WAR and glass abattoirs - the "demeritocracy-loyalty" theory

OK, so the press played dumb. Did they really? I think not. I think it is impossible that so many outlets sang the same song unless there was something VERY powerful to make them. I don't believe in the "demeritocracy-loyalty" theory.

The "glass abattoirs" meme is nice.

World painted in blood ...

Chilcot Inquiry: The Establishment Goes To Work (Part 2)

by MediaLens / December 17th, 2009

Buckling Under Bush

In an early leading article on the Chilcot inquiry, the Guardian observed:

“What is already clear from the first week alone is that the decisions, secret or otherwise, that led to war were the product of systemic failure. Intelligence analysts, diplomats, in fact the entire machinery of the British government, proved supine against Washington’s will. Under that pressure, almost everyone buckled.”¹

They certainly did. The Guardian’s Martin Woollacott wrote in January 24, 2003:

“Among those knowledgeable about Iraq there are few, if any, who believe he is not hiding such weapons. It is a given.”²

This was close to being an exact reversal of the truth. Hans Blix, former head of UNMOVIC arms inspections in Iraq (November 2002-March 2003), said in June 2003:

“If anyone had cared… to study what UNSCOM [arms inspections in Iraq from 1991-1998] was saying for quite a number of years, and what we [UNMOVIC] were saying, they should not have assumed that they would stumble on weapons.”³

Unfortunately, almost no-one had cared to study anything. Former chief UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, put the issue in perspective last month:

As of December 1998, both the U.S. and Britain knew there was no ‘smoking gun’ in Iraq that could prove that Saddam’s government was retaining or reconstituting a WMD capability. Nothing transpired between that time and when the decision was made in 2002 to invade Iraq that fundamentally altered that basic picture.

But having decided on war using WMD as the justification, both the US and Great Britain began the process of fabricating a case after the fact. Lacking new intelligence data on Iraqi WMD, both nations resorted to either recycling old charges that had been disproved by UN inspectors in the past, or fabricating new charges that would not withstand even the most cursory of investigations.

He added:

The evidence needed to undermine any WMD-based case for war, derived from the work of the UN weapons inspectors, was always available to those officials in a position to weigh in on this matter, but either never consulted or deliberately ignored…

But “even the most cursory of investigations” was never attempted. We were amazed in 2002-2003 at the media’s complete lack of interest in testing US-UK government claims. Ritter’s comments above +were+ published in the Guardian, but in 2009, long after they had lost the power to make a difference. In 2003, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in a total of 12,356 articles. In these articles, Ritter was mentioned 17 times, mostly in passing. The Independent mentioned Ritter eight times in 5,648 articles on Iraq in 2003. Ritter’s claim that Iraq had been “fundamentally disarmed” by December 1998, received fewer than a dozen brief mentions in the Guardian in 2002. Ritter made the point:

“The president’s task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.”

Everyone knew that Iraq’s nuclear programme had been completely eliminated by weapons inspectors before December 1998. The only conceivable threat was offered by the prospect of the Iraqi government supplying old battlefield chemical and biological weapons to al Qaeda. But Saddam Hussein was known to be a mortal enemy of al Qaeda, and any retained WMD would long since have become “harmless sludge”, according to credible experts, like Ritter, whose arguments were available from all good booksellers from 2002 onwards (See: Ritter and William Rivers Pitt, War On Iraq, Profile Books, 2002).

The Iraqi “threat” was a fantasy invented by the immensely powerful, nuclear-armed bullies of the West. This is why former British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, was able to observe last month that prior to the attacks on September 11, 2001, Iraq was merely “a grumbling appendix.”

The extent of media buckling under Bush-Blair propaganda was spectacular. On February 6, 2003, a Guardian leader responded to US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous speech at the UN the previous day:

It is not credible to argue, as Iraq did in its initial reaction to Mr Powell, that it is simply all lies. It may be that some of what he said is unfounded or exaggerated. But not all of it. As we have noted on numerous occasions, Iraq is not cooperating with the UN in the way the world has a right to expect. Mr Powell has reinforced that impression. Saddam, that bloodiest of dictators who has caused so much pain and suffering for so long, is once again recklessly courting the very disaster so many people rightly fear. Iraqi behaviour must change radically and without any more delay.⁴

But it +was+ credible that it was “simply all lies.” Again, Ritter was on hand to make this clear, although not in the Guardian:

“He just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses people — and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people… The Powell presentation is not evidence… It’s a very confusing presentation. What does it mean? What does it represent? How does it all link up? It doesn’t link up.”⁵

As we recently noted, the pitiful response of the BBC’s leading interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, was standard for the media:

“I thought, well, ‘We know that Colin Powell is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes all this to be the case, then, you know, he’s seen the evidence; I haven’t.’” (See our alert for details)

The Guardian’s insult to the intelligence in the wake of Powell’s “evidence” was completed by its observation that “Iraqi behaviour must change radically and without any more delay.” But by February 2003 the Gulf was packed with hundreds of thousands of troops, hundreds of tanks, and hundreds of ships and planes. It was inconceivable that the US and Britain would simply bring them all home again, regardless of what Iraq did or did not do.

In April 2003, one week after US tanks had captured both Baghdad and the hearts of most British journalists, one of the Guardian’s most senior commentators, the late Hugo Young, wrote of Tony Blair:

“For a political leader, few therapies compare with military victory. For a leader who went to war in the absence of a single political ally who believed in the war as unreservedly as he did, Iraq now looks like vindication on an astounding scale.”⁶

Young added:

No one can deny that victory happened. The existential fact sweeps aside the prior agonising. That is an inexorable short-term truth about war. Not even the promised shed-loads of chemical and biological weapons seem any longer necessary to make war seem good. For many people, especially those who waged it, its validation becomes very simple. We got rid of a pitiless enemy of humanity. What more do you want? All that agonising about the whys and wherefores? Forget it.

The Guardian’s Simon Hoggart went beyond vindication of Western crimes in an article titled, “Anti-war MPs cling to intellectual life rafts.”

Mocking courageous opponents of the war like MPs George Galloway, Tam Dalyell and Alice Mahon, Hoggart wrote:

“The end of a war is not a time for taking stock, for reflecting on what has been lost and what achieved, but for scrambling on to the intellectual life rafts and hoping for rescue. Tony Blair, for his part, didn’t gloat. He doesn’t do gloating.”⁷

In its November 23 editorial, the Guardian writes:

“No one disputes that the foreign secretary plotted to ‘work up’ an ultimatum that could trigger war even though he believed that ‘the case was thin’…”

The careful choice of words is interesting. In fact, as Michael Smith’s reports on the leaked Downing Street memo revealed in The Times, the phrase “an ultimatum that could trigger war” should read “an ultimatum +designed+ to trigger war” – infinitely more damning.⁸

The Guardian continues:

“If, however, the inquiry gets too bogged down in logistical questions it could create the impression that the mission was merely poorly executed, as opposed to being misconceived.”

As ever, the language is carefully chosen to protect Tweedledum and Tweedledee from a public that has woken up to their criminal actions.

Were the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, merely “misconceived”? Or were they crimes, atrocities? Consider the Independent’s remarkable conclusion:

“But in the end, Sir John and his team will be judged on their success in getting answers to a number of crucial questions: What intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq did ministers see and was this evidence deliberately distorted in making the public case for war? Was the door prematurely shut on a diplomatic solution to the crisis?”⁹ .

But we know the answers to both these questions. The threat of Iraqi WMD was simply invented. It beggars belief that the Independent can still ask if “the door” was “prematurely shut on a diplomatic solution.” We know, without a shred of doubt, that the door to a “diplomatic solution” was never open — “the crisis” was not a real crisis. It was a fiction manufactured precisely +because+ the US-UK governments wanted war; they were determined to invade Iraq.

The “diplomatic solution” was a diplomatic ploy, a sham, a trap. Even now, the Independent cannot bring itself to recognise the ruthless, cynical nature of the political system by which we are governed.

The Glass Abattoir

A Guardian leader observed: “the primary aim of the probe must be to promote the reconciliation of the public with a political class which misled it so badly.”¹⁰

The “political class” did the misleading, notice — no mention of the media. A later Guardian editorial comments:

“Neither the US nor Britain has kicked the intervention habit, and the conflict in Iraq is also far from over.”¹

Again, the Guardian presents itself as a neutral voice, an impartial observer of the powerful. In fact, as we have seen, it was very much one of the useful idiots to which Ritter referred. It is true that neither the US nor Britain has kicked the intervention habit. But what of the Guardian itself?

In May 2007, a front-page Guardian article declared that Iran was “forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal.”

Juan Cole, Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, responded:

US military spokesmen have been trying to push implausible articles about Shiite Iran supporting Sunni insurgents for a couple of years now, and with virtually the sole exception of the New York Times, no one in the journalistic community has taken these wild charges seriously. But The Guardian?¹¹

In September, a Guardian editorial declared:

“Iranian negotiators should realise that their centrifuges are reaching their highest trade-in value. Push it any further, and Iran will not have an internationally monitored production line of enriched uranium to feed its nuclear reactors. Instead of international finance and trade, it will attract blockades and bombs.”¹²

The Guardian might ask if these are the words of a newspaper that has “kicked the intervention habit”. But a corporate media system can never subject itself to this kind of self-analysis.

True, vanishingly rare, and incomplete, exceptions do appear. In 2004, George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian that “the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job.”¹³

The media merely “reproduced” falsehoods, then. Similarly, the “job” of the media was assumed +not+ to be the one it performs with such consistency, year after year, for the powerful. Happily, Monbiot’s own newspaper, the Guardian, was among a select group of liberal papers that “were the most sceptical about the claims made by the government and intelligence agencies,” although they “still got some important things wrong.” The appallingly deceptive version of events offered by the pro-war Observer was judged by Monbiot to have been “partly false.” The ugliest truth was not even mentioned — Monbiot talked of media “mistakes,” not “crimes.”

But Monbiot does deserve credit — his article provided a rare discussion of an issue that is normally unmentionable. His comments will have been noted by the powers that be, and not appreciated. Sir Ken Macdonald QC, former Director of Public Prosecutions, recently shone an equally rare light on the subject of thought control in modern Britain:

In British public life, loyalty and service to power can sometimes count for more to insiders than any tricky questions of wider reputation. It’s the regard you are held in by your peers that really counts, so that steadfastness in the face of attack and threatened exposure brings its own rich hierarchy of honour and reward. Disloyalty, on the other hand, means a terrible casting out, a rocky and barren Roman exile that few have the courage to endure.

This helps explain why modern media and politics are such obvious moral and intellectual demeritocracies.

The corporate media concern, quite obviously, is not with examining and declaring the reality of what the organisation is — much less the ugly reality — but the reality of what it needs to +appear+ to be to its customers in order to maximise profits. Expecting honest self-analysis from the Guardian and the Independent is like expecting the meat industry to set up glass abattoirs next to supermarkets. The idea is a logical absurdity, a structural impossibility. Abattoirs +have+ to kill animals out of sight and earshot of consumers. Corporate media +have+ to serve state-corporate power while feigning neutrality. The sham of media neutrality +has+ to be defended by silence — honest, rational analysis is a serious threat.

And so we have the Guardian opining that, in the face of US government propaganda in 2002-2003, “almost everyone buckled.”

The elephant tap dancing across the living room floor, shaking the house to its very foundations, is not even mentioned. This is the role of the media in causing the deaths of more than one million living, breathing, dreaming, suffering human beings. This is the role of a media, which did +not+ merely buckle in helping this happen, but which performed the traditional propaganda service it has been +designed+ to perform in the service of the interests that created it.

The problem is that there can be no fundamental political change so long as the media has the power to stifle discussion and dissent. This is why media protestations that politicians need to be called to account are so cynical, so insulting to the intelligence. The very structure, the very reason for being of the media, ensures that there can be no real change.

Power has to be taken away from the mainstream media. The answer, as ever, lies with ordinary people willing to reject compromise, willing to invest their time, energy and resources in work that prioritises people and planet above profit.

In truth, this path is not at all “rocky and barren”; it does not involve a “terrible casting out.” It is alive with humanity, compassion and creativity. It is the life of meek servility to power and profit that is soulless, miserable and dead.

Read Part 1.

1. Leading Article: ‘Iraq inquiry: Dancing to American drums,’ The Guardian, November 28, 2009. [↩] [↩]
2. Woollacott, ‘This drive to war is one of the mysteries of our time – We know Saddam is hiding weapons. That isn’t the argument,’ The Guardian, January 24, 2003. [↩]
3. Miles Pomper and Paul Kerr, ‘An Interview With Hans Blix,’ Arms Control Today, June 16 2003. [↩]
4. Leading article, ‘Powell shoots to kill: But battle over Iraq is far from finished,’ The Guardian, February 6, 2003. [↩]
5. ‘Ritter dismisses Powell report,’ Kyodo News, February 7, 2003. [↩]
6. Young, ‘So begins Blair’s descent into powerless mediocrity, Victory in Iraq risks being effaced by imminent surrender over the euro,’ The Guardian, April 15, 2003. [↩]
7. Hoggart, ‘Anti-war MPs cling to intellectual life rafts,’ The Guardian, April 15, 2003. [↩]
8. See Chapter 5 of our book Newspeak, Pluto Press, 2009, for many more examples of media mendacity on this point [↩]
9. Leading article, ‘Sir John Chilcot must assert his independence and focus on the key issues,’ The Independent, November 24, 2009 [↩]
10. Leading article, ‘Chilcot inquiry: Healing the wounds of war,’ The Guardian, November 23, 2009. [↩]
11. Juan Cole, Informed Comment blog, May 22, 2007. [↩]
12. Leading article, ‘Iran: Spinning out of control,’ The Guardian, September 25, 2009. [↩]
13. Monbiot, ‘Our lies led us into war,’ The Guardian, July 20, 2004 [↩]

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The first Media Lens book is Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media (Pluto Books, London, 2006).

HAARP - Hurricain erin - 911 WTC

The US is going ahead with the HF Active Auroral Ionospheric Research Program
(HAARP) involving USAF, US Navy's Office of Naval Research, ARCO Power to
enhance C3 capabilities. The purpose is to develop high frequency ionospheric
heating capabilities to:

1) generate ELF (70-150 Hz) for submarine communications.

2) geophysical probing of ionospheric processes

3) creation of ionospheric lenses for military purposes

4) ionize pathways by electron acceleration for infrared, optical and radio
wave propagation in the ionosphere

5) generate new geomagnetic alignments to control reflection and scattering
properties of radio waves

6) create ionospheric "mirrors" for HF/VHF/UHF surveillance of flying objects.

The heating involves 1 Gigawatt (at 1 MHz to 15 MHz) from a 30 acre antenna
farm in Gakona, Alaska and will operate in tandem with a Brazilian ionospheric
modification program (BIME) and the Navy's RED AIR program.

It is a follow up on various Soviet facilities (1 GW in Niir (Dushanbe), Sura
(400 MW), Gorkiy (20 MW) and Monchegorsk (10 MW) which were by defense
estimates more advanced than Western facilities in Arecibo, Puerto Rico (80
MW), Fairbanks (80 MW) and the Max Planck facility in Tromso, Norway (1 GW).

It is reported that the project poses so many uncertainties that existing
military bases refused to house it and many scientists consider this as
unlawful and dangerous experimentation while the congress has already rejected
funding in 1989 for it.

Details available from:

Clare Zickuhr
5316 Shorecrest Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99515
Tel: 907-248-8189
Fax: 907-248-2283

So had you heard of that one before? That means quite many watts in the air! No
wonder scientists are detecting gree house effects!

A positive mass localized on a lower end of a funnel explains a fast extension of a funnel and a subsequent blow against the surface of the earth or water.

A vacuum domain as well as a vacuum doesn't have the conductivity of self-gravitational current, it doesn't possess a free gravitational charges. Therefore while touching the surface only the surface gravitational charges go in the ground. At that a funnel is detached from the ground. Whereupon the process of polarisation again extends a funnel and it again touches the ground. In such a way it may be explained an observable dotted contact of a funnel with the earth.

The energy source as in the experiment of Einstein-de-Haas is energy of the magnetic field, in this case - energy of the polarisation. Thus a gravitational energy is transformed into a spin energy.

A cloud always rises through a height of 20 km above a funnel of tornado. Since an upper boundary of the troposphere passing in a middle latitudes at a height of 10-11 km confines all thermobaric processes in the atmosphere, a manifestation of tornado at such a height can't have a meteorological explanation, but it can have a gravidynamical explanation. A stretched and strongly polarized vacuum domain contains at its upper end a large positive mass and positive electrical charge. And both charges repel from the earth and rushes together with the air outside the troposphere. The entrapped moisture makes a domain visible.
Figure 56 (Figure 5).

The most widespread and the most inexplicable manifestation of tornado as a picking of solid objects by soft ones

(straws pick boards, chips pick trunks, a board penetrates a wall of a house, a thick steel plate) also can be explained by the accepted model, see Figure 5.

Under the action of the gravitational field of the Earth a gravitational charge is accumulated on the thin ends of different objects. It rushes to the gravitational charge created by the Earth on the surface of a house or tree. The charge density at some concentration of defects can be sufficient for a puncturing the firm objects. A charge carrier is carried along in a made aperture. It's solidity doesn't play any role.

By the same mechanism may be explained the fact why a maple leafe was found to be pressed in a hard stucco. If one could set a laboratory experiment for the demonstration of gravitational charges, one can't invent the better way of manifestation of their effect than in this experiment.

The probability that a board by its end hits a palm trunk is very small but howerever it differs from zero, but the probability that all boards pick palms in such a way that a palm is always in the middle of a board equals to zero.

But if to accept that an equipotential of a gravitational field passes along a palm, then a hit of a board in a palm and a stop of a board just in its middle becomes no longer accidental.

The positive gravitational charges originating on the lower surface of a parent cloud allow to keep and to transport not only silver coins and Amphibia but also large masses of water extracted from reservoirs.

The gravitational polarisation of a tornado's column allows to explain why fast rotated bricks from the destroyed school were stacked in a high hillock in a center of the area formed by a school foundation.

The positive gravitational charges originated on the lower end of a column cause the same polarisation on the earth surface, in this particular case - in the foundation of the school. The attraction of these charges has compensated a centrifugal force and gathered all bricks in a center of a column.

9/11 Weather Anomalies and Field Effects

Hurricane Erin track (atl.ec.gc.ca). Hurricane Erin was the closest to NYC on 9/11/01. Why didn't we hear about this in the morning news?????

Weather reported on 9/11, reporting rain and thunder at JFK airport. They don't mention wind direction or that the wind shifted direction by 180°.

http://drjudywood.com/articles/erin/noaapics/erintrack_ss.jpg

Best track for Hurricane Erin, September 2001. Track during the extratropical stage is based on analyses from the NOAA Marine Prediction Center. The colored circles indicate the approximate area covered by the main body of the hurricane. This shows the potential danger this hurrcane posed on New York and the surrounding area.

http://drjudywood.com/articles/erin/hpics/010911_254.1520.rgb14cccbc2.jpg
THE EYE ... weird huh?

News TURKEY GLADIO November 2009

Judicial operations in the media spotlight
There are a few findings in common in the investigations into Judges and Prosecutors Association (YARSAV) President Ömer Faruk Eminağaoğlu and Sincan 1st High Criminal Court Chief Justice Osman Kaçmaz Osman Kaçmaz.

Both men call journalists to provide information on cases they are closely following and in so doing direct public opinion through the resulting news reports. For example, EminaÄŸaoÄŸlu says he might even meet with the executives of a newspaper to ensure that news stories on cases of interest to him are covered better in the newspaper.

We learned about this and a dozen other similar scandals after an inspection board investigation. Following an audit at the Telecommunications Directorate (TÄ°B) that was conducted through the joint efforts of the two men, another manipulative tactic was employed by way of the same journalists. Journalists, especially those at NTV who are disturbed by the investigation into Ergenekon, a clandestine network accused of attempting to overthrow the government, are busy working long and hard again.

YARSAV President Eminağaoğlu wanted it, and the Sincan chief justice granted it. An investigation was launched at the TİB, the center where legal telephone interceptions are conducted. TİB President Fethi Şimşek, who is also an experienced public prosecutor, said the investigation would endanger investigations that are in progress. He rejected the investigation on the grounds that it was illegal, but to no avail. In the end, however, Şimşek was right. Reports on the audits at the TİB were leaked to the media, and the names of many people in ongoing cases as well as the names of judges that ordered the monitoring of telephone conversations were exposed. A witch hunt started for these judges. A lynch campaign was launched against people who had acted within the scope of their powers as if they had engaged in illegal activities. It must have had the anticipated effect because Kaçmaz called for an even broader investigation.

There is a serious level of disinformation. These situations cannot be called “wiretapping scandals.” When some police chiefs illegally wiretapped telephone conversations on the eighth floor of the Ankara Security Directorate, we called that a wiretapping scandal. But the wiretaps currently in question were conducted at the direction of judges. Judges would not permit the monitoring of telephone conversations if they did not have concrete evidence in their hands. Less than a year ago, Ergenekon supporters obtained a CD numbered 51 that featured private images and information about dozens of judges and prosecutors. The court of appeals president directly informed the officials concerned about these individuals. Isn’t it possible that Ergenekon may have used some of these individuals to serve their own interests? More than 50 members of the judiciary were involved in wiretaps ordered for Ergenekon suspects. Is the relationship between a lawyer who is a suspect in a case and a judge who says to him “Do you have any orders for me?” not going to be investigated?

Take, for example, Ergenekon suspect Engin Aydın, who attracted attention when pictures of him eating at a restaurant with a Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) member were published in the media. He saw in himself the power to be able to interfere in the Supreme Court of Appeals elections. Should Aydın working behind the scenes for some people at appeals court be ignored? When retired chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals Sabih KanadoÄŸlu, whose home was searched within the scope of the same case, said prosecutors leading the investigation would suffer the same fate as those in the Şemdinli case, in which a prosecutor in Turkey’s East was disbarred due to an indictment he presented to the court, whom did he trust?

Interestingly, yesterday the Milliyet daily commented on the wiretapping issue as “preposterous.” But immediately under that headline it covered the story titled “Six judges, three prosecutors in prostitution case,” in which it indicated that the HSYK had been informed about these individuals. In other words, we need to bear in mind that there is a chance that members of the judiciary can commit a crime as well. It’s hard to understand why some institutions hastily make statements. HSYK Deputy President Kadir Özbek made such a statement about a matter that did not yet involve them, which brought many judges under suspicion. He claimed that some judges cringed when inspectors made requests and issued warrants for wiretapping.

Inspectors just conduct inspections, but the HSYK not only discharges people from their jobs, it doesn’t even allow lawyers to do their jobs. If only Özbek had taken a look at a relevant report released by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) and realized how HSYK decisions affect members of the judiciary.

Italian prosecutor Felice Casson said he was inhibited by the higher judiciary when conducting an investigation into Gladio. Over the last year Turkey has been witnessing events similar to those experienced in Italy, and this does not take anyone by surprise.

14 November 2009, Saturday

ALÄ° AKKUŞ TODAY’S ZAMAN

War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel

War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel

By NOAM CHOMSKY
Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.

The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well alignedâ€"not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.
The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,” Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.
The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.
The Nobel committee’s concerns were valid. They singled out Obama’s rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.
Right now Iran’s nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama’s efforts to contain Iran.
Meanwhile, a debate continues on whether Obama’s recent decision to reconfigure missile-defense systems in Europe is a capitulation to the Russians or a pragmatic step to defend the West from Iranian nuclear attack.
Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.
Amid the furor over Iranian duplicity, the IAEA passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection.
The United States and Europe tried to block the IAEA resolution, but it passed anyway. The media virtually ignored the event.
The United States assured Israel that it would support Israel’s rejection of the resolutionâ€"reaffirming a secret understanding that has allowed Israel to maintain a nuclear arsenal closed to international inspections, according to officials familiar with the arrangements. Again, the media were silent.
Indian officials greeted U.N. Resolution 1887 by announcing that India “can now build nuclear weapons with the same destructive power as those in the arsenals of the world’s major nuclear powers,” the Financial Times reported.
Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear weapons programs. They have twice come dangerously close to nuclear war, and the problems that almost ignited this catastrophe are very much alive.
Obama greeted Resolution 1887 differently. The day before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his inspiring commitment to peace, the Pentagon announced it was accelerating delivery of the most lethal non-nuclear weapons in the arsenal: 13-ton bombs for B-2 and B-52 stealth bombers, designed to destroy deeply hidden bunkers shielded by 10,000 pounds of reinforced concrete.
It’s no secret the bunker busters could be deployed against Iran.
Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators” began in the Bush years but languished until Obama called for developing them rapidly when he came into office.
Passed unanimously, Resolution 1887 calls for the end of threats of force and for all countries to join the NPT, as Iran did long ago. NPT non-signers are India, Israel and Pakistan, all of which developed nuclear weapons with U.S. help, in violation of the NPT.
Iran hasn’t invaded another country for hundreds of yearsâ€"unlike the United States, Israel and India (which occupies Kashmir, brutally).
The threat from Iran is minuscule. If Iran had nuclear weapons and delivery systems and prepared to use them, the country would be vaporized.
To believe Iran would use nuclear weapons to attack Israel, or anyone, “amounts to assuming that Iran’s leaders are insane” and that they look forward to being reduced to “radioactive dust,” strategic analyst Leonard Weiss observes, adding that Israel’s missile-carrying submarines are “virtually impervious to preemptive military attack,” not to speak of the immense U.S. arsenal.
In naval maneuvers in July, Israel sent its Dolphin class subs, capable of carrying nuclear missiles, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, sometimes accompanied by warships, to a position from which they could attack Iranâ€"as they have a “sovereign right” to do, according to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
Not for the first time, what is veiled in silence would receive front-page headlines in societies that valued their freedom and were concerned with the fate of the world.
The Iranian regime is harsh and repressive, and no humane person wants Iranâ€"or anyone elseâ€"to have nuclear weapons. But a little honesty would not hurt in addressing these problems.
The Nobel Peace Prize, of course, is not concerned solely with reducing the threat of terminal nuclear war, but rather with war generally, and the preparation for war. In this regard, the selection of Obama raised eyebrows, not least in Iran, surrounded by U.S. occupying armies.
On Iran’s borders in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, Obama has escalated Bush’s war and is likely to proceed on that course, perhaps sharply.
Obama has made clear that the United States intends to retain a long-term major presence in the region. That much is signaled by the huge city-within-a city called “the Baghdad Embassy,” unlike any embassy in the world.
Obama has announced the construction of mega-embassies in Islamabad and Kabul, and huge consulates in Peshawar and elsewhere.
Nonpartisan budget and security monitors report in Government Executive that the “administration’s request for $538 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II. And that’s not counting the additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending slated for future years.”
The Nobel Peace Prize committee might well have made truly worthy choices, prominent among them the remarkable Afghan activist Malalai Joya.
This brave woman survived the Russians, and then the radical Islamists whose brutality was so extreme that the population welcomed the Taliban. Joya has withstood the Taliban and now the return of the warlords under the Karzai government.
Throughout, Joya worked effectively for human rights, particularly for women; she was elected to parliament and then expelled when she continued to denounce warlord atrocities. She now lives underground under heavy protection, but she continues the struggle, in word and deed. By such actions, repeated everywhere as best we can, the prospects for peace edge closer to hopes.
This column appears, in edited form, in In These Times’ December 2009 issue.
© New York Times Syndicate

Hitler's secret archive - chain mail explained

> This story was aired on CBS on "60
> MINUTES" ** about a long-secret

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9cet2_LoJQ

It a bad TV report about an archive
of the records of mass murder,
genocide and progroms. The german
archive contains Schindler's list,
Anne Frank documents and all the
gruesome, scrupulous records of
"Hitler's willing executioners" in
writing. Crimes that can never be
atoned.

As always with Western corporate
embedded media, there is spin and
deception by omission of vital
references.

For starters, missing is a
comparision to the closed archives of
UK and USA as well as the omission of
any positive word on today's
germany's committment to keep the
historic facts straight.

But some mentioned "facts" are wrong,
too. Let's always try to give some
background and perspective. The age
of enlightenment depends on reason,
and information.

> German archive that houses a
> treasure trove of information on
> 17.5 million victims of the
> Holocaust.

Germans pay for the Red Cross to
house this amazing archive in
eternity. It is in perfect shape,
indexed and open to researchers.
Currently they pay 317 people to work
in the archive.

> The archive, located in the German
> town of Bad Arolsen ,

near Kassel.

> is massive (there are 16 miles of
> shelving containing 50 million
> pages of documents) and until
> recently, was off-limits to the
> public.

30 million documents, open for
research since 28 nov 2007 to be
exact.
http://www.its-arolsen.org/de/ueber_its/finanz_und_rechtsgrundlagen/index.html

The "International Tracing Service"
was disclosing information on anyone
who asked since after the war.

It was not a SECRET ARCHIVE.

The backlog was unquantified,
it depends on how you count it.

The CBS figure of 400,000 is
unclear and may give the wrong
impression because of the
missing time-frame. Also the way of
counting has changed in 2008. Before
each enquiry was counted as "enquiry
per name". Today they count "enquiry
per enquiry".

During the german government
reparation-payouts to former slave
labourers between 2000 and 2007 there
were almost a million enquiries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Tracing_Service

The CBS report ("Hitler's secret
archive" by Michael Rosenbaum) is a
sensationalist yellow-press emotional
piece that could convey much better
information in the almost 10 minutes.
In fact it gives wrong impressions at
every fact. There are emotional
scenes of holocaust survivors crying
in front of the camera.

> But after the German government
> agreed earlier this year to open
> the archives, CBS News' Scott
> Pelley traveled there with three
> Jewish survivors who were able to
> see their own Holocaust records.
> It's an incredibly moving piece,

Yes, but where are the "incredibly
moving" films about Hiroshima and
Nagasaki? Iraq, Iran, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Vietnam, My Lai and New
York (9/11 2001)? Is one Holocaust 65
years ago as bad as a recent one? How
about the eon million victims of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War

Between 1945 and 2005 the United
States has attempted to overthrow
more than 40 foreign governments, and
to crush more than 30
populist-nationalist movements
struggling against intolerable
regimes... In the process, the U.S.
caused the end of life for several
million people, and condemned many
millions more to a life of agony and
despair.

If I were the president, I could stop
terrorist attacks against the United
States in a few days. Permanently. I
would first apologize -- very
publicly and very sincerely -- to all
the widows and the orphans, the
impoverished and the tortured, and
all the many millions of other
victims of American imperialism. I
would then announce that America's
global interventions -- including the
awful bombings -- have come to an
end. And I would inform Israel that
it is no longer the 51st state of the
union but . oddly enough . a foreign
country. I would then reduce the
military budget by at least 90% and
use the savings to pay reparations to
the victims and repair the damage
from the many American bombings and
invasions. There would be more than
enough money. Do you know what one
year of the US military budget is
equal to? One year. It's equal to
more than $20,000 per hour for every
hour since Jesus Christ was born.
That's what I'd do on my first three
days in the White House. On the
fourth day, I'd be assassinated.
(William Blum)

> all the more
> poignant in the wake of the
> meeting of Holocaust deniers in
> Iran and the denial speeches in
> the UN

Sure. The exact wording *CAN* be
interpreted like that

exact recent quote:

At the 18 September 2009 Quds Day
ceremonies in Tehran Ahmadinejad
stated Israel was created on "a lie
and a mythical claim," that the
Western powers "launched the myth of
the Holocaust. They lied, they put on
a show and then they support the
Jews.

In a more benevolent interpretation
Ahmadinejad is not totally wrong.
Israel was created by many crimes and
lies:

Disguised as Arabs ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing

boobytrapped corpses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_Affair
"the hanging of the sergeants did
more than anything else to get us out
of Palestine."

It is self-evident that the holocaust
is not a myth in itself. But it is
certainly true that the holocaust is
used (launched) as a myth to justify
imperialism, see: John Mearsheimer .
Invoking the Holocaust to Defend the
Occupation
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2008/12/10/john-mearsheimer-invoking-the-holocaust-to-defend-the-occuption/
http://www.fmep.org/analysis/analysis/invoking-the-holocaust-to-defend-the-occupation
for more information.

> We're trying to get word out about
> the story to people who have a
> special interest in this subject.

Now, who would that be? Historians?
It is soooo important that EVERYONE
is EDUCATED about the crimes of
empires.

The free citizens of the USA should
learn their own history, with utmost
priority:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

> It is now more than 60 years after
> the Second World War in Europe
> ended. This e-mail is being sent as
> a memorial chain, in memory of the
> six million Jews, 20 million
> Russians, 10 million Christians and
> 1,900 Catholic priests who were
> murdered, massacred, raped, burned,
> starved and humiliated with the
> German and Russia peoples looking
> the other way!

It can be argued that the "looking
the other way" by the allies was
contributing a great deal.

Fascism was a catastrophe for Europe
which must never be forgotten.
Propaganda celebrated a bloody
victory! Many Germans really
believed they were being attacked by
jews. The wonderful german military
was cause for militarist fascination,
and it was all intentional.
The big lesson (soon forgotten) by
the germans was that the corporations
were the actual enablers and
instigators of war.

The german "republicans" (right wing
conservatives) 'CDU' drafted the
following party manifesto worth
reading in 1947:

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Parties%20WZ%205%20Eng.pdf

Today's Hollywood glorifies
militarism! "Fascism 2.0" is alive
and well world-wide. While we no
longer comit genocide we *are*
enslaving the world by finacially.

> Now, more than ever, with Iran ,
> among others, claiming the
> Holocaust to be "a myth," it is
> imperative to make sure the world
> never forgets.

"Iran" is not claiming anything. The
Claim that "Iran" is denying the
holocaust is a brazen war-mongering
effort to propagandize, in best
Goebbels tradition.

> This e-mail is intended to reach 40
> million people worldwide!

You better forward this amended
email. 40 million people are
hopefully not dumb enough to advocate
the Repugnican USA-christian-fascists
call for a bloodbath, on the count of
a few Holocaust denying idiots. The
USA has plenty of them, start at
home!

Iran has NEVER in 2000 years attacked
ANY country. The USA has attacked
during EVERY presidency. The USA is a
"war country", it needs frequent wars
to justify the monstrous
state-socialism military-spending.
The USA out-spends the WORLD, and
since 9/11 it aquired military bases
in pipeline-hotspots under a huge
cost of lives. There was never a
proper investigation in the events of
9/11, and to-this-day the NTSB has
not said ANYTHING about the
airplanes:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/AccList.asp?month=9&year=2001
The most factual website on the 9/11
myth is this one:
http://drjudywood.com/ (it takes
weeks and is indigestable).

> Join us and be a link in the
> memorial chain and help us
> distribute it around the world.

Yes, please forward this amended
email. It is formatted for
trouble-free quoting.

> Please send this e-mail to 10
> people you know and ask them to
> continue the memorial chain.
> Please don't just delete it. It
> will only take you a minute to pass
> this along
>
> ** A recreation of the CBS program
> can be found on You Tube. Here are
> the links to "CBS Holocaust, Parts
> 1 & 2"
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9cet2_LoJQ
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g63zTkDsxfM&feature=related

Israel Wiped of map exact quote

===== WIPED OFF THE MAP ========

Text of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Speech

Published: October 30, 2005

This is a translation, by Nazila Fathi in The New York Times Tehran bureau, of the October 26 speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to an Islamic Student Associations conference on "The World Without Zionism." The conference was held in Tehran, at the Interior Ministry.

The text of the speech was posted online, in Persian, by the Iranian Student News Agency (www.isnagency.com). Bracketed explanatory material is from Ms. Fathi.

I thank God that I have had the opportunity to participate in the event today ..

We need to examine the true origins of the issue of Palestine: is it a fight between a group of Muslims and non-Jews? Is it a fight between Judaism and other religions? Is it the fight of one country with another country? Is it the fight of one country with the Arab world? Is it a fight over the land of Palestine? I guess the answer to all these questions is .no..

The establishment of the occupying regime of Qods [Jerusalem]was a major move by the world oppressor [ the United States] against the Islamic world. The situation has changed in this historical struggle. Sometimes the Muslims have won and moved forward and the world oppressor was forced to withdraw.

Unfortunately, the Islamic world has been withdrawing in the past 300 years. I do not want to examine the reasons for this, but only to review the history. The Islamic world lost its last defenses in the past 100 years and the world oppressor established the occupying regime. Therefore the struggle in Palestine today is the major front of the struggle of the Islamic world with the world oppressor and its fate will decide the destiny of the struggles of the past several hundred years.

The Palestinian nation represents the Islamic nation [Umma] against a system of oppression, and thank God, the Palestinian nation adopted Islamic behavior in an Islamic environment in their struggle and so we have witnessed their progress and success.

I need to thank you for choosing this valuable title for the conference.

Many who are disappointed in the struggle between the Islamic world and the infidels have tried to spread the blame. They say it is not possible to have a world without the United States and Zionism. But you know that this is a possible goal and slogan.

Let.s take a step back. We had a hostile regime in this country which was undemocratic, armed to the teeth and, with SAVAK, its security apparatus of SAVAK [the intelligence bureau of the Shah of Iran.s government] watched everyone. An environment of terror existed. When our dear Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder the Iranian revolution] said that the regime must be removed, many of those who claimed to be politically well-informed said it was not possible. All the corrupt governments were in support of the regime when Imam Khomeini started his movement. All the Western and Eastern countries supported the regime even after the massacre of September 7 [1978] and said the removal of the regime was not possible. But our people resisted and it is 27 years now that we have survived without a regime dependant on the United States. The tyranny of the East and the West over the world must should end, but weak people who can see only what lies in front of them cannot believe this.

Who could believe that one day we could witness the collapse of the Eastern Empire? But we have seen its fall during our lives and it collapsed in such a way that we have to refer to libraries because no trace of it is left. Imam [Khomeini] said Saddam must go and he said he would grow weaker than anyone could imagine. Now you see the man who spoke with such arrogance ten years ago that one would have thought he was immortal, is being tried in his own country in handcuffs and shackles by those who he believed supported him and with whose backing he committed his crimes.

Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime [Israel] has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks.

For over 50 years the world oppressor tried to give legitimacy to the occupying regime and it has taken measures in this direction to stabilize it. About 27 or 28 years ago they took a major step and unfortunately one of the leading countries made a mistake which we hope will correct it.[an apparent reference to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel].

Recently they [the Israelis] tried a new trick. They want to show the evacuation from the Gaza strip, which was imposed on them by Palestinians, as a final victory for the Palestinians and end the issue of Palestine with the excuse of establishing a Palestinian government next to themselves. Today, they want to involve Palestinians with mischief and trick them into fighting with one another over political positions so that they would drop the issue of Palestine.

They want to convince some of the Islamic countries that, since they evacuated the Gaza strip with good intentions, the legitimacy of their corrupt regime should be recognized. I hope Palestinian groups and people are aware of this trick.

The issue of Palestine is not over at all. It will be over the day a Palestinian government, which belongs to the Palestinian people, comes to power; the day that all refugees return to their homes; a democratic government elected by the people comes to power. Of course those who have come from far away to plunder this land have no right to choose for this nation.

I hope the Palestinian people will remain alert and aware in the same way that they have continued their struggle in the past ten years.

If we get through this brief period successfully, the path of eliminating the occupying regime will be easy and down-hill.

I warn all leaders of the Islamic world that they should be aware of this trick. Anyone who recognizes this regime because of the pressure of the World oppressor, or because of naiveté or selfishness, will be eternally disgraced and will burn in the fury of the Islamic nations.

Those who are sitting in closed rooms cannot decide for the Islamic nation and cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.

RETORT - Leftist mostly correct, but clouded

Here is a nice article that confirms that the LEFT is clueless about all the dirty wars AGAINST THEM.
9/11 was a US military false-flag black-op that had the explicit aim to

a) rule CONTROL the world (!) by force for many decades to come
b) get all the funding and compliance to do so
c) to control the cover-up of the 9/11 crime by making it a heresy to be a 911-truther

So far it worked, the biggest lie-detector (the internet) has responded, but in the real-world people are still hand-in-sand. Including the left/anarchists as we see here in this article:

To make it clear. The article is VERY GOOD, but the conclusions regarding the muslim world are flawed and the vision is clouded because 911 was not terror, but synthetic terror.

Talking Back with Retort

Sunday, 25 October 2009 12:58

Interview with Retort -- by Iain Boal

The text of this interview with Emilien Bernard, who reviewed Afflicted Powers in the French edition published by les Prairies Ordinaires. The interview will appear in the French online journal Article XI.

Who are the people composing Retort? When and how was this collective born? What type of actions do you usually launch?

Retort is a gathering of antinomians based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are not a collective, we have no explicit program; we are a motley crew - writers, artists, teachers, artisans, scientists, poets - joined in a web of sustaining friendships, who share an antagonism to the present order of things.

We have been meeting on a regular basis for the last two decades, for the most part to eat and drink together - we happily confess to that - but also to discuss politics, history, aesthetics, and the terms and tactics of root-and-branch opposition to capital, empire and the various versions of barbarism currently on offer.

There is a deep appreciation of old cafes and city taverns competing with a tendency to favor the open air - rambles, the back country, tidepool picnics, wild swimming. We have produced broadsides and pamphlets for particular occasions, and from time to time we also organize more public events - readings, conviviums, evenings of film, and so forth. There are collaborations of many kinds within the milieu.

The name Retort acknowledges that we are engaged in a wider conversation whose terms and assumptions we reject, and that we stand on ground, rhetorical and otherwise, not of our own choosing. We are forced to spend much of our time - far too much - in rebuttals, demurrers, rejoinders. In a word, retorting. The name gestures to an obscure non-sectarian 1940s journal of that title, which at first we thought seriously about reviving. It was edited and published out of a cabin in Bearsville, a hamlet near Woodstock, New York.


Retort's printing press had belonged to the eloquent Wobbly agitator Carlo Tresca before he was assassinated on the streets of Manhattan, perhaps by agents of Mussolini. The journal Retort was anti-statist, anti-militarist and published essays on art, politics and culture. Poetry too - the first issue published the Kenneth Rexroth poem that begins "Now in Waldheim where the rain/ Has fallen careless and unthinking/ For all an evil century's youth, / Where now the banks of dark roses lie..." Retort Press also published Prison Etiquette: The Convict's Compendium of Useful Information, compiled by war resisters, specifically those imprisoned for refusing to collaborate either with the state or with the Anabaptist "peace churches" who had agreed with the US government to self-manage the rural work camps for conscientious objectors. Finally, a retort is the alchemist's vessel that ferments, distills, transforms. It's fragile, it needs fire, there may be problems with the underlying theory, but there's occasional magic.

2. How came the idea of writing such a book?

Afflicted Powers emerged out of a broadside entitled "Neither Their War Nor Their Peace", produced by Retort for the anti-war demonstrations in the spring of 2003. The broadside was written in a hurry, with the purpose of challenging the slogans we knew would dominate the marches - namely, "No Bood for Oil" and "Peace". Tens of thousands of the broadsheet made their way around the planet, and we had a very strong response asking that we elaborate what was, for obvious reasons, compressed and rhetorical. We intended to produce a pamphlet that we would distribute through our own networks, but it grew into a manuscript eventually published in London by Verso. The tone of Afflicted Powers bears the marks of its origin as an intervention on the streets; one reviewer called it "venomous and poetic" - no higher praise. Chomsky accurately described the book as "part analysis, part manifesto", and we were cheered that Harold Pinter wrote of Afflicted Powers: "A comprehensive analysis of America's relationship with the world. No stone is left unturned. The maggots exposed are grotesque."

3. Al Qaida wanted the victory of Bush in the 2004 elections because his action "was full of force rather than wisdom". In 2008, leaders of Al Qaida said they wanted the election of McCain for quite the same reason (with a conservative, America remains the "perfect enemy"). So was the victory of Obama a defeat for Al Qaida?

Surely not. Obama's victory was, no question, a domestic defeat for America's white supremacists at the level of the symbolic economy. It was also a rebuff to the military caste that McCain embodies. Much of the US officer corps has been drawn, since the early days of the republic, from migrant Scots-Irish protestant stock, who have also overseen a lot of the dirty work for English imperialists. On the other hand, if the leaders of Al Qaida now believe they need a conservative in the White House to constitute "the perfect enemy" - and we don't think they are that foolish - then they have been watching too much American television. Or maybe too little. After all, Obama has publicly committed himself on TV to expanding the war in Afghanistan, and if necessary to bomb Pakistan without consultation. Even Bush baulked when he heard that remark during the 2008 campaign. Never underestimate the extremism of liberals - historically, the global death-count under liberal regimes swamps even the bloodbaths instigated by state-communists, fascists and the gallery of tinpot tyrants. Crucially, of course, vis a vis the Middle East and the Islamic world, Obama has already sworn fealty to the Zionist state. And Obama knows perfectly well that, with respect to Israel, if you will the means, you will the ends. Full-spectrum ethnocide, now under way in Palestine.

4. In Afflicted Powers, your analysis gave a lot of space to the concept of "spectacle", which was first theorised by the French intellectual Guy Debord. And when I think about Barack Obama, he is a representation of spectacle if ever I've seen it, but in a "good way", not far from Hollywood. After being defeated in Iraq, does American imperialism need to adapt its image, to "smooth" it, in order to be able to continue its work? Could Obama be a factor of change on this question? Will he progressively disengage the USA from the war? Close Guantanamo and some of the other military bases all over the world?

First, Obama is fully within spectacular politics - how could he not be? Consider the staged shots straight out of the Leni Riefenstahl album, the 'rising sun' campaign logo reminiscent of the hinomaru flag that was banned for its militaristic associations during the US occupation of Japan, the young Muslim woman hustled offstage by handlers at an Obama rally for wearing a headscarf, and so forth. Torturer-in-chief Rumsfeld once fretted and frothed in front of the Washington Press Club about the difficulties of managing the state's business in a world of cell-phone cameras, the internet, a 4-hour news cycle, and Al Jazeera. He produced his own - vulgarized, to be sure - theory of spectacle. Our book is precisely about the contradictions of military neo-liberalism under conditions of spectacle produced by the new image-machinery. There will, of course, be certain changes under Obama - especially in the organization of appearances. For example, Guantanamo, the unacceptable face of state torture, will be closed; the gulag will persist, and the military may even be expanded under Obama.

Also, we think it important to resist the simplicity of your phrasing "After being defeated in Iraq". As we argue extensively in the chapter of Afflicted Powers titled "Permanent War" (which, regrettably, does not appear in the French translation), there are many ways in which the invasion and occupation of Iraq served neoliberal, and particularly American, interests even though in other ways it proved a debacle. These arguments, about the unfettered use of force, the imposition of hegemonic will, the establishment of military outposts, etc., might be summed up in the expression "The U.S. state and its capital clients were able to do what they wanted, even if they were unable to get all they wanted."

5. Since September 11, 2001 those who were the specialists in "spectacular" manipulation know that they are vulnerable. Their enemy learned how to act on this terrain, and are much more efficient (in a nasty way) than anyone ever thought possible; 9/11 is proof of this. The reaction of the US administration was mainly military (wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, threats against Iran, Syria, North Korea...). How will they react if the "enemy", Islamic revolutionaries, continue to act in this direction? Will they follow this path?

Given the history of the US, it's a fair bet that a second attentat would produce once again a very violent response from the American state, and would be supported by the significant jingoist element of the population. We venture two predictions - first, that in any further military adventures abroad the casualties will as usual be overwhelmingly non-combatants, and second, that on the domestic front, in the heimat, there will be further assaults on civic freedoms - on privacy of correspondence, habeas corpus, the right to assemble, the right to the city, and so on. Of course, these have always been regularly and significantly breached, which will hardly be news, for example, to those Americans routinely stopped for "driving while black." As to future state policy, whatever the degrees of belligerence within the ruling clique, the crucial point is that the empire's strategic apparatus is "always teetering in the direction of military intervention", no matter what the Obama administration pronounces about "smart power diplomacy" as their chief weapon.

6. One chapter of your book deals with the emergence of Islamic revolutionary terrorism, people who learnt how to use the technics of modernity and the power of images. Of course, you reject en bloc their methods. But at the same time you seem to say that they are the only ones who were able to really destabilize American imperialism and the figure of capitalism. Do you think that western opposition to the "way the things are" should be inspired by some of the analysis of the Revolutionary Islam?

No assassin, no propagandist of the deed, ever matched the impact of the aviators who struck the World Trade Center in 2001, though whether the consequences would be seriously destabilizing for the hegemon or might lead to real strategic failure, well, we were from the outset skeptical. Certainly, the event signaled the arrival in the heartland of global capital of a new model vanguard, managing a kind of détournement of the apparatus of modernity. Remember that the planes which Atta and his crews refunctioned as missile-bombers actually originated as weapons of mass destruction. The Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned them for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 1960s. Atta himself was an urban planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) disgusted with the disneyfication he saw coming in the wake of the failure of secular national development in Egypt and the Third World. He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal globalization, megaslums another. At the same time it is necessary to acknowledge al-Qaida's love affair with image-politics. Even in its rejection of the West, the Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the virtual and of the new technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the current moment's mixture of atavism and new-fangledness that those in opposition to both Empire and Jihad, which we regard as two virulent mutations of the Right, must take very seriously. Absolutely seriously, not because of the mayhem that follows in their train, or not only that, but because the revolutionary vanguard of Terror speaks like nothing else to the truth of modernity, in ways that no idiom of Reason dares to. That is why we say that it is at the level of modernity itself that a strategic Left critique must be framed. Tactically of course we need an anti-capitalist programme that links commoners of the north and south, that campaigns to shut down the imperial base-world, and that blocks fresh rounds of enclosure and primary accumulation.

7. I know that some chapters of the original book are not present in the French edition. What were they dealing with?

Afflicted Powers has two chapters not included in the French translation. A chapter entitled "Permanent War" argues for the centrality of militarism to any analysis of the contemporary world picture and the role of the US. We review the historical record of the relentless belligerence of the US state, in order to skewer claims about the purported difference between a state in the hands of a "war party" as opposed to a "party of peace" and diplomacy. It is followed by a chapter entitled "The Future of an Illusion" which tackles the relationship between the US state and the state of Israel, and attempts to break the almost total silence about its genealogy and dynamics, and the role of that relationship in the current imperial moment. We argue that Israel is not only a "failed state" in IMF terms, and certainly no longer a strategic asset, but even as a mirage/mirror in the desert it is now a failure, indeed a serious liability for the managers of empire. At the level of spectacle it has turned disastrous; images of orange groves and "making the desert bloom" have been replaced by the bulldozing of olive groves, and now by scenes of the wholesale slaughter of innocents in Gaza, who this time did not even have the miserable option of becoming refugees.

We are delighted that Les Prairies Ordinaires have published the book in France, and we understand the demands of format requiring certain excisions. Even so, the argument of Afflicted Powers is precisely about the new complex conditions in which brute imperial interests and geopolitical struggles have collided with fresh developments in the machinery, production and management of the image-world. By omitting two chapters our case (for francophone readers) is in important respects left incomplete.

8. What about Americans intellectuals? Except for Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky, are there other "voices" who play a large role in opposition?

The figure of the oppositional public intellectual in America more or less disappeared during the anti-communist witch hunts of the Cold War, partly through the destruction of careers, partly through the choking off of access to the fourth estate. Chomsky's essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", printed as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, made him notorious as a critic of the Vietnam war but by the time it was published in 1967 Chomsky was safely tenured at MIT thanks to his path-breaking work in mathematical linguistics, funded by the US Navy and the Army Signal Corps. The burst of antinomian energy that flared here in the Bay Area in the 1960s, captured in the voices of Huey Newton and Mario Savio who articulated the demands of the Black Panthers and the Free Speech Movement, was soon snuffed out or suppressed. The handful welcomed into the new model multi-cultural academy were beneficiaries of those struggles, but black radical voices like Angela Davis, Adolph Reed, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore are occluded from the mainstream media. The underground presses of the counterculture were either closed or normalized by the mid-1970s. Public discourse since then has been dominated by the agenda of conservative and neoliberal think-tanks, established in direct response to the events of the late sixties. The reaction set in and Chomsky, for example, found himself excluded from the pages of the New York Review of Books. Likewise his fellow anarchist Howard Zinn, who taught at Boston University across the river from MIT. Although hugely popular with young students who flocked to his lectures on civil liberties, Zinn was perennially harried and humiliated by the university administration in an effort to oust him. Zinn gained national recognition very late, following the extraordinary success of his textbook A People's History of the United States, which continues to sell 100,000 copies a year. Ironically, the marginalization of critical voices in America means that the ongoing collapse in circulation of major newspapers and magazines is not having the consequences it would have, say, in India.

Much more serious for the voices of opposition is the implosion of independent bookshops and the network of spaces for reading, gathering and discussion. Enthusiasts of the virtual life are apparently so fixated on their screens or perhaps their heads are stuck so far up the blogosphere that they have not noticed the hollowing out of city neighborhoods or what remains of public space. In the circumstances, therefore, it is hardly surprising that critical voices are to be found circulating mainly on the internet. A few break out of the ghetto; Mike Davis and Naomi Klein come to mind because they combine trenchant analysis with serious research. They command attention because investigative journalism is more or less dead. Below the threshold of a certain kind of public notoriety, there is a much longer list - it would be invidious to pluck out a few names - of those whose thought and work is helping reclaim the past and forge tools to clarify and theorize the current situation. And of course there may be some writings whose instrumentality, whose time as a weapon, lies a little in the future. A goodly representation of such "other voices" can be heard by going to the online archive of "Against the Grain" [<www.againstthegrain.org>], a program of broad-ranging and deeply researched interviews aired on Pacifica Radio, the only independent broadcasting network in the US. Pacifica has struggled since its founding in 1946 to survive in a hostile political environment; now publishing in general is on the rocks, so we are greatly indebted to the courageous and tireless efforts of small outfits like Autonomedia in New York and AK and PM Press in the Bay Area to continue providing a platform for radical voices.

9. You seem to have been really impressed by the manifestations against the Iraq war of February and March 2003, not only in the United States but all over the world. For you, there was at that moment a "multitude" which began to stand up against American military neoliberalism. Six years later, is this "multitude" still growing? Are you still optimistic?

We were never optimistic. We did, however, want to insist that at a moment that is normally the state's finest hour - the hour of mobilizing for war when it whips up an attack-dog unanimity compounded of fear, aggressivity and xenophobia - millions of people simply refused to believe what the warlords were telling them and attempted to stop a war before it had begun. Unsuccessfully, of course; the anti-war movement, as we argue in Afflicted Powers, quickly ran aground, firstly because the ubiquitous slogan "No blood for oil" covered real confusion about the relation of the US to the political economy of global oil - a complex business, to be sure. And secondly, because marching and organizing under the banner of "peace" is predicated on a misunderstanding of the dynamics of militarism and modernity. Nearly a century ago, Randolph Bourne foresaw the ominous fact that with a standing army, an income tax, and an industrialized warfare sector, the state needs only a Gramscian tacit consent or obliviousness from its population. Peace as an oppositional frame is bound to end in demoralization and bewilderment, if only because the reality is that under current conditions peace is war by other means. The peace of the "peace process" and "pacification". The peace of cemeteries, of the kind they are digging today in Gaza.

As for "multitude", we do not subscribe to the lately popular view proposed by a post-Leninist Franciscan tendency that, just as the steam engine of the Victorian factory produces a self-conscious proletariat, so the networked computer produces a neo-Spinozan multitude that will be the gravedigger this time. This millennial phantasy is the flipside of the breathless cyberhype generated in the PR mills of silicon capitalism for the consumption of Wall Street. Still, it is true that out of the shambles of failed states, IMF shock therapies, and neoliberalism's new round of global enclosures, a non-vanguardist movement of movements is slowly coming into being. The sites and modes of resistance are - have to be - as motley and protean as the sites and modes of the new enclosures. The time of nostalgia for the factory gate, for fetishizing the point of production, is long gone. The urgent and necessary task is to connect the struggles at all points, north and south, in the circuits of capital - at the points of production, reproduction, consumption, and expropriation. That means, for example, perceiving and then articulating the interests linking the landless commoners of the Movimento Sem Terra in South America, the Norwegian biologists trying to insert genes not into other lifeforms but into their ecological context at different scales, and the open source movement here in the Bay Area challenging the very category of "intellectual property" as the form of enclosure driving GM agribusiness and the biofuels fiasco. Quite apart from the practical problems facing horizontalist, transnational networks like the G8 resistance or the World Social Forum, there is hard theoretical work to be done. At the conceptual level, if the commodity form has its metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, what we are calling "common form" also has its philosophical conundrums, which urgently demand our attention. We need to listen to the planet's surviving commoners, and to enlist the help of anthropologists and historians of commoning, usufruct and coincident use-rights.

10. In the foreword to the French edition, you assert that the concept of Europe thought of as a pole of opposition to the American hegemon, is a delusion. For you, Europe is more or less aligned with US power and with military neoliberalism. Since the election of Sarkozy, France seems to be more and more attracted by "Atlanticism" and alignment with the US. Is this a confirmation of your point of view? Is the whole of Europe a tool of American strategy?

Not merely "delusion" but serving a role within the spectacle of false opposition. This spectacular imagery permits those within Europe, who might otherwise be forced to admit - and some, perhaps, confront - their states' willing complicity with U.S. military neoliberalism and full participation in the wider neoliberal project within Europe itself, to pretend that such deep and unwavering collusion does not exist. This is not to argue that Europe is a "tool of American strategy" but instead that European states are full partners with the U.S. in capital's global - sometimes military, sometimes not - strategies. Sarkozy's "Atlanticism" - this, of course, was Blair's term, too - is just another painted wooden figure on the carousel of European self-representation. Schroeder and Merkel, Chirac and Sarkozy, Blair and Brown, Berlusconi and Prodi, Simitis and Karamanlis: regardless of which one rides the painted horse, the carousel goes nowhere. Not one of these European states has engaged in any meaningful opposition to American militarism while each has relentlessly pushed forward its own - and the EU's - internal neoliberalization. It remains the work of people in the streets to provide actual resistance to both militarism and internal neoliberalization, as the insurrectionists in Greece have recently shown - not only by their willingness to battle in the streets but also by their specifically targeted actions, including ongoing protection of migrants and the blockading at the port of Astakos of U.S. arms bound for Israel.

11. There is something in your book that is quite unusual in political writing: like the situationists, who seem to exercise a great influence on your analysis, you use the power of poetry to express your ideas - no doubt the recurrent citation of Milton in the book is an illustration of this. In general, the theorical background of your work is quite extensive. From Marx to Guy Debord, Burke to Polanyi or Milton, you seem to refuse to structure your work in any one way. Is it something that you intended, this multiplicity of approach and reference? How important is it for you to refer to literature? Is it a way to refuse the boredom of most political books?

Part of the answer obviously lies in the fact that it is a collaborative project, with the wider group in active material support of the four authors, each of whom brought their particular experience and body of knowledge. Of the quartet who sat down to draft and write Afflicted Powers two are historians, and the other two are historically minded. It is no doubt the déformation of the historian to raid the lumber-rooms of the past, but frankly we cannot imagine having embarked on such a project without the assistance of Rosa Luxemburg, Randolph Bourne, or Hannah Arendt. And unless Nietzsche were to hand, a critique of modernity would be far more difficult to frame. Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes were an essential part of the analytic toolkit. Milton, who helped to forge a radical, political idiom in the revolutionary decades of the 17th century, gave us our title, and was an abiding inspiration, not least because his great poem was written in the face of defeat. And of course the indelible line of Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace" speaks to us across the centuries. Much of the work of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the historian of ancient Greece, was concerned with state violence and the assassination of memory, which is central to the spectacle. He was inspired by a line of Chateaubriand which he found transcribed in his father's diary before deportation to Auschwitz: "Nero triumphs in vain, as elsewhere in the empire Tacitus has already been born."

You are right about the boredom induced by political books. Hey, what is not boring? The entertainments of modern life are three parts narcotic, and modernity in general is one vast repetitive stress injury. Nevertheless we seem to be on the threshold of interesting times, and there is reason to listen up. It is, we argued, a moment for fresh concepts as well as the ruthless reworking of old concepts in the light of the new and nightmarish terrain. Look out for some fresh decoctions and ferments from our laboratories in the Bay Area. Without being optimistic, we are heartened by signs everywhere of people beginning to reassemble their afflicted powers, and - who know - confederating to offend the enemy.

NY TIMES STORY - CIA JFK

The New York Times, on October 17, published a page-one story by Scott Shane about the CIA.s defiance of a court order to release documents pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination, in its so-called Joannides file. George Joannides was the CIA case officer for a Cuban exile group that made headlines in 1963 by its public engagements with Lee Harvey Oswald, just a few weeks before Oswald allegedly killed Kennedy. For over six years a former Washington Post reporter, Jefferson Morley, has been suing the CIA for the release of these documents. [1]

Sometimes the way that a news item is reported can be more newsworthy than the item itself. A notorious example was the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (documents far too detailed for most people to read) on the front page of the New York Times.

The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed, perhaps for the first time in any major U.S. newspaper, that the CIA has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK assassination.

On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The C.I.A. hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in C.I.A. support during 1963.

In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group.s goal of ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.

That the October 17 story was published at all is astonishing. According to Lexis Nexis, there have only been two earlier references to the CIA Joannides documents controversy in any major U.S. newspaper: a brief squib in the New York Daily News in 2003 announcing the launching of the case, and a letter to the New York Times in 2007 (of which the lead author was Jeff Morley) complaining about the Times. rave review of a book claiming that Oswald was a lone assassin.

(The review had said inter alia that .''Conspiracy theorists'' should be ''ridiculed, even shunned... marginalized the way we've marginalized smokers.'' The letter pointed out in response that those suspecting conspiracy included Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover.)

The New York Times has systematically regulated the release of any facts about the Kennedy assassination, ever since November 25, 1963, when it first declared Oswald, the day after his death, to have been the .assassin. of JFK. A notorious example was the deletion, between the early and the final edition of a Times issue, of a paragraph in a review of a book about the JFK assassination, making the obvious point that .MYSTERIES PERSIST.. [2]

Apparently there was similar jockeying over the positioning of the Scott Shane story. In some east coast editions it ran on page eleven, with a trivializing introductory squib, "Food for Conspiracy Theorists." In the California edition, headlined .C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery,. it was on page one above the fold.

One can assume that the Times decision to run the story was a momentous one not made casually. The same can probably be said of another recent remarkable editorial decision, to publish Tom Friedman.s op-ed on September 29 about the .very dangerous. climate now in America, .the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination..

Friedman did not mention JFK at all, and his most specific reference was to a recent poll on Facebook asking respondents, .Should Obama be killed?. [3] Four days later the Wall Street Journal expressed similar concern, adding to the .poll on Facebook asking whether the president should be assassinated, a column on a conservative Web site suggesting a military coup is in the works.. [4]

Friedman.s column broke a code of silence about the threats to Obama that had been in place ever since two redneck white supremacists (Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell) were arrested in August 2008 for a plot to assassinate Obama with scoped bolt-action rifles. Andrew Gumbel.s story about them ran in the London Independent on November 16, 2008; of the fifteen related news stories in Lexis Nexis, only one, a brief one, is from a U.S. paper.

It is possible to take at face value the concern expressed by Friedman in his column. The Boston Globe, a New York Times affiliate, reported on October 18 that .The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service.. [5]

But there may have been a higher level of concern in the normally pro-war Wall Street Journal.s reference to a military coup. Such talk on a conservative web site is hardly newsworthy. More alarming is the report by Robert Dreyfuss in the October 29 Rolling Stone that Obama is currently facing an ultimatum from the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs: either provide General McChrystal with the 40,000 additional troops he has publicly demanded, or .face a full-scale mutiny by his generals...The president, it seems, is battling two insurgencies: one in Afghanistan and one cooked up by his own generals.. [6]

One can only guess at what led the New York Times to publish a story about CIA obstinacy over documents about the JFK assassination. One explanation would be the similarities between the painful choices that Obama now faces in Afghanistan . to escalate, maintain a losing status quo, or begin to withdraw . and the same equally painful choices that Kennedy in 1963 faced in Vietnam. [7] More and more books in recent years have asked if some disgruntled hawks in the CIA and Pentagon did not participate in the assassination which led to a wider Vietnam War. [8]

Six weeks before Kennedy.s murder, the Washington News published an extraordinary attack on the CIA.s .bureaucratic arrogance. and

obstinate disregard of orders... .If the United States ever experiences a `Seven Days in May. it will come from the CIA.... one U.S. official commented caustically. (.Seven Days in May. is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.) [9]

The story was actually a misleading one, but it was a symptom of the high-level rifts and infighting that were becoming explosive over Vietnam inside the Kennedy administration. The New York Times story about the CIA on October 17 can also be seen as a symptom of rifts and infighting. One must hope that the country has matured enough since 1963 to avoid a similarly bloody denouement.

The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott