Nebuchadnezzar

If you look at Americas past you see them doing the absolute worst war crimes imaginable, and past behavior is a good indication of future behavior. American leaders think they have absolution from all the horrific war crimes they are committing. If someone else did it they would be the most vile terrorists and war criminals, but hey! We

by Nick Turse February 22, 2005 I first noticed the pattern last year with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploding. By now it's beyond a trend. Closer to an established fact. Plain for all to see -- and it suggests a significant breakdown of some unknown sort at the Department of Defense. On April 28, 2004, with Sy Hersh about to scoop them, the journalists at CBS ran a story about crimes committed by American soldiers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on its 60 Minutes II program. It included the now infamous torture photographs as well as information on the military's own "scathing report" on the subject, which would later become known (by its author's name) as the Taguba Report. About a week later, I began to notice the trend. During a briefing with reporters on May 4, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he had himself read the Taguba Report. He hemmed and hawed about seeing a summary of it before finally answering "no." Another question followed: "REPORTER: ...given the ramifications of not only what is in this report, the findings specifically, but the pictures, the photographs that you knew, as of a couple of weeks ago, were going to be broadcast, why did you not feel [it] incumbent upon you at that time to ask for the findings, to take a look at the pictures beforehand, so you could perhaps be prepared to deal with some of the world reaction? "SEC. RUMSFELD: I think I did inquire about the pictures and was told that we didn't have copies. "RUMSFELD (to staff): Is that correct? "STAFF: We didn't have them here, that's for sure. "SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah, I didn't have them." Could it be, I wondered, that I had the hardware on my desk to burn photo CDs and make copies of reports, but the Pentagon didn't? On May 5, Rumsfeld did an interview with Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show and was again asked about not reading the report or seeing the photographs until they aired on television. Rumsfeld sputtered "just a minute" before he confessed that "when I'm asked a question as to whether I've read the entire report, I answer honestly that I have not. It is a mountain of paper and investigative material." So I wondered, could the problem be the amount of reading involved? Or could the SECDEF be suffering from adult Attention Deficit Disorder? On May 7, Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. There, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham asked him about the video files of torture at Abu Ghraib. "GRAHAM: Mr. Secretary, have you seen the video? "RUMSFELD: I have not. The disk that I saw that had photos on it did not have the videos on it. I checked with General Smith and he indicates he does have a disk with the videos on it. I don't know if that means there's two disks with all these photographs or if the photographs are the same and one just doesn't have the video." Later, Democratic Senator Bill Nelson asked: "BILL NELSON: ...Mr. Secretary, when did you first see the photos? "RUMSFELD: Last night about 7:30. "BILL NELSON: Mr. Secretary... "RUMSFELD: I should say, I had seen the ones in the press. I had seen the ones that are doctored slightly to suit people's tastes. We've been trying to get one of the discs for days and days and days. And I'm told by General Smith that there were only a couple of these, that they were in the criminal investigation process. And we finally, Dick Myers and I, finally saw them last night." By then I was truly curious: Was it a budgetary problem -- the lack of CD burners, or floppy disks, or available computers at the Pentagon? Or was no one technically capable of making copies for Rumsfeld? Or was there some kind of institutional/personal issue at stake? Were Rumsfeld's underlings, for unknown reasons, engaging in a game of diskette keep-away "for days and days and days" (and right before his big Senate grilling too)? Since then, I've paid closer attention to Rumsfeld's problems and continued to speculate. Just take a look at a few of the numerous incidents thus far in 2005... On January 8, 2005, Newsweek broke a story about a high-level debate within the Pentagon on implementing the "Salvador Option" -- that is, the use of "death-squads" like those the U.S. funded in El Salvador during the 1980s -- in Iraq. On January 11th, at a press conference, Rumsfeld finally weighed in: "The -- on the subject of Iraq, I also have been reading and hearing about this so-called Salvatore -- Salvador option, I think it's called. And I looked all through Newsweek, which apparently was the place it supposedly had appeared. I couldn't find it." Rumsfeld went on to complain that he couldn't find a copy of the story anywhere and could only read articles about the story. Members of the press corps promised to get him a copy and informed him that it was available in the on-line edition of the magazine. In his defense, Rumsfeld claimed that he only buys the hard-copy of Newsweek. I wondered how much time he had spent futilely paging through back issues of Newsweek. Had none of his staff thought to look online? Or could it be that they were thumbing their noses at their aging boss as he stared at an unplugged computer? Or was there simply not a single person on hand in the Pentagon who could master a Google search? Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, made headlines when, on February 1st , he publicly stated, "It's fun to shoot some people." Rumsfeld apparently missed all the morning newspaper accounts and TV reports on this; for, on the afternoon of February 3rd, he told a reporter, "I have not read his words. I don't know what he said precisely..." On February 10, Axis of Evil Enemy Number One, North Korea, declared for the first time that it definitively possessed nuclear weapons. You'd think an announcement of that sort from a nation with which the United States is still technically at war would warrant some attention from the Secretary of Defense. (I mean, just look at the response Saddam's phantom WMD warranted way back in 2002-03). But Rumsfeld, it seems, didn't even bother to read an account of the announcement, although he was apparently briefed on the fact that such stories had been written. When asked about North Korean nukes, the Secretary of Defense said, "I know I'm told that today in the press they indicated they do [have nuclear weapons]." On February 16, when fielding questions from the press following a House Armed Services Committee Hearing, Rumsfeld was asked about an intelligence report concerning Al-Qaeda and replied, "I have not seen the paper that you're referring to with respect to the memorandum. It hasn't come to me yet... [To General Meyers:] You haven't seen it either, have you?" Not surprisingly, Meyers hadn't. The next day dawned on a near repeat of this incident. At another session with the press, this time following a Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, Rumsfeld was asked about a presidentially-ordered joint CIA/Department of Defense study of paramilitary activities. "Rumsfeld: [To Myers]: Have you seen it? I have not seen the study. "Myers: I have not seen the results of the study. I think that's coming over here shortly to us in the department." Responses like these have come fast and furiously from Rumsfeld since the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke. Obviously, a pattern has developed, involving what looks like a systemic breakdown in information reaching the Secretary of Defense. The question is why? Why do reporters consistently know more than he does? Hell, why had I read the stories (and probably the military's own reports) before Rumsfeld? I assume he's busy, but given his lack of reading, what exactly is he busy doing? Is he having personal problems? Recent reports indicate that lately Rumsfeld has been increasingly belligerent and cranky; most recently packing up his briefcase and spouting off about his lunch while being questioned by the House Armed Services Committee (where he also replied incoherently to a question about an aide's comments pertaining to the expansion of military retirement benefits with, "I have not... seen the statement that you've quoted in the context that it might have been included"). Other theories exist. Has he developed his boss's aversion to reading? Or has he somehow, despite all the new intelligence powers he's been garnering for the DoD, been squeezed out of the national security information loop. Is he being kept in the dark even about front-page national security news? Could Pentagon subordinates be rebelling against him for unknown reasons by refusing his requests for information, thus making him look uninformed and inept? Or could this be a more general problem of incompetence at the Department of Defense? Okay, maybe you can't expect a 72-year-old Secretary of Defense to be up-to-date on the latest technology, but can no one at the Pentagon figure out how to photocopy a report? Burn a photo CD? Copy a disk? Find an article on-line? Or figure out how to email a file? Last year the DoD paid out almost $300 million to Battelle Memorial Institute -- whose scientists "played a crucial role in developing the office copier machine (Xerox)" and which holds "more than 250 patents related to the dry-copying process." It paid almost $643 million to PC-maker Dell, and nearly $2.4 billion to Computer Sciences Corporation -- "a leading global information technology (IT) services company... [whose] mission is to provide customers... with solutions crafted to meet their specific challenges and enable them to profit from the advanced use of technology." You'd think with this kind of spending the people at the DoD could manage to get copies of crucial materials to their chief. But they either can't or won't. They've left Rumsfeld twisting in the wind, forced to admit on a daily basis that he can't get the information he asks for or wants to see in a timely fashion. The implications for national security are obvious. It's time for an inquiry. We need to know what Rumsfeld didn't see, when he didn't see it, and why he is so incredibly uninformed. Nick Turse

In the pre-war debate between Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush over Iraq

Only Israel appears to benefit from Hariri's assassination, the assassination of Hariri is the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad's job, aimed at creating political tension in Lebanon.. The blast was similar to previous Israeli-orchestrated bombings against former Palestinian leaders. Sharon's government will now blame its enemy Syria - as it has already done - for Haririis assassination and if they can make the accusation stick, The logical progression would lead to a joint Israeli/US attack against the Syrian regime which, in conjunction with an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities, compose what is no secret to anyone: the ultimate neo-con dream ticket. The neo-con agenda - which happens to be the same as Sharon's agenda - is once again pure divide and conquer, the aim is to destabilize what neo-cons see as the emerging "Shi'ite crescent" in the Middle East, Iran, the new Iraq and Lebanon, with Syria as a key transit point. A key component of this strategy is to strike a blow against Hezbollah. It's important to note that the new Shi'ite dominated government in Iraq will be a keen supporter of Hezbollah. Hezbollah plays a very important political and social role in Lebanese life. As for the 16,000 or so Syrian troops, they are in Lebanon basically to protect it against another Israeli invasion. Israel occupied part of southern Lebanon until it was thrown out by Hezbollah. The Syrian regime is instrumental in helping Hezbollah, as well as an array of Palestinian armed groups. Hezbollah may be aligned with Iran, but its intelligence, weapons and most of all financing flows from Iran to Lebanon via Syria. The White House and the State Department's key agenda in the current offensive calling for Syria's troops to leave Lebanon is to cut support for Hezbollah - therefore leaving Israel worry-free as far as its northern border is concerned. Washington's interest has nothing to do with "spreading freedom" to Lebanon. Syria, with its military stranglehold over Lebanon, may be the usual suspect in the assassination. But the fundamental question - evaded in the Bush administration's drive to blame Syria - is who profits the most from it. Pepe Escobar

The final war for the planet

America's list of terrorism Ever since the United States Army massacred 300 Lakotas in 1890, American forces have intervened elsewhere around the globe 100 times. Indeed the United States has sent troops abroad or militarily struck other countries' territory 216 times since independence from Britain. Since 1945 the United States has intervened in more than 20 countries throughout the world. Since World War II, the United States actually dropped bombs on 23 countries. These include: China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Congo 1964, Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999. Post World War II, the United States has also assisted in over 20 different coups throughout the world, and the CIA was responsible for half a dozen assassinations of political heads of state. The following is a comprehensive summary of the United States over the span of the past century: Argentina - 1890 - Troops sent to Buenos Aires to protect business interests. Chile - 1891 - Marines sent to Chile and clashed with nationalist rebels. Haiti - 1891 - American troops suppress a revolt by Black workers on United States-claimed Navassa Island. Hawaii - 1893 - Navy sent to Hawaii to overthrow the independent kingdom - Hawaii annexed by the United States. Nicaragua - 1894 - Troops occupied Bluefields, a city on the Caribbean Sea, for a month. China - 1894-95 - Navy, Army, and Marines landed during the Sino-Japanese War. Korea - 1894-96 - Troops kept in Seoul during the war. Panama - 1895 - Army, Navy, and Marines landed in the port city of Corinto. China - 1894-1900 - Troops occupied China during the Boxer Rebellion. Philippines - 1898-1910 - Navy and Army troops landed after the Philippines fell during the Spanish-American War; 600,000 Filipinos were killed. Cuba - 1898-1902 - Troops seized Cuba in the Spanish-American War; the United States still maintains troops at Guantanamo Bay today. Puerto Rico - 1898 - present - Troops seized Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War and still occupy Puerto Rico today. Nicaragua - 1898 - Marines landed at the port of San Juan del Sur. Samoa - 1899 - Troops landed as a result over the battle for succession to the throne. Panama - 1901-14 - Navy supported the revolution when Panama claimed independence from Colombia. American troops have occupied the Canal Zone since 1901 when construction for the canal began. Honduras - 1903 - Marines landed to intervene during a revolution. Dominican Rep 1903-04 - Troops landed to protect American interests during a revolution. Korea - 1904-05 - Marines landed during the Russo-Japanese War. Cuba - 1906-09 - Troops landed during an election. Nicaragua - 1907 - Troops landed and a protectorate was set up. Honduras - 1907 - Marines landed during Honduras' war with Nicaragua. Panama - 1908 - Marines sent in during Panama's election. Nicaragua - 1910 - Marines landed for a second time in Bluefields and Corinto. Honduras - 1911 - Troops sent in to protect American interests during Honduras' civil war. China - 1911-41 - Navy and troops sent to China during continuous flare-ups. Cuba - 1912 - Troops sent in to protect American interests in Havana. Panama - 1912 - Marines landed during Panama's election. Honduras - 1912 - Troops sent in to protect American interests. Nicaragua - 1912-33 - Troops occupied Nicaragua and fought guerrillas during its 20-year civil war. Mexico - 1913 - Navy evacuated Americans during revolution. Dominican Rep 1914 - Navy fought with rebels over Santo Domingo. Mexico - 1914-18 - Navy and troops sent in to intervene against nationalists. Haiti - 1914-34 - Troops occupied Haiti after a revolution and occupied Haiti for 19 years. Dominican Rep 1916-24 - Marines occupied the Dominican Republic for eight years. Cuba - 1917-33 - Troops landed and occupied Cuba for 16 years; Cuba became an economic protectorate. World War I - 1917-18 - Navy and Army sent to Europe to fight the Axis powers. Russia - 1918-22 - Navy and troops sent to eastern Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution; Army made five landings. Honduras - 1919 - Marines sent during Honduras' national elections. Guatemala - 1920 - Troops occupied Guatemala for two weeks during a union strike. Turkey - 1922 - Troops fought nationalists in Smyrna. China - 1922-27 - Navy and Army troops deployed during a nationalist revolt. Honduras - 1924-25 - Troops landed twice during a national election. Panama - 1925 - Troops sent in to put down a general strike. China - 1927-34 - Marines sent in and stationed for seven years throughout China. El Salvador - 1932 - Naval warships deployed during the FMLN revolt under Marti. World War II - 1941-45 - Military fought the Axis powers: Japan, Germany, and Italy. Yugoslavia - 1946 - Navy deployed off the coast of Yugoslavia in response to the downing of an American plane. Uruguay - 1947 - Bombers deployed as a show of military force. Greece - 1947-49 - United States operations insured a victory for the far right in national "elections." Germany - 1948 - Military deployed in response to the Berlin blockade; the Berlin airlift lasts 444 days. Philippines - 1948-54 - The CIA directed a civil war against the Filipino Huk revolt. Puerto Rico - 1950 - Military helped crush an independence rebellion in Ponce. Korean War - 1951-53 - Military sent in during the war. Iran - 1953 - The CIA orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power. Vietnam - 1954 - The United States offered weapons to the French in the battle against Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. Guatemala - 1954 - The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz and placed Colonel Armas in power. Egypt - 1956 - Marines deployed to evacuate foreigners after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Lebanon - 1958 - Navy supported an Army occupation of Lebanon during its civil war. Panama - 1958 - Troops landed after Panamanians demonstrations threatened the Canal Zone. Vietnam - 1950s-75 - Vietnam War. Cuba - 1961 - The CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasions failed to overthrow the Castro government. Cuba - 1962 - The Navy quarantines Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Laos - 1962 - Military occupied Laos during its civil war against the Pathet Lao guerrillas. Panama - 1964 - Troops sent in and Panamanians shot while protesting the United States presence in the Canal Zone. Indonesia - 1965 - The CIA orchestrated a military coup. Dominican Rep- 1965-66 - Troops deployed during a national election. Guatemala - 1966-67 - Green Berets sent in. Cambodia - 1969-75 - Military sent in after the Vietnam War expanded into Cambodia. Oman - 1970 - Marines landed to direct a possible invasion into Iran. Laos - 1971-75 - Americans carpet-bomb the countryside during Laos' civil war. Chile - 1973 - The CIA orchestrated a coup, killing President Allende who had been popularly elected. The CIA helped to establish a military regime under General Pinochet. Cambodia - 1975 - Twenty-eight Americans killed in an effort to retrieve the crew of the Mayaquez, which had been seized. Angola - 1976-92 - The CIA backed South African rebels fighting against Marxist Angola. Iran - 1980 - Americans aborted a rescue attempt to liberate 52 hostages seized in the Teheran embassy. Libya - 1981 - American fighters shoot down two Libyan fighters. El Salvador - 1981-92 - The CIA, troops, and advisers aid in El Salvador's war against the FMLN. Nicaragua - 1981-90 - The CIA and NSC directed the Contra War against the Sandinistas. Lebanon - 1982-84 - Marines occupied Beirut during Lebanon's civil war; 241 were killed in the American barracks and Reagan "redeployed" the troops to the Mediterranean. Honduras - 1983-89 - Troops sent in to build bases near the Honduran border. Grenada - 1983-84 - American invasion overthrew the Maurice Bishop government. Iran - 1984 - American fighters shot down two Iranian planes over the Persian Gulf. Libya - 1986 - American fighters hit targets in and around the capital city of Tripoli. Bolivia - 1986 - The Army assisted government troops on raids of cocaine areas. Iran - 1987-88 - The United States intervened on the side of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Libya - 1989 - Navy shot down two more Libyan jets. Virgin Islands - 1989 - Troops landed during unrest among Virgin Island peoples. Philippines - 1989 - Air Force provided air cover for government during coup. Panama - 1989-90 - 27,000 Americans landed in overthrow of President Noriega; over 2,000 Panama civilians were killed. Liberia - 1990 - Troops entered Liberia to evacuate foreigners during civil war. Saudi Arabia - 1990-91 - American troops sent to Saudi Arabia, which was a staging area in the war against Iraq. Kuwait - 1991 - Troops sent into Kuwait to turn back Saddam Hussein. Somalia - 1992-94 - Troops occupied Somalia during civil war. Bosnia - 1993-95 - Air Force jets bombed "no-fly zone" during civil war in Yugoslavia. Haiti - 1994-96 - American troops and Navy provided a blockade against Haiti's military government. The CIA restored Aristide to power. Zaire - 1996-97 - Marines sent into Rwanda Hutus' refugee camps in the area where the Congo revolution began. Albania - 1997 - Troops deployed during evacuation of foreigners. Sudan - 1998 - American missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical complex where alleged nerve gas components were manufactured. Afghanistan - 1998 - Missiles launched towards alleged Afghan terrorist training camps. Yugoslavia - 1999 - Bombings and missile attacks carried out by the United States in conjunction with NATO in the 11 week war against Milosevic. Iraq - 1998-2005 -

IN 1978, the people of Nicaragua were under attack by a proxy army, the Contras, Whose aim was to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the government, burning down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbors, bombing and strafing. These were called Ronald Reagan

We've Been Taken Over By a Cult By SEYMOUR HERSH Editors' Note: This is a transcript of remarks by Seymour Hersh at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York. About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he's doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don't know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren't voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have. It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can't begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. "They did it to us. We've got to do it to them." That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with. I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word "insurgency". It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me. There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been "diminish the agency." I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power. On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can't win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone" right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said, "Welcome to Stalingrad." We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it. We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, "Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it," as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, "well, we don't do torture." We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what's happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven "bad seeds", enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They've gotten away with it. So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, "Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away." There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had -- for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because it's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're "rag-heads". They're less than human. The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting having the K rations -- that's what they called them -- MRE's now -- the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, "Plug him," he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac'd out. As he was being medevac'd out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, "God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too." So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, "I'm coming to see you. I don't remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to - I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old - hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then she said, one of these great -- she said to me, "I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer." So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these -- some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, "Were you there?" She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She doesn't know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked "Iraq". She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn't publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's another story. For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in "macro" in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're going to have some very bad months ahead. Seymour Hersh's latest book is Chain of Command: The Road to Abu Ghraib.

If one nation launches a brutal war of aggression against another based on lies, massacres over one hundred thousand civilians(red cross estimate) tortures tens of thousands, now, whether these brutal forces build a school or two for the six o

I have to agree! I

Revelation 17:18 And the woman which thou sawest is that GREAT CITY, which reigneth over the kings of the earth. This is the WHORE of world Capitalism situated in New York City, the economic capital of both the United States and the world. It is trying to capture more of the world through what she calls FREE TRADE which helps the rich and enslaves the poor and the poorer countries So right now, the spirit of World Capitalism, MAMMON, is centered in New York City, and she gives out rewards or tricks to her merchants and those that fornicate with her. As she kills and destroys and drinks the blood of the poor she murders economically and militarily. Rev 18: 17-19 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate. For in one hour so great riches is come to nought

I read a testimony a few years ago from a guy that was in one of the two planes that crashed into each other in Tenerife on the Canary Islands. He said as flames engulfed the passengers he heard people cursing God, he knew he would be meeting God in few seconds so started praising the Lord, he wanted to come into the presents of God praising him. But as he started Praising the Lord the plane opened up right beside him and he walked right out onto the tarmac. So.........Praise the Lord!

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2 http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeas...ss_link?mode=PF http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorintelligence/bushwidened.html http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0521-06.htm http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.as...RJ8OVF&b=246536 http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/01/r...s/index_np.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/08/c...p/index_np.html http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1257847.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...55E2703,00.html http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/...ampdown?mode=PF http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...13/ixworld.html http://slate.msn.com/id/2102416/ The spirit of war, of killing, of bloodshed and violence is not of Christ, nor is it part of Christianity. It is not from Heaven but from Hell, for the spirit of war comes from the Enemy himself. He was a murderer from the beginning

When the devil comes knocking on your front door, looking for a way to spread his evil inside, he won't be sporting horns and a tail. He's going to come dressed as your sweetest dream, clean as a whistle, pious, sincere. He's going to speak your lingo, mimic your ways -- and when he opens up his little box of poison, it's going to look like the heaven your mama sang about when she rocked you to sleep in your cradle. Then one day, when the mind-fog lifts, you see him sitting at the head of the table, the walls of the room smeared with filth, dead bodies swelling on the blood-mucked floor, the still-living victims hog-tied and naked, screaming for mercy as the whipcords strike. He beckons you forward with a welcoming smile....he says..torture is ok, Christ would not object. You pause for a moment. It seems so strange: All this horror -- it would have once made you sick, but now it just feels like ... home. You shrug, you grin, you take your place beside him at the feast. In just this way, as Americans are preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, a series of stories exposed -- once again -- the torture chamber at the heart of their feast: a government gone insane, embracing terror, atrocity and tyranny. Yet there was no public outcry against these desecrations. Few even noticed; fewer still cared. Last month, the minions of George W. Bush announced, in open court, that he has the power to seize anyone on earth -- even "little old ladies in Switzerland" -- and imprison them forever if he so chooses, The New York Times reports. His minions said that anyone Bush declared "an enemy combatant" -- even if they never took up arms against America, even if they didn't know their actions were related to terrorism in any way -- could be abducted from any nation, friend or foe, or in the Homeland itself, and held indefinitely, "at the president's discretion," stripped of all rights under the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. Assistant Attorney General Brian Boyle said Bush's captives were entitled only to a single hearing, alone before a military tribunal, without legal counsel or access to the evidence against them -- evidence which Boyle cheerfully admitted could be obtained by torture in foreign countries, The Associated Press reported. Overturning centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence, Boyle said there were no restrictions whatsoever on using torture evidence, as long as the president or his military agents arbitrarily decide it is "credible." . But outsourcing torture to foreign countries is only one aspect of Bush's Torture, Incorporated; he has plenty of domestic production as well. Last week, the Pentagon released a report -- completed long before the election -- confessing that the "aberrations" of Abu Ghraib were in fact part of a broad system of state terror spread throughout Iraq, the Washington Post reports. Elite squads of "Special Operations" officers and CIA agents beat and abused prisoners across the country, the Pentagon said, while regular troops committed "technically illegal acts" by rounding up thousands of innocent people at random and holding them for months in crowded prisons, where they were often turned over to those same "elite" squads for "special handling." Some of this blood-soaked "intelligence" was "sent directly to the White House," interrogators noted. The report also admitted that American forces had taken innocent people hostage -- especially "female family members" -- in an effort to pressure wanted men to surrender: a clear war crime, as if such things mattered anymore. Meanwhile, the International Red Cross revealed that Bush has even perverted the healing professions at his concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, using doctors and nurses to help "set the conditions for interrogation" by withholding medical treatment and using their diagnostic skills to determine captives' "vulnerabilities" to various physical and psychological torments -- "a flagrant violation of medical ethics," said the Red Cross. Its investigators also found that the Guantanamo regime -- "an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment, and a form of torture" -- was growing worse over time, Salon.com reports. In such a moral sink, it was hardly even news that more photos of prisoner abuse -- taken months before the Abu Ghraib atrocities -- were uncovered last weekend, Reuters reports. This time it was "elite" teams of Navy SEALs mugging for the cameras with bloodied captives -- some with guns to their heads. Nor did anyone blink when Bush military brass announced plans to create forced labor camps for all male citizens in "liberated" Fallujah, the Boston Globe reports. Bush's legal counsel, Al Gonzales, engineered memos "justifying" torture and exalting unrestricted presidential power, beyond the reach of any law, foreign or domestic. As a reward for this violent outrage of American honor, Gonzales -- sweet-talking, pious and sincere, just like his boss -- will soon become the chief law officer of the land. And the American people, what do they do about all the horror being wrought in their name? They shrug. They grin. They sit down at the Christmas feast.