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Bloggingheads Video

2008-12-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

Jack Balkin of Yale, pictured, and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago on whether members of the Bush White House should face trial.

Traducing Solzhenitsyn

2008-08-04T03:37:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com Widgets

by Daniel J. Mahoney
Copyright (c) 2004 First Things (August/September 2004).

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great souls of the age. He is also among its most maligned and misunderstood figures. It is hard to think of another prominent writer whose thought and character have been subjected to as many willful distortions and vilifications over the past thirty years.

Things were not always so. Until the early 1970s Solzhenitsyn was widely admired in the West as a dissident and as a critic of Communist totalitarianism. On the left he was appreciated as a defender of human rights against an undeniably illiberal and autocratic regime. But with the publication of works such as August1914 (1972), the Letter to the Soviet Leaders, and the cultural-spiritual anthology From Under the Rubble (both published in the West in 1974), it became impossible to claim Solzhenitsyn as a champion of left-liberal secularism. He continued to be, of course, a ferocious critic of the ideological “lie” and a tenacious defender of fundamental human liberties. But this antitotalitarian writer clearly did not believe that a free Russia should become a slavish imitator of the secular, postmodern West. It became increasingly clear that he was both an old-fashioned patriot and a committed Christian—but here also he was perplexing to some, because he adamantly rejected “blood and soil” nationalism, expressed no desire to return to the Tsarist past, and asked for no special privileges for Christianity in a post-totalitarian Russia.

Some of his critics soon reasoned that if Solzhenitsyn was not a conventional liberal, then he must be an enemy of liberty. The legend grew that he was, at best, a “Slavophile” and a romantic critic of decadent Western political institutions, and that he was, at worst, an authoritarian and even, perhaps, an anti-Semite and a theocrat. Even those Western critics who admired Solzhenitsyn’s courage in confronting the Communist behemoth and who drew upon his dissections of ideological tyranny tended to slight his contribution to the renewal of the spiritual foundations of human liberty in a post-totalitarian world. In a memorable article published in Commentary in 1985 (“The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”), Norman Podhoretz praised Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Communist and as the author of The Gulag Archipelago, while largely taking for granted the accuracy of the caricature about him that had taken shape over the previous decade and a half. Podhoretz simply assumed that Solzhenitsyn was an authoritarian or anti-democratic thinker, though he did acquit Solzhenitsyn, a strong supporter of the state of Israel, of the charge of anti-Semitism. He also cavalierly dismissed as a literary failure The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus that explores the events leading up to the Bolshevik revolution. (Podhoretz was in no position to do so at the time since he did not have access to any of the finished volumes of that great work.) The anti-Communist Podhoretz, however, never denied Solzhenitsyn’s greatness or his enduring commitment to human dignity.

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Chomsky Caroussel

2008-07-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com Widgets

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler

2008-06-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

Banking With Hitler Part 1 of 5

Banking With Hitler Part 2 of 5

Banking With Hitler Part 3 of 5

Banking With Hitler Part4 of 5

Banking With Hitler Part 5 of 5

Sutton makes that case that several Wall Street firms were deeply involved in financing the rise to power of the National Socialist German Workers Party (i.e., the Nazis) in pre-World War II Germany. Sutton shows that first, Wall Street financed the German cartels in the 1920's, second, that Wall Street indirectly financed Hitler and the Nazi Party, prior to their rise in power in Germany, third, that Wall Street firms profited from the build-up to war and the war itself, even after the U.S. got involved, and finally, that U.S. firms worked to cover up their complicity after the war.

This book is the third in a trilogy. The two other books chronicle Wall Street's involvement in the rise of FDR and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies of businessmen like Henry Ford is no secret, so it's surprising that this subject gets so little play. Given modern leftist thought on big business, one would think that they would leap at the chance to link Wall Street to the Nazis. The reason they don't is no doubt due to Sutton's larger effort at showing that Wall Street supported "corporate socialism" not only in Germany, but in Russia and the U.S. as well. Since leftists still idealize FDR and the brutal regime that arose to become the U.S.S.R., they probably prefer to forget about the businessmen who connect them all. Sutton himself is no anti-business left-winger, instead he is a conservative concerned with the actions of an "unelected power elite", controlling events/governments/societies behind the scenes, to the detriment of freedom everywhere.

It makes for rather dry reading, but Sutton goes into extensive details about the persons, funds and timelines that show the deep connection between certain American Big Businesses and the Nazis. Why would Big Business embrace such a horrid political movement? Although Sutton does not go into details about motivation, there is a good case to be made that many businesses were not fond of the untrammeled free market and instead yearned for the security of government guaranteed profits, regardless of the expense to others in terms of loss of freedom. These businesses saw themselves as the contractors running the government machinery of what was thought to be the inevitable march to socialism. Sutton doesn't mention it, but many in the early twentieth century thought that some form of socialism was unavoidable, and that it was a choice between that and corporate domination through monopoly. Thus these businesses saw themselves as merely working towards what was almost pre-destined to happen, and ensuring that they would be the ones running the show and reaping the benefit.

The book turns a bit conspiratorial in the end. Sutton invokes the Kennedy Assassination, the Korean War and Vietnam War and the Council on Foreign Relations all in an attempt to suggest that we are being ruled by an unelected power elite, bent on societal domination at all costs, in the name of profit. There's no need to invoke conspiracy, though. The selfish acts of business men, tempted by access to the levers of power, is as good an explanation as any.

The case that Sutton makes is compelling. If his evidence is able to withstand scrutiny, it's hard to come to any other conclusion than that Big Business was willing to deal with the worst of the worst in order to profit via the coercive powers of government.

Chase Bank collaboration with the Nazis Part One

Chase Bank collaboration with the Nazis Part Two

Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who began investigating this collaboration, He found the Chase were not alone. His archives reveal that both British and American bankers continued to do business with Hitler, even as Germany was invading Europe and bombing London. Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan?
Gold that had been looted from the national banks of Austria, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, or melted down from the Reichsbank holdings of the teeth fillings, spectacle frames, cigarette cases and lighters, and wedding rings of the murdered Jews.

John Adams (HBO Miniseries) (2008)

2008-06-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

Based on David McCullough's bestselling biography, the HBO miniseries John Adams is the furthest thing from a starry-eyed look at America's founding fathers and the brutal path to independence. Adams (Paul Giamatti), second president of the United States, is portrayed as a skilled orator and principled attorney whose preference for justice over anti-English passions earns enemies. But he also gains the esteem of the first national government of the United States, i.e., the Continental Congress, which seeks non-firebrands capable of making a reasoned if powerful case for America's break from England's monarchy. The first thing one notices about John Adams' dramatizations of congress' proceedings, and the fervent pro-independence violence in the streets of Boston and elsewhere, is that America's roots don't look pretty or idealized here. Some horrendous things happen in the name of protest, driving Adams to push the cause of independence in a legitimate effort to get on with a revolutionary war under the command of George Washington. But the process isn't easy: not every one of the 13 colonies-turned-states is ready to incur the wrath of England, and behind-the-scenes negotiations prove as much a part of 18th century congressional sessions as they do today.

Besides this peek into a less-romanticized version of the past, John Adams is also a story of the man himself. Adams' frustration at being forgotten or overlooked at critical junctures of America's early development--sent abroad for years instead of helping to draft the U.S. constitution--is detailed. So is his dismay that the truth of what actually transpired leading to the signing of the Declaration of Independence has been slowly forgotten and replaced by a rosier myth. But above all, John Adams is the story of two key ties: Adams' 54-year marriage to Abigail Adams (Laura Linney), every bit her husband's intellectual equal and anchor, and his difficult, almost symbiotic relationship with Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane) over decades. Giamatti, of course, has to carry much of the drama, and if he doesn't always seem quite believable in the series' first half, he becomes increasingly excellent at the point where an aging Adams becomes bitter over his place in history. Linney is marvelous, as is Dillane, Sarah Polley as daughter Nabby, Danny Huston as cousin Samuel Adams, and above all Tom Wilkinson as a complex but indispensable Ben Franklin. --Tom Keogh

Product Description
John Adams is a sprawling HBO miniseries event that depicts the extraordinary life and times of one of Americas least understood and most underestimated founding fathers: the second President of the United States John Adams. Starring Paul Giamatti (Sideways Cinderella Man HBOs American Spendor) in the title role and Laura Linney (You Can Count on Me Kinsey) as Adams devoted wife Abigail John Adams chronicles the extraordinary life journey of one of the primary shapers of our independence and government whose legacy has often been eclipsed by more flamboyant contemporaries like George Washington Thomas Jefferson Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. Set against the backdrop of a nations stormy birth this sweeping miniseries is a moving love story a gripping narrative and a fascinating study of human nature. Above all at a time when the nation is increasingly polarized politically this story celebrates the shared values of liberty and freedom upon which this country was built.Running Time: 501 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/SERIES & SEQUELS UPC: 883929020065 Manufacturer No: 1000038820

Churchill and His Myths

2008-06-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Wheatcroft | New York Review of Books | May 29, 2008

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning
by John Lukacs
Basic Books, 147 pp., $24.00

Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
by Lynne Olson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 436 pp., $27.50; $15.00 (paper)

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
by Nicholson Baker
Simon and Schuster, 566 pp., $30.00

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan.
Crown, 544 pp., $29.95

1.

At the end of 1936, Winston Churchill's fortunes had sunk as low as he would ever know. His career had long resembled Snakes and Ladders, the nursery board game where a shake of the dice leads to either a brisk ascent or a downward slither. Already famous in 1900 when he entered Parliament at the age of twenty-five, he was home secretary at thirty-four (having nimbly deserted the Conservatives before the Liberals won their landslide in 1906), and went on climbing the ladder until the outbreak of the Great War. Then in 1915 he stepped on a nasty snake. He was saddled with the blame for the Dardanelles debacle and left government to command an infantry battalion on the Western Front. After easing his way back into office, he stealthily returned to the Conservative fold, but in 1931, while the Tories were in opposition, he resigned from the party leadership because of his bitter opposition to Gandhi's release from prison, and to any measure of Indian self-government.

A heroic account of his "wilderness years" in the 1930s, which Churchill promoted and which is current today among his huge American claque, has him as the noble lone voice crying out while his countrymen willfully ignored his warnings about the need to rearm against a resurgent Germany. It's true that most British people understandably had little enthusiasm for another war only twenty years after one in which they had lost three quarters of a million dead (equivalent to nearly six million Americans today). But Churchill's woes were largely self-inflicted, from India to what John Lukacs calls "his impetuous (and, in retrospect, unnecessary) championing of Edward VIII" in December 1936. In the most disastrous parliamentary performance of his life, incoherent and seemingly the worse for drink, Churchill pleaded on behalf of the King until he was shouted down. London bookmakers take bets on anything from sport to the weather to politics; what odds would they have given that December that, within less than four years, he would be prime minister, at the supreme crisis in his country's history?

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The Book They’re All Talking About!

2008-06-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

Even before it was published (May 27, 2008), Pat Buchanan’s book, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, set the cat amongst the pigeons, not least because of John Lukacs review, “Necessary Evil”, which appeared, somewhat incongruously, in the June 2, 2008 [sic] issue (presumably online), sometime late last May, of The American Conservative. As an anti-anti-communist, who considers Nationalism to have been the supreme evil of the 20th century, Lukacs, whom Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a more considered judge of Churchill’s achievements, describes as “preeminent among intellectually respectable Churchillians”, has always idolized Churchill, who fought against that most extreme form of 20th-century Nationalism, Nazism, and made common cause with Uncle Joe Stalin.

On May 25, Buchanan posted an excerpt from his book, titled, “Man of the Century”, on Taki’s Magazine. He begins:

As the twentieth century ended, a debate ensued over who had been its greatest man. The Weekly Standard nominee was Churchill. Not only was he Man of the Century, said scholar Harry Jaffa, he was the Man of Many Centuries. To Kissinger he was “the quintessential hero.” A BBC poll of a million people in 2002 found that Britons considered Churchill the “greatest Briton of all time.”

As a Briton, I well remember the poll, tho’ I didn’t take part in it.

Buchanan goes on to examine whether Churchill really deserves that accolade and concludes that “Churchill succeeded magnificently as a war leader”, but “failed as a statesman”: “He had been a great man—at the cost of his country’s greatness.”

He also says of his own country, which has ceased to be a republic and has become a fast-declining empire: “There is hardly a blunder of the British Empire we have not replicated.”

Two days later, Buchanan posted a second article, “How the West Lost the World”, on Takimag, in which he outlines the series of British “blunders” which led to the Second World War.

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, is one of a number of books on the subject reviewed by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in his review, “Churchill and His Myths” (a possible allusion to Churchill’s phrase, “Hitler and all his works”), which appeared on the same day in The New York review of Books, the others being John Lukacs’ own Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning, Lynne Olson’s Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England, about the Tory rebels who voted against Chamberlain in 1940, and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which Lukacs has denounced, unsurprisingly, as “a bad book”.

Wheatcroft writes:

In the best sentence in her book, about the Suez adventure of 1956, [Olson] writes, "Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the lessons of Munich and appeasement were wrongly applied to a later international crisis." Likewise, having rightly observed that "there has arisen among America's elite a Churchill cult," Patrick Buchanan devotes a chapter, "Man of the Century," to denouncing the cult, and the man. He not only looks askance at Churchill's saying in September 1943 that "to achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go"; he chastises the administration of George Bush the Younger—who installed a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office—for having emulated "every folly of imperial Britain in her plunge from power," and having drawn every wrong lesson from Churchill's career. There is by now an entire book to be written about the way that "Munich," "appeasement," and "Churchill" have been ritually invoked, from Suez to Vietnam to Iraq, so often in false analogy, and so often with calamitous results.

Pat Buchanan himself appeared on CNN’s Situation Room to discuss his book with Wolf Blitzer, an appearance which was written up in an article, “Pat Buchanan Blames Britain for Holocaust”, by Jason Linkins on the Huffington Post, and which he peppered with ad hominem attacks:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srwk5WwroXY]

He also appeared with Lester Holt on the Today Show:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChP4-FF4A3E]

Man of the Century
How the West Lost the World

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Buchanan, Kennan, and the “Good War”

2008-06-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

Paul Gottfried | Taki's Magazine | June 01, 2008

The following is the first installment in a three-part critical symposium on Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War.”

It is not surprising that Pat Buchanan’s new book, exploring the collapse of the British Empire and the connection of that disaster to England’s involvement in two world wars, should have received a strong endorsement from George F. Kennan, written (it might be surmised) shortly before this luminary’s death at the age of a hundred and one. Although Kennan praises Pat specifically for taking over and developing his argument that “the British guaranty to Poland [in 1939] was neither necessary nor wise,” there is little in Pat’s work that is not traceable to this once celebrated American exponent of political realism. There are other historians whom Pat cites, such as Giles MacDonogh, Thomas Fleming, John Charmley and my close friend Ralph Raico, all of whom have written critically about Churchill. But his main guide to enlightenment is Kennan. Moreover, the work by this author and onetime American ambassador to Russia that fuels Pat’s “revisionist” arguments, concerning the misuse of British power, the overly close connection between the U.S. and Britain, and the overextension of English participation in continental European conflicts, is Kennan’s American Diplomacy 1900-1950, a work that was first published in 1951.

When I was in college and later graduate school in the 1960s, this book was regularly assigned to undergraduates as an authoritative introduction to America’s role in international affairs in the 20th century. As Lee Congdon will surely explain in his forthcoming monograph, Kennan then enjoyed a certain cachet on the academic left as a critic of Cold War hawks, and he was even allowed to publish in the “anti-anti-Communist” New York Review of Books a tribute to the Prussian aristocracy that had tried to overthrow Hitler in 1944. By the 1980s Kennan had predictably come to rattle the neocons as someone who had never been particularly favorable to Israel and who had even shown the effrontery to warn against weakening the white minority government in South Africa. Despite Kennan’s mostly accidental association with the Left, the neocons, led by the sociologist Paul Hollander, correctly reminded us that Kennan was a reactionary—and certainly no friend of progressive democracy.

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Review: When Robert Kennedy gave his all

2008-06-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

By Todd Leopold | CNN

A few days before the 1968 California Democratic primary, Washington Post reporter Richard Harwood told his editor he wanted to stop covering Robert F. Kennedy's campaign for president.

Robert Kennedy's campaign for president lasted 82 days before he died on June 6, 1968.

"I'm falling in love with the guy," he said, according to Thurston Clarke's "The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America" (Henry Holt).

It was easy to see why. During his ill-fated run for the presidency, Kennedy appeared to be that rarest of candidates, the truth teller. By many accounts, he meant every word he said, particularly those about fighting prejudice and poverty. He refused to kowtow to his audiences, and he wore his emotions on his sleeves (adoring crowds sometimes shredded his cuffs). And he pondered questions before offering thoughtful, sometimes stammering, answers.

Indeed, if Clarke's careful and moving book has a problem, it's that the author also seems to have fallen a little in love with his subject. The hard-nosed -- the preferred adjective was "ruthless" -- RFK who shrewdly managed his brother's presidential campaign gets short shrift. The book sometimes seems to exist in its own bubble, lacking the uncertainty that afflicted Kennedy in fighting his uphill nomination battle.

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The Jewish key to Henry Kissinger

2008-06-11T07:41:00.001-07:00

Is the ferocity of criticism for Kissinger related to the fact that he is Jewish?, asks Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson | The Times Literary Supplement | May 28, 2008

To say that Henry Kissinger is the most controversial of twentieth-century American Secretaries of State would be an understatement. No other holder of that office has inspired opprobrium of the sort heaped on Kissinger by journalists such as Seymour Hersh and Christopher Hitchens. The latter’s polemic, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2002), for example, accuses Kissinger of having “ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way”. Hitchens offers no explanation of his subject’s alleged record of “promiscuous violence abroad and flagrant illegality at home”. The reader is merely left to infer that Kissinger must be a terribly wicked man.

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Angry Man

2008-06-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Nixon's America was a land of rebellion and reaction.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Drew | WaPo | Sunday, June 1, 2008; BW05

NIXONLAND

The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
By Rick Perlstein
Scribner. 881 pp. $37.50

There is so much literature about various aspects of Richard Nixon -- his foreign policy, his domestic policy, his rise to power, his time in power, his fall from power, his comeback, his relationship with Vice President Spiro Agnew, his trip to China -- that it would seem difficult to find an original approach to the man. But, in Nixonland, Rick Perlstein has come up with the novel and important idea of exploring the relationship between Nixon and the 1960s counterculture, a rebellion of mostly young people against society's conventions and authority in general. Perlstein is quite right in identifying this rebellion -- and the reaction against it -- as critical to Nixon's rise and his strange hold on the American people. One might even consider Perlstein's book to be primarily about the counterculture and only secondarily about Nixon, since he devotes nearly half of it to a brilliant evocation of the '60s.

The decade had begun quiescently, with a general acceptance of the conventional mores of the '50s and the Cold War. But midway through came upheaval: hippies, yippies, be-ins, the drug culture, the Weather Underground, the "summer of love." Then the traumas of 1968: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, campus unrest, urban riots. And, of course, Vietnam. A nation unhinged.

Perlstein astutely follows the reaction against all of this by a large part of the American people, whose deep resentments and fear Nixon shrewdly observed and exploited. In the 1968 election campaign, he offered America peace and quiet, law and order. But once in office, he delivered mass arrests of peaceful protesters against the war; his allies in the construction unions beat up demonstrators on Wall Street. Perlstein's Nixonland is a land of rebellion and reaction, each faction stirring up the other.

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McClellan’s Biggest Revelation? Bush Personally Authorized Leak Of CIA Agent’s Identity

2008-05-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

By: emptywheel Thursday May 29, 2008 7:08 am

Scottie McC doesn't know it yet. But that's basically what he revealed this morning on the Today Show (h/t Rayne).

During the interview, Scottie revealed the two things that really pissed him off with the Bush Administration. First, being set up to lie by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. And second, learning that Bush had--himself--authorized the selective leaking of the NIE.

Scottie McC: But the other defining moment was in early April 2006, when I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters. And we had been out there talking about how seriously the President took the selective leaking of classified information. And here we were, learning that the President had authorized the very same thing we had criticized.

Viera: Did you talk to the President and say why are you doing this?

Scottie McC: Actually, I did. I talked about the conversation we had. I walked onto Air Force One, it was right after an event we had, it was down in the south, I believe it was North Carolina. And I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the President trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the legal proceedings. The revelation was that it was the President who had authorized, or, enable Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the President that that's what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, was the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said "yeah, I did." And I was kinda taken aback.

Now, for the most part, this is not new. We have known (since I first reported it here) that Scooter Libby testified that, after Libby told Dick Cheney he couldn't leak the information Cheney had ordered him to leak to Judy Miller because it was classified, Cheney told Libby he had gotten the President to authorize the declassification of that information.

Thus far, though, we only had Dick Cheney's word that he had actually asked Bush to declassify this information. We didn't have Bush's confirmation that he had actually declassified the information. In fact, we've had Dick Cheney's claims that he--Dick--had insta-declassified via his super secret pixie dust declassification powers.

But now we've got George Bush, confirming that he, the President of the United States, authorized the leaks of "this information."

Now, though Scottie refers, obliquely, to "this information," he explicitly refers only to the NIE. But as I've described over and over again, it's not just the NIE Bush authorized Dick to order Libby to leak.

As a review, here's what Libby's NIE lies are all about. This is all documented in this post, and here is the court transcript in which most of this is revealed.

Scooter Libby has instructions in his notes to leak something to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003

When questioned about the notation, Libby claimed the instructions related to the NIE

Libby went further to make certain claims about the NIE leak--that the leak was authorized by Dick Cheney and George Bush, that such an authorization was totally unique in his career, and that Libby was so worried about leaking the NIE to Judy that he double checked to make sure he was authorized to do so

Libby later made claims that directly contradicted these assertions--most importantly, even though Libby claims the Judy leak was totally unique in his career, he also leaked the NIE to three other people: Bob Woodward, a journalist [David Sanger] on July 2, and the WSJ

Also, in spite of the fact that Libby says he was really worried about getting authorization to leak the NIE to Judy, he's not really sure whether he was authorized to leak the NIE to Woodward; his concern about the leak to Judy only extended to whatever he leaked to Judy

In short, Libby is almost certainly lying about what he was authorized to leak to Judy on July 8, 2003, in a meeting where Judy Miller admits he talked about Valerie Plame, and where Libby tried to get her to falsely attribute the story.

At this point, Scottie McC is still accepting Scooter Libby's lies, though I suspect he sees the dangerous frailty of them. With Bush's clear admission to Scottie that he was in the loop, and the evidence that, subsequent to receiving an order from Cheney (authorized by Bush) to leak classified information to Judy Miller, Libby leaked Valerie Wilson's identity, the circumstantial evidence shows the President was directly involved in the deliberate outing of a CIA spy. The only question now is whether Bush realized he authorized the leak of Valerie's identity, in addition to a bunch of other classified documents.

Think of how much sense this makes. We have evidence that George Bush ordered Libby to respond to Joe Wilson on June 9, 2003. We now have Bush's own confirmation that he authorized the leak Libby made to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003--which included the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. We know on July 10, Condi told Stephen Hadley that Bush "was comfortable" with the response the White House was making towards Wilson. And we know that--when Cheney forced Scottie McC to exonerate Libby publicly that fall, he did so by reminding people that "The Pres[ident] [asked Libby] to stick his head in the meat-grinder." We know that Libby's lawyers tried desperately to prevent a full discussion of the NIE lies to be presented at trial. And we know that--after those NIE lies did not come out, for the most part (though one juror told me that NIE story was obviously false, even with the limited information they received)--the President commuted Libby's sentence on July 2, 2007.

The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America

2008-05-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

In the course of his forty-year-career as one of America's most admired journalists, Robert Scheer's work has been praised by Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion, who deems him "one of the best reporters of our time." Now, Scheer brings a lifetime of wisdom and experience to one of the most overlooked and dangerous issues of our time - the destructive influence of America's military-industrial complex.

Scheer examines the expansion of our military presence throughout the world, our insane nuclear strategy, the immorality of corporations profiting in Iraq, and the arrogance of our foreign policy. Although Scheer is a liberal, his view echoes that of former Republican president General Dwight Eisenhower, who, in his farewell speech to the American people, spoke prophetically about need to guard against the growing influence of the military-industrial complex. In George W. Bush's America, politicians like Ike and Richard Nixon seem like prudent centrists.

The views of libertarians, liberals, and pacifists are often overlooked or ignored by America's mainstream media. The Pornography of Power is the culmination of a respected journalist's efforts to change the terms of debate. At a time when many are exploiting fears of terrorist attacks and only a few national leaders are willing to advocate cuts in defense spending, nuclear disarmament, and restrained use of American force, Robert Scheer has written a manifesto for enlightened reform.

About the Author
Robert Scheer is currently Editor-in-Chief of Truthdig.com, 2007 Webby Award winner for best political blog.

Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Scheer can be heard on the political radio program "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif. He has written seven books, including "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War."
He is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Daily Show: Moving Private Ryan

2008-05-26T04:21:00.000-07:00

President Bush announces the troops will finally be coming home, but not the troops you're thinking of and not for another ten years.

“I’m sorry, did you say plural? Was that ‘wars’? How many more of these do you have in mind?” Jon Stewart

David Iglesias Vows: "It's Not Over!"

2008-05-26T02:26:00.000-07:00

...so if you hear anybody says it's yesterday's news (Oh, that' so 2007!), please straighten them out, 'cos it's not.

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias has some harsh words for fellow Republicans during a visit to an Albuquerque, N.M. bookstore on May 19, 2008.

The Bush administration's drive to politicize the Justice Department reached a new low with the wrongful firing of seven U.S. Attorneys in late 2006. Their action has ignited public outrage on a scale that far surpassed the reaction to any of the Bush administration's other political debacles. David Iglesias was one of those federal prosecutors, and now he tells his story.

The first chapter, titled, "For Such a Time as This" (a quotation from the Book of Esther), describes how, shortly before he departed Baltimore-Washington International Airport to spend the Christmas of 2006 with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Iglesias received a message on his BlackBerry from his assistant telling him to phone director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA), Mike Battle, which he did and his reactions on being told to resign, "effective the end of January".

Iglesias writes:

I consider it one of the ironies of history that my personal "day that will live in infamy" occurred on December 7, 2006, exactly sixty-five years after the Japanese launched the sneak attack that took us into World War II. Of course, I'm not comparing what happened to me that afternoon to any such epic date with destiny. At the same time, however, I realize that my personal Pearl Harbor Day is not without its own historical resonance. From that moment on, things were not the same, for me or for the country I'd so proudly served. I'd arrived at a point when my history intersected with America's history in a way that would change—and is still changing—both America's justice system and me.

"It's ironic to think," Iglesias now reflects, "that I had once been offered the position of director of EOUSA. If I'd taken it, I'd have been the one who would have had to make that fateful phone call."

The penultimate chapter is titled, "All Roads Lead to Rove", the final one, "Fredo", a reference to the little man who occupied the office of Attorney General when Iglesias was fired (alas, he is no longer with us), and whose famous powers of recollection have so often formed the subject of posts on this blog.

Chapter 1 can be read online (click here) and is well worth reading, as no doubt, is the rest of the book.

In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration

From the Inside Flap:

David Iglesias's first encounter with Alberto Gonzales was when he was White House counsel in 2001. Something Gonzales said really stuck in his mind. "This is a tough town," Gonzales told him. "They are out to destroy the president, and it is my job to protect him." Who knew he would even break the law to do it?

The Bush administration's drive to politicize the Justice Department reached a new low with the wrongful firing of seven U.S. Attorneys in late 2006. Their action has ignited public outrage on a scale that far surpassed the reaction to any of the Bush administration's other political debacles. David Iglesias was one of those federal prosecutors, and now he tells his story.

Iglesias has long served in the navy as part of the JAG Corps. One of his earliest cases, concerning an assaulted marine in Guantanamo Bay, became the basis for the movie A Few Good Men. When Bush chose Iglesias to become the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, it was a dream come true. He was a core member of Karl Rove's idealized Republican Party of the future—handsome, Hispanic, evangelical, and a military veteran. The dream came to an abrupt end when Senator Pete Domenici improperly called Iglesias, asking him to indict high-level Democrats before the 2006 elections. When Iglesias refused, the line went dead. Iglesias was fired just weeks later. First he was devastated. Then he was angry. Now he is speaking out.

Packed with previously unrevealed facts, In Justice follows Iglesias and his colleagues, who would soon be known as the Justice League, as they pieced together the sources and purpose of the conspiracy against them. In fascinating detail, it reveals how various members of the group viewed their own dismissals, reacted to threats from Justice Department officials designed to ensure their silence, and struggled to find a way to respond to the growing furor over the case.

Complete with insights into the power and responsibilities of U.S. Attorneys and an impassioned plea for their historic independence, the rule of law, and insulation from politics, In Justice is a compelling, real-life political thriller that takes you deep inside the Bush administration's darkest moment.

Wiley publishers substitute the last two paragraphs above with the following paragraph:

Iglesias recounts his interactions with Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and other key players as he takes readers into his time at the Justice Department to reveal what top Republican officials said and did, and how they subverted justice.

The Last Good Campaign

2008-05-24T15:32:00.000-07:00

Increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War, Robert F. Kennedy struggled over whether he should challenge his party’s incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, in 1968. His younger brother, Teddy, was against it. His wife, Ethel, urged him on. Many feared he would be assassinated, like the older brother he mourned.

by Thurston Clarke | Vanity Fair | June 2008

Bobby Kennedy campaigns in Indianapolis during May of 1968, with various aides and friends, including (behind and left of Kennedy) former prizefighter Tony Zale and (right of Kennedy) N.F.L. stars Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, and Deacon Jones. Photographs by Bill Eppridge.

Text excerpted from The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America by Thurston Clarke, to be published this month by Henry Holt and Company, L.L.C.; © 2008 by the author.

Photographs excerpted from A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties; photographs and text by Bill Eppridge; introduction by Pete Hamill; to be published this month by Abrams; © 2008 by Bill Eppridge.

Two months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy traveled to Asia on an itinerary that had originally been planned for J.F.K. During the trip, he visited a girls’ school in the Philippines where the students sang a song they had composed to honor his brother. As he drove away with CBS cameraman Walter Dombrow, he clenched his hands so tightly that they turned white, and tears rolled down his cheeks. He shook his head, signaling that Dombrow should remain silent. Finally he said in a choked voice, “They would have loved my brother.” Dombrow put his arm around him and said, “Bob, you’re going to have to carry on for him.” Kennedy stared straight ahead for half a minute before turning to Dombrow and nodding. It was then, Dombrow said, that he knew Bobby would run for president and realized how much he loved him.

A deep, black grief gripped Robert Kennedy in the months following his brother’s assassination. He lost weight, fell into melancholy silences, wore his brother’s clothes, smoked the cigars his brother had liked, and imitated his mannerisms. Eventually his grief went underground, but it sometimes erupted in geysers of tears, as had happened in the Philippines. He wept after seeing a photograph of his late brother in the office of a former aide, wept when asked to comment on the Warren Commission Report, and wept after eulogizing J.F.K. at the 1964 Democratic convention with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

Kennedy was still mourning his brother and endeavoring to live for him when he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York in the autumn of 1964, telling a friend that he wanted to ensure that the hopes J.F.K. had kindled around the world would not die, and saying in his victory statement that he had won “an overwhelming mandate to continue the policies” of President Kennedy. And at first it appeared that his 1968 presidential campaign—challenging his brother’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic Party’s nomination—would be another homage to J.F.K. Bobby announced his candidacy on March 16 in the caucus room of the Old Senate Office Building, the room that his brother had used for the same purpose. He stood in the same spot and began with the same sentence: “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.” After saying that he was running to “close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old,” he concluded with a passage that made him sound like his brother, perhaps because it had been contributed in part by Ted Sorensen, who had been his brother’s speechwriter: “I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President. But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election. At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to the moral leadership of this planet.”

Read more...

The still-vital Vidal

2008-05-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

Friend of the Kennedys, enemy of Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal is an extraordinary compendium of American politics and literature

Playing to the gallery ... Self-confessed 'American patriot' Gore Vidal. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Ben Marshall |guardian.co.uk | May 23, 2008 3:45 PM

It was a strange sensation to see Gore Vidal wheeled on stage in Brighton last night. As his recent appearance on the South Bank Show revealed, Vidal is, for the first time ever, looking, if not sounding, his age. He was born in 1925, the year F Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, but he still has something of the enfant terrible about him, even sitting trembling and shrunken in a wheelchair. Furthermore he seems, in his archness and studied pomposity, to belong to a time I fancifully imagine, and he credibly claims, to have been altogether more thoughtful and civilised than our own.

Vidal has written more than 25 novels, another 20 or so works of non-fiction, more than a half dozen plays and, I think, eight screenplays. And of course he has met pretty everyone who matters from the worlds of politics and the arts. Amongst his friends he could count Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, John Kennedy, the Clintons and pornographer Bob Guccione. And his enemies make for an equally exalted list - Truman Capote, Bobby Kennedy, Norman Mailer, the Reagans and of course the Bush family (and I do mean the entire family, he hates the whole dynasty, probably because they are almost as ancient and American-aristo as his own).

It was politics that Vidal stuck to in Brighton, despite interviewer Andrew Marr's valiant efforts to talk about his novels, plays and poetry. Vidal's long-practised technique is to mix extraordinary anecdotes with mostly incisive, occasionally glib observations about the parlous state of the United States. Thus an early question about literature evoked a story about JFK, which in turn evolved into a critique of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain and, swiftly but inevitably turned into a vitriolic attack on George W Bush.

And this was a problem for me. Gore, despite his impeccable credentials as a snob, cannot help but play to the gallery. So the second he detected that Brighton loathed the present American administration (and perhaps America and Americans too) he wasted no time in attacking it, them and everything it and they stand for. Often in the crudest terms. For instance calling Bush a "cretin" seems to me to be both inaccurate and lazy, but it elicited huge laughs. So Gore persisted. Bush began as a "cretin", was soon a "real cretin", occasionally an "imbecile", and ultimately a "congenital cretin". The audience just lapped this stuff up.

His best moments, as ever, came when he defended the American constitution, something, he stressed, he and his family have always done. He made one marvellous point - alluding to the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment - concerning the US in particular and the world in general. Gore, rightly in my view, thinks that anyone who believes in an afterlife should never be afforded any power whatsoever over the lives of others.

Once again the crowd, audibly prepared to storm Grosvenor Square, appeared to assume he was simply talking about Dubya and his God-fearing, tub-thumping, Bible-bashing mates. It was left to a member of the audience to ask the question that elicited the simplest, most unequivocal reply. Given his remorseless defence of the constitution, would Gore Vidal consider himself an American patriot? "Yes!" he shouted, from his wheelchair. There was only the faintest ripple of polite applause. No surprise, given the ghastly nature of the Brighton crowd.

Me? With patriots like Gore Vidal around, I walked home whistling The Star Spangled Banner.

Gore Vidal: ready to kill

2008-05-24T05:43:00.001-07:00

Jon Snow interviews the writer Gore Vidal on the American presidential campaign - he dismisses John McCain as Mr Magoo and says he should have been court-martialled.

His career has spanned more than six decades, and he has written more than 20 novels and five plays. Gore Vidal is one of Americas most respected writers and thinkers, and is considered a patriarch of American letters and Democratic politics.

He is highly critical of George W Bush's administration. But what does he have to say about the bitter contest for the Democratic nomination?

This afternoon Jon Snow spoke to Gore Vidal here in London. They discussed the race to lead America and the candidates presenting themselves for president, starting with John McCain.

To watch Jon Snow's complete interview with Gore Vidal, click here.

Is the U.S. the World’s Largest State Sponsor of Terrorism?

2008-05-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

George Washington's Blog | Friday, May 16, 2008

Preface: As someone who was born in America and has lived here my whole life, and who loves the ideals and Constitution our country was founded on, it has been a rude and painful awakening to learn about my government's terrorist acts.

I believe that, if the American public knew what crimes the government was carrying out, they would not stand for it.

Four headlines this week make it clear that America may be the world's largest sponsor of terrorism:

"Iran ... to sue U.S. . . . over mosque blast"

"Neo-Con General Calls For Terror Attacks In Iran"

"Iran Intercepts U.S. Terrorists Plotting Attack on Russian Consulate"

"Rumsfeld On Tape: Terror Attack Could Restore Neo-Con Agenda"

This is on top of previous stories showing that Cheney is directly funding terrorist groups out of his office, and that the U.S. is funding terrorists all over the world to promote its agenda. See also this, this and this.

And Americans dressed as Arabs have apparently been setting off car bombs in Iraq (when it was discovered that some of the cars used in Iraqi bombings recently came from the U.S., the cover story seemed to become that American cars were involved in car bombings only because they had recently been stolen from the U.S. and then shipped to Iraq -- but does it make sense that Iraqi insurgents would steal cars in the U.S. and ship them all the way to Iraq?)

Unfortunately, this involvement in terrorism is not unique to the Bush administration:

As documented by the New York Times, Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950's posed as Communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president (see also this essay)

As confirmed by a former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence, NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: "You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

No wonder the former director of the National Security Agency said "By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation"(the audio is here).

So next time the warmongers accuse a foreign country of sponsoring terrorism, remind them that - even if that is true - the U.S. is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism.

In addition to being the leading sponsor of terrorism, the U.S. is also the largest purveyor of disinformation and propaganda in the world. Gangsters like Al Capone would be astonished at how successfully the American public has been fooled as to the nature of their government's actions.

As one of the leading American media critics says:

"Little has been done to address the astonishing ignorance of Americans regarding the US role in the world, [including] the extensive use of terrorism by the United States . . . ."

I Agree with Bush . . . Stop Appeasing the Terrorists!

2008-05-17T14:30:00.001-07:00

George Washington's Blog | Thursday, May 15, 2008

A lot of people, including Senator Biden, are criticizing Bush's statement to the Israeli parliament that Democrats are like those who tried to appease the Nazis. Bush - apparently incensed that people are trying to frustrate the Neocon plan to bomb Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon in order to "protect" Israel and seize a little oil in the process - accused the Democrats of trying to negotiate with terrorists.

But who is really appeasing who?

It is Congress that is trying to appease the terrorists in the White House. After the 9/11 false flag attack, and the attack on Congress with U.S. military anthrax, and the attack on liberty and privacy, and the attack on the U.S. economy, Congress has done nothing but role over and play dead.

Instead of doing something to stop the terrorists in the White House, to stop their terrorist plans, to de-fund terrorist operations, to impeach the terrorists and try them for war crimes, Congress members and senators just make long speeches, hold endless "investigations", and write letters begging for the terrorists to consider talking to them.

The real terrorists are the anti-Americans who pulled a Reichstag-fire on 9/11 and the anthrax attacks soon after, who lied us into Iraq and are trying to lie us into Iran, who instituted torture policies which fly in the face of human rights and the safety of our military personnel, who authorized spying on all Americans and have stomped on our freedoms and privacies, and who have used the old trick of whipping the populace into a state of fear by exaggerating the danger from our supposed enemies (isn't that the very definition of terrorism?)

Indeed, the "appeasing Hitler" image is not just an analogy with the Bush family. His grandfather literally helped Hitler rise to power (he also plotted a coup against the sitting American president, FDR). And Cheney and the boys are now directly funding terrorist groups (see confirming articles here, here and here).

I agree with Bush . . . stop appeasing the terrorists!

Gladio: Nato-sponsored State Terrorism in Europe

2008-05-11T03:48:00.001-07:00

On August 4, 1974, while I was travelling around Italy on an Interrail ticket, a bomb exploded in car 5 of the Italicus Express running from Rome to Brennero on the Florence-Bologna line as it left the tunnel of San Benedetto Val di Sambro. Twelve passengers were killed and 44 were wounded. Mario Tuti, Pietro Malentacchi, and Luciano Franci of the Revolutionary National Front were accused of the attack, though when they came to trial years later they were aquitted for lack of evidence.

Days earlier I had travelled through the same tunnel on my way by train from Venice to Naples. A few days later, I would travel through the same tunnel on my way to Florence. Had my schedule been different, I may well have found myself a victim of the attack.

I became aware of the event through the lurid artist's reconstructions on the covers of Italian news magazines outside newsagents on Rome's Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

I was seventeen at the time.

On August 2, 1980, a bomb was planted in the waiting room of the Bologna railway station: 84 died and some 200 were injured. The act was ascribed to neo-Fascists.

A few weeks later, while travelling with a friend around Italy by train we passed through Bologna and noted the gap where the waiting room had been.

In March, 1982, I began to live and work in Italy. In the June of that year, the body of Italian banker, Roberto Calviwas found hanging from a noose under Blackfriars Bridge, London. In the next few years, the name of Banco Ambrosiano, the Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic Lodge, and Licio Gelli would become familiar.

In the winter of 1984/85, I was working in Pistoia, Tuscany, and I lived in a mansard directly under the rafters on the top floor of the medieval Casa del Capitano del Popolo (House of the Captain of the People). (See picture below.)

Shortly before Christmas, 1984, I travelled through the San Benedetto Val di Sambro tunnel where, ten years earlier, there had been a bomb explosion, on my way from Florence to Bologna and from Bologna to Padua to stay with the family of an Italian friend who lived in a house in the Veneto countryside, before flying from Treviso airport to London's Gatwick airport.

In the January 7, 1985, edition of Time Magazine, the article, "Italy Tunnel of Death", appeared. It began:

Stretching for 11 1/2 miles beneath central Italy's rugged Apennine mountains, it is one of Europe's longest railway tunnels and carries the nickname La Direttissima because it provides the most direct route between Florence and Bologna. Last week the Italian press renamed it the "Tunnel of Death."

Two days before Christmas, Train 904, an express bound from Naples to Milan with 700 holiday passengers aboard, was roaring through La Direttissima at 90 m.p.h. when a time bomb exploded in a second-class carriage. The force of the blast blew in the double-paned windows in most of the train's 14 cars. Antonio Algieri, 33, one of those wounded by the flying glass, described the scene as "a hurricane of slivers--and then so much terrible screaming in the dark." The train came to a stop, and thick smoke billowed through the tunnel, initially frustrating rescue attempts as dazed passengers stumbled around in the blackness.

When rescue teams eventually reached the wreckage, they found that the ninth car of the train had been demolished by the blast; at least 15 people were found dead and 80 were seriously injured. It was Italy's bloodiest terrorist act since the authorities began to gain the upper hand in the fight against political extremists two years ago.

Within hours, a number of outlawed groups of both the left and the right claimed responsibility for the blast. Official suspicion centered on neo- Fascist terrorists, since the Christmas attack took place in the same tunnel in which right-wing extremists bombed a train in 1974, killing twelve and wounding 48. In 1980 neo-Fascists planted a bomb in the waiting room of the Bologna railway station: 84 died and some 200 were injured.

I had travelled through this very tunnel only days before this second bomb attack.

After flying back to Italy, I returned by the same route to my mansard in Pistoia's Casa del Capitano del Popolo.

As the couple above whose flat I lived were out and I couldn't get in, a doctor who lived in a flat below theirs invited me in for a drink and a chat. Naturally, the conversation revolved around the recent bombing, and my own lucky escapes, both in 1974 and a few weeks earlier.

It was then that I became aware of the view, quite commonly held by all classes of people in Italy, including respectable middle class doctors, that the Italian government were somehow behind these attacks.

Over the next few years, the words Operazione Gladio (Operation Gladio), and strategia di tensione (strategy of tension), became increasingly familiar as these were increasingly talked about in the Italian press. These topics are too complicated to deal with in one article. But I leave the reader with a few links and the first of a three-part BBC programme on Operation Gladio.

And with one final thought. When, in 1990, Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, revealed the existence of Gladio (though he denied that it had anything to do with the bombings described above), then president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, who had been involved in setting Gladio up, felt honor-bound to resign.

More recently, Senator Cossiga, who clearly has a deep roots in his country's intelligence service, has stated, in an interview with leading Italian newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera: "It is common knowledge amongst global intelligence agencies that 9/11 was an inside job."

Operation Gladio: NATO Terrorists pt 1 of 15

part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

part 6

part 7

part 8

part 9

part 10

part 11

part 12

part 13

part 14

part 15

The $3-Trillion War

2008-04-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

By James Harris | truthdig, posted on Apr 16, 2008

Listen to this interview.

Transcript:

James Harris: This is Truthdig. James Harris here with Linda Bilmes. She is the co-author of the new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” She’s also a Harvard economist, and she did serve in the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration. As we watch the sensational news coverage of the governor of New York’s resignation, “The Three Trillion Dollar War” reminds us that nearly 4,000 American soldiers and more than half a million Iraqis have been killed in this war. And that spending will total more than $3 trillion. Linda, why is it important that we take this war, and our spending, more seriously?

Read more...

Alfred Kazin: A Biography

2008-04-13T13:13:00.001-07:00

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

For more than 50 years Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) was one of the best known critics in America. In 1934, at the age of 19, he started reviewing for the New Republic (under the literary editorship of Malcolm Cowley). In 1942, at only 27, Kazin published a masterly study of American literature, On Native Grounds. During the 1940s and '50s he contributed to Partisan Review, Commentary and the Reporter, as well as a host of other magazines. Just as important, throughout these years he steadily debated politics and literature with Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Lionel Abel, Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Leslie Fiedler, Mark Van Doren, Harold Rosenberg, Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling. By the early 1960s he was, arguably, after Edmund Wilson, the country's leading man of letters.

And yet. Look at the names in that paragraph. How many do you recognize? If you are under 50, perhaps a couple. How many have you actually read? Probably just one: Edmund Wilson. It is a sad truth that almost any poet or novelist has a shot at immortality, but a critic lives only as long as he keeps writing, keeps in the thick of the action. A decade after his (or her) death, a loyal publisher may bring out a "selected essays" that will prompt a few reminiscences and reconsiderations. After another decade, nothing.

Kazin, however, is luckier than most. While he scratched out a living by writing book reviews, teaching at various colleges and universities, and snagging grants (four Guggenheims, numerous other fellowships and regular visits to the artist's retreat Yaddo), he also produced three wonderful works of autobiography, classics of the modern American experience:

A Walker in the City (1951) describes his childhood and education in New York's impoverished Brownsville neighborhood; it remains one of the great documents of Jewish-American immigrant life.

Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) recalls the ideological and literary battles of a decade racked by the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and the darkening shadow of Stalinism. Yet grim as they were, the 1930s were also as exhilarating as the 1960s, full of intellectual intensity and passion: Socialism would surely change the world.

New York Jew (1978) strikes a more elegiac tone, as Kazin offers pen portraits of many of the leading figures of the postwar cultural scene. But now the young rebels and hotshots have grown old, become the mainstays of the establishment, even turned to the right.

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Soros Says the Pain Has only just Begun

2008-04-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

Louise Story | International Herald Tribune | Friday, April 11, 2008

George Soros will not go quietly.

At the age of 77, Soros, one the world's most successful investors and richest men, leapt out of retirement last summer to safeguard his fortune and legacy. Alarmed by the unfolding crisis in the financial markets, he once again began trading for his giant hedge fund and won big while so many others lost.

Soros has always been a controversial figure. But he is becoming more so with a new, dire forecast for the world economy. Last week he rushed out a book, his 10th, warning that the financial pain has only just begun.

"I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime," Soros said during an interview Monday in his office overlooking Central Park. A "superbubble" that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said.

Soros, whose daring, controversial trades came to symbolize global capitalism in the 1990s, is now busy promoting his book, "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets," which goes on sale next month.

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Alfred Kazin Book Carousel

2008-04-13T09:02:00.001-07:00

Amazon.com Widgets

The Solitary New York Jew

2008-04-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Wheatcroft | The Spectator | 8th April, 2008

Alfred Kazin by Richard M. Cook
Richard M. Cook
Yale, 452pp, £25,

In a recent review of They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book about the neo-conservatives, Mark Lilla began by asking:

How many of you are sick to death of hearing about City College in the 1930s, Alcove One and Alcove Two, the prima donnas at Partisan Review, who stopped speaking to whom at which cocktail party . . .

and a good deal more besides? Well, the answer is that some of us can’t get enough of the extraordinary story of the ‘New York intellectuals’, from Starting Out in the Thirties, the title of one of the books by that New York Jew — the title of another — Alfred Kazin. He was not only an excellent writer, as critic and memoirist; his life illustrates a number of salient themes in mid-20th-century American social as well as literary history.

Born in 1915 the son of semi-literate Yiddish-speaking immigrants, Kazin grew up in Brownsville, a quarter of Brooklyn then as Jewish as the Polish or Russian shtetls from which its inhabitants had fled. He went to City College, geographically not many blocks from Columbia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan but a world apart. Some of its alumni who would become famous, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Bernard Malamud, remembered ‘CCNY’ with affection, but Kazin hated it. He was never as politicised as many of his contemporaries, and the radical atmosphere at the college, with those famous competitive Stalinist and Trotskyist alcoves in the cafeteria, seemed to him odiously ‘fanatical’, for him the harshest term of abuse.

On the other hand, he followed so many other children of the immigration when he chose English as his academic subject. The implications of this were obvious, in terms of the urge to assimilate: Kazin said that he fell in love with American literature because ‘this literature was mine — I felt a part of it and at home with it’. He made his name with On Native Grounds, his study of American writing from the late 19th century to the 1930s, published while he was still in his twenties, and he was unmistakably claiming a place for himself and those like him on those native grounds.

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Steve Wasserman on Fidel Castro

2008-04-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

By Steve Wasserman | Truthdig | Posted on Apr 10, 2008

Fifty years ago, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times interviewed a rebel-with-a-cause most people thought was dead. Matthews’ scoop in the tangled jungle of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra proved the man was alive. His name (which in its entirety was but four syllables) would soon come to be known the world over. To his followers, the first two syllables would suffice: “Fi-del.” Castro’s quest to topple Cuba’s strongman, Fulgencio Batista, captured the imagination of millions. Victory, secured after only two years of urban insurrection and guerrilla warfare, catapulted the 32-year-old former lawyer and son of a wealthy landowner into the ranks of revolutionary stardom. After the catastrophes and crimes that had befallen the 1917 Bolshevik project, Castro seemed at first to herald something new. His was the first socialist revolution, after all, to have been made without the central participation of the Communist Party (and even, it appeared, against the party). (Six years before, in the aftermath of Castro’s failed attack on the military barracks of Moncada in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953, its apparatchiks had denounced him as a “putschist” and an “adventurist.") All previous socialist revolutionaries had seemed grimly puritanical; by contrast, Castro’s barbudos appeared almost to be bohemians with guns. Democracy and radical reform were poised to replace dictatorship and social misery.

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“Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics”

2008-04-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

(updated below)

My new book -- Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics -- is available for online ordering now. It will be available in book stores beginning April 15. Ordering now can help increase visibility for the book and its arguments.

Writing a book enables a much different type of analysis and discussion than the type one is able to pursue in a daily column or blog. The day-to-day focus here is typically on a discrete event -- the latest act of government lawlessness, Congressional complicity, media deceit or pundit propaganda. A book is a more deliberative process. It therefore allows one to take several steps back and think about the underlying causes of those events, identify what they have in common, and consider ways they can be changed.

From the time I began blogging in October, 2005, I've written about many different topics, but almost all have a similar undercurrent: the Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox-News right-wing faction that controls the Republican Party and has dominated our political life for the last 15 years, and the multiple ways that our political institutions -- and particularly the Drudgified establishment press -- enable them. Marketing packages aside, this book is about them; how they function; the weakness-driven bloodthirstiness, dishonesty and sleaze which defines them; the indispensable eagerness of the establishment media to be used by them; and what can be done by those opposed to them to change all of that.

All of the radical and reprehensible events of the last eight years -- the commencement and endless prosecution of an indescribably disastrous war, the accelerated dismantling of our Constitutional framework, the creation of a lawless Surveillance State and a virtually omnipotent President, the legitimization of truly grotesque torture and detention regimes, the complete corruption of our political discourse -- have individuals and a political movement behind them, causing all of that to happen. They have cultivated the ability to manipulate media behavior, largely as a result of a media eager to help. But what they do not have is popular support for virtually anything they are doing. And yet they continue to win elections.

How and why that happens -- the deceitful electoral tactics and manipulative personality-based myths the Right has perfected and continuously deploys to win elections, and the ways in which our slothful, vapid and complicit establishment press propagates those myths -- is the principal subject of this book. And understanding and exposing that right-wing/media partnership is a necessary precondition for weakening it.

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Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation

2008-04-09T13:04:00.000-07:00

Product Description

In Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts paid homage to the heroic women whose patriotism and sacrifice helped create a new nation. Now the number one New York Times bestselling author and renowned political commentator—praised in USA Today as a "custodian of time-honored values"—continues the story of early America's influential women with Ladies of Liberty. In her "delightfully intimate and confiding" style (Publishers Weekly), Roberts presents a colorful blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities.

Recounted with the insight and humor of an expert storyteller and drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources—many of them previously unpublished—Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Almost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. From first ladies to freethinkers, educators to explorers, this exceptional group includes Abigail Adams, Margaret Bayard Smith, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Catherine Adams, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Rebecca Gratz, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Sacajawea, and others. In a much-needed addition to the shelves of Founding Father literature, Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation, giving these ladies of liberty the recognition they so greatly deserve.

About the Author

Cokie Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News and a senior news analyst for National Public Radio. From 1996 to 2002, she and Sam Donaldson coanchored the weekly ABC interview program, This Week.

In addition to broadcasting, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media. Both are also contributing editors to USA Weekend, and together they wrote From This Day Forward, an account of their now more than forty-year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto the New York Times bestseller list, following a six-month run on the list by Roberts's first book on women in American history, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters. Roberts is also the author of the bestselling Founding Mothers, the companion volume to Ladies of Liberty. A mother of two and grandmother of six, she lives with her husband in Bethesda, Maryland.

McCain caught in expletive-laden spat with wife

2008-04-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

John McCain's temper is well documented. He's called opponents and colleagues "shitheads," "assholes" and in at least one case "a fucking jerk."

But a new book on the presumptive Republican nominee will air perhaps the most shocking angry exchange to date.

The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, which will arrive in bookstores next month, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop. An advance copy of the book was obtained by RAW STORY.

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Martin Luther King: When Silence is Betrayal

2008-04-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

US marks 40 years since Martin Luther King killing

The United States is today marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. The 39-year-old was shot dead as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis on April 4th, 1968.

Today, I wish to remember Dr. Martin King in a number of ways, firstly, by looking at his words on the war in Vietnam which, if applied to the situation in Iraq today, are as topical now as they were when he first addressed the American people on this issue in 1967.

“Beyond Vietnam”
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church, 4 April, 1967, New York City

Text from AmericanRhetoric.com

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us… . Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. …and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. …What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? …Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. …we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. …The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. …“This way of settling differences is not just.” …A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. …Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. …I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

Complete text

Martin Luther King Jr.: “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”

Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967

I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. …Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

…Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love.

…It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. …I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.”

Complete text

Safire's Political Dictionary

2008-04-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com
Legendary language guru, author of more than twenty-five books, and Pulitzer-prize winning political columnist, William Safire is perhaps best known for his weekly "On Language" column for the New York Times. From slang to spin, Safire has for nearly four decades, shown us how the English language is a living, breathing and ever-evolving organism, that should never, ever be taken at face value. This is particularly true of the political jargon cast out by politicians, pundits, and the press. When Safire catches these colorful and slippery specimens of "polingo" in his lexicographer's net, his probing reveals them to be as curious and revealing of our historical past as our present. Want to know what the politicians are really saying, or trying to say? Then check out the newly revised edition of Safire's Political Dictionary--a magnum opus of U.S. political terminology. In it, Safire shares with readers his expert dissection of politico-speak to uncover its deeper meanings and broader significance. This fully updated reference volume is essential and highly entertaining reading for voters of all persuasions and just about anyone interested in American political culture. --Lauren Nemroff

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Former Governor Jesse Ventura: WTC Collapse A Controlled Demolition

2008-04-03T02:24:00.000-07:00

Navy veteran and movie star savages official story, says media covering up truth about attacks

Paul Joseph Watson - Wednesday, April 2, 2008

(Video in 3 parts.)

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Jesse Ventura Discusses Politics

2008-04-03T02:14:00.000-07:00

(Video in 6 parts)

Part 1: Jesse discusses the political landscape.

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Sen Chuck Hagel, Olbermann and Reality on the Ground in Iraq

2008-04-02T02:59:00.000-07:00

Senator Hagel speaks to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show

2008-04-02T02:15:00.000-07:00

The Senator breaks from his party's ranks to denounce the Iraq War and apologizes to the American people for not asking the tough questions.

Book Review: America: Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers

2008-04-02T02:12:00.000-07:00

Senator Chuck Hagel has long been admired by his colleagues on both sides of the Senate floor for his honesty, integrity, and common-sense approach to the challenges of our times. The Los Angeles Times has praised his "bold positions on foreign policy and national security" and wondered, "What's not to like?" In America: Our Next Chapter, Nebraska-born Hagel offers a hard-hitting examination of the current state of our nation and provides substantial, meaningful proposals that can guide America back onto the right path.

In America: Our Next Chapter, Hagel speaks the truth as he sees it—in a direct and refreshingly unvarnished manner. Basing his suggestions on thorough research and careful thought, as well as on personal insight from his years as a political insider, successful businessman, and decorated war hero, he discusses domestic issues—including the health care crisis, immigration, and Social Security and Medicare reform—and global climate change. He confronts foreign policy problems that the current administration has bungled or ignored, including China's growing economy; control of U.S. debt; India's and Pakistan's nuclear capabilities; and Iran's aggressive political, ideological, and nuclear stances. He decries the pervasive disease of third world poverty, arguing convincingly that this is where the real fight against terrorism must begin. Always true to the beliefs instilled in his childhood on the prairie, he speaks passionately about service—to one's country and to one's fellow citizens—as the path toward a renewed America. And, of course, he gives a candid examination of the debacle that is the Iraq War.

A staunch Republican yet a "hero to liberals" (Time), Hagel asks the tough questions and delivers straight answers to America's most pressing problems. America: Our Next Chapter is a serious, honest, and, ultimately, optimistic look at our nation's future, from an American original.

About the Author

Chuck Hagel, Nebraska's senior senator, is serving his second term in the U.S. Senate. His duties include membership on four senate committees: Foreign Relations; Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; Intelligence; and Rules. Hagel and his brother Tom served side by side in Vietnam in 1968 as infantry squad leaders with the U.S. Army's 9th Infantry Division. He earned many military decorations and honors, including two Purple Hearts. A fourth-generation Nebraskan, Senator Hagel is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Hagel and his wife, Lilibet, have two children.

Hagel: Bush Iraq speech like 'Alice in Wonderland'

2008-04-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

Nick Langewis and David Edwards | Raw Story | Published: Thursday March 27, 2008

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) suggests to CNN's Wolf Blitzer that there is no cause for optimism towards the situation in Iraq, propagated by arrogance, with an ever-growing cost in lives and money, despite a recent speech by President Bush.

"I think this is another episode of 'Alice in Wonderland,'" the Senator says. "What's up is down, and what's down is up. What do you mean, 'stability and security?' Baghdad, for example, has been over the last year essentially ethnically divided."

"And," Hagel adds, "when you look at the casualties the United States has taken since since the so-called 'military surge,' over 900 deaths; you look at almost 30,000 wounded, and the money we've put in there.

And then, the other point of this is, too: If, in fact, the 'surge' has calmed things to a point where the President and others are saying 'Well, they've done a great service, and they've achieved some terrific things,' why, then, is the administration talking about keeping more American troops in Iraq for the remainder of this year than we had before the 'surge'?"

"This," the Senator continues, "is still a very unstable, serious, dangerous situation in Iraq."

John Adams

2008-03-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

By David McCullough
736pp, Simon & Schuster, $35

reviewed by John Coggin | Yale Review of Books

When David McCullough won the National Book Award in 1981 for Mornings on Horseback, his rendering of Theodore Roosevelt’s struggle to manhood, he said that his childhood in Pennsylvania amid the horror of World War II had spurred his love for history. He then described his undergraduate experience at Yale as the crucial period when he seriously considered writing as a lifelong endeavor. He later concluded that, “one of the lessons of history—one of the lessons of life—is that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman.” In John Adams, McCullough teaches the significance of this lesson. He studies Adams, a man of honesty and wisdom, so we might learn his story, and then delight in his triumph.

At age 25, John Adams resembled his college friends. Ambitious and vain, he yearned for distinction, but needed “ballast.” “Why have I not genius to start some new thought?” he wondered in his diary. “Let me search for the clue which led great Shakespeare into the labyrinth of human nature. Let me examine how men think.” Adams began writing portraits of “original characters” around his home of Braintree, Massachusetts—brief, poignant sketches of human failure and conquest. McCullough examines Adams with the same tenacity these diary entries display. The historian draws from a marvelous collection of family letters and diaries (especially the voluminous correspondence between John and Abigail) to illuminate the “labyrinth” of John Adams’ mind. McCullough explores his public and private persona with equal vigor, relating even the humiliations that resulted from Adam’s obstinacy and vanity. While depicting these flaws, McCullough reveals that Adams’ abiding honesty and courage carried him from his Massachusetts law practice to the presidency of the United States. McCullough highlights these traits beautifully.

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The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

2008-03-27T05:57:00.001-07:00

From Publishers Weekly

Global warming is hardly new; in fact, the very long-term trend began about 12,000 years ago with the end of the Ice Age. Anthropologist Fagan (The Little Ice Age) focuses on the medieval warming period (ca. 800-1300), which helped Europe produce larger harvests; the surpluses helped fund the great cathedrals. But in many other parts of the world, says Fagan, changing water and air currents led to drought and malnutrition, for instance among the Native Americans of Northern California, whose key acorn harvests largely failed. Long-term drought contributed to the collapse of the Mayan civilization, and fluctuations in temperature contributed to, and inhibited, Mongol incursions into Europe. Fagan reveals how new research methods like ice borings, satellite observations and computer modeling have sharpened our understanding of meteorological trends in prehistorical times and preliterate cultures. Finally, he notes how times of intense, sustained global warming can have particularly dire consequences; for example, by 2025, an estimated 2.8 billion of us will live in areas with increasingly scarce water resources. Looking backward, Fagan presents a well-documented warning to those who choose to look forward. Illus., maps. (Mar.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"An alarm bell ringing out from a distant time."—Kirkus

"Superbly integrating the human and climatological past, Fagan’s expertise wears easily in a fine popular treatment relevant to contemporary debate about climate."—Booklist

"This is not only World History at its best, sweeping across all of humankind with a coherent vision, but also a feat of imagination and massive research. If Fagan has given the medieval period throughout the globe a new dimension, he has at the same time issued an irrefutable warning about climate change that is deeply troubling."--Theodore Rabb, author of The Last Days of the Renaissance

“Climate has been making history for a very long time, though historians have rarely paid much attention to it. But as it turns out, a few less inches of rain, a change in temperature of just a degree or two can make all the difference in how human events unfold. The Great Warming demonstrates that although human beings make history, they very definitely do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing.”--Ted Steinberg, author of Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History and American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn

“Looking backward, Fagan presents a well-documented warning to those who choose to look forward.”--Publisher's Weekly

How to Make Friends and Influence People (Bush-Style)

2008-03-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Chilean Envoy to U.N. Recounts Threats of Retaliation in Run-Up to Invasion

Colum Lynch | Washington Post | Sunday, March 23, 2008

UNITED NATIONS -- In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.

The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting "bitterness" and "deep mistrust" in Washington's relations with allies in Europe, Latin Americaand elsewhere, Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, writes in his book "A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," set for publication next month.

In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished" for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein's government, Muñoz writes.

But the tough talk dissipated as the war situation worsened, and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Muñoz's account suggests that the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration's standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.

Muñoz details key roles by Chile and Mexico, the Security Council's two Latin members at the time, in the run-up to the war: Then-U.N. Ambassadors Juan Gabriel Vald¿s of Chile and Adolfo Aguilar Zinser of Mexico helped thwart U.S. and British efforts to rally support among the council's six undecided members for a resolution authorizing the U.S.-led invasion.

The book portrays Bush personally prodding the leaders of those six governments -- Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico and Pakistan -- to support the war resolution, a strategy aimed at demonstrating broad support for U.S. military plans, despite the French threat to veto the resolution.

In the weeks preceding the war, Bush made several appeals to Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and Mexican President Vicente Fox to rein in their diplomats and support U.S. war aims. "We have problems with your ambassador at the U.N.," Bush told Fox at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperationin Los Cabos, Mexico, in late 2002.

It's time to bring up the vote, Ricardo. We've had this debate too long," Bush told the Chilean president on March 11, 2003."

Bush had referred to Lagos by his first name, but as the conversation drew to a close and Lagos refused to support the resolution as it stood, Bush shifted to a cool and aloof 'Mr. President,' " Muñoz writes. "Next Monday, time is up," Bush told Lagos.

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How Bush coerced allies to support invading Iraq-1/3

Taking Back the Constitution--A Case for Impeaching George W. Bush

2008-03-21T06:06:00.000-07:00

Taki's Magazine | Posted by Kevin R. C. Gutzman on March 21, 2008

On Saturday, March 8, 2008, President George W. Bush vetoed a congressional bill that would have explicitly banned interrogation techniques like waterboarding. In doing so, Bush cemented his worthiness of impeachment.

The impeachment power allows Congress to keep the other two branches from grasping at powers that the Constitution gives to the Legislative Branch. Congress is described in Article I of the Constitution, and its structure was the chief issue in the Philadelphia Convention. Why? Because in a republic, it is to be the most important branch.

People commonly repeat the idea today that the federal government features three equal branches. This is an error. Congress is to be the most important branch. The Founders generally feared the power of the executive and assigned the traditional royal powers in foreign policy to Congress instead of the president. The courts were to be even weaker, the “least dangerous” branch.

Yet, over time, the three have come to be more equal. This is the result of Congress’s supine attitude toward the other branches’ overreaching. When federal courts legislate, Congress does nothing. When presidents and their subordinates—generals, cabinet officials, and others—ignore statutory law, refuse to comply with congressional demands for information, or flat-out lie to Congress, Congress does nothing.

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25 Intolerable Contradictions: The Final Undoing of the Official 9/11 Story

2008-03-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Woodworth | Global Research | Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A review of "9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press," by Dr. David Ray Griffin. Interlink Publishing, March 2008. 368 p. List

At last there is a book about 9/11 that politicians and journalists can openly discuss without fear of being labeled "conspiracy theorists".

9/11 Contradictions advances no theories. It simply exposes 25 astonishing internal contradictions that will haunt the public story of this unparalleled event for all time.

Until now, the persistent and disturbing questions about the day that changed the world have confused and alienated journalists and politicians, because:

The technical issues regarding the collapse of the towers, the failure of the military to intercept the flights, and the relatively minor damage to the Pentagon have been considered too complex for analysis in the media.

However, Griffin’s new book requires no technical expertise from the reader, because each readable chapter revolves around one simple internal contradiction inherent in the public story. “If Jones says ‘P’ and Smith says ‘Not P’, we can all recognize that something must be wrong, because both statements cannot be true.”

Many who have doubted the official story have offered alternative theories which have been dismissed as “conspiracy theories” by a press which must understandably place a high value on its credibility.

However, this book offers no alternative theories to explain the contradictions within the public story. It simply presents the glaring contradictions that have never been probed by Congress or the media, and beseeches members of these institutions come to grips with the reality and lead the charge for a truly independent investigation.

The 9/11 issue is six years old, journalists are busy people, and the world has moved on.

Though six years have passed, this matter is by no means closed, nor is the trail cold. "The accepted story about 9/11 has been used to increase military spending, justify wars, restrict civil liberties, and exalt the executive branch of the government." Indeed, this reviewer notes, the public story has recently been challenged in foreign forums (Japan Parliament, January 10, 2008, and at the European Parliament building in Brussels, February 26, 2008). The 9/11 Commissioners themselves have cast doubt on the credibility of the Commission Report in their January 2, 2008 New York Times article, "Stonewalled by the CIA." (Ref. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02kean.html)<

Let us now turn to the contradictions.

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A Chosen People without God--The Rise of the Neocons

2008-03-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

Grant Havers | Taki's Magazine | March 13, 2008

It is always risky to write the obituary of neoconservatism, despite the now fashionable view that this is an idea whose time is finally gone. As Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrates in They Knew They Were Right: The Rise Of The Neocons, the neoconservatives have always been a tenacious bunch. Who could have predicted that a small group of ex-Trotskyite intellectuals would not only shape foreign policy for the Republican Party in the last three decades but also reinvent conservatism in America? Heilbrunn, a former senior editor of The New Republic, wisely prefers to emphasize the past success of the neoconservatives rather than offer ironclad predictions about their future influence, settling for rather safe forecasts such as his claim that American soldiers will be in Iraq for another four years, whoever wins the election in 2008.

The title of the book is Heilbrunn’s essential explanation for the success of the neoconservatives—they knew they were right. Their sheer self-confidence of the neoconservatives, their belief that they have The Answer, is astounding and goes a long way in explaining their stunning victories. For this reason, the author emphasizes the radical origins of the movement. Heilbrunn offers a readable (though not terribly original) account of how the future leaders of neoconservatism (especially Irving Kristol) got their start as public intellectuals engaged in various fratricidal battles between Trotskyites and Stalinists in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite this parochial beginning, these former leftist radicals—who eventually became ardent anti-Communists—possessed the will to power necessary to enter and then transform the mainstream of American politics, especially on the right. As they eventually moved from the left to the right in the 1970s, this will to change the world through endless promotion of their ideas never flagged.

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Lou Dobbs: New World Order Can Be Defeated

2008-03-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet | Friday, March 7, 2008

CNN host Lou Dobbs says that the New World Order can be defeated but only if "Americans awaken and soon," as he attacked the Bush administration's "shameless" destruction of U.S. sovereignty on a nationally syndicated radio show.

"What we have permitted in allowing the Bush administration to have effectively further reduced our sovereignty and respect for our laws and certainly regard for our borders and our ports - it's been a shameless, shameless period in American history that we're going to have to reverse," Dobbs told the Alex Jones Show.

Dobbs said that if people did not wake up to the unfolding North American Union agenda as well as the Trans Texas Corridor under the banner of the Security and Prosperity partnership, then America could "kiss its future goodbye."

The CNN host said that the New World Order could be defeated, but only if the American people awakened and did it soon.

Speaking on the subject of 9/11, Dobbs said the federal government had acted with deceit in failing to prevent the attack .

"We gave George Tenet a gold medal while the CIA failed to act intelligently or responsibly to stop that attack - I'm talking about a government that almost seven years after September 11th continues to leave our borders wide open and our ports insecure with 95% of what enters this country uninspected, it's unconscionable," said Dobbs.

During the interview, Dobbs also said that the U.S. economy is heading for a stagflation crisis as a result of the U.S. government's policy of dollar depreciation and that the only solution is for the American people to restore a proper Constitutional system of government.

"We have the specter of stagflation staring at us coldly and inevitably right now," said Dobbs, adding, "There's no doubt that those who would degrade the sovereignty of this country would want to certainly the power, the strength, and the respect of the U.S. dollar and it is the last thing we should permit," he concluded.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irkyi-YWocw]

They Knew They Were Right

2008-03-01T12:40:00.000-08:00

From Publishers Weekly
News of neoconservatism's demise has been greatly exaggerated, according to prolific journalist Heilbrunn, who profiles the largely (though by no means exclusively) Jewish makeup of the movement. Heilbrunn roots his interpretation of neoconservatism's Jewish character in the American immigrant experience, the persistent memory of the Holocaust and Western appeasement of Hitler, among other phenomena. Charting the movement's philosophy from its inception through the foreign policy vision crafted in the 1970s and the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s, Heilbrunn employs a quasi-biblical spin echoed in Old Testament-inspired chapter headings. With the exception of his grasp of neoconservatism's right-wing Christian contingent, Heilbrunn displays an innate understanding of the movement. He argues persuasively that though these self-styled prophets embrace an outsider stance, and though he believes they are happiest when viewed as the opposition, they will remain a formidable influence for the foreseeable future. Heilbrunn's analysis lacks rigor concerning foreign policy assumptions and ideological and economic motives, thus unintentionally leaving his subjects more historically isolated than they really are. His proximity to the conservative movement brings benefits and limitations to this historical analysis. (Jan.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
The neocons have become at once the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. Critics on left and right describe them as a tight-knit cabal that ensnared the Bush administration in an unwinnable foreign war.

Who are the neoconservatives? How did an obscure band of policy intellectuals, left for dead in the 1990s, suddenly rise to influence the Bush administration and revolutionize American foreign policy?

Jacob Heilbrunn wittily and pungently depicts the government officials, pundits, and think-tank denizens who make up this controversial movement, bringing them to life against a background rich in historical detail and political insight. Setting the movement in the larger context of the decades-long battle between liberals and conservatives, first over communism, now over the war on terrorism, he shows that they have always been intellectual mavericks, with a fiery prophetic temperament (and a rhetoric to match) that sets them apart from both liberals and traditional conservatives.

Neoconservatism grew out of a split in the 1930s between Stalinists and followers of Trotsky. These obscure ideological battles between warring Marxist factions were transported to the larger canvas of the Cold War, as over time the neocons moved steadily to the right, abandoning the Democratic party after 1972 when it shunned intervention abroad, and completing their journey in 1980 when they embraced Ronald Reagan and the Republican party. There they supplied the ideological glue that held the Reagan coalition together, combining the agenda of “family values” with a crusading foreign policy.

Out of favor with the first President Bush, and reduced to gadflies in the Clinton years, they suddenly found themselves in George W. Bush’s administration in a position of unprecendented influence. For the first time in their long history, they had their hands on the levers of power. Prompted by 9/11, they used that power to advance what they believed to be America’s strategic interest in spreading democracy throughout the Arab world.

Their critics charge that the neo-conservatives were doing the bidding of the Israeli government -- a charge that the neoconservatives rightfully reject. But Heilbrunn shows that the story of the neocons is inseparable from the great historical drama of Jewish assimilation. Decisively shaped by the immigrant exerience and the trauma of the Holocaust, they rose from the margins of political life to become an insurgent counter-establishment that challenged the old WASP foreign policy elite.

Far from being chastened by the Iraq debacle, the neocons continue to guide foreign policy. They are advisors to each of the major GOP presidential candidates. Repeatedly declared dead in the past, like Old Testament prophets they thrive on adversity. This book shows where they came from -- and why they remain a potent and permanent force in American politics.

The U.S. Constitution is Not Democratic—and Why That’s a Good Thing

2008-02-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

Kevin R. C. Gutzman | Taki's Top Drawer | February 21, 2008
Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It). Oxford University Press, 2006.
Sanford Levinson is very upset. As he sees it, the United States Constitution fails to uphold the principles of the American nation, and something needs to be done about it. Our Undemocratic Constitution is his case for a national referendum on calling a new constitutional convention to revise the Constitution to bring it into the 21st century.

What are the principles the national Constitution is supposed to further? They include those of the Preamble, asserts Levinson. Insofar as it does not conduce to the achievement of “a more perfect union,” say, “promote the general welfare,” or “secure the blessings of liberty,” then, the Constitution needs to be changed.

Those are not the only principles Levinson identifies as fundamental. Also fundamental are equality and democracy. Levinson knows that these are fundamental, and the Constitution does not serve them, so it needs to be amended to allow them to be followed, too.

Levinson points to several provisions of the Constitution as contrary to principles such as equality and democracy. He is especially exercised about the structure of the U.S. Senate and of the Electoral College, each of which skews outcomes in favor of less populous states. This is undemocratic, says Levinson, and cannot be tolerated.

Read more...

Benazir Bhutto's 'Reconciliation': Islam, Democracy, and the West

2008-02-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

By Michiko Kakutani | International Herald Tribune | Published: February 19, 2008

328 pages. $27.95. HarperCollins.

Benazir Bhutto called her 1989 autobiography "Daughter of Destiny," and when she was assassinated in December at 54, she became the fourth member of her immediate family to die violently against the backdrop of Pakistani intrigue and politics: her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a minor political opponent; her younger brother, Shahnawaz, mysteriously died of poisoning in 1985; and her other brother, Murtaza, was gunned down outside his home in 1996.

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Kamila Shamsie | The Guardian | Saturday February 16, 2008

336pp, Simon & Schuster, £17.99

There can be few experiences more disquieting than that of reading the opening pages of Benazir Bhutto's Reconciliation, with its description of her homecoming on October 18 2007 - the jubilation followed by carnage. The details of the suicide attack are horrific enough within their own context, but when read as precursor to the attack that killed Bhutto 10 weeks later they acquire an even more chilling resonance. There is the sense of reading two texts: the first might well have been published during the early months of Bhutto's premiership, its words a yardstick against which we would measure the effectiveness of her government; the second stands as the final testament of an extraordinary woman whose death added urgency to the already-urgent arguments of the book.

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Timothy Snyder on the Forgotten Holocaust

2008-02-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

“I felt a strong desire to sprinkle my head, my whole self, with ashes, to be nothing, to be changed into dust.”
-- Ida Belozovskaya, quoted in “The Unknown Black Book”

Though she survived the Holocaust, Ida Belozovskaya was not invoking the crematoriums of Auschwitz. In the Kiev of September 1941 that she was describing in one of the interviews published in “The Unknown Black Book,” the Germans were killing the Jews, but without the help of gas chambers. These had not yet been invented, but the Holocaust was under way. What she was trying to describe was the fear and shame of hiding in a city where 30,000 Jews could be shot in a single day, where her father had just been seized on the street. Her references jar the ones we have come to know, but her experience is just as representative, and important, as that of Jews who lived through Auschwitz. Half of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed by bullets rather than by gas, in death pits rather than in death camps. Some 2.2 million Soviet Jews were killed by shooting; 350,000 more were asphyxiated in mobile gas vans. Compare this to the 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz, or the approximately 800,000 deaths at Treblinka. Even had the death camps never existed, this eastern Holocaust would have to be regarded as the most horrible of atrocities. Yet we have all but forgotten it.

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Jon Stewart takes on the ‘uncensored’ history of the 9/11 Commission

2008-02-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

Mike Aivaz and Michael Roston | therawstory | Published: Tuesday February 12, 2008

Jon Stewart hosted the New York Times' Philip Shenon on Monday night to discuss his new book, The Commission: An Uncensored history of the 9/11 Commission. The author described White House obstructionism in the course of the officially-mandated Sept. 11 investigation.

"It is remarkable the efforts that the Bush White House went through to try to prevent the 9/11 Commission from getting the information it needed," Shenon told Stewart. "The person who was most responsible for that tension was former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who was then the White House Counsel."

"Well he's really matured since then, I don't know if you've seen some of his work recently," Stewart joked in response.

Stewart also asked Shenon about Commission executive director Philip Zelikow and his relationship with Karl Rove. According to the author, "alarms" went off for the staff when they heard about multiple phone calls Rove had made to Zelikow.

"Then Zelikow calls in his secretary and apparently tells her to stop keeping phone logs of his conversations with the White House," Shenon explained.

"I'm sure it's all innocent stuff," Stewart quipped.

Reached by the Associated Press, Zelikow provided a 131-page statement with information he said was provided for the book. In it, Zelikow acknowledges talking to Rove and Rice during the course of the commission's work despite a general pledge he made not to. But he said the conversations never dealt with politics.

A video clip from Monday night's episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is presented below:

Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power

2008-02-11T10:02:00.000-08:00

Review
America’s leaders have gone from hubris to waking fantasy, according to this caustic critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Kaplan (The Wizards of Armageddon) argues that the Cold War’s end and 9/11 persuaded President Bush and his advisers to unilaterally impose America’s political will on the world, while remaining blind to the military and diplomatic fiascoes that followed. Rumsfeld’s "Revolution in Military Affairs," a doctrine touting supposedly omnipotent mobile forces and high-tech smart weapons, convinced Pentagon officials that Iraq could be pacified without a large force or a reconstruction plan. Bush abandoned Clinton’s diplomatic rapprochement with North Korea, then stood by as Kim Jong-Il built nuclear weapons. And imbued with a "mix of neo-conservatism and evangelism" that was peddled most flamboyantly by Israeli ideologue Natan Sharansky, Bush backed clumsy pro democracy initiatives that backfired by bringing anti-American and sectarian groups to power in the Middle East. Eschewing Kaplan’s favored approach of fostering international security through alliances and consensus building, Bush assumed that "by virtue of American power, saying something was tantamount to making it so." The particulars of Kaplan’s indictment aren’t new, but his detailed, illuminating (if occasionally disjointed) accounts of the evolution of the Bush administration’s strategic doctrines add up to a cogent brief for soft realism over truculent idealism. (Feb.) (Publishers Weekly, November 12, 2007)

Book Description
America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past eight years is well-known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. In Daydream Believers, celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan combines in-depth reporting and razor-sharp analysis to explain just how George W. Bush and his aides got so far off track -- and why much of the nation followed.

For eight years, Kaplan reminds us, the White House -- and many of the nation's podiums and opinion pages -- rang out with appealing but deluded claims: that we live in a time like no other and that, therefore, the lessons of history no longer apply; that new technology has transformed warfare; that the world's peoples will be set free, if only America topples their dictators; and that those who dispute such promises do so for partisan reasons. They thought they were visionaries, but they only had visions. And they believed in their daydreams.

"In his Slate chronicles through the Iraq War years, Fred Kaplan consistently outshone other analysts with his explanations of what was going wrong and why. In this engrossing and completely new work, he tells the story of the little-known theorists who have shaped much of the world's recent history. For me this book was full of revelations."--James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

"This is the inside history of our time, told with precision and confidence by an author who knows where the secrets are kept -- and also that the most powerful and dangerous weapon in Washington, D.C., is a new idea." --Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and Making the Corps

The greatest story never told: Winston Churchill and the crash of 1929

2008-02-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

There is an amazing book titled, The Greatest Story Never Told: Winston Churchill and the Crash of 1929 by Pat Riott, which is a real eye opener. In light of all the talk about the dollar and the fact that America's economy is in hock to foreign countries, our "strong economy" and other popular sound bites, I thought this would be a good time to let you know about this excellent little book.

The Greatest Story lays out the events of October 1929 in a simple fashion in this thoroughly documented work. The big cigar puffer, Winston Churchill, is a great hero to many Americans. Was he, really? I think people will find out differently after they read this well researched work. Sadly, most Americans won't because they would rather willfully believe lies than have their comfort zone disturbed and because Americans have become intellectually lazy and just want to be entertained by the TV, drugs, booze, porn and "leisure activities." In the meantime, they are jeopardizing everything they have ever worked for by placing their blind trust in their elected public officials in Washington, DC who have proven themselves to be crooks, cowards, liars and the worst of scoundrels.

The majority of comfort zone Americans think the "Crash of '29" was some sort of anomaly that can't happen again. They think that because some "safeguards" have been put in place by the NYSE, a big crash can't happen again. Not here in America! Really? Here's a few points about The Greatest Story Never Told that might interest you:

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Milton Viorst on Israel’s Tragic Predicament

2008-02-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

By Milton Viorst | TruthDig | Posted on Feb 1, 2008

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

—Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” Act III.

In opening his stunning memoir, “Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine,” David Shulman declares: “I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” It is a very sad story, of a society gone astray with power, and of decent Israelis in despair over the failure of their efforts to save it from itself. The story, as Shulman says, is not yet over, but he asks whether its end is not already determined. Is tragedy inevitable? Can Israel right its course to achieve its once glowing promise as a refuge and as a nation?

Shulman’s memoir is not unique in raising these questions. Two recent books share his foreboding: “Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007,” a careful work of scholarship by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, and “Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society,” a stinging essay by Michel Warschawski. Shulman and Zertal are college professors, Eldar is a journalist, Warschawski is a peace activist. All are Israeli Jews. Whatever the stylistic differences of their books, they are equally unforgiving of Israel for placing its future in stark jeopardy.

None of these authors, it should be emphasized, is an apologist for Arabs. They do not deny that two peoples of vastly different cultures are engaged in a conflict of nationalisms, in which both sides have killed intemperately. All agree it is a conflict with too many victims, in both cultures. But these writers, good Israelis, are convinced Israel cannot resolve it by military superiority, much less by physical abuse.

Keep reading...

He’d rather talk about sex than God

2008-02-03T08:12:00.000-08:00

George Bush built his career on his faith. But his key religious adviser tells of a different man behind the born-again image

Jacob Weisberg | The Sunday Times | January 27, 2008

One of the defining aspects of George W Bush’s presidency is his professed belief in God. Yet what really are his religious beliefs? The question, which seems central to understanding his presidency, never receives a satisfactory answer. Indeed, one religious figure close to him soon after his conversion was shocked to find that he talked about sex rather than theology and says that a lot of his faith seemed to be politically calculated.

Bush’s religion has often been described as evangelical. But unlike most other evangelicals, he blithely uses profanity and as governor of Texas he would play poker. He doesn’t pay tithes, he doesn’t try to convert others – one of the central obligations in most evangelical denominations. And he didn’t raise his daughters in the faith.

What Bush clearly does believe in is the personal, transforming and sustaining power of belief in God. Having a personal relationship with God, praying and reading the Bible daily were the tools he used to get control of his life more than 20 years ago.

They made it possible for him to control his drinking, keep his family together after his wife Laura threatened to leave him, manage his aggressive behaviour, cope with the burden of a heroic father and attain success.

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Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party

2008-01-12T03:17:00.001-08:00

Book Description
Coming just in time for election season, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party chronicles the extraordinary stories of five politicians and activists: three "progressive heroes" who exhibited rare political courage - and through it found unexpected political success, and two "spineless weasels" who embraced The Politics of Fear and rode it to ultimate failure.

The book reveals how Senator Paul Wellstone used his courage to overcome a quirky personality, an occasionally hysterical style and, most of all, an ideology considerably to the left of his constituents, eventually becoming a national hero.

It tells the dramatic story of how the same foundations and corporations that engineered the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party used junk political science to move Democrats to the right as well. Hurowitz shows how the legacy of Bill Clinton, widely proclaimed his generation's greatest political talent, will actually burden the Democratic Party and the progressive movement for decades to come.

A work of astounding insight, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party promises to transform political discourse in 2008.

From the Publisher
"Glenn is a brilliant emerging star in the progressive movement." - Matt Stoller, OpenLeft.com.

* Find out why "issues don't matter," why "politicians should only pander to people who care" and discover what exactly the "wimp love myth" is.

*Read why the legacy of Bill Clinton, proclaimed his generation's greatest political talent, will actually burden the Democratic Party and the progressive movement

*Learn how progressive heroes like Senator Paul Wellstone and organizations like MoveOn.org can teach you to transform your community, your country, and the world.

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The Secret Founding of America

2007-12-30T03:21:00.000-08:00

The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans, & the Battle for The New World

Book Description

Ask most Americans where the country’s origins lie and they’ll point to the Mayflower and its settlers—whom we often think of as the earliest arrivals to our shores. But something existed even before that: Jamestown. Its founders had thoroughly different values than the Puritans, and their Masonic beliefs indelibly shaped America’s future. This authoritative, accessible, and absorbing history takes a fresh look at the past to reveal the truth about why the United States is now run by Freemasons who are Christians, too. Drawing on original findings, and exhibiting a rich, in-depth understanding of the political and philosophical realities of the time, acclaimed author Nicholas Hagger argues that the new nation, conceived in liberty, was the Freemasons’ first step towards a new world order. He charts the connections between secret societies and libertarian ideals, explains how the influence of German Illuminati worked on the framers of the new republic, and shows the hand of Freemasonry at work at every turning point in America’s history—from the Civil War to the Cold War to today’s global struggles for democracy. It’s a fascinating subject, and one that will also be at the center of Dan Brown’s next book—so interest is sure to be high and the tie-in potential immense.

Eight Senior Republican Appointees Challenge Official Account of 9/11 - “Not Possible”, “a Whitewash”, “False”

2007-12-09T05:16:00.000-08:00

Alan Miller | OpEdNews | December 4, 2007 at 11:20:30

December 4, 2007 – Eight former senior Republican administration appointees have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and several have called for a new investigation. "I find the facts against the official story of the [WTC] buildings' collapse more compelling than the case that has been made in behalf of the official story. I would like to see the issue debated by independent scientists and engineers," wrote Paul Craig Roberts, PhD, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan. "A real investigation is needed to find an explanation consistent with the evidence, even if it doesn't reassure the public," said Dr. Roberts [1], frequently referred to as the "Father of Reagonomics."

"Over the past six years, the ranks of distinguished skeptics of the 9-11 storyline have grown enormously. The ranks include distinguished scientists, engineers and architects, intelligence officers, air traffic controllers, military officers and generals, including the former commanding general of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, former presidential appointees and members of the White House staff in Republican administrations, Top Gun fighter pilots and career airline pilots who say that the flying attributed to the 9-11 hijackers is beyond the skills of America's best pilots, and foreign dignitaries."

Dr. Roberts currently serves as Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. Previously he was the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. He also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and as Associate Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

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Calling on Congress to Stop a War

2007-12-08T04:26:00.000-08:00

Scott Ritter | Truthdig | December 7, 2007

Let’s hear it for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). After more than five years of effort, incorporating technologically advanced, exhaustive inspections of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities (and, to a lesser degree, some undeclared facilities as well), the fruit of its labor has been borne out in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced by the U.S. intelligence community that finds that Iran is not currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program. While the analysis behind the NIE conclusion reflects the independent judgment of the 16 agencies which comprise the U.S. intelligence community, there is no doubt that the most influential information behind the assessment was that of the IAEA inspections, which had probed Iran’s nuclear program since November 2002. The IAEA had coordinated closely with the U.S. intelligence community in preparing for its inspections inside Iran, so much so that there was almost no stone left unturned and no major question left unanswered for U.S. analysts when it came to the nuclear facilities and activities of interest. The consensus-driven NIE puts to rest the notion that Iran represents any sort of imminent threat worthy of near-term pre-emptive military action.

Personally, the NIE (and its roots in the findings of the IAEA inspections) came as no surprise. In my 2006 book “Target Iran” I framed precisely the same argument using data virtually identical to that contained in the NIE. While I am tempted to utter the immortal words “I told you so,” such self-congratulation would not only reek of hubris but divert attention away from the fact that the NIE isn’t the final word on the framing and implementation of U.S.-Iran policy. It is but an empty document void of meaning unless life is breathed into its findings by an Executive rededicated to formulating policy founded in fact, not ideology, or a Congress awakened to its long-dormant status as a separate but equal branch of government.

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United States Tells Iran: Become a Nuclear Power

2007-12-04T09:43:00.000-08:00

Reese Erlich | Truthdig | Posted on Dec 3, 2007

Top Democratic and Republican leaders absolutely believe that Iran is planning to develop nuclear weapons. And one of their seemingly strongest arguments involves a process of deduction. Since Iran has so much oil, they argue, why develop nuclear power?

James Woolsey typifies the view. The director of the CIA under both George Bush (the elder) and Bill Clinton said, “There is no underlying reason for one of the greatest oil producers in the world to need to get into the nuclear [energy] business ... unless what they want to do is train and produce people and an infrastructure that can have highly enriched uranium or plutonium, fissionable material for nuclear weapons."¹

In an op-ed commentary, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote, “For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources,” a position later cited approvingly by the Bush administration.²

But U.S. leaders are engaging in a massive case of collective amnesia, or perhaps more accurately, intentional misdirection. In the 1970s the United States encouraged Iran to develop nuclear power precisely because Iran will eventually run out of oil.

A declassified document from President Gerald Ford’s administration, for which Kissinger was secretary of state, supported Iran’s push for nuclear power. The document noted that Tehran should “prepare against the time—about 15 years in the future—when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply."³

The United States ultimately planned to sell billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear reactors, spare parts, and nuclear fuel to Iran. Muhammad Sahimi, a professor and former department chair of the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Department at the University of Southern California, told me that Kissinger thought “it was in the U.S. national interest, both economic and security interest, to have such close relations in terms of nuclear power.”⁴

The shah even periodically hinted that he wanted Iran to build nuclear weapons. In June 1974, the shah proclaimed that Iran would have nuclear weapons “without a doubt and sooner than one would think.”⁵ Iranian embassy officials in France later denied the shah made those remarks, and the shah disowned them. But a few months later, the shah noted that Iran “has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons but if small states began building them, then Iran might have to reconsider its policy.”⁶

If an Iranian leader made such statements today, the United States and Israel would denounce them as proof of nefarious intent. They might well threaten military action if Iran didn’t immediately halt its nuclear buildup. At the time, however, the comments caused no ripples in Washington or Tel Aviv because the shah was a staunch ally of both. Asked to comment on his contradictory views then and now, Kissinger said, “They were an allied country, and this was a commercial transaction. We didn’t address the question of them one day moving toward nuclear weapons.”⁷

Kissinger should have added that consistency has never been a strong point of U.S. foreign policy.

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White House Obstructs Plame Investigation

2007-12-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

Sam Stein | Huffington Post | December 3, 2007 11:11 AM

The Bush Administration is actively blocking Congress' investigation into the outing of once-covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman.

In a letter sent today to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Waxman notes that "White House objections are preventing Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald from disclosing key information to investigating officials." Among the documents being withheld are interviews taken from White House officers during Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of Plame's identity.

"Over the summer, Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to provide relevant documents to the Committee, including records of interviews with senior White House officials. Unfortunately, the White House has been blocking Mr. Fitzgerald from providing key documents to the Committee," Waxman writes to newly appointed Mukasey. "I ask that you personally look into this matter and authorize the production of the documents to the Committee without any further delay."

Waxman's letter provides one of the first tests for Mukasey, who stressed during his confirmation hearings that he would operate independently from White House directive. The letter also provides greater insight into the extent of collaboration between Fitzgerald and the oversight committee.

Read the full letter here. Emptywheel has more here.

The Bush Family Gets Away with Crimes That Would Land Anyone Else in Jail

2007-12-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted November 26, 2007.

For decades, the Bush family has operated above the law, using powerful connections to brush aside evidence that would put lesser Americans in the slammer.

In the history of the American Republic, perhaps no political family has been more protected from scandal than the Bushes.

When the Bushes are involved in dirty deals or even criminal activity, standards of evidence change. Instead of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that would lock up an average citizen, the evidence must be perfect.

If there's any doubt at all, the Bushes must be presumed innocent. Even when their guilt is obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense, it's their accusers and those who dare investigate who get the worst of it. Their motives are challenged and their own shortcomings are cast in the harshest possible light.

For decades -- arguably going back generations -- the Bushes have been protected by their unique position straddling two centers of national power, the family's blueblood Eastern Establishment ties and the Texas oil crowd with strong links to the Republican Right. [For details on this family phenomenon, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Naomi Wolf: America's Fascist Coup Owes Legacy To Bush's Nazi Grandfather

2007-11-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

Author of "10 steps" speaks publicly for the first time about origins of modern-day tyranny

Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet | Thursday, November 29, 2007

Author Naomi Wolf, who made headlines earlier this year after she identified the ten steps to fascism that were being followed to a tee by the Bush administration, spoke publicly for the first time yesterday about the origins of what we see unfolding today, Prescott Bush's attempt to launch a Nazi coup in 1930's America.

Speaking on the Alex Jones Show, Wolf said that she was first alerted to begin researching America's slide into fascism when her friend, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, warned her that the same events that laid the foundations for the rise of the Third Reich in early 1930's Germany, when it was still a Parliamentary democracy, were being mirrored in modern-day America.

"A small group of people began very systematically to use the law and dismantle the Constitution and put pressure on citizens to subvert the law - and that opened the door for everything that followed," said Wolf.

"When I started reading, not only are tactics and strategy being reproduced exactly right now by the Bush administration - but actual sound bytes and language and images and scenarios are being reproduced," she added.

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America's day of reckoning is at hand

2007-11-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

Paul Craig Roberts | Online Journal | Tuesday November 27, 2007

Pat Buchanan is too patriotic to come right out and say it, but the message of his new book, Day of Reckoning, is that America as we have known her is finished. Moreover, Naomi Wolf agrees with him. These two writers of different political persuasions arrive at America’s demise from different directions.

Buchanan explains how hubris, ideology, and greed have torn America apart. A neoconservative cabal with an alien agenda captured the Bush administration and committed American blood, energy, and money to aggression against Muslim countries in the Middle East, while permitting America’s domestic borders to be overrun by immigrants and exporting the jobs that had made the US an opportunity society. War and offshoring have taken a savage economic toll while open borders and diversity have created social and political division.

In her new book, End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Wolf explains America’s demise in terms of the erosion of freedoms. She writes that the 10 classic steps that are used to close open societies are currently being taken in the US. Martial law is only a declaration away.

The Bush administration responded to September 11 by initiating military aggression in the Middle East and by using fear and the “war on terror” to implement police state measures at home with legislation, presidential directives, and executive orders.

Overnight the US became a tyranny in which people could be arrested and incarcerated on the basis of unsubstantiated accusation. Both US citizens and non-citizens were denied habeas corpus, due process, and access to attorneys and courts. Congress gave Bush legislation establishing military tribunals, the procedures of which permit people to be condemned to death on the basis of secret evidence, hearsay, and confessions extracted by torture. Nothing of the like has ever been seen before in the US.

[More...]

Noam Chomsky on U.S. Policy Towards Iran

2007-11-25T06:19:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript

Are assumptions about Iran wrong?

"Suppose it was true that Iran is helping insurgents in Iraq. I mean, wasn’t the United States helping insurgents when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? Did we think there was anything wrong with that? I mean, Iraq's a country that was invaded and is under military occupation. You can't have a serious discussion about whether someone else is interfering in it. The basic assumption underlying the discussion is that we own the world."

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: ElBaradei, is the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, stated quite definitively there is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. The recent resolution—the Kyle-Lieberman amendment—and the recent U.S. sanctions against Iran, which one of the charges is that Iran has been helping what they call insurgents in Iraq. There's practically no evidence of that either. Based on what we know as evidence, there's not a lot of reasons for U.S. policy to be as aggressive right now towards Iran as it is, certainly not for the stated reason. What really does motivate U.S. policy towards Iran?

NOAM CHOMSKY, PROFESSOR OF LINGUISTICS, MIT: Well, if I can make a comment about the stated reasons, the very fact that we're discussing them tells us a lot about the sort of intellectual culture and moral culture in the United States. I mean, suppose it was true that Iran is helping insurgents in Iraq. I mean, wasn’t the United States helping insurgents when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? Did we think there was anything wrong with that? I mean, Iraq's a country that was invaded and is under military occupation. You can't have a serious discussion about whether someone else is interfering in it. The basic assumption underlying the discussion is that we own the world. So if we invade and occupy another country, then it's a criminal act for anyone to interfere with it. What about the nuclear weapons? I mean, are there countries with nuclear weapons in the region? Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. The United States gives more support to it than any other country in the world. The Bush administration is trying very hard to push through an agreement that not only authorizes India's illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons but assists it. That's what the U.S.-Indo Nuclear Pact is about. And, furthermore, there happens to be an obligation of the states in the Security Council and elsewhere to move towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. Now that would include Iran and Israel and any U.S. forces deployed there. That's part of Resolution 687. Now to your question. The real reasons for the attack on Iran, the sanctions, and so on go back into history. I mean, we like to forget the history; Iranians don't. In 1953, the United States and Britain overthrew the parliamentary government and installed a brutal dictator, the Shah, who ruled until 1979. And during his rule, incidentally, the United States was strongly supporting the same programs they're objecting to today. In 1979, the population overthrew the dictator, and since then the United States has been essentially torturing Iran. First it tried a military coup. Then it supported Saddam Hussein during Iraq's invasion of Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Then, after that was over, the United States started imposing harsh sanctions on Iran. And now it's escalating that. The point is: Iran is out of control. You know, it's supposed to be a U.S.-client state, as it was under the Shah, and it's refusing to play that role.

JAY: The sanctions that were just issued recently [are] the beginnings of a kind of act of war, this ratcheting up of the rhetoric right at a time when the IAEA is saying, in fact, Iran's cooperating in the process. But it's all coming down to this question of does Iran even have its right to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear, which in fact it has, under the non-proliferation treaty. But Bush in his last press conference, where he had his famous World War III warning, has said even the knowledge of having nuclear weapons we won't permit, never mind a civilian program. This puts U.S. policy on a collision course with the IAEA, with international law.

CHOMSKY: Just a couple of years ago, from 2004 through 2006, Iran did agree to suspend all uranium enrichment, halt even what everyone agrees they're legally entitled to. That was an agreement with the European Union. They agreed to suspend all uranium enrichment. And in return, the European Union was to provide what were called full guarantees on security issues—that means getting the United States to call off its threats to attack and destroy Iran. Well, the European Union didn't live up to its obligation, [as] they couldn't get the U.S. to stop it. So the Iranians then also pulled out and began to return to uranium enrichment. The way that's described here is-- the Iranians broke the agreement.

JAY: The experts are saying, including ElBaradei and others, that if you can enrich uranium to something just under 5%, which is apparently what's needed for civilian purposes, you're most of the way there towards the technology of having a bomb, that once you have that enrichment technology, you're not that much further towards a bomb.

CHOMSKY: Yeah, but that's true of every developed country in the world. Why pick out Iran? It's true of Japan, it's true of Brazil, it's true of Egypt. And in fact, one could say—here I tend to agree with the Bush administration. In the non-proliferation treaty, there's an article, Article 4, which says that countries signing the NPT are allowed to develop nuclear energy. Well, okay, that made some sense in 1970, but by now technology has developed enough so that it has reached the point that you describe. When you've developed nuclear energy, you're not that far from nuclear weapons. So, yeah, I think something should be done about that. But that has nothing special to do with Iran. In fact, it's a much more serious problem for those nuclear weapons states who are obligated under that same treaty to make good faith efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. And, in fact, there are some solutions to that. ElBaradei had proposed a couple of years ago that no states should develop weapons-grade materials: all high enrichment should be done by an international agency, maybe the IAEA or something else, and then countries should apply to it. If they want enriched uranium for nuclear energy, the international agency should determine whether they're doing it for peaceful means. As far as I'm aware, there's only one country that formally agreed to ElBaradei's proposal. That was Iran. And there's more. I mean, there's an international treaty, called the Fissban, to ban production of fissile materials except under international control. The United States has been strongly opposed to that, to a verifiable treaty. Nevertheless, it did come to the General Assembly, the U.N. Disarmament Commission in the General Assembly, which overwhelmingly voted in favour of it. The disarmament commission vote was, I think, 147 to 1, the United States being the 1. Unless a verifiable fissile materials treaty is passed and implemented, the world very well may move towards nuclear disaster.

JAY: Do you think we're actually moving towards a military confrontation? Or are we seeing a game of brinksmanship?

CHOMSKY: Well, whether purposely or not, yes, we're moving towards a military confrontation.

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at MIT. He is the author of over 30 political books dissecting U.S. interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rights and the propaganda role of corporate media.

Priorities and Prospects

2007-11-25T05:49:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky

Excerpted from Hegemony or Survival, Metropolitan Books, 2003

A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood for success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Mayr took exception to the conclusions of astrophysicists who confidently expected to find higher intelligence throughout the universe. He considered the prospects of success very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call "higher intelligence," meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about 50 billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization." It did so very recently, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. It is generally assumed that only one small breeding group survived, of which we are all descendants, apparently with very little genetic variation. What we call "civilizations" developed near the end of this brief moment of evolutionary time, and are "inevitably are short-lived."

Mayr speculates that higher intelligence may not be favored by selection. The history of life on Earth, he concluded, refutes the claim that "it is better to be smart than to be stupid," at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are far more successful than primates in these terms, and that is generally true of creatures that fill a specific niche or can undergo rapid genetic change. He also made the rather somber observation that "the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years."

We are entering a period of human life that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid -- whether there is intelligent life on earth, in some sense of "intelligence" that might be admired by a sensible extraterrestrial observer, could one exist. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else. The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and our hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might conclude that they have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well.

More...

How Daddy Warbucks and his Pals Scr*wed the American People…

2007-11-24T12:57:00.000-08:00

…the day stays grey and lonely for Little Orphan Annie and Sandy gets sent to the pound and eternal sleep!

Excerpt: “I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told further that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson where Senator Aldrich’s private car would be in readiness attached to the rear-end of a train to the south. Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed one another as Ben, Paul, Nelson and Abe. Davison and I adopted even deeper disguises abandoning our first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I became Orville after those two aviation pioneers the Wright brothers. The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all and it was the names of all printed together that would’ve made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery we knew simply must not happen.” (Frank Vanderlip, Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1935)

[More...]

Conjuring Hitler; how Britain and America made the Third Reich

2007-11-24T03:29:00.000-08:00

Guido Giacomo Preparata

Nazism is usually depicted as the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated.In this explosive book, Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he demonstrates that Hitler's extraordinary rise to power was in fact facilitated -- and eventually financed -- by the British and American political classes during the decade following World War I.

Through a close analysis of events in the Third Reich, Preparata unveils a startling history of Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the early twentieth century. He explains that Britain, still clinging to its empire, was terrified of an alliance forming between Germany and Russia. He shows how the UK, through the Bank of England, came to exercise control over Weimar Germany and how Anglo-American financial support for Hitler enabled the Nazis to seize power.

This controversial study shows that Nazism was not regarded as an aberration: for the British and American establishment of the time, it was a convenient way of destabilising Europe and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia, thus preventing the formation of any rival continent power bloc.

Guido Giacomo Preparata lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the British and American establishment who aided Hitler's meteoric rise.

University of Michigan Press

Exploring the genesis of the German Nazis, Preparata (political economy, U. of Washington) makes the rather extraordinary argument that the Nazis and the war they so disastrously plunged Europe into were in fact the successful end product of long standing intrigue on the part of the elites of the British Empire to prevent a feared "Eurasian embrace" between Germany and Russia that would pose a great danger to British power. In sum, he argues that Britain began WWI as an attempt to break German political and economic structures. When this failed, Britain conspired to bring to power a reactionary regime that could be prodded into a two-front war in the West and against Russia, which itself had experienced British installation of the Bolsheviks in pursuit of this wider goal. The British and colluding American elites engaged in a complex economic gambit that had the premeditated purpose of providing the political preconditions necessary for the germination of the Nazis and their eventual rise to state power. The history of WWII, as well, is the result of this grand scheme, with the British feigning a lack of commitment to the Western Front (and keeping the Americans out) in order to lure the Germans into the trap of the Eastern Front, which allowed the Anglo- Americans to annihilate the German threat once and for all. Distributed in the US by the U. of Michigan Press.

BNET Press

YouTube Potpourri: The Legacy of Carroll Quigley

2007-11-23T08:44:00.000-08:00

Charles A. Burris
Lew Rockwell.com
Friday November 23, 2007

The Professor and the President

"As a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And as a student at Georgetown, I heard the call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley, who said America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so."

When Bill Clinton spoke these stirring words to millions of Americans during his 1992 acceptance address before the Democratic National Convention upon receiving his party's nomination for President of the United States, the vast multitude of his television audience paused for a micro-second to reflect: Who is Carroll Quigley and why did he have such a dramatic effect on this young man before us who may become our country's leader?

Carroll Quigley was a legendary professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, and a former instructor at Princeton and Harvard.

He was a lecturer at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the Brookings Institution, the U. S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College.

Quigley was a closely connected elite "insider" to the American Establishment, with impeccable credentials and trappings of respectability.

But Carroll Quigley's most notable achievement was the authorship of one of the most important books of the 20th Century: Tragedy and Hope – A History of the World in Our Time.

No one can truly be cognizant of the intricate evolution of networks of power and influence which have played a crucial role in determining who and what we are as a civilization without being familiar with the contents of this 1,348-page tome.

It is the "Ur-text" of Establishment Studies, earning Quigley the epithet of "the professor who knew too much" in a Washington Post article published shortly after his 1977 death.

In Tragedy and Hope, as well as the posthumous The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, Quigley traces this network, in both its overt and covert manifestations, back to British racial imperialist and financial magnate Cecil Rhodes and his secret wills, outlining the clandestine master plan through seven decades of intrigue, spanning two world wars, to the assassination of John Kennedy.

Through an elaborate structure of banks, foundations, trusts, public-policy research groups, and publishing concerns (in addition to the prestigious scholarship program at Oxford), the initiates of what are described as the Round Table groups (and its offshoots such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations) came to dominate the political and financial affairs of the world.

For the ambitious young man from Hope, Arkansas, his mentor's visionary observations would provide the blueprint of how the world really worked as he made his ascendancy via Oxford through the elite corridors of power to the Oval Office.

The Conservatives Discover Carroll Quigley

Published in 1966, Tragedy and Hope lay virtually unnoticed by academic reviewers and the mainstream media establishment. Then Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, the noted conservative author of the 1961 national best-seller, The Naked Communist, discovered Quigley, and the serious implications of what Quigley had revealed. In 1970, Skousen published The Naked Capitalist: A Review and Commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley's Book Tragedy and Hope.

This was soon followed by None Dare Call It Conspiracy. This slim volume by Gary Allen (and Larry Abraham) provided the massive paradigm shift of grassroots, populist conservatives from mere anti-Communism to a much larger anti-elitist world-view.

Millions of copies of these books came into print, and the conservative movement changed forever.

Copies of Tragedy and Hope began disappearing from library shelves. A pirate edition was printed. Quigley came to believe that his publisher Macmillan had suppressed his book. Dr. Gary North, the esteemed writer well known to readers of LewRockwell.com, has an interesting discussion of these curious facts in the chapter, "Maverick 'Insider' Historians," in his book, Conspiracy: A Biblical View, available on-line.

However some persons believe Carroll Quigley was simply amplifying earlier research in conservative authors Emanuel Josephson's Rockefeller 'Internationalist': The Man Who Misrules The World, and Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government, or that of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mill's The Power Elite, which had outlined these same elite networks of power.

I disagree with that narrow assessment. Although there is much to disagree with in interpretation in Quigley's book, the originality and titanic scope of the work cannot be doubted or disparaged.

In a book much praised by Murray Rothbard, author Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas To Watergate, has a fascinating discussion of Quigley within a wider framework of American power politics and subterranean intrigue.

And in a volume hailed by Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, before he morphed from Trotskyist man of letters to Neocon mouthpiece, had some insightful musings along the line of Quigley in his Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.

YouTube Potpourri

I'm becoming convinced that every piece of film ever produced, no matter how small or insignificant, eventually ends up on YouTube. That site is simply amazing.

With this in mind, here is a YouTube potpourri of items I discovered that introduce the viewer to the incomparable Carroll Quigley and his book, Tragedy and Hope. These brief videos focus upon the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and the North American Union.

After viewing them, I hope you will be prompted to read Quigley's book and unlock many mysteries that have puzzled your understandings of the world about you.

The first two clips are from an ancient documentary filmstrip, The Capitalist Conspiracy, by Fed critic and Ron Paul supporter, G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.

Carrol Quigley, part 1

Carrol Quigley, part 2

More on Carrol Quigley

The Roots of the U. N. and the Rockefellers

Presidential Candidates for the North American Union

The David Rockefeller and Dick Cheney Show

Lou Dobbs vs. the NAU, the CFR and David Rockefeller

John Mack Faragher on the ‘Hard Road West’

2007-11-23T07:45:00.000-08:00

By John Mack Faragher | Truthdog

On the morning of Jan. 24, 1848, millwright James Marshall spied a golden flash in the tailrace of the sawmill he was constructing for John Sutter on the American River, about 40 miles above Sutter’s Fort, the site of present-day Sacramento, Calif. “I picked up one or two pieces and examined them attentively,” Marshall later recalled. “Having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this—sulphuret of iron [pyrite], very bright and brittle; and gold, bright, yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.” Gathering up a handful of nuggets, he went to William Scott, one of his carpenters. “I have found it!” Marshall exclaimed. What? asked Scott. “Gold,” declared Marshall. Scott couldn’t believe it. “Oh! No! That can’t be,” he insisted. “I know it to be nothing else,” Marshall replied. He took his discovery to Sutter, who immersed the nuggets in nitric acid, to no effect. Consulting a copy of the Encyclopedia Americana, Sutter improvised a density test. The nuggets, he concluded, were 23 karat, 99 percent pure gold. Sutter did what he could to keep the discovery secret, fearing the news would make it impossible to hire hands, but it proved impossible. Soon others had found similar deposits in the many streams draining the Sierras. By the late summer of 1848 an estimated 10,000 men were at work in “the diggings.” The Gold Rush had begun. Over the next decade some 200,000 hopeful argonauts made the overland journey to California.

In his fascinating new book, “Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail,” Keith Meldahl, professor of geology at CostaMira College in California, is concerned not so much with the miners in California as with the “hard road west” they took to get there. Yet he opens his book with the story of Marshall’s discovery, and it’s a telling choice, for it introduces us to the way 19th-century Americans interacted with their world. Marshall was no metallurgist, but he had the practical sensibility of a mechanic. The thousands of men and women on the overland trail to California were similarly practical and inquisitive about the formidable landscape they had to traverse. Passing Devil’s Gate in what’s now southern Wyoming, where the Sweetwater River unexpectedly slices straight through a great standing ridge of granite, perplexed overlanders proposed various explanations. Perhaps the ridge, one emigrant noted in his trail diary, “had been rent by an earthquake,” or, as a woman traveler thought, opened “by volcanic force.” Some considered it evidence of divine power. “One stands in awe of Him Who tore asunder the mountains and holds the winds in the hollow of His hands.” But nearly everyone searched for answers. “How I wish I was a geologist,” James Berry Brown scribbled in his journal in 1859, “then the rambles over rocks and hills would be of some benefit to me.” As if on cue, Meldahl seizes the opportunity presented by 19th-century curiosity to offer the explanation of 21st-century science. The Sweetwater was there first, draining the primeval eastern slope of the Rockies when the mountains were brand new, gradually eroding its way down through thousands of feet of sand and gravel, and finally even through that granite ridge, until it established its present course.

Jet travel, interstate highways and our general expectation of comfort make it difficult for most Americans today to realize just how dauntingly big and rugged the American West is, and how difficult it was to traverse. Meldahl recovers that truth by taking us along as he navigates the whole of the California trail. He escorts us along the valley of the Platte River in Nebraska, up the gradual ascent of the Rockies and over South Pass in Wyoming, across the treacherous calderas of the Snake River Plain into Idaho, through the deadly deserts of the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada, and finally up and over the sheer eastern escarpment of California’s Sierra Nevadas. The landscape is in many places little changed since 1849. Ancient wagon ruts still visibly scar the mountains and deserts. “The past becomes personal,” Meldahl writes, “when you stand in the old wagon ruts and read what men and women thought and wrote while looking out at the same scenes.” On the way he provides us with samplings from the emigrants, their expressions of awe and wonder as well as frustration and exhaustion, balancing those with his scientific account, which he offers in non-scientific prose.

This approach works not only because Meldahl’s so good at explaining geology, but because he has so many emigrant voices to work with. From the 1840s to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 at least a quarter-million Americans made the 2,000-mile trek across the continent. Moving at the pace of ox-drawn wagons or pack mules—12 to 15 miles a day—the journey took them six months or more. They departed from the “jumping off places” on the Missouri River as soon as spring grass was high enough to support grazing stock, and aimed to make it over the far western mountains before the first winter storms. Everyone knew the fate of the Donner Party of 1846, driven to cannibalism after it was stranded in the High Sierra by an October blizzard. Such tales dissuaded most people from even considering the journey. But for many others the danger was part of the allure. For the gold-seeking argonauts it was part of what they called “seeing the elephant,” an Americanism that came into wide use with the Gold Rush. It originated in the tale of the Western farmer who hitches his team and drives to town to see the circus, and on the way encounters the parade of exotic animals led by the elephant. The farmer’s terrified horses buck, pitch and overturn the wagon. When the disheveled husband returns home his wife asks him how he liked the show. “Didn’t get to the circus,” he replies with a crooked smile, “but I’ve seen the elephant!” The flirtation with deadly danger. Thousands of overland travelers wrote of seeing the elephant in letters, diaries or reminiscences. With the exception of the Civil War, no other 19th-century event inspired so many personal accounts from Americans.

In the many decades since the great overland trek of American pioneers in the mid-19th century, hundreds of writers have been inspired to tell the story. Francis Parkman’s classic “The California and Oregon Trail” became a best-seller in 1849. A century later A.B. Guthrie’s “The Way West” updated the epic for modern readers. In the past two decades scholars have produced a new generation of histories, including modern classics such as J.S. Holiday’s “The World Rushed In” (1983) and Malcolm Rohrbaugh’s “Days of Gold” (1997). And in the 21st century the overland trail remains surprisingly familiar to the undergraduates in my course in the history of the American West, thanks to the computer game “The Oregon Trail,” which since its commercial release in 1985 has become the single most successful educational software title. The library at Yale University, where I teach, lists 1,411 titles under the subject heading “Overland Journeys to the Pacific.” “Hard Road West” is No. 1,411, the most recent addition to this crowded field. But it will find its audience because of Keith Meldahl’s original approach and his engaging style.

The human history of westering across the continent, Mehdahl tells us, was guided by the geological history of a continent itself drifting westward. For the past 200 million years North America has been sliding west a few inches a year, which adds up to several thousand miles. Pushing against the tectonic plates of the Pacific generated the monumental forces that spawned the great North American Cordillera, the mountain ranges that span the western third of the continent. Alternating processes of compression and expansion of the Earth’s crust produced the hard landscape that confronted the overland emigrants. Colliding plates created the land that would become California, and the maze of faults and fractures that made up the glue line, and hydrothermal expansion filled these gaps with dissolved silica and precious metals. They cooled to form the rich belt of gold-laden quartz, the Motherlode, that meanders from north to south along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada (a line that can be traced today by following California Highway 49 through the many famous old Gold Rush towns).

Meldahl is skilled at offering understandable explanations of scientific concepts. He writes very well, and in the tradition of the best 19th-century accounts he does not hesitate to put himself in the story. Deep in the desert of Nevada he drinks from an old well that saved the lives of many an emigrant. “The water tasted of salt and dish soap mixed with algae,” he writes. “It took a whole beer to take the flavor away—and then a second to toast the hapless souls who had to drink the stuff to survive—and then a third to toast the beauty of a cold beer on a hot day in the desert.” Here’s a book that not only informs but is fun to read.

John Mack Faragher teaches the history of the American West at Yale University and is the director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders. His books include “Women and Men on the Overland Trail” and “Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer.”

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

2007-11-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy. A Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz, sees a generation-long struggle to recoup.

Joseph E. Stiglitz | Vanity Fair | December 2007

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.

More...

Ten Steps To Close Down an Open Society

2007-11-20T13:12:00.001-08:00

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

[More...]

Former WH Press Sec.: Bush, Rove helped pass along 'false information' on Plame

2007-11-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

President Bush, Karl Rove, and other top administration officials were "involved" in misleading the White House press corps about the outing of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame, a forthcoming book from former Press Secretary Scott McClellan alleges.

Entitled What Happened, the new tell-all features McClellan's account of his days as the White House's top spokesman -- including a behind-the-scenes look at the Bush administration's handling of the Plame affair, according to a tantalizing excerpt from the book released on its publisher's website.

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," writes McClellan. "So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby."

But his press performances weren't based on the facts, McClellan continues.

"There was one problem. It was not true," he writes. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."

McClellan conducted a number of often-heated press events centering on Plame. In one September 2003 briefing, he expressly denied Rove's involvement in the matter.

"I've made it very clear, from the beginning, that it is totally ridiculous," said McClellan at the time. "I've known Karl for a long time, and I didn't even need to go ask Karl, because I know the kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct."

Later, in an October 10 press conference the same year, McClellan said that Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Scooter Libby, and another senior administration staffer had all denied being connected to the leaking of Plame's name.

"I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out," said McClellan, "and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.

The new book also touches on other key Bush events and policy decisions, including the war in Iraq and the handling of Hurricane Katrina. "With unprecedented candor, one of George W. Bush's closest aides takes readers behind the scenes of the Bush presidency, and what exactly happened to take it off course," states a publicity blurb. "He gives readers a candid look into who George W. Bush is and what he believes, and into the personalities, strengths, and liabilities of his top aides. Finally, McClellan looks to the future, exploring the lessons this presidency offers the American people as we prepare to elect a new leader."

Source

Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve [sic]

2007-11-19T09:17:00.000-08:00

Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson understood “The Monster”. But to most Americans today, Federal Reserve is just a name on the dollar bill. They have no idea of what the central bank does to the economy, or to their own economic lives; of how and why it was founded and operates; or of the sound money and banking that could end the statism, inflation, and business cycles that the Fed generates.

Dedicated to Murray N. Rothbard, steeped in American history and Austrian economics, and featuring Ron Paul, Joseph Salerno, Hans Hoppe, and Lew Rockwell, this extraordinary new film is the clearest, most compelling explanation ever offered of the Fed, and why curbing it must be our first priority.

Alan Greenspan is not, we’re told, happy about this 42-minute blockbuster. Watch it, and you’ll understand why. This is economics and history as they are meant to be: fascinating, informative, and motivating. This movie could change America.

Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 1 of 4)

Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 2 of 4)

Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 3 of 4)

Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve (Part 4 of 4)

Another Day in the Empire

2007-11-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

For the first time ever in a single volume, Dandelion Books presents a selection of journalist-photographer, Kurt Nimmo's highly acclaimed articles first published in Counterpunch www.counterpunch.com. It takes tremendous courage to write truthfully about the rampages of an Empire, especially from within the belly of the beast. See the life and times of Tom Paine. Even Suetonius paid a price. Hadrian took offense at something the historian wrote about the Empress Sabina, stripped him of his position, burned the offensive text and exiled him to Asia Minor. --Jeffrey St. Clair From author, Kurt Nimmo: "You'd think intelligent people would be outraged, moved to action by the attorney general suggesting neighbors need to spy on each other . . . You'd think normal everyday folks would look at their own kids and break out sobbing realizing what's happened to kids in Iraq. Is there Soma in the drinking water? But this isn't some Aldous Huxley novel, it's the real deal up in your face 24/7."

The Lobby

2007-11-17T03:42:00.000-08:00

By Paul Craig Roberts

11/14/07 "ICH" -- -- Experts in the West and ordinary people in Arab lands have understood for many years that the United States does not have an independent policy toward the Middle East. President Jimmy Carter, a man of good will, tried to use American influence to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the source of dangerous instability in the Middle East. However, Israel was able to block Carter’s attempt, while blaming Yasser Arafat. Carter’s plan would have given rise to a Palestinian state. Israel did not want any such state, because obvious military aggression is necessary in order to steal the territory of an official state with defined borders. It is much easier to steal land from a non-state.

By preventing the rise of a Palestinian state, Israel has been able to continue with its theft of the West Bank. Palestinians who have not been driven out have been forced into ghettos, cut off from schools, hospitals, water, and their olive groves and farmlands. In a recent book, President Carter called the existing situation “apartheid.” Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for his use of this word, but some experts consider Carter’s choice of words to be an euphemism for the continuation of what I. Pappe and N. G. Finkelstein call “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

That the vast majority of Americans know nothing of this is testimony to the power of the Israel Lobby.

[More...]

The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

2007-11-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

Book Description
A central player's account of the clash between the rule of law and the necessity of defending America.

Jack Goldsmith's duty as head of the Office of Legal Counsel was to advise President Bush what he could and could not do...legally. Goldsmith took the job in October 2003 and began to review the work of his predecessors. Their opinions were the legal framework governing the conduct of the military and intelligence agencies in the war on terror, and he found many—especially those regulating the treatment and interrogation of prisoners—that were deeply flawed.

Goldsmith is a conservative lawyer who understands the imperative of averting another 9/11. But his unflinching insistence that we abide by the law put him on a collision course with powerful figures in the administration. Goldsmith's fascinating analysis of parallel legal crises in the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations shows why Bush's apparent indifference to human rights has damaged his presidency and, perhaps, his standing in history. 8 pages of photographs.

About the Author
Jack L. Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University. From October 2003 to June 2004 he was assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush

2007-11-16T09:08:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Richard Wolffe

There are two questions any definitive account of George W. Bush's presidency must answer. One has dogged him from the very start of his presidential campaign in 1999: Is he as stupid as he seems? The other has dogged him for the last five years: Why did he decide to invade Iraq?

The first question about Bush's intelligence is relatively easy to dodge but exceptionally hard to answer. No, he's not stupid, but he is simplistic and sometimes sloppy. He has a sharp strategic mind when it comes to politics, and he can delve into policy details when he wants to. However, everyone who knows the president realizes that is only a partial answer. The deeper question boils down to this: How does he apply his intelligence? Why does he disdain the policy experts and the nuance in favor of his gut judgment?

[More...]

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

2007-11-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

by Jeffrey Toobin (Author)

From Publishers Weekly

It's not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker legal writer Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees as an almost primal attunement to a middle-of-the-road public consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist and Scalia ended up bitter old men, their rigorous constitutional doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates' compromises. The author deftly distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court's internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials (inept and unsavory is his verdict on the Court's intervention in the 2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court right in the thick of American life. (A final chapter and epilogue on the 2006–2007 term, with new justices Roberts and Alito, was unavailable to PW.) (Sept. 18)

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The Decision to Drop the Bomb

2007-11-14T11:48:00.000-08:00

Alonzo L. Hamby | Journal of American History, Vol. 84, no. 2 (September 1997)

The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. By Gar Alperovitz. (New York: Knopf, 1995. xiv, 847 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-679-44331-2.)

The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. By Dennis D. Wainstock. (Westport: Praeger, 1996. x, 180 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-275-95475-7.)

The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July/August 1945. By Stanley Weintraub. (New York: Dutton, 1995. xvi, 730 pp. j35.00, ISBN 0-525-93687-4.)

Harry S. Truman and the Bomb: A Documentary History. Ed. by Robert H. Ferrell. (Worland, Wyo.: High Plains, 1996. x, 125 pp. $24.50, ISBN 1-881019-12-8.)

History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. Ed. by Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt. (New York: Metropolitan, 1996. viii, 295 pp. Cloth, $30.00, ISBN 0-8050-4386-1. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 08050-4387-X.)

American observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995 occasioned bitter controversy. An uncomfortable Clinton administration canceled a mushroom cloud postage stamp and tentatively suggested that it might be kinder to Japan to talk of V-P Day instead of V-J Day. An angry dispute over the viewpoint of the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibition culminated in a purge at the nation's greatest cultural institution. These books all deal in one fashion or another with the Enola Gay, that mushroom cloud, and its enduring implications.

Gar Alperovitz has been a presence of major significance in the study of the bomb and the endgame of World War II for a generation. His latest project, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, has drawn wide attention. A critical review of it by John Bonnett that appeared on the H-Net diplomatic history service, H-Diplo, was followed by a protracted and tempestuous controversy (http: / h-net 2. msu. edu / - diplo / balp.htm). Alperovitz's thesis basically repeats the one pressed in his earlier Atomic Diplomacy (1965, 1985, 1994) but is stated at much greater length, much more elaborately, and with the help of no less than seven collaborators listed under his name on the title page. Extensively researched and documented by 112 pages of endnotes, this book is the end result of a long joint effort beyond the capabilities of most scholars. Financing came from no less than ten foundations or funds and "several individuals who traditionally have preferred to remain anonymous in their various philanthropic efforts."

Alperovitz argues that the atomic bomb was unnecessary to end World War II for the following reasons:

1. The Japanese government wanted to surrender; its leaders, military as well as civilian, rationally understood that the war was lost. But they had a determined attachment (irrational?) to the emperor. Japan would have surrendered, very possibly as early as June 1945, had its ruling establishment received guarantees of the emperor's personal safety and continuance on the throne. This should have been the first step in an American surrender strategy.

2. Any remaining Japanese reluctance to quit the war would have been quickly overcome by the second step, entry of the Soviet Union in August 1945.

3. American failure to accept and implement this "two-step logic" for an expeditious end to World War II was largely a result of the emerging Cold War and especially American concern over Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe and northeast Asia.

4. The American public would have accepted some modification of the unconditional surrender policy in order to avoid prolongation of the war. The Washington Post and Time magazine advocated its abandonment; so did some United States senators. Many military leaders and diplomats-British as well as Americanconcurred.

5. President Harry S. Truman seemed inclined to give assurances on the emperor, then pulled back. He did so out of concern with Soviet behavior and with increasingly firm knowledge that the United States would soon have atomic weapons available. Coming to believe that the bomb would be decisive and anxious to keep the Soviet Union out of Manchuria, he dropped modification of unconditional surrender; moreover, he sought to prevent a Soviet declaration of war against Japan by encouraging China not to yield to Soviet demands beyond those granted at Yalta. In so doing, he acted primarily at the urging of James F. Byrnes, the archvillain in the plot.

6. Truman also refused to move on Japanese peace feelers, apparently in the belief that it was necessary to prevent a Japanese surrender before the bomb could be demonstrated to the world, and especially to the Soviet Union. The result was the needless destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and many allied casualties that need not have happened.

7. In subsequent years, the American decision makers of 1945 devoted considerable energy to the construction of a misleading "myth" that attempted to vindicate the use of the bomb by denying Japanese efforts at peace and by asserting grossly inflated estimates of American casualties that would have been sustained in an invasion of Japan.

More...

Endgame Soars to Number 3 On Amazon Charts

2007-11-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

Prison Planet | Wednesday, November 14, 2007

After our push to vault Endgame up the Amazon rankings in order to expose the vital information contained on the DVD to new people, Endgame is now sitting pretty at number three on the most popular documentaries list.

Endgame is now outselling the likes of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, and Michael Moore's Sicko.

The DVD is also surging up in the general category rankings and our aim is to push it right to the top in order to expose the information to new people who browse the bestseller lists.

Please buy a copy of Endgame at a heavily discounted price from Amazon, or buy several and give them as gifts for Christmas.

We barely make anything from heavily promoting Amazon sales at knock-down prices but our mission is to spread the message to as many new people as possible and help wake up America and the world to the Globalist's master plan.

Click here to buy the DVD from Amazon.

Party Time

2007-11-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

Smear tactics, skulduggery, and the début of American democracy.

by Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | September 17, 2007

The year is 1800. Americans go to the polls to elect a President. Which Founder do you favor? The Federalist incumbent, sixty-four-year-old John Adams, or the Republican challenger, fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, awkwardly enough, is currently serving as Adams’s Vice-President?

Consider your vote carefully. This is the most important election in American history. What Jefferson dubbed “the revolution of 1800” marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. (Before that, whoever placed second became the Vice-President, which is what happened to Jefferson in 1796.) It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College. At the time, many people, not all of them members of the Adams family, thought that it might spell the end of the American experiment. As Edward J. Larson observes in his new book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” (Free Press; $27), “Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.”

To size up the candidates, what you need, for starters, is the word on the street—or, since the United States in 1800 is an agrarian nation, the word on the cow path. Adams: a Harvard graduate and Massachusetts lawyer who helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and served two terms as Washington’s Vice-President before his election to the Presidency in 1796. Distinguished, disputatious, short, ugly, hot-tempered, upstanding, provincial, learned (president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences). Very clever wife. Suspected of wanting to be king. Loves England. Thinks his diplomats have to tread carefully with Napoleon. Signed into law the Sedition Act in 1798; depending on your point of view, this was either so that he could have anyone who disagreed with him thrown in jail or so that he could protect the country from dangerous anarchists.

Jefferson: former governor of Virginia, onetime Ambassador to France, Washington’s Secretary of State. Eminent, brilliant (president of the American Philosophical Society), surpassing prose stylist, author of the Declaration of Independence (with help from Adams), unrivalled champion of liberty, slave owner, grieving widower, rumored to have fathered children by one of his slaves. Tall, humorless, moody, zealous, cosmopolitan. Artistic. Loves France, not so worried about Bonaparte. Ardently opposes the Sedition Act. Reputed atheist.

Are you still on the fence? You’re out of luck: there will be no Presidential debates, and precious few speeches. (In 1800, Americans considered politicians’ putting themselves so far forward to be unforgivably tacky.) No campaign managers, no Web sites, no television ads, no YouTube interviews, not so much as a Horse and Cart Across America tour.

[More...]

Declarations of Faith

2007-11-12T13:50:00.000-08:00

By EDWARD J. LARSON | TIME Magazine | Friday, Nov. 02, 2007

The narrow margin of the last presidential election left those on the losing side second-guessing themselves. Many of them blamed the loss on the opposition's appeals to Christian voters and their own candidate's failure to answer basic questions about his personal faith. Determined to win the next election, party strategists mapped plans to neutralize the religion issue. Those plans included buffing their candidate's image as a believer, condemning the other party's ties to evangelical extremists and hailing their side's devotion to religious liberty.

It may sound like the current presidential campaign, but the year was 1800 and the beleaguered candidate was Thomas Jefferson. Four years earlier, he had lost the presidency to John Adams in an election fraught with religious angst. Jacobin revolutionaries had taken over France, closed its churches and threatened to export their reign of terror. Supporters of Adams' Federalist Party linked Jefferson to the French secularists through his defense of revolutionary France and support for the separation of church and state. Adams, in contrast, they argued, was a man of God who opposed radical French ideas, and under his rule America had launched a naval war with France and mobilized against a rumored Jacobin invasion.

As the election of 1800 approached, a boldface notice appeared in leading Federalist newspapers. "At the present solemn and momentous epoch," it declared, "the only question to be asked by every American, laying his hand on his heart, is, 'Shall I continue in allegiance to GOD--AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON--AND NO GOD!!!'"

Such tactics had worked in 1796, but this time Jefferson's supporters rushed to his defense. In their party publications, they characterized Jefferson as "an adorer of our God" and "a real Christian." They wooed disaffected Protestants, Catholics and Jews by contrasting their candidate's defense of religious pluralism with Adams' purported support for an evangelical establishment. And turning the tables on their accusers, they also questioned Adams' faith. Despite his bow to civil religion by invoking God's name on public occasions, Adams differed little from Jefferson in his personal beliefs. Both men inclined toward Deism or Unitarianism, though Adams kept it under wraps better than Jefferson did. With both candidates sullied, their partisans debated the relative merits of a pious hypocrite vs. a reputed infidel as President.

Then, as now, many Christians saw biblical beliefs as the foundation for law and liberty. "If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it," declared Jefferson's chief evangelical critic, Yale president Timothy Dwight. The Jeffersonians bit back. "Now I don't know that John Adams is a hypocrite, or Jefferson a Deist," one wrote, "yet supposing they are, I am of the opinion the last ought to be preferred to the first [because] a secret enemy is worse than an open and avowed one."

The dueling charges largely neutralized the religion issue, which was all Jefferson needed, given public concerns over other Federalist policies. Both political parties reached out to Christian voters. Federalists praised Adams' public support for religious institutions; their opponents trumpeted Jefferson's passion for religious liberty. Each side claimed its candidate was a Christian--or at least as good a Christian as the other guy. By all accounts, Evangelicals still voted overwhelmingly for Adams but not in sufficient numbers to overcome the popular surge for Jefferson's party, which captured the presidency and both houses of Congress. Adams later blamed his defeat on fears that he was too tied to Evangelicals.

Today's Democratic Party appears to be taking a page from Jefferson's playbook by contesting the religious vote. In 2006 Democrats successfully ran an ordained minister for Ohio Governor against Ken Blackwell, a darling of the religious right, and a pro-life Catholic for Senator in Pennsylvania against fellow Catholic Rick Santorum. Now, as the numerous public declarations of faith made during this campaign season suggest, the party's leading candidates for President seem to have learned this lesson too and are, no doubt, praying for a similar outcome.

Larson is the author of A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign

My Life with Benjamin Franklin

2007-11-12T12:15:00.000-08:00

Claude-Anne Lopez

This delightful book is a collection of incidental pieces that reveal little-known aspects of the life and personality of Benjamin Franklin. Written by the doyenne of Franklin scholars, it conveys Franklin’s humor, resiliency, courage, and intelligence, and his faith in a better future.

The selections are based on Claude-Anne Lopez’s research in the treasure trove of nearly thirty thousand documents on Franklin assembled at Yale University. They include a detailed refutation of an anti-Semitic forgery attributed to Franklin and currently circulating on the Internet; three mini-detective stories showing Franklin on the fringes of the espionage world; discussions of Franklin’s efforts to outfit Washington’s army and to choose the first dinner set for the Foreign Service; and the tale of the misadventures of a French utopian scheme he sponsored. The only piece of fiction in the book is an imaginary party during which, on the first anniversary of his death, six illustrious Frenchmen discuss Franklin’s influence on their country. Lopez has provided brief personal introductions to each of the pieces, giving her reasons for writing them and in the process threading the essays together.

Claude-Anne Lopez, for many years an editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, is also the author of Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris, published by Yale University Press, as well as many other books and articles about Franklin.

On the Eve of Destruction

2007-11-10T01:38:00.000-08:00

The former intelligence officer and weapons inspector argues that the president’s recent World War III comment offers some rare insight into the highly secretive world of George W. Bush’s White House, where the leader of the free world gets advice from reckless neoconservatives, “war criminal” Dick Cheney and “God.”

Scott Ritter | Truthdig | Oct 22, 2007

Don’t worry, the White House is telling us. The world’s most powerful leader was simply making a rhetorical point. At a White House press conference last week, just in case you haven’t heard, President Bush informed the American people that he had told world leaders “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” World War III. That is certainly some rhetorical point, especially coming from the man singularly most capable of making such an event reality.

[More...]

Improbable Collapse - The Demolition of our Republic

2007-11-09T11:25:00.000-08:00

Film showing scientific evidence of a controlled demolition of the World Trade Center Twin Towers on 9/11

Improbable Collapse is the first film to thoroughly review the evidence for WTC demolitions from a scientific perspective.

The film includes an exclusive interview with Steven Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University. Jones argues that the mechanism of the building collapses proposed by US government investigators is extremely unlikely, hence the title of the film. His influential research paper is entitled "Why Indeed did the WTC Towers Collapse?"

The original version of Improbable Collapse enjoyed a successful premiere on April 9th in New York City and follow-up showing at the Chicago conference in June. At both events, we acquired new images and interviews that we believe greatly enhance the film.

Most significantly, we took advantage of new opportunities to complete our work by adding interviews with Glenn Corbett, Kevin Ryan, and Steven E. Jones.

Kevin Ryan was dismissed from his executive position at Underwriters Laboratories in 2004, after the public release of a letter he wrote to Frank Gayle, a scientist in the World Trade Center fire investigation. Ryan asked Gayle to clarify the results of a UL fire test on behalf of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). In the test, steel structures similar to those used in the WTC were subjected to furnace fires for two hours at temperatures higher than those in the Twin Towers on September 11th. The steel withstood the test easily, and Ryan concluded this raised serious concerns about the NIST collapse hypothesis.

This is the first interview Kevin Ryan has granted on film.

Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at John Jay College in New York, serves as a lead adviser to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign. He has been outspoken in criticizing the rapid scrapping of steel recovered from the Ground Zero site, and the resulting handicap to all investigations of the collapse mechanism. However, Corbett provides a balancing perspective with his strong support of the widely accepted hypothesis that the Twin Towers came down as the result of plane hits and damage from fire, and that WTC 7 fell due to damage caused by the fall of the other buildings and subsequent fire.

Click on link to buy video

Endgame: The Rabbit Hole Doesn’t End Here - Part 2

2007-11-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

Daniel Taylor | Old-thinker news | November 1, 2007

“It seems like every new corner we turn, the Rockefellers are already there. And in some cases, they have been there for a long, long time.” — William H. Gates Sr.

If you have watched Alex Jones’ Endgame, you know that population reduction has been a leading goal of Rockefeller, Kissinger, and other global elite for many years. You may be wondering; How will the elite fulfill their plans for global population reduction? There are many theories as to how this will be done, and speculation abounds. Race specific bio-weapons, as written in the Project for a New American Century, “…may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” A report released early this year by the U.K. Ministry of Defense outlining possible future scenarios says that, “The development of neutron weapons which destroy living organs but not buildings ‘might make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world.” Documentation can be shown demonstrating that at this very moment massive population reduction programs are being carried out.

Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum 200, as noted in Endgame, is a foundational document regarding population reduction plans for the third world.

The 1974 NSSM 200 document cites “Injectable contraceptives for women” as a possible method of population reduction and control. Depopulation, as stated in the document, should be pursued because it would be in the “…economic interests of the United States.”

“Wherever a lessening of population pressures… can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States.”

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Council, both Rockefeller organizations, have been instrumental in the funding and development of sterilization vaccines. The Rockefeller family has been involved with population control and eugenics since the early 1900’s. The Population Council, founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1952, was first headed by Frederick Osborn, who served as the Secretary of the American Eugenics Society.

[More...]

Endgame: The Rabbit Hole Doesn’t End Here

2007-11-03T06:13:00.000-07:00

Daniel Taylor | Old-Thinker News | October 26, 2007

Upon hearing the announcement from Alex Jones that he was embarking on a new filmmaking adventure - and later finding out what the film would cover - I decided to conduct my own research into the various subjects that Endgame would discuss. Rather than get the information for the first time from the film, I wanted to see what I could dig up on my own prior to viewing it. The information I found - which is openly available to anyone willing to look - is incredibly sobering, but not all hope is lost. If we live our lives in fear of what the future may bring, we allow ourselves to be defeated. We still have the power to raise awareness among our fellow man, and despite what the elite may believe, they do not have a monopoly on the future.

You may have heard Alex say that Endgame only covers a small percentage of the information out there. After watching his excellent film, I can tell you from my own investigation that this is absolutely true. I point this out not because I am criticizing the film, but to drive home the true gravity of our situation.

[More...]

Todd Gitlin on ‘The Terror Dream’

2007-11-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

Todd Gitlin | Truthdig | November 1, 2007

In her new book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” Susan Faludi squares three circles at once. She takes popular culture seriously but, for the most part, refuses to overload each and every scrap in our onrushing media torrent with unearned significance. She connects the spasm of understanding and misunderstanding that began on Sept. 11 with a deep strand of American history, yet without washing away the singularity and enormity of what happened on that grotesque day. Her third feat is this: Her third book, her most fluid and stylish, is also her most compressed.

To write well about catastrophes, especially catastrophes that—thanks to media immersion—“everybody knows,” requires a difficult hybrid of concentration, severity, delicacy, nearness and distance. I don’t know that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk. (See under: Giuliani.) Faludi conducts an autopsy of the latter without indifference to the former. “The Terror Dream” is, among other things, a tract for the times against slovenly journalism, which is the means by which this culture decides not to think straight.

[More...]

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Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy

2007-10-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In 1789, the Founding Fathers came up with a system of checks and balances to keep kingly powers out of the hands of American presidents. But in the 1970s and '80s, a faction of Republican loyalists, outraged by the fall of the imperial presidency after Watergate and the Vietnam War, abandoned conservatives' traditional suspicion of concentrated government power. These men hatched a plot that would allow the White House to return to, or even surpass, the virtually unchecked powers that Richard Nixon had briefly tried to wield. Congress would be defanged, and the commander-in-chief would be able to assert a unilateral dominance both at home and abroad.Today, this plot is coming to fruition. As Takeover reveals, the Bush-Cheney administration has succeeded in seizing vast powers for the presidency by throwing off many of the restraints placed upon it by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution. This timely book unveils the secret machinations behind the headlines, explaining the links between warrantless wiretapping and the President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, between the torture debate and the secrecy surrounding Vice President Cheney's energy task force, and between the faith-based initiative and the holding of US citizens without trial as enemy combatants. It tells, for the first time, the full story of a hidden agenda three decades in the making, laying out how a group of true believers set out to establish monarchical executive powers that, in the words of one conservative critic, will lie around like a loaded weapon ready to be picked up by any future president.Brilliantly reported and deftly told, Takeover is a searing investigation into how the constitutionalbalance of our democracy is in danger of being permanently altered. For anyone who cares about America's past, present, and future, it is essential reading.

Review:

"'Savage, who won a Pulitzer for his Boston Globe articles about the signing statements George W. Bush used to negate legislation limiting presidential authority, gives that issue a key part in this account of the Bush administration's efforts to increase executive power. Covering constitutional issues as well as the political backgrounds of former White House attorneys like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, this detailed report traces their concerted effort, from the moment Bush took office in 2001, to '[leave] the presidency in better shape than he [Bush] found it.' The authorization to use force against Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg. Bush has already gone so far as to declare himself able to negate treaties with other nations at will, Savage reports. He also demonstrates how many of the administration's most controversial acts have their roots in Dick Cheney's experiences in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This incisive analysis of congressional and judicial efforts to check the administration's power grabs adds up to a searing indictment. (Sept. 5)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Synopsis:

Savage investigates how the Bush-Cheney administration has seized vast, unprecedented powers for the presidency. He argues that such imperialism stands to permanently alter the constitutional balance of American democracy. Eight-page b&w photo insert.

Synopsis:

From Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Charlie Savage - an investigation into how the Bush-Cheney administration has seized vast powers for the presidency to permanently alter the constitutional balance of American democracy. In 1789, the Founders devised a system of checks and balances to keep kingly powers out of the hands of presidents. But in the 1970s and 80s, a faction of Republicans, outraged by the weakening of the presidency after Watergate and Vietnam, abandoned the traditional conservative suspicion of concentrated government power. These men hatched a plot that would allow the White House to wield enormous powers, operating behind a veil of secrecy and unchecked by Congress or the courts. Today's administration is bringing this project to fruition. TAKEOVER reveals the machinations behind the headlines and lays bare a hidden agenda three decades in the making, one that links warrantless wiretapping and Bush's judicial nominees, torture and Cheney's energy task force, the faith-based initiative and the imprisonment of citizens without trial. It tells the story of how a group of true believers, led by Cheney, set out to establish near-monarchical executive powers that, in the words of one conservative critic, will lie around like a loaded weapon for any future president.

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The Pearl Harbor Deception

2007-10-29T10:00:00.001-07:00

Robert Stinnett | Independent Institute | December 7, 2003

Two questions about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have ignited a controversy that has burned for 60 years: Did U.S. naval cryptographers crack the Japanese naval codes before the attack? Did Japanese warships and their commanding admirals break radio silence at sea before the attack?

If the answer to both is "no," then Pearl Harbor was indeed a surprise attack described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a "Day of Infamy." The integrity of the U.S. government regarding Pearl Harbor remains solid.

But if the answer is "yes," then hundreds of books, articles, movies, and TV documentaries based on the "no" answer – and the integrity of the federal government – go down the drain. If the Japanese naval codes were intercepted, decoded, and translated into English by U.S. naval cryptographers prior to Pearl Harbor, then the Japanese naval attacks on American Pacific military bases were known in advance among the highest levels of the American government.

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JAPAN MAY STRIKE OVER WEEKEND!

2007-10-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

Ralph Epperson | Ralph Epperson's Latest Conspiracy Catalog

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy and air force attacked the United States army, navy and air force units at PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII in what was called “A SURPRISE ATTACK.”

The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt called the attack “A DAY OF INFAMY,” and asked Congress for a Declaration of War.

It was granted, and America was in WORLD WAR TWO.

Many at the time questioned how “A SURPRISE ATTACK” could happen, and whether President Roosevelt should have known about it in advance and warned our forces in Hawaii.

NINE CONGRESSIONAL investigations were conducted, during and after the war, and each examined the question: DID PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT KNOW ABOUT THE ATTACK BEFORE IT HAPPENED, AND IF SO, WHY DID HE DO NOTHING TO PREPARE OUR FORCES.

And NINE CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS all concluded that ROOSEVELT DID NOT KNOW IN ADVANCE!

A few years ago, I saw a photo copy of the HILO, HAWAII TRIBUNE HERALD newspaper of November 30, 1941, the Sunday before the attack. I called the HILO, HAWAII library and they photocopied the top half of their front page and sent it to me.

The HEADLINE of this newspaper reads:

JAPAN MAY STRIKE OVER WEEKEND

meaning the following weekend, Saturday, December 6th and Sunday, December 7th, 1941.

ASK YOURSELF THIS QUESTION:

How could this NEWSPAPER KNOW IN ADVANCE, but PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DID NOT KNOW?

One could reasonably conclude that PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S INTELLIGENCE SOURCES were better than the NEWSPAPERS!

In other words, NINE CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS WERE WRONG: President ROOSEVELT had to have known ……… even a Hawaii newspaper knew!!!

An Answer to Popular Mechanics and the Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory

2007-10-28T07:19:00.000-07:00

By virtue of his previous four books on the subject, David Ray Griffin is widely recognized as one of the leading spokespersons of the 9/11 truth movement, which rejects the official conspiracy theory about 9/11. Although this movement was long ignored by the US government and the mainstream media, recent polls have shown that (as Time magazine has acknowledged) the rejection of the official theory has become “a mainstream political phenomenon.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the government and the corporately controlled media have shifted tactics. No longer ignoring the 9/11 truth movement, they have released a flurry of stories and reports aimed at debunking it.

In the present book, David Ray Griffin shows that these attempts can themselves be easily debunked. Besides demonstrating the pitiful failure of Debunking 9/11 Myths (published by Popular Mechanics and endorsed by Senator John McCain), Griffin riddles recent reports and stories put out by the US Department of State, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Time magazine. He also responds to criticisms of these efforts by left-leaning and Christian publications—which one might have expected to be supportive.

Throughout these critiques, Griffin shows that the charge that is regularly leveled against critics of the official theory—that they employ irrational and unscientific methods to defend conclusions based on faith—actually applies more fully to those who defend the official theory.

This book, by debunking the most prevalent attempts to refute the evidence cited by the 9/11 truth movement, shows that this movement’s central claim—that 9/11 was an inside job—remains the only explanation that fits the facts.

David Ray Griffin is professor of philosophy of religion and theology, emeritus, at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he remains a co-director of the Center for Process Studies. His 30 books include The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004), The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), and 9/11 and American Empire (2006, with Peter Dale Scott).

The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True

2007-10-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

David Ray Griffin

Authorized Version (with references & notes)

In The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004), I summarized dozens of facts and reports that cast doubt on the official story about 9/11. Then in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005a), I discussed the way these various facts and reports were treated by the 9/11 Commission, namely, by distorting or simply omitting them. I have also taken this big-picture approach, with its cumulative argument, in my previous essays and lectures on 9/11 (Griffin, 2005b and 2005d).[1] This approach, which shows every aspect of the official story to be problematic, provides the most effective challenge to the official story.

But this way of presenting the evidence has one great limitation, especially when used in lectures and essays: It means that the treatment of every particular issue must be quite brief, hence superficial. People can thereby be led to suspect that a more thorough treatment of any particular issue might show the official story to be plausible after all.

In the present essay, I focus on one question: why the Twin Towers and building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed.

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Video: David Ray Griffin - 911 Commission Report: Ommissions and Distortions

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

2007-10-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

Twenty months after the 2004 presidential election, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? is the first sustained investigation of what really happened on the first Tuesday of November 2004. Scrutinizing the widest spectrum of facts and theories that have emerged to explain the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official count, authors Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss tell the story of our electoral democracy at this moment in its history without fear or favor. The story they have to tell is a damning one—one that has profound implications for the 2006 and 2008 elections, indeed for the future of American democracy...

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Book Excerpt: ‘Caspian Rain’

2007-10-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

Gina Nahai

“Caspian Rain” Excerpt 1:

ALL SUMMER LONG, Chamedooni watches our house. He hovers around our front door with his suitcase full of promises, stands at the corner bus stop like a sentry at his station. He lets the buses come and go without climbing into any of them because he’s too busy keeping an eye out for the boy with the bicycle. At night, he hides behind the shutters in his darkened bedroom and watches me.

People say that in his youth, Chamedooni was a “person of substance.” He comes from a family of crypto Jews in Mashad—a city in northeastern Iran where, in the mid-nineteenth century, the entire Jewish community was forced to convert to Islam. After that, the Jews practiced their religion in secret, aware that if discovered, they would be put to death. To keep from assimilating, they promised their children to one another at birth and married them off at very young ages, so that generations later, even after they had been liberated from their oath of conversion, Mashadi Jews were surrounded by an aura of remoteness and mystery that set them apart from Jews in other parts of Iran.

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Anatomy of Deceit

2007-10-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

Book Description

What happens when Washington, D.C. pundits and journalists run in the same social circles as the powerful people they cover? When the President and his administration trade press access for loyalty? You get a complicit, uncritical press greasing the skids to a brutal war, conspiring to out a CIA agent, and muddying the waters of a grand jury investigation. In the fearful aftermath of 9/11, much of America’s pride — its free press — became an unquestioning propaganda arm.

Marcy Wheeler’s Anatomy of Deceit documents how the media promoted the Bush administration’s justification for war — that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction — even though much of it was debunked. And it provides a play-by-play account of how Vice President Dick Cheney’s office first used the media to target a critic, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and then to avoid criminal charges in the CIA leak case.

While the media was beating the drums of war and cozying up to the administration, citizen journalists were digging for the truth. Wheeler's compelling account tells the story, as it needs to be told — from outside the Beltway's cocktail circuit.

About the Author

Marcy Wheeler blogs under the name "emptywheel" at the political blog The Next Hurrah. Her PhD and academic background — relating to citizen journalism at times of heavy propaganda — brings a unique perspective to her blogging and the CIA leak case. Several of her posts have scooped the mainstream media's coverage of the Plame Affair, including her coverage of Scooter Libby's NIE leaks. She is a self-employed business consultant based in Ann Arbor, MI.

Russo Film Exposes Criminal Banking Syndicate That Rules America

2007-10-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

In 1913 America was a free country. Then a band of powerful bankers achieved their fathers’ and great grandfathers’ goal. America has never been the same. Soon the world will not be the same.

Aaron Russo expertly exposes the traitorous Federal Reserve Act and the fact that there is no law that stipulates American citizens have to pay income taxes. The ratification of the 16th amendment, also known as the “Tax amendment”, represents a fundamental undermining of Constitutional law in America. It is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people by the elite private banking institutions that have usurped government as an arm of their overall control mechanism. Aaron Russo’s From Freedom to Fascism

EU: History of Deceit

2007-10-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

Christopher Booker London Telegraph Monday October 22, 2007

Lisbon crowns a history of deceit

It was apt that Gordon Brown's agreement to the EU treaty should have coincided with the announcement that MPs are to get an additional two weeks' holiday a year because there is so little for them to do.

The Lisbon Treaty, after all, is another giant step towards a new form of government, empowered to decide most of the laws that govern our lives, making our Westminster MPs even more redundant than they are now.

It was equally appropriate that Mr Brown and his puppet foreign minister, David Miliband, should have agreed this treaty on the basis of the most shameless political lie one can recall: that the new treaty is completely different from the rejected EU constitution – with which it is 96 per cent identical.

[More...]

ENDGAME- ALEX JONES - Blueprint for Global Enslavement

2007-10-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Endgame Rips The Lid Off Elite's Final Masterplan

New documentary delves into the darkest recesses of the global elite

Alex Jones' brand new documentary Endgame charts the history of the elite blueprint for social domination and control, outlining the ultimate plans that those who consider themselves the anointed have for our planet.

The first section of the film documents the rise of the banking cartels, who since 1800 have funded both sides of almost every war. Endgame charts the usurpation of the British economy by the Rothchild family who went on to bankroll all factions during the first world war providing armaments companies through banks in France, Austria, Germany and England.

Endgame then documents the fallout of the great war and the attempts to form a controlling League of Nations, which was ultimately blocked by Congress. Such frustration on the part of the elite led to the rise of two factions, fascists and Fabian socialists. Endgame documents how bankers again funded both sides during WW2 which ultimately led to the creation of the UN and the beginning of the movement to implement three power blocs via incremental globalism.

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Plame: Disclosure of classified status amounted to 'treason'

2007-10-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

Jason Rhyne | Raw Story | Published: Friday October 26, 2007

Disclosure of her covert identity for political purposes was nothing short of "treason," outed former CIA agent Valerie Plame told Hardball host Chris Matthews Thursday on MSNBC.

Plame, whose classified status as an undercover agent was exposed in 2003, said she couldn't possibly have known that a New York Times column disputing White House rationale for war -- penned by her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson -- would prompt what she views as a vicious attempt by the White House to ruin her career.

"When your husband filed that story," Matthews said, "he must have known, didn't he, that he was gonna light a match that was going to lead all the way to you?"

Plame responded that her outing was not only unexpected, it was also treasonous.

"You cannot possibly be suggesting that with Joe's credentials, my airtight cover, that we actually anticipated that senior government officials would commit treason by blowing my covert identity," she said.

Matthews asked Plame how, if she believed the Bush administration had covered up a "false case for war," that she didn't also anticipate that the White House would strike back at her personally.

"Call me naive," she said, "but that wasn't on our list of options...we didn't actually consider they would betray our country's national security to get at me."