Bible and refers to an ancient kingdom extending from the Horn of Africa to southern Egypt. There is some informed speculation in the region that the Mossad was behind the recent Christmas car bombing outside an Egyptian Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt in order to stir up tensions between Egypt's ten percent Coptic minority and its majority Muslim population. Some Middle East commentators pointed out that remotely-controlled car bombs are virtually unknown in Egypt but have been carried out by CIA/Mossad, Asef SHAWKAT and the infamous White House Murder INC, in Lebanon, where they are then blamed on Hezbollah...through a Kangaroo court room/STL, set up by CIA/MOSSAD/DGSE with fabricated evidence, in order to avenge the blood of 241 US Marines killed in Beirut in 1983, and 58 French Paratroopers, also killed in Beirut in 83......

Mossad is reportedly recruiting agents from the hundreds of southern Sudanese in Israel who have migrated to Israel for employment opportunities....and some of them were captured in Lebanon over the long years of the war in the 70s/80s... Many of these southern Sudanese refugees, mostly found in Tel Aviv, are expected to return to their new nation.

http://africannewsanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/06/feds-wont-charge-blackwater-xe-in-sudan.html

Southern Egypt, the land that supposedly once included Cush [Cush was the mythical grandson of Noah], is a center for Egypt's Copts and wider irredentist claims in the region by an independent Cush [or "Kush"] in southern Sudan could further inflame tensions along the entire stretch of the Nile River...., while Mubarak is asleep at the helm..., dreaming of passing absolute power to his stupid son for another 40 years of an utter Dictatorship, fomented by CIA to keep tabs on Egypt.

Another proposed name for the new nation in southern Sudan, New Sudan, may stir up tensions on the disputed oil-rich territory on the border of old Sudan and "New Sudan," the Abyei region. Continued use of "South Sudan" or "Southern Sudan" would give the impression of a divided country like South and North Korea or South and North Yemen. Continued use of Sudan in the name may also create friction as seen in the Balkans between Greece and Macedonia. Greece has insisted that Macedonia be referred to by the United Nations as "FYROM: former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" because of what it believes are irredentist claims by Macedonia on northern Greece.

However, it is the ambitions of Israel that may pose the greater problem for the land of the Nile headwaters. Israel' expansionist government is fond of using the collection of ancient folk lore and myths known as the "Old Testament" to drive claims to land in the West Bank [which are referred to by the arcane biblical names of Judea and Samaria] but also, increasingly to lands in northern Iraq and Southern Lebanon. On January 28, 2008, WMR reported: "Israeli expansionists, their intentions to take full control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and permanently keep the Golan Heights of Syria and expand into southern Lebanon already well known, also have their eyes on parts of Iraq considered part of a biblical 'Greater Israel.' Israel reportedly has plans to re-locate thousands of Kurdish Jews from Israel, including expatriates from Kurdish Iran, to the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Nineweh under the guise of religious pilgrimages to ancient Jewish religious shrines. According to Kurdish sources, the Israelis are secretly working with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to carry out the integration of Kurdish and other Jews into areas of Iraq under control of the KRG. Kurdish, Iraqi Sunni Muslim, and Turkmen have noted that Kurdish Israelis began to buy land in Iraqi Kurdistan after the U.S. invasion in 2003 that is considered historical Jewish 'property.' The Israelis are particularly interested in the shrine of the Jewish prophet Nahum in al Qush, the prophet Jonah in Mosul, and the tomb of the prophet Daniel in Kirkuk. Israelis are also trying to claim Jewish 'properties' outside of the Kurdish region, including the shrine of Ezekiel in the village of al-Kifl in Babel Province near Najaf and the tomb of Ezra in al-Uzayr in Misan Province, near Basra, both in southern Iraq's Shi'a-dominated territory. Israeli expansionists consider these shrines and tombs as much a part of "Greater Israel" as Jerusalem and the West Bank, which they call 'Judea and Samaria.'"

Oil is also a major factor in the independence of southern Sudan. The new country is rich in oil and with Africa's oil and other resources now highly sought after by competing nations like the United States, China, France and Japan, the traditional strictures issued by the Organization of African Unity upon its founding in 1963 against changing Africa's colonial borders through secession have been overtaken by new realities and a new organization, the African Union, which has now permitted two nations to secede from established nations: Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1993 and now southern Sudan or whatever it will call itself, from Sudan in 2011.

Several nations point to Somaliland, the former British Somaliland that declared itself independent from Somalia in 1991, as the next state in line to achieve recognition. Israeli diplomats have reportedly been in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital, to talk about Israeli recognition of the state. However, it will be the United States and Britain, both of which favor recognition, that will spur Somaliland's quest for international recognition and UN membership. After Somaliland, two other parts of Somalia, Puntland and Jubaland, will likely follow suit.

Some Africa policy habitués of the Council on Foreign Relations and other fronts for the global banking elites are already floating the idea that the Sudan solution may be applied to Africa's other north-south and Islamic-Christian flash points like Nigeria and Ivory Coast. They reason that if majority Christian south Sudan can separate from largely Muslim north Sudan, why not majority Muslim north Ivory Coast from largely Christian south Ivory Coast and Muslim north Nigeria from Christian south Nigeria? And the Democratic Republic of the Congo has long been seen as a prime candidate for "Balkanization" by the Corporate Council on Africa and its affiliates at the Kissingerian Center for Strategic and International Studies.

As for southern Sudan or whatever it will be, after the likes of John Kerry and George Clooney depart from the photo ops in Juba, they will be replaced by non-governmental organization and international aid agency faceless international bureaucrats, the foot soldiers of the global "misery industry" who migrate from killing fields to war zones in search of new tax-free income, walled compounds with servants and Land Rovers, and duty free shopping gigs. Southern Sudan's "independence" will be in name only, with the aid agencies/ CIA-MOSSAD and NGOs calling the shots as they do in Haiti today....

How reassuring to hear that Human Rights Watch is taking such good care of them and wtching over the transition....Soros just gave HRW $100 million to do all this good in the world with...the usual suspects, i.e. NGOs and humanitarian aid fronts who are all CIA and Mossad in disguise have descended on the new balkanized nation of New Sudan - SMOM, AmeriCares, USAID and Blackwater/Xe has been busy making trouble in New Sudan already LINK

The new nation needs a name...New Sudan sounds too generic...maybe Mossadistan? Rothschildistan is already taken - we are laying claim to that in the countries formerly known as Yugoslavia...this dismemberment of Sudan is following the blueprint of what happened to the Balkans and the global corporate buyers are already lining up...

It's necessary to 'triangulate' a center in Politics..... Definition of a center in politics: something that is neither here nor there nor sharp but blurry in the middle!

33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True, What Every Person Should Know…

Conspiracy theory is a term that originally was a neutral descriptor for any claim of civil, criminal or political conspiracy. However, it has come almost exclusively to refer to any fringe theory which explains a historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning. To conspire means “to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end.” The term “conspiracy theory” is frequently used by scholars and in popular culture to identify secret military, banking, or political actions aimed at stealing power, money, or freedom, from “the people”.

...Pakistan will be divided too

[Gen. Kayani was quick to denounce the US drone massacre of 40 tribal leaders meeting in N. Waziristan, after thinking that he had reached some sort of accommodation with the US. Obviously, it has once again become US policy to concentrate on killing the tribal leaders who have reached some sort of agreement with the Pak Army. In a murderous pattern that has repeated over and over in S. Waziristan, since the first drone assassination of Nek Mohammad, Ahmadzai Wazirs have been marked for death, always after signing peace treaties with the govt. In other words, the US military demands that Pakistan's Taliban fight the Pak Army, under penalty of death. Fight the Army or we will kill you.

In the most recent example of the American war upon Pakistan's Wazirs, the following two reports (notice the dates) tell of an Army/Wazir agreement, followed by the deadly Predator strike upon a grand Jirga meeting to demand an end to the war....

Failure to fight the Pak Army is grounds for an American death penalty.]

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=34037&Cat=7&dt=3/3/2011

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011\03\18\story_18-3-2011_pg1_2

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011\03\18\story_18-3-2011_pg1_1

US bends to Pakistan and Turkey's wish.....

http://www.dailypioneer.com/312744/How-US-glosses-over-the-truth.html

US bends to Pakistan and Turkey's wish.....
By M K Bhadrakumar

The unscheduled visit by United States Vice President Joe Biden to Islamabad this week underscores Washington's embarrassment and anxiety that it stands excluded from a regional initiative on Afghan peace process that could be about to take off.... The rapid sequence of events over the past fortnight has taken Washington by surprise....

There have been so many difficult moments in the US-Pakistani relationship through the past nine years since the US invasion of Afghanistan. But Biden's mission can only be compared with the visit to Islamabad by the then-US secretary of state Colin Powell in mid-October 2001, right after the Barbaric inside job of 9/11.... If the Powell mission was seminal to the US invasion of Afghanistan, Biden's mission may well turn out to be formative in sowing the germane seeds of peace/American style....meaning Endless War.....

The trail leading Biden to Islamabad began in Istanbul on Christmas Eve when, as part of Ankara's three-year old initiative, Turkish President Abdullah Gul hosted a fifth summit meeting of the trilateral forum comprising his Pakistani and Afghan counterparts Asif Zardari and Hamid Karzai. The Turks take their mediatory role very seriously and have indeed met with some measure of success in bringing Kabul and Islamabad closer together as neighbors - an endeavor in which the US has repeatedly failed. But then, Turkey's credentials cannot be easily matched.

A home for the Taliban

Turkey is an "ally" of the US, Russia and Pakistan and a long-lost friend of China; it has "normalized" with Iran and Saudi Arabia and is an active Organization of the Islamic Conference member; Turkey has a claim over the "Turkic" heritage of Central Asia; Ankara maintains good equations with various Afghan groups and kept a line open to Taliban leadership in the late 1990s; Turkey is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country with an International Security Assistance Force contingent that acquitted itself well; and Turkey is a generous donor for Afghan reconstruction.

Turkish foreign policy has become extremely innovative and ambitious.... Ankara worked hard to bring Kabul and Islamabad together and it now aspires to scale audacious heights in the Hindu Kush.

Turkey is willing to allow the opening of a "representative office" of the Taliban on its soil. Karzai says the idea came from "dignitaries close to the Taliban". At any rate, it figured in the tripartite summit at Istanbul and Turkey and Pakistan voiced support. Interestingly, Taliban have not so far disowned it, either....

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutglu later said, "We are ready to meet these expectations at every level. Turkey is closely following each step to be taken. We are ready to perform in Turkey in any process sought by the Afghan government and we are also ready to contribute to processes that may be under way outside Turkey."

Just before Karzai left Kabul for Istanbul, he deputed the head of the Afghan High Council for Peace (HCP), Burhanuddin Rabbani, (a former president) to visit Tehran. Within days, Tehran also had another important Afghan visitor, Mohammed Fahim, key figure in the erstwhile Northern Alliance and currently first vice president. (Curiously, a veteran "Afghan hand" from Moscow, Viktor Ivanov, former KGB general who heads the anti-narcotic agency in Russia, also arrived in Tehran at the same time as Fahim.)

Karzai obviously sounded out the Iranians on his project kick-starting the intra-Afghan dialogue. But Tehran's stance appears to be ambivalent, though its stated position is consistently that the continued presence of US troops is aggravating regional tensions.... The visit by Fahim suggests that Tehran is keeping its options open.... The recent fracas over Iran's petroleum supplies to Afghanistan also suggests some friction between Tehran and Kabul. The powerful speaker of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) Ali MOSSAD Larijani is due to visit Kabul shortly....

Ahead of his trip to Tehran, Rabbani also addressed a major regional peace jirga (council) at Nangarhar convened by the government, comprising over 800 delegates drawn from various Pashtun-dominated eastern provinces where Taliban are active.... Rabbani exhorted the Taliban, "This is your country. Afghanistan is your country. Of course, everyone makes mistakes. We need to work together to fix those mistakes."

The jirga decided that the Taliban's reintegration must be in line with Islamic values. "Whatever we do here will be based on Islam," Rabbani said. The jirga took a significant decision that in the reconciliation process Taliban must be given the latitude to "deal with their fellow Afghans rather than with [US-led] coalition forces".

Pakistani turnaround

Following Karzai's return from Istanbul, things have speeded up... Last Tuesday, Rabbani led a 25-member delegation to Islamabad at the invitation of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani... This signified a turnaround by Pakistan, which (and Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami) had been previously derisive about the HCP. Quite obviously, there has been some rethink in Islamabad.

In fact, Pakistani army chief General Parvez Kiani received Rabbani in Rawalpindi on Wednesday. The official press release said they discussed "matters of mutual interest". The fact that Kiani personally staked his prestige becomes very important.

The meeting in Rawalpindi signaled Pakistani military's endorsement of Rabbani's leadership role in any intra-Afghan dialogue. Far more important, however, it contained an unmistakable hint to Washington that with or without US involvement, a dialogue might well commence in a near future, Pakistan is going ahead with a regional initiative involving Karzai, as there is little time to lose, and it is in Washington's interest to be on the same page...

Pakistan has been critical of David Petraeus' surge strategy in Afghanistan and has refused to undertake operations in the North Waziristan tribal area despite repeated US urgings...

Karzai couldn't have made a better choice than Rabbani to spearhead the peace process as the latter has old links with the Taliban dating back to the jihad of 1980s. Pakistan's dealings with Rabbani go even further back to the mid-1970s predating the communist revolution. Rabbani is an Islamic scholar who has an appeal among the Islamic circles in Pakistan, especially the leadership of the Islam Pasand parties such as Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam. Rabbani belonged to the original "Peshawar Seven" during the jihad and had extensive dealings with Pakistani military and intelligence.

Rabbani is also a key Tajik leader heading the Jamiat-i-Islami and it is important to bring Tajiks on board any Afghan settlement. He is a veteran mujahideen leader enjoying wide networking with commanders like Jalaluddin Haqqani who are with the Taliban. Rabbani can be instrumental to putting up a bridge through which controversial figures like Jalaluddin could cross over to mainstream Afghan politics some day.

All-in-all, therefore, Kiani's decision to stake his prestige on Rabbani can be seen as a meaningful shift in the Pakistani strategy...

US fears 'exclusion'

The speed with which Kabul and Islamabad are pushing the proposal for intra-Afghan dialogue has taken the US by surprise. The US maintains that it is still premature to talk to the Taliban. Rabbani's mission to Islamabad, in particular, would have made Washington sit up. The US never took a real liking toward Rabbani due to his staunchly nationalist-Islamist streak, his off-and-on links with Iran and his virulent "anti-American" outlook, which he never cared to hide....

Washington senses "exclusion", while so much is happening. Ironically, it finds itself in the same boat as Tehran.... The US acting special representative for Afghanistan Frank Ruggeiro's quick dash to Islamabad Thursday aimed at taking stock of the flow of events. Ruggeiro was shown full courtesies, including a meeting with Kiani, but Pakistan seems to have held the ground that talks must begin with the Taliban.

Swiftly following up on Ruggeiro's reccy trip, President Barack Obama has deputed Biden to forthwith proceed to Islamabad. Obama's choice of Biden makes careful study. Put simply, Biden has been arguing that Taliban do not pose any real threat to the US national security interests as such and a deal with them makes it possible to bring the war to an end....

Petraeus, on the other hand, hopes to intensify the military operations to degrade the Taliban to a point that they will crawl on their knees and sue for peace on US' terms. Petraeus is in it for the long haul whereas Biden is in great hurry....

There is widespread skepticism within the US security establishment over Petraeus' claim that his strategy is beginning to work. By nominating Biden to lead the mission to Islamabad, Obama seems to indicate he keeps an open mind.

Zardari is visiting Washington this week while Biden is rushing to Islamabad. The strange two-way traffic highlights the depth of US anxiety over the slide in US-Pakistan ties as also its admission that Kiani is the key interlocutor. The murder of the governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab, Salman Taseer, and its after-shocks on the Pakistani society and politics has only muddied the waters of the anxiety in the White House over the slide in US-Pakistan relations in the recent months.

Based on briefings by senior US officials, Washington Post has reported on the main elements of Biden's mission. They are:

Biden will seek a "frank exchange of views and priorities" with Kiani in terms of the Afghan endgame and the "long-term strategy for the region".

The US may not press for urgent commencement of Pakistani military operations in North Waziristan.

Biden will categorically assure that the US has no intentions of mounting cross-border military operations into Pakistani territory....

Biden will ascertain what Pakistan's needs, expectations and demands are in return for extending more cooperation in the war.

The US will offer a new assistance package with military, intelligence and economic components.

The US will strengthen troop presence on the Afghan side of the border with Pakistan and intensify intelligence-sharing arrangements with Pakistan on India's and Israel's activities in Afghanistan....

The report estimated a "significant shift in [US] administration thinking" and Obama's inclination to join the peace process and recognize that Pakistan has an important role, "if not a dominant role", in reconciliation talks with the Taliban....

Washington is, in essence, making a virtue out of necessity, which is of course good politics almost always. Ideally, the US would have liked Pakistan to robustly supplement the US war effort... But the heart of the matter is that if and when intra-Afghan peace talks begin stemming from a regional initiative by Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey (and, perhaps, grudging Iranian acquiescence), the entire US position will cave in and the Obama administration will find itself in an absurd and untenable position of adamantly insisting on pursuing a war which neither the Afghan people nor the regional powers want....

On India....

Change may be afoot in the US-Pakistan relationship. If carried out as recently reported, a new US approach may prove to be a turning point in the nine-year-old Afghan conflict. It may even bring a semblance of peace and stability to the region in the medium term. But New Delhi must watch the developments closely.

The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration would give Pakistan more military, intelligence and economic support after assessing that the US could not afford to alienate Pakistan, a precariously perched nuclear armed state and an indispensible ally in the Afghan conflict. In arriving at that assessment, the White House rejected proposals made by military commanders who, after losing patience with Pakistan’s refusal to go after the Afghan Taliban, recommended that the US deploy ground forces to raid the insurgents’ safe havens inside Pakistan.

The idea is to forge a regional peace with Pakistan’s cooperation. Joe Biden, the US vice president, will be in Islamabad soon to explain the new approach, which aims for a political solution to the Afghan conflict. The US has realized that the war cannot be won without the Pakistani army wiping out the shelter and support the ISI provides the Taliban insurgents. Since that won’t happen, why not buy peace?

The Obama administration faces mounting domestic pressure somehow to bring about a conclusion to its involvement in Afghanistan. Public opinion is now clearly against the war. A presidential election is due in 2012. President Barack Obama would like to show visible progress in Afghanistan by then.

If General Ashfaq Kayani agrees to cooperate with the new US approach after extracting all the goodies he can from the deal, the AfPak region might in fact witness some stability and apparent peace in the medium term. The Pashtun regions of Afghanistan will be effectively under Taliban control with the ISI promising to keep its wards on a leash; Kabul can have a token Afghan government while various warlords continue to manage the rest of the country.

The remaining al-CIAda biggies, who are all inside Pakistan and not in Afghanistan, can be quietly shipped off to Yemen or whichever sanctuary money can buy. The Pakistani army, in perennial search of ‘strategic depth’ against India, will have got what it wanted and the region’s war-weary face might acquire a patina of peace....

In other words, Pakistan’s army has the US over a barrel. General Kayani and his cohorts know well that the Americans want to leave the region without appearing to lose face.... And he is aware that Washington is acutely nervous about an unstable Pakistan that has a nuclear capability within possible reach of terrorists.

Attempts at democratizing and de-radicalizing Pakistan have so far failed. The recent assassination of a liberal governor of Punjab merely underscores that reality. As India knows well and as the Americans have apparently accepted, the only source of stability in Pakistan is the military. Or, to put it another way, there can be no peace within Pakistan or in the region unless the Pakistani army agrees to ensure it.

But where does the new US approach, if implemented and successful over the next couple of years, leave the region as a whole? And where does it place India?

The AfPak region, for better or for worse, will somewhat resemble a status quo ante bellum. In other words, it won’t be all that different from what prevailed in the decade preceding the outbreak of war in 2001. This time, the ISI-backed Taliban will effectively control a large part of Afghanistan while a weak Kabul will go along with the arrangement as long as it can persuade the Taliban not to take over the whole country. Pakistan will once again obtain space outside its borders to shelter radical Taliban as well as other potential insurgents. An international force will continue to guard Kabul while the Americans can see it all in the driving mirror as they depart....

Such a scenario, if it indeed comes about, will not be very different from what Robert Blackwill, a former US ambassador to India, has been suggesting for a while, his latest articulation coming in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Which is that Afghanistan be partitioned de facto; the US gets out of a mess; al-CIAda goes away somewhere; where the USA/Israel/UK axis of evils needs to create hundreds of Tribes With Flags from Quetta to Darfur..., Pakistan is left to its devices; and AfPak moves out of prime time TV.....

As for India, there’s little to do but wait and watch while weighing our options. We must keep looking over our shoulder at the looming presence of China, with which we can’t see eye to eye in many matters, from unsettled borders to its unsettling camaraderie with our hostile neighbor. And we have to watch every move by a Pakistani military that we know needs an India bogey to justify its hold on power...

In a disturbed neighborhood, we probably have to fend for ourselves. In case there is trouble, can we rely on support from new-found partners like the US/Israel when their national interest and domestic pressure call for a quick exit from the region? Who knows. Maybe it’s time to put together a few wise heads to rethink policy options....

The last American Caesars

http://www.kitco.com/ind/willie/jan132011.html

"The danger to America is not just George W Bush, or the power behind the power in USA..., which made it possible for him and others to be in place exactly in time for the most horrific and barbaric crime of the century, the odious inside Job of 9/11 in 2001..., but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him or Obama, or Clinton with the presidency.... It will be easier to limit and undo the follies of a George W Bush presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to an electorate willing to have such men for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than George W Bush, who is a mere symptom of what ails USA and the whole phony, utterly corrupt Western world.... Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of traitors, criminals, crooks and fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a George W Bush. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president...."

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110112/18002112643/congress-once-again-looks-to-extend-patriot-act-with-little-no-debate.shtml

The last American Caesars.... and * The urge to surge: The US's 65-year high and the utter Corruption....starting with the inside Job of 9/11 and the infamous White House Murder INC,.....

Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

by Chalmers Johnson

http://www.methownaturalist.com/20-War,Ecology&Intelligence.pdf

Reviewed by Jim Ash

The United States is a country convinced of its own greatness. And while many would argue this claim, one thing that truly does make America great is its tradition of free expression, and its corresponding capacity for critical self-examination. Although other countries also have legal protections on free speech, none of them have the same anything-goes ethos of pushing the boundaries artistically, and speaking truth to power politically. Even though artists and thinkers who challenge the dominant corporate-state worldview are increasingly sidelined out of
mainstream American culture, they continue to keep this tradition alive, and it is difficult to imagine them ever being silenced.

But one of these challenging voices was lost in November, when Chalmers Johnson died at the age of 79. Johnson was a former University of California historian most famous for a trilogy of books on American militarism and imperialism: Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000); Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004); and Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic (2007). In his latest and last book, a collection of essays called Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope, Johnson encapsulates many of the main themes of his earlier trilogy in a short and very readable format.

The author argues that the United States has been running an empire that spans the globe since soon after the end of World War II, and that the clock is running out on this "American century". Being in the empire business has destroyed American democracy, Johnson maintains, and is in the process of bankrupting the nation. There is also the fact that the US hegemon is constantly creating enemies anew around the world through "blowback", which Johnson defines in an essay in Dismantling the Empire called "Empire v Democracy":

I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. [italics in original] These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries… as well as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners.

For Johnson, the most pernicious feature of blowback is not the damage that these retaliatory actions do to the US or its allies; it is the way in which the public is too ignorant to put them into context. The September 11, 2001 attack was the classic example of this, with most Americans incapable of seeing that US policy - both overt and covert - had filled the pond of hatred which then spawned al-CIAda. Even worse, opportunistic American policymakers were then able to fool and frighten the electorate into backing what had until then been only neocon fantasies: the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive warfare; an endlessly expensive Pentagon drive for "full-spectrum dominance"; and an attempt to remake the Middle East as a Western-style democracy.

These post-9/11 responses have only exacerbated other side effects of imperialism that Johnson identifies: the massive constellation of US bases overseas, which create resentment and potential for blowback around the globe; and the hijacking of the American economy by runaway military spending, which Johnson calls "military Keynesianism".

On the base front, Johnson points out that the Pentagon has more than 700 in 130 foreign countries. Some of these bases are the size of small cities, with their own internal bus systems taking off-duty soldiers to transplanted Burger King and Starbucks franchises. According to Johnson, most of the locals in the lands that host these bases take a dim view of having a little America grafted onto their country. In particular, they resent the Status of Forces Agreements that the US military forces the host countries to sign.

These agreements generally exempt American servicemen from the laws of the country they are based in. Thus, when an American soldier rapes a local woman - something that happens an average of twice per month in Japan, according to Johnson - the local police can't touch him. In theory, the American offender will face harsh justice for the crime from the American military, but Johnson argues that in practice, US soldiers often get only a slap on the wrist for committing heinous crimes overseas.

In "Peddling Democracy", Johnson examines the dismal US record of promoting democracy in South Korea, another country that hosts large numbers of US soldiers. In the author's view, South Korea has become one of the most truly democratic countries in Asia despite US efforts, not because of them. He explains how Washington has backed anti-democratic strongmen in Seoul since the Southern state's founding. In one particularly shameful episode in 1980, the American ambassador encouraged South Korean dictator Major General Chun Doo-hwan to crush a student pro-democracy movement, and South Korean troops under US command were then released to Chun so he could do so. The resulting massacre at Kwangju killed thousands of demonstrators.

Mainstream Western media largely ignored the incident, Johnson says, a task that was made easier by the fact that Washington did everything in its power to stymie a 1989 investigation of the violence by the Korean National Assembly. He contrasts this Western media indifference to the brutality of a US client state with its lavish - and damning - coverage of Beijing's 1989 crackdown on the Tienanmen demonstrators. How, Johnson asks, can Americans have an honest debate about US imperialism when they aren't even aware of it, or understand its consequences if it comes back to haunt them in the form of blowback?

All of this base-building and throwing of American weight around abroad has its cost, which is another of Johnson's key points in Dismantling the Empire: that the empire business is beggaring the United States, and may lead to the country's demise. The huge deficits and astronomical debt load that the US economy is carrying are not supportable, Johnson argues, and things that can't go on forever won't. Borrowing money to finance its empire is a suicide option for America, the author argues, and the country must either change course or go the way of the Roman Empire, which collapsed under a similar mixture of hubris and unaffordable military adventures.

You might think that with a subtitle like America's Last Best Hope, Johnson's book would offer some optimism about America's future, but in reality his prognosis is grim. In the book's final essay, "Dismantling the Empire", he does offer some concrete solutions, such as getting out of Afghanistan and bringing the troops home from garrisons around the world, and taking steps to check the Pentagon's enormous influence on the US economy and political system. But it seems that at the end of his life, Johnson had little hope that any of this would actually happen. As he writes in "Empire v. Democracy":

Whatever future developments may prove to be, my best guess is that the United States will continue to maintain a facade of constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it. Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001-2002. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system – or for military rule, revolution, or simply some new development we cannot yet imagine.

Many critics of the US have been predicting for years that its empire would lead to financial collapse, but the hegemon is still standing for now. Perhaps Johnson was wrong and imperial America can keep operating indefinitely. US policymakers had better hope so. They continue to double down on the empire option, as if the possibility it's a losing hand doesn't even exist. The ruins of all the empires past point to the folly of such arrogance.

Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope....
by Chalmers

* The urge to surge: The US's 65-year high and the utter Corruption....

By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.methownaturalist.com/20-War,Ecology&Intelligence.pdf


If, as 2011 begins, you want to peer into the future, enter my time machine, strap yourself in, and head for the past, that laboratory for all developments of our moment and beyond.

Just as 2010 ended, the American military's urge to surge resurfaced in a significant way. It seems that "leaders" in the Obama administration and "senior American military commanders" in Afghanistan were acting as a veritable CIA/WikiLeaks machine. They slipped information to New York Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins about secret planning to increase pressure in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, possibly on the tinderbox province of Baluchistan, and undoubtedly on the Pakistani government and military via cross-border raids by US Special Operations forces in the new year.

In the front-page story those two reporters produced, you could practically slice with a dull knife American military frustration over a war going terribly wrong, over an enemy (shades of Vietnam!) with "sanctuaries" for rest, recuperation, and rearming just over an ill-marked, half-existent border. You could practically taste the chagrin of the military that their war against... well you name it: terrorists, guerrillas, former Islamic fundamentalist allies, Afghan and Pakistani nationalists, and god knows who else... wasn't proceeding exactly swimmingly. You could practically reach out and be seared by their anger at the Pakistanis for continuing to take American bucks by the billions while playing their own game, rather than an American one, in the region.

If you were of a certain age, you could practically feel (shades of Vietnam again!) that eerily hopeful sense that the next step in spreading the war, the next escalation, could be the decisive one. Admittedly, these days no one talks (as they did in the Vietnam and Iraq years) about turning "corners" or reaching "tipping points," but you can practically hear those phrases anyway, or at least the mingled hope and desperation that always lurked behind them.

Take this sentence, for instance: "Even with the risks, military commanders say that using American Special Operations troops could bring an intelligence windfall, if militants were captured, brought back across the border into Afghanistan and interrogated." Can't you catch the familiar conviction that, when things are going badly, the answer is never "less," always "more," that just another decisive step or two and you'll be around that fateful corner?

In this single New York Times piece (and other hints about cross-border operations), you can sense just how addictive war is for the war planners. Once you begin down the path of invasion and occupation, turning back is as difficult as an addict going cold turkey. With all the sober talk about year-end reviews in Afghanistan, about planning and "progress" (a word used nine times in the relatively brief, vetted "overview" of that review recently released by the White House), about future dates for drawdowns and present tactics, it's easy to forget that war is a drug. When you're high on it, your decisions undoubtedly look as rational, even practical, as the public language you tend to use to describe them. But don't believe it for a second.

Once you've shot up this drug, your thinking is impaired. Through its dream-haze, unpleasant history becomes bunk; what others couldn't do, you fantasize that you can. Forget the fact that crossing similar borders to get similar information and wipe out similar sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War years led to catastrophe for American planners and the peoples of the region. It only widened that war into what in Cambodia would become auto-genocide. Forget the fact that, no matter whom American raiders might capture, they have no hope of capturing the feeling of nationalism (or the tribal equivalent) that, in the face of foreign invaders or a foreign occupation, keeps the under-armed resilient against the mightiest of forces.

Think of the American urge to surge as a manifestation of the war drug's effect in the world. In what the Bush administration used to call "the Greater Middle East," Washington is now in its third and grimmest surge iteration. The first took place in the 1980s during the Reagan administration's anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and proved the highest of highs; the second got rolling as the last century was ending and culminated in the first years of the twenty-first century amid what can only be described as delusions of grandeur, or even imperial megalomania. It focused on a global Pax Americana and the wars that extend it into the distant future. The third started in 2006 in Iraq and is still playing itself out in Afghanistan as 2011 commences.

In Central and South Asia, we could now be heading for the end of the age of American surges, which in practical terms have manifested themselves as the urge to destabilize. Geopolitically, little could be uglier or riskier on our planet at the moment than destabilizing Pakistan - or the United States. Three decades after the American urge to surge in Afghanistan helped destabilize one imperial superpower, the Soviet Union, the present plans, whatever they may turn out to be, could belatedly destabilize the other superpower of the Cold War era. And what our preeminent group of surgers welcomed as an "unprecedented strategic opportunity" as this century dawned may, in its later stages, be seen as an unprecedented act of strategic desperation.

That, of course, is what drugs, taken over decades, do to you: they give you delusions of grandeur and then leave you on the street, strung out, and without much to call your own. Perhaps it's fitting that Afghanistan, the country we helped turn into the planet's leading narco-state, has given us a 30-year high from hell.
So, as the New Year begins, strap yourself into that time machine and travel with me back into the 1980s, so that we can peer into a future we know and see the pattern that lies both behind and ahead of us.

Getting High in Afghanistan..., Heroin, Heroin, Heroin Galore....

As 2011 begins, what could be eerier than reading secret Soviet documents from the USSR's Afghan debacle of the 1980s? It gives you chills to run across Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in October 1985, almost six years after Soviet troops first flooded into Afghanistan, reading letters aloud to his colleagues from embittered Soviet citizens ("The Politburo had made a mistake and must correct it as soon as possible - every day precious lives are lost."); or, in November 1986, insisting to those same colleagues that the Afghan war must be ended in a year, "at maximum, two." Yet, with the gut-wrenching sureness history offers, you can't help but know that, even two years later, even with a strong desire to leave (which has yet to surface among the Washington elite a decade into our own Afghan adventure), imperial pride and fear of loss of "credibility" would keep the Soviets fighting on to 1989.

Or what about Marshal Sergei Akhromeev offering that same Politburo meeting an assessment that any honest American military commander might offer a quarter century later about our own Afghan adventure: "There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels." Or General Boris Gromov, the last commander of the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, boasting "on his last day in the country that ‘[n]o Soviet garrison or major outpost was ever overrun.'"

Or Andrei Gromyko, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, emphasizing in 1986 the strategic pleasure of their not-so-secret foe, that other great imperial power of the moment: "Concerning the Americans, they are not interested in the settlement of the situation in Afghanistan. On the contrary, it is to their advantage for the war to drag out." (The same might today be said of a far less impressive foe, al-Qaeda.)

Or in 1988, with the war still dragging on, to read a "closed" letter the Communist Party distributed to its members explaining how the Afghan fiasco happened (again, the sort of thing that any honest American leader could say of our Afghan war): "In addition, [we] completely disregarded the most important national and historical factors, above all the fact that the appearance of armed foreigners in Afghanistan was always met with arms in the hands [of the population]... One should not disregard the economic factor either. If the enemy in Afghanistan received weapons and ammunition for hundreds of millions and later even billions of dollars, the Soviet-Afghan side also had to shoulder adequate expenditures. The war in Afghanistan costs us 5 billion roubles a year."

Or finally the pathetic letter the Soviet Military Command delivered to the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan on February 14, 1989, arguing (just as the American military high command would do of our war effort) that it was "not only unfair but even absurd to draw... parallels" between the Soviet Afghan disaster and the American war in Vietnam. That was, of course, the day the last of 100,000 Soviet soldiers - just about the number of American soldiers there today - left Afghan soil heading home to a sclerotic country bled dry by war, its infrastructure aging, its economy crumbling. Riddled by drugs and thoroughly demoralized, the Red Army limped home to a society riddled by drugs and thoroughly demoralized led by a Communist Party significantly delegitimized by its disastrous Afghan adventure, its Islamic territories from Chechnya to Central Asia in increasing turmoil. In November of that same year, the Berlin Wall would be torn down and not long after the Soviet Union would disappear from the face of the Earth.

Reading those documents, you can almost imagine CIA director William Webster and "his euphoric ‘Afghan Team'" toasting the success of the Agency's 10-year effort, its largest paramilitary operation since the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration surge in Pakistan and Afghanistan had been profligate, involving billions of dollars and a massive propaganda campaign, as well as alliances with the Saudis and a Pakistani dictator and his intelligence service to fund and arm the most extreme of the anti-Soviet jihadists of that moment - "freedom fighters" as they were then commonly called in Washington.

It's easy to imagine the triumphalist mood of celebration in Washington among those who had intended to give the Soviet Union a full blast of the Vietnam effect. They had used the "war" part of the Cold War to purposely bleed the less powerful, less wealthy of the two superpowers dry. As President Reagan would later write in his memoirs: "The great dynamic of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism - money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever."

By 1990, the urge to surge seemed a success beyond imagining. Forget that it had left more than a million Afghans dead (and more dying), that one-third of that impoverished country's population had been turned into refugees, or that the most extreme of jihadists, including a group that called itself al-CIAda, had been brought together, funded, and empowered through the Afghan War. More important, the urge to surge in the region was now in the American bloodstream. And who could ever imagine that, in a new century, "our" freedom fighters would become our sworn enemies, or that the Afghans, that backward people in a poor land, could ever be the sort of impediment to American power that they had been to the Soviets?

The Cold War was over. The surge had it. We were supreme. And what better high could there be than that?

Fever dreams of military might

With the Soviet Union gone, there was no military on the planet that could come close to challenging the American one, nor was there a nascent rival great power on the horizon. Still, a question remained: After centuries of great power rivalry, what did it mean to have a "sole superpower" on planet Earth, and what path should that triumphant power head down? It took a few years, including passing talk about a possible "peace dividend" - that is, the investment of monies that would have gone into the Cold War, the Pentagon, and the military in infrastructural and other domestic projects - for this question to be settled, but settled it was, definitively, on September 12, 2001.

And for all the unknown paths that might have been taken in this unique situation, the one chosen was familiar. It was, of course, the very one that had helped lead the Soviet Union to implosion, the investment of national treasure in military power above all else. However, to those high on the urge to surge and now eager to surge globally, when it came to an American future, the fate of the Soviet Union seemed no more relevant than what the Afghans had done to the Red Army. In those glory years, analogies between the greatest power the planet had ever seen and a defeated foe seemed absurd to those who believed themselves the smartest, clearest-headed guys in the room....

Previously, the "arms race," like any race, had involved at least two, and sometimes more, great powers. Now, it seemed, there would be something new under the sun, an arms race of one, as the US prepared itself for utter dominance into a distant, highly militarized future. The military-industrial complex would, in these years, be further embedded in the warp and woof of American life; the military expanded and privatized (which meant being firmly embraced by crony corporations and hire-a-gun outfits of every sort); and the American "global presence" - from military bases to aircraft-carrier task forces - enhanced until, however briefly, the United States became a military presence unique in the annals of history.

Thanks to the destructive acts of 19 jihadis, the urge to surge would with finality overwhelm all other urges in the fall of 2001 - and there would be a group ready for just such a moment, for (as the newspaper headlines screamed) a "Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century."

To take full stock of that group, however, we would first have to pilot our time machine back to June 3, 1997, the day a confident crew of Washington think-tank, academic, and political types calling themselves the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) posted a fin de si่ecle "statement of principles." In it, they called for "a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities." Crucially, they were demanding that the Clinton administration, or assumedly some future administration with a better sense of American priorities, "increase defense spending significantly."

The 23 men and two women who signed the initial PNAC statement urging the United States to go for the military option in the twenty-first century would, however, prove something more than your typical crew of think-tank types. After all, not so many years later, after a disputed presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, Dick Cheney would be vice president; I Lewis ("Scooter") Libby would be his right-hand man; Donald Rumsfeld would be secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense; Zalmay Khalilzad, head of the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Department of Defense and then the first post- invasion US ambassador to Afghanistan, as well as ambassador to Iraq and UN ambassador; Elliot Abrams, special assistant to the president with a post on the National Security Council; Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs; Aaron Friedberg, deputy assistant for national security affairs and director of policy planning in the office of the vice president; and Jeb Bush, governor of Florida. (Others like John Bolton, who signed on to PNAC later, would be no less well employed.)

This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think-tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it's the only example so far of a government-in-waiting masquerading as an online think tank. In either case, more than 13 years later, the success of that group can still take your breath away, as can both the narrowness - and scope - of their thinking, and of their seminal document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," published in September 2000, two months before George W Bush took the presidency.

This crew of surgers extraordinaires was considering a global situation that, as they saw it, offered Americans an "unprecedented strategic opportunity." Facing a new century, their ambitions were caught by James Peck in his startling upcoming book, Ideal Illusions: How the US Government Co-opted Human Rights, in this way: "In the [Reagan] era, Washington organized half the planet; in the [Bush era] it sought to organize the whole."

"Rebuilding America's Defenses," if remembered at all today, is recalled mainly for a throwaway sentence that looked ominous indeed in retrospect: "Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." It remains, however, a remarkable document for other reasons. In many ways canny about the direction war would take in the near future, ranging from the role of drones in air war to the onrushing possibility that cyber-war (or "Net-War," as they called it) would be the style of future conflict, it was a clarion call to ensure this country's "unchallenged supremacy" into the distant future by military means alone.

In 1983, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, president Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." It wanted, as he saw it, what all dark empires (and every evildoer in any James Bond film) desires: unchallenged dominion over the planet - and it pursued that dominion in the name of a glorious "world revolution." Now, in the name of American safety and the glories of global democracy, we were - so the PNAC people both pleaded and demanded - to do what only evil empires did and achieve global dominion beyond compare over planet Earth.

We could, they insisted in a phrase they liked, enforce an American peace, a Pax Americana, for decades to come, if only we poured our resources, untold billions - they refused to estimate what the real price might be - into war preparations and, if necessary, war itself, from the seven seas to the heavens, from manifold new "forward operating bases on land" to space and cyberspace. Pushing "the American security perimeter" ever farther into the distant reaches of the planet (and "patrolling" it via "constabulary missions") was, they claimed, the only way that "US military supremacy" could be translated into "American geopolitical preeminence." It was also the only that the "homeland" - yes, unlike 99.9% of Americans before the inside Job of 9/11, they were already using that term - could be effectively "defended."

In making their pitch, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge that the United States was already a military giant among midgets, but they were also eager to suggest as well that our military situation was "deteriorating" fast, that we were "increasingly ill-prepared" or even (gasp!) in "retreat" on a planet without obvious enemies. They couldn't have thought more globally. (They were, after all, visionaries, as druggies tend to be.) Nor could they have thought longer term. (They were 21st century mavens.) And on military matters, they couldn't have been more up to date.

Yet on the most crucial issues, they - and so their documents - couldn't have been dumber or more misguided. They were fundamentalists when it came to the use of force and idolaters on the subject of the US military. They believed it capable of doing just about anything. As a result, they made a massive miscalculation, mistaking military destructiveness for global power. Nor could they have been less interested in the sinews of global economic power (though they did imagine our future enemy to be China). Nor were they capable of imagining that the greatest military power on the planet might be stopped in its tracks - in the Greater Middle East, no less - by a ragtag crew of Iraqis and Afghans. To read "Rebuilding America's Defenses" today is to see the rabbit hole down which, as if in a fever dream, we would soon disappear.

It was a genuine American tragedy that they came to power and proceeded to put their military-first policies in place; that, on September 12 of the year that "changed everything," the PNAC people seized the reins of defense and foreign policy, mobilized for war, began channeling American treasure into the military solution they had long desired, and surged. Oh, how they surged!

That urge to surge was infamously caught in notes on Rumsfeld's comments taken on September 11, 2001. "[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon ... Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq," even though he was already certain that al-CIAda had launched the attack. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'")

And so they did. They swept up everything and then watched as their dreams and geopolitical calculations were themselves swept into the dustbin of history. And yet the urge to surge, twisted and ever more desperate, did not abate.

The Soviet path

To one degree or another, we have been on the Soviet path for years and yet, ever more desperately, we continue to plan more surges. Our military, like the Soviet one, has not lost a battle and has occupied whatever ground it chose to take. Yet, in the process, it has won less than nothing at all. Our country, still far more wealthy than the Soviet Union ever was, has nonetheless entered its Soviet phase. At home, in the increasing emphasis on surveillance of every sort, there is even a hint of what made "soviet" and "totalitarian" synonymous.

The US economy looks increasingly sclerotic; moneys for an aging and rotting infrastructure are long gone; state and city governments are laying off teachers, police, even firefighters; Americans are unemployed in near record numbers; global oil prices (for a country that has in no way begun to wean itself from its dependence on foreign oil) are ominously on the rise; and yet taxpayer money continues to pour into the military and into our foreign wars. It has recently been estimated, for instance, that after spending $11.6 billion in 2011 on the training, supply, and support of the Afghan army and police, the US will continue to spend an average of $6.2 billion a year at least through 2015 (and undoubtedly into an unknown future) - and that's but one expense in the estimated $120 billion to $160 billion a year being spent at present on the Afghan War, what can only be described as part of America's war stimulus package abroad.

And, the talk for 2011 is how to expand the American ground war - the air version of the same has already been on a sharp escalatory trajectory - in Pakistan. History and common sense assure us that this can only lead to further disaster. Clear-eyed leaders, military or civilian, would never consider such plans. But Washington's 30-year high in the region, that urge to surge still coursing through its veins, says otherwise, and it's not likely to be denied.

Sooner than later, Washington, the Pentagon, and the US military will have to enter rehab. They desperately need a 12-step program for recovery. Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end.....

NATO's utterly corrupt politics driving Afghan war

For decades, the USA and Israel have been aiding and arming a pseudo-democratic (but effectively military) regime in Pakistan in the guise of enlisting its support against terrorism, while this aid is being spent by the Pakistani regime on fighting an internal civil war which is designed to create more terrorists (including the heroic predator drone strikes on civilian populations from the safety of Kansas, Nevada, DC, and West Virginia). Both donor and recipient have developed incentives to continue this killing spree in the name of fighting the very "terrorism" whose flames are being fanned by their actions. Consider the synergy between the military-industrial-congressional-think-tank-university-media complex in the US/Israel/NATO countries and the military-jihadi complex in Pakistan, and the Greater Eurasian/African theater of operation for Centcom, Africom, CIA/MOSSAD/AMAN/DIA/MI6/DGSE/BND/CSIS and others..., from Quetta to Darfur and follow the money.... Ask yourself who is gaining by all this....The war on terror has expanded, not shrunk, because it has evolved into a political project... ( PNAC, The Inside Job of 9/11, Al-CIAda, ICC, STL... ) to keep people in a permanent state of insecurity in which they would feel compelled to support policies to protect them against imagined terrors....

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/8342/1/

NATO's utterly corrupt politics driving Afghan war....While AFRICOM/Israel/Sarkozy implement plans for hundreds of Tribes with Flags all over Africa and from Quetta to the Balkans to Darfur....

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22699

By Gareth Porter

http://orientalreview.org/2011/01/03/a-brief-survey-of-nato%E2%80%99s-intelligence-services-in-afghanistan/

WASHINGTON - The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there.....

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/u-s-backs-japan-in-looming-confrontation-with-russia/

In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in Afghanistan because of the influence of United States officials concerned with the alliance, according to a US military officer who was in a position to observe the decision-making process.

"NATO's role in Afghanistan is more about NATO than it is about Afghanistan," the officer, who insisted on anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the subject, told Inter Press Service in an interview.

The alliance would never have been given such a prominent role in Afghanistan but for the fact that the George W Bush administration wanted no significant US military role there that could interfere with their plans to take control of Iraq.

That reality gave US officials working on NATO an opening.

General James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 2003 to 2005, pushed aggressively for giving NATO the primary security role in Afghanistan, according to the officer.

"Jones sold US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on turning Afghanistan over to NATO," said the officer, adding that he did so with the full support of Pentagon officials with responsibilities for NATO. "You have to understand that the NATO lobbyists are very prominent in the Pentagon - both in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Joint Staff," said the officer.

Jones admitted in an October 2005 interview with American Forces Press Service that NATO had struggled to avoid becoming irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. "NATO was in limbo for a bit," he said.

But the 9/11 attacks on the US had offered a new opportunity for NATO to demonstrate its relevance.

The NATO allies were opposed to the US war in Iraq, but they wanted to demonstrate their support for stabilizing and reconstructing Afghanistan. Jones prodded NATO member countries to provide troops for Afghanistan and to extend NATO operations from the north into the west and eventually to the east and south, where US troops were concentrated.

That position coincided with the interests of NATO's military and civilian bureaucrats and those of the military establishments in the member countries.

But there was one major problem: public opinion in NATO member countries was running heavily against military involvement in Afghanistan.

To get NATO allies to increase their troop presence in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, Jones assured member states that they would only be mopping up after the US military had defeated the Taliban. On a visit to Afghanistan in August 2004, Jones said, "We should not ever even think that there is going to be an insurrection of the type that we see in Iraq here. It's just not going to happen."

Reassured by Washington and by Jones, in September 2005 NATO defense ministers agreed formally that NATO would assume command of southern Afghanistan in 2006.

But conflicts immediately arose between the US and NATO member countries over the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Britain, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands had all sold the NATO mission to their publics as "peacekeeping" or "reconstruction" as distinct from counter-insurgency war.

When the Bush administration sought to merge the US and NATO commands in Afghanistan, key allies pushed back, arguing the two commands had different missions. The French, meanwhile, were convinced the Bush administration was using NATO troops to fill the gap left by shifting US troops from Afghanistan to Iraq - a war they strongly opposed.

The result was that one NATO member state after another adopted "caveats" that ruled out or severely limited their troops from actually carrying out combat in Afghanistan.

Even as the Bush administration was assuring its NATO allies that they would not have to face a major Taliban uprising, US intelligence was reporting that the insurgency was growing and would intensify in spring 2006.

General Karl Eikenberry, who had just arrived as commander of all US troops in Afghanistan in 2005, and newly appointed US ambassador Ronald E Neumann were warning Washington that the well-publicized domestic debates in NATO member states over troop commitments were "generating a perception of NATO political weakness", as Neumann recalls in his memoirs on Afghanistan published in 2009.

Neumann wrote that both he and Eikenberry believed "the insurgents would see ISAF's expansion and the US contraction as the moment to rekindle the war".

But Eikenberry assured the news media that the insurgency was under control. In a December 8, 2005 press briefing at the Pentagon, Eikenberry asserted that the more aggressive Taliban tactics were "very much a sign of weakness".

Asked if he wasn't concerned that the situation in Afghanistan was "sliding towards an Iraqi scenario", Eikenberry replied: "We see no indications that such is the case."

A few weeks later, the Taliban launched the biggest offensive since its regime was ousted in 2001, seizing control of much of Helmand, Kandahar and several other southern provinces.

Eikenberry, clearly under orders from Rumsfeld, continued to carry out the policy of turning the south over to NATO in mid-2006. He was rewarded in early 2007 by being sent to Brussels as deputy chairman of NATO's Military Committee.

Eikenberry acknowledged in testimony before the US Congress in February 2007 that the policy of turning Afghanistan over to NATO was really about the future of NATO rather than about Afghanistan. He noted the argument that failure in Afghanistan could "break" NATO, while hailing the new NATO role in Afghanistan as one that could "make" the alliance.

"The long view of the Afghanistan campaign," said Eikenberry, "is that it is a means to continue the transformation of the alliance."

The Afghanistan mission, Eikenberry said, "could mark the beginning of sustained NATO efforts to overhaul alliance operational practices in every domain." Specifically, he suggested that NATO could use Afghan deployments to press some member nations to carry out "military modernization".

But Canadian General Rick Hillier, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan from February to August 2004 and was later chief of staff of the Canadian Armed Forces from 2005 to 2008, wrote in his memoir A Soldier First, published in 2009, that NATO was an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.

He recalled that when it formally accepted responsibility for Afghanistan in 2003, NATO had "no strategy, no clear articulation of what it wanted to achieve" and that its performance was "abysmal".

Hillier said the situation "remains unchanged" after several years of NATO responsibility for Afghanistan. NATO had "started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the alliance," Hillier wrote.

"Afghanistan has revealed," wrote Hillier, "that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing" ....

From Cryptome, another 9/11 Commission interview, this time with Captain Charles Joseph Leidig, U.S.N., Commandant of Midshipmen, U.S. Naval Academy, the guy in charge of defending that part of the United States from attack on September 11, and a man who can't seem to recall much of anything, describing what appears to be a madhouse (my emphasis in red; 'a small light plane'?):

"Shortly after he received the watch from General Winfield, he saw a report on
one of the big news stations, a small light plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
They had live television feed from multiple TV stations. Gardner, he recalled flew as
crew on an A-6 and the discussed when they saw and they started the internal JCS
notification list, to include the Chairman's office. They also notified the office of the
Secretary of Defense. Either he or Commander Gardner would have made the
notification calls. He reported that a small airplane crashed into one of the two towers of
the World Trade Center.
He was prompted that the Senior Operations Officer went to gather up as much
information as he could and he recalled that one call was made to the FAA. He thought
Commander Gardner actually made that call. FAA had a report of a hijacking on a plane
that had departed Boston. They asked if FAA needed any assistance. The answer was

no, the pilot had called in and said everything was under control and he was going to land

at New York shortly. This call was made to the FAA Operations Center

There was something unusual, he and Gardner thought, that a light plane had
crashed into the WTC and that there was a report of a hijacking. This is all before the
second plane impacted the other WTC tower."

and:

"Concerning the NOIWON call (a Washington area-specific watch officer
network that links key 24-hour watches, including the White House Situation Room), he
does not recall who called first. It is not uncommon for the White House to call first,
while' the NMCC is making its notifications. That, and most other calls to the NMCC
were seeking whatever additional information was available. He recalled no situational
awareness that came from the NOrwON call.
He was told that the SIEC was convened between 0920 and 0925 and was asked
if he was aware of any other aircraft out there, lost, missing or hijack. He did not recall
being concerned about any other aircraft at the point that the SIEC was convened. The
only plane he knew about was the one that was going to land in NYC and that had not
been resolved.
He recalled that FAA only had one STU-III and they could not stay up on a
conference on that phone .

He had no awareness of AA 77 coming back to Washington D.C. His first

awareness was a call from the SECDEF's three-star aide who asked if he felt the

explosion in the building and asked Leidig to investigate, it might be a terrorist attack."

and:

"No one talked Force Protection before the Pentagon was struck, that he recalled.
[9/11 Classified Information]
He did not recall phone calls to NORAD prior to the advent of the SIEC. At
this point Stafftumed to the transcript of the Air Threat Conference Call (ATCC) and
recalled for him his update. His reference to AA 11 he recalled was because that incident
was open and not resolved; he said on the conference that AA11 was headed for
Washington. He thought his reference was that "it was being confirmed" not that "it has
been confirmed." He thought the information came from FAA. They're trying to figure
out where the hijacked aircraft was going.
There was not a separate hijack conference, he said. Staff then referred to such
as an FAA conference. He does not recall being on any such conference.
Staff recounted for Liedig, in reference to the SIEC, that NORAD
recommended the reconvening of the conference as an ATCC. He thought the SIEC was
the right conference, the ATCC had cold war implications and brought a different group
of people to a conference.

The plane that hit the Pentagon was not the same plane that was under

discussion in the Air Threat Conference Call. The fact that he transitioned to an ATCC,
in retrospect, he thought was because he perceived an air threat at that time. He recalled
that they were notifying people continuously and did not recall who was notified that the
ATCC was convened, but was confident that notification was made. He recalled very
clearly being frustrated that he could not keep FAA in the conference. They would ask
questions, FAA would not be there, and they would have to redial them. He thought it
would have been the ADDO or the SOO who was trying to keep FAA in the conference
by calling their watch center; he referred to it as an ops center.
[EGHet He did not recall if the VCJCS was in the ATCC conference, by telephone. He
said they would have been trying to do so; he is a member of the conference."

and:

"He described his situation as a multi-tiered battle, to include knowing about
consequence management underway elsewhere in the building. He recalled his

situational awareness on the Pentagon crash as being an aircraft was from CNN.

Leidig is certain that Winfield returned after the Pentagon was hit. He is not
certain of Winfield's arrival in relationship with the Vice Chairman.
The only specific situational awareness he recalled was on a hijacked airplane
that was a threat to Chicago. He was referred to a NORAD report of "a possible fourth"
aircraft. He did not recall where the term "fourth" came from. He was not aware of any
other continuous open line with either the FAA or with NORAD.

and:

"They did not have the thought in the Command Center to put all the aircraft in

the United States on the ground. There was no discussion about that event before it

occurred.

Leidig did not know that there were fighter aircraft in CAP over DC before
discussions at the national level about that need. He did remember discussions about
fighter support for Air Force One, in the conference and not on a separate line.
He can't say that there was a separate source for the PEOC report of an inbound
aircraft. He equated that report to the same plane that had been headed to Chicago.
He deferred to the transcript of the Air Threat Conference for definitive
information as to when FAA was on the Conference. He did not recall anyone coming in
from another room or calling out himself to bring FAA into the conference.
Concerning Andrews, he thought Commander Gardner might have been
handling any such calls. He recalled that General Meyers was using available phones to
talk to senior officers at multiple locations. He and other Generals/Admirals were
working issues using a bank of available phones. The Air Threat Conference was on
speaker so everyone could hear. He recalled the room going quiet when the shootdown
language came over the Conference.

Concerning the threat to DC, the NMCC was convinced, he recalled that there

was an inbound threat to the Pentagon. He sense was that there were fighters in the air

and they were trying to get them focused on the inbound threat. He had a hard time

getting someone to tell him about the fighters."

and:

"Concerning the first registering of the Vice President's shoot down language.
He recalled that it was more specific than what is registered in the transcript at this point.
It is more of a question than an order. He doesn't think that they have given the order at
that point.
He recalled language that when a plane got 15 minutes outbound (he meant
inbound) they had authority to engage. That language apparently came during a blank
portion of the tape. [Staff Note. The taping device that day was an analog device that
required that someone pay attention and periodically flip the cassette or insert a new one.
His recollection was, on reading the transcript, that there were conversations not
recorded.] He thought he was still the DDO at this point, not General Winfield. [He later
recalled that there wasn't that much missing from the transcript.]

He recalled a discussion about what they were going to do with any future

threats and that's when the Vice President came forward with other specificity.

However, the "pin drop" moment was when the "15 minutes" language came over the

speaker phone. All heads in the room turned toward the speaker, he recalled."

and:

"General Winfield took over at some point in relation to the report of the
Pennsylvania crash. [Crash was at 10:03, so any reporting would be after that time.]
There was a question as to whether the military shot down the airplane that he
believes was not captured on the transcript. The issue was who's talking to those pilots
right now so we can talk to them and find out if the fighters shot down an aircraft. His
recall was that the fighters overhead were Andrews fighters."

and:

"There was never a doubt, he said, that the President was in control that day. His
specific reference was to the Vice President's language, "I've confirmed ... " He also
knows from his job that the President is always capable of constant communication with
the national leadership. He again reaffirmed that there was never a doubt in his mind."

Leidig was the acting Deputy Director for Operations, sitting in for Brigadier General Montague Winfied, who was conveniently absent until later. It looks like the Joint Chiefs arranged for this completely unprepared guy - he had been qualified to do this job for a month - to guard the chicken coop while the fox went egg hunting.....

[Just look at the line of tired, dirty, hungry, hard-working Afghan laborers, waiting for their pay-checks. The United States is trying to do in Afghanistan today what it should have done there twenty-years ago, pay local laborers a decent salary repairing all the stuff destroyed in our latest war there. We are such stingy, opportunist bastards that we do our best to get everything at "bottom dollar," or free. In the case of Afghanistan, we had no problem at all throwing money at the Afghan "mujaheddin," to help them fight against the Soviet invaders that we brought into their midst with Brzezinski's deception, but the minute that the last Russian soldier crossed that bridge we washed our hands of the Afghan problem. We got their country and about a million of their citizens blown to hell, but we then left them all to rot in that hell we created and wondered, ten years afterward, why they were still pissed at us....then, we re-invented and re-invigorated Al-CIAda....and engineered the barbaric Inside Job of 9/11.....

Pay up, Uncle Sam. Stop looking for new wars to start until you have cleaned-up your previous messes, wars, assassinations and utter war crimes.....]

The common view of history we are programmed to believe is that world events (wars, revolutions, terrorism) are a series of unrelated incidents that happen by mere coincidence. Critical examination shows that this is not the case. We are entering into a new system of neo-feudalist control -- a global totalitarian government that is administered through a form of communistic rule or scientific socialism, but is fascistic at the top -- by the big multinational corporations in tandem with the ZIOCON Anglo-American establishment described by former Georgetown professor and CFR archivist, Carroll Quigley, in his 1966 epic, Tragedy & Hope.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/03/BA5N1H3G12.DTL&tsp=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&feature=player_embedded&v=dfhLJ7Kw8xE

[ There have to be ways to bring a negotiated end to the Afghan war, which roll-back forces that have been aligned and brought into confrontation. One thing is certain that must come to light in any effort to bring Pakistan and the United States closer together, is that both spy agencies have empowered gangs to represent their state interests... It is true that Pakistan has created the Afghan Taliban as a surrogate army, but it is equally true that the United States has used its own Pakistani Taliban, as well as its anti-Taliban forces as instruments of US policy. Unwinding the webs of treachery and deception necessary to service these criminal outfits will require both law enforcement and citizen informers.... Undoing the criminal networks that undermine all of Pakistani society is the only thing that will save Pakistan. Getting local groups to become active in saving the country is the first step to saving democracy from the monsters.... The monsters want to unleash the bloodbath to purify the unbelievers in the name of religion, even though their ideas bear little resemblance to the messages of the Prophets. Getting to the point where the world community wants to help Pakistan again will bring-in foreign help with experience in dismantling a paramilitary subculture.... Pakistan cannot win its war against America's pawns without American help.... America cannot win a single battle against the Taliban without Pakistan's help. Pakistan has profited by other nations trying to extricate themselves from the American paramilitary aid trap.... Colombia has advanced its struggle past the dangerous confrontational stage (which Pakistan is now in), to the next stage in disarmament and demobilization of paramilitaries. Surviving the explosive pressures which have been released fighting America's counterinsurgency is the hardest part of it all....]

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/01/01/networks-of-empire-and-realignments-of-w

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/060309.html

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/010711.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7wXhN5h_Pg&feature=player_embedded#!

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/5/catch-22-in-pakistan/


.....

Susan Lindauer, author of Extreme Prejudice, is the first CIA asset to have spoken out, under her own name and for the record, on Israeli complicity in 9/11, the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and the specific, detailed foreknowledge of the time, target, and means of the 9/11 attacks held throughout the months prior to 9/11 by the CIA in general and Lindauer's CIA handler, Richard Fuisz, in particular. She has also exposed her first-hand knowledge of pre-war intelligence and negotiations showing that Iraq was willing to give the US "anything it asked" and that the war was therefore--from the perspective of US interests--not only utterly unnecessary, but wildly counterproductive. Lindauer's evidence points strongly to 9/11 being a coup d'etat by hard-line Zionists determined to steer the US into a self-destructive war on Israel's enemies.

Listen to my complete interview with Susan Lindauer here. Below is a transcript of the first half of the interview.

Kevin Barrett, PhD

www.truthjihad.blogspot.com

www.truthjihad.com

Barrett
I understand that you had some 9/11 foreknowledge, but were actually busted for trying to explain to the Bush Administration through your cousin Andrew Card, that invading Iraq was insane, that the Iraqis were basically going to do anything we wanted anyway--they'll agree to anything for peace--and that there would be a terrible resistance and a terrible war if there was an invasion. And for that very accurate and prescient warning, they went after you.

Lindauer
Well, you have a very good grasp of this issue, I will tell you. It is a complicated story. I was one of the very few (CIA) assets covering Iraq before the war. And I had established contact with the Iraqi embassy at the United Nations in New York back in August of 1996. And for seven years before the invasion, I was what they call a "back channel" to Iraq on the question of terrorism. That was my foremost priority. This was covert in the sense that it was covert to the West. But the Iraqis were fully informed as to who I was and what I was doing and what my purpose was. My motivation was that I hated the United Nations sanctions. I hated the genocidal consequences and suffering for the Iraqi people, most truly and genuinely--that was very sincere. And they knew it. And both sides knew my politics. In fact, the CIA had come to me knowing my politics and said "hey, why don't you try to help us." They co-opted me--they did--but I agreed to be co-opted. We all understood each other. And that's very important for what happened.

Barrett
That's not necessarily a bad thing. There is a role for people who are intermediaries between warring parties and who try to make peace. And it sounds like that's what you were doing.

Lindauer
Yes indeed. And both sides understood my politics, that I wanted to help end the sanctions. And the CIA was very adamant that Iraq had to meet certain criteria in order for that to happen. And my contribution from the very first days was on terrorism. Our team started what we called preliminary talks with Baghdad in November of 2000, two years before the United Nations got involved. Our team started back channel talks to get Iraq's agreement on the weapons inspections. And over the next fifteen months, my supervisor, Richard Fuisz (pronounced "fuse"), through talks at the Iraqi embassy, mostly with Iraq's ambassador Dr. Sayeed Hassan, and with other senior Iraqi diplomats, on what conditions Iraq would have to accept in order to resume the weapons inspections. And at that point we had begun to develop a comprehensive peace framework which extended great support to anti-terrorism. Iraq agreed to let the FBI come into Baghdad and operate a task force that would have authority--this was before 9/11 ever happened! Nine months before 9/11 happened, Iraq agreed to have the FBI come into Baghdad with the authority to conduct terrorism investigations, interview witnesses, make arrests. After 9/11, Iraq agreed to give financial records on al-Qaeda to the United States. BUT the United states didn't want to take the records.

Barrett
It makes you wonder why not.

Lindauer
Isn't that an interesting question.

Barrett
It leads me to (my next question): You apparently had some kind of foreknowledge of 9/11. Can you explain to us what that was?

Lindauer
Yes. This is a very interesting thing, and I'm glad...I hope your audience will pay attention to this. We absolutely expected 9/11 to happen. And there's a subtlety here that I hope your audience will appreciate. In April and May of 2001 I was summoned to my CIA handler's office and told that I needed to confront the Iraqi diplomats at the United Nations, through my back channel, with a demand for any fragment of intelligence regarding airplane hijackings and/or airplane bombings. And over the summer, that progressed to a deep belief that there was going to be an airplane hijacking attack, and some sort of aerial strike, on the World Trade Center. We talked about this in our one-on-one meetings practically every week. Just so we are clear, this was not a one-time conversation. This was a major focus of our efforts. Richard (Fuisz, Lindauer's CIA handler) was very worried about it, very agitated about it, how Iraq must give us this intelligence. Now, I don't mean to patronize you, but I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of deniability. I do not think that Richard Fuisz knew all the details of 9/11. However, he knew enough. My book Extreme Prejudice goes into the conversations that we had in great detail. And he knew the timing of the attack. By August 2001, Richard was telling me not to go into New York City because this attack was immanent. And on the day of FBI Director Robert Mueller's confirmation hearings, which I think was August 2nd--in my book it's very clear, I've checked all the dates--Richard Fuisz told me that the attack was immanent. And I said, well, I'm going up to New York to ask my Iraqi sources about this again. And he said "Don't go to New York, it's too dangerous, I don't want you going there again." And I said "I'm just going up this weekend, and I promise I will not go back to New York." And that's how close this was. They knew a great deal. And what was interesting is that after 9/11, I get arrested, and he gets thirteen million dollars in payoffs. (laughs)

Barrett
(laughing) Oh boy. That's amazing. They arrested you, because they were probably concerned about you revealing the contents of your conversations with Richard, among other things.

Lindauer
Oh yes, absolutely. And the fact that there was a peace option on the table that had been developed over a two year period before the war, a comprehensive peace framework. It included cooperation on anti-terrorism; it included the weapons inspections, of course--you already knew that; and it included Iraq's commitment to donate economic reconstruction--donate is not the right word--to dedicate economic reconstruction contracts to United States corporations with preferential treatment, preferential contracts in telecommunications, health care, pharmaceuticals, and transportation. This was a comprehensive peace framework! We covered everything! We covered a lot. And nobody even knows about this!

Barrett
That's amazing. There have been general reports of this nature, including post-9/11, right up to the eve of the invasion, there have been reports that Saddam Hussein was willing to give the US basically everything it wanted to hold off the invasion.

Lindauer
Yes. Yes.

Barrett
That leads to the question: Why do you think, given that you recognize just how insane this invasion was, how completely unnecessary--the Iraqis were caving as far as they had to cave anyway--what was the point?

Lindauer
Yes, literally, Iraq said to me: "What is it the United States wants? Anything that the United States asks for, we will give them. Just tell us what it is!" When I was on a trip to Baghdad, they offered to buy one million American-made automobiles every year for ten years. And (an Iraqi diplomat) said to me, "Look, Susan, if ten years isn't enough, we'll make it twenty years."

Barrett
You know, Susan, you're kind of ruining Saddam Hussein's posthumous reputation as somebody who stood up to the U.S.!

Lindauer
He was more harsh on terrorists than we were.

Barrett
He didn't get along with al-Qaeda, and he didn't get along with Islamists of any kind, including the Iranians.

Lindauer
That's right.

Barrett
You would have thought that the U.S. would have just kept running him as an American puppet. He got his start as a CIA hit man, apparently.

Lindauer
Yes indeed.

Barrett
So why, why this insane insistence on going to war with Iraq--a war that has killed one and a half million innocent Iraqis and destroyed that country. What was the purpose of it?

Lindauer
It was so incredibly stupid. And 9/11...9/11 could have been used at the start...9/11 was a tragedy, a terrible, terrible tragedy, but 9/11 could have accomplished great good. Because right after 9/11 Iraq went into high mode of giving. They were offering us everything we wanted: Financial records on al-Qaeda, proof of a Middle Eastern link to what we used to call the inter-Arab group of terrorists, which was actually an amalgamation of several different terrorist factions, coalesced into al-Qaeda. They were willing to prove that there was a Middle Eastern link to the Oklahoma City bombing and the first attack on the World Trade Center, and those included financial documents, bank records...we could have tracked the money that's financing terrorism around the world. Instead what we do is, we create an enemy. Because it looks better--the politicians could go grandstand. As a former (CIA) asset I can assure you, they don't actually do anything on terrorism. They give speeches. They go wave their hands in the parades. But they don't do anything to contribute to anti-terrorism efforts. But the people have been fooled by their showmanship and their grandstanding and their spectacle. It's like a circus performance now! In fact, before 9/11, there were 200 to 300 terrorists in the world who wanted to attack America. Now, after 9/11 and after the war in Iraq and after the war on Afghanistan, there are only about 2000 to 3000 individuals whose entire focus of life is revenge and coming into the United States and attacking us. That's only 3000 people. The way I look at it, this is like a high school auditorium that you could fill with the potential terrorists. That's it! This is an invention! We've made this up!

Barrett
Right. Very well put. I've often explained to people that there was no real terrorist threat pre-9/11, and that for every one person pre-9/11 who was bent on doing harm to the US, there must be a great many today, because of all the terrible things that have gone on since 9/11.

Lindauer
Yes.

Barrett
So the question then, is...is it just sheer total incompetence and stupidity and grandstanding and egotism--I'm sure all of that contributes to it, but---uh...well, frankly, Susan, my take on all of this is that 9/11 was a Mossad operation, that it was of course done through Cheney's office. There were no hijackings. The guys that they blamed for it were not terrorists at all. They weren't even on the planes. There is not a shred of evidence that any of these guys were on those planes, nor is there a shred of actual evidence that there were any hijackings. Instead, we had a military operation that was essentially a Zionist coup d'état by the Likkud faction that wanted to destroy Iraq so it would never be a threat to Israel. A prosperous Iraq, allied to the US, would actually be terrible for Israel. That's why they wouldn't take the deals that you were brokering. Care to comment?

Lindauer
I think that you are--I do believe in the hijackings, but I believe in everything else that you have just said. One of the things that came out right after 9/11: I've often been asked by people what my CIA handler Richard Fuisz's source was for the 9/11 attack. And he told me briefly, he let it slip. Immediately after the attack, when we were all in a state of shock, he said to me...the first building had collapsed, but it was before the second building collapsed. This is a very important time frame. He made reference to video tape, which by the way was not released to the public until the next day, but right after 9/11 Richard Fuisz already knows about this video tape! Right after the attack--the first building has collapsed, the second one is still standing--and we're both talking in the living room, we're both shouting--I'm in my living room, he's in his living room, and we're shouting at the televisions--and he blurts out to me: "Susan, how many times do you think a camera is cued up waiting for a car accident to occur?" He said, "What do you think are the odds that those two people were just standing on the sidewalk with a video camera waiting patiently for the plane to hit the building?" And he said, "Those are Mossad agents. They knew that the World Trade Center was about to get hit, and they were waiting there for it to happen so they could record it and put it out in the media." Now this is before it has even come out in the media. He identifies them as Mossad agents, and I believe--I'm convinced--that that was the source of our knowledge of al-Qaeda. But what you guys don't know, which I will throw out to you, which comes out in my book, is that from April and May of 2001 onwards, Richard Fuisz instructed me to threaten the Iraqis with war. Now everybody assumes that the war stuff came after 9/11. But it didn't. They had decided months before 9/11 ever happened that as soon as this attack occurred, this would be the motivation for the war. So they absolutely knew that this attack was coming. They knew that it was going to be in late August or September. And that opens up a whole new dynamic proving what you have just said: That it was a Mossad conspiracy, that there was complicity...maybe that's a better word, complicity...I'm going to go a little softer on the language than you. Mossad complicity.

Barrett
I would argue that it's a little more than complicity--that the demolitions of the three tallest buildings ever taken down in controlled demolitions required immense skill and military specialization and so on...

Lindauer
Oh yes, when I say complicity, I include that in it. Yes. I believe in the detonations. In fact...do I have time to tell you one story before break?

Barrett
Tell it, go for it.

Lindauer
While I was writing my book, I had a high-ranking State Department official, who has a very very high, top-top-top security classification, and I cannot name him for you because I don't want to hurt his reputation. He's close to retirement, he's going to have a pension--they would crush him if he was ever exposed, I suspect. He thinks it too. He says that a couple of weeks before 9/11, at the end of August, for about two weeks, strange vans were arriving at the World Trade Center at three o' clock in the morning. They were staying from about three o' clock to about four-thirty or five. They were coming in for a brief period. And he swore to me that he personally had investigated the janitorial services, and he said "I know first hand how many employees the janitorial service had, what their trucks looked like, what their revenues were like, where they lived." He said "we know the addresses." We are confident that none of the people from the janitorial services were tied to these trucks. It had never happened before, it was a unique thing. This was not a constant thing like over a six month period. It was a strange anomaly right before (the attack on) the World Trade Center. And he was convinced that this was government-level thermite, government-level weapons, that had been put into either the stairwells or the elevator shafts. And he is convinced that this is when it happened.....