More Reasons Not to Join the Military

Here's what Charley Reese has to say. Keep in mind that he is a southern conservative:

Epitaph For The War Dead

A long time ago, Ezra Pound wrote an epitaph for the war dead of the 20th century, and now it applies equally well to the war dead of the 21st.

They "walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy, usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. ... There died a myriad, and of the best, among them, for an old bitch gone in the teeth, for a botched civilization."

That's what all the young men and now women are dying for - lies and a botched civilization. They are not dying for freedom or to defend their homes and loved ones. They are dying so corporations can make big profits, so evil old men who presume to re-arrange the world to suit their notions can test their theories. They are dying for money, oil and ego, and none of it is worth the life of single boy or girl.

Ernest Hemingway said it best when he said, "War itself is a crime against humanity." The people who deserve to be tried as war criminals are the politicians on both sides who start the wars. To think of the millions of young people, all the joys of life still ahead of them, who have died for scabrous ideologies, political stupidity and the greed of people far from the sound of the guns should turn everyone into an isolationist.

But lies are powerful, and people are easy to manipulate. One of the Nazis said all you have to do is have an enemy at the gate and then suggest that anyone who opposes you is unpatriotic. That is precisely the game plan the Bush administration has employed.

What's actually unpatriotic is to support wars started by crooks and liars for reasons they hide from the public. What's unpatriotic is for old men who won't be within 7,000 miles of the sight of blood to be cheerleaders for the war du jour. What's unpatriotic is for the press to act as a conduit for propaganda rather than independently developing information the people need to know.

It's painful to acknowledge that these young people, so idealistic, were and are being lied to so that they die not for their ideals, but for the sordid schemes of lying politicians, corporations and special-interest groups. No wonder the Bush administration doesn't want photographs of the coffins and tries to blame the press for bad news even though, God knows, the American media rub every story with Clorox and censor the photographs like they were some Puritan in pursuit of sin. No wonder the Bush administration has a murderous hatred for Al-Jazeera, the Arab television station that shows the reality of the war with all its stink, filth and blood.

American society today is a house of lies. People are continuously being lied to for commercial, political and ideological reasons. They are lied to about the environment, the war, foreign policy, the economy, agriculture and public health. You name it, and the Establishment has a set of lies all ready to dupe the public into supporting its selfish aims.

I advise every parent to actively discourage his or her children from joining the military until we have cleaned up the political mess in Washington. Idealistic young men and women should not be sent to do the work of mercenaries.

For the kind of murder Mr. Bush wants to commit, he should form an American version of the French Foreign Legion and pay the market price for mercenaries. There are enough heartless psychopaths in the world to do that kind of work without killing, maiming and scarring the souls of America's best young people.

If you want to support the troops, put pressure on the spineless, lying politicians to bring them home. Don't worry about Iraq going to hell. It's already there.

What if they had a war and no one showed up? Maybe stuff like the following wouldn't happen so much:

Message from a Vet of My Lai Time
"Our Descent Into Hell Has Begun"

May 4, 2006
By Tony Swindell

A few weeks ago we got a friendly letter from Tony Swindell, a newspaper editor in Sherman, Texas. "Begin paying attention," Swindell urged, ''to stories from Iraq like the very recent one about U.S. Marines killing a group of civilians near Baghdad. This is the next step in the Iraq war as frustration among our soldiers grows -- especially with multiple tours.

''I served with the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, and My Lai was not an isolated incident. We came to be known as the Butcher's Brigade, and we also were the birthplace of the Phoenix Program. The brigade commander and a battalion commander were charged with murdering civilians (shooting them from helicopters, recorded in some of my photos), although both skated. If you recall from his autobiography, Colin Powell served briefly with the 11th in Duc Pho before going to division HQ in Chu Lai.

''The atrocities against Iraqi civilians are slipping under the media radar screen, but they're going to explode in America's face not too long from now and dwarf the Abu Ghraib (sic) incident. That was a fraternity beer bust by comparison. The Ft. Sill episode [described in JoAnn Wypijewski's piece in our last issue] is another one of the same storm clouds on the horizon. I sincerely fear for our country.''

We asked Swindell to expand these thoughts. Here's his powerful response. AC/JSC
In Iraq, our descent into hell, our "Apocalypse Now" moment, has begun. First there was Gitmo, then the global rendition program, then Abu Ghraib, then the pulverizing of Fallujah, and now trigger-happy raids that are filling multitudes of sandy graves with men, women and children. Has "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" become the mission in Babylon? Can't anyone remember Vietnam, where we left behind more than a million dead civilians? In Iraq, we've way past the half-million mark, probably the million mark, if you count the 1990s sanctions. Are the American people as blind and deaf as they seem? Don't we see ourselves walking through the gates of hell and can't we hear the doors clanging shut on our country?

Who am I to say all this, you might ask. Fair enough, I reply. So let me tell you a story about monstrous crimes and tragedies from my generation about to be repeated in Iraq in front of the whole world. First, understand that a single soldier can't be expected to grasp the total criminality of war because his whole universe is a tiny place right in front of his nose. So he can stay alive. If he knew everything that was going on, he would be heartbroken, and if he also knew why, he would go insane.

The narrowness of his vision is exactly how even the best and most humane soldier unwillingly becomes a monster, and the people who create war know this. Out of grief and rage, with the stench of his buddy's shredded flesh in his nostrils, the soldier stops asking questions and then begins making up his own rules with a rifle. He has touched the heart of darkness and there's no going back ever. Embracing the whore called war destroys morality, and doing all this in a dishonorable cause compounds the damage.

That's why we who have been there must speak out forcefully. If it requires a stiff punch in the mouth to jump-start some addled neocon brains, so be it. And for anyone who gets their political truth from self-inflating whoopee cushions like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, it will come none too soon. To remain silent this time risks the loss of everything that our country stands for.

The story I want to tell you begins on a miserably hot day in February, 1969, as I watched U.S. Army Col. John W. Donaldson put a cup of rice wine mixed with blood to his lips and drink deeply. No matter that the concoction was alive with heartworms, Donaldson never flinched. At the time, I was serving as an army combat correspondent attached to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade and my job that day was to follow Donaldson around, snapping picture after picture of the macabre festivities unfolding in front of my eyes. He was the brigade commander at a bloody punching bag called LZ Bronco next to the village of Duc Pho. The brigade base camp was part of the Americal Division, headquartered to the north in Chu Lai.

The colonel and a large contingent of other brigade and division officers were guests of honor at a Tet festival in the Montagnard village of Ba To in the central highlands southwest of Chu Lai. Nearby was a Special Forces A Team camp, an ominous triangular fortress bristling with 105 mm cannon at each corner firing flechette rounds. A snake couldn't have crawled through the maze of sharp barbed and razor tape wire surrounding the compound, and dozens of claymore mines were set in the walls. A claymore at close range will instantly render you into your constituent molecules.

The Montagnard village and A Team camp had been hit hard by concentrated North Vietnamese forces earlier in the week, and Donaldson's presence was in part a thumb in the eye to enemy commanders licking their wounds in nearby triple canopy jungle. The landscape gave me chills, because the beautiful, green-dappled hills all around the village were pockmarked with hundreds of fresh artillery and bomb craters exposing the bright red soil. I couldn't get the image of the Jolly Green Giant with a bad case of acne out of my mind. While topless Montagnard women spruced up the area with totems and bright banners to cover attack damage, a sacrificial water buffalo calf was slowly being prodded to death with a spear by the local village chief. It took about half an hour before the calf sagged to its knees in exhaustion, at that point too weak to even cry out. The chief then cut the calf's throat above a large earthen jug to catch the pulsing blood while another villager poured rice wine and stirred.

Unknown to the visitors, the Montagnards had earlier tortured to death three North Vietnamese captives and partook of their blood in the company of Special Forces A Team troopers. These unfortunate had been impaled through their anuses with bamboo poles and given the same spear prodding. Later, their bodies were staked out along enemy infiltration trails as a mortal warning to the enemy.

This day became my own personal "Apocalypse Now" moment, a full decade before the Francis Ford Coppola's movie was released. Not long before, we became personally aware that soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, had rampaged in My Lai when military police ransacked our hooch looking for evidence and then hauled Rusty Calley off in handcuffs. Meanwhile, Tiger Teams were creating ruthless, bloody havoc across the Batangan Peninsula against suspected enemy cadre. Brutality against civilians was standard operating procedure. Because of the Pacification Program mass relocations, entire swathes of the countryside began to resemble the Missouri Burnt District during the Civil War.

The Phoenix Program was in full swing, and it was the horror to end all horrors. I had earlier tagged along on a Phoenix mission directed by the ARVN National Police, and will spare you the details. Trust me, you do not want to know what was being done. Standing there and watching Donaldson drink from the cup, the profound symbolism of all that was wrong in this place hit me like a blow in the face. Ironically, an anti-war rag called the Overseas Weekly or Overseas latched onto one of my pictures and captioned it, "Army Brass Drinks Blood In Pagan Ceremonies".

By February 1969, morale in the brigade had hit rock bottom because of horrific casualties caused primarily from booby traps, and an entire battalion had been stood down as non-functional. The North Vietnamese were endlessly blasting our firebases with 122 mm rocket artillery, and LZ Bronco was soon to be hit more than 200 times during a famous assault that came to be called "Duc Pho Burning". Mutinies, insubordination and fragging of officers became commonplace. Soldiers cracked and a few committed suicide. One grunt over the edge opened fire into the POW compound, killing a number of captured enemy. Col. Donaldson and a battalion commander, two of the highest-ranking officers in the brigade, were charged with murdering civilians from helicopters while the My Lai investigation was still underway. A young Major Colin Powell assigned to the 11th Brigade ­ who was well acquainted with Donaldson ­ wrote in his autobiography about being stunned by what he saw going on in the 11th. Perhaps, he had experienced his own "Apocalypse Now" moment.

There's a numbness in my guts as I see the same nightmares becoming reality again in Iraq, and I wonder what's happened to America's soul. Is this what we want, another generation suckled on the poison of another renegade leadership? Gooks have become ragheads, every adult male is an insurgent eligible for torture, and every Iraqi home filled with men, women and children is a free-fire zone. Even places of worship get flattened. Once again, we've been marched into another lunatic asylum in the Twilight Zone.

How did it happen? Why did we sit on our hands and let our leaders initiate an unprovoked proxy war? A mushroom cloud over Cleveland delivered by a pipsqueak Iraq that couldn't even get an airplane in the air or a dilapidated tank outside its own borders without throwing a track? Gimme a break. How could the average John Doe let himself be deceived into believing that Saddam Hussein was really a threat?

With Iran now in the crosshairs, I pray that our national amnesia is wearing off. I know that from coast to coast a growing number of people ­ especially many combat veterans like myself ­ feel helpless, confused, frightened, and completely out of the loop. Three years into Iraq, why do we still keep hearing the same refrain, pre-emptive war into the next generation? On and on and on it goes, but unfortunately our emperors in Washington treat middle Americans asking hard questions like bill collectors at a funeral or, publicly skewer them as extremists and traitors. And don't even think about asking about Israeli involvement in the disaster that Dubya calls a Middle Eastern policy.

I listen in vain to hear the voices of young Americans who will be directly and immediately affected. Current events in the Middle East should be a paramount issue, but, inexplicably, the kids are completely nonchalant. Raised on the Internet and X-Boxes, maybe Iraq is just another Hollywood-style media production to them. But, I'm going to make a prediction. Our salvation will come when Selective Service notices begin arriving in mailboxes, and make no mistake, they are coming. I predict that young voices will soon become the loudest against empire as the hip-hoppers, the teeny boppers and the slackers rudely discover that involuntary combat means no video games or boom boxes, no marathon beer busts, and certainly no teenaged girls in thong bikinis.

We in the older generation can help things along. First, turn off the televisions and study a little American history, like the parts repeatedly warning us about foreign entanglements and passionate attachments. Really think about what kind of America we're handing to our children. Organize geezer squads to buttonhole politicians, and enlist a slacker cavalry to rain e-mail on every bureaucrat in sight. Let them all know we don't care about the new world order and its Manifest Corporate Destiny. Tell Washington that unprovoked, pre-emptive wars go against the grain of everything that's American, and we're no longer going to give it the Good Homicidal Seal of Approval.

While we're at it, let's make a sincere effort to tell elected representatives, loud and clear at every opportunity, that we want our government back from the political and corporate lobbies. Give the entire bureaucratic structure the message that we want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on anything that affects our lives fast, before another bullet is fired or bomb dropped in anger. The U.S. State Department especially needs this message drummed into their heads until they all have tinnitus.

Don't leave out the Billy Grahams, Jerry Falwells, and Pat Robertsons, (comma) and their legions of religious robots. Ask these Bible thumpers a simple question: brother, who would GEE-zus bomb, torture, rape and murder? While they choke on their own hypocrisy, direct them to the Book of John in the New Testament for a theology refresher. Christ wasn't called the Prince of Peace for nothing.

Constantly remind anyone who'll listen to you that the American Revolution blossomed with a ferocious commitment to keep a new continent free from two thousand years of empires, monarchies, feudal dictatorships, and armed religious institutions held in power by brute force and the doctrine of might makes right. People like Washington, Jefferson and Franklin instead shouted no, RIGHT makes might. That timeless concept was an invincible weapon against King George's Redcoats and it is just as powerful against nuclear weapons and carrier battle groups.
Yes, it will take guts, but what's our alternative? Either we start living up to our own ideals or the world will very soon compel us to do it. If, that is, they even think we're worth saving...

The usually calm Juan Cole has this to say about the Neocons and the next war planned in Iran:

Americans are not fighting any more wars in the Middle East against toothless third rate powers. So sit down and shut up.

One, two, three, four! We don't want your stinking war!

We are not going to see any more US troops come home in body bags at Dover for the sake of some Cheney affiliate grabbing the petroleum in Iran's Ahvaz fields.

We are not going to have another 15,000 wounded vets flood onto our streets with spine damage and brain damage.

We are not going to put Yazd behind barbed wire to liberate it, as a millenarian Christian general did to Habbaniyah in Iraq.

We are not going to imprison and torture thousands of Iranians at Evin Penitentiary in Tehran, as worthy successors to the bloodthirsty Shah and Khomeini.

We are not going to kill 200,000 Iranians with aerial bombardments of Tabriz, Isfahan, Qom, Kerman, Shiraz and Mashahd.

We are not going to let dozens of US corporations loot the American people and the Iranian people alike with no-bid "contracts", embezzlement, corruption, and graft.

We are not going to let you have a war against Iran.

So sit down and shut up, American Enterprise Institute, and Hudson Institute, and Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and American Heritage Institute, and this institute and that institute, and cable "news", and government "spokesmen", and all the pundit-ferrets you pay millions to make business for the American military-industrial complex and Big Oil.

We don't give a rat's ass what Ahmadinejad thinks about European history or what pissant speech the little shit gives.

I call on university students across America to begin holding antiwar rallies. The only way you can have a war on Iran is to draft the young people. It is you who are on the line. Demonstrate! Demonstrate against the very hint of war! Demonstrate in front of the warmongering "institutes" in Washington, DC! Demonstrate to end the one we've already got! (See Speaker's Forum on IraqHere is what the real Iran experts think about the prospect of an Iran war.)

Because Hitchens's dirty tricks and lies against me are only the beginning. Whoever stands against the Perpetual War machine will be attacked, slimed, marginalized, and destroyed if the warmongers get their way. I don't care. Thus far and no farther.

One, two, three, four. We don't want your stinking war!

Evidence Clean-Up on the Bush Link to the Kennedy Assassination?

Wayne Madsen today claims that the reason the FBI searched the papers of the late investigative reporter, Jack Anderson, was not to find what he had on the AIPAC spy case but rather evidence Anderson had linking George H.W. Bush to the John Kennedy assassination.

According to individuals close to the FBI fishing expedition, the actual documents the FBI wanted to seize were files Anderson collected in the 1960s that linked George H. W. Bush's activities in Texas in 1963 to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 of that year. Bush was a friend of George DeMohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald's Belarusian-born contact officer. DeMohrenschildt befriended Oswald and arranged for him to settle in Dallas after leaving the Soviet Union. DeMohrenshildt "committed suicide" shortly before he was due to testify before the 1978 House Assassinations Committee. The elder Bush's name, address, and phone number in Midland, Texas was found in DeMohrenshildt's address book under the heading "Poppy."

In addition, the FBI wanted to remove from future public circulation Anderson documents that point to George H. W. Bush conspiring with the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran to keep U.S. hostages imprisoned in Iran until after the 1980 presidential election and avoid an "October Surprise" for Carter. The agreement between the Iranians and Bush (who was working with William Casey) sank the chances for Jimmy Carter's re-election and George H. W. Bush's entry into the White House as Vice President. The hostages were released at the very time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1981. That operation would lay the ground for future Bush-Tehran collusion in the Iran-Contra scandal. Another set of files involve the links between the Bush family and that of Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin John W. Hinckley. Had Hinckley succeeded in killing Reagan, the Bush political agenda would have commenced in earnest in 1981 rather than 1989.

The Bush family has been known to use retired FBI agents as their political heavies and clean up men in the past -- most notably to erase the Bush links to Dallas. George W. Bush's departing Press Secretary Scott McClellan has a close relative who continued to muddy the waters about the JFK assassination. McClellan's father, Barr McClellan, wrote a book claiming it was Lyndon Johnson, not George H. W. Bush, who conspired to kill the president.

In another post today, Madsen writes that the next couple of weeks will see indictments of Karl Rove and a widening sex/prostitution scandal involving senior Republican leaders and, amazingly enough, the Watergate Hotel.

The cresting wave of major scandals in Washington. At week's end, there is every indication that the Bush White House is bracing for additional scandals. A sex scandal involving the rented suites at the Watergate Hotel (the GOP just can't stay away from that place), female and male prostitutes and male GOP members of Congress and top CIA officials, including Director Porter Goss, and GOP-connected contractors is simmering but is expected to blow wide open in the next few weeks. Goss's warnings about ex-CIA officers speaking to the media have more to do with curtailing information about the growing sex and bribery scandal than in tracking down leaks about pre-Iraq war intelligence. Also, George W. Bush's top assistant Karl Rove appears to be facing at least two criminal charges that could be brought by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the next few weeks.

Funny that Jeff Rense’s site pushes the LBJ-Kennedy link and deflects away from the Bush family link. Is Jeff Rense COINTELPRO?

Is the 911 Truth Movement Being Undermined from Within?

Laura Knight-Jadczyk posted an important essay this week on the undermining of the 911 truth movement. It’s long but well worth the time to read. She describes the “ponerization” process, using a term from Lobaczewski’s just published Political Ponerology, probably the most important book in social psychology of the last hundred years. Ponerization refers to the process whereby social, political and religious movements are gradually taken over by psychopathic opportunists who make use for their own purposes of the idealistic capital accumulated in the early days of such groups.

Looks like it is happening now with 911 Truth. The good news is there are easy ways to counter ponerization if you know how it works. As a very astute poster on the Signs of the Times Forum put it:

What matters here, however, is that Ponerization for once is not allowed to proceed unaddressed or without a precedence in prior knowledge. Ponerization is an obvious transition state of an ideal from truth affirming self-organization to Pathocratic entropy. And it is also an opportunity, because until it completes its intended purpose the poneric transition is still a transition, and hence an unstable state, with the potential for greater self-organization if enough energy and the right kind of energy is adequately pumped into the system during its unstable period. Usually ponerization occurs so smoothly that it is practically imperceptable to normal people.

It goes smoothly when it is allowed to do so and when it is left unobserved and unaddressed. This smoothness has generated the illusion that ponerization is a powerful process. The thing is, there was really never any organized and coherent interference with the process in past historic examples to my knowledge, so we really don't know how powerful the process really is. It has never been consistently challenged until it was too late.

And now we have Lobaczewski, a nonagenarian Polish psychologist who survived Nazism and Bolshevism to describe the process for us. His warning to this generation must be heeded.

Drums of Iran War Dying Down?

The drums of war in Iran seemed to have died down a bit in the last few days. Interesting. The visit of Chinese president Hu to the United States (he may be bringing a threat to sink the U.S. economy if the U.S. bombs Iran), the shocking rise of gold and oil and drop in the dollar (a warning from other central banks?), the near mutiny of top military brass may have slowed down the neocons plans. Now, Wayne Madsen reports that a secret delegation from Iran visited Washington:

April 20, 2006 -- According to U.S. government insiders and foreign intelligence sources, a high-level Iranian government delegation arrived in the United States last week for negotiations on Iran's nuclear program and other matters of mutual interest. The delegation included Iranian nuclear program officials and leaders close to President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. The presence of the Iranian delegation was confirmed by the presence in Washington of Mohammed Nahavandian, a senior aide to chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani. The sighting of Nahavandian in Washington was a clear embarrassment for the Bush administration since the Iranian visit has been held in great secrecy amid saber rattling over the Iranian nuclear issue from both the neo-cons in the Bush administration and the hardliners in the Iranian government. Informed sources speculate that the U.S.-Iranian talks may have taken place at the Aspen Institute's Wye River Conference Center on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where access is limited and security is tight. Since Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld maintain residences near the Wye River Center, there is a continued federal security presence in the area. Nahavandian likely entered the United States as secretly as his colleagues until his presence in Washington was noticed. Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani tipped his hand when he revealed that Nahavandian, who is the president of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce and an Iranian international policy think tank, was in the United States to attend a "conference." On April 12, a large motorcade consisting of federal law enforcement vehicles and a bus with blacked out windows was seen traveling at a high rate of speed on US Route 50 towards the Wye River Center from Washington DC. The Wye River center was the site of October 1998 talks between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Chairman Yassir Arafat.

It could also be that all the war talk was done just to raise oil prices. See Xymphora on this and on the related issue that the Neocons/Israelis and the Iranians go way back (Iran-Contra) and have a lot of common interests, believe it or not.

Can You Connect the Dots?

I came across a few interesting items on the internet this past week.

First this from Seymour Hersh:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

… One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

… “This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said.

… One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.

… The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”
He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

Here is Kurt Nimmo, with a more realistic take on Hersh’s somewhat bloodless article:

It is now obvious the criminal globalist elite plan to use nukes and believe they can contain this once unimaginable usage to the “third world” where “rogue regimes” with or without nukes or weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with in severe fashion—that is to say they must be irradiated and suffer horrible deaths.

“In addition to the immediate effects of blast, air shock, and thermal radiation, shallow nuclear explosions produce especially intense local radioactive fallout,” explains Nelson of FAS. “The fireball breaks through the surface of the earth, carrying into the air large amounts of dirt and debris. This material has been exposed to the intense neutron flux from the nuclear detonation, which adds to the radioactivity from the fission products. The cloud typically consists of a narrow column and a broad base surge of air filled with radioactive dust which expands to a radius of over a mile for a 5 kiloton explosion.”

Imagine such “intense local radioactive fallout” in Tehran, population approximately 12 million.

Obviously, if Bush indeed nukes Iran, as we are now told, we are dealing with a war criminal of Hitlerian proportions. Since it appears Bush and the neocon maniacs will be allowed to proceed and nuke Iran (and other countries on the neocon hit list), we can only hope in the catastrophic wake they will be rounded up and prosecuted. Fat chance of this happening before Bush and crew begin slinging nukes around.

Can anyone stop Bush? TBR (I have no idea how reliable his rumors are) passes on some anonymous leaks from the White House:

The Voice of the White House

March 9, 2006: “Bush's approval polls are tanking. Republicans are terrified lest, as they now believe, they will lose both the House and Senate in November. (Really major felonious activities would certainly be revealed by Democrats in control of either, or both, houses.)

There certainly have been prepared, at the Pentagon, plans to attack Iran. They were only plans for possible future actions. There are also current plans, on file, to attack Lebanon, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba (again!), and Mexico. Not to forget Dubai and Saudi Arabia in the event that Muslim fundamentalists gain power in those states. These plans are kept in the Big Safe over at the Pentagon in the event they are needed.

Now, the evil Karl Rove, terrified that he might be indicted and have to go to jail … has been pushing Bush to make a new war. Rove points out, one learns here from those who have read reams of notes and memos, that these slimy shits believe that Bush can regain his lost popularity in a wave of wonderful American patriotism, the military will be enhanced by a public-demanded general draft, we can at once, (when the new military is in place), invade the evil leftist Chavez (and guarantee his oil production for the United States and not the PRC) and put an end to the Castro government, not to mention all kinds of things designed to flatter the idiot Bush who does not want to seem weak (he is) or a failure (which he certainly is.)

Believe me, Bush wants to do this and Karl, with his connivance, has "leaked" this to a number of “friendly” media people.

…A personal friend in the Pentagon (War Plans Division) tells me that we simply cannot maintain any further military activities in that region. Bottomed-out morale, suicides, desertions, self-mutilations to get a discharge and such like would make any more expanded activity a disaster of the first magnitude. Also, a report tells us that many West Pointers, considered to be the elite of the Army’s officer corps, are leaving the service in droves when their enlistment period (5 years) is up. Also, the Pentagon is now taking young men with criminal records who have never gone to high school or who, if they have, have not graduated. This is the real bottom of the barrel, believe me, and we are scraping it even as I speak.

Many senior military personages are beginning to say that Bush should be physically removed from office lest he utterly destroy the United States., and similar sentiments are being expressed in different influential quarters.

Let's hope they are successful!"

Why just hope for “senior military personages” to come to our rescue. How many countries have really been rescued by generals? Here is an excerpt from the latest newsletter of the incomparable David McGowan (do read it in full):

…So there you have it, folks: concentration camps, forced labor, martial law, global surveillance, sadistic forms of crowd control, genocidal biological weapons – all this and more is looming in the not-too-distant future. And our trusty servants in Washington will have no trouble finding some handy justification for fully activating and expanding these programs. A seemingly natural disaster, such as an earthquake or hurricane, could serve as the trigger. So too could another ‘terrorist’ attack, and the Homeland Defense report promises us that more are coming: “Terrorists will seek and potentially gain surreptitious entry into the United States to conduct mass casualty attacks against Americans on US soil … Terrorists and/or rogue states will attempt multiple, simultaneous mass casualty attacks against the US homeland.”These triggering events could themselves be triggered by any sudden increase in the anger level of average Americans. Because the truth is, you see, that beneath all the bluster and arrogance, the Washington gang is terrified of you. It’s hard to believe, I know, but it is true nonetheless. Even though you have sit idly by while your beloved Constitution and Bill of Rights have been thoroughly trampled over, the powers-that-be view you as a sleeping giant that, if fully awakened, is capable of laying waste to their cherished plans.Although they have convinced you that you are utterly powerless, they know that that is not the case. They know that they would not be able to contain the seething anger of the masses should it ever fully surface. They know the fury that will be unleashed should the dormant beast awaken to the fact it has been deliberately and systematically lied to. And they fear that some day soon one of their provocations will awaken you.They will never let you see that fear, of course, for to do so would shatter the illusion that they are omnipotent and you are powerless to resist. But the fear is there, lurking just beneath the arrogant façade. In Washington, in the halls of academia, and in the newsrooms of Fox and CNN and ABC and NBC and CBS, the fear is palpable. It can be found in all the institutions of society that are complicit in serving you up your daily portion of lies.Their greatest fear is facing the beast at full strength, for they know that if that day of reckoning ever comes, there will be hell to pay for their transgressions against the American people. And so they try to weaken the beast while it lies dormant – by demoralizing it, and by breaking it up into smaller, more manageable pieces, preferably pieces that can be played against each other. And as long as the American people continue to play along, by allowing Washington to dictate the rules of this game, the beast will remain too weak to fight back against the considerable oppressive powers of the state.The rest of the world has a better understanding of how this game must be played. Turn on your television set and you might catch a glimpse of a few million French citizens taking to the streets to express their anger at their government’s labor policies. Turn to another channel and you might see half-a-million Latino immigrants marching through the streets of Los Angeles to protest proposed immigration reforms. And yet the American people, as a whole, cannot summon the energy to take to the streets even as your sons and daughters are being fed into the meat grinder in Iraq.Make no mistake about it: those images from Paris and Los Angeles scare the shit out of the criminals in Washington, as can be discerned from the tone of the news coverage provided by the Western media. They look at those masses of humanity and begin picturing such scenes in every big city across this nation. And then they imagine public anger becoming so widespread that they begin to lose control of the militarized law enforcement agencies all across the country that they rely upon to keep the masses at bay.So what's it going to be, people? Are you going to continue to sit passively in the bleachers, or are you going to take to the streets in numbers previously unseen on these shores? Are you going to initiate a general strike and shut corporate America down? Are you going to storm the offices of all the major media outlets and let the opinion-shapers know that aiding and abetting the criminals in Washington is itself a crime, and one that has severe consequences?Is it not your responsibility to act to protect your children if they are in danger? And can we not agree that virtually all of the key figures in the media are not merely messengers, as we are to believe, but rather highly-paid propagandists for the State? And can we not also agree that the propaganda being sold poses a direct threat to our children's futures? If a 'common criminal,' so to speak, were posing a direct and very serious threat to your children's safety, would you sit idly by doing nothing?Is it not perfectly obvious that we would not be in our current predicament if we had anything resembling a free and independent press? Washington would still harbor a desire to implement an overtly fascist agenda, to be sure, but without a compliant media machine to obscure the truth and shape public opinion, those plans would remain but a dream. Without a compliant media, we would not be living in a post-911 world, because no 'terrorist' attacks would have occurred on September 11, 2001. Why? Because without a propaganda machine masquerading as a free press, such an audacious and patently fraudulent story could have never been sold to the American people, just as the lie-based wars in Central Asia and the Middle East could have never been marketed.When your children come to you ten or twenty years in the future (and they will – assuming, of course, that they survive that long, given the unfolding plans to wipe out 90% of humanity, likely justified on the basis of the junk science known as 'Peak Oil' theory: http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/feature1p/index.html) to ask why you were asleep at the wheel while the country was evolving into an overtly fascist police state, what will you tell them? That there was nothing you could do? And when they then ask if you were truly powerless or if you just allowed yourself to be convinced that you were, what will you tell them then?

The Pentagon's Homeland Defense report concludes as follows: “The Department of Defense must change its conceptual approach to homeland defense. The Department can no longer think in terms of the ‘home’ game and the ‘away’ game. There is only one game. The Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support is a significant step toward this strategic transformation. Defending the US homeland – our people, property, and freedom – is our most fundamental duty. Failure is not an option.”

As has been demonstrated repeatedly in various foreign adventures, the US Department of Defense has little interest in defending freedom or people. Its primary function is the acquisition and defense of property – property ‘owned’ by US and multinational corporations. In the ‘Homeland’ as elsewhere, the role of the military will be to protect corporate property and corporate profits, at the expense of the rights and the freedoms of the people – and quite likely at the expense of the very lives of the people.

The responsibility of defending the rights and freedoms of the American people falls squarely on your shoulders. Nobody else is going to do it for you. It is your most fundamental duty. And failure is definitely not an option.

Who's Got Their Hands on the Pendulum?

Laura Knight-Jadczyk has posted an essay today that explains a lot of puzzling facts about recent history. She starts with some astute observations about the work of historians, both of ancient and recent history. She then discusses theories of generational historical cycles, criticizing them for not taking into account differences between human beings.

Here’s an example I’ve been thinking over for the past decade or so. People have long noticed generational political swings in U.S. history. Generally the cycles can last about 25 years, long enough for one side, the left wing or right wing, to grow in opposition, take power, implement policies, create their own reactions and problems which in turn generates an increasingly powerful opposition which then takes over, etc. There is also concurrently a kind of cultural exhaustion with the right or left at the transition points of the cycle.

It was completely clear, for example, that in 1980, U.S. liberalism was completely exhausted. The things liberalism did well, they already did, and people longed for right wing policies. You could feel it. Watching this happen at the time, it was clear that although the right-wing policies would be disastrous for the United States if they were ever implemented, there was no way to convince most people of that before the fact; they would just have to experience it. The right-wing ideas seemed fresher, even to those who knew they were bad. Then came Reagan, of course, and the rest was history. By the nineteen nineties, the right wing seemed exhausted and spent. Polls consistently have shown majority support for liberal policies. Yet, due to skillful organization, control of the media, and criminal vote stealing, the grip of the right wing increased at the time it should have been in decline according to the theories of pendulum swings.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us to rethink our views of human nature. Here’s Knight-Jadczyk:

This idea leads to the primary reason for the failure of such systems of analysis: when considering a human population, what is left out of the equation is the fact that, in every society on earth, there is a certain percentage of individuals, that are extremely deviant from the masses of normal people, and this small group is generally very active in ways that can affect hundreds, thousands, even millions of other human beings in negative ways. The analogy of a disease pathogen in a body serves very well to convey the proper perspective.

Deviant personalities, being in a minority and knowing that they are a minority, feel driven to take power over their environment in order to alleviate the stress of this feeling of being abnormal. This drive enables them to easily "rise to the top," and then to interpenetrate the entire social structure with a ramified network of mutual and multiple pathological conspiracies in a way similar to how a disease takes over a body.

…Just as a disease organism seeks its own survival and to propagate, pathologically deviant persons want power over others and they are not inhibited by considerations of conscience or feeling for others. An analogy of this is that the disease pathogen is totally uncaring of the damage it may do to the organ systems it invades. It only wants to survive and propagate. The bacteria or virus has evolved many unique characteristics that enable it to take over a body when that body is weak. Thus, when societies are weakened for any of a number of reasons, deviant personalities are able to utilize their specifically evolved methods and means to achieve that power that normal people with normal morals simply cannot comprehend because it is not part of their reality and all human beings tend to assume that everyone else is like themselves.

And so, networks of pathological deviants rise to power again and again, imposing their distortions on the masses of normal people like a disease until the masses wake up and get rid of the deviants, (bring in the therapies), normalize human relations, and begin to take care of the body of society, thus restoring health.

The problem of deviants coming to power again and again is due to the same factor mentioned above: that human beings tend to believe that others that look like them, talk like them, walk like them, are, in fact, like them even inside. They are not. There are vast differences between human beings. All people are not created equal in ability, though they certainly ought to be equal in terms of opportunity and legal rights.

…It is this problem we are facing today. The United States has been infected for a very long time by a particular species of pathogen that, due to its long-term presence and gradual weakening of the organ systems, has finally generated a cancer that has gone metastatic: George W. Bush and the Neocons.

911, Cointelpro and Cults, Part 3

The saga of the psyops site, Above Top Secret continues. Exposed for what they are, well-connected secret government disinformation and Cointelpro operatives, they have stuck back against Signs of the Times for publishing the results of research on ATS's activities.

They are trying to shut down Signs of the Times using a high-powered intellectual property law firm located near the CIA headquarters to threaten server hosts. The SOTT site has been taken down repeatedly today.

See Laura Knight-Jadczyk's blog for more details.

Charlie Sheen joins the 911 Truth Movement

Charlie Sheen joins the 911 Truth Movement, but the media won't let him. This should be big news, but there appears to be a MSM news blackout on this. Prison Planet published this interview with the famous actor.

This comes on the heels of a long article in New York Magazine on the 911 Truth Movement, which only indulges in a little mockery.

And, unlike a year or two ago, you can find David Ray Griffin's books in your neighborhood Barnes & Noble store.

Not sure what to make of this. If "they" are planning a bombshell disclosure on 911, it's hard to imagine the enormity of what they would be distracting us from. There aren't too many things bigger than the real story of 911.