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© Zahir Ebrahim

April 17, 2010

Seven years later!

Another American President elected on the ‘CHANGE’ ticket.

Yet, predictably, nothing has changed. American military occupation and decimation of Iraq and Afghanistan continues right alongside Israel’s in Palestine. Both Iran and Pakistan are in the gun-sights of invasion and actively being destabilized from within with fabricated “insurgency” to soften up the targets. Pakistan’s own mighty military is waging war upon its peoples at the behest of its foreign masters as “counter-insurgency”, with full support from aerial “drone attacks” being run by the CIA and the Pentagon, and with full-ground assist from empire’s own private mercenary military, the Blackwater/Xe. Global Governance is the open focus. All the global turbulences, both manufactured ones (global war on terror, global financial collapse, global epidemics), as well as fictitious (global warming, others), are being harvested as the pretext to usher in world government. The following, appearing in the Financial Times of December 08, 2008, accurately sums up the real motivation behind the “new pearl harbor” of 911 and the subsequent pursuit of the endless “war on terrorism”:

I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible. A “world government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force. So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might. First, it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a “global war on terror”.’ (Gideon Rachman, And now for a world government, Financial Times, December 8, 2008)

I wrote in my letter to the Financial Times’ editor on December 11 (which obviously wasn’t published, read its full text at http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/12/responseto-ft-gideon-rachman-worldgov.html )

‘And there you have it, right from the mouthpiece of high finance, the shill for the New World Order, the media asset of the intelligence apparatus, testing the water temperature. This time, the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist lets the full caboodle out of the bag, saying exactly what Project Humanbeingsfirst has been warning about: that the most natural solution to global fictions and global manufactured crises will be presented as “world government”. … This instance in the Financial Times editorial is the most egregious testing of the waters because it brings all the manufactured global boogiemen together, and exactly posits their solution-space as “world government”. It brings to full circle implementation these ominous words of G. Edward Griffin from ‘The Capitalist Conspiracy’: “Create conditions so frightful at home and abroad, that the abandonment of personal liberties and national sovereignty, will appear as a reasonable price for a return to domestic tranquility and world peace.”’

Creating the pretext for world government was the prime-mover agenda behind Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard. In 2003 when I wrote this book, I had taken Brzezinski at face value that American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives was the core agenda of the hectoring hegemons – from PNAC to Pentagon. The empirical facts on the ground over the past several years through the successive wars and financial crises conclusively betray that the mantra of American Primacy was only a most diabolical pretext. Empirically observing, what kind of asinine American Primacy is it that’s making America as a nation go progressively broke and into trillions of dollars in debt which no one can justifiably explain; its national sovereignty eroded piece by piece into the clutches of supranational organizations like the UN; and it becoming the most hated and reviled Christian nation on earth? And this was done to America entirely by Zionist-Jewish masterminds running America’s top think-tanks and foundations, like the CFR and the AEI. George W. Bush, by his own admission on the eve of launching his invasion of Iraq in search of its fictitious WMDs, stated of the latter: “Some of the finest minds of our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed twenty such minds. I want to thank them for their service.” (speaking at the AEI on February 26, 2003). President Obama has pretty much drawn from the same sacred cesspool of Zionist-Jewish misanthropes to run his Administration and the White House.

No, most assuredly, American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives is not the real purpose of all this global mayhem. It was only a mantra like “Islamic Fundamentalism”. It is the primacy of the financial oligarchs! The globalists who own America and Europe primarily through interlocking controls of its private central banks, are using the unchallenged sole superpower’s muscles as a battering ram to finally cement their own long conspired agenda for world government. That’s the real prime-mover force behind the fabricated “war on terrorism” in order to globally seed and fabricate the requisite “revolutionary times” from which other crises could follow. In the American context, to overspend its resources into crises, to eventually collapsing it into a regional supranational state, the North American Union, just like the European Union, as the baby step towards One-world government. That could not so easily be accomplished for a fervently nationalistic and well endowed peoples like the American masses, what with all their Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, their massive industrial capacity, their lucrative job markets across many sectors. Unless of course, the proposal was presented to them at the barrel of the domestic gun in a state of helplessness in an offer which they could not refuse. Namely, the North American supranational Union being the only viable solution for containing and overcoming the many manufactured international and domestic crises that America finds itself mired in. The modus operandi had clearly been outlined by the CFR as far back as 1974 in The Hard Road to World Order:

In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault. Of course, for political as well as administrative reasons, some of these specialized arrangements should be brought into an appropriate relationship with the central institutions of the U.N. system, but the main thing is that the essential functions be performed.

The diabolical play of the globalists on the grand chessboard throughout the twentieth century, through the three horrendously manufactured World Wars, and still on-going in this synthetic World War IV in the twenty-first century makes a great bedtime story: progressively breaking up the Old World Order comprising a few huge Christian and Muslim colonial empires dominated by the old aristocracy into initially a large number of often warring new nation-states in stages; re-combining them into a handful of supranational unionizing regional states; to eventually give birth to the New World Order of a single One World Government of the “Zion that will light all all the world”. The global power transfer from Christian-Muslim domination into exclusively Jewish domination through an unfathomable global bloodshed is simply remarkable – considering no one even dares to publicly recognize it as such even today!

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a polish Jew, in his co-strategizing in other people’s blood on the evolving grand chessboard with his cohorts from the many think-tanks and foundations since the Brzezinski-Carter White House, while claiming to be directing American foreign policy, has exclusively been directing the Rockefeller-Rothschild driven globalist agenda for World Government. His book, The Grand Chessboard, which is the subject of Prisoners of the Cave, is a Machiavellian blueprint for the end-stages of America’s destruction as a sovereign nation-state, and not the prima facie one for acquiring America’s “full spectrum dominance” as deceptively portrayed in its subtitle: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. The blueprint is entirely diabolical in its overt strategizing for American Primacy, a Straussian Noble Lie at multiple levels. While Brzezinski accurately portrays the political science and the dynamics of “imperial mobilization” under conditions of “democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”, it is a path to making America go financially bankrupt and suffer a currency collapse. That is all the pretext needed to create the fait accompli. That is in fact the sheer brilliance of the plan.

The faits accomplis of “history’s actors” are irreversible by the very nature of its Machiavellian design:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Senior Bush Advisor, The New York Times, October 17, 2004)

The only way to preempt that design is for the public to act BEFORE the history’s actors act. That can never happen because Machiavelli 101 dictates that when plans are inchoate and easily disreputable, the state must take precautions to ensure that they are not derailed. Thus enter social engineering – manufacturing consent and dissent to keep the public otherwise engaged. Once orchestrations and plans are completed and matters reach execution phase, the history’s actors take over the moment a “catalyzing event” makes embarking on it practicable. It is too late for the public to do anything at that time but “study what we do”. Most will simply get tired after a while.

We can see that already in play. The world’s public today has been made remarkably quiescent despite the horrendous atrocities being committed by the American military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, causing ripples of “diffuse violence” to percolate throughout the “Global Zone of Percolating Violence”. Even America’s own top military commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, had the cold chutzpah to brazenly proclaim without fear of any future Nuremberg accountability: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” (New York Times, March 26, 2010)

There are not even any “focus groups” of protests any more. The handful of conscionable Western rebels still making noise here and there do so entirely ineffectively. They bizarrely tend to focus on comparatively lesser order crimes, and former crimes, while the many elephants in the bedroom still defecating all over the place are blithely ignored.

The following Open Letter to Dr. Francis Boyle, the law professor who filed criminal charges in the International Criminal Court against the previous George W. Bush Administration for crimes of torture, sums up the state of affairs, including a daring but rational future course of action to follow which can be far more effective:

‘Open Letter to Francis Boyle, the Moral Law Professor, on the Ignored Iraqi & Afghani Victims of Imperial Mobilization

Date: January 31, 2010

Subject Re: International Criminal Court Complaint Filed Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, Gonzales By Prof. Francis A. Boyle

Dear Dr. Francis Boyle:

In reference to your complaint filed with the ICC against the previous errand-boys who occupied the White House, would it be rude to notice that the higher order bits of using 911 to “goosestep the herrenvolk across international frontiers” ; the subsequent “shock and awe” visitations upon largely civilian population-centers and civilian infrastructures ; the decimation of millions of Iraqis/Afghanis ; subverting of the United States into a pre-planned police-state ; fabricating crises upon crises to propose pre-planned solutions in order to systematically usurp national sovereignty as per the diabolical modus operandi set by the Council on Foreign Relations in their own documents: “In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” – have all been overlooked to pursue the relatively lower order crimes of “extraordinary rendition” upon a few individuals with the highly dubious statement: “I doubt very seriously that the Accused would have inflicted these criminal practices upon 100 White Judeo-Christian men.” ?

We only wish there was one decent ‘Christian’ man or woman alive in the hallways and beltways of Western academe and among the legal fraternity who might even attempt to capture the angst of the tens of millions of Iraqis/Afghanis still barely alive and who still await someone who will file legal charges against the monumental crimes that have been perpetrated upon them and their millions of murdered kin.

We fervently hope that you, Professor Francis Boyle, might be such a person. That you will file pertinent charges in the ICC, for both culpability and restitution, on behalf of the untold millions already dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, many more suffering with their entire national fabric, ancient heritage, and even their DNA despoiled in a crime so stupendous that “it is a mystery whose parallel may only be the one of Sinai when something was revealed to mankind.

For surely, it is inconceivable that you make complete obeisance to Western standards of morality by focussing on this lower order crime in the presence of un-addressed higher order monumental crimes – a morality which brazenly asserts from the highest pulpit of law in this land of the free:

Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes, that a name, a phrases, a standard has meaning only when associated with the considerations which give birth to nomenclature. To those who would paralyze our Government in the face of impending threat by encasing it in a semantic strait-jacket, we must reply that all concepts are relative.” — Justice Vinson, U.S. Supreme Court, 1951 AD

And as you venture to focus on the higher order real monumental crimes against humanity, we hope you will not remain content by focussing merely on the errand boys. That you will see the connections between the quest for “Global Governance”, fabricated crises from pandemics to global warming, the seeding of “revolutionary times” across the “global zone of percolating violence” to make “imperial mobilization” possible which otherwise is “inconceivable in normal times”, and the “history’s actors” who drive war-mongering policies and orchestrate wretched events from their Zion in the Middle East to their Zion in the Western capitals, not the least of which is Washington DC, in the expectation of creating the ultimate “Zion that will light up all the world”.

And that, as you pursue the highest order crimes, you will not shy away from going directly for the jugular of the prime-movers behind the scenes of all the war-mongering ‘errand boys’ fronting for them in the Western capitals as the duly elected representatives of a duped Western peoples, including those presently occupying the White House. This was, lamentably enough, already pleaded to no avail in the following editorial when your lonely fraternal brother, Mr. Vincent Bugliosi, courageously asserted that “Murder Trumps Torture”, but inexplicably failed to also simultaneously assert the legal and moral commonsense that prime-movers trump trigger-pullers: Who is more guilty of monumental war crimes – the prime-movers or trigger pullers? April 09, 2009.

Attempted prosecution of state-criminals on ‘petty charges’ without also prosecuting their criminal aiders and abettors who ‘legalize’ and propagandistically justify their brazen acts of aggression, and therefore are entirely culpable in toto for “all the evil which follows” ; staying silent on punitive as well restitutive compensation for their victims, is [all] a legal sham that is only waiting to be torn down by some courageous people. We hope, Dr. Francis Boyle, that you might be one such precedent setting spark which ignites the moral imagination of many to follow. The world has had enough from the dispensers of victor’s justice!

Thank you.

Zahir Ebrahim

Project Humanbeingsfirst.org’

I have no great note of optimism to share in April 2010. I have no idea what the future holds. My country is likely to become the next Afghanistan or Iraq – perhaps sooner than Iran. But I do know one thing: that maggots really can’t tell the difference six feet under, between who was the hectoring hegemon and who its victim. But if there is indeed something more to man than what the nihilist Social Darwinians seeking worldwide population reduction would like humanity to believe, then perhaps the soul extractor can. And if there is a soul extractor, then the script for the final outcome of “war on terrorism” cannot possibly conclude in the inferno for the ‘untermensch’ mankind.

The printable PDF is available for free download from Project Humanbeingsfirst.org at the URL noted on the Copyright Page.

Zahir Ebrahim,

April 17, 2010

California, United States of America

© Zahir Ebrahim

March 31 2007

I wrote this book during April-May 2003. That was exactly four years ago. What has changed in America since then? Has this book become obsolete even before it got published? With another aggression against another defenseless nation in the offing, I inexplicably find the American peoples still quite absorbed in the pursuits of their ‘American Dream’ and hardly anyone gives a damn! Those handful who do, are entirely neutralized, with the efficacy of their anemic protests exactly ZERO! And I continue to hear the same nonsense as I heard in 2001 and 2002 and 2003 and 2004 and 2005 and 2006, and once again in 2007, from my American friends, colleagues, and from the general mainstream population, about the necessity of lifetime of battle against the ‘terrorist Islamists’ and ‘evil doers’ which is “Not [even] a Clash of Civilizations, It’s a Clash between the Civilized World and Barbarians” as per its ‘notable exponent Daniel Pipes’, and the “primacy imperative” of the so called “preemption” in self-defense of a Goliath superpower state possessing the largest and widest assortment of the most horrendous ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ against defenseless nations. The roots of the ‘jihadi terror’, taking its toll on the civilians in many nations – so deliberately unleashed by Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CIA with the clarion call of “God is on your side” to “have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” – now cleverly ‘forgotten’ by the ‘profound American intellectuals’ as its rotten fruits are deftly re-harvested for another “imperial mobilization” by purposely sustaining its growth in the very modus operandi employed to presumably fighting it. What is indeed the purpose of this so called ‘war on terror’?

Who are the real terrorists, the real war mongers, the superterrorist monumental criminals from whom “all the evil that follow[ed]”?

Is it the “populist democracy” in the lone superpower nation who cleverly enable their elected leaders to commit monumental crimes through their uncourageous acceptance of barbarianism upon defenseless nations that they watch on their television screens, never mind that they prefer to not read the multiple ‘American Mein Kampfs’ existing among them? Or is it only their testosterone laden legally conspired leadership who abuse their authority in the name of the peoples because “hegemony is as old as mankind” and “radical Islam, sometimes called Islamaism” works really well as the quintessential “doctrinal motivation” du jour for “imperial mobilization”? Can the hectoring hegemons be checkmated on the Grand Chessboard by ordinary peoples? If not that fear, why would the fiction of ‘war on terrorism’ be even erected? It is to that fear of the hectoring hegemons that this plebeian book and its preface spoke to four years ago which no publisher deemed worthy enough to print. It’s relevance today four years later?

You dear reader be the judge!

And as a judge, you are also obligated to issue the final verdict – a peoples of conscience, or a barbarians in suits?

Sometimes, binary choices are indeed the only choices as your favorite American President George W. Bush Jr. has already informed you.

It’s now your judgment to identify to which of the two sides you belong: “either you are with us or with the [super]terrorists”!

© Zahir Ebrahim

May 2005

More than half a dozen publishers had turned my book down by early 2004 despite a sterling letter of commendation by the famous American historian Howard Zinn who had very generously read two earlier drafts, and I pretty much abandoned the effort. I was very depressed that tons of garbage sits on American bookshelves, but my message of conscience wasn’t deemed good enough to see the light of day. I was becoming asphyxiated from all the freedom of speech you could want in America in total vacuum. And watching the behavior of the American public continually saluting the flag even when they could see the dead and the dying and doing absolutely nothing as the mass deception of WMDs quickly unraveled before their very eyes, and instead, reelecting George W. Bush Jr., for a second time, I became so disgusted, I threw the manuscript away. However, this renewed talk of attacking Iran in 2006 has given me the additional motivation to dig the manuscript out once again and this time prepare it for an internet release.

The material in the book is the same as when it was first penned, with the addition of copious footnotes. I have judiciously refrained from tempering with much of my original writing or update facts as new revelations have occurred, because this is a snapshot of what was transpiring in April of 2003 as viewed from the eyes of a Muslim writing a message from his heart to the American peoples. It is not a history text. And unfortunately, it is just as relevant today as it was two years ago. I would love nothing more than this message to become obsolete – for therein lies my success. However I am quite convinced now that nothing will come out of the book. No one really cares, and few mainstream people in America really read non-fiction books, let alone something as serious as this one that requires considerable reflection and soul searching. A thousand books have been written since America attacked Iraq, all of my predictions in this book and those of other dissenters already published came true – the Iraqis resisted, and the Americans attempted to create a servile client-state, and all of these are already in the public eye. The exposé of the horrible prison tortures of innocent civilian men and women, and all the evil that [has] follow[ed] the American initial aggression and invasion of conquest is open for all to see. Yet the past two years have also shown me that the American public really does not care. And when it does, it is only because of its own casualties – exactly like what Zbigniew Brzezinski had predicted in The Grand Chessboard. Despite my pessimism of ever reaching the eyeballs of the mainstream audience of America, never mind their conscience, I am compelled to make these humble writings available on the internet. For I do not know what else I can do as an ordinary powerless individual who has had it up to his neck and is not willing to take it anymore!!

In this foreword, I would like to elaborate upon how and why, I as an ordinary foreigner (not some academic or scholar), not even a citizen of the United States, but living in America for over a quarter century as a Permanent Resident alien, know what is going on in the minds of the hectoring hegemons, and the American public does not. And why is it that such public pronouncements as those made by PNAC (Project New American Century), Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2020, the White House’s preemption doctrines in its National Security Council and Nuclear Posture Review papers, and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard, exist publicly? Furthermore, despite their easy public access, no one in the mainstream media has even today, almost four years after 911, questioned the motive that is blatantly visible in these writings for the “new Pearl Harbor”. And if it was indeed ever mentioned, it quickly disappeared from the horizon, while all the pundits on television repeat the mantra of “Islamic Fundamentalism, and members of the Bush Administration regularly refresh it for them as the most significant threat to world peace since the demise of the USSR, with even the most respected journalists and other scholarly personalities in the American society joining the chorus.

Even those who offer their dissent, do so premised on the axiom of 911 being an invasion from abroad, or the cost to American lives being too much. In other words, the majority of dissent is not based on primarily moral issues of bombing other nations, or on challenging the deception of 911, but on how much it is costing the Americans and what a quagmire Iraq has become, with resolute I told you so echoing across the pundit landscape who proudly strut their wisdom before the America public. Thus had it not been a quagmire, and had fewer Americans been killed, it would have been just peachy to invade even more nations.

Even “arguably the most important intellectual alive, Noam Chomsky, has bought into the 911 story of the George W. Bush Administration in promoting the idea of invasion from abroad by one Osama Bin Laden, and thus being instrumental in getting Bush reelected despite all the overt gestures towards his opponent John Kerry. I believe this is the case throughout America when debate was never allowed to focus on what has become the unquestioned axioms of 911, but rather was immediately diverted to the corollaries and other theorems based on such axioms, even by the majority of those handful who expressed dissent in public writings. Even the facade of 911 inquiry commission was in fact very cleverly used by the Bush Administration to pass what was earlier called Patriot Act II, in the guise of 911 security reform Act. Incredible! It’s like being in Alice in Wonderland, where all the ordinary characters think everything is normal, except Alice! Only Lewis Carroll and his publisher know the reality.

My book refocusses on the very premise of this axiom as it systematically dismantles the deception on a very broad canvas from the unique perspective of an ordinary Muslim whose peoples are bearing the brunt of this “imperial mobilization. All those who have helped make this axiom successful, in my humble opinion, have blood on their hands, whether or not they may choose to acknowledge it. Indeed, it is immaterial what the important and the visible peoples think anymore, or what they acknowledge and don’t acknowledge, for we all know what they have thought and said over the past four years, be they on the Right, Left, Center, Up, Down, in the Government, or in the dissent space – for the audience of this book is the American peoples, not their monumental intellectuals, nor their monumental criminals.

It is the informed and fair judgment of the American peoples that is of significance in having the last word in much the same way as the American Jury’s, composed only from ordinary citizens adjudicating on the crimes of anyone, including the mighty. And so will be the judgment of a ‘Robert Jackson’ in the future when he will coldly assert: The plans of the aggressor for aggression were just as secret as the PNAC on the Grand Chessboard, just as the original Robert Jackson had asserted at Nuremberg before proceeding to hang the Nazi leadership:

The plans of Adolf Hitler for aggression were just as secret as Mein Kampf, of which over six million copies were published in Germany.

How did I learn about these plans? I actually only uncovered PNAC, JV2020, and the Wolfowitz’s chauvinist doctrines of preemption that he had supposedly been pushing since 1990, after 911, when I started scratching my head at the inexplicability of it all the moment some 19 Muslim hijackers’ names were announced, and the public was informed that they had learnt flying on flight simulators and had told their instructors that they weren’t interested in learning how to land! If Bin Laden was so smart at having planned such an outrageous attack and counted on such brilliant executioners who did it so flawlessly after only learning to fly on simulators, he was pretty stupid at having enlisted idiots who would deliberately leave such a trail of evidence behind, including statements that they weren’t interested in landing – so that either they would risk being uncovered before the attack, or their attack foiled while in progress, or after a successful attack, America would know exactly whom to go bomb in retaliation!

Only one of these aspects could be true, either they were brilliant military tacticians and strategists, or nincompoops from a three stooges movie who succeeded despite themselves, but the incongruence could not exist simultaneously on this large scale military style invasion project, except in a Hollywood spoof.

Having already read Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations several years earlier, I immediately grasped the new pearl harbor concept the moment America deployed to bomb Afghanistan without adequately explaining or investigating any of the events of 911, such as the incredible air defense failure after the Government had reliably apprehended at 8:28 am that the first plane was hijacked, on top of this bizarre explanation for who did 911 (see Chapter 5). The entire discourse in America started spinning around earlier forewarnings and other red herrings, entirely ignoring to bring up the crucial question in public debate that okay, what happened after 8:28 am on 911 once the fact of hijacking was established? Why was there still no air defenses when it is actually part of normal and established FAA and NORAD operating procedures? Very simple questions. No one was asking. Neither is anyone asking today in America’s mainstream, given that so much has already been apprehended from Donald Rumsfeld’s “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Major “imperial mobilization” has been launched on this maxim, more than several hundred thousand peoples have been killed or otherwise effected, and entire nations have been bombed to oblivion with monstrous Daisy Cutters, all based on his maxim. But no serious and impartial investigation can be launched on the same maxim. Nor can the famous and the scholarly intellectuals in America question the integrity of the facile statements of 911 by the Government on the same maxim. While these intellectuals write fancy treatise on their responsibilities as intellectuals, but when it comes time to put it into action on the most momentous exhibition of the mendacity of power since World War II, they are amazingly impotent. And despite the availability of even this convenient maxim that is handed to them on a platter, and behind which they can seek refuge if they lack the raw boldness of a gadfly, their “reputation” seems to be their primary concern rather than the quest for truth and repelling of falsehoods.

I started to reread Brzezinski and Huntington very carefully once again, then reread the entire voluminous Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and the Mein Kampf of Hitler. The similarities between the rising crescendo of WMDs and the propaganda that William Shirer had recorded as having transpired in the Third Reich, and the similarities between ZB’s and Hitler’s descriptions of their respective imperatives and how to get them, were ominous, except that ZB’s were more polished and more sophisticatedly put. I got really paranoid as many more light bulbs went on in my head which had not gone on when I had originally read them. I had just taken Brzezinski’s book as theoretical, as being from the pen of a Cold War warrior now retired and indulging in some arm chair warrior fantasies. I didn’t understand that hectoring hegemons never retire until they are six feet under. I had also dismissed Huntington’s book as an ignoramus’s work not to be taken seriously, as it was replete with obvious disinformation and tortuous conclusions that were easy to spot by anyone who knew anything about the subject. Now both were being egregiously put into practice, and the latter’s book did not appear so silly anymore, but rather shrewd and calculated.

The first time I had read Huntington with the lens of ‘here is an interestingly titled book from a prominent Harvard professor, let me see what he has to say’; the second time I read it with the lens ‘let me understand how deception is created and its seeds planted in a free society that is not too knowledgeable about the rest of the world’. The second reading showed that the obviousness of his distortions, coming from a top branded American University like Harvard, had some deeper strategic thinking behind it. Huntington is also involved in national security and other strategic studies as a prominent professor and intellectual at Harvard, and couldn’t be just a simple moron like Harvard’s President, Lawrence Summers, who recently claimed women were inherently not as smart as men. I was wondering how people like that become President’s at prestigious American universities, until once again I uncovered during my research that the same Harvard President had also written how the industrialized nations should dump their waste in developing nations while he was at the World Bank in the 1990s. With Wolfowitz now as the head of the World Bank, it is only shortsightedness to underestimate the power of the dark side, or the people who wield it. Huntington’s theme from portions of his book relevant to the topic at hand is systematically dismantled in Chapter 9. Based on this new found respect of the doctrinal scholars for their craft, and realizing that we were entering a phase with the hastily approved Patriot Act I that could only lead to the Fourth Reich in America, I started attending antiwar teachins and protest marches with my family, and began talking to prominent Vietnam war dissenters about governmental lies.

And that is when I first heard about the PNAC – from antiwar teachins. Ordinary people like me, engagingly concerned about what was happening, had uncovered more material from public sources and the analysis of history, than the entire mainstream scholarship and media apparatus in the United States of America.

This is shockingly not surprising. And this must be of concern to the American peoples – how some handful of ordinary activists can uncover truth so easily without needing any top secret clearances. Why isn’t truth shielded better, especially when it is the incriminating type? Why is it so damn easily accessible in America? Never mind why most can’t see it, or their inability to connect the dots, because that is a well understood matter and that matter has been adequately covered in Part-II of the book, as the book title Prisoners of the Cave would reflect.

Here, it is important to attempt to unravel the psychology behind making such incriminating documents and pronouncements publicly available, because at first glance, it appears rather counter intuitive. It often leads the unsuspecting American commentators and journalists to read into it that since it is so blatantly put, there must not be anything insidious behind it that needs unraveling, and they take it on face value. Thus Donald Rumsfeld for instance, was asked on some ABC news program in 2004 about the PNAC letter that he had signed advocating invasion of Iraq, and the letter itself was flashed briefly on the screen. Rumsfeld’s curt answer however, that it was his private opinion before he became the Secretary of Defense, did not elicit any intelligent followup questions from the interviewer (whose name I forget), even about why as Secretary of Defense did he then immediately order preparations be made for attacking Iraq right after 911? Indeed, many of the same guys who signed on to PNAC (see Exhibit A) had been members of the Bush Sr. Administration during the first massacre of Iraq in 1991, and it was Bush Sr. himself who had deliberately left Sadaam Hussain in power after destroying his military; the same military that as Vice President for eight years under Reagan, he had helped arm and sustained to fight Iran on his behalf and had sent Rumsfeld as the special envoy to advise Sadaam, and it was indeed his own CIA that had backed Sadaam to power in 1963 and 1968. It was the same faces who had now clamored for removing Sadaam after installing him. All these followup questions were missing, even the most obvious one that the report available from the same PNAC website where the interviewer (or his script writer) had found the letter, was also the term “new pearl harbor” mentioned, and why was 911 being gratuitously used as the new pearl harbor for “imperial mobilization”?

If I had been the interlocutor of Donald Rumsfeld, as my last question to him, I would have point blank asked him whether he had himself orchestrated 911 with remote control of the planes. And let his obvious answer be officially recorded for posterity, although I can bet that he would have tried to dodge a straight of course not response by showing some indignation like he wasn’t going to dignify the question by answering it, or how dare I imply that he had committed treason and yelling at me. Perfect – for those are indeed the thoughts that I would want to be seeded in the mainstream public discourse with this anger trap, and forcing him to make the infamous statement: I am not a liar is what I would have gunned for.

However, the failure of the American and world press for such obvious and logical followups is not the point under discussion. The point here is, why make such chauvinist pronouncements like the PNAC documents, the White House’s NSC and the NPR, and The Grand Chessboard public in the first place?

I feel there is indeed a Machiavellianess behind such public writings, for upon face value, it is illogical to make such unabashed and incriminating pronouncements such as “new pearl harbor” public by a ruling elite hell bent on “imperial mobilization”, and actually having a multifaceted vested interest in a “new pearl harbor” pretext to scare its “populist democracy” to go along. One might think they’d be more effective keeping it secret, as they indeed keep all the real secrets, secret. The real top secrets only get revealed after the deed is fait accompli, and well into the future as the famed declassification process, or as an occasional egotistical confession – almost always remorseless autobiographies or posthumously published diaries. The following is my limited attempt at unraveling this question, and I will let the readers decide if it makes sense to them in the light of all the rest of the evidence that is also presented in this book. If it does make sense, they must worry about what has become of their society, that truth and falsehood are now indistinguishable in such a free society, with all the freedoms known to man in their laps. How easy it has been to make prisoners of the cave in such a free society! If my unraveling doesn’t make sense to them, then they must answer this question for themselves, for it is indeed a conundrum that begs my favorite question “why”.

So to carry this thought further, it was rather disturbing that in 2002, I had discovered blatant statements from the people immediately within the Bush Administration that directly matched ZB’s made in 1996/97. And indeed available so openly, that they are still available as of this writing. I knew that actual receipts for their complicity in 911 would never be found, if indeed there, but the proof of intent for “imperial mobilization was right there. The more I studied and reflected, the more it all came together, and the more compelled I was by my conscience to protest publicly in anti-war demonstrations on American streets with my family. The deception of “war on terrorism” was plainly manifest, as were the dead bodies, and the theology of foreign policy that had created it, and who were the bastards behind it all.

When the FBI showed up at my door as the bombing of Iraq was just underway – the combative piece of my mind that I gave them is recorded in my essay “They dared to knock on my door” in Part-1 of the book.

This is the kind of effort and time, as well as a natural suspicion of any ruling elite in general, that it took me to educate myself to know the specific reality behind this “war on terrorism”, apart from the general commonsensical questions that come to any reasonable mind regarding the remarkable failure of all air defenses on 911 (see Chapter 5). I call this effort activism, and in the present context, I define it as the intellectual effort required to unravel the web of deception, to expose the mendacity of all incantations of power, and to oppose it effectively as a moral imperative. I am a stay at home dad taking care of my children and could muster both the motivation (my own innocent people being killed), and the free time that is needed to study and think for effective activism. From there to standing up for myself was a very short step indeed, almost instinctive, and quite spontaneous!

How many in America can afford this luxury of time for such activism amidst their busy weekday routine of put the bread on the table, and their compulsively consumerist weekend routine of shop till you drop and drive kids to soccer games lives? Only a handful. And this is what the imperial planners and the ruling elite in America have always counted on, in addition to creating the mindset of blind patriotism among the masses from kindergarten onwards, when the first salute to the flag is given by an American child at age five.

Thus the hectoring hegemons aren’t shy of boldly making their writings publicly available, because the mainstream populace in America is too busy pursuing their American Dreams to have the time to read and reflect in order to be able to connect the dots from Machiavellianly spinned pieces of prose, and to relate them coherently to distant reality that is often only expressed in the inner pages and obscure bylines of major newspapers like the New York Times and rarely if ever on television from where the majority get informed. And even when some intelligent peoples may suspect something, they often lack the self-interest to do anything about it. This changes rather dramatically when they actually start seeing their own flesh and blood in body bags. Then they sit up and take notice due to the new found self-interest, and connecting the dots don’t matter anymore because their own dead are now before them.

If the strategic thinkers can understand that the American public is body bags averse in their own self-interest, but couldn’t care less for other peoples’ body bags if the victims were properly demonized as “unworthy victimsas the name “war on terrorism” actually implies its victims to be – so can the “unworthy victims” also understand that their most potent self-defense is to send more body bags home to America regardless of cost to themselves. It is the same mindset in Israel, where Jewish lives are inherently treated as more “holy”, and thus more “worthy” than Palestinian lives. This was also the major cause of Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon after two decades of military occupation. The Israelis lost approx. 800 Jewish soldiers, while they killed, or got killed, more than 25000 Lebanese due to Hezbollah’s unflinching resistance. The cost of military occupation became more than it was worth in “worthy victims lives. While this formal terminology of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims is from Noam Chomsky, the understanding of this concept is easily apprehended by the local populace who are victims of the hectoring hegemons, and they don’t need any pedantic formalisms from American scholarship to describe their pain and suffering and the loss of their loved ones.

The control of mass media on the one hand from where the American masses get the totality of their information, and the suicide bombers from among the victims on the other, are just different sides of the same coin. The former wants to keep the American public prisoners of the cave so that they can build empire without interference from the “populist democracy”, the latter wants to free them so that they may come to the victims’ rescue by shocking them into sitting up and taking notice of their own self-interests. The victims can unfortunately only do it by the supreme sacrifice of their most precious possession, for only that can shock the prisoners of the cave into sitting up and noticing their chains. From there, to breaking out of their chains due to sheer self-interest of protecting their own loved ones, is a very very short step indeed.

This was demonstrated to the world during the protests that filled the streets during the Vietnam war when 50,000 dead American soldiers brought the American people out in the streets. They could tolerate a devastated country far out of sight with over ten to twenty times that number dead, and murdered by their own dead sons for no reason other than the ideology of their Presidents and their ruling elite; they could not tolerate their own loved ones dead. Even the term “murder” is still not used to reflect their loved ones’ deeds as they are glorified with memorials, and neither are the bombed out victims of Indochina remembered nor their society compensated, because such “awakening of the conscience” is purely emotional self-interest.

None of this is very profound, just commonsense 101. It only seems to escape the American public until self-interest strikes.

Thus letting the public have PNAC and JV2020, and the White House’s NSC and NPR like documents, is part of the arrogance of power when they know that they have the public under full control as prisoners of the cave, so long as they can mitigate their self-interest from coming into play. Thus note all the modern research in robotic and remote controlled drone based warfare technology to reduce American military casualties, where MIT, my own alma mater, is leading the research.

Indeed, these documents, such as the deceptive open letters written by PNAC to American Presidents openly advocating war on Iraq under the mantra of WMD, when the reality is known to all in the Pentagon and the American and British military who routinely bombed Iraq for twelve years, that none remained in Iraq as it had been entirely disarmed, and as evidenced in this Wall Street journal quote from 1999: “After eight years of enforcing a no fly zone in northern [and southern] Iraq, few military targets remain. ‘We’re down to the last outhouse,’”, is in fact setting up the stage for full scale propaganda in the future. Its target is not the President to whom the letters were addressed, but the unsuspecting general public, to mold public opinion. By judiciously planting terms like “clash of civilizations” and “weapons of mass destruction” and “Islamic fundamentalism” years in advance, these “collateral” language constructs acquire a dynamics of their own in the hands of obliging stenographers in the press and script reading actors (oops anchors) on television.

Indeed, one might even ask oneself why give such a lame excuse for who did 911? Why not make it more sophisticated and air tight? That understanding is easy to apprehend if one realizes that the consumers of these lies are not cynical people like me, but the trusting people in the masses who do not possess the time or inclination to think, and believe simple lies repeatedly told them more easily than complex ones – right out of Hitler’s propaganda thesis in Mein Kampf:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. … The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

Thus two things are achieved simultaneously: a) an ego trip of arrogance of power that blatant supermorality can go unchallenged in the society by even its best scholars, and thus an indication to the hectoring hegemons of how successful has been the efforts at social control by the ruling elite in an open society like America; and b) seeds from which the fruits of war and conquest can be profitably harvested in the future in a populace that is not so inspired by imperial visions, and has the choice to not go along.

To know that a) is true, as an ordinary decent moral person of the populace not suffering from any superiority complex, ask yourself if you’d ever write something like these hectoring hegemons, while understanding that it would espouse a supermorality where you set yourself up as having a higher prerogative over other human beings. Your answer to yourself should clarify this matter for you.

To know that b) is true, just look around you. What Bernard Lewis introduced over a decade ago in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1990 (right after the demise of the USSR for which both Zbigniew Brzezinski as well as AEI have taken credit), and what Samuel Huntington argued equally long time ago in his what appeared at that time to be a silly book, is now ostensibly the basis of American Foreign Policy theology. Indeed, here is the full quote from Clash of Civilizations in which Huntington attributes the phrase to Bernard Lewis.

In 1990 Bernard Lewis, a leading Western scholar of Islam, analyzed ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage,’ and concluded: ‘It should now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations – that perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against our rival.‘”

That is the only logical explanation for such blatantly chauvinist political writings existing in a “populist democracy” whose people are not inspired by dreams of “imperial mobilization” and world conquest. In totalitarian societies and dictatorships where the masses are more in physical chains rather than mental ones*1, and the ruling elite is not depended on the opinions of the masses in order to rule them, such writings are rarely if ever made publicly available. Why? Because such writings in dictatorships that betrays a supermorality, a higher order national prerogative, has no public utility. Quite the contrary, the ruling elite in such dictatorships endeavor to take on the public persona of high morality; baboons pretending to be moral beings before the public because all know their true reality and no one trusts them.

Whereas in America, we have baboons deliberately and unabashedly come across as baboons, and few can see it even then. I am not aware of such chauvinist national strategy documents advocating world conquest and self-apportioned national destiny being put out publicly for instance, by the ruling elite in the Soviet Union or China, or in any of the petty dictatorships in the Middle East and other developing nations that would betray a supermorality of the ruling elite (even when it may be espoused privately). This difference isn’t entirely due to freedom of speech, for the ruling elite in all dictatorships have all the freedoms they can want, and then some, and they still don’t make writings like these accessible to the general public. It appears to be solely an artifact of a free society of a superpower nation for deceptive social control in the absence of any other overt forms of control.

The prisoners of the cave metaphor is also true for the Israeli Jews but in a slightly different manner from the American context, and that dynamics is analyzed in Chapter 3, and Chapter 4. Despite Israel’s freer press and open and frank debate in the Hebrew society about their usurpation of Palestine, the brutal daily oppression of the Palestinians before the Israeli public’s very eyes continues right alongside the debate on new maps that show various new Biblical cities that will be recreated in Eretz Yisrael. This is because the Israeli Jewish public (modulo a few rabble rousers) is complicit with the Jewish State in their barbarism to achieve the imperial mobilization for Biblical Lebensraum that many have been led to believe since birth to be their divine birth right regardless of where they might be born on earth.

The Palestinians are merely lowly goyems to be trampled afoot as inherently “unworthy” victims “illegally” occupying the Jewish Lebensraum even when born there, and thus must be eliminated, or subjugated as slaves by the dictates of the Jews’ “holy” rabbinical teachings in the Talmud. This self perceived “holiness” that leads to a supermorality, coupled with the sustained indoctrination that preventing another holocaust is only possible by creating/expanding the Jewish State, is how these Jewish prisoners of the cave are systematically prepared for new crimes against humanity while the world spectates silently. Breaking their chains is a lot harder through activism alone as they labor under the weight of three thousand years of cultural history prescribed by their Rabbis in the Talmud. Their renaissance is not possible unless they undertake it themselves, and even then, highly unlikely to come to pass in the present generation.

Only a power-play that brings their own self-interests into focus, is the sole effective weapon against their naked aggression – for the antagonists’ strength is what defines morality for anyone who has multiple standards of morality. We easily observe this in the jungles as the “imperatives” of beasts where might is right prevails, but not always.

The way nature and mathematics work, the neo-imperialists are bound to lose with or without the help from their own peoples, with or without their own Machiavellian shenanigans, just as imperialist have always lost eventually – for the minnows are many, and the sharks are few, and the sharks need minnows more than the minnows need the sharks. A “poisonous” batch of minnows can easily wipe out an entire school of greedy sharks in one short meal.

Footnotes

*1 Quite contrary to the scenarios spinned in the prescient Hollywood movie ’1984′ where George Orwell also shows a public in mental chains except for the lone resistor, the empirical reality today in modern client-state dictatorships is that the public in dictatorships is far more suspicious, cynical, and the least bit trusting of their own ruling elite. It is the converse in open developed societies where the public is rather well fed and far more indoctrinated, tending to trust its ruling elite blindly. This is one of the reasons that imperialism du jour will fail, as it has always failed – but only after it has taken its toll and extracted its ‘pound of flesh’ for its gift of ‘modernity’ to humanity. The achievement of a progressive civilization is not in overthrowing it, for that is inevitable, but in preventing it to start with. Otherwise, as Brzezinski notes, “Hegemony” will indeed surely always remain “as old as mankind taking its barbaric toll upon us all.

© Zahir Ebrahim

September 2003

One fine afternoon, as the bombing of Iraq was about to be launched, I suddenly found myself in the periscopic cross-hairs of the FBI and Homeland Security agencies under the USA Patriot Acts just because I am a “Muslim” living in America. While complaining to my attorney about this unwarranted and offensive intrusion into the bliss and sanity of my idyllic life without any just cause, and without even being truthfully informed what it was all about, he suggested that I go public if it was upsetting me so much, as it might bring awareness to the offensive Patriot Acts that enabled this harassment. The idea of going public took instant root as a means of ordinary civilians peacefully fighting back in the same intellectual space that had seeded the world’s harassment at the hands of the hectoring hegemons in the first place. However, instead of talking to reporters which is what my attorney had suggested, I sat down to write despite never having written (for public) before.

And with some trepidation – as I don’t really relish the thought of being hauled off to jail for using my “inalienable” rights of free speech as a further test case of the USA Patriot Acts – and in order to fight back the tyranny of my own conscience, I now break my uncourageous silence to no longer be among those deserving the curse of posterity, of having known, and complicitly remained silent.

I will state at the outset that this humble and rather plebeian maiden book presents mainly a critical and dissenting perspective. It does not provide the opposing viewpoint of its antagonists other than in their own words to make my case. The antagonists generally speak quite vocally for themselves; they own the media and the propaganda machinery and already reach almost 100% of the American homes with their mantra of “war on terrorism”. Their views are propagated throughout the planet as news and unquestioned statements of fact. In order to be fair to their perspective, I decided to not speak for them as their official viewpoints are already known to everyone and easily accessible to anyone (e.g. for an eloquent and scholarly précis of their perspectives see the book with the insulting title Crisis of Islam – Holy War and Unholy Terror). It is their deception game that I have tried to unravel here. In that sense, I feel my book is well balanced as it shows the American public the contrarian and analytical view that is generally not available to them in the mainstream news media. Furthermore, before I am accused of holding extreme positions, I will admit (borrowing from Bertrand Russell’s diction on commonsense) that I am prepared to accept any evidence to the contrary, and prepared to give it “as much weight as the evidence warrants”, in order to derive logical conclusions whatever they might be. I am prepared to “admit the ordinary beliefs of common sense” when making any empirical observation or evaluating any proposition. I have used these tools in deriving the thesis of this book, the same tools that an American jury is instructed to employ in order to reach any fair decision.

On these grounds, I feel further justified in claiming that my book is well balanced. Finally, a balance in perspective is impossible when one has to take sides – in this case the side of whatever the truth is. It is only for the politicians and the diplomats to stay neutral in front of a moving train or double speak their way out of it. I do not proclaim to maintain a balance between truth and falsehood. Hence I also stake claim to prejudice – extreme prejudice towards the altar at which truth burns. Michael Moore calls this Fahrenheit 911 – the temperature at which truth spontaneously ignites!

I will also admit at the outset that I employ the definition of “Terrorism” provided by St. Augustine when he described the supposed interlocution of a pirate by the world conquering emperor Alexander:

When the King asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘the same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.‘” (The City of God against the Pagans, Page 148).

Being a computer scientist at heart and appreciating the importance of identifying and pursuing the “higher order bits” in any problem solving, instead of incompletely understanding the problem and often getting bogged down in the pursuit of distracting issues which turn out not to determine the course of events after all unless and until the “higher order bits” are settled first, I dwell on the more significant of the two crimes in this book: the criminality of the emperor. That is the raison d’être of the book.

I would like to state up front that I have generally enjoyed living in America. The disciplined, organized, and free spirited environment has allowed the educated, and even the uneducated but enterprising and hard working new immigrants, to fare rather well in this country. This spirit of enterprise and unfettered pursuit of the “American Dream” consequently composes the multicultural milieu of cross-pollinating ideas and diversity which today is America’s strength – and also her weakness. Before the large scale immigration of German and other European scientists to America in the 1930s, despite her enormous industrial capacity and many incredible inventions, America was not even counted among the leading scientific nations in the world; some suggest it was rather third rate among the developed nations, and lagging far behind Europe and Japan. Yet today, within a span of only a handful of decades, it is that welcome to immigrants and the pursuit of the “American Dream” which makes America dominate the planet – that, and her imperial brutality in imposing her plunderous will on all other weaker nations through the mass deception of her own peoples who remain diligently busy in their private pursuits of their “American Dream” to be bothered about others.

In this book unfortunately, I cannot dwell on the wonderful things about America as the more pressing task of preventing them from being lost through subjugation and domination of the rest of the less fortunate peoples on the planet, is at hand. See the eloquent expression of what many immigrants fleeing from the tyrannies of their own constricting societies in the poorer nations have generally found in America, in the book What’s so Great About America by the eloquent Indian immigrant, Dinesh D’souza. Little further needs to be added about that topic here.

Why should a mainstream American, my primary audience, want to read my book? To answer this question, I must first show the American reader how they are generally perceived by ordinary people in the world today, especially in the third world nations, where America’s political, economic, and military dominance overwhelmingly impacts many aspects of an ordinary persons life in unexpected and often negative ways. This negative impact can in places span the entire gamut from neoliberalism to neoconservatism, the two sides of the new imperial coin du jour that deftly harvests the Global South of its assets and resources in the service of the denizens of the Global North. The ring leader of this enterprise, as well as the de facto policeman of course, the judge, jury, and executioner rolled into one, is the Goliath du jour. As Thomas Friedman aptly put it:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. “Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,” says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. “If a lesser power were promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union, promoted its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a century.”’ (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1999)

What the Americans are usually told by the “institutional and ruling elite” in many of these nations, and seconded by many American opinion writers and scholars opposed to oppressive American Foreign Policies of hoisting clandestine client-states on the third world, is that while many in the local populace may hate the American government for her oppressive polices and support of dictatorships, they don’t hate the American people. This however is not a complete description. Let me provide a more complete picture as I see it.

How the majority in the world view the American People

Having lived in America for most of my adult life, I have discovered the general American public, from the college educated to the blue collar, to be the most trusting of their own government, the least cynical about what they see and hear on their televisions which more or less is exclusively their main source of news and world views, and most uninformed about the reality of the world outside their own minuscule microcosm. Far more so, than the general public living in other nations.

Many of these people outside America, especially in the poorer nations of the planet that constitute 3/4 to 4/5 of all humanity, perceive the American nation not too dissimilarly. They also generally tend to believe however, that the general American public is also very selfish and self-serving, purposely prefers to live with its eyes shut to the world, and knowingly turns a blind eye to what its ruling elite does in the world in its name! That the daily grind of industriousness the American people have been snared in by their search for the “American Dream”, leaves them little time or inclination to reflect about the rest of the world. That they really only care about their SUVs, their Wall Street, their taxes, and their fun weekends, and purposely don’t want to think too deeply about the ultimate source of their continued prosperity and “good life” in America. That an average American is wasteful and spoiled, and consumes orders of magnitude more “goods” than an average person in the poorer nations, and generates orders of magnitude more “trash”, often sending it for disposal to the poorer nations. They believe that most people in America generally hog more than their fair share of the world’s limited resources just because they happen to reside in an empire that is all too willing to get it for them. That (the fact that) their government is striving to harvest the world of all its resources, by hook or by crook, the main thrust of their “American Foreign Policy” and “American Interests Abroad”, is in their own best interests so that they may continue their “American Dream”. A “Dream” that relies very heavily on the American economy doing well, and the price and availability of oil – their lifeline. They believe that this egregious attempt at reshaping of the Middle East by the neo-con Bush administration, is just one more link in the long successive chain of American Foreign Policy initiatives for securing their lifelines and hegemony. That as far as the peoples of the poor nations of the South are concerned, there is hardly any difference to their lives between the George Kennan seeded “Truman Doctrine” that held the world hostage in a superpower Cold War for forty years which saw many poor nations decimated in Proxy warfare and as client-states, and the neo-con seeded “Bush Doctrine” that promises to hold the world hostage for another forty years through direct warfare and more client-states. That this “right” to secure their lifelines in the world is unquestioningly accepted as axiomatic by the general public, as a god given right of America to perpetuate her dominance upon the rest of the world. That the American public consequently perceives their own lives to be so much more valuable than any one else’s, that this “superiority” justifies to their mind any act of barbarism upon others in order to protect their own. That they go along with any pretext that “helps protect American lives” or “helps secure their lifelines”, cost to anyone else is usually not a consideration, or at best thought and stated to be: “we think the price is worth it.

So why should the American public want to put an end to all this luxury by trying to interfere with those who enable it, the people outside America bearing the brunt of America’s largess exclaim? It is utmost naiveté to expect the American people to deny themselves this cultivated feeling of “superiority” over the rest of the planet – by treating their own lives as of equal value and sanctity as everyone else’s, their own freedoms as equal to everyone else’s, and their own desire for living the “good life” as of equal importance as others having the same aspirations (and rights). When is a well-fed public ever bothered about being just? Isn’t it only the have-nots who clamor for it, and then variously labeled as “terrorists” and “evil-doers” for pursuing it?

Should the American public ask these “crazed” denizens in the outer humanity for any empirical evidence for their “strange” perception of the American people, the world would point to the collective gusto with which the American nation accepted the preemptive “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq under the pretext of protecting themselves preemptively from “weapons of mass destruction” possessed by crazed “evil doers”. That what is otherwise known as unprovoked aggression, became euphemistically and easily accepted as “preemptive self-defense” by them. That the American public will agree to anything in the name of “saving American lives”, including dropping nuclear bombs on civilians, as they didn’t seem to rise up in protest either when the White House’s “National Security Council Strategy” and “Nuclear Posture Review” was revealed. The world believes that the notion that Americans are somehow “superior” and command a “higher” prerogative is so ingrained in the American public’s psyche that it frames all their public discourse and their morality. So the immorality of killing other (“lesser”) innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq under the delusional notion of “preemptive self-defense”, is only dismissed as a justifiable “collateral damage” by the American government, and accepted as such by the American nation without question. That there is little public outrage even when children in wedding parties are reported killed in American newspapers, and Bush rises in his ratings every time Rumsfeld comes on television and says that the war is going well.

It is almost guaranteed that if an ordinary American strolled through the streets of a developing nation, and chatted up at a food stall in the local language that he was fortunate enough to speak like a native, and didn’t look, act, and sound like a tourist, but appeared as one of the natives just shooting the breeze, he would hear concerned people talking: If ever the bombed out victims of America’s “war on terrorism” start fighting back, and are even a wee bit effective in generating American body bags that get seen on American television, that President Bush will suddenly plummet in the ratings. More and more people will start filling the streets of America to bring their sons and daughters home, as happened in the Vietnam War. Only because American deaths are more intolerable to the American public than the deaths of others. This is why the Americans really withdrew from Vietnam – not because they felt remorse at the unjust invasion and destruction of another people by an out of control administration in Washington, but mainly because the American public saw that it cost them too many of their own precious lives when the Vietcong bravely fought back in self defense. And the only reason the Americans eventually dethroned their President was because he was caught lying about some other inane matter in comparison – not for waging a horrific genocide with napalms and other cocktails of death!

The largely cynical people of the world further point as evidence for this view, the fact that the American retrenchment from Vietnam did not elicit profound national apologies and public cries for restitution and compensation to the Vietnamese Victims, nor for any calls for war crime charges to be brought against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Instead, asphyxiating economic sanctions were slapped on the impoverished Vietnamese for two decades after their land had been decimated by napalms in the quest for some “containment ideology” of imperial thinkers! That there is no solemn “Vietnam Remembrance or My Lai Massacre Day” commemorated in America; and the ones solemnly remembered, are their own “heroes”, who “following orders” of the White House, only brought death and destruction to another courageous people who dared to fight back in self-defense on their own soil. Even now, when decades later the Americans speak of reconciliation, there is no talk of rebuilding Vietnam at the expense of American tax payers’ monies in compensation, there is no Marshall Plan. And neither is there one for Laos, the most secretly and brutally bombed country on the planet to this day. There is no public remorse, or attempt to compensate the Laotians living in daily misery even today, the forgotten humanity. Their country is littered with unexploded American bombs. Their children are living in squalor, and playing around American rocket skeletons and with empty American bullet shells, just as American children play with their safe and fancy plastic play-yards. While tourists visiting other countries look for indigent handicrafts as travel mementos, tourists to Laos mainly find jewelry made from empty American bullet shells. The cynical people of the world further point out that the orchestrator of these heinous crimes on humanity, Dr. Henry Kissinger, still limps along in the corridors of Power in America, and was even appointed to initially head the 9-11 inquiry.

One also often hears the following clichés almost everywhere, from University Professor to ordinary taxi driver, in various flavors depending on the sophistication of the despondent and their willingness to open up to you: All these terrorism labels they apply on whosoever opposes them is a joke and the American public knows it. When Osama was fighting the oppression of the Soviets, he and his mujahideen were the “moral equivalent of our founding fathers” according to the previous American President Reagan. But now that Osama is fighting American oppression, this President of America calls him a “terrorist” and an “evil doer”, while at the same time he calls Ariel Sharon, who systematically mows down Palestinian homes and families in a genocide that the Americans refuse to recognize because the Jews run America, a “man of peace”, and feels pride in shaking hands with him. And people of America wear T-shirts showing Osama as the target, but don’t do anything about Ariel Sharon because he is favored by their President. They even took the word of their President that Osama did 9-11, without demanding any evidence or conducting an investigation of the events that how comes America’s air defenses magically happened to be inoperative that day, and immediately, in the next month, launched their holocaust of Afghanistan. This label of “terrorist” is just a label of convenience, and it can change overnight. Like throwing all that tea overboard and ambushing the enemy from behind bushes and trees disguised in the enemies own uniforms, and later being called fathers of the nation, or even blowing up King David Hotel killing scores of people, and later being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as the Prime Minister. Or like Nelson Mandela, forced to sit out 27 years in jail, and later only to be acknowledged as the most distinguished world Statesman, and elected first President of non-apartheid South Africa, which his sitting in jail and being labeled as “terrorist”, was instrumental in creating.

The ordinary denizen of the world further laments that this has been the hypocrisy from time immemorial of all emperors and their faithful subjects, and there is no point in even fretting about it. If it is successful, it is a “revolution”, otherwise it is “terrorism”. The American public knows this “labeling technology” all too well, they aren’t that stupid – they can put a man on the moon and unravel the mysteries of life, and now you are telling me they can’t see the elongating noses in front of their faces? They will accept any hypocrisy when it serves them as they continue to “United We Stand” behind their murderous President. Wonder how they go to sleep at night after watching or hearing that their soldiers dropped Depleted Uranium tipped bombs on wedding parties and decimated innocent children? Aren’t these children as precious as their own children? Their own children would get solemn burials and eulogies broadcast to the planet, but these innocent Muslim children are only dumped in mass graves if their bodies are even found, like burying dead cattle! You are telling me I should not be angry with the American people, that it’s only their government doing these things? They are a democracy and they support their government. If they wanted to, they could have thrown Bush out in no time. On the other hand we have no choice, we live in dictatorships and kingdoms actively supported by the Americans, and if we even open our mouths to protest our own government’s excesses in the service of their masters in Washington, our intelligence agencies will make us disappear – “You go to bed at night not knowing where you will get up in the morning.” But the American people can do something. And yet why don’t they? Instead, they salute “United We Stand”, and Bush jumps in a popularity point each time it is announced that the “war is going well”.

And finally, if I was to tell the people of the developing world about my book that makes an appeal to the mainstream American public to rein in their government and bring them to justice, my friends and well wishers in these countries will inform me with much incredulity to not waste my time and jeopardize my safety and good life in America (as they indeed did), that few people in America would be interested in knowing the obvious. As a friend of mine succinctly put it: “It’s like a Mafia family’s ‘innocent’ members, not directly involved in the racket but enjoying the wealth generated from it, turning a blind eye to what the elders in the house do for a living to make all their wealth – with a wink and a self-serving nod, looking the other way.

This is how many around the world largely view the American people. Not a very flattering view is it? Whether the American public will think this view true or not is besides the point, because the outside world will act and react based on what they perceive as the reality about America, not what the Americans like to think of themselves. A critical self examination in this light can go a long ways in understanding “why they hate us”, and hence do something about it. And no, bombing them into “loving us” is not the solution, anymore than is bombing democracy onto them – if indeed democracy is what is being rained on defenseless civilians, and not a re-colonization with a more modern name: client-state. However, this is still not the complete picture. Let me add to it just a bit more.

How the majority in the world perceive America – the land of the free

There is also much ambivalence among people not directly in the path of American cluster bombs and Daisy Cutters, exploring of which can fill volumes. In a nutshell, the “have-nots” also want to become the “haves” like the Americans. Most dream of coming to America in search of the wonderful domestic “American Dream” that the entire planet has been shown on their televisions – the song “they come to America” captures this sentiment well. One might be surprised to learn that even the dispossessed, who might take up arms to fight American imperialism in the poverty stricken world because of the economic circumstances of their lives, joblessness, lack of education, coaxed on by various and sundry rabble rousers to take on the arch nemesis of all mankind responsible for their miserable situation in life, may also have applied for the American “visa lottery”! One way or another, people find ways to get out of the shackles of oppression – beat ‘em or join ‘em, which ever happens first! Something that the Neocon planners fail to appreciate as they embark on their ambitious plan for world conquest – that tyranny cannot endure forever. Perhaps America can settle all the dispossessed humanity on its vast shores! That’s certainly one way to take the thunder out of a significant number of “evil doers”. This however used to be true before the present climate of oppression and the headlong rush towards police state came into vogue in America. This country used to be a haven for immigrants before. And once here, as immigrants pursuing the “good life” and enjoying the new found freedoms, many tended to become like their formerly envied “conspicuously consumptive” foe, even in their very first generation.

America appears quite different from the “inside”, than from the “outside”. Her behavior towards her own domestic population (before the emergence of the police state atmosphere), is different from her exploitative and plunderous behavior towards the denizens outside her shores, especially those in the third world where America creates mixed emotions: anger at her exploitation of them, and desire for the freedoms and promise of the “good life” that it offers those able to reach its shores. This has generally also been true in history: most empires have always remained tyrannical outside their outer frontiers where “barbarians” were known to reside, while freedoms, culture, and the “good life” flourished in their inner sanctums of power. High walls and military guards at the periphery would protect the dominions and harvest the “barbarians” of their wealth and resources because these were the “lesser” people, probably not even human beings. It was taken for granted that it was okay to rape, pillage, and plunder them to support the good life within the empire. And it appears that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, with the march of civilizations towards liberation, progress, sophistication, and a global “shrinking village”, the modern empires still do not seem to have evolved any sense of justice and fair play towards those at the perpetual outer periphery, the borders where empires, nations, and civilizations meet, necessitating even higher walls, more border patrols, and self-serving doctrines of “clash of civilizations”.

Those residing within the American empire rarely get to glimpse this dual reality on the outer periphery, even if they travel a lot. Most Americans travel either on business or for tourism, and unless they are visiting friends and family, they tend to stay in fancy hotels; interact mostly with the business and other institutional ruling elite minority (comprising less than 2% of the population) whose views generally tend to favor their own privileged class, and who also tend to largely benefit from American policies; and at best stroll through native areas as tourists in search of trinklets, where both view each other with their own stereotypical lenses. Only the few that actually stay with the local mainstream people, who comprise the remaining 98% of the nation in almost every developing country, make friends with them, and earn their trust enough to have heart to heart exchanges over social affairs like marriages and death ceremonies, get to understand what is an everyday hell for the majority of the planet – and what is largely the real cause of it. I have met many an American in America, who have completely transformed their view of their country after having lived for some time in S. America, Asia or Africa.

Indeed, the contrast between the “inside” and “outside” views of America used to be far pronounced, and even looked like antipodes when I initially came to America a quarter century ago. But now with this new found love of xenophobia, the new penchant for a surveillance society to keep the Americans safe from “evil doers”, and the imposition of the oppressive USA Patriot Act-1 (with Patriot Act-2 already circulated in Congress though not yet introduced as a Bill), the America of today appears distinctly unfriendly and inhospitable to immigrants. It is becoming a burgeoning police state not too dissimilar from other dictatorships and police states in the rest of the world – except just more high-tech and more sophisticated: give people as many choices for TV channels, underwear, and shopping malls, but none to speak their mind on any subject that conflicts with the state’s view of it. No dissent allowed. United we stand.

If one were to ask the proverbial frog in water being slowly heated to a boil, whether it is in any danger, the frog would invariably respond that no it is quite comfortable lazily floating along – until it slowly becomes comatose and croaks in the boiling water, never even realizing that precious life was being squeezed out of it all this time. And if the water temperature is maintained just where the frog can continue to float, and eat when a prey falls into its mouth, but not have the energy to hop, it would soon forget how to hop at all. Its offspring would even lose the capability in a few short generations. Whereas a frog from another region falling into a boiling water would immediately jump to safety – and perhaps post a sign there, if it was a conscionable frog, saying: “beware – boiling water”!

Motivation for this book and the reason for this title “Prisoners of the Cave”

The value of my book derives from the fact that as a Muslim from a third world country living in America for more than a quarter century, who came here mainly seeking education and ended up entrapped in the pursuit of the abundant “good life”, I bring a unique perspective. I understand both kind of mentalities rather well, and I also keenly perceive the oppressive changes occurring within America because the Muslims are the first to bear the brunt of them.

I don’t believe that the majority of the American public, which the outside world perceives as self-serving for their self-indulgent pursuits of the “American Dream”, are quite like that. I don’t believe that they are out to get the world, nor do I believe that they “knowingly” turn a blind eye to the machinations of their government, unlike how most of the world’s populations might perceive them.

I believe that the American public is genuinely deceived, incredibly indoctrinated, and purposely and systematically kept ignorant. And that their condition of “ignorance” is the outcome of their institutional ruling elite finding this to be the most efficient way to conduct the “imperial” business of the state, because otherwise, “democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”. These are the main assumptions in my book. I guess if you don’t agree with them, then you are only left with the first alternative, that the American public is indeed incredibly self-serving, and consequently morally guilty of war crimes against humanity for their role in knowingly aiding and abetting their government in this fictitious “war on terrorism”. Take your pick.

I believe that the invention of “war on terrorism” was largely for the benefit of the American public in order to gain their support – to provide a pretext to launch this overt attempt to remake the “New World Order” while America was still the unrivaled superpower. 9-11 gave them that launch pad. With both Russia and China too busy internally to interfere, with India China and the Pacific Rim nations rapidly developing and industrializing, with the countries of Europe finally uniting after fighting for centuries, and with the global ground reserves of oil rapidly diminishing, the American imperial planners foresaw having a margin of 30 to 50 years before the rest of the world caught on to America’s industrial and military supremacy. Then it would be back to détente. If America could acquire monopolistic control over this black gold, and politically control critical regions of the planet, it would wield the upper hand and control the destinies of all potential rivals to America’s supremacy on the planet.

This also forms the motivation for this book to address the American public. If I was to only express my dissent, I would have directly addressed it to the American President and his Cabinet, the Israeli Prime Minister and his Cabinet, the secular Zionist-Neocon planners and all their religious collaborators in one sentence: You are despicable war criminals and I publicly call for your indictments for war crimes against humanity in an open public trial conducted by the victims, as the one held for Eichmann in Jerusalem. It would however have been a rather pointless venting and dissipation of perfectly legitimate anger. By addressing it to their biggest fears instead, the American public, from whom they derive all their powers, and over whom they exercise all their demagoguery, it may prove to be a bit more efficacious.

Being familiar with their courageous history of struggles for social justice – the “People’s history of the United States” – I am motivated to address my plea to the American public because I feel they would do something about this fictitious “war on terrorism” if only they knew. For instance, I find it rather difficult to imagine that if my good friend and neighbor, an ordinary mainstream white conservative American retired high school teacher, ever finds out about the Machiavellian deception game that he is being put through in his hours of daily American television watching, that he will continue with his life as if he did not know. Albeit he did caution me against going public many times: “if you enter a pig pen to wrestle, win lose, or draw, you come out smelling like one”, he never quite believed much of what I informed him was really up with this “war on terrorism”. He was often incredulous that their government would ever do such a thing! Always the one with quick proverbs, “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck” was his response on why Muslims were being profiled, harassed, and labeled as “terrorists” in America – because the hijackers were Muslims. Who identified them as such, and how were they identified (their bodies were never found, 5 of the 19 named dead hijackers were later discovered to be innocent people in the rest of the world quite alive), he never thought to ask. These two anecdotes pretty much sum up my own personal experience over a quarter century of how the majority of general public thinks in America, and because of which I feel why they are incredibly indoctrinated. And that cultivated belief in ‘my country can do no wrong’ and ‘my country right or wrong’, is the main battle front for this book.

Plato would argue that such a cultivated state of mass ignorance, can by sheer force of habit, become a new chain around the neck. He wrote in his Republic about such ignorance that is fed from birth, and that no illumination can penetrate. While I find Plato’s “Simile of the Cave” in The Republic quite apropos in describing the plight of the mainstream American society today, I do not believe in his pessimism that this can be a permanent state. I rather choose to believe in what William Shakespeare portrayed as the frailty of human conscience in his famous play Macbeth. It is only a matter of getting to it. Even a conscience completely dead can sometimes be revived – as long as one is alive. Some might argue that these are perhaps the few exceptions, like Rachel Corrie – the indomitable American spirit that no murderous Israeli Bulldozer could subdue once realization set in. Even at the expense of the ultimate sacrifice of her life, in the prime of her youth, a mere 23 year old who asked in her final letter to her mother: “let me know if you have any ideas about what I should do with the rest of my life”, she was compelled by an awakened conscience to take her moral and fatal stand for humanity.

I am indeed more optimistic about the power of conscience. I believe that there is a courageous “Rachel Corrie” lurking in every American, regardless of which side of the political divide they fall on, or how indoctrinated they might be about their benevolent munificent role in the world. With an awakened conscience, I do not believe that a significant proportion of American public will choose to remain (willfully) ignorant. I do not believe that they will remain silent bystanders of history. Their outrage during the Vietnam War demonstrated that to the world. It also demonstrated to the Pentagon and the White House, the power of ignorance in creating perfect Prisoners of the Cave. They realized the powerful role of American media in both empowering the people to act, and conversely, possibly enslaving them into inaction. The latter being the only way to win support from the American public for their future adventures in the world – this new “World War IV”, in the making ever since the demise of the Soviet Union left only one superpower standing. This arrogance of absolute power history testifies, has been the prerogative of all the powerful since time immemorial. And Zbigniew Brzezinski argues in his “Grand Chessboard” that it is the first time in history that this has befallen a “populist democracy”. That to have a democracy become an imperial power requires careful machinations, for the American populace is unwilling to become an “empire” or the policeman of the world, and that it’s the public’s “preference for ‘sharing’ power with others, rather than for its monopolistic exercise” which makes the American “democracy [is] inimical to imperial mobilization”. But the democracy is indeed willing to fight if it feels threatened, and that is the only way to convince an otherwise peaceful public to wage a war of conquest. Only a “Pearl Harbor” can bring them rallying around the flag, saluting “United We Stand”.

This entire profound “war on terrorism” against the “evil doers” is really only as complex as that! This is precisely why 911 was “allowed” to occur – putting it ever so charitably. The only bogeymen the American public must fear are their own leaders, and the power-brokers who control them.

The real cause for American insecurity and how they can become secure

The ultimate cause of their insecurity and well being is indeed the world wide web of criminal machinations of their successive emperors and the behind the scene policy planners as “American interests abroad” – from the “Truman doctrine” of containment to the “Bush doctrine” of preemption – rather than the oft repeated Machiavellian mantra of “evil doers” out to get us. If these “evil doers” are indeed real, as some might well be, then they are not going to disappear no matter how much you bomb them! Indeed, it is precisely the actions of “evil-doers” like these that also gave birth to the great nation of United States of America. I am certain that the British also viewed the tea being thrown overboard as economic terrorism by the American “evil-doers”. But more than likely, the “evil doers” du jour that the Bush administration talks about, are either entirely fictitious and deliberately manufactured through covert-ops, or purposely created by genuinely provoking them into existence. Because the Neo-con planners talk of “World War IV” lasting a lifetime, how else would they find a steady supply of “evil-doers” to keep fighting for 30 to 50 years?

I believe that their escalated pursuit of “evil-doers” is specifically designed to culminate in a total police state domestically. Why? Because it is otherwise impossible to keep sending the sons and daughters of America overseas to keep on fighting the wars of conquest for a lifetime, and contain the dissent of her conscionable people opposed to it. So long as one is not in opposition to the state, “United One Stands”, one is free to pursue one’s “American Dream” as the “patriotic” American. Already there is all the freedom to agree, and far less to disagree. If this “war on terrorism” is taken to its logical conclusion, it will only end up being the epitaph on the tombstone of free America – Here lies freedom to be free.

The Zionists may perhaps want such a police state in their monumentally criminal agenda for Eretz Yisrael – perhaps they also see themselves as ruling the world on the shoulders of the world’s largest police state. They already control the Bush White House, the Pentagon, the mighty military-industrial complex as their largest weapons manufacturing contractor, the United States Congress, and the ubiquitous American news media. Many of the Neocons influencing this Bush administration are openly Zionist in their aspirations, or are their ardent admirers and empathizers; diehard supporters of Israel to the extent that despite being American citizens, their policies and influence peddling in the Congressional corridors of power often favor Israeli national interests over American national interests. The evidence for this can easily be found in the record of American vetoes and abstentions of every single condemnation of Israel in the UN Security council by the world; the allocation of billions of US dollars in annual aid to Israel despite its homicidal oppression of the Palestinians, the most recent being the $9 billion in loan/cash guarantees; and the regular homage paid by Congressional leaders to AIPAC and to the Jewish votes for fear of electoral defeat if they go against Israel.

The Zionist influence in the American media through their diabolical alliance with the Evangelical Christian Right, creates a reporting of the Israeli occupation of Palestine so skewed that even new terminology frequently gets invented to sanitize what is a murderous and genocidal military occupation of a defenseless civilian population. The image presented is one of besieged Israelis combating the wanton and mindless terrorism of the uncivilized, less than human, stone throwing and suicide bombing misanthropes, who refuse to quietly disappear across the borders, and who are forcibly living on land granted to the Jews by the almighty Creator Himself who anointed them as the “Chosen People”. Occupied territories have become “disputed territories”, manifestly illegal settlements on stolen lands are “neighborhoods”, and Israeli military’s murderous bombing of civilian population centers, regularly targeting children and shooting them to death or maiming them for life, and daily bulldozing of ordinary people’s homes, is benignly an “incursion” into the West Bank and Gaza strip.

The compelling evidence for this farcical and prejudicial reporting can be gleaned rather quickly from the statistics compiled by “ifamericansknew”, an organization run by conscionable Jews who condemn the Zionist occupation of Palestine, from reading the letters of the American martyr Rachel Corrie, and from the insightful reporting of Robert Fisk, all available on the internet. These Zionists and their supporters are clearly a very small minority, although they are disproportionally powerful, disproportionally wealthy, and disproportionally cruel!

The Neocons may perhaps want such a police state in their monumentally criminal endeavors for empire – they are the ones who developed the essential elements in the Patriot Acts, which did not magically materialize within a month of 9-11. I have often heard talk of the existence of an ultra secret government within the American government, drawn from all branches of the (unelected) bureaucracy comprising 70 to a 100 individuals, who regularly practice taking over the reins of the government in simulation, and running the nation from underground bunkers – a legacy of the Cold War still being continued. These individuals remain constant across administrations. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary presently running the Pentagon, a seasoned veteran of the Cold War, is rumored to perhaps be the head of this cabal. These demented kooks bring to mind the scenarios of “Dr. Strangelove”, and the secretive unaccountable activities described in Body of Secrets by James Bamford about the inner workings of the NSA. Without another courageous Daniel Ellsberg leaking out a sequel to the Pentagon Papers, one can only speculate what these kooks are up to. Clearly these are only a handful of people, although quite powerful. And they perhaps constantly dream of a police state with someone like George Bush Jr. as the front face: “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator”.

It is also possible that such a police state is what the extreme fanatic right-wing Christian Evangelical crusaders may want – they apparently seek to hasten the arrival of their lord with a forced Armageddon upon the rest of humanity. After all, the Attorney General of America, John Ashcroft, and President of America, George Bush Jr., both right-wing Evangelical Christians, did eagerly approve the Patriot Acts. It is certainly in their interests for people of America to remain silent bystanders while their ardent supporters bring salvation of Biblical proportions to the lesser peoples: “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done”. We are clearly seeing this profound ‘Bushian Justice’ being generously disseminated by the plane loads in Iraq and Palestine under the “Bush Doctrine”!

And it is also possible that this is what some of the racist supremacist and other nihilist Neanderthals in America may want – I don’t know for sure as I have never met one, but I am told they exist. All of these people are surely also a minority in the American milieu, albeit perhaps a substantial one according to some people.

But is a police state something that the majority of American public wants?

What is your verdict? It cannot possibly be yes!

Therefore, through the humble pages of this book, I invite this segment of the American public, the ones who do not share any ulterior motives with the demagogues leading them, who I believe are only pursuing their “American Dream” with vigor as the “conscionable” back bone of America, to immediately and without further ado, commence the real war on terrorism – by looking for the terrorist and assorted war mongering monumental criminals in their own hallowed institutions of power first. It will bring them true peace and security world wide, and without any loss of freedoms and civil liberties in their own lives.

This is the premise behind my book. That once knowledge will come to the good people, the American public will not choose to remain (willfully) ignorant. It is only a matter of showing them the blood on thine hands that “all the perfumes of Arabia” will not wash off, and for them to accept it – beyond the expected initial denial (see Plato). Once that realization sets in, then all the chains in the world, invisible or not, will not hold them – as they fill the streets of America to take their country back. This is my expectation, my hope, and I fear the only hope for mankind in the short term. The American government must be reined in from visiting further ‘justice’ upon other defenseless nations. There just isn’t another choice. Since there are no rivals internationally that can dare impose their will upon the American empire. It is only the conscionable American public who must impose its democratic will upon the American empire.

The only “earthly” power at the moment that can immediately checkmate the “godly” ambitions of the Washington Neocons and their Zionist and Evangelical Christian allies in their nefarious agendas to transform the world for their own corporate, hegemonic, and crusading interests, is the awakened peoples of America.

Their time to act is now, when it is still possible for them to legally protest, when they still retain their constitutional rights, when the Patriot Act 2 has not yet been passed, and when martial law has not yet been imposed. Only they can bring to bear the pressure to which the White House responds. It is only in their consideration that the monopolar superpower in the world today cannot see body bags. Otherwise the Neocon planners would have no problems with body bags – a necessary evil they would argue, just as they argue today that a lifetime of war has now become a necessary evil, their “World War IV”. They certainly couldn’t care less for other people’s bodies – which don’t even get to be put in bags – just thrown about in lorries like dead cattle, or completely decimated at the altar of the Daisy Cutters. These images though conveniently hidden from the American public, are seen world wide. Why keep the American public chained prisoners in the cave of ignorance? Precisely because of the fear of their potential awakening and fighting back to reclaim their People’s Democracy. This is also the only way for the Americans to truly become safe from “evil-doers”.

America’s Profound Shame – The collective hypocrisy and responsibility of the American Nation

I wish to finally conclude with a few words on the collective and national hypocrisy of the American public that cannot be so charitably dismissed as indoctrinated and deceived individuals being “Innocent of Knowledge” and captive “Prisoners of the cave”.

The Americans as a nation, seem to have bizarrely frozen in time all crimes against humanity committed by a state, to Nazi Germany. Even as the slaughter of innocent civilians goes on in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq with impunity, it is only the crime of Holocaust against the Jews that remains persistent in the American public psyche with vows of never to let it happen again to anyone. Elaborate war crime tribunals are created in Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Jerusalem, and various human rights conventions, treaties, and international laws are drawn to safe guard humanity from the future barbarism of mentally deranged war mongering lunatics. “Following orders”, “collective civilian punishment”, and “indifference” are made repugnant, immoral, and even criminal as excuses for war crimes. And the distinguished survivor of the Holocaust, director of the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel issues this curse in his memoirs All Rivers Run to the Sea: and I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent.

As the American nation continues to reflect on the Holocaust victims with memorials and Hollywood films over decades, it silently watches the public spectacles of the Bush government compelling the world to exempt them from America’s own yardstick for civilized existence by seeking immunity from prosecution in the world court for war crimes. And the nation dutifully salutes the flag “United We Stand” at the systematic launching of “Shock and Awe” of civilian populations and their civilian infrastructures with millions of tons of Depleted Uranium bombs and frightening munitions. And this after a decade of strangulating economic sanctions which have already resulted in the death and starvation of a million civilians. These new victims however remain ignored and unmourned in the American conscience as the Holocaust is commemorated with even more fervor, and pledges for “never again” staunchly renewed.

What is going on here?

Why are the Jewish Holocaust victims at the hands of the Nazi war machine of the past century deemed more worthy of consideration, even if only in constant remembrance of a lesson learned as it should, but the contemporary innocent civilian Muslim victims at the hands of the American war machine not even sympathized with or mourned, when something can actually be done to halt their barbaric terrorization, displacement, internment, and wanton slaughter as an application of that very lesson learned?

The fact of the existence of these innocent civilian victims cannot be denied, and nor is it denied. General Colin Powell even openly proclaimed his “Shock and Awe” terror campaign on densely populated cities. Instead, these victims are daily subjected to the same kind of vile and dehumanizing propaganda that was leveled at the Jews culminating in the Holocaust. Their victimization is justified either as inevitable collateral damage for a higher cause, or as altogether deserved for the higher objective of “saving American lives”! Any act no matter how barbaric, is permissible to save American lives.

Does the import of Elie Wiesel’s curse only apply to some victimizers and not others? Obviously, he meant to write those words only for his Nazi persecutors – yet their stark significance is left for some hypothetical future victims and not applied to the bombing and destruction of civilian Muslims occurring today. Why? Is it because they share the religion of Islam with the supposed “Muslim” perpetrators of 9-11?

Taking everything at face value about 9-11: accepting on faith the White House’s unsubstantiated and unproven assertions of it being the work of “Muslim” terrorists; even accepting President Bush’s unsubstantiated and actually disproved assertions of Sadaam Hussein possessing WMDs being an imminent threat to America; and even that he was directly responsible for 9-11; accepting all these assertions as gospel truth handed by god himself to the American people, how can the American public condone, let alone actively support the “Shock and Awe” retaliation on innocent civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq with all of America’s superpower might?

Have the American people become a nation of cowards that they pick on the defenseless and the weak with long range bombers and depleted Uranium munitions which keep on killing for decades and even centuries after the hostilities are over? For four decades the Americans could not pick a direct fight with their arch nemesis the Soviet Union – because the latter also had teeth and could bite back. But now, is it time to brow beat all the other much weaker nations into submission? The new barbarians in three piece suits? If there is any other conclusion that any rational person can come to, what is it?

There were no large armies amassed to attack America unlike Pearl Harbor in 1941. There were no vast military and industrial infrastructures to be destroyed as in Dresden and Tokyo. Only at best, some tens or hundreds of individual bare footed criminals 20 thousand miles away hiding in caves and surrounded by hungry, barefooted, and war-ravaged civilian tribal communities, or in equally distant and quite defenseless, years of sanction starved deserts amidst some of the most dense civilian population centers in the region. And even under the assumption that these were the criminal masterminds behind 911, a collective inhuman punishment was and is being visited upon millions of civilians. All of this is a fact that is openly known to the public.

Even worse, how can the American public not absolutely go berserk and immediately march on the White House at the White House’s open proclamation of unilateral preemptive nuclear strikes at non-nuclear nations? Here again there is no aspect of deception, only open belligerence and Nuclear War mongering posture upon the majority of innocent people who happen to live in the same area as the few “evil doers”.

While in as much as this book has concentrated on demonstrating how Zbigniew Brzezinski’s diabolical thesis in the “Grand Chessboard” is actually being put into practice post 9-11, and how the American population is being bamboozled into an imperial mobilization through lies and deceit, it has not dwelled upon this moral lapse and plain guilt of the American population and the American Congress, from which neither may claim the often abused “I didn’t know” exemption. Both knowingly and deliberately agreed to decimating civilian populations with awesomely frightening weapons of mass destruction of their own nation’s making.

The sole exception being the lone dissenting and courageous voice of Congress Woman Barbara Lee from Oakland California, and the few hundred thousand people of conscience futilely protesting the call to war in the main streets of America.

The claim to “innocence of knowledge” due to being “prisoners of the cave” may only be made with respect to the deception game of their government and their media in keeping the American public in the dark. Not with respect to what the American public already quite plainly knows. And even that claim to innocence henceforth, has been eviscerated in this book.

The American nation collectively cannot be absolved of accountability, nor escape restitution and compensation to the innocent victims of this “war on terrorism”. The unheard cries of the innocent victims demand it.

I do not advocate collective punishment of any people for the crimes of their leaders – whether elected, selected, inherited, or imposed (that pretty much covers the entire planet). But collective punishment is precisely what is likely to transpire at the hands of the innocent victims of America’s global wars who will see no other recourse than to bring the same war home to those watching it on HD television in the comfort of their American living rooms. As this poignant verse notes:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do Evil in return.
” (W.H. AUDEN, “September 1, 1939”)

There may not remain much difference between Iraqi, Afghani, and Palestinian civilian victims, and American civilian victims – the graveyard is the ultimate equalizer. To protect you – or so they will claim, your leaders will convert this country into a lucrative corporate controlled police state; already many of the prison systems in this nation are run by them. The day isn’t very far away when no one will be able to move from their home without showing ID cards at military-police checkpoints on every off ramp and gas station in America.

The oil that all industrialized nations so covet, is really still under other people’s soil. All the “evil-doers” have to do is to detonate some nuclear bombs in their own oil fields and there is no process known to man that can remove radioactivity from gasoline. A “Samson” defense isn’t the prerogative of Israel alone. Especially when this self-defense can also completely destroy their arch enemies. With the oil fields “peaking”, as some fear mongers boldly allege even while Mobil and Chevron et. al. reap in record breaking profits each year, the long lines and 1929 can be brought back just as easily as the coming military draft – be it of economic servitude, skills of the professional, or the precious lives of the youth. Allies today can easily become arch nemesis tomorrow over a shrinking pie. We shall all be collectively punished when the dominoes fall, bystanders and silent spectators and all. The law of unintended consequences is still among the least understood laws of nature!

Self-interest alone dictates immediate atonement and restitution – before it is too late.

This book is in two parts. Part-1 discloses my dialog with the United States Security agencies in the essay “They dared to knock on my door”.

Part-2, titled “The Innocent of Knowledge” from Shakespeare’s famous play (Macbeth 3:2:45), employs some key insightful themes from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book “The Grand Chessboard”, to deconstruct, dismantle, and entirely dethrone the fiction of “war on terrorism” which is entirely blueprinted in this 1996-97 “American Mein Kampf” written by the quintessential “ubermensch” mastermind who is directly responsible for “Some stirred-up Moslems” when “giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” with Muslim blood. This blood still runs just as red!

© Zahir Ebrahim

April 2003

Abstract

This essay describes my two encounters with the United States of America’s Security Agencies as they came knocking on my door in March and April 2003 in the supposed hot pursuit of the boogie man du-jour. The essay describes what transpired, how I felt, and my extemporaneous lecture to them on how dare they come visit me without any justification other than ethnic and religious profiling. Why should they want to interrogate me just because I am a Muslim from a foreign country? Is that now a crime in America?

I was startled by that dreaded knock on the front door, and not a polite one at that, nor even ringing of the door bell, but what sounded like urgent pounding. Two men flashed their badges in my face for a few seconds when I rushed to the door, stated that they were from the FBI, and asked me if I was Mr. so and so. The badges disappeared just as quickly as they had appeared in the best rendering of life imitating art I had ever seen. When I replied in the affirmative, they asked to see my ID to verify it. After I had shown them my driver’s license and they seemed satisfied that I was indeed the person they had asked for, they started asking me for my SSN (Social Security Number), my telephone number, whether I was citizen or permanent resident, and if the latter to show them the Green card, how long I had been in the country, when did I become permanent resident, when did I travel last?

Now being a reasonably intelligent person under normal conditions, it suddenly occurred to me to ask them why they were talking to me in the first place, and how my name was flagged to them. They indicated that my name had loosely matched a terrorist they were looking for and it was off by only a couple of letters in the name, but that fortunately for me the guy they were seeking was thin and short, while I am tall and big, so I should relax and simply answer their questions. I questioned them that if they were already convinced I wasn’t the guy they wanted, why were they still here, and why I should answer any of their questions beyond having showed them my ID to prove my identity? And in my heart I was thanking God for the first time about my overweight, for I could have been in the docks based solely on my size according to them. They mumbled something about this “terrorism thing around us” being the reason they wanted to talk to me now that they were here anyway.

My head still in a daze but starting to function again slowly, I suggested to them that the number of possible names they would be searching based on their ‘partial string matching’ criteria could potentially be in the thousands, and were they planning to visit them all at their homes? They said no. So now it seemed that they had picked me specifically. And if they could find out where I lived, they could just as easily find out answers to the questions they were asking me by simply looking them up on their super computers. So why this visit to my home in the first place? What did they really want to talk to me about? And what was the real criteria they used to finger me? And what was in that folder they were carrying in their hand that they kept referring to? So I asked them whether I could see what information they had on me in that folder, and I stretched my hand out to receive it from them: “Well, the FBI is not in the business of disclosing its information to anyone” was the curt reply as they moved the folder closer to their chest.

I was getting more and more perturbed that perhaps they had come to me because I was a certain nationality and a brown skinned Muslim at that, and all of the preceding dialog could just be a pretext. To confirm this further, I asked them if they were also planning to interview any of the other folks in the neighborhood, and they said no, it was just me they wanted to talk to. Why me? The fact that their story line would have been so obviously unconvincing to anyone except the most naive, also disturbed me very much. Did they think I was stupid? Or perhaps they wanted me to feel that indeed their pretext was phony so that I might get afraid? Why didn’t they just leave when they indicated they were satisfied I was not the person they were chasing. And if that was indeed only a pretext, why didn’t they simply come right out and tell me honestly why they had come to my house? I might have been more agreeable had they demonstrated some legitimate cause. All of these things started to whirl in my fertile imagination and I began to see the Japanese internment camps of World War II looming at the horizon. My heart was beating rather quickly, but I mustered some presence of mind and decided not to submit to any of their questioning without a lawyer present, and I told them so.

I was quite relieved when they very politely agreed, even apologized several times for having disturbed and distressed me so much, reassured me that they had not come to arrest me nor was I a suspect in any way and they were simply chasing down terrorists, and left me with their calling card and the scary recollections from Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” about how the Jewish community was gradually intimidated from similar knocks on the door into a full blown Holocaust:

They never demanded the impossible, made no unpleasant comments, and even smiled occasionally at the mistress of the house … even brought a box of chocolates. The optimists rejoiced … ‘what did we tell you. You wouldn’t believe us. They are your Germans … where is their famous cruelty.’ The Germans were already in the town, the Fascists were already in power, the verdict had already been pronounced, yet the Jews of Sighet continued to smile.

I have no reason to smile. One of the disturbing consequences of being a thinking person who is not ignorant of the lessons of history, and who is not unwary of the propaganda in the mainstream American media that dutifully toes the government’s line as if they were a state sponsored news agency of the Soviet Union of the yore, is the awesome realization that I am living in a nation that is fast declining into the worst form of Fascism ever to exist. For like the people in Plato’s mythical cave, where all they can see and experience is the reality synthesized for them by the spinning controllers outside the cave, the majority of the kind people in this great nation are becoming enslaved and don’t even realize it. It is worse than a gilded cage, because there is no need for a cage for the “Prisoners of the Cave” (see Part-2 of this book). Is it any coincidence that the United States is the only country in the world in which while there have been record antiwar protests in many of its cities, the vast majority of its mainstream public overwhelmingly supports the “war on terrorism” as evidenced by opinion polls and the rising popularity of its President? Does this perhaps have anything to do with the fact that the mainstream public is also incessantly being exposed to the government leaders arguing the justifications for this “fictitious war” with “fictitious facts”, necessitating all this curbing of civil liberties to hunt down the “fictitious fifth columnist” – and not to the opposing voices and reasoned critics who possess the tools and knowledge to dismantle and deconstruct this “fiction” that is perpetuated through mindless repetitions of “officials say” in the well oiled media machinery? The unnerving similarities between the rise of Fascism in Germany – the Third Reich, and what is happening now in this once great and hospitable nation for all immigrants – the making of a Fourth Reich, is making me reconsider whether I should pack my bags and catch that last boat out of this place before this impending “Red Yellow and Green” travel ticket labeling technology of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) system inadvertently closes even the doors of exit for its victims.

Then the door bell rang again three weeks later. After the FBI’s first visit, I had immediately called the National Lawyers Guild for advice. Thanks to the fliers they had distributed everywhere, we had put up their phone number up on the wall and didn’t have to hunt for it. They immediately gave me the name and contact for a wonderful attorney, who in turn met with me to explain to me what was really going on in the immigrant community with respect to this “war on terrorism”. “What they were really after was compiling an extensive database of every detail of your life”, my lawyer explained. I had been under the impression that perhaps the FBI had mistakenly visited me, and I should try to clear up the matter with them so that they wouldn’t hassle me at airports when we traveled during the summer vacation with the kids.

My very distinguished and kindly attorney must have surely marveled at my naiveté when he suggested that the FBI is not in the business of clearing people, there was no such thing. All they are doing is compiling a database right now, and who knows how it could be used in the future, perhaps it would be one of the feeders into the TIA system. So why were they asking me all these questions whose answers they should already have in their own computers? Because that was just a pretext to get you to talk about your brother or sister or friend or people at the mosque or to peek at your passport to see where you have been or the content of the discussion you were seen to be having around the cooler in your office or with your neighbor or colleague from 10 years ago, etc. etc. explained my lawyer.

Oh boy! I wasn’t keen on participating in this Gestapo interrogation, sugar coated though it might have been, but I was still anxious to know what had really triggered the FBI to come to my house like that. Being a law abiding and tax paying engineer by profession, with more than two dozen patents, having contributed to the computer industry that fueled the silicon valley technological revolution even if only as a cog in the capitalist machinery, and having lived more than half my life in this country pursuing the proverbial American dream, of making an honest living and raising a family in the pursuit of life liberty and happiness for all, it was quite distressing to me that I should be visited by the FBI at my home. They had caught me in my pajamas enjoying a sunny afternoon, without any intimation of their visit. Not the best way to seek cooperation – only foster intimidation. So my lawyer decided to write them a letter seeking further clarification on the real reasons for their visit to my house, whether I was some sort of suspect or not, and declining to being interviewed by them or anyone else until we got some clarification.

Furthermore, the two men who had identified themselves as FBI agents left me their business card that stated they were from the local Sheriff’s office, “Special Operations Division – Criminal Intelligence/Vice Unit”, and not the FBI. After they had left, while waiting to get in touch with my assigned attorney, I had called the number of the Sheriff’s office by first getting it from 411 (information) just to verify that it wasn’t some kind of con game for getting me to divulge my social security number, and I was told that the officer was indeed working there but was on special deputation, and they could not say any more. When I told my attorney about my sleuthing, he seemed quite surprised that the local county Sheriff’s office was cooperating in conducting intrusive interviews of the immigrant community when several local cities had passed resolutions not to cooperate with the FBI in their enactment of the draconian Patriot Act.

So now three weeks later when I greeted two new strangers at the door flashing their Homeland Security badges at me, I was initially stunned. They again asked for me by my name, and questioned me whether I was a citizen or permanent resident, and wanted to see my green card when I answered them. But this time, for some reason, I felt myself getting mad. I asked them what kind of information system they had that they know my name and address but cannot look up my immigration status on their computers, that they physically had to drive up here to question me when they could have simply sent me a letter requesting my presence at their immigration office to verify my status. They muttered something about their databases or computers from the 70s and 80s not working properly with modern systems, I did not quite understand their explanation. And my mind was doing a logical analysis of why couldn’t they have simply written to me if that was indeed the case, to come down to their office with my green card? And if I was a flight risk or something, then why wait 3 weeks after the first FBI visit. And especially after I had specifically indicated through my lawyer to the FBI that I did not want to be disturbed like this? Or was this a brand new visit, unrelated to the previous one? And then I also got a little afraid, because two plus two was adding up to five.

So I asked them to wait until I contacted my lawyer to see what my options were, that I was only going to cooperate with them to the extent that they were lawfully entitled to, and that I was going to assert every single right that this country’s Constitution afforded me. And I let them know in no uncertain terms that I was upset at their visit to my home. They warned me that unless I produced my green card right there and then, they will arrest me. I responded that I wanted to verify whether they indeed had this right to ask for my green card by making this cold call visit to my home, when they were not making similar visits to any of my neighbors nor seeking this information from anyone else other than brown skinned people. After a bit of loud argument in which they wanted to know whether I was calling them racist, and that they themselves were of Hispanic origin and were not racist, I said no I was not calling them racist and would they kindly allow me to make this phone call to my lawyer, they graciously agreed. But they also requested that I return them the courtesy by leaving the front door open, to which I agreed by saying that normally we are very hospitable people and under any other circumstance I would have invited them in and offered them tea, but that in this case they were kindly not to come inside my house without a warrant. Now that I look back on that moment, I am very surprised that I had the chutzpah to stand up to the Homeland Security people like that, and also quite relieved that they turned out to be tolerant enough to not arrest me for it. I must admit that it also gives me hope that all is not lost yet, that old laws are still being upheld and the basic decencies of their executors still does shine through their facades.

So I called my lawyer while the G men waited at the open door. The poor attorney who despite being quite sick very kindly answered his cell phone, and confirmed to me that the immigration and homeland security folks could ask me for my immigration status by making a cold call visit to my home. It appeared that the FBI had sent in bigger guns. So I dug out my green card from the secure passport container that I keep it in for safe keeping along with rest of our travel documents and showed it to them. Now a new drama ensued. First one of the officers examined it carefully and said something that sounded like “this is not valid”. And I freaked out. What do you mean it’s not valid? Me, the meticulous person all of my life in every such detail, how can my green card not be valid? The officer said I should get a new one, that it was a lot nicer. And now I am even more confused. What has nice got anything to do with it?

I asked him to explicitly state to me in clear language what was wrong with my green card which I had carried with me faithfully for almost 19 years now. No one at the port of entries during our summer travels previously had ever said a word about it not being valid. In fact, they would simply scan it and presumably all my history would show up on their computers and they would happily waive me on, never even asking me any of the questions they usually asked other brown people with green cards. So what was up here?

The officer called someone on his cell phone, read out my green card number, got some kind of confirmation, and made me feel quite relieved when he stated to me that there was nothing wrong with the green card and that it was still very valid, but that I should get the new one because it was a lot nicer! Now, my green card is the permanent type that does not need to be renewed during one’s lifetime, whereas the new ones, I understand, need renewal every so many years. I was not about to trade in my precious permanent credential for something that might look a lot nicer. Who cares how it looks? And besides, who knows, perhaps it has a microchip embedded in it that tracks all your movements, as part of the TIA. In any case, after the Homeland security officer had cleared my green card and advised me to always carry it on my person instead of keeping it in a safety box, and panic had subsided, a strange thing occurred.

By this time it must have been at least 20 or more minutes and we seemed to have developed a rapport of some strange Orwellian sort through it all. The weeks and months of unvoiced frustration that had been building up inside me about the harassment and intimidation that the Muslim community was suffering unjustly, all due to the adventureism of the few in the White House, suddenly came to the surface. Strangely, now I became their interlocutor. I called them back as they started to leave, and started lecturing them on how unhappy I was about this whole thing, how civil liberties were being eroded in the name of security. They remarked that they were only following an order from up above and did not know why they were sent to my house, to which I reminded them of what Eichmann said in his Jerusalem trial, that he was just following orders. Then they argued that they were just doing this to keep their streets secure, and I reminded them of what their own founding father the great Benjamin Franklin had said about the preciousness of freedom, that those who trade their essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserved neither.

Then my wife showed up from work, and being even more outspoken than me, and being a US citizen, she got very upset at their visiting our home like this, attempting to terrorize and intimidate us with their Gestapo tactics and she said so. And then she exclaimed: “perhaps when I return home one day I will not find my husband because he would have been hauled off to Guantanamo Bay”. So what does one of the officer respond with? Instead of reassuring us that something like that wouldn’t happen, that we weren’t suspects or anything, like the FBI agents had done previously, he goes: “Well I have been there, it’s not such a bad place”. And I remarked “were you on the inside or the outside?”, quite incredulous at this insane justification for hauling someone innocent off to the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay where according to all reports, the conditions of the interred even in the most optimistic manner can be best described as inhuman. And he responded by saying something even more bizarre “well aren’t we are, all inside of something”! I could feel a Kafkaesque moment coming on. Were they playing with me or was it just that they couldn’t think fast enough at their own interlocution at our hands?

I felt that just the fact that they had knocked on my door and no one else’s in the neighborhood, was racial profiling and a presumption of guilt on their part, and a very intimidating moment for me because now I was going to have psychological problems about door knocks and door bells. And I also worried that my questioning them about their right to do so might lead them to think that I was trying to hide something. So I explained out loud to them that while I had nothing to hide, there was no reason for them to be suspicious at my wanting to assert my rights. I was living in a country which did accord me such rights, which is why I was living here and not elsewhere in the first place. I lectured them that it was unfair that they had their periscopes drawn on the Muslim community, that despite this “war on terrorism”, innocent until proven guilty was a fundamental edict of this nation and cannot be wiped away by the Patriot Act 1, intrusive and obnoxious though it may be. And I even cautioned them, just in case they were not aware – few people are, of the looming Patriot Act 2 which is far more insidious and dangerous proposal for all US citizens and would impact them and their children and grandchildren far more than it would impact me, since I am not a citizen. I told them the story of the proverbial frog which can easily jump out of instant hot water and escape, but not from the reassuring warmth of gradually heated luke-warm water whose temperature is raised slowly to a boiling point, one civil liberty at a time, until there is no escape, only Fascism. They just stared at me, perhaps confounded by my spontaneous burst of outspokenness. Perhaps they had not expected such a reception, perhaps they were usually accustomed to the acquiescence of people they had been visiting up to that time, and had not thought about any of these issues as they carried out their normal course of duties. Like it used to be in Germany!

Why was I so garrulously lecturing the two officers from Homeland Security on the erosion of civil rights? As I am sure they must have wondered while they seemed to have all the time in the world listening to my rant. I don’t know whether they were recording my speech surreptitiously or were simply trying to placate me, perhaps they felt badly, I don’t know. But I answered their unstated question quite clearly that I wanted them to go home and reflect on these persecutory orders that they were following blindly. I told them quite frankly, that well intentioned though they might be in diligently trying to do their jobs to earn a living, the unintended consequences of their actions was having a drastic effect. It was not only creating fear and terror in the immigrant community and causing discussions in families about whether it was indeed time to leave this country – their home for the past so many years, but also providing legitimacy to these draconian measures by the government. In time, it will come to bite their own families – weren’t they of Hispanic origin? At some point during my tirade, they wondered why I had not become a citizen all this time, I had sure been here long enough – as if one’s native nationality is of no value. I felt a bit offended at that question and blurted out that in this unfortunate climate of oppression with G-men knocking at my door, I saw no compelling reason to become a citizen of this United States.

I was making these comments to them perhaps at the risk of being labeled “uncooperative” and “non-submissive”, and what if that is fed into the TIA system which in turn may deny me boarding my flight when I want to visit my mother in an emergency? Being a computer science person myself, I well understand the pitfalls of false positives of systems like the TIA, where an elephant can easily squeak by but a mouse is netted. And what of my transcribing these events and going public with it? Having been a private person all my life, not much caring for limelight or publicity, as my wife and I endeavor to raise our family with the freedom and opportunity that this country was providing us, will I now pay for exercising my free speech rights, the most prized edict of this nation?

But is anyone listening? Free speech only means something when there is someone listening. I can have all the free speech in vacuum and still die from asphyxiation.

Thus ended my saga with the two G men from Homeland Security at my door. I doubt if I made much of an impression on them besides that of a very agitated person. But I do hope I was articulate enough to make them at least think twice before they go knocking on other immigrants home like this, when they can just as easily send them a courteous letter requesting them to bring their paper work to the immigration office for verification. Similarly, there is no need for the FBI to come knocking with such urgency that they even don’t see the door bell, they can do likewise and request an audience at a police station along with an attorney. There is absolutely no justification for causing intimidation and fear by knocks on the door at homes in front of family members and children. Unless of course there is a more insidious purpose behind it, that the intent is indeed to intimidate the Muslim and immigrant community and create fear on purpose, so that many of them would simply pack up and leave. This rings too familiar with what transpired with the Jews in xenophobic Nazi Germany, and I sure hope that this is not true in this country. Thus to demonstrate it is not true, why don’t they just stop the harassment with the door knocks? I would have been quite willing to comply with a written request to show up at an immigration office with my green card, albeit I have grave concerns answering unjustified private questions that are just feeders into a database for the TIA. I would probably not answer them. Or would I? Two plus two can ultimately still make five!

Before they departed, the two officers did advise me that if we did not like the new laws being framed in this country, my wife being a US citizen, should write to our congress person and be an active participant in the democratic process. The conversation with them overall was quite cordial, albeit their responses at times didn’t always make much sense to me – perhaps they were an invitation to keep talking, and there was indeed an Orwellian touch to the whole thing. I did not feel threatened by them except at the beginning when they wanted to see my Green card or else, and under any other ‘normal’ circumstance, these guys could very well have been my respected colleagues at work. And that is indeed one of my biggest fears, that ordinary well intentioned people, may end up becoming complicit in perpetuating the most heinous crimes of the future through their silence or unquestioning inadvertence of their jobs – yet again.

My attorney later told me that the first FBI agent called him up in response to his letter, and much after this second visit by Homeland security, identified himself as an FBI agent, and told him that it was a purely “voluntary” questioning they wanted to do of me. When my attorney informed him that I was quite keen on clearing up any misunderstandings they might have but that I would like my attorney to be present, the FBI agent said he did not see any point in interviewing me if an attorney was to be present, and just hung up!

In other words, if I have legal representation, they leave me alone! They only want to interrogate me if I don’t have legal representation! And they don’t even inform me that it is voluntary when they first come to visit and instead tell me that my name had loosely matched some terrorist they were hunting down! So much for the State’s Security apparatus upholding the public’s civil rights in good faith! My knowing and insisting on my rights because of the brochure that NLG had handed out was instrumental in defeating their design of interrogating me without legal representation – or so it appears for the moment. Only for the moment however, as they can always interrogate one at airports, especially on arrival from overseas. In the guise of making immigration checks, they are regularly putting Muslims through a barrage of unjustified questioning and there are no lawyers present then.

It is also somewhat confusing what precisely are their rights under the new Patriot Act 1. Contradicting my attorney’s advice to show them my credentials, several other civil rights lawyers including from NLG subsequently told me that even Homeland Security does not have the right and could not have legally arrested me for not showing them my green card on demand inside my own home. This is why I had taken the stand in the first place. But those federal agents just wouldn’t back off necessitating that call to my attorney. And while my attorney saved me from further unnecessary aggravation for he quickly realized that I should not become the test case for this, I am somewhat confused about where the new boundaries are between Rights of the people vs. Rights of the new laws, which are themselves unconstitutional. This has become so bizarre that we are debating the legality of unconstitutional laws, but not with respect to the Constitution as it should be, but with respect to what extent they are applicable! I thank my attorney for thinking of my personal well being over and above those of the civil rights cause for which he has devoted his entire life (he even refused to take monetary compensation from me despite my telling him that I could afford to pay him and he instead directed me to donate it when I insisted that he accept payment for representing me). For had he said no instead of yes, I was fully determined to not show them my green card and who knows what might have happened. I was not living in America to experience their State Fascism. I could certainly experience plenty of it elsewhere in much of the developing world replete with American client-states.

I do not know when there will be another knock on my door. But I dread it very much. Not because I have something to be guilty for, but because it is indeed not a question of innocence or guilt. I am no more guilty than the poor Jew was in the 1930s as he was marched to unspeakable horrors, and it had also started for him with an innocuous knock on the door, only to be apologized for later by the rest of the world vowing never to forget. Or the poor Japanese was in the 1940s as he was unceremoniously scooped into the internment camps at the orders of a US President, again beginning with a knock on the door, only to be apologized for decades later by another US President. Or the alleged communist sympathizer was in the 1950s, when a US Senator used the FBI to run a campaign of fear and terror in the pursuit of a fictitious enemy, culminating in the FBI abusing their powers of surveillance on the respected civil rights leaders in the 1960s, leading to the eventual recognition that security agencies cannot be trusted to uphold the rights of ordinary citizens and a curtailment of their powers in the 1970s, which have now been re-unleashed in the 2000s on the Muslims by yet another overzealous US President.

Is this nation so “memory challenged” that it needs refreshing every decade or so at the expense of witch hunting another minority community? The only thing Muslims are guilty of, is perhaps the hijab they wear, the mosque they visit, the country they hail from, or their skin tone. Why should that elicit a visit from the FBI, when blond haired, church going, white Christian folks are exempt from such visits? Weren’t Timothy McVeigh and Terry McNichols Christian terrorists who blew up the Oklahoma state building? While it has not been proven that 9-11 was the work of Muslims, only unsubstantiated blanket assertions made by the American government that it indeed was the handiwork of a handful of Arab “Muslim terrorists” (their bodies were never found, 5 of the 19 names attributed to the dead hijackers were later discovered to belong to innocent people quite alive and healthy), why is it suddenly okay to hold culpable an entire people because of the sins of individual criminals, even if they were “Muslims”? Such standards if applied to the Jews would lead to an uproar in the American society with charges of Anti-Semitism. And of course never applied to the Christians themselves. Double standards can ultimately, never win – but a price has to be paid for it – again and again.

Wake up sleeping and complacent America!

It may have started with the Muslims, but it will not end there. You might be next. Fascism usually starts against a minority group, because it is easier to tolerate since it is only happening to those “damn Arabs” – not to us – how did our oil get under their sand anyway? But the laws that are getting on the books in the persecution of the minority, tend to stay there for a long time. If not you, then your children will surely pay the price. Are the Bill of Rights so trivial that you can stay silent? If not for reasons of compassion for another, then at least for the logic of self preservation, do not let this injustice prevail.

It will be of no compensation when several Ph.D. theses will be written by the succeeding generations about why and how their parents’ generation could remain so silent, as a once democratic country with such lofty ideals, slowly descended into a Fascist state within, and the world’s most barbaric imperial power outside. All the warning signs are plain to see, their designs even documented by the imperial perpetuators themselves, if only one can read. The images of reality pleadingly tell the truth – if only one is allowed to see them.

If we, all of us, do not arm ourselves with knowledge and critical thinking now, and don’t exercise our Constitutional rights in publicly challenging the injustices done in our name, it might indeed be too late by the time we do finally wake up, when they would dare knock on anyone’s front door, not just the Muslims. And no rights left to legally protest! Countless would have paid the price for our privilege of writing remorseful theses, soul searching books, sorrowful poetry, and sheepish apologies, in the future – yet again.

Epilogue

Taking a leaf out of my own book, I gave my first interview to the American news media in a joint press conference with the ADC (American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee), the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and the NLG (National Lawyers Guild) on May 28, 2003, attempting to tell the whole world what they were trying to do to the Muslims. I called up all the organizations I could think off, from Washington DC to San Francisco, including CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), and told them my story if they had 5 minutes to spare. I was quite certain that my phone was tapped, and I made it a point to speak very openly about my views in the hope that any eavesdroppers might actually learn something from me that would make them ponder. The authorities have mercifully left me alone since their last visit. I traveled overseas during the summer 2003 despite apprehensions of getting a grilling at the airports, and was pleasantly surprised to face no questioning of any sort, either upon departure, or upon re-entering the United States several months later, using the same Green Card that I have had for 20 years now. Perhaps some guardian angel has been watching (over) me.

Footnotes

The two visits by the FBI and Homeland Security occurred in mid March and early April 2003, respectively. For days after the second visit by the Federal agents, I was very stressed out. I just could not figure out what they wanted from me, and why they had chosen me. I kept bugging my attorney with questions about how they could get hold of my name, until he suggested I take a look at the local newspaper of that day in which there was an article about the success of the FBI interviews with the local immigrant Iraqi community just as the bombing of Iraq was underway. He suggested that if their visits were bothering me so much that I couldn’t sleep, that perhaps I should consider talking to the reporter who had written that story and enlighten them on the tactics the FBI was using that was being called “success”, and that perhaps this would bring further attention to the Patriot Acts and how they were being used intrusively against innocent people. The idea of going public with my story took instant root, but instead of talking to the media as I was apprehensive that they will not tell the entire story or butcher it up as they normally tend to do, I sat down the same day, on Tuesday April 6, 2003, and wrote the bulk of this essay. The next day I surprised my attorney with a copy as a record of these events for his file. I also gave a copy to the NLG. They showed it to a TV documentary crew from Germany, who in turn called me up and asked to make a documentary on my family as part of their coverage of the emerging police state atmosphere in America showing how the Patriot Act had affected the lives of ordinary people in America, to be aired on public TV in France and Germany. I offered them an interview in my lawyers office, but they didn’t think that would make good television viewing, and instead wished to film my family in our daily routine and open up the privacy of our home to the world. I wasn’t ready for that yet, and declined.

© Zahir Ebrahim

April – June 2003

Abstract

The majority of the American public appears quite unconcerned about their loss of civil liberties, the passage of the USA Patriot Act, and the barbaric bombings of two civilizations in this “war on terrorism” – what James Woolsey, the former director of CIA, quite candidly referred to as “World War IV”. The American public appears to be rooting and cheering their leaders louder with each bombing mission for the homeland! The images they see on their television screens is one of Iraqi children garlanding the American soldiers – but no body bags, neither of the Americans, nor of the victims. Is this eerily reminiscent of an era that was mercifully thought to be over? How did we get here? Why do they hate us? Why don’t they hate us more? Why should General Colin Powell wave fictitious evidence in the UN and the entire American mainstream public stand up and salute in the finest tradition of the Third Reich – are we in the making of a Fourth Reich? Is this the 1930s revisited? Or is it “1984” belated? The analysis presented in Part-2 is the first of its kind to seek help from Plato, Shakespeare, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to unravel the Machiavellian deception game being played on a gullible public. Is the American public invisibly chained like Plato’s mythical cave dwellers, only seeing the carefully crafted images designed for them by the corporate media? Or are they merely being “Innocent of Knowledge”, as Macbeth might proclaim, of the barbaric devastation of nations and innocent people in their name as empire building and profiteering proceeds at full pace in the White House? Is “The Grand Chessboard” indicative of some deep strategic planning? Is there any empirical evidence of it in the events post 9-11? Why is there all of a sudden such vile and malignant propaganda against Islam? These issues are analyzed to deconstruct and dismantle this fictitious “war on terrorism”. If the mainstream American public only knew its reality, they would surely take their country back.

The events analyzed here are current only up to April 17, 2003. This book should be treated as a snapshot of life and thoughts in America as viewed autobiographically. Hence, when HolocaustTM remembrance is the mantra du jour in America, the book is minimally as objective as any Diary of Anne Frank, and as moral as any moral voice of anguish of Elie Wiesel.

What is this book all about

What is the collective and individual responsibility of a people who live in a Democracy for the crimes of their government? Can the people morally claim the “I didn’t know defense” and absolve themselves of culpability, the same defense claimed by the German citizenry for the Holocaust? Hitler had indeed come to power “legally”. He had motivated his reluctant people based on his well publicized doctrines in Mein Kampf, into the conquest of Europe. Now that he is vanquished, what does the civilized world think of him and his Nazi war machine? Or is it only the vanquished foe that we can see the faults with? Will our own faults also only come to light when we too have been vanquished? Or is there a less painful way to recognize that what we might be doing to the world has been done before, time and again? That the lessons of history might already be there as the low hanging fruits of wisdom ripe for the plucking?

In America too, the doctrines for world conquest have been outlined publicly:

I.1: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Grand Chessboard”;

I.2: Documentation of “Project New American Century” signed by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, among others, especially the report on “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” – all of these are summarized in Exhibit A;

I.3: “Nuclear Posture Review” circulated to Congress by the White House and its details revealed in the Los Angeles Times wherein preemption and nuclear first strikes are the new superpower doctrine;

I.4: National Security Council strategy documents released by the White House on its web site;

I.5: Patriot Acts hurriedly rushed into law after 9-11 by the Congress;

I.6: And the fanatically held fundamentalist Evangelical Christian beliefs of her President that allows him to easily wage an endless “crusade” of “Infinite Justice” against the “evil-doers”;

all of which clearly point to where America is heading. All of this knowledge is just as publicly available today, as Mein Kampf was in the 1920s and 1930s, when Hitler’s invasion of Eastern Europe came as a surprise to Western Europe and America. The concomitant policies of appeasement, in the futile hope of placating the new ambitious Alexander of the twentieth century, and the initial acquiescence of the world to Hitler’s boldness, only emboldened him further. The following remark by the Chief American prosecuting judge at Nuremberg Military Tribunal is incredibly telling as he proceeded to hang those who dared to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers”:

The plans of Adolf Hitler for aggression were just as secret as Mein Kampf, of which over six million copies were published in Germany.

But justice in this case has nothing to do with some of the arguments put forth by the defendants or their counsel. We have not previously and we need not now discuss the merits of all their obscure and tortuous philosophy. We are not trying them for the possession of obnoxious ideas. It is their right, if they choose, to renounce the Hebraic heritage in the civilization of which Germany was once a part. Nor is it our affair that they repudiated the Hellenic influence as well. The intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the Nazi regime might have been no concern of international law had it not been utilized to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers. It is not their thoughts, it is their overt acts which we charge to be crimes. Their creed and teachings are important only as evidence of motive, purpose, knowledge, and intent.

Furthermore, the history of how Hitler took power through back door deals and legal maneuverings, the Reichstag fire, and how he convinced his generally war averse German public to successively occupy the Eastern European nations with new chicaneries each time, are well known. “Everybody against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?” noted William Shirer, a war correspondent in Berlin, in his diary on the eve of World War II.

Hitler knew the answer well. Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that he would ‘give a propagandist reason for starting the war’ and admonished them not to ‘mind whether it was plausible or not’? ‘The victor’, he had told them, ‘will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not the right that matters, but victory.‘”

The bold highlights are Hitler’s own words as noted by William Shirer, as they were disclosed in the Nuremberg trials. These ideas are well known as the Art of War making by an Aggressor around the world, and certainly are no secret to the journalism profession. Hitler was not the first to invent them, although he used them masterfully. In this instance, Hitler created the false pretext to attack Poland by synthesizing fake attacks on Germany by a handful of German soldiers disguised as Poles, the main operation being called “Canned Goods”. The personal motivations of Hitler, his belief in the “superiority” of the German race allowing him the “higher” prerogative to bomb and annihilate the “lesser” people for “protecting and perpetuating German lives”, is also known to everyone. Indeed, the role of deluded beliefs that bring suffering to other “lesser” humanity, as is “following orders” to execute heinous crimes against humanity, have been studied to “death” in America. The holocaust memories are kept constantly alive – an entire museum is dedicated to “never again” in Washington DC, directed by Holocaust survivor, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel.

And yet the American nation salutes “United We Stand”. How is that even possible?

The similarities with recent history of only 60 – 70 years ago are just too uncanny to escape notice, even for an isolated nation like America:

One: The coming to power of the Zionist Neo-Cons, fronted by the rather naïve and straightforward George Bush Jr., through legal maneuverings in the US supreme court and in Florida, with the active connivance of the Florida Secretary of State Kathleen Harris, the Florida Governor Jeb Bush (George Bush’s real brother), the news media calling early election results that were false, and purposely not reporting the centralized voter list fraud that illegally black listed 57,700 voters in Florida who were unable to vote, almost all of them black, and majority of them Democrats, despite the fact that Greg Palast shared his investigative report of the fraud with them. All of these legal maneuverings that mesmerized and paralyzed the American nation into impotence while they waited with baited breadth for the powers to be to make the decision for them – a mouse democracy; eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s own back room deals and “legal” maneuverings to come to power “legally” after his failed Putsch; demonstrate no popular mandate.

Two: America’s subsequent barbaric “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq under the pretext of “preemptive self defense” to “save American lives” from “evil doers”, similar to Hitler’s lies to attack Eastern Europe; General Colin Powell telling monumental lies in the UN with fake evidence and a straight face, following it seems, the advice of Mein Fuehrer: The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not the right that matters, but victory”, for victory was assured as the general knew they were going against a disarmed and non-existent threat; the “coalition of the willing” only as necessary as operation “canned goods” for domestic consumption only; the very gullible American public had to be shown that the entire world was united against the “evil doers”, it didn’t matter that the world public knew this pretext to be fictitious; since the American public, unlike the German public, had already been deftly primed by the new Pearl Harbor of 9-11, it took even less convincing to attack Iraq than the German public to attack Poland; Colin Powell did not even choose to lie very cleverly – the desired impact of the hand waving with plagiarized fake evidence in the UN, in a dazzling corporate board room style slideshow prepared in Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Presentation, had already accomplished its purpose better than Goebbels could have foreseen.

Three: Both having pre-advertised their intentions publicly for several years.

Four: Both military war machine leaders sharing the delusions of a “higher” moral prerogative – Hitler his “god given superiority of the fatherland and the Germanic race”, and George Bush Jr. his Evangelical Christian “crusade” of “Infinite Justice” to “save American lives” and bring on Jesus sooner. It is uncanny how often both have invoked divine mission in their speeches. What is the difference between them as perceived by many of their own delusional peoples during their leader’s momentous rise to power?

Five: Both spinning propaganda and disinformation formally – Hitler through his Reichsminister for propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and George Bush through his coterie of seasoned mentors Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, artfully generating disinformation and lies from the Pentagon and the State Department, with the corporate mainstream media faithfully reporting it ad nauseum as if these public airwaves were the exclusive propaganda arm of the Bush Administration.

Six: Both coerced the world into acquiescence – Hitler through August 31, 1939; and George Bush still as of today, as he murderously bombs Iraq while the world watches on television; While Hitler remained short sighted about September 1 and the Ides of March, the seasoned warriors advising Bush have done a remarkable job in eliminating that threat from the world scene by “either you are with us or with the terrorists”, and the realities of post Cold War lone superpower eminence denied Hitler. But are the Ides of March ever inescapable?

Seven: It was the Jews blood being spilled by Christian Hitler, the “scourge of the Earth”, so it was all right; now it is the Muslim blood being spilled by Christian George Bush Jr., the “new scourge of the Earth” belonging to the “very wicked and evil religion” according to their eminent Evangelical Christian leaders Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson et. al., so it is still all right; how did our oil get underneath their sand anyway – it must have seeped through from Alaska! In both cases, only the victims clamored for succor, with the rest of the world busy with their lives. The only difference being that after the Jewish Holocaust, the world had also vociferously vowed “never again” – and that is within living memory of many an American grandparents today.

And the major similarities don’t just end there. Both also introduced similar measures to curb internal dissent. Hitler consolidated all police functions for the first time in German history, in 1936, as a prelude to the Nazi police state. George Bush Jr. pushed Congress to pass the oppressive Patriot Act 1 without debate, under the shock effect of 9-11, within a month of it, arguing that it was needed to find the “terrorists”. Another Patriot Act 2 awaits in the wings for an opportune moment, having already been circulated in Congress but not yet introduced. And then Bush proceeded to found the department of “Homeland Security”, also attempting to consolidate all the police functions of the American state, led by Tom Ridge, and elevated to the post of his Cabinet team.

Indeed, if the denizens of other nations were to point out to the American public that given so many similarities with the Third Reich, that whether the American nation too, with the emerging police state atmosphere inside America, was in the process of becoming the Fourth Reich, the American public would seethe with indignation at the mere thought of being equated with the Nazis!

They would rush to offer protestations that they are not out to conquer the world. That they are only bringing “democracy”, “good will”, and a “superior Christian civilization and love of Jesus” to the “lesser” unfortunate humanity, by getting rid of the ruthless tyrants that these unfortunate people could not rid themselves. The denizens of other nations would point out that the American public’s inability to see the hypocrisy of their rather disingenuous affectations, how while they rose to fight Hitler for a similar offense of a “sense of superiority”, and the privilege of a “higher purpose”, now they don’t see even their own descriptions of their actions in the same vein, is unequivocal evidence of either their diabolical complicity in the crimes against humanity, or their complete indoctrination, similar to the German public in the Third Reich!

In Plato’s allegory of chained prisoners dwelling in an underground cave, who are kept in perpetual ignorance through sophisticated image manipulation, the prisoners have little choice in their course of actions. They are chained by their necks at birth until they die, forced to look only straight ahead, and forced to live underground by the fascist dictatorship of their unelected and imposed controllers. If these controllers committed crimes on another people somewhere outside the cave, the chained prisoners would be powerless to stop them even if they were to become aware of those crimes by seeing them on the screens in front of them. Hence the prisoners could not be held accountable for those crimes even when they knew about them.

Based on my personal experience of living in America for almost a quarter century, and the reality of what has transpired since 9-11, it may be convincingly argued that Plato’s analogy of mass ignorance is quite apropos when applied to the American public. Indeed, I would not be entirely remiss if I were to abstract the following assertions:

The vast majority of mainstream peace loving people in the United States of America are systematically deceived by their rulers. All they see and experience is the reality synthesized for them by the image makers on their television screens, much like the chained dwellers in Plato’s mythical underground cave. They are kept ignorant and self absorbed to willingly submit to their rulers without the need for the cage of ruthless totalitarianism. Invisibly chained, prisoners of the cave, a perfect fraud committed to keep them happily towing their leader’s line, as the State embarks on an imperial war of global conquest disguised as “war on terrorism”, and the American public oblige with “United We Stand”.

But unlike Plato’s chained prisoners in the underground cave, the American public lives in a democracy aboveground, and not in a cave! They enjoy considerable power over their elected government, and substantial personal freedoms and constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. If they are ignorant of the crimes of their government, either through their own inadvertence – too busy chasing their “American Dreams” – or through the Machiavellian machinations of their institutional ruling elite that indoctrinated them with false patriotism and “false flag operations”, can they still morally claim the “I didn’t know defense”?

If they were to discover that there might be even the slightest possibility that they are being deliberately kept ignorant of reality, then what should their responsibility be?

This book is primarily about stimulating the American reader’s own self interest into seeking out whence his chains of ignorance come from, if indeed there, in the expectations that if the chains are made visible to the good citizenry of America, that they will endeavor to break them. The American public is presently the only other superpower in the world capable of challenging the runaway rogue superpower juggernaut, their own American government. And the curse of posterity also presently swings over their heads like the Damocles sword: “and I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent” (Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel). Which path to traverse? My whole hearted intent in this message to mainstream America is to remove any excuse from posterity that their ancestors were “Innocent of knowledge”. In either case, not only will history judge the people of America, but also whether there will be an epitaph on the tombstone of America “Here Lies Freedom – Victim of Greed, Crusades, and Plunder”.


The outline of chapters in Part-2 is as follows

Chapter 1 analyses the true basis behind this fictitious “war on terrorism” by employing the thesis outlined by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book “The Grand Chessboard”. Chapter 2 unveils America’s not so secret history of regularly doing 9/11s on other developing nations in far less subtler, and yet even more devastating ways. Chapter 3 questions the assumption that democracy matters by analyzing the apartheid State of Israel, and answers the question that how comes despite being a democracy, the Israelis keep electing known killers – perhaps Socrates was right that democracy is generally ignorant and stupid? If this be the case, then why is Brzezinski so worried about America being a democracy? Chapter 4 further connects the dots by analyzing the role of mass media in keeping the American public intellectually chained Prisoners of the Cave. It analyses how the Israeli occupation of Palestine is treated in the mainstream news, and how Rachel Corrie’s homicide was covered. Chapter 5 analyzes the “Pearl Harbor” of 9-11 that provided a convenient pretext to launch empire. It examines the many bogeymen used to justify the new draconian laws of the Patriot Acts and exposes their true purpose. Chapter 6 further examines the nature of news control exercised in the corporate dominated mass media without America being a totalitarian country. Chapter 7 analyzes the reasons why the antiwar protests remained ineffectual in stopping the invasions of sovereign nations. It offers some new directions to pursue for the justice minded peaceable denizens of America to reclaim their People’s Democracy. Chapter 8 is a wake up call to the Muslims living in America. It examines their predicament as possibly the “new Jews of Germany”, in the New American Century. Chapter 9 exposes the sources of doctrinal motivations like “clash of civilizations” that enables waging another crusade against Islam. It dismantles many of the myths the American public is purposely being made to believe about Islam and Muslims, and deconstructs the fear of Islam and any impending clash of civilizations. The only clash that Americans need fear is the clash of haves vs. the have-nots, and victimizers vs. the victims. Chapter 10 concludes by appealing to the conscience of the mainstream American public to face up to the reality of their nation’s crimes against humanity, and to their own substantial role in contributing to it. Postscript adds some final thoughts including a message to the Jews.

But before you proceed further, take a look at Plato’s allegory is more detail.

The Myth of the Cave

Excerpted from The Republic, appears under the heading The Simile of the Cave (pages 241–243). A remarkable allegory for its keen insights into the mendacity of power and its ability to indoctrinate the public into an abject state of ignorance, escape from which can become impossible. It requires substantial amount of work to make the journey up the “steep and rugged ascent” of knowledge to understand how one is being made a fool of, and deliberately being manipulated and controlled. I just can’t imagine how Plato visualized 2500 years ago our ubiquitous televisions. If he could conceive a thought experiment just to teach an idea in which he simply devised a contraption for indoctrination to illustrate his thinking, does it escape the sophisticated imagination of the hectoring hegemons today? I do not project that there is a deliberate controller sitting out there in America doing this. Rather, as will be evident throughout this book, such mind control, especially in America, is a bizarre confluence of interests, ownerships, and a singular agenda of the incredibly wealthy ruling elite which controls all access to news, views, media, finances, and resources. This transpires with no less efficacy as an autonomous unstated and unquestioned agenda, than for instance, how corporations’ primal agenda is to make a profit as a truism of capitalism and the stock markets’ evaluation of them. Thus to accuse GE of its own natural primacy for instance, that it seeks to optimize its profits at all cost, or to accuse a mighty lion that it is preying on a lowly goat, is foolish in the same way as to accuse the mighty ruling elite that they deliberately seek to manipulate and control their own public’s opinions, or that they deliberately seek to exercise their monstrous and usurpative hegemony on the destinies of other lowlier peoples and nations. Thus the issue isn’t that ignorance does not exist, or is not deliberately perpetuated by vested interests, but rather, it is in identifying the hectoring hegemons and dismantling their lies and deceit to bring awareness to the audience over whom they exercise their deception. As such, you, the American nation, are that audience. And as you begin on this journey, monitor your own feelings and relate them to what Plato predicts that you shall surely feel. The rest is up to you.

Plato is speaking to his disciple

[...]

I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human condition somewhat as follows:

‘Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners since they were children, their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has been built, like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets.’

‘I see.’

‘Imagine further that there are men carrying all sorts of gear along behind the curtain-wall, projecting above it and including figures of men and animals made of wood and stone and all sorts of other materials, and that some of these men, as you would expect, are talking and some not.’

‘An odd picture and an odd sort of prisoner.’

‘They are drawn from life’, I replied. ‘For, tell me, do you think our prisoners could see anything of themselves or their fellows except the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them?’

‘How could they see anything else if they were prevented from moving their heads all their lives?’

‘And would they see anything more of the objects carried along the road?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then if they were able to talk to each other, would they not assume that the shadows they saw were the real things?’

‘Inevitably.’

‘And if the wall of their prison opposite them reflected sound, don’t you think that they would suppose, whenever one of the passers-by on the road spoke, that the voice belonged to the shadow passing before them?’

‘They would be bound to think so.’

‘And so in every way they would believe that the shadows of the objects we mentioned were the whole truth.’

‘Yes inevitably.’

‘Then think what would naturally happen to them if they were released from their bonds and cured of their delusions. Suppose one of them were let loose, and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards the fire; all these actions would be painful and he would be too dazzled to see properly the objects of which he used to see the shadows. What do you think he would say if he was told that what he used to see was so much empty nonsense and that he was now nearer reality and seeing more correctly, because he was turned towards objects that were more real, and if on top of that he were compelled to say what each of the passing objects was when it was pointed out to him? Don’t you think he would be at a loss, and think that what he used to see was far truer than the objects now being pointed out to him?’

‘Yes, far truer.’

‘And if he were made to look directly at the light of the fire, it would hurt his eyes and he would turn back and retreat to the things which he could see properly, which he would think really clearer than the things being shown him.’

‘Yes.’

‘And if,’ I went on, ‘he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rugged ascent and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight, the process would be a painful one, to which he would much object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be so dazzled by the glare of it that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.’

‘Certainly not at first,’ he agreed.

‘Because, of course, he would need to grow accustomed to the light before he could see things in the upper world outside the cave. First he would find it easiest to look at shadows, next at the reflections of men and other objects in water, and later on at the objects themselves. After that he would find it easier to observe the heavenly bodies and the sky itself at night, and to look at the light of the moon and stars rather than at the sun and its light by day.’

‘Of course.’

‘The thing he would be able to do last would be to look directly at the sun itself, and gaze at it without reflections in water or any other medium, but as it is in itself.’

‘That must come last.’

‘Later on he would come to the conclusion that it is the sun that produces the changing seasons and years and controls everything in the visible world, and is in a sense responsible for everything that he and his fellow-prisoners used to see.’

‘That is the conclusion which he would obviously reach.’

‘And when he thought of his first home and what passed for wisdom there, and of his fellow-prisoners, don’t you think he would congratulate himself on his fortune and be sorry for them?’

‘Very much so.’

[...]

‘Then what do you think would happen,’ I asked, ‘if he went back to sit in his old seat in the cave? Wouldn’t his eyes be blinded by the darkness, because he had come in suddenly out of the sunlight?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And if he had to discriminate between the shadows, in competition with the other prisoners, while he was still blinded and before his eyes got used to the darkness – a process that would take some time – wouldn’t he be likely to make a fool of himself? And they would say that his visit to upper world had ruined his sight, and that the ascent was not worth even attempting. And if anyone tried to release them and lead them up, they would kill him if they could lay hands on him.’

‘They certainly would.’

[...]”

— end excerpt Plato

Strategic Thinkers of the Empire

Introduction

As an argument against the assertion of mass ignorance of the American public, especially with respect to the true nature of the “war on terrorism” launched by their democratically elected President in response to 9-11, one might well ask the question “why”, in order to evaluate the merits of this assertion. Of course, one could also simply just deny it. In that case just stop here and don’t bother reading any further. This book is not for you. Or ask why should the people be misled and kept deliberately ignorant, in order to analyze the veracity of this analogy with Plato’s mythical prisoners of the cave.

So let us begin by examining the “why” questions from the eyes of the very scholars and thinkers influencing this American administration. We do not even need to rely on any evidence from any of its detractors, as one of the artifacts of arrogance of power has always been its open flaunting. This “war on terrorism” is not as tactical a response as one might think to the events of 9/11, but has behind it years of strategic thinking and planning, ever since the end of the Cold War and the demise of the balance of power left behind only one and truly global superpower, the United States of America.

In his revealing and influential book The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, the former Carter Administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (ZB), quite unabashedly analyzes the world dominance available to the United States in the post Cold War era. Published in 1997, it provides an illuminating glimpse into how America must wield its new found global station in geopolitics as the only remaining superpower with tremendous economic and military supremacy. The main thesis of the book is that America must use this surplus of military and economic muscle to control the wealth and politics in Eurasia, the key to world dominance: “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also challenging America”, and that this opportunity for perpetuating unilateral dominance will last only a few decades as other nations will eventually catch up, and therefore America must attempt to shape the world to it’s future advantage today while it still can. Explaining some of the domestic challenges America might face in this exercise of global primacy, ZB states:

The earlier empires were built by aristocratic political elites and were in most cases ruled by essentially authoritarian or absolutist regimes. The bulk of the populations of the imperial states were either politically indifferent, … or infected by imperialist emotions …a quest for national glory, ‘the white man’s burden’, la mission civilisatrice’, not to speak of the opportunities for personal profit – all served to mobilize support for imperial adventures to sustain essentially hierarchical imperial power pyramids. The attitude of American public toward the external projection of American power has been more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in WWII largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. …. After the Cold War had ended, the emergence of the United States as the single global power did not evoke much public gloating but rather elicited an inclination toward more limited definitions of American responsibilities abroad. Public opinion polls conducted in 1995 – 1996 indicated a general public preference for ‘sharing’ power with others, rather than for its monopolistic exercise.” (24,25)

It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is defense spending), and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” (35,36)

Public opinion polls suggest that only a small minority (13 percent) of Americans favor the proposition that ‘as the sole remaining superpower, the US should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems’. … Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. …. More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification. … Mass communications have been playing a particularly important role in that regard, generating a strong revulsion against any selective use of force that entails even low levels of casualties …. In brief, the U.S. Policy goals must be un-apologetically twofold: to perpetuate America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer,…” (211-215)

It does not require an interpreter to parse that language. It is brazen, insightful, and very revealing. Let us summarize some main points: The American public is not interested in building a global colonial empire, that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad, and that the public would rather share power with other nations of the world. This limits America’s ability to militarily dominate other nations because the public perceives it as being at the cost of domestic social spending and loss of young blood. However there is one exception to this, that when there is a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat, the public tends to rally around the flag and will support the government in pretty much any endeavor. To sustain this support requires three additional factors: a) a high degree of doctrinal motivation (such as Communists are evil, or Islamic terrorists are out to get us); b) intellectual commitment (such as thinking about the doctrine must make it appear intellectually compelling to foster adherence); and c) patriotic gratification (such as fighting a just cause and winning with few casualties with stories of heroism and nobleness making the public feel good about their country and themselves). The modern mass media has demonstrated its immense power in shaping public opinion against war in which there are even low level deaths and sufferings. It is all summed up very succinctly in his own words: Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.

To be fair, ZB also argues in the book that “the ultimate objective of American policy should be benign and visionary: to shape a truly cooperative global community.” However, his view of cooperation underlies a world cooperating with America in America’s own best interests. This reading is not inconsistent with the age old political truism that all nations, will only endeavor in their own best interest. No where in the entire book, does he address the morality, or indeed any issues of global, social, economic, and political injustices stemming from embarking on such an imperial conquest, as that would be too antithetical to his entire premise, that a nation like the United States of America, is entitled “to perpetuate America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer”, as might makes right. And the last time I visited the zoo with my kids, I saw a bigger chimpanzee beating the crap out of a smaller one.

Are these ZB’s personal views? Or do they also represent the dominant thinking of the neo conservative think tanks and foundations habitating the streets of Washington DC? Or perhaps they represent an institutionalized bipartisan ideology going back to the post WWII period? Let’s again use our antagonist to speak for themselves. Noam Chomsky in one of his many foreign policy studies also allowed the institutional elites to speak for themselves as follows. He quoted the State Department’s George F. Kennan in the once-classified Policy Planning Study PPS 23 from 1948:

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population …. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction …. We should cease to talk about vague and – for the Far East – unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.*1

Wow! As far back as 1948, the US policy makers were looking at empire building dealing in “straight power concepts” and did not want to be handicapped by sentimentality about “altruism” and “world-benefaction”, “human rights” and “democratization” in order to retain the disparity in world’s wealth and resources in their favor. Does that sound a wee bit like ZB’s imperatives of a truly global superpower half a century later? You decide!

Okay fine, you might say, so what? What does that have to with this White House? Wasn’t ZB in a Democrat’s government? And wasn’t Kennan in Truman’s government which was also Democrats? It’s the damn Democrats who want to conquer the world, not this GOP White House, who are only responding to 9/11 and waging a war on terrorism to protect us from those nasty bearded turban wearing mullahs who attack us clean shaven! Unfortunately, there is substantial evidence to suggest that this White House has everything to do with it, not the least of which is the fact that ZB remained a faithful background advisor to both the Reagan and the first Bush Republican Administrations, and represents only the tip of the visible iceberg of strategist thinkers in Washington. There is a plethora of writings from neo conservatives and other imperial thinkers after the end of the Cold War that reflects that America is now the only superpower in the world and the main question facing it is how to preserve its Hegemony and prevent others from rising up to challenge it.

Foreign policy statements and their impact

The open doctrine of “preemptive war” adopted by the present hawkish White House as a dominant theme underlying its foreign policy since 9/11 is also very telling. According to ZB in a conversation broadcast on public television, this had always been the unstated and unadvertised prerogative of the United States even pre 9/11, but now it has become an active and overt foreign policy initiative. The White house has openly claimed for itself the right to preemptive nuclear strikes against non nuclear nations employing any of its vilest weapons of mass destruction from its vast arsenal of chemical biological, nuclear, and conventional weapons. This was first disclosed in the Los Angeles Times article by William Arkin, who revealed the contents of the White House’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that had been given to Congress for review in January 2002 and magically ‘leaked’ out. The White House has ordered the Pentagon to draw up war plans for the first strike use of nuclear weapons against seven states: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and the two nuclear powers Russia and China.

The NPR further calls for nuclear war-fighting plans for first strikes against 1) alleged nuclear/chemical/biological materials or facilities; 2) against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack; 3) in the event of surprising military developments; 4) intervene with nuclear weapons in wars a) between China and Taiwan, b) between Israel and Arab states, c) between Israel and Iraq, d) between North and South Korea.*2 Now why would something so sinister leak out, if not to purposely create fear? Very reminiscent of Nixon and Kissinger while loudly lamenting in the media about the terrible leaks of the Pentagon Papers and what a threat that posed to National Security, privately quite happy that those secrets of the damn Democrats were leaking out, and in some cases purposely leaked out by them, as disclosed in the Nixon tapes, and explained by Daniel Ellsberg himself in a speech that aired on Pacifica.

NSC National Security Council Strategy policy documents available openly on the White House web site now argue that best defense is an offensive war against possible enemies (mainly I suppose those rich in oil or other geostrategic value), not only wiping out the concept of détente and negotiated settlement (or is that only for nations that can hit back), but also eliminating the entire basis behind the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which had made assurances to non nuclear nations against nuclear attacks by the big five nuclear powers if they did not seek nuclear weapons, and which had helped keep in check the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. So now, the rest of the countries in the world, especially the developing nations not already under the US hegemonic protection, feeling quite insecure have scurried into a new arms race to protect themselves from America’s imperialism, making the world inherently less safe.

The bellicose statements made by the President and his senior Cabinet have further set the preamble of fear and intimidation in the entire world, so essential to global conquest as the histories of past conquering civilizations will testify. The US president has put the entire world on notice that “either you are with us or with the terrorists” and identified his “axis of evil” for initiating his offensive “war on terrorism”. The Defense Secretary has warned that this “war on terrorism” will last 30 – 40 years. The Secretary of State, an experienced General, has oft repeated his formula for a winning military strategy being the use of overwhelming force against a weak opponent to minimize one’s own casualties, and strike “Shock and Awe” into the enemy, such that they would give up without a fight. All these statements betray a unilateral desire to go to global and permanent war footings, unchallenged by any rivals because there aren’t any.

Okay, but where is the documented evidence for policy statements by this White House about their desire for world conquest? Unless I see it in writing, I ain’t believing it, you might ask.

That’s a bit like what Greg Palast explained the CBS TV news told him when he had given them his investigative report on election 2000 (while the recount drama was still going on). He had discovered that Jeb Bush’s state government in Florida had denied tens of thousands of legitimate voters, most of them Democrats, and most of them Black, their right to vote by using centralized computer voting lists (which was to later enable his brother to win the White House with the help of the Supreme Court of the United States). So the CBS producers called up Jeb Bush’s office and asked if that was true. They replied that no, of course not, the allegation was patently false. Thus CBS did not run the story, and called up Greg Palast and told him: “I’m sorry, but your story didn’t hold up because Jeb Bush’s office says so! Can you tell what is wrong with this picture?*3 The Washington Post finally ran the story in June on its front page “though they had it at hand seven months earlier when the ballots were still being counted”. By then the deal was done and the election stolen from the people of these United States, the largest democracy in the industrialized free world. Michael Moore in his book Stupid White Men collects further details of what he calls “A very American Coup (1 – 28). At this theft of America, the cultured and sophisticated Americans seem to be least bothered, judging from President Bush’s soaring approval rating. Whereas even in a developing country like Venezuela, the lowly peasants showed more courage and concern for their polity when they marched in the streets in millions to defeat the illegal coup d’état against their democratically elected president in 2002.

We might have to wait 30 years or more, until the classified documents get declassified, and historians get a chance to go over them to see what was really going on inside the White House in the early years of the twenty first century. This may even no longer be possible because of new restrictions on declassification of Presidential papers signed into law through an executive order by the current administration, along with their reluctance to honor any FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) requests – perhaps FOIA may be nullified as well if the government can prevail. But there is sufficient information available already in their foreign policy statements and foreign policy actions, along with their behavior, to know exactly what they are up to. It’s not that mystical!

For instance, which is a more successful “war on terrorism”? Dropping 900,000 bombs on Afghanistan in search of one man they did not even catch, killing more innocent civilians than were killed in the 9/11 atrocity at the hands of Frankenstines they had themselves nurtured, and decimating a land with Depleted Uranium having a half life of 4.5 billion years that will keep on killing for generations long after the war is declared over? Or the US Government owning up to her ravage and abuse of the impoverished nation of Afghanistan and her people for three decades, in an ideological proxy war against the Soviets when these very people were referred to as “Mujahideen”, “moral equivalent of our founding fathers”, and having walked away from her sins in the past, demonstrated her true superpower greatness by helping rebuild that country and its infrastructure in fair recompense? Some argue that questions of morality aside, just the pragmatism of a mere 10% to 20% of the cost of this lifetime “war on terrorism” ending 90% terrorism in the world within a year through a humble mea culpa, makes this “war on terrorism” look awfully stupid! As it now stands, the threat of terrorism has been multiplied several folds, with two cultures and two civilizations lying in ruins! And a million more people, not having access to F16s and cruise missiles to “Shock and Awe” their enemy in return, are perhaps ready to blow themselves up in retaliation for the loss of their innocent loved ones before their very eyes! If the roles were reversed, would the American public feel any differently? Remember the American war of independence not too long ago? If these rational options weren’t followed, let alone debated or even brought up in the mainstream media or in Washington or in the UN, what other rational conclusions besides perpetuation of a fraud on the American people for ulterior motives of corporate greed and world conquest can one draw about the team occupying the White House? A Martian observer looking at Earth and seeing the incredible ground swell of support for the US President in the American populace could only conclude one of two rational things, as Noam Chomsky aptly puts it: either the American public is incredibly racist and self-serving that it wants to annihilate entire Muslim civilizations because they suffered 9/11, or the American populace is incredibly indoctrinated! Every time I see the Congress and the public rise to hail the chief, it reminds me of the old newsreels of Hitler.

It is interesting to also witness the backdrop that preceded the US actions after 9-11, as history in hindsight can often provide 20-20 vision. Until the Summer of 2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan were in the good graces of Washington. There was a Taliban delegation even visiting the US to work out the details of the oil and gas pipeline that was to pass through Afghanistan carrying the precious black gold from the oil-rich Central Asian Republics to the Indian Ocean and onwards into the coffers of American oil companies. When the recalcitrance of the turbaned warriors proved too much for the polished bean counters and empire builders from the American side, the United States representatives warned them to either accept their offer of a carpet of gold or they would be buried in a carpet of bombs. Subsequently, US representatives had informed Pakistan that military action against Afghanistan would occur by middle of October 2001. All of this is in the press reports in the public domain.

Even earlier, in the report on Rebuilding America’s Defenses by the neoconservative “Project New American Century” (PNAC) under the tutelage of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et. al.*4, the American foreign policy agenda for the New American Century was set for the “full spectrum dominance*5 strategy of American preeminence for today and tomorrow (page 17) over the entire planet in the interest of securing a very “American Peace (page 76).

This report and the PNAC web site make a very insightful read because this Project, seeded years before 9-11, and based on an earlier even more chauvinistic preemptive imperial ideology espoused in a report at least a decade prior by Paul Wolfowitz under the stewardship of Dick Cheney when George H. W. Bush Sr. had ushered in the “Grande baille of the New World Order”, is extremely clairvoyant. It accurately predicts all the actions that America subsequently undertook after 9-11, even to the extent of spotlighting Iraq, Syria and Iran, and militarizing the world and its skies with the American military muscle. The invasion of Iraq is actively advocated to destroy the threat from “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, and indeed, whether or not Sadaam Hussain was in power. Then why should one be surprised when Donald Rumsfeld within hours of 9-11 ordered to prepare plans to attack Iraq (See further below).

Witness these prophetic statements in some detail from the chapter Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force in the above mentioned PNAC report. Please do note some of the instructive key phrases that realize ZB’s “imperial mobilization”: “new Pearl Harbor”, enduring military mission worthy of constant allocation of dollars and forces”, “expanding perimeter”, “American political and military operations around the world”, “American peace”, “benevolent order it secures. Published in September 2000, a full year before 911, and four years after ZB’s Grand Chessboard, Paul Wolfowitz is listed as one of the authors of this report (a detailed list of contributors to this report and to PNAC, is summarized in Exhibit A). The report states:

As long as wars and other military operations derive their logic from political purposes, land power will remain the truly decisive form of military power. … In sum the ability to preserve American military preeminence in the future will rest in increasing measure on the ability to operate in space militarily. … But over the long term, maintaining control of space will inevitably require the application of force both in space and from space, including but not limited to antimissile defenses … Cyberspace, or ‘Net-War’ If outerspace represents an emerging medium of warfare, then “cyberspace”, and in particular the internet hold similar promise and threat. And as with space, access to and use of cyberspace and the internet are emerging elements of global commerce, politics and powerplay. Any nation wishing to assert itself globally must take account of this other new “global commons”. … there nonetheless will remain an imperative to be able to deny America and its allies’ enemies the ability to disrupt or paralyze either the military’s or the commercial sector’s computer networks. Conversely, an offensive capability could offer America’s military and political leaders an invaluable tool in disabling an adversary in a decisive manner. Taken together, the prospects for space and “cyberspace war” represent the truly revolutionary potential inherent in the notion of military transformation. These future forms of warfare are technologically immature, to be sure. But, it is also clear that for the U.S. Armed forces to remain preeminent and avoid an Achilles Heel in the exercise of its power they must be sure that these potential future forms of warfare favor America just as today’s air, land and sea warfare reflect United States military dominance. Until the process of transformation is treated as an enduring military mission – worthy of constant allocation of dollars and forces – it will remain stillborn. … Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” (pages 51-61)

The Price of American Preeminence: The program we advocate – one that would provide America with forces to meet the strategic demands of the world’s sole superpower – requires budget levels to be increased to 3.5 to 3.8 percent of the GDP… We believe it is necessary to increase slightly the personnel strength of U.S. Forces – many of the missions associated with patrolling the expanding American security perimeter are manpower-intensive, and planning for major theater wars must include for politically decisive campaigns … Also this expanding perimeter argues for new overseas bases and forward operating locations to facilitate American political and military operations around the world. … Keeping the American peace requires the U.S. Military to undertake a broad array of missions today and rise to very different challenges tomorrow, but there can be no retreat from these missions without compromising American leadership and the benevolent order it secures.” (pages 74-76)

And finally, the following sentences from the PNAC Statement of Principles, circa 1997, are also noteworthy for the overarching goals of the American empire (emphasis is mine):

[...] We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital — both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements — built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world.

[...] We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.

[...] we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles. Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.

And of course, included is the traditional disingenuousness that must always accompany such goals for the lay public’s consumption, as logically, the two cannot be reconciled with each other (try to reconcile them yourself as you read through this book):

[...] we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;

Here is a brief excerpt from where the term Full Spectrum Dominance originated. It is the title of Chapter 3 of the Department of Defense strategy document Joint Vision 2020, released in June 2000:

The label full spectrum dominance implies that US forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air, and information. Additionally, given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.*5

And what did ZB predict about this? Restating ZB’s shrewd articulation from the Grand Chessboard:

[...] the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.

[...] as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.

[...] the U.S. Policy goals must be un-apologetically twofold: to perpetuate America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer.

Wow! ZB said the same thing that Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld et. al., the most powerful people running the American Government today, as well as the American military Strategic Planning high command, the Department of Defense, publicly stated in 1997 – 2000, way before any 911.*6

Even Tony Blair openly hinted at the facade that launched this fictitious “war on terrorism” when he commented to the Commons Liaison Committee something to the effect that there was no way the public would have consented to suddenly launching a campaign against Afghanistan except for 9-11. This too was reported on publicly.

Thus the failure of the armed-to-the-teeth United States in preventing 9-11 despite all the forewarnings, and their deliberate invasion of two defenseless and war-ravaged nations, ostensibly in retaliation or preemption of another 9-11, when even the CIA could not come up with any plausible linkage between Iraq and 9-11 as testified by CIA Director George Tenet to Congress, can only lead a rational person to conclude what?

You be the judge of that!

And based on your response, also try to counter the most illustrious of all voices of American conscience, who the New York Times calls “arguably the most important intellectual alive”, Noam Chomsky’s observation mentioned earlier, as well as my own after having lived among the American peoples for almost a quarter century and reaching the same lamentable conclusions, that either the American public is very self-serving, or highly indoctrinated.

Foreign policy miscalculations and their impact

The following foreign policy miscalculations further betray the imperial thinking of the rogues in Washington, provided one isn’t indoctrinated enough to still be able to connect dots.

One of these was the final UN security council vote to go to war which was never submitted, because the US could not get the majority of the members to sign on to its agenda for war as they weren’t convinced by any of the evidence that had been provided thus far to incriminate Iraq. The UN security council did not meekly oblige with a legal cover for the adventure as anticipated, by not acceding to a unanimous vote thus leaving only 4 out of the 15 members in the Security Council in favor of the war and dashing the hopes of this second Bush administration from achieving what the first Bush administration did, namely “the use of multilateral instrument to carry out a unilateral war” (see Phyllis Bennis below). The US went to war anyway, making it an illegal war according to the rules of the UN charter. Why go to this war despite it being an illegal war with no support from the rest of the world? Being against all international norms, why shouldn’t America, its leaders, and its generals be tried for war crimes against humanity? And why aren’t the political leaders worried about this? In fact their public statements of “Shock and Awe” a civilian population are no less criminal than Hitler’s Holocaust. Why issue such incriminating policy remarks that can come to haunt them in any war crime court? Furthermore, does not signing on to the World Court, and claiming exemption for Americans from being charged for war crimes, now start to make more sense? I am just connecting the dots here, you the astute reader can judge for yourself!

Another miscalculation occurred when the facade of the “coalition of the willing”, was exposed to be the “coalition of the coerced” with only UK, Australia, Spain, and Hungary being the really willing. Many of the rest are small powerless or impoverished nations browbeaten into acquiescence by economic bribes (such as the newly freed countries of new Europe excited to be joining NATO), or threats of withholding US aid and loans from the IMF and World Bank (the client-states). According to a Gallup Poll, there was never a public support for war higher than 11% in any European country (as noted by Arundhati Roy in a speech). Most major countries in the world (as determined by GDP times their population size) did not even participate in this fraudulent unilateral war. Even the major US client-state Turkey, despite its economic down turn and its pending application to the European Union, turned down a bribe of approx. $27 billion (give or take a few) and allowed the will of 90% of its populace to prevail through its democratically elected parliament and finally said “NO” to the US in letting it open a northern front on Iraq through its Kurdish territories. You can judge the fraud of this coalition yourself. Just look at the countries in the coalition of the willing; some Americans might be hard pressed to even name the continents some are in! And there is also ample precedent behind this coercion – the threat that was overheard by everyone in the UN on an open microphone, made to Yemen in the first Gulf War when it had cast a dissenting ‘no’ to the final Security Council vote authorizing war: “that will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast.” Within days, the US cut off its $70 million aid package to Yemen, one of the most impoverished nations.*7 The question arises that why have this obsession for a coalition in the first place? Why seek this cover of legality, even if a flimsy one is all they can get? Why did George Bush Sr. also endeavor in this attempt in the first war on Iraq? Could perhaps domestic consumption have anything to do with it? Does this fetish for “legal cover” ring a bell in anyone?

Finally, a slightly more cumbersome tactical miscalculation was the triggering of a new arms race amongst the have-not nations. North Korea, not quite comprehending why it was suddenly made part of the “axis of evil”, withdrew from NPT and openly stated that it possesses nuclear weapons, and will attack if provoked or threatened in any way, including impositions of sanctions. And the US, in accordance with its strategic plans, attacked with its full imperial might, the inherently weak and defenseless Iraq, while attempting to engage North Korea in diplomacy, thus sending a strong message to the entire world that the US, like any school yard bully, only picks on the defenseless, and implying to the weaker nation they had better arm themselves. If the mightiest power on Earth that spends over $400 billion a year on defense, and has sufficient weapons of mass destruction to set this entire solar system ablaze, can feel threatened by a weakened and disarmed foe like Iraq, and the US public can buy that farce and support this invasion, then what about the rest of the world? Would it be very surprising that they should consider arming themselves with deterrence too, because America only picks on toothless paper tigers? A single nuclear bomb is the greatest equalizer in the world. There is hardly a difference between having a few and a few hundred, the advantage of having a few thousand seemingly such an ill thought out use of a nation’s resources when social spending cuts is making class sizes double because teachers are being laid off. Unless of course one recalls the warnings of Eisenhower about the military-industrial complex! Hence witness that the White House wants to build more nuclear bombs, its arsenal of some 10,000 plus not being sufficient!

The prescient fears of Robert Oppenheimer, the conscionable bomb-maker (what a nonsequitur), labeled a traitor when he expressed his vision for “a world that is united, and a world in which a war will not occur”, and his concern that either no one should possess a nuclear bomb or every nation should (or will) possess one to deter war, might finally become a reality! But perhaps not the kind he had envisaged.

This duplicity between Iraq and N. Korea created a slight public relations headache to explain the hypocrisy. But the US is seemingly unperturbed about the real boondoggle of a ready to fight North Korea. Why unnecessarily take on this headache of North Korea now? And all North Korea really seeks is a terminal peace treaty anyway. But the US does not want to make peace just yet. Is it perhaps because North Korea is their insurance policy on future threat pretexts? US must feel that they can contain North Korea easily, otherwise if US really felt any danger, they would rush to make peace. So the entire world is now at the mercy of accurate threat perceptions by the White House and North Korea about each other! Making it a very safe world indeed! Why create this situation needlessly?

The addition of North Korea into the “axis of evil”, since it has real teeth and can bite back but is of no obvious geostrategic significance and no oil under its soil, some surmise may initially have been a tactical error, a last minute hasty addition, as claimed by the President’s then speechwriter David Frum. He was asked to come up with a justification to attack Iraq, for the President’s State of the Union address.*8 But Frum does not say who chose North Korea in the “axis of evil”, only that it was added at the last minute. So whether or not it was indeed a tactical error is open to speculation, and to first order, its impact seems not to have been well anticipated. Or had it?

A deeper analysis shows a purposeful pattern of creating fear in the world about America’s raw military power and her willingness to use that might, and is consistent with other actions taken by the White House that have needlessly also raised the fear factor of the empire in the world. It is doubtful that there is anything accidental about anything the White House says or does. It may not appear to work sometimes, and may cause some headaches, but there are deep thinkers behind the scenes planing the American imperial empire. It is a display of purposeful naked aggression, like we saw the dark Emperor make in Star Wars. It is not coincidental that the militarization of space in the Reagan era was actually called Star Wars. Most people at the time thought it was about laser gadgetry and such. But the choice of names and other Freudian slips betray the psycho-historical hand of Hari Seldon and his invisible band of “Second Foundationers” running amok in Washington, but working for Daarth Vaider instead of Luke Skywalker. Isaac Asimov sure seems to have had a keen understanding of power and behind the scenes manipulation,*9 as George Lucas’ prophetic cineo-drama is being reenacted once again on the global stage. It is not a conspiracy theory, but empirical evidence for ZB’s American hegemony model of creating a “direct external threat” to rally the people for imperial mobilization.

History has demonstrated time and again that the best weapon to prevent others from fighting your tyrannical imperialism is to instill the fear of god in all your perceived enemies. Display your naked brute force and no moral compunction about using it. It is also what animals do. It is also what the ordinary school yard bully does. This show of force has often temporarily subdued others from rising up to challenge the aggressor, especially if the aggressor is overwhelmingly powerful. And always, contrary to all the grandiose plans of all the emperors in the history of the world, there has always been a Luke Skywalker, many Luke Skywalkers; a Moses to every Pharaoh, a Nelson to every Napoleon, a Churchill to every Hitler, and an America to every Germany! Sometimes it takes a tyrant to defeat another tyrant, just as it took the Nazi’s to bring down the colonial British Empire. And “If America fights Hitler, we will become Hitler”, says the famous insightful quote in history by Thomas Merton, who observed this truism way back in 1936. But the misery endured by ordinary humanity in the course of rising up to tyranny has made history grotesque; the oppressor grotesque; and the oppressed’s revenge grotesque. The real victims of war aren’t the innocent ones who are dead, as grotesque as their slaughter may have been, they are mercifully spared the agony of their conqueror’s loss of humanity.

As Plato had observed: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”. Those who died, died as humans. Those who lived through it, may die as animals. Just see what Ariel Sharon, the famous “man of peace” is doing to the innocent Palestinian civilians, many of them children, and what the suicide bombers are doing back to the Israeli civilians, some of them also innocent children! Despite what Shakespeare notes in Macbeth: “Yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.”, they still died as predatory beasts despite their delusions, despite their Nobel Peace prizes, and despite all their accolades from a mesmerized world. “Battle not with monsters lest ye become one; for when you look into the Abyss, the Abyss looks into you” has some empirical reality behind it, as so profoundly noted by Nietzsche, and similarly observed by W.H. AUDEN in his poem “September 1, 1939”:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do Evil in return.

The New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges brings this realization full circle into the twenty first century in his very insightful and personal “War is a Force that gives us Meaning”. A must read for every thinking and conscionable American being fed the false flag of patriotism, as they are shown on mainstream television only carefully screened “surgical strikes” on “targets”, and dead children are merely labeled “collateral damage” and kept hidden from view. The hijacking of television as an omnipresent source of public education and political enlightenment in America, now having acquired the singular dubious distinction of the most unrecognized theft in history of a public commons. The remarkable thing is that this theft has occurred in plain sight of the mainstream audience, but they are apparently immune to it like the best behaved “prisoners of the cave”. The Peoples in these United States have been so deliberately primed with the spirit of war and “patriotic gratification” for ostensibly the ultimate battle between ‘good and evil’ with magical mantras like “either you are with us or with the terrorists”, especially when the goodly peoples suffer no casualties in their own homes and of their own loved ones, that indeed, ‘war has become the force that gives these civilized barbarians any meaning to their vacuous shop-till-you-drop lives’!

However, returning to Frum, note that his explicit testimony in his essay about his being asked to come up with a pretext to attack Iraq, is consistent with other facts, including that within hours of 9/11, Rumsfeld is said to have ordered making plans to attack Iraq, and as late as 1997 some strategist were arguing to make “Baghdad look like Hiroshima with Shock and Awe”. Frum’s eyewitness testimony lays to rest any doubt that the entire drama enacted in the UN over several months was indeed a hoax, as the renowned and award winning journalist Robert Fisk had boldly pointed out as far back as October 2002, when the UN drama was just unfolding. Fisk had clearly stated, as I recall hearing him on Pacifica in an interview to Dennis Bernstein in his Flashpoints news program, that when the discrediting of the UN inspection team starts appearing in the New York Times (implying in the press), that’s when we will know that the US is about to attack Iraq! And he stated that when he told this to some American journalists, they were astounded at his pronouncement! Hans Blix, the UN’s chief weapons inspector who led the inspection team in Iraq, his report subsequently being scorned by the US in order to commence its pre-planned slaughter on Iraq, now openly warns other countries that if you are offered UN inspections, you must understand that it’s a prelude to war! He says that he was duped! Tariq Ali reported this in a speech that I attended on May 8, 2003 (the 2003 Sanford S. Elberg Lecture in International Studies, Institute of International Studies, Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Center, UC Berkeley), but I haven’t been able to locate Blix’s own statements. No one else seems to have been duped in the rest of the world except in the US, even George Tenet stated before Congress that Iraq posed no threat to the US, nor was there any link established between 9/11 and Baghdad, and nor were there any Iraqi hijackers on board, that it was all a pretext for something far more insidious was clear to most people. So I am not sure that it isn’t entirely disingenuous for the learned UN inspection team leader to now claim that he was “duped”, if he did indeed say it in that context as reported by Tariq Ali, the famous author of Clash of Fundamentalisms.

The real purpose behind the UN drama of course was domestic consumption and cover of legality. What is wrong with the Americans that they always refuse to ask the obvious? Is it all that Ritalin and Friends on television numbing their brains? The idea that if the UN says so then sanctions against a civilian population are justified, if the UN says so then disarming a nation is justified, if the UN says so then somehow bombing a country that did nothing to you would be justified! Since the country is such a sheep, this seeking of legal cover from the UN works well for domestic consumption. It is also too close to Hitler’s obsession with cover of legality as he rose to power. These guys seem to have studied their Nazi History well. The Pentagon strategist who prepare battle plans study Nazi history very carefully to extract valuable lessons for their current thinking, according to Daniel Ellsberg who himself worked for the Rand Corporation and the Pentagon in the 1960s making strategic war plans.

Not a random foreign policy

Some detractors of this White House persist in arguing that these new power brokers are ill informed, random in their foreign policy decisions, and don’t know what they are doing. They allege that Rumsfeld et. al and the strategist goading them on are all armchair warriors. Unfortunately, while it may seem like this, the evidence speaks otherwise. The strategist are very seasoned warriors and global thinkers. George Bush Senior has presided over the strategic pulse of this nation at least since the Ford Administration when he became the director of CIA, through his Vice Presidency in the Reagan Administration when he presided over the implosion of the Soviet Union. His own Presidency in which he oversaw the first destruction of Iraq that he himself had carefully cultivated and built up during Reagan Administration. And his legacy being continued through the two Clinton Administrations, as we note the sanctions regime on Iraq, and Bosnian ethnic cleansing at the hands of Slovadan Milosovic being presided over on Clinton’s watch. Heartless brutes like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright saying that the death of up to a million Iraqis, including babies, due to the American led UN imposed sanctions was “we think the price is worth it, and Clinton himself showing remarkable restraint for years as Bosnian Muslim women were raped and pillaged until the ‘feared’ Muslim expansion in the heartland of Europe was contained.

Now the prodigal son, though dyslexic and somewhat intelligence challenged (see his profile further on), but surrounded by seasoned high IQ professionals, and image makers like Karl Rove, has taken over. ZB has remained among the master advisors throughout many of these administrations, and has already claimed the honor of being the mastermind behind the downfall of the Soviet empire by handing the Soviets their own Vietnam!. Perhaps Bush Sr. and ZB might have competing claims to it, perhaps they might share the next Nobel Peace prize! Even George Bush Jr., during his run for the US Presidency and afterwards, when asked how he was planing to run foreign affairs and be an effective commander-in-chief because he didn’t seem to know much about the world, said that yes, “I’m not going to play like I’ve been a person who’s spent hours involved with foreign policy”, but “That’s dependent upon the military advisors that would be advising me”, and “That depends upon my advisors and the people who know a heck of a lot more about the subject than I do”, and finally, “A key to foreign policy is to rely on reliance.” A candid moment of truth.*10

This entire administration and their strategist are the remnants of the Cold War warriors of the past decades, not the least of whom is the current and very experienced Secretary of State General Colin Powell whose political machinations extend at least as far back as the Reagan administration if not further. He was the National Security Advisor to Reagan since 1987, and oversaw the first attack on Iraq for Bush Sr. as Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff. And when not making military battle plans, he lends his expertise to making corporate battle plans on the boards of several corporations. His son is the present Chairman of the very powerful FCC that controls media alliances and monopolies, and who at one point as a member of the FCC was responsible for overseeing the AOL – Time Warner merger, while Colin Powell sat on the board of AOL! His image as a ‘moderate’ and unwilling soldier only dutifully obliged to follow his commander-in-chief in ‘Shock and Awe’ of civilian populations, in complete contravention of all Geneva Conventions to which the US is a signatory hence breaking both international law and US law, and in willful ignorance of the lessons of Nuremberg trials that following orders is not an excuse for war crimes, is a carefully crafted Machiavellian image for some future Presidency of the United States. After all, the present front runners will need replacement once they have been used up. Donald Rumsfeld is his evil twin in this good cop bad cop style carefully cultivated persona, and comes in a close second in battlefield planning. He had been the Defense Secretary for President Ford, and was Ronald Reagan’s key envoy to Iraq to normalize relations with the butcher of Halabja and America’s strategic proxy war partner against Iran to contain its Islamic revolution from spreading into the adjacent oily client-states of the United States.

Final anecdotal evidence that lends further credence to this analysis of seasoned warriors at the helm, was obtained during the aforementioned public talk by Tariq Ali, the famed antiwar activist from the UK. Speaking quite candidly he enlightened the audience with two anecdotal points that he was privy to, and which substantiates the above thesis of determined planners deliberately following a well defined course of action, not to be underestimated for their apparent randomness, or the “mule” making the world laugh.*11

First point is with respect to North Korea. While publicly debating one of the advisors to Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense, who was taking very hawkish positions during the debate, Tariq Ali asked her privately after the debate if she would enlighten him about North Korea. Apparently the two had known each other since the 1970s, and she used to read his “New Left Review” before she came over on the side of the emperor. She candidly told him that it is not about North Korea at all. But about South Korea. South Korea wants to get its hands on North’s nuclear weapons through rapprochement between the two nations, and the specter of China and combined Korea, two of the three giants in the industrial triad in the Pacific Rim being nuclear armed, would motivate the third member of the triad, Japan to also seek nuclear weapons, and that would change the dynamics of global hegemony in Asia to the detriment of the US. According to Tariq Ali, and also quite plainly obvious to anyone willing to spend 5 minutes on the world map looking at where America has its bases (of the 189 member states of the UN, 121 have a US military base), China is in the gun-sights of the American imperial planners as the main threat to American hegemony in the coming years. One might still wonder what was the rush to add North Korea into the axis of evil now, why not just take on one challenge at a time, it’s not like the two antipodes are rushing into an headlong embrace tomorrow – unless the intent is indeed to put the fear of god in all potential near and long term foes that: don’t you dare even twitch without our permission!

China’s cautious approach to the present US takeover of the world bespeaks their centuries old wisdom in dealing with a foe who is far ahead, while they catch up. China’s defense budget is approx. $40 billion, about a tenth of US defense spending, and is second largest in the world after the US. But it is not the amount of money spent that necessarily determines military prowess, as China so convincingly demonstrated a few years ago when a US stealth bomber was shot down over Yugoslavia. Contrary to denials from the Pentagon, the story published in many places excited the imagination of many third world scientists when they heard how a simple low tech solution could bring down a billion dollar high tech bird that was decades in development with the American tax payers hard earned money. Whether or not it is true that this is how the plane was downed is besides the point, because the science behind it is certainly plausible. Apparently, Chinese scientists noticed a very subtle electromagnetic interference in the ubiquitous television signals blanketing the earth when one of these supersonic birds flew by. They strung thousands of Intel 486 microprocessor based jelly bean networked boxes each connected to an ordinary television antenna, with sophisticated triangulation and prediction software running on them that they developed, and it could predict with accuracy enough the flight path and next coordinates of the radar-invisible bird as it soared at heights and speed unimaginable to the lay person, and were able to shoot one down!

The second anecdotal point brought up by Tariq Ali, is about Iraq. Apparently, four editors from the Guardian “unofficially” met with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the blitzkrieg over Iraq had ended and Sadaam had disappeared, and asked him: ~“Mr. Prime Minister, may we ask where are the famous weapons of mass destruction? Tony Blair, as dramatized by Tariq Ali, simply stared at them and said: ~“you don’t get it do you, it’s about Syria and Iran, [not about Iraq,] now we don’t have to bomb them because they will acquiesce”. This has not been published in the Guardian because it was “off the record”, but according to Tariq Ali, word gets around quickly in journalist circles.

White House dream team assembled

Let’s look a bit more closely at this White House, where we seem to have a perfect team assembled for world conquest:

George W. Bush Jr.

We have a born-again fundamentalist Evangelical Christian war mongering US President as plainly evidenced by his foreign policy actions, who according to Nelson Mandela, is a president “who cannot think properly”, who says that Jesus was his favorite philosopher and then calls Ariel Sharon, an indicted war criminal, “a man of peace” and his mentor, a Phillips/Yale/Harvard educated privileged person who is largely ignorant and quite incoherent on almost any subject despite his pedigree “More and more of our imports come from overseas.” – but transforms into a fiery orator speaking from the heart when he is pouring vengeance on the enemy “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”, who easily jokes about democracy “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator”, and who was reinvented from the ashes of a failed presidency before 9/11 into a great statesman and moral leader by the “Co-President” and war-addicted master kingmaker Karl Rove.*12

George Bush’s factual biography Fortunate Son by J. H. Hatfield offers a revealing glimpse into the kind of person who is now the most powerful Alexander in the history of the world, the thirteen pages of cartoons alone at the beginning of this book summarize his life quite succinctly. His other image makers are also hard at work pulling overtime to make him look presidential, as the “MBA President” and CEO of America, in Team Bush – leadership lessons from the Bush White House by Donald F. Kettl. It is quite incredulous that the explanation for Bush’s poor performance at Yale University is deftly spinned as the big picture person who was actually busy “studying the students” during his partying binges! I must hide this book from my kids because they might one day argue the same case – I sure dread that day. But perhaps I shouldn’t worry because this argument only works if one is President of the United States, and not for anyone else? In his public letter to George W. Bush in Stupid White Men, Michael Moore after rehearsing Bush’s public factual history, ends as follows: “In short, you’ve been a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a cry baby.” If the American public accepts this man as their savior from the terrorists of the world, as they seem to be doing by the shovel full, it sets new standards for marketing Teflon coatings, a patentable asset for globalization! I hope I did not speak too soon!

He is either Magnifico*13, or a figure head CEO of an administration of highly ambitious and seasoned ideologues. They exhibit few moral compunctions as evidenced by their own foreign policy statements, with deep connections to corporate interests and oil.

But worse than that, and unfortunately so for the American nation and the rest of the world, he is a religious fanatic President of the most powerful country on Earth, who very likely imagines himself the latter day “Richard the Lionhearted” in his rare moments of reflection. He deeply feels the fundamentalist religious urge to “Crusade” against the Islamic “evil-doers” who dared to hit America with another “Pearl Harbor”. A self proclaimed born-again Christian who intimately shares in the belief system of the extreme right-wing Evangelical Christians, along with his highest ranking law enforcement officer, John Ashcroft. They entertain the most shocking and obnoxious set of beliefs, more apropos to call “doomsday seeking” (See discussion of Evangelical Christians further on). The “Compassionate Conservatives” as they like to call themselves, was the nom de guerre of George Bush during the 2000 election battle.

When Bush initially called the “war on terrorism” a “Crusade”, or when one of the invasion plans was initially named operation “Infinite Justice”, most skeptics thought it was just a slip of tongue by an ignoramus, and accidental. But it is exactly what George Bush perceived he was doing, waging a crusade of infinite justice against the Muslims, a charge handed him he believes, directly by god: “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done”.

This also perhaps sheds light on why he magically becomes so eloquent when heaping vengeance on the enemy like an ordained minister, or latter day Richard the Lionhearted, when under almost all other circumstances, he appears to be searching for answers in a script, and becomes incoherent when he can’t find them. And it also partially explains why he takes so warmly to Ariel Sharon, calling him a “man of peace” – a peace in which the Evangelical Christians expect to be the only victors, and Sharon is helping them realize it by making their Biblical Prophesy come even more true by conquering all of Palestine. Quite incredible! And monumentally criminal.

It is a monumental crime because as the President of the United States of America, George Bush had sworn to uphold the Constitution during his inauguration. With the constitutional separation of church and state, to use the American state’s vast military and economic prowess and its unrivaled superpower status in the world, to inflict these personal self-deluded religious beliefs on the rest of the planet with criminal “Shock and Awe” of defenseless innocent civilian populations, is not only a constitutional crime against the American nation, but a more consequential and monumental war crime on Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. A war crime no less horrific than what Hitler visited upon many nations of Europe laboring under similar self delusions of the “right” of the “superior race” to exterminate the “lesser” Jews, and to bring enlightenment to the world by conquering it for the Lebensraum of his own Germanic peoples.

Dick Cheney

We have a Vice President who was the CEO of Halliburton – the largest oil services company in the world whose accounting irregularities are off limits from scrutiny, nor the role of its CEO in the President’s Energy Task Force and the Enron debacle allowed public disclosure. And Halliburton has just been awarded a contract for 7 Billion dollars over 2 years without any open bidding to put out the oil fires in Iraq – right! His respected wife sits on the board of directors of Lockheed Martin, the weapons manufacturer which stands to directly benefit from the sale of its weapon products to the US military, keeping it all in the family. In his six terms as a congressman from Wisconsin, he voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, and against a House resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. He has been involved in Republican Administrations going as far back as the Nixon White House, where he was Deputy House counsel under Donald Rumsfeld, and replaced him as chief of staff for President Ford. He was the Defense Secretary for Bush Sr. during the first slaughter on Iraq, and now he is presiding over its complete military occupation under Bush Jr.

It seems that a sick humor in Washington is that if Cheney has a heart attack, Bush might finally become President! I hope this does not happen because it would steal the satisfaction of some fine police man one day when he reads to Cheney, ‘sir it is my deepest honor to arrest you for crimes against humanity’, as what finally occurred in the case of the murderous Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet at the hands of an English Bobby. According to Daniel Ellsberg, to get rid of this election theft, work on the real president, because the public won’t care if it’s Vice President is brought to justice, but doing it to the overt President makes for a national trauma and hence much harder!

In any other country, Cheney’s financial interests would be considered conflicts of interest at the bare minimum, even by the US media itself. But in America, it appears to be collective amnesia that no one in the mainstream can even recall the famous prescient warnings of the past US President General Dwight D. Eisenhower in his last message to the nation:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience … The total influence – economics, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government … In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influences, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex … The disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” The military-industrial complex should never be allowed to “endanger our liberties or democratic process.*14

No questions are asked!

Donald Rumsfeld

We have the “Hermann Goering” of this “war on terrorism”, the real second in command to Dick Cheney, running this administration from within the hallowed walls of the Pentagon, the earnest Defense Secretary. Of all the people assembled in this administration, he appears to be the most amoral, ruthless, and inhuman character. The evidence against him for lies and deceit for everything that has transpired, from the ill fated day of 9-11, when the air defenses of America magically failed to respond, through the inhuman treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay as “illegal combatants”, to the monumentally criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, is as long as the Pentagon is deep. The record of his own statements publicly available, show him off as the most inhuman “butcher” of innocent Muslims with not a modicum of humanity in him. As unpopular a thing for me to say as this might be, while he is still the reigning and all powerful Defense Secretary, I would surely like to be present at his trial for war crimes and observe from the public back benches Hannah Arendt’s disturbing observations of Eichmann during his own war crimes trial in Jerusalem.*15

A Princeton graduate, he was the CEO of G. D. Searle pharmaceutical company and General Instrument, and has sat on the boards of several corporations, who has vociferously argued for using chemical weapons against Iraq in this new assault on that defenseless nation as a humane alternative to minimize US casualties in urban warfare, and was photographed shaking hands in 1983-84 with the now bad (or dead) boy Sadaam Hussain right after the brutal dictator had gassed his own people and used chemical weapons against Iran. As noted before, he was sent there to normalize relations with Iraq by the Reagan administration – there is no question of morality in politics as President Ronald Reagan had rightly observed: ~“I am told politics is the second oldest profession, it seems to have a strong resemblance to the first one”.

It is said about Donald Rumsfeld that he never met a nuclear bomb that he didn’t like, and his record bespeaks of this reputation. He was White House counsel to Nixon, Defense Secretary and then Chief of Staff for Ford where he officially remained against any arms control, and three decades later still clung to his play toys calling the ABM treaty “ancient history” during his confirmation hearing as Defense Secretary under President Bush Jr. He reputedly runs the CIA’s secret army Special Operations Group (SOG) funded to the tune of billions of dollars for autonomous special operations in the world without any Congressional oversight. He is the prime hawkish supporter of militarization and weaponization of space and has deep affinity with the ideologues who advocate world domination by “the empire”. His association with former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who subsequently became the CEO and Chairman of the empire-building Carlyle group, and the influence peddling and revolving door unwritten agreement between government and the military-industrial complex, is unraveled in the investigative book The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group by Briody and Byron. But what is this empire of which Donald Rumsfeld is only the tip of the iceberg? Is it only about oil? Arundhati Roy eloquently refers to the non obvious aspects of empire in her speech “How to confront Empire?” which might be apropos to interject here:

As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through ‘sweetheart deals’, to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. Corporate Globalization – or shall we call it by its name – Imperialism – needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice. Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all, they have to make sure that it’s only money, goods, patents, and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, or – God forbid – Justice. So this – all this – is ‘empire’.

John Ashcroft

We have an Attorney General who can only be described as an extreme far right-wing gun toting fundamentalist doomsday seeking mullah, but without a turban and a beard – starting official morning meetings with his staff by holding hands and singing prayers to the Lord, subscribing to the philosophy of the extreme right-wing Evangelical Christian fanatics who seem to have taken over this White House administration – or so it would appear. Their fundamentalist fanatic ideology and its marriage of convenience with Zionist aspirations in the Middle East is discussed later. One of his first acts beside instituting morning chanting to the Lord (I personally don’t have a problem with it – sing all you want – but perhaps the US Constitution might – what with all that separation of Church and State which ostensibly disallows even morning prayers by children in public schools let alone by public officials in government buildings), was to announce that the Justice department will destroy all background check records of gun ownership within 24 hours of such approval being granted. So no record of who owns what weapons is to be kept whatsoever!

The NRA (National Rifle Association), I am sure, will be thrilled to elect Ashcroft as their Next President after the gun toting Mr. Heston, the moses of the silver screen, has retired. See Bowling for Columbine, and reflect on the new message that this glamorous Bush coterie is sending to the youth in America – the best way to resolve differences is to shoot it out with your opponents – the bigger your weapon, the better your chances of minimizing your own casualties while “not terribly being concerned about” what you do to your enemy. The latter is a direct quote of General Colin Powell, while proudly commenting on US high tech superiority after the first Gulf war on Iraq that how the American casualties were “only” a few hundred as they liberated Kuwait, he was asked “well what about Iraqi casualties?”. This quip by the then Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff a decade ago under the stewardship of the illustrious dad, summarizes the imperial colonial attitude of this entire administration under the stewardship of the prodigal son, and the same General as the Secretary of State.

Ashcroft’s opinion of Islam and its billion plus followers is noteworthy: ~“God [of the Christians] sends son to die for people – people [in Islam] send sons to die for God”. With his crusading attitude shared by many in the administration including the President, how much of a fair shake can the Muslims expect from this Christian religious fanatic who is the highest ranking law officer in the most powerful country in the world? Thus we see the kind of illegal and extra judicial internment of Afghan Muslims in Guantanamo Bay, stripped of all human rights and dignities, treated worse than animals. If they were dogs or cats instead, there’d be an uproar by all the animal rights groups at least!

His Justice department argues that the Posse Comatatus Act that Congress passed a century and a half ago now gets in the way of terrorist fighting effort, and the revival of COINTELPRO of decades past to enable the FBI free and unfettered access to the terrorists, is a necessity. This is the Patriot Act 1, already the law of the land until at least 2005. A Patriot Act 2 already circulated in Congress, is also in the waiting, and goes a few steps further. Following that, might be the blurring of the distinction between civilian policing functions and military policing functions, as the constitution is getting in the way of locating and fighting the terrorists. Taken to its logical conclusion, it will result in a police state. Not the type we see in the vanilla imposed dictatorships in developing countries with a centralized brutal dictator and the entire population against him, but a brand new type, only possible in America, where its populace plays a cooperative rather than an adversarial role in maintaining it. These issues are fleshed out in greater detail throughout the essay, such that the big picture will emerge after you have read through it all. Then you can judge for yourself the truth or falsity of the connections made therein. Unlike other thesis where the protagonists defend their view point as that determines success of their positions, in this case, the protagonist’s success is to be proven wrong. Please try to do that.

Condoleezza Rice

We have a National Security Advisor who was on the board of Chevron and has a Nigerian flagged oil tanker named after her, who has been a director of several other corporations as well including Charles Schwab, and also served in the National Security team of Bush Sr. as the Russian affairs expert. She rose up through the ranks of political science professor to become Provost at Stanford University and was allegedly a fortunate beneficiary of Affirmative Action but now is an ardent opponent of it. An accomplished hawkish senior advisor to the President, she was perhaps also instrumental in orchestrating the fall of Baghdad without blood shed through her alleged visit to Moscow days before the event. If this be true, here is a true Nobel Peace Prize candidate because that avoided the sufferings and misery of a civilian population of 5 – 6 million people at the hands of American bombs and high tech soldiers, as well as the American soldiers themselves due to the anticipated street fighting! I hope it is true, because this is one Machiavellian machination that deserves this award. Of course it would have been even more deserved had she talked the White House out of launching this illegal assault on Iraq to start with, or resigned as a matter of principal – what with she being Black and all – having been at the receiving end of slavery for centuries, perhaps she might have been more conscious of the sufferings of another! It is almost as if many commentators are almost sorry that there was no resistance in Baghdad the way many talk about this: shucks(!) we missed our chance of watching a real battle on the telli. Yes, resist to the last Iraqi, or for that matter, every last Palestinian! Rent a war movie, you can’t tell the difference anyway. I sincerely thank Condoleezza Rice if she did have even the smallest role in minimizing the slaughter of Iraqi population by orchestrating this departure of the Baathist – just don’t bring them back now in another uniform!

Colin Powell

We have an imposing and very articulate Secretary of State, who in addition to his impressive credentials as a General and Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, exhibits no qualms about openly lying to the people of the United States, and indeed the whole world by waving plagiarized documents and “fictitious facts” in the UN, and just offers a cavalier shrug when the “fiction” blows up in his face a week later – the main effect having already been achieved on the domestic audience. His hurriedly updated autobiography My American Journey rushed onto the bookshelves contains his report in its entirety made to the UN on 5 February 2003, with charts and maps galore detailing Iraq’s WMDs, but not the one above. The future youngsters browsing it in their school libraries will come away with shock and awe at the patriot who once served so valiantly for the defense of his country, and having no knowledge of him having waived fake plagiarized evidence to bomb another country. Another Nobel Peace Prize in the making!

Other Big Brains

We also have a convicted felon, the highest ranking White House staff member ever to be convicted of lying to Congress: Mr. John Poindexter of the Iran-Contra scandal from Reagan administration, subsequently pardoned after his conviction by Bush Sr., and now appointed to run the “Total Information Awareness” system for Bush Jr., to bring the Orwellian “1984” into a belated reality for the good citizenry of this country.

We further have the likes of Richard Perle, Ex. Chairman and member of the Defense Policy Board, advising the government on imperial strategies. A known war mongering and profiteering Zionist ally who has, since 1997, argued for war on Iraq. The Defense Policy Board is a very secretive advisory group to the Pentagon whose members are appointed under the stewardship of the Secretary of Defense, whose meetings are classified, and for which there is no public scrutiny of its deliberations. Nine of its thirty members are connected to corporations in the military-industrial complex, and as reported by the Washington based Center for Public Integrity watchdog group, they were awarded contracts worth $76 billion dollars between 2001 and 2002! Among them are Jack Sheehan, a senior executive vice President at Bechtel who is also a retired Marine Corps General, and the well known former US Secretary of State George Schultz, a board member of the board of directors at Bechtel, and also involved in the reconstruction of Iraq as the Chairman of the advisory board on the committee for the liberation of Iraq. This cozy coupling between the Corporations, the Military, and the Government is well documented in The Iron Triangle mentioned earlier for those who are wont to dismiss all empirical evidence of collusion as conspiracy theories.

And we have his twin, deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a Zionist hawk for whom it is sometimes hard to tell whether he holds that position on behalf of the United States or Israel. He has been around since the 1970s in various Administrations and is also part of the JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) strategic planning group for Zionists’ occupation of the greater Israel. I often wonder if he is the war mongering Daarth Vaider version of Hari Seldon! That is an immense compliment for those not familiar with this science fiction character from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Please read this trilogy, especially the first novel in the trilogy. You will not be able to put the book down. That will define for you an exceedingly brilliant and mastermind character who operates deceptively from behind the scenes. Except that Hari Seldon uses his genius for “good” even when his methods are based on deception of the masses as well as the visible ruling elite. Now imagine the “dark side” metaphor from the Star Wars trilogy of George Lucas, and layer it upon Hari Seldon. That is exactly Paul Wolfowitz in my humble opinion. He was the prized disciple of the master of all deception – the latter day Machiavelli – the father of modern neoconservatism and professor of political philosophy, Leo Strauss.*16

Please lookup Wolfowitz, the Sunshine Boy, and his mentor Leo Strauss on the internet. While at it, also look up the names of the Zionist Neocons listed in Exhibit A, all of whom are active exponents of this invasion of Iraq and encouraged both President Clinton and the current President Bush to attack Iraq because of “Weapons of Mass Destruction that Sadaam Hussain refuses to relinquish, and after the invasion wrote him laudatory and supporting letters that finally, there is moral clarity in American Foreign Policy. Instead of my rehearsing all the easily accessible information about these peoples here, it is imperative that you as a reader concerned about your nation, spend some time on a computer looking up the biographies of these leaders of America. Every character listed in Exhibit A has some incredible story of confluence of interests spanning the gamut from “The Iron Triangle” to being intensely pro-Zionist. Wikipedia, a grass-roots encyclopedia on the internet, is a great place to start to learn about this coterie of evil geniuses among the ruling elite of America who are so anxious to spill American blood. To fulfill whose agenda and under which political philosophy? That will be a revelation I can assure you. This will be the best couple of weekends of investment you can make in your own future.

You will note that a majority of these names in Exhibit A, are not surprisingly, Jews, but a few are also Christians, and at least one is of Muslim origin. Indeed, Zalmay Khalilzad’s background is worth studying in some depth for Afghanis might view him as their Benedict Arnold. As a protégé of Zbigniew Brzezinski, he played many significant roles in the Pentagon to bring about the demise of the USSR by offering them the sacrifice of his own peoples in Afghanistan. As a member of the Congressionally funded organization “Friends of Afghanistan”, he was instrumental in getting the Afghans to not make any peace with the Soviets and to fight to the last Afghan. A major traitor to his own peoples according to some, including this scribe, it escapes me how he is able to survive his stay in Afghanistan – unless they do not know who helped Brzezinski destroy their nation, and who deliberately kindled this flame of “Islamic extremism” to take down the USSR that Bush is conveniently using once again, first to bomb their country to prehistoric times, and now for the “full spectrum dominance” of the planet.*16A

When Bush was referring to his advisors in “That depends upon my advisors and the people who know a heck of a lot more about the subject than I do”, it was to this bunch of people, beyond the obvious first tier handlers in the White House under the captainship of Karl Rove – and all are Zionists or their immediate exponents. Indeed, I would really like to discover a single Neocon who is not an ardent supporter of Israel – the singular American Foreign Policy pivot since the inception of Israel that is the root cause of the Middle East perpetually being an international hotspot, always in the throes of bloodshed. But the neoconservatives have only in recent years acquired such power – yet the support of Israel is systemic in America. And that is because whether it is neoconservatives, or neoliberals or another “neo” or “multi” or “wing” flavor, Zionism has laid its eggs in their midst as their chief ideologues and exponents, and behind it all, is the singular shillling for Zion. It is almost akin to all the spokes of a bicycle wheel all spread out around the wheel’s circumference on the one end, and all connecting at the wheel’s center at the other end. All the spokes are integral to the strength of the wheel. It is just that the focus today happens to be on the “spoke” of the Neocons, because they are the ones who happen to be in power. It was not lightly that Ariel Sharon so gallantly boasted to Shimon Perez on Israeli radio “I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” (see fuller quote later)

And finally, not to be out done by the presence of Machiavellian thinkers, we also have the Machiavellian doer, a retired General, Jay Garner, appointed to run Iraq, a past weapons manufacturer executive and an open ideological ally of Israel and the Zionist dream of physically conquering Arab lands from the “Nile to the Euphrates”. Just imagine who is being appointed in the role of Douglas MacArthur! There should be little surprise to anyone that a Jordanian political cartoonist would capture the Arab fears for post war Iraq with his cartoon showing the statue of Sadaam waving to the people, being replaced by one of George Bush waving to the people! Their only expectation of hope, that perhaps this new one might be a bit more lenient with them. Some regime change!

Among all these aforementioned leaders of America, it appears to me that this pentet of Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Bush Sr., might be the core group of “Second Foundationers” in this White House. But they are also too visible for that, except perhaps Bush Sr., who I only caught a glimpse of once in the news very symbolically in charge driving a golf cart himself, as his son the President, sat in the passenger seat mildly waving to the onlookers. Bush Sr. still resides in the White House, and though presumably “retired” from public life, he fits right in with the pentet as their godfather. He is by far the most seasoned, experienced, and politically astute of anyone in this Administration, and also has deep connections to intelligence having been the Director of CIA himself. All the major players in his son’s present cabinet once worked for him, and may still be reporting to him. And I am sure he lives in the White House only to reminisce about old times!

Are there also some not so visible – the invisible hand – “Second Foundationers”? The only reason we know about ZB is because he published, detailing his thinking openly. And also because his name shows up in interesting places, like as one of the founders of the Trilateral Commission. He is one of the most pragmatic and successful imperial strategists today. He also seems to be rather straight forward and blatant in his chauvinistic pronouncements and therefore does not strike me as a secretive behind the scenes covert operator. While he may sanction covert operations upon other nations such as the CIA’s intervention in Afghanistan, he boasts too openly about it after their completion to be a covert “Second Foundationer”. And we also know the names of the hundred plus Neocons from the PNAC reports and their open letters encouraging American Presidents to wage war upon other nations to bring about a very “American Peace” in the “New American Century” (See Exhibit A). But they are all still too prominent to be the hidden “Second Foundationers”. And they contain some rather unusual names, like Dan Quayle who could not even spell potato let alone define strategy for world conquest, and billionaires like Steve Forbes, and administrators like Jeb Bush (the President’s brother running Florida).

I suspect that the real covert thinkers and doers of the “Second Foundation” might prefer to remain shielded from the public eye, and that their powers likely extend into the deepest darkest recesses of the Pentagon, the NSA, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency – the behind the scene parent of CIA) and NORAD (which means collusion with the top brass from among the Generals). The covert “Second Foundationers must also remain constant across Administrations for continuity of doctrines and command of executions, constant like ZB, and enjoy true bipartisan support in America’s version of Democracy, like ZB. They are also the ones most likely to possess the real truth behind the new “Pearl Harbor”. And consequently, both: the identities of the covert “Second Foundationers the root godheads of terror and conquest – and the modalities of their treasonous crime of 911, will remain obscure and a matter of conjecture unless a third party comes to the White House and really cleans house!

This self house cleaning in the inner sanctums of power is a highly improbable proposition however, for one can only get to the White House after one has choked one’s own conscience with one’s own hands and paid one’s dutiful homage to the king-makers. And this would surely apply to even courageous third parties. But a candidate who can outsmart the king-makers can always be born – watch out for Luke Skywalker!

Can George Bush Jr. be nobly converted over from the power of the dark side and be re-born as the Luke? May the “Force” be with him! From Asimov’s “mule” to Lucas’ “Skywalker” can be a very short step indeed!

How can monumental criminals ever be brought to justice for providing the intellectual motivation and Machiavellian orchestration of this lifetime of “World War IV” to build empire?

They are directly responsible for the ensuing barbarianism of a mighty peoples – for “all the evil .. follow[ed]” from their first cause co-optation of the “populist democracy” that was perceived to be “inimical to imperial mobilization” – and the death and misery of hundreds of thousands, actually millions, as they have bombed entire nations and thrown their entire societies into disarray and turmoil. They are quite the opposite of the fictional “Second Foundation” setup by Hari Seldon as the behind the scenes “good guys” who orchestrate global events to eliminate many lifetimes of wars and free people from the decaying remnants of an oppressive empire. Perhaps these Zionist Neocons are also sci-fi fans and actually draw their evil inspiration for global domination from the likes of Daarth Vaider and the power of the Dark Side of his Emperor!

Then watch out for Luke Skywalker and the power of the Force! While these may be popular literary icons from American science fiction and cinematic culture, they seem strangely apropos in expressing the imperial designs, mass deceptions, and barbaric demonstrations of military prowess upon innocent and defenseless civilians in this brazenly lopsided “Holy war and Unholy terror” unleashed by a mighty unchallenged superpower in its unquenchable thirst for “full spectrum dominance”!

It is more aptly the “war of imperialism”, as banal in its origin and in its bottom line, as all the club wielding Neanderthals of history for “hegemony is as old as mankind”. Past all the sophistication and suits, ideologies and fancy names, they are just petty thugs performing monumental crimes because they happen to occupy a particular position on the Grand Chessboard. Once in the docks, they will lose their ‘patriotic hero’ persona in a blink to look just as pathetic and banal as Eichmann did in Jerusalem facing his own victims and accusers.

When you look at their photographs in books like Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, it is hard to tell from the grim serious looks on their faces how they can be up to anything insidious behind the scenes, the blasé and obvious profit making conflicts of interests notwithstanding? How is it possible to do these photo shoots in the middle of a crisis and have them come out looking like they are really working on solving the problem, and not the cause of the problem? I have stared at those photographs a lot. They have expressions of ice and steel on their faces. I am impressed and also scared because I cannot penetrate through their expressions in these pictures. Are these saints or demagogues? They look far from guilty in these pictures. Power of the photographic images? We already saw General Powell demonstrate this photographic power with glossy evidence of WMDs in the UN which can now only be found in his updated biography but not in Iraq!

Was Socrates right about democracy being stupid, and Plato about the masses easily fooled by imagery? And were the founding fathers of this country right in recognizing that condition and putting in safeguards against it in the US Constitution for the freedom of the press in order to keep the people informed lest they either become chained in Plato’s Cave or revert back to poisoning Socrates again?

The ordinary public only sees patriotic heroes in these pictures, and in their stories, as told by even respected journalists. This image making it would appear, is the biggest obstacle in the path of mainstream American public accepting them as anything other than what they appear to be on the silver and photographic screen!

Is it then little wonder that the outfit that designed the set for General Tommy Franks in Qatar to provide his television press briefings during the operation “Iraqi Freedom”, built to the tune of $250,000 according to Arundhati Roy, is also a Hollywood outfit that designs sets for Disney, MGM, and Good Morning America! When all news media ownership falls into the hands of the industrial military complex, you end up with the fox guarding the coup!

The discussion of how consent used to be manufactured in the past, and how news is manufactured today permeates all essays in this book, and by the time you are done reading it, you would have a good understanding of why mainstream Americans are now complete prisoners of the cave. Becoming aware of it is the first step in breaking loose from its shackles.

Conqueror’s prerogatives: Destroying Iraq’s Civilization

It is instructive to pause here for a moment, and digress briefly to reflect on the stated intentions of the US to publish new text books for the Iraqi schools. This is ominous, and could portend a real remaking of Iraq, away from its nationalistic Arab roots, away from its thousands of years of heritage, into a ‘Mesopotamian Turkey’, very much suited to the interests of Israel, who is already seeking to revive the dormant oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa. As Winston Churchill once noted in the waning years of British colonialism, that one does not physically have to colonize a nation in the post colonial era, it can just as effectively be done and also be a lot cheaper in the long run, to install a client-state that serves your interests – and that has been the history of the post WWII era, especially in the Middle East. Why should it be any different now? The burning of the National Library and looting of National Museum in Baghdad, as witnessed by Robert Fisk, destroying the priceless heritage of the Muslims and the Iraqi nation including the destruction of some of the oldest copies of the Koran, and the theft and looting of some of the world’s most priceless art and archaeological heritage of the ancient Mesopotamia, as the American army stood by doing nothing, is not much different from the burning down of Baghdad by Halaku Khan that had turned the Tigress river black with the ink of the thousands of library books thrown into it as the Mongols didn’t see much use for other’s civilization. While the US troops only guard the oil ministries with tanks, the civil records and other infrastructure burns, to some eye witness accounts even actively goaded into destruction by the US soldiers as a few chaotic looters go on a rampage to torch their own infrastructure. All substantiating the above mentioned fears of remaking Iraq with a new history. ‘Destroying Iraqi Civilization’ would have been more apropos as the title for this adventure, but then would the American public have allowed it? Dangerously poised at the brink of civil war, it is another Lebanon in the making. More innocent Muslims to continue to die for oil and Israel. This war of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is freedom for the Iraqis to be at the receiving end of American bombs and American-Zionist Corporate Hegemony!

When Tom Brokaw, the earnest news anchor at NBC candidly observed ~“one of the things we don’t want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we will own that country”, he was perhaps being exuberant about the obvious empire building for America, perhaps not understanding the deeper con game of destroy and rebuild contracts to select American corporations like Bechtel, Chevron, Shell, and Halliburton, some of whose executives also sit on the advisory board of the Defense Policy Board as well as in the White House itself, nor the Neocon Zionist’s plan to remake Iraq into the best mold of exploitation learned from recent history’s best world colonizer, the Great Britannia.

It is used to be exact same designs and articulations when the British conquered Burma and India in the past centuries, for the white man’s burden of bringing them freedom and civilization to the oppressed of the world, of recreating new civilizations for the natives in the image of the conqueror, and to save them from the plenitude of their own natural resources. It used to be freedom to obey the British! The Shell oil of today used to be Burma-Shell of yesterday. Many new histories can be written for the American empire by simple substitutions of a few choice names in histories past!*17

Is Iraq to be any different?

The Evangelical Christian Crusaders and their alliance with the Zionists

These are the burgeoning Bible thumping born-again ultra right-wing Evangelical Christian fanatics, who want to bomb Christianity onto the Muslims in a revived Crusade. Among their leaders is billionaire Dr. Pat Robertson, who continually broadcasts anti-Islamic hateful propaganda from his ubiquitous 700 Club and CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) television shows, and openly calls Islam a “very wicked and evil religion”. These Christians form the majority of “white conservative born-again Christian” electorate in many parts of the heartland of America. They are the ones who voted Republican to bring George Bush, and the likes of John Ashcroft to power from the crucial Bible belt of America. They can make or break an election for a candidate, for they are well organized and galvanized into action, and thus both Republicans and Democrats generally covet their favors. And these “Compassionate Conservatives” as they like to call themselves, have finally found an ally in this White House, in George Bush Jr., who is purported to subscribe to their fanatical beliefs.

Some of these beliefs are monumentally obnoxious, and lead to severe policy implications when held by the most powerful person on earth, who seeks his charter from some voice whispering into his inner ear, instead of from the American people whom he represents, and who aims to fulfill “god’s” promise on earth rather than the one he made to the American people upon taking oath as the President of the United States of America.

Let’s see what the beliefs of these doomsday seeking Bible literalists appear to be and how they effect America’s foreign policy:

I.1: that the return of the Jews to Israel is a Biblical Prophesy come true and a sign of Rapture; thus in order to hasten the arrival of Jesus further, they must support Israel, even in its most oppressive and barbaric conquest of Palestine, and even if it entails bringing on Armageddon, as that would only hasten the arrival of their Messiah;

I.2: that they must bring the message of Christ to the “lesser” humanity who are otherwise doomed to perish, even at the expense of bombing it onto them in the name of bringing them democracy, for it’s only the “lesser heathens” destined for hell anyway that are being done a favor, as against the possibility of converting the rest who escape the killing fields, to Jesus and saving them;

I.3: that the “higher heathens”, the Jews, will automatically be converted to Jesus when Christ comes; thus supporting the right-wing Israeli “heathens” and the Zionists now in their homicidal conquest of an innocent civilian population in Palestine, is also only doing all the living Jewish people a favor by hastening the arrival of the Messiah, so that all the living Jews can be saved;

I.4: the rest of humanity that is not “saved” will burn in Hell, and the “saved ones” i.e. born-again and the Jews, will get to watch the show from the best seats in the house!

The diabolical right-wing Zionist alliance with the right-wing Evangelical Christians makes a self serving marriage of convenience for both sides. The Zionist Jews, while privately scoffing at the delusional beliefs harbored by these fanatics and their benefactor George Bush, nevertheless find them a convenient source of indispensable American support in their own agenda for Eretz Israel. Thus various Prime Ministers of Israel have routinely visited the Bible belt states in America and met with the Evangelical Christian leadership; the Israeli lobby AIPAC in conjunction with the well organized Evangelists, either actively support or actively ensure failure of electoral candidates for most higher local and national offices in America based on the candidate’s stated position on Israel; and we continually see Ariel Sharon beaming from ear to ear every time he meets and shakes hands with the President of the United States, George W. Bush, for he usually goes home with a basket of Palestinian gifts from the White House, and a license to acquire more.

Perhaps it is time that the Muslims around the world also called for the reformation of the “Bible” on the continued (mis)interpretation of which these fanatics wage death and pestilence on the rest of humanity. It would be a befitting response to the West’s disingenuous calls to reform “Islam” as an antiquated religion that needs to be brought in sync with modern times, and especially its concept of Jihad, that the Muslims keep getting energized by to fight the West’s continual attempts to colonize them over the past two centuries to this day. Pursuing such an outrageous path however would only engender further hatred among the already antagonized factions rather than foster amity and friendship, and hence I do not advocate it. In any case, it would be as unfair as the acts of those we condemn, and akin to burning books in a library that we don’t agree with!

At the risk of harping on truism, but which sadly needs restating over and over again: If faith inspires and moves one to reclaim one’s life and become a better more stellar human being, all power to one – regardless of what someone else might think of that faith. So if stone worshipers are moved by their statues, people of the Abrahamic faith moved by an unseen Creator, and the secular humanist and assorted modern day spiritualist atheists moved by the lack of perceiving one, more power to all of them. But when one’s beliefs entail invading others and bombing innocent civilians to bits because one holds one’s beliefs to be “superior”, a crusade or (neo) Zionism of any flavor, then freedom to hold personal opinions has transitioned to monumental crimes – regardless of how profound or deeply felt these beliefs might be for the perpetuators. Such tyrants must be opposed in no less a confrontation, than that allied to vanquish the Nazi Third Reich! While students across the vast class rooms of America study the Third Reich and energetically debate the lessons to be learned, they are sadly not taught to recognize it appearing at home as the public lines up to salute “United We Stand”.

It is rather disingenuous that the American mainstream press generally presents these criminals not as fanatic and monumentally criminal fundamentalists out to get the world, but as people of profound Christian faith who “deeply” believe in their mission – and what their mission might be is either left out, or in the rare circumstance that it is delved into, the depth of their feelings for their mission is somehow portrayed as a justification for holding such beliefs – ‘la mission civilisatrice’. Not in so many words, but leaving that distinct impression – because no sympathy is shown at all for those on the receiving end of their ‘divine mission’ (sic!).

Why?

Is it perhaps because these fanatics wear corporate suits and are clean shaved, instead of the traditional view that fanatic fundamentalists only come in turbans and wavy beards wearing baggy pants and wailing their heads off or burning the American flag? Or is it perhaps because these “ubermensch” conservatives also populate the upper echelons of the American news media and agree with ZB’s assertion that “More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation,…”.

You be the judge!

This is a serious team play

Suffice it to say, any objective assessment of the few dozen or so most influential people, both in the Cabinet and outside of it, their religious and other institutional corporate backers from the military-industrial-media complex of America, and their orchestration of events now unfolding in Iraq, and what transpired in Afghanistan, coupled with the personal motivating religious beliefs of the President, leaves one quite bewildered, and sick to the stomach. Many of them have been waiting in the wings so impatiently to come to unilateral power. They are so driven ideologically, that they will go to any lengths to grab power, if they cannot get it through popular democratic vote. As they have successfully demonstrated in the 2000 elections where the president was finally selected by the US supreme court conveniently stacked by his “one term” daddy, and not entirely elected by the people. According to Greg Palast’s further investigations, other states are adopting the Florida Model for centralized voting lists and the potential for further vote manipulation in other states will assure this administration legal cover of legitimacy in future elections, just in case people decide they have had a bit too much of their empire building and crusading. If people don’t wisen up now, this White House is here to stay. The legal cover obsession of this government is eerily reminiscent of the “legal cover” that Hitler insisted on after his failed Putsch the first time around, and he eventually did come to power through intrigues and shabby back door deals, but publicly having the “legal cover” and “legitimacy” necessary for foreign relations (i.e. empire building), even if it was of a somewhat dubious nature.*18

So we have here a perfect team of a few dozen or so Sunshine boys assembled for realizing this global imperial domination in the “New American Century” that ZB was kind enough to let us know about. Otherwise, such strategies usually lie buried in obscure think tank papers, classified war game strategies of the Rand Corporation and the Pentagon, or unknown Neocon foundation journals and papers not easily accessible to the lay public, certainly not quite so readily available at Barnes and Noble. Fortunately for us, some of this stuff is accessible on the web if you know where to look. Visit the PNAC web site for understanding what these Neocons have openly stated as their goals for the New American Century, read the Nuclear Posture Review and the National Security Council Strategy, and see if you would support such goals with your hard earned tax dollars and the lives of your own children. Even better, see if you would like to be in the shoes of those being bombed into Democracy, for that is the surest way to know something is not right when sophisticated Machiavellian propaganda envelops all sensory inputs 24/7.

Putting it all together – who runs this White House?

The Zionist Neocons dominate the agenda in the White House. And their agenda is basically only two fold: a) Zionism from the Nile to the Euphrates for Eretz Yisrael – a regathering of the Jews of the Diaspora in the Biblical lands of Palestine (and Babylon and the rest of the Middle East up to the edge of the Persian Gulf eventually) – drawing upon their cultural ethos and weight of three thousand years of history to inspire the Jews to come together in the only place that can possibly bind them together. And b) Neo Zionism, from continent to continent, shore to shore, and to the skies above and space beyond, for Eretz America – complete world domination by America as its national imperative to be a global empire, as the “Zion that will light up all the world.

The former agenda is very serious and cannot be taken lightly as most of the global population of the Jews worldwide is likely in sympathy with it at the back of their minds, even though only a small percentage, less than 4 million actually live in Israel. The sentiment alone of an ethnic Jewish homeland, coupled with the holocaust and anti-Semitism of Europe, has created in the existence of Israel, an insurance policy of sorts, and the subscribers pay their annual premiums like anyone carrying any insurance. Among the new generation of its more fanatic adherents, it has now acquired a life of its own, like Frankenstien. The new generation of Jewish Fundamentalists are worse than the Talibans in their rabid fanaticism for the biblical lands, the only difference being that it is for Eretz-Yisrael as directly inspired by the tortuous rabbinical Talmudic teachings that insists Zionism is Judaism, rather than any misinterpretation and misapplication of Islamic teachings as in the case of the ill fated Talibans. A vast majority of these Jewish Talibans are sourced directly from New York into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza as the gun totting Settlers and Rabbis, who periodically gather at the wailing wall with huge machine guns slung over their shoulders. They find natural sympathy in approximately 20% to 25% of the US population that lives in the Bible Belt, the Christian Zionists, and of course their President W. George Bush.

The latter agenda, Neo Zionism, is the sentiment of the secularists and largely Westernized atheistic Hectoring Hegemons who see any dominant civilization du-jour as their Zion, for power upon others is all they aspire for. Not unremarkably, they too are inspired by the tortuous rabbinical teachings that has become their cultural heritage of supermorality, enjoying a “holy” superiority as god’s chosen peoples beyond the pale of ordinary morality, even when god is dead for a majority of them leaving behind only a cultural residue that is passed on from generation to generation under the weight of three thousand years of history. Exploitation, and subjugation of the goyem is their religion, making temporary alliances with them as might suit them, but having only contempt for the hosts that carry them.

What unites the two into an American-Israeli Zionist institutional ruling elite is the nexus that they have no other religion but imperial power, one inspired by the Kingdom of David, the other by the Kingdom of superpower that is manifested today as corporate multinationalism with dizzying global profits, and direct influence and control of the planet as the great prize. It is neo-liberalism on the guns of neo-conservatism, all neos, and ultimately only “neo dash nothing”, as Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism which today controls the world by virtue of having acquired direct control over the White House, described himself.*19

This Zionist ruling elite are masterminds in aligning all disparate interests, both nationally and internationally, towards their singular focus, which is what enables them to harness the energies of non Zionists as well in this fantasy of a New World Order – for hunger for absolute power is in the veins of all baboons and makes a perfect fly-trap! This is so well thought out that majority of the non-Jewish participants caught in the Iron Triangle, the revolving door of alumnus working in Government, the Pentagon, and the Corporations almost cyclically in America’s military-industrial complex, are frequently invited to Israel at Zionist expense and shown the wonderful democratic mini Europe in the heart of the barbaric dictatorial Middle East that is supposed to be instrumental in America’s hegemonist success in the world as outlined and pitched by JINSA to the White House since President Gerald Ford was in power. All these divergent interests meet at the loci of the Jewish think tanks from American Enterprise Institute to the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Hoover institute, ad infinetum. It is a legal cover to pitch private aspirations in the guise of public policy analysis and advice to meet the interests of the ruling elite, and behind that backdrop, is thrown in the inevitable shill for Zion.

Do your analysis, and see of all these think tanks and lobby groups, how many advocate immediate and unilateral support of Israel? Also examine their various other policy focus, and they will span the gamut from corporate interests from different segments of the economy, to the theory of capitalism, to social security reform, to the environment and global warming. And what is in common with all these disparate interests? Israel. Considerations for Israel dominate all American Foreign Policy theology that is spinned so deftly by its carpet beggars overtly representing their various special interests, and legally so in the guise of think tanks and lobby groups. There is unfortunately, no lobby group or think tank that represents the American people. The Congress is supposed to be doing that, but they take their advice from specialists coming from these very lobby groups and think tanks who represent the special interests. A perfect example is the AEI from which George W. Bush admitted borrowing twenty of their best minds and thanked them for their service to the nation. Reagan borrowed a few dozen from AEI. And this is just one think tank. There are dozens of others. So where is the American public in all this? Nicely ensconced in consumerism and the pursuit of their own passionate loves for the good life of America, with once every four year trek to the Mecca of the polling station to cast their vote to select between the carefully crafted and pre-determined choices that are laid before them.

It is the Zionists from these think tanks who have now entered the Administration as the so called “neoconservatives”, who are taking the rather simplistic and dole Evangelical Christian President and his chief law enforcement officer for an imperial ride by indulging them in their respective fantasies of Christian Zionism. It even culminated in the greatest war criminal of our times, Ariel Sharon, being awarded the nom de guerre “man of peace” by George W. Bush himself. Even more amazing, Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Irving Kristol of the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, a person who argued for multiple levels of “truths” in politics, being the direct descendent of both Machiavelli and Leo Strauss in political theology where words behind the scenes mean the exact opposite of what they are projected to be in public, surely eliciting a chuckle among those in the inner circles as yet another triumph of their ideologies over the dolt goyems.

I believe that these brilliant Zionist Neocons actually needed a religious freakish gullible dolt like George W. Bush in the White House for them to launch their new “World War IV”. A more saner person harboring fewer self delusions might have asked too many questions and not quite obliged walking in the carefully crafted paths and options laid out before the President on a daily basis. Yes, I believe George Bush does choose, and indeed perhaps did choose to go to war. And I am certain that he exercises all his Presidential prerogatives of independent thinking and taking actions, for no one is holding a gun to his head and making him do things he does not want.

But like the rest of the American public, this American President is also obliged to choose between only the restricted options presented to him by the ruling elite who are the real power brokers – for he had openly stated:

I’m not going to play like I’ve been a person who’s spent hours involved with foreign policy”;

That depends upon my advisors and the people who know a heck of a lot more about the subject than I do”;

That’s dependent upon the military advisors that would be advising me”.

This dream team is well backed by a conservative dominated Capitol Hill (since at least 1994) with at best a silenced opposition. While the pusillanimous behavior of the Democrats that only one brave voice, that of Congress member Barbara Lee, could courageously stand up in dissent among 400 or so members in the Congress, can perhaps be explained away by the shock factor of 9/11, the strong endorsement of the now convalesced legislature in passing most legislation asked by the White House, such as the oppressive USA Patriot Act without much if any debate, or the $80 Billion appropriations for war, makes the synergy between them self evident. Even other supporters are cropping up. James Woolsey, the former director of CIA, in a speech at UCLA recently echoed similar sentiments as ZB’s “to perpetuate America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer”, calling it World War IV, a lifetime of wars, regime changing one country after another to get them all aligned with US geostrategic interests. This team is further backed by a Judiciary dominated by the conservative right-wing ideologues that not only brought this team into power, but is effectively able to thwart any legal challenges to them that may come before them.

All three governing institutions of the US are now singularly aligned – or so it appears. It’s like a baseball or soccer team, after several failed seasons, finally all coming together to dominate the world series.

In summary, all of the above foreign policy evidence, along with the examination of the backgrounds of the many members in this administration, and those neoconservative and Zionist foundations and think tanks influencing them (Heritage Foundation, AIPAC, JINSA, PNAC, and many others), unequivocally demonstrates that there is sufficient confluence of interests between ZB’s stated imperatives of a truly global superpower, and the ambitions of Washington. It is also obvious that this strategic alliance to ZB’s framework is institutional, not Republican, or Democrat, as evidenced by the strategists themselves, whose only aim appears to be best captured by sentiments expressed by Hitler’s top rocket scientists who went to work for the United States after the end of WWII: ~“our job is to send it up, what does it matter where it comes down”! The only significant differences between the two political parties in America arise on certain very predictable domestic agendas. In foreign policies, it is only ‘the will to execute’ – depending on how despotic a Cabinet has been assembled, and how much synergy exists between them and the law makers on Capitol Hill, as in any team play.

It would have been a different story altogether, if contrary to George Kennan’s advice, the US had spent the $9 Billion dollars that it just handed over to Israel in April 2003, for eliminating hunger and poverty from the world, and instead forced Israel to stop the occupation of the Palestinians by withholding all its aid; and not waged these genocidal imperial slaughters of innocent civilians across two civilizations, like a bully thrashing out to the world, in response to 9/11. If the American public cannot reason through this obviousness, what would an objective observer on mars conclude? Indeed, you be the wisest judge of that!

A word about Jewish Power today and its interplay with American Foreign Policy

Israel and the role of the Jews in the world today has become central to American geopolitics, and to the very definition itself of the primacy and geostrategic imperatives of the United States of America. All its major thinkers, leading exponents, and immediate contributors are Jews. The harbingers of the New American Century are primarily Jews. And the majority of the signatories noted in Exhibit A who advocated attack on the Muslim country of Iraq are Jews. All the doctrinal scholars rebutted in Chapter 9 are Jews or their declared exponents, as is the author of the Grand Chessboard that my book uses to disambiguate the facade of “war on terrorism”, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who so easily and remorselessly, destroyed an entire Muslim civilization in Afghanistan by handing the USSR their “Vietnam war” on Muslim lands:

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire. … What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” (Full excerpt of ZB’s 1998 interview to “Le Nouvel Observateur” appears in Chapter 2.)

And the most potent weapon in the hands of the hectoring hegemons against developing nations where 3/4th to 4/5th of all humanity lives today, the World Bank, is run by the Jews, with their head now being the same person who spearheaded the destruction and attempted conquest of Iraq.*20

The aspirations of the Zionist Jews to piggyback on the dominant civilization of the time is made manifest by the scholarship of the neoconservative scholars themselves – a large number of whom are scholars at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), from where George Bush borrowed twenty of their best Zionist minds:

Some of the finest minds of our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed twenty such minds. I want to thank them for their service.*21

AEI’s lifetime member and Senior Fellow, Irving Kristol, a Leo Strauss disciple, whose son William Kristol is the founder of Project New American Century (PNAC), summed it up elegantly as an imperative, a manifest destiny, a “national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny”:

patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness…. Neoconservatives believe… that the goals of American foreign policy must go well beyond a narrow, too literal definition of ‘national security’. It is the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny … not a myopic national security*22

And Straussian Harry Jaffa entirely summed up the Jewish aspirations for America the best:

Zion that will light up all the world.*23

I can almost imagine a remaking of the hilarious Charlie Chaplin movie “The Great Dictator” in which the new hectoring hegemonists (all Charlie Chaplin look alikes) are lying on their backs on a row of desks, and each playing with a globe of the world with their feet in the air. It was his manifest destiny too to light up the world – for Berlin, up to the mid 1930s, was the heart of Europe in civilization, culture, scholarship, technology, the arts, the sciences, and Germany, the proud inheritors of the Austrio-Hungarian empire, had a self-evident manifest destiny to “light up all the world”. Within a single decade, it lay in ruins. It was Hitler who did for them. “If America fights Hitler, we will become Hitler”. His inheritors – and it is sadly ironic, but also empirical and in their own words – are they setting up goyem America for the same, as the ultimate in revenge for the weight of two thousand years of Christian generosity to god’s chosen peoples? Or is it a win-win deal in either case?

Jewish power is not just pervasive in the corridors of Governmental power at all levels – from theology spinners to its efficient executors, but is also ubiquitous in the very fabric of American society. It is now so pronounced in America today, that most people are even afraid to discuss anything related to the Jews, critical or benign, lest the demonizing label of “anti-Semitism” be inadvertently applied to them and potentially wreck their careers, as it used to do with the “communist” label during the McCarthy era. It is the dawn of the new McCarthyism in the New American Century.*24

An organization like the fascist “Campus Watch” has been formed by the most fanatical haters of Islam and the Muslims, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, to squelch all debate critical of Israel from occurring on American college campuses. It is the same persons who claim up to 10% to 15% of Muslims in America are “terrorists” and must be closely monitored. But since they don’t specify which 15% they don’t like, it implies monitor all 100% for who knows which 15% among them might be “terrorists”. Why is such simultaneous fascism transpiring now as America is fighting its lifetime of “war on terrorism”, the twin propagation of hatred of American Muslims, and the squelching of debate on Israel and anything Jewish under the mantra of “anti-Semitism”? Who is behind that “war on terrorism” and who does not want any public debate on their activities in America – their prime and exclusive source of global power today? Who would rather have debate focussed on some other mindless or fictional matters to create lots of red-herrings and keep any intelligent peoples thoughtful enough to ponder, gainfully employed pursuing such red-herrings?

Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister and President Bush’s famous “man of peace”, summed up today’s reality of Jewish power in America the best:

Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.*25

The fundamental question for the concerned American citizen to ask themselves, and their friends and neighbors, colleagues and peers, parents and children, teachers and students, is that is this what they want for America?

Do they want to live under the thumbscrews of a tiny perverse minority among the Jews – a peoples upon whom their Christian brethren have heaped venom and destruction for two thousand years culminating in the horrendous holocaust; in whose ethos is the ideology of lording over the goyems every moment they can get away with it; and in whose morality deception is a justifiable method to achieve any end as god’s chosen peoples beyond the pale of ordinary laws and moral values?

You ask yourselves this question as you read through the systematic unraveling of the deception of the “war on terrorism” in the subsequent 10 chapters and examine who is behind it all – who spilled the blood of your own sons and daughters in this quest for American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives? Please see Exhibit A for some of the names of the authors who had your children killed in Iraq in search of fictitious WMDs for which “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

Would you not have become a suicide bomber ten times over had your country been invaded on any pretext, let alone false ones, by an enormously and overwhelmingly superior military force? Your forefathers wouldn’t even agree to pay taxes without representation, and laid their lives down for a principle so that you could be free. What is your responsibility for your progeny?

In the very words of my greatest intellectual antagonist today, Jewish Zionist Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, who might indeed be a closet Straussian, for that would rationally explain the level of his deliberate deceit in his Machiavellianly titled books like Crisis of Islam – Holy War Unholy Terror where he states:

Terrorism requires only a few. Obviously the West must defend itself by whatever means will be effective. But in devising means to fight the terrorist, it would surely be useful to understand the forces that drive them”.

Forces that drive them – surely we are in the process of uncovering both, the real superterrorists, and the forces that drive them. Then you dear astute reader make up your own mind. Either you can kill me for bringing you the news as Plato has informed me that you may, or wake up and break your damn chains of ignorance as Prisoners of the Cave that Shakespeare has informed me that you shall, once the knowledge comes to you.

Some reflections and musings

In my own mind, I often see myself shouting at the perpetuators of these monumental crimes inflicted upon humanity in the name of “war on terrorism”: ‘You are despicable war criminals and I publicly call for your indictments for war crimes against humanity in an open public trial conducted by the victims, as the one held for Eichmann in Jerusalem.’ But I cannot imagine what punishment on earth would atone for “Shock and Awe” bombing entire civilizations with depleted uranium bombs, murdering tens of thousands of innocent civilians including defenseless men, women, and children, and depriving many more of their kin, breadwinners, and loved ones. What does 10,000 years of rigorous imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay mean anyway – these guys are already in their 50s, 60s or 70s. Shouldn’t punishments match the crimes? Isn’t is as unfair to punish a black child who steals chocolates with the ‘three-strikes and out for years in jail‘ law, as it is to ask perpetuators of monumental crimes to simply vacate their posts by the fancy names of “impeachment”? What do you think?

Monumental crimes must deserve monumental punishments. We know what monumental crimes look like. We have seen them rehearsed not just over the past couple of years, but continually over several millennia of human history. Thus most people, possessing even a modicum of humanity, and an iota of commonsense, must easily recognize monumental crimes. But what is a befitting monumental punishment that can be awarded for these crimes? There can be no adequate atonement and compensation made once monumental crimes have occurred, try as a nation may for generations. Impeachment and getting the criminals out of office is hardly sufficient (though rather necessary if only to hold up the pretense of an advanced civilizations’ justice at work). This begets the axiomatic truth that monumental crimes must be prevented from occurring to start with. One cannot wait until the receipts for the ordering of such crimes are found, as the perpetuators seldom leave one behind, and generally maintain the alibis of “plausible deniability”. By the time people wake up to their deeds, the bomber bays have already dropped their payloads.

To stop these handful of misanthropes who command the vast armies of State to indulge in their various ideological fantasies, before they can commence their monumental offenses against humanity, is a responsibility jointly shared by all human kind. But a responsibility more closely shared by the people whose leaders engage in it, especially when they live in a democracy.

Of the 5+ billion people in the world, only about 10 million seemed to have realized it when they clogged the streets in many a world capital (< 0.2%); and of the ~300 million people of America, about a half million came out to protest (< 0.2%). Where are the other people? If a hundred times more people had clogged the streets before the bombs started falling, if the garbage truck driver to the dock worker, engineer to the doctor, student to the teacher, simply refused to do their jobs and just stayed at home for a mere ten days, there would have been stink in the streets, empty grocery shelves, and no bombs dropped at all. It would not have been dismissed as a “focus group” by George Bush. That is all it takes to stop these monumental criminals of humanity, because “they need us more than we need them as Arundhati Roy so eloquently puts it. The people don’t need vast military war machines to counter other military war machines, as Gandhi’s non-cooperative movement indeed demonstrated in India, as did the vast pouring onto the streets by the simple peasants – barefooted and sticks in hand, in Cochabamba Bolivia.

Michael Moore has already called the White House publicly and shouted “Time’s Up!” into his cell phone, to a thunderous chorus of a thousand voices in the background chanting the same. If I had not lived in this country and had not witnessed the mental enslaving of its kind people, I would have further argued ‘Time’s Up’ for its people as well, and condemned them to take off this garb of hypocrisy and openly admit to the world that they are being willingly led by plain old ordinary thugs no different than those lining many of the private jails run by the Wackenhut Corporation, except that these ones are wearing Wall Street suits and live between their lexuses and their olive trees. Indeed, from George Bush’s stand point, what difference could it make if he lies or not? The rest of the world already knows the reality anyway, but can’t do a thing about it. Why doesn’t he come right out and openly inform his own people that he is the new Mongol emperor and crusading king of the world, and clean out his conscience of any lies – it is the lies that can get him into trouble in the first place, not his maiming and killing of mankind! That is what the histories of his past illustrious predecessors have taught him, especially Nixon’s. Why doesn’t he? In fact, it would also save his otherwise pure Christian soul from eternal damnation as he seeks to bring Jesus home, the hypocrite having been loudly condemned by the disciples of Jesus as they wrote down his teachings. I would presume that George Bush would love to openly proclaim himself emperor, a divinely appointed Crusading latter day Richard the Lionhearted on a mission from god – democracy aside. He has even publicly joked about being a dictator that bears repeating: “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator. Except that he is afraid of the good people of this country throwing him out if he openly proclaimed himself the new crusading King.

I dearly hope that some astute reader would demonstrate to me that I have got it all wrong; facts, rational thinking, and logical reasoning aside. Because I would much rather be wrong – for my perception of reality has stripped me of my sanity.

Perhaps this “war on terrorism” is indeed the truth as it is projected by Bush? The world outside is perhaps indeed as Bush says it is, the “evil-doers” are indeed out to get the Americans, the FBI really does have to come to my house to check me out, what with me being a Muslim and all, and these oppressive domestic surveillance measures are indeed necessary to “protect American lives”. That: “the Patriot Acts and the other law enforcement measures are like speed bumps in the parking lot, designed to slow down and catch speedsters, but only a minor nuisance to law abiding responsible drivers. So I should just live with it as we go clean out the world of all its assorted terrorists and evil-doers and make it a safer place for all! In fact, why even bother checking the other passengers at airports, they should straight away profile only Muslims who are easily identified by their names, because it’s the Muslims doing all the terrorism in the world, not the Irish or the Swedes, so why hassle us white folks?”

I was told the aforementioned things by a mainstream conservative Republican American friend whom I had asked for candid feedback about the FBI’s visit to my home. He also quite frankly told me that he did not see anything wrong with profiling the Muslims, and that President Bush is indeed doing a great job of getting the terrorists before they get us. While feeling sorry for the FBI having disquieted me, he said it was a necessary evil. They had only very politely asked me for information about myself, and left when I told them to go away. So what’s the big deal?

Is this how mainstream America views the Muslims and their predicament? So perhaps it must be me, I am just prejudiced against America and do not see the Western values of bringing democracy to the world at the expense of bombing it onto them. I even ponder that my mentor Howard Zinn is also not living in the twilight zone when he suggests that imagine for a moment that you could end all the world’s injustices and rid it of all terrorists for all future time by dropping one big bomb even if it kills a 100,000 children in collateral damage, wouldn’t you do it? Remember this is peace for all eternity at this small price. Come on, wouldn’t you do it? Okay now imagine that these were 100,000 American children. Would you still do it?

Whenever I think about this question, the very underlying premise that required asking such a question in the first place and its significance in American history at least since World War II, is very disturbing. This question could be asked of every single American foreign policy adventure – from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. The premise being: that the American public values its own lives over everyone else’s, and the only reason they would be restrained in their actions is the cost to themselves. The cost to others is immaterial!

If the FBI were to start investigating all the majority white Americans, all the Bobs and the Sallys and the Goldsmiths, would they still feel that the FBI is just doing its job? If the US Air Force started bombing Florida with 2000 pound Depleted Uranium Daisy Cutters, would they still feel they are liberating the poor natives of Florida from the stolen 2000 election? The other disturbing conclusion is yielded if one negates the thesis of this book – that the Americans are unwilling, or at least unwitting, prisoners of the cave spun by the elite ruling them.

Because if they are not, then they are a deliberate participant in this barbaric and murderous exercise of imperial world hegemony. And it becomes an inescapable conclusion that the American public must be incredibly self-serving and hypocritical. For the sake of their own comfortable and wasteful living, they are willing to wage endless wars on the weaker nations with bombs and sanctions, trade treaties and ruthless dictators, all to control the raw materials that fuel their empire, while shamelessly denying that they are doing so and disingenuously looking the other way when their closest ally Israel does the same for Eretz Israel.

Would most mainstream Americans, except those of the Zionist-imperialist-crusading ilk, have a problem with this inescapable conclusion? I think they would. But then, I haven’t met all of them.

In the meantime, back on earth in the insanity of the times when fools live long and the wise and innocent die young, with the preceding analysis and exposé of the factual US Foreign Policy theology as background, and the identification of their greatest exponents with an expanded list in Exhibit A, this global “war on terrorism” mercifully begins to shed some of its facade and brings us back out of the twilight zone.

Footnotes Chapter 1

*1 George Kennan in the once-classified Policy Planning Study 23 from 1948, quoted by Noam Chomsky. Quote excerpted from Mark Chmiel’s Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, page 16.

Original citation: Memo by George Kennan, Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff. Written February 28, 1948, Declassified June 17, 1974. George Kennan, Review of Current Trends, U.S. Foreign Policy, Policy Planning Staff, PPS No. 23. Top Secret. Included in the U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, volume 1, part 2 (Washington DC Government Printing Office, 1976), 524-525. Can be read in its gory details at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memo_PPS23_by_George_Kennan.

*2 See The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence by Francis A. Boyle.

*3 See Greg Palast’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy (11 – 81) for the solution if you can’t solve it.

*4 See Exhibit A for a detailed list of contributors and reference URLs on the web, and examine the cited documents for the amazing frankness of strategic goals – as George W. Bush Jr. parrots “war on terrorism” on cue from his trainers.

*5 Key term in Joint Vision 2020. It’s a strategy document approved by General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, J5; Strategy Division. It was Published by: US Government Printing Office, Washington DC, June 2000, and for a time was available publicly from the website http:www.dtic.mil/jv2020. Also see the summary of it by Jim Garamone from the American Forces Press Service in: Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of its Chapter 3 titled Full Spectrum Dominance. Please pay special attention to the underlined portion, emphasis is mine, and ask yourself – which morality, or god, gave America the right to have “global nature of our interests and obligations”? If you answered “might is right”, welcome to the civilization of baboons and barbarians, and await the arrival of bigger baboons with bigger clubs that might just hand you “eye for an eye” and an Armageddon to boot.

The ultimate goal of our military force is to accomplish the objectives directed by the National Command Authorities. For the joint force of the future, this goal will be achieved through full spectrum dominance – the ability of US forces, operating unilaterally or in combination with multinational and interagency partners, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations.

The full range of operations includes maintaining a posture of strategic deterrence. It includes theater engagement and presence activities. It includes conflict involving employment of strategic forces and weapons of mass destruction, major theater wars, regional conflicts, and smaller-scale contingencies. It also includes those ambiguous situations residing between peace and war, such as peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations, as well as noncombat humanitarian relief operations and support to domestic authorities.

The label full spectrum dominance implies that US forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air, and information. Additionally, given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance. [...]

*6 The dates are in the documents themselves, I don’t know when exactly were they put on the web and made accessible to the general public. I only learnt of PNAC and JV2020 after 911.

*7 See Calling the Shots – How Washington Dominates Today’s UN by Phyllis Bennis, for a better understanding of how the US enforces its own will on the members, and uses the UN as its own foreign policy tool when necessary, and ignores it when necessary.

*8 See The New Yorker, Jan 13, 2003.

*9 See Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy.

*10 See The Bush Dyslexicon by Mark Crispin Miller for these and other interesting and funny statements of George W. Bush Jr. In any other profession, he could never be hired based on the intelligence level betrayed in these comments, and this makes him eminently qualified to be the leader of the free world as the front man for the incredibly brilliant Zionist imperial thinkers behind him.

*11 See Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire for the character of the “mule”.

*12 See Bush’s Brain by Moore and Slater. Also, The Bush Dyslexicon by Mark Crispin Miller.

*13 See Asimov’s Foundation and Empire. Magnifico is the behind the scenes mule who controlled the world through emotional mind control of its inhabitants, but played the fool and made everyone laugh at him. The mule was finally destroyed by the sole remaining innocence of one girl whom the mule left untouched because her natural reaction to him had been one of sympathy and friendship, and not of recoil at his overt disfigurement, or laughter at his antics. One of Bush’s biographers almost makes the case that Bush purposely allows his opponents to underestimate him, purposely plays the fool. Otherwise how else would he have got into Harvard and become the MBA President of America, especially when Junior did not even inform Papa that he was applying to Harvard. See Team Bush by Donald Kettl. Amazing marketing!

*14 Excerpted from Eisenhower – Soldier and President, (536 – 537) by S. Ambrose.

*15 See Hannah Arendt’s insightful report on the “Banality of Evil” – that the all powerful Adolph Eichmann, who during the reign of terror of the Third Reich exercised monumental control over the lives and deaths of millions in Nazi concentration camps, appeared like an ordinary, quite unremarkable, common criminal seated in the docks lamely commenting that he was just “following orders”. Whose orders is Rumsfeld following? Dick Cheney’s? The two together are the ones who devilishly orchestrated the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan with Paul Wolfowitz as the mastermind, and if not stopped, Iran and Syria next. I can bet however that all will claim they were following orders from the President, who indeed obliged them by issuing the orders they deftly maneuvered him into issuing by preying on his base fanatical zeal for a Christian Crusade to hasten the return of the Jews to all of Eretz Yisrael and the consequent return of his Messiah upon fulfillment of some “biblical prophesy”. A double pincer Machiavelli.

*16 See the article on Strauss “Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq”, at http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1542.jsp or http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.htm

Some relevant excerpts from this highly recommended article as background reading are included below to enable the reader to understand the deeper philosophical underpinnings that motivates the creation of lies and deception as an acceptable means to pursue any goals and agendas based on a super-morality of Nietszche’s superman. Whether these ends be the creation of Israel in Palestine, creation of Eretz Yisrael in the rest of the Middle East, or to secure an “American peace” in the New American Century based on the monumental deception of 911 and WMDs, all are related by the singular fact of their exponents being Jews with the shared interest of Zion – be it in Palestine or America. And it transcends generations, be it Theodor Herzl spinning his Machiavellian deception at the close of the nineteenth century, or Paul Wolfowitz and his gang of masterminds spinning the WMD and 911 deception at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

One must go further down the unraveling path by peeling down to the next onion layer beyond Strauss to understand how is it that the Jews keep coming up with such tortuous philosophies. I don’t see any other peoples with other mighty world heritages, generation after generation, come up with doctrines which at best, can be defined as brilliantly inhuman, and at worst, monumentally criminal. It may just be, that Jews have been given the gift of brilliance. They entirely dominate the sciences today, and in Physics they are king, as in Economics. They are also brilliant financiers and most banks and large endowments are under their purview. Some of Germany’s best scientists were Jews and it was Hitler’s loss that he hadn’t the imagination to keep them. Historically as well, they have always been physicians and prominent citizens among the ruling elite in most civilizations where they have lived in their Diaspora, including among the hospitable Muslims, as well as in the inimical Christian Europe. Ironically, even when the fanatics were chasing them out of town, they might call upon the services of the Jew. And just the statistical averages may lead to a minority of brilliantly tortuous scholars to also be born among them. On the other hand, the rabbinical teachings in the Talmud is also a great place to search for further comprehension and unravel.

If there is any reasonable definition of genuine terrorism, it must indeed begin right here in the Hebrew editions of the Talmud, where a supermorality based on exploiting and subjugating others is defined for a god’s chosen peoples, who are themselves perceived as beyond ordinary standards of morality. I am not sure where Nietzsche got his idea of the superman, but Talmud is a logical place. And now, everyone quotes Nietzsche when they mention this concept of supermorality, and no one mentions the Hebrew Talmud. And neither is it mentioned in this article that is excerpted below in the context of Leo Strauss, but Nietzsche is certainly mentioned. It is important to make the distinction between the Hebrew and the English versions of the Talmud, because the latter is deliberately sanitized – lest the goyems become aware of it. See Professor Israel Shahak’s Jewish history, Jewish Religion available for free on the internet, to catch a glimpse of this sanitization, and what comprises the actual cultural religion of the Jews under the leadership of their own mullahs (i.e., Rabbis who for three Millennia have followed their own whim rather than try to understand the spirit of the teachings of their Noble Prophet, and who distort and twist and create complex legalisms and rituals to synthesize their own powers over their flock, and the latter like all flocks, have only suffered and obeyed throughout the Jewish Diaspora). Also see Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 for quotes from the pen of the Jews themselves that illustrate how this notion of supermorality has been actually put into practice in Israel in the service of Zionism, that it isn’t just harmless ancient theory in ancient books. This supermorality arrived at the American shores as the new Zion, just as it arrived in Palestine as Der Judenstaat, by way of deception – for which peoples among all the 5 or 6 billion peoples on the planet earth today, have that motto: wage war by way of deception? The Zionists.

My own humble and limited comprehension of Jewish history and Jewish peoples leads me to conclude that it must only be a handful of people who gravitate towards such tortuous philosophies in almost every generation of the Jews among the ruling elite, perhaps based on their exposure to these rabbinical teachings in their formative years or through cultural osmosis if they don’t speak Hebrew (like Theodor Herzl supposedly didn’t as claimed by his biographers). And I imagine that these teachings must be nothing but an embarrassment for the vast majority of the modern ordinary Jewish peoples who might be familiar with them. A significant majority likely aren’t, but that is only a hypothesis since my sampling is limited. None of my Jewish friends for example, have even heard of such things and nor do they care for world conquest or enslaving and exploiting others. My many Jewish bosses in the Corporate world over the years have always been more than generous and fair to me. My once Jewish roommate, a Ph.D. In Electrical Engineering from MIT, and brilliant in every respect, did not even have a clue about Israel, and what this entire hullabaloo with the Palestinians was all about – and neither did he have any time or interest to want to understand it as he was too engaged designing servo-controllers chasing his own passionate American Dreams like the rest of us. It is indeed a marvel of Creation, that among the same peoples, alongside the perverse hectoring hegemons, and the apathetic public, is also born straightforward and conscionable moralists like young Rachel Corrie and other courageous ISM members, who shy not, to offer the greatest gift they possess, their very lives in the prime of their youths, to save the genuine teachings that Prophet Moses brought them, from all its hijackers.

To me, Rachel Corrie, in her bid to bear witness to the crimes of her own peoples in Palestine, salvaged for a time, any claims of the Jewish peoples to the inheritance of Moses (peace be upon him). But even more than that, to me as a Muslim, she showed as a Jew, what it means to be a Muslim. And even beyond that, as a human being, she showed the world what it means to fight the “banality of evil” with body and soul to prevent the holocaust of another innocent people. She was obviously not a Straussian, nor a hectoring hegemon. I cry every time I think about her, her youth, and her sacrifice – when all she had to do was enjoy life in the best period of here life, at 23 years of age, like every other ordinary American. But conscience – the same conscience that got the better of Lady Macbeth – also got the better of her, for both of them, like all the rest of us muted spectators and silent bystanders, had blood soaked hands. It is precisely that awakened conscience, the unheeding of which becomes humanly impossible, and the call of which becomes a moral imperative, that is my most potent weapon against the Hectoring Hegemons. If merely 10% of the American population has it, there will be Justice and Peace on Earth, and Guantanamo Bay will be oversubscribed with baboons playing with themselves. See Chapter 4 for how the Straussian philosophy led American Government and their exponents in the mainstream news media covered her death amidst the roaring silence of the majority of the American Jews themselves to create more prisoners of the cave.

As Bernard Lewis put it, “Terrorism requires only a few. And it can end up maligning an entire peoples in the hands that have an axe to grind. The end of America through implosion, due to indigestion of the barbarian and perverse thinking created by Zionist scholars like Strauss and his disciples who acquire political power, is more likely to spell her demise than any external enemies. It isn’t limited to neoconservatism however, for Zionism has many and ever changing faces. No wonder the Chinese are just so relaxed, they don’t need to spend 400 billion dollars a year to beat America – ‘for America is the “Zion that will light up all the world.”’ as it goes up in flames.

Yes superterrorism requires even fewer. “Obviously the West [and the world] must defend itself by whatever means will be effective. But in devising means to fight the [super] terrorist, it would surely be useful to understand the forces that drive them.

Wake up you ordinary comatose peoples of America – Muslims aren’t your enemies, Islam isn’t your enemy. If we (Muslims) have terrorists among us, you have superterrorists among you. While ours hide in caves perhaps, yours hide in plain sight under the legal protection of freedom of academia, freedom of speech, and freedom of forming think tanks and lobby groups with corporate funding to control American Foreign Policy. If we need new laws to rein in our terrorists, you need new superlaws to rein in your superterrorists. And as commonsense and Saint Augustine might dictate, the more significant and the root cause must be taken down first, with a war on superterrorism. You can still throw these supermisanthropes and their supertortuous philosophies in Guantanamo Bay and give them a steady supply of ordinary real baboons to practice their craft with. I have a feeling that a real baboon will actually come out on top of these super ones. May the curse of God be on these super Neanderthals – they have no humanity of their own, and want to strip others of theirs as well. Together we can beat ‘em for they are cowards and fight with other people’s blood. Just wake the damn up first because your slumber in the pursuit of American dream is their prime enabler.

With the aforementioned as the contextual backdrop to “understand the forces that drive the superterrorists, here is the relevant excerpt from “Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq”:

[...]

Paul Wolfowitz, the influential United States deputy secretary of defense, has acknowledged that the evidence used to justify the war was “murky” and now says that weapons of mass destruction weren’t the crucial issue anyway (see the book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: the uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq (2003.)

By contrast, Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, argues that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). His disciples include Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration.

She argues that the central claims of Straussian thought wield a crucial influence on men of power in the contemporary United States. She elaborates her argument in this interview.

A natural order of inequality

Danny Postel: You’ve argued that there is an important connection between the teachings of Leo Strauss and the Bush administration’s selling of the Iraq war. What is that connection?

Shadia Drury: Leo Strauss was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics. Public support for the Iraq war rested on lies about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United States – the business about weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious alliance between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime. Now that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the war party are denying that these were the real reasons for the war.

So what were the real reasons? Reorganising the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of Israel? Expanding American hegemony in the Arab world? Possibly. But these reasons would not have been sufficient in themselves to mobilise American support for the war. And the Straussian cabal in the administration realised that.

Danny Postel: The neo-conservative vision is commonly taken to be about spreading democracy and liberal values globally. And when Strauss is mentioned in the press, he is typically described as a great defender of liberal democracy against totalitarian tyranny. You’ve written, however, that Strauss had a “profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy.”

Shadia Drury: The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it.

How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.

Praising the wisdom of the ancients and condemning the folly of the moderns was the whole point of Strauss’s most famous book, Natural Right and History. The cover of the book sports the American Declaration of Independence. But the book is a celebration of nature – not the natural rights of man (as the appearance of the book would lead one to believe) but the natural order of domination and subordination.

The necessity of lies

Danny Postel: What is the relevance of Strauss’s interpretation of Plato’s notion of the noble lie?

Shadia Drury: Strauss rarely spoke in his own name. He wrote as a commentator on the classical texts of political theory. But he was an extremely opinionated and dualistic commentator. The fundamental distinction that pervades and informs all of his work is that between the ancients and the moderns. Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish. Now, it seems to me eminently fair and reasonable to attribute to Strauss the ideas he attributes to his beloved ancients.

In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece. But Strauss argues in his book The City and Man (pp. 74-5, 77, 83-4, 97, 100, 111) that Thrasymachus is Plato’s real mouthpiece (on this point, see also M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]). So, we must surmise that Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.

Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, for example, his Natural Right and History, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.

A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals.

The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law (p. 70).

Now, the ancients were determined to keep this tyrannical teaching secret because the people are not likely to tolerate the fact that they are intended for subordination; indeed, they may very well turn their resentment against the superior few. Lies are thus necessary to protect the superior few from the persecution of the vulgar many.

The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lies – is the peculiar justice of the wise.

Strauss justifies his position by an appeal to Plato’s concept of the noble lie. But in truth, Strauss has a very impoverished conception of Plato’s noble lie. Plato thought that the noble lie is a story whose details are fictitious; but at the heart of it is a profound truth.

In the myth of metals, for example, some people have golden souls – meaning that they are more capable of resisting the temptations of power. And these morally trustworthy types are the ones who are most fit to rule. The details are fictitious, but the moral of the story is that not all human beings are morally equal.

In contrast to this reading of Plato, Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one (Natural Right and History, p. 151). For many commentators who (like Karl Popper) have read Plato as a totalitarian, the logical consequence is to doubt that philosophers can be trusted with political power. Those who read him this way invariably reject him. Strauss is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him.

The dialectic of fear and tyranny

Danny Postel: In the Straussian scheme of things, there are the wise few and the vulgar many. But there is also a third group – the gentlemen. Would you explain how they figure?

Shadia Drury: There are indeed three types of men: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar. The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the “higher” pleasures, which amount to consorting with their “puppies” or young initiates.

The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society – that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour, and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment’s notice.

The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe.

Like Plato, Strauss believed that the supreme political ideal is the rule of the wise. But the rule of the wise is unattainable in the real world. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, Plato realised this, and settled for the rule of law. But Strauss did not endorse this solution entirely. Nor did he think that it was Plato’s real solution – Strauss pointed to the “nocturnal council” in Plato’s Laws to illustrate his point.

The real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise (see Strauss’s – The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws). This covert rule is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them. Supposedly, Xenophon makes that clear to us.

For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed. It is the age in which they have come closest to having exactly what their hearts desire – wealth, pleasure, and endless entertainment. But in getting just what they desire, they have unwittingly been reduced to beasts.

Nowhere is this state of affairs more advanced than in America. And the global reach of American culture threatens to trivialise life and turn it into entertainment. This was as terrifying a spectre for Strauss as it was for Alexandre Kojève and Carl Schmitt.

This is made clear in Strauss’s exchange with Kojève (reprinted in Strauss’s On Tyranny), and in his commentary on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (reprinted in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue). Kojève lamented the animalisation of man and Schmitt worried about the trivialisation of life. All three of them were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and “creature comforts.” Life can be politicised once more, and man’s humanity can be restored.

This terrifying vision fits perfectly well with the desire for honour and glory that the neo-conservative gentlemen covet. It also fits very well with the religious sensibilities of gentlemen. The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.

I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.

The intoxication of perpetual war

Danny Postel: You characterise the outlook of the Bush administration as a kind of realism, in the spirit of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli. But isn’t the real divide within the administration (and on the American right more generally) more complex: between foreign policy realists, who are pragmatists, and neo-conservatives, who see themselves as idealists – even moralists – on a mission to topple tyrants, and therefore in a struggle against realism?

Shadia Drury: I think that the neo-conservatives are for the most part genuine in wanting to spread the American commercial model of liberal democracy around the globe. They are convinced that it is the best thing, not just for America, but for the world. Naturally, there is a tension between these “idealists” and the more hard-headed realists within the administration.

I contend that the tensions and conflicts within the current administration reflect the differences between the surface teaching, which is appropriate for gentlemen, and the ‘nocturnal’ or covert teaching, which the philosophers alone are privy to. It is very unlikely for an ideology inspired by a secret teaching to be entirely coherent.

The issue of nationalism is an example of this. The philosophers, wanting to secure the nation against its external enemies as well as its internal decadence, sloth, pleasure, and consumption, encourage a strong patriotic fervour among the honour-loving gentlemen who wield the reins of power. That strong nationalistic spirit consists in the belief that their nation and its values are the best in the world, and that all other cultures and their values are inferior in comparison.

Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism and a Strauss disciple, denounced nationalism in a 1973 essay; but in another essay written in 1983, he declared that the foreign policy of neo-conservatism must reflect its nationalist proclivities. A decade on, in a 1993 essay, he claimed that “religion, nationalism, and economic growth are the pillars of neoconservatism.” (See “The Coming ‘Conservative Century’”, in Neoconservatism: the autobiography of an idea, p. 365.)

In Reflections of a Neoconservative (p. xiii), Kristol wrote that:

patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness…. Neoconservatives believe… that the goals of American foreign policy must go well beyond a narrow, too literal definition of ‘national security’. It is the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny … not a myopic national security”.

The same sentiment was echoed by the doyen of contemporary Straussianism, Harry Jaffa, when he said that America is the “Zion that will light up all the world.”

It is easy to see how this sort of thinking can get out of hand, and why hard-headed realists tend to find it naïve if not dangerous.

But Strauss’s worries about America’s global aspirations are entirely different. Like Heidegger, Schmitt, and Kojève, Strauss would be more concerned that America would succeed in this enterprise than that it would fail. In that case, the “last man” would extinguish all hope for humanity (Nietzsche); the “night of the world” would be at hand (Heidegger); the animalisation of man would be complete (Kojève); and the trivialisation of life would be accomplished (Schmitt). That is what the success of America’s global aspirations meant to them.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a popularisation of this viewpoint. It sees the coming catastrophe of American global power as inevitable, and seeks to make the best of a bad situation. It is far from a celebration of American dominance.

On this perverse view of the world, if America fails to achieve her “national destiny”, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction. But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man. To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.

To be clear, Strauss was not as hostile to democracy as he was to liberalism. This is because he recognises that the vulgar masses have numbers on their side, and the sheer power of numbers cannot be completely ignored. Whatever can be done to bring the masses along is legitimate. If you can use democracy to turn the masses against their own liberty, this is a great triumph. It is the sort of tactic that neo-conservatives use consistently, and in some cases very successfully. [...]

*16A Time Magazine, Selling the Carter Doctrine, February. 18, 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski creating “jihadis” at the Pak-Afghan border. See the PBS video clip “God is on your side” – does that look like a young Khalilzad sporting the Afghan hat (topi) next to the young Brzezinski on the Pak-Afghan border urging the Mujahideen to fight the infidels? Video at: http://www.takeoverworld.info/vid/god_is_on_your_side.ram. Alternate: http://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/god_is_on_your_side.wmv

Transcript:

News voice over 1980:US National Security Advisor Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America’s role. On the Afghan border near the Khayber Pass, he urged the Soldiers of God to redouble their efforts

Brzezinski 1980 speaking to the Mujahideens at the Pak-Afghan border:We know of their deep belief in God, and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there, is yours, you’ll go back to it one day, because your fight will prevail, and you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again; because your cause is right; God is on your side.” [enthusiastic clapping by the Mujahideens]

Brzezinski 1990s in the studio speaking to the PBS interviewer: “… [garbled] coordinated with the Pakistanis will be to make the Soviets bleed, for as much, as long, as possible.

*17 See the interesting novel by Amitav Ghosh The Glass Palace for a glimpse in a readable fictional form, the ravages of imperial designs on the lives of natives in colonies past.

*18 See The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer for details.

*19 Full quote: “Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a neo-something: a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative; in religion a neo-orthodox even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a neo-Marxist. I’m going to end up a neo- that’s all, neo dash nothing.” See Arguing the World — The New York Intellectuals at http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_krystol.html.

Also see About AEI history at www.aei.org, where the following precious gem is found under the heading “AEI’s Diamond Jubilee, 1943-2003”. Note the last sentence, emphasis is mine. No mention is made of the enormous cost of the Muslim blood spilled in Afghanistan and the destruction of Afghani society from a civilized cultured peoples to barbarians that led to the creation of the Talibans. The credit goes to AEI – they claim it themselves. They are as laudatory of themselves as Zbigniew Brzezinski was of himself in his 1998 interview quoted in this chapter – for using other peoples’ blood is their conviction: “The 1980s were great years for AEI’s ideas but troubled years for the institution itself. President Ronald Reagan appointed several dozen AEI scholars and fellows to his administration and to federal judgeships, where they helped him to achieve monumental improvements in economic, regulatory, and legal policy and to deploy the more assertive foreign policy that dispatched Soviet Communism by decade’s end.

The Americans populace better start getting their heads out of hedonism and start using it for what the good Lord gave it to them for, as America is the “Zion that will light up all the world. Also see the excerpt of interview with Straussian scholar Shadia Drury in a preceding footnote. The relevant question to ask for the American public of themselves, is with whose blood, now that their own sons and daughters are directly involved in the quest for conquest. It is already obvious that cost to others is immaterial. The question now is, what will be the cost to the American peoples themselves?

*20 [Added 2005] See Joel Leyden’s snippet from the Jerusalem Post article in: “American Jewish Congress Lauds Wolfowitz Appointment to World Bank” excerpted below on how Paul Wolfowitz is being lauded in Israel and is their man of the year. It is a masterpiece of disinformation. See John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” about the role of the World Bank in Machiavellianly managing and harvesting the resources of the developing nations for “empire” by keeping them poor and perpetually in debt, and put the comment by the American Jewish Congress congratulating Wolfowitz in context: “the World Bank will build on its proud traditions in the fight against worldwide poverty and for sustainable development”.

Note the outstanding example of Machiavelli’s teachings in the statement: “the principal problem in the Middle East is not the unsettled status of our borders.” Imagine if Mexico made that statement while it was trying to gobble up California and redrawing the borders every week with each new settlement in San Diego to San Francisco based on a charter posted in every Mission in Mexico: “From sea to the shining sea”!

Observe how the “anti-Semitism” slogan: “In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the name “Wolfowitz” has become its lightning rod is being cleverly setup for harvesting later upon anything critical being said of Paul Wolfowitz, like heaven forbid, he be called the worst war criminal since Hitler and a call be sent out for his head as the mastermind behind American State Terrorism in the New American Century. For what is anti-Semitic about pointing out that people participating in a particular joint venture are mostly Jews? Well what is the fact – are they, or are they not Jews? Are they, or they not, by their own words, ardent sympathizers of Israel and have advocated for years, war upon Muslim nations? If by their own admissions and in their own words they have done that, and they are also Jews, then how does pointing the finger at the war criminals and murderers become anti-Semitic? But the label is powerful in the American and European social context because of guilt complex that is deftly maintained, and it often mutes the indictment of the crime if its perpetuators happen to be Jews. Muslims and the rest of the world are least bit bothered by these labels, but they also aren’t all that significant because the Jewish power-base is America, which is where their unraveling is threatened. Behind the thin veneer of silence however, even ordinary Americans are beginning to ask why should they be spilling their blood for Israel, as is evidenced by Jim Moran. He won’t be coming back to Congress next election, that’s for sure! It does not take long for winds of war to change in America (and in the Christian West in general). One day Bin Laden was a heroic freedom fighter akin to the founding fathers of this nation, the next day people in America wear bulls-eye T-shirts with his face on it. One day Rumsfeld is pumping Sadaam Hussein’s hand in gratitude for keeping Iran’s revolution in check for America, the next day he is being hunted down in a foxhole and dragged out by the cuff of his neck. One day Hitler’s scientists are mad men, the next they are working for their former enemies. The Zionists understand this fast “friendship” morality better than anyone.

Finally, note how all of Wolfowitz’s doctrines and American invasion of Iraq are being lauded in Israel – whereas also note how the same doctrines were defined as war crimes at Nuremberg by the victorious Americans themselves: “The intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the Nazi regime might have been no concern of international law had it not been utilized to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers”; and be amazed at the irony, that what enabled the Holocaust of the Jews at the hands of Hitler and the propaganda machinery of the Reichminister for propaganda Joseph Goebbels, is now lauded as “Wolfowitz talking”, with the following coup de grace: “Israel has also long waited for an administration that understands that the regimes that threaten Tel Aviv also threaten New York.”. I.e., they have been awaiting the Fourth Reich!

Everything that is stated in this eloquent short blurb of Joel Leyden is Alice in Wonderland where it turns reality and truth over its head. That is quintessential Machiavelli. Quintessentially Straussian. I specifically chose his blurb in 2005 for inclusion in this footnote, because the words of the antagonists themselves once again attest to my earlier analysis in this chapter written in 2003, just as their own words one day will again attest to the entire thesis of this book also written in 2003 – it will be too late by then. Wake up and do something now, or wait to be awarded the same fate, and in spades, by the next baboon that comes out on top!

If I was interviewing journalists and reporters in my news organization for hiring, hypothetically speaking, I would present them this blurb by Joel Leyden and ask them to analyze it. If they couldn’t, they’d not be hired. And I would offer this litmus test to my seasoned professional journalists commanding six and seven figure salaries and show them the door if they asked what’s wrong with it – the rest I would offer real journalism training. Perhaps the American news organizations, once they are free from their predominantly Jewish ownership and watchful gatekeepers, and universities when they are free from the fascist Jewish Campus Watch orchestrating its speech-squelch for Zion, can use this very blurb to clean house and to educate their students in the art of detecting deception, respectively.

That will only happen when the American peoples wake up to Bernard Lewis’ own words in his own disinformation masterpiece Crisis of Islam, written in a similar quintessentially Machiavellian manner to craftily and fictitiously apply to Islam and the Muslims what he could have applied incredibly accurately and realistically to his own brethren in kind: “Terrorism requires only a few. Obviously the West must defend itself by whatever means will be effective. But in devising means to fight the terrorist, it would surely be useful to understand the forces that drive them”. I would only change “West” to “World” in this statement to accurately reflect the scope of their superterrorism. Please see Chapter 9 for the full dismantling of Bernard Lewis’ deceit.

Here is the relevant excerpt from Leyden’s article:

Jerusalem—-April 2…..The American Jewish Congress today congratulated Paul Wolfowitz on his election as the president of the World Bank. “I know that under your leadership, the World Bank will build on its proud traditions in the fight against worldwide poverty and for sustainable development,” said AJCongress Chair Jack Rosen. “Your election comes at a critical time for the international community, with hopes for democratic change and peaceful resolution of long standing conflicts. The World Bank will play a significant role in all if these areas.” …

In Israel, The Jerusalem Post had selected Paul Wolfowitz as its Man of the Year for 2002. The Post stated: “On September 15, 2001, at a meeting in Camp David, Wolfowitz advised President George W. Bush to skip Kabul and train American guns on Baghdad. In March 2003, he got his wish. In the process, Wolfowitz became the most influential US deputy defense secretary ever – can you so much as name anyone else who held the post?” The Post added: “The war in Iraq had many authors: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, George Bush. Wolfowitz may have been an early and vocal advocate, but he was cheering from the second row. What’s not in dispute is that Wolfowitz is the principal author of the doctrine of preemption, which framed the war in Iraq and which, when it comes to it, will underpin US action against other rogue states.” … “When President Bush says, “America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons” — that’s Wolfowitz talking. When the president calls for “a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater political participation, economic openness and free trade” — that’s Wolfowitz’s talking, too. … To our ears, the sudden stress on Mideast democratization is “transformative,” to use the Pentagon jargon. Israel has long waited for an administration that understands that the principal problem in the Middle East is not the unsettled status of our borders. It is the unsettling nature of Arab regimes — and of the bellicosity, fanaticism, and resentments to which they give rise. Israel has also long waited for an administration that understands that the regimes that threaten Tel Aviv also threaten New York.” …

The Jerusalem Post concluded: “There’s a downside. Earlier in the year, the notion took hold that the president was taking the country to war at the urgings of his Jewish advisers, themselves shills for Israel. “Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol [are]… the clique of conservatives who are driving this war,” wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She may as well have written “the clique of Jews,” some felt. Other critics of the war were more explicit. “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war in Iraq,” said Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, “we would not be doing this.” In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the name “Wolfowitz” has become its lightning rod.”

*21 President George W. Bush Jr., on the eve of invasion of Iraq in search of the fictitious WMDs, on 26 February 2003, as the key-note speaker at the highly influential Zionist neoconservative Jewish think-tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) at which Richard Perle is a Resident Fellow, noted it with enthusiasm.

*22 In Reflections of a Neoconservative (p. xiii), noted by Professor Shadia Drury in her interview “Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq” excerpted in a footnote above.

*23 Noted by Shadia Drury – see interview excerpt above.

*24 [Added 2005] See Baruch Kimmerling: ‘Can a “Patriot” Mob Take over the Universities’

*25 Ariel Sharon heard on Israeli radio while talking to Shimon Perez in October 2001.

Don’t Ever Ask “Why is it possible to hate America”

The US mainstream media never tires of unquestioningly mouthing the Government’s version that this war is all about “war on terrorism”. There are many who argue that this war is actually about many things, but the only thing it is not about, is fighting “terrorism”. Because if it was, then the first question to be asked would have been “why”. Why did ‘they’ hit us on 9/11? For any crime, ask the FBI what they look for? Yes the motive! The Why!

Have we seen much of the questioning “why?”*1

If the mainstream news media had tried to help us understand the ‘why’ by looking for a motive, instead of the totally senseless parroting of the President’s equally inane ~ they hate us because we are good and a democracy”, we might have noticed the little obscure fact that while as despicable an act it is to kill 3000 American innocent civilians in the heart of America, of whom at least 350 dead were innocent Muslims as well, America has been doing 9/11 on other nations regularly since the end of WWII. We might even have understood that the way we do it, is not by running airliners full of innocent passengers into tall buildings and making big news headlines, but with more subtlety and finesses, which though less shocking and purposely less newsworthy, is usually far more devastating than what this country suffered.

So let’s briefly review the “why” question that the American media might have explored, even by taking 911 on its face value that it was a ‘Pearl Harbor’ surprise invasion from abroad rather than one complicitly aided and abetted from within, and tried to uncover “why” it is possible to hate America.

Unveiling America’s Secret History

We employ deceit and proxy agents to do our dirty deeds, the dictatorships we impose and support by supplying them weapons that get used to suppress their own people as in Indonesia and the entire Middle East; the clandestine over throw of elected democracies that we engineer as in Iran in 1953 by hoisting the most ruthless dictatorship in the form of a kingdom on the people of Iran, and we aid and abet the king to suppress his own people for three decades, its secret police SAVAK being next to none in oppressive tactics and remaining closely allied with the Israeli Mossad and the American CIA until the very end; the insurrections and coups and arming of the rebels that we pursue in the name of ideology and “national interests” as in almost every country in South America for decades. The US brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and replaced him with the right-wing despotic General Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973 in Chile, there being a somewhat ironical association with the date 9/11. Not only was Allende assassinated, thousands of his supporters, mostly left wing, were rounded up, tortured, and put to death, with active support of the US to the military junta of Pinochet. It is amply documented in Christopher Hitchen’s The Trial Of Henry Kissinger (56 – 76). Kissinger had once remarked that he saw no reason to allow a certain country (Chile) to “go Marxist” just because “its people are irresponsible”. General Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State when asked during a question answer session before the war in Iraq began, about the hypocrisy that we want to bring Democracy to Iraq but we brought a ruthless General’s murderous dictatorship to Chile, remarked ~ “that was not the most attractive moment in US history”.

And just recently on seeing the populace demand in the majority population in Shi’ite Iraq for a religious government styled after Iran, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary remarked that he had no interest in allowing such a theocratic government to come to power in post war Iraq despite its persistent demand by the majority people of Iraq, and despite the US government’s own public proclamation that this war is all about bringing democracy to Iraq! So is it a democracy from a list of Generals that US dictates? It is pointless rehearsing all the history because not only is it well documented, but one might well argue that it was in those bad old days of the Cold War, and this war on Iraq is all about Bin Laden collaborating with Sadaam to take down the towers so we can’t possibly have more mullahs running Iraq. So let’s examine what occurred last year under the saintly stewardship of this White House in Venezuela, where none of these allegations can be true.

The three day military coup in Venezuela in 2002 is a fascinating example of contemporary US foreign policy initiatives for protecting “American national interests” abroad. The popularly elected government of Hugo Chavez, a man of the lay people, whose government is very popular among the masses but not among the minority elite which own most of the country, or the press which is vehemently against him, the presidency of OPEC presently being in the hands of Venezuela and this nation being the largest oil supplier for the US, was over thrown by the military in a coup d’état. The very first things the new General did, in the 72 hours that he was in power was: 1) suspend the democratic constitution, 2) dismiss the elected representatives, and 3) dismiss the judges. The New York Times in less than 24 hours of the coup, in its very next day edition brought out the now infamous headlines ~ “Democracy has now been restored in Venezuela”! The fascinating details of this farce were broadcast on Pacifica, including why the US should be interested in removing Chavez and evidence implicating it. As I recall it was Robert Fisk once again who did the reporting from Caracas. His interviews are probably still available on Pacifica’s website for anyone betting that America is a noble country that only wishes to bring democracy to the uncivilized world. The way the coup was defeated so quickly by the hundreds of thousands of ordinary peasants and supporters of Chavez is a guiding beacon for the citizenry of the world on how to resist US inflicted ‘democracy’. “It is only irresistible if one chooses not to resist”, as I believe I once heard Tariq Ali, the famous antiwar activist, remark.

The economic policies we force them to adopt through our sophisticated machinations of sanctions and instruments of economic hegemony such as the WTO treaties, the World Bank, the IMF, and the ECA, as in almost every developing country in the world except Malaysia and Cuba who refused help from the World Bank and escaped.*2 Since the end of WWII, 104 stifling economic sanctions have been imposed on the civil populations of the world. “In 1998 alone, the US had sanctions against 75 countries, accounting for 52% of the world’s population.*3 Then of course, there is the least talked about and totally unaccountable and unregulated ECA (Export Credit Agency), a lending agency to the developing world. It is a unique partnership between corporations and the American tax payers, and according to some experts, far worse than the world Bank.*4

The structural re-adjustments in poor countries pushed by these lending and aid agencies through corrupt dictatorships, oblige these developing nations to high interest loans for useless projects that are subsequently contracted out to multinational corporations, and in return for privatization of their national resources for a song. The corrupt leadership also nets a few million in the process and make palatial homes with it. While the poor are squeezed dry by higher taxes and even higher cost for their own natural resources. Privatization of drinking water in Cochabamba Bolivia at the hands of Bechtel Corporation, or electricity in India at the hands of Enron Corporation, is a glaring example of this.*5

This is a two prong economic assault on the developing countries – prevent them from making their own lower cost products indigenously, and destroy their existing indigenous low tech capacity to make them your perpetual consumers. It is necessary to briefly explore this incredible system of exploitation of the developing nations, where 3/4th to 4/5th of all humanity make their home. It might help you understand with clarity “why they hate us” more than a million hours of watching American mainstream news and Sunday morning talk shows.

The first aspect of this is imposed through various Free Trade Agreements and WTO regimes to ensure that items which are of necessity, such as essential medicines for killer diseases for instance, cannot be locally manufactured through intellectual property rights patent protection – thus ensuring that only the multinationals will be supplying the products at their own asking premiums to a captive audience for a very long time. If you don’t pay, you die. It is rather besides the point who invested what in developing the life saving drugs, as in this example. The entire system is designed to support this monopolistic endeavor by denying the fruits of Western labors to the developing nations, while harvesting them of all their own resources, with rules of the game that were also conveniently invented by the West. The American courts granted the idea of patent protection to all kinds of things – some even unpatentable things – but it was for their own domestic competition and the American’s own internal matter. Since when did American courts acquire jurisdiction over other countries? Since empire! What empire? The empire spawned by the Multinationals in whose interest it is to monopolize their products through the protection of the military and economic imperial reach of the hectoring hegemons.

The second aspect is how these multinationals destroy the domestic small time mom and pop producers just as they did in America, for the benefit of huge profits for their shareholders and stock market speculators on Wall Street. The multinationals come in and buy out the local companies and local producers. Once the local competition is wiped out, they reign supreme. Even if they want to, the local indigenous producers cannot compete with these giant corporations due to their fantastic economies of scale, high tech sophistication in manufacturing, slick psychological marketing, and enormous initial price competitiveness where the multinationals can out compete a local producer or a domestic self-sufficiency because of their other diversified businesses and products worldwide. They command so much surplus cash and leverage that they can cleverly circumvent the toothless anti-dumping clauses in trade agreements and other meaningless rules that the poor developing nations are sold on and made to sign on the dotted line. Just the sheer magnitude of resources they can bring to bear to wipe out local competition, ranging from preferential host government policies to outright buyouts at ten to hundred times the market value of the local businesses, can entirely destroy domestic producers. And thus the concomitant self-reliance of an independent nation, making everyone only abject consumers of multinationals in the name of progress and “modernity”.

Often the same products that they previously grew, raised, or produced themselves, admittedly sometimes of lesser quality due to their own low tech but independent and self-reliant ways, they are now obliged to purchase from the multinationals. They either become unemployed in the process, or through economic conscription, come into the service of their new pay masters – the New East India Companies of the New American Century. Admittedly some do benefit, and typically it is the same 1-2% educated and affluent class who are employed in managerial positions, or who can afford the luxuries of life. The common man just sweats more blood and tears to eke out a subsistence living. Thus “Multinationalism” finds natural allies among the ruling elite in any developing nation. And it is the same folks who also control the wealth, resources, and unaccountable power in the poor nation! They will create fantastic rationalizations for their support of the Multinationals, ranging from acquiescence to the fait-accompli of their presence in their nation (can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em), to “trickle down economics” that they learnt from their Western masters that George H. W. Bush Sr. once had the temerity to call “Voodoo economics”, to actively seeking and soliciting them as finance and trade ministers, bankers, and Chambers of Commerce of the nation. Avarice is nationalism blind – which is why we have “Multinationalism” today on a global scale. No one will deny these observations because they have become truisms today. Indeed, the wealthy commerce man in the developing nations would likely retort back: what century are you living in, this is reality today my friend, get with it, as I have experienced first hand in my interlocution of many a rich and powerful in the industry and society in my own developing country.

This is the world wide Wall Street based empire that America is crafting with the backing of its big military machine and economic muscle as the sole superpower. You either march to the American tune to secure an “American peace” for the Americans and their favored allies in the industrialized nations, or not at all. It is equally insidious how this marching is forced upon the poor and the lowly – how the developing nations are prevailed upon to open up the doors to their domestic markets. John Perkins, a former consultant for the World Bank, finally found the courage after trying for over a decade, to write about his role as an “economic hitman” for the World Bank in helping destroy developing nations’ indigenous economies world wide in the guise of “development”. His amazing book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, must be made essential reading for all Americans. He explains how the developing nations are deliberately and systematically made beholden to the World Bank and the IMF, and then subsequently, in exchange for alleviating debt repayment, forced to make structural reforms towards privatization from state ownership and public commons held in the public trust for the benefit of the indigenous peoples.*6 Often times, these are accompanied with compromises in local government policies and rules regarding zoning, pollution, work standards, compensation, and remitting the enormous profits back to the home countries in the industrialized West, all of which favor the multinationals to the detriment of their own domestic industries, their own foreign currency reserves, and their own peoples.

While in America, the corporations worry about OSHA regulations and workman compensations, and in paying a fair wage for 40 hour work-week with essential healthcare to boot, there are usually no such standards for other human beings on the planet employed by these corporations, especially those in the production capacity. There, human labor is just a commodity to keep while it is useful and productive, and to discard when it has outlived its usefulness. I have witnessed these things first hand in my own country, in factories supplying to multinationals and export only businesses – and that includes pretty much everything one buys in supermarkets like Walmart, K-Mart, Costco, etc. in America. These inhuman work conditions are not implemented by the “White Man” himself, his hands and suits are too clean to mess with such exploitation directly, but by his dutiful proxy agents – the local employers and local ruling elite who lord over their own peoples in the service of their masters du-jour. While outside their factories in industrial areas they will have large posted signs saying “No Child Labor Used Here”, the villages are full of sub-contractors employing whosoever they want and in whatsoever work condition they want, especially for cottage industries that require small fingers and delicate hands. It’s the wink wink and nod nod of the ruling elite, and business as usual for everyone. None of these things are especially secret – they are in fact, right out in the open.

These new corporate marauders, not too unlike their imperial predecessor East India Company, come in with any crack in the door that is invariably there due to the corruption of petty dictators wielding absolute powers and ruling their public with an iron fist, and is then forced to be made open wider and wider with each new debt service deferment plan by the IMF, and each new loan for new monstrous “development” project from the World Bank and all its sister affiliates.

The impact of this economic slavery is quite obvious for everyone to see, it is not buried in secret and classified documents. All one has to do is to survey the developing world to examine who is doing business there, what is on the shelves in their stores and who has produced them, and where are all the profits from these products and services being repatriated to and in what currency. In the vast majority of cases, the trail of money will start at Wall Street, and end at Wall Street. The poor developing nations only consume like good consumers, and at the end of the year, are left with a huge foreign exchange deficit because that’s how profit made in local currencies is remitted in dollars and Euros and Yens back to the greedily awaiting stock holders in the developed nations. A poverty stricken developing nation, often having sufficient natural resources under its own soil to be self-reliant in many cases, is already in enormous debt to various lending agencies of the West under the guise of “development”. It is thus further unable to pay its huge debts due to the depletion of its foreign currency reserves after the multinationals have extracted their pound of flesh, and consequently continues on in the perpetual vicious lender’s trap of: here is some more money for debt servicing, now be a good boy and make the following changes in your laws so more big multinationals can come rape you further but we will call it privatization and market liberalization.

It is an amazing self-sustaining positive feedback loop from the minds of the money lenders, if I might be permitted to use my engineering parlance to describe their usurpative system. And as any engineer understands, all such loops are unsustainable and unstable. The best example of such unstability that actually reached critical mass due to the unbridled greed and ambitions of one such American Corporation, the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco, is the oft repeated story of the brave peoples of Cochabamba in Bolivia. One could, if one had the courage, consider this economic onslaught and unprovoked aggression by the West, as much a call to arms in self defense as those early courageous patriots did who had the sense and the chutzpah to throw all that tea overboard. The British too were fighting a “war on terrorism” at that time for empire!

While all this is going on, the Americans are told by their politicians and parroted by their media that the US is the most generous and altruistic of nations, even though their own Ex. President Jimmy Carter finds the courage to tell the truth after leaving office that “We are the stingiest nation of all” to Christian Science Monitor.*7

Dear thinking reader, link this global reality today to George Kennan’s imperial advice from 1948 (see next), to the warnings of the unquenchable hydra of the American military-industrial complex by President Eisenhower, and to the hectoring hegemons’ desire for America’s “preeminence” and “full spectrum dominance”, and judge for yourself whether it is the great munificence of a superpower, or a case of Kafkaesque ‘knowledgeable ignorance’ of its peoples.

Continuing with how we do things in America, if all else fails, the wars we impose when they try to wiggle out of our control by covert and overt weapons support to the proxy agents, as in the 8 year war waged by Iraq on Iran resulting in over a million Muslims dead. And we do all this while we continue to maintain the cover of “plausible deniability” just in case we are caught as in Iran-Contra case. The two books by investigative journalist Dilip Hero: Iraq – In the Eye of the Storm, and The Longest War – The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict documents the devastation suffered by both the countries at the instigation and support of the US, eventually to both sides, to keep them fighting. An official in the US government had even commented something to the effect ~“let them kill each other”.

And we totally rely on the collective amnesia of the docile news media to ever remind let alone inform the nation of its past sins as in this “war on Iraq”, where there has been a complete silence on the history of Iraq – and who brought the Baathist to power, who armed, aided and abetted them as geopolitical chess pieces for three decades, who starved and killed their civilians through 12 long years of economic sanctions. When the alleged retributions come for our sins and many more innocent lives are lost, we wonder “why do they hate us”. While all this goes on, the guilty continue to sit ‘pretty’ in high office, or go on lecture circuits commanding high fees after they leave office, and are sometimes even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize if they do their PR right.

How to win the Nobel Peace Prize

President Jimmy Carter, known as the conscionable president, refused to bomb Tehran despite recommendations from his wife and advisors, as noted by a speaker recently, builds homes for Habitat for Humanity with his own bare hands, and is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. His own National Security Advisor (ZB) took credit for handing the Soviets their Vietnam in Afghanistan, leading to the destruction of an entire civilization and loss of multiple of its generations to multiple civil wars and poverty, eventually leading to 911 – if one is to believe the facile version of 911 put forth by the American Government. Whether or not Bin Laden was involved in 911, the facts of history attest to the machinations of the United States of America in the exercise of its military and economic power since the end of World War II as forcefully articulated by George Kennan in 1948:

We should cease to talk about vague and – for the Far East – unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.*8

ZB’s own confessions to this end are highly instructive. The 1998 ZB interview to Le Nouvel Observateur, translated from the original French by author and historian William Blum, is reproduced below. The translator also footnoted that: “* There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the perhaps sole exception of the Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States is shorter than the French version, and the Brzezinski interview was not included in the shorter version.”

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Question: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Question: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Question: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Question: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.*9

Frighteningly amoral execution of George Kennan’s policy articulation from 1948 of “going to have to deal in straight power concepts”, no? Wouldn’t you say that all American Presidents have been doing exactly that?

I had also personally witnessed on television, President Carter in 1978 toasting to the health of the King of Persia, Raza Shah, with approximately the following words: ~To your majesty, to the love that your people have for you.” This to a tyrant responsible for brutally suppressing his own people with American supplied weapons, and while Carter is toasting his host inside the Palace, outside the streets are filled with people protesting their king. When the revolution proceeds a few month later, instead of a mea culpa, a reign of vilification, long war, and sanctions is imposed on the people of Iran. And for what crime? For wanting their freedom from American-CIA imposed tyranny at the hands of one of their own elite? The Iran Hostage Crisis, covered on ABC Nightline daily, which I would occasionally catch while eating dinner in the late night cafeteria at MIT, as I recall was quite devoid of any significant history or accurate analysis of the past 26 years leading up to the crisis. I subsequently saw a shredded memo painstakingly put together and freely available in the streets of most countries in the region about some of the imperial work being done by the American staff in the US embassy in Teheran, whom the hostage takers were calling CIA spies. The taking of these hostages, many of them civilians, was probably the biggest blunder the Iranians made after their revolution, and were paid for in spades by America with the war imposed on them through Iraq. If Jimmy Carter had deserved any Peace Prize, it would have been to avert the crisis with Tehran and successfully bring back the hostages, made amends with Iran for its people finally exercising their will and set the stage for friendship between the two countries, leaving a legacy of peace and prosperity for the region and appreciated the world over. He did not do that.

What is the prize for?

You might say Camp David and Egypt-Israel peace accord over a desert that was militarily occupied in a war? When his own people call Anwar Sadaat a traitor for making his private and separate peace with Israel and breaking up the Arab stance on Palestine which is what Israel wanted all along; and he is also a despised dictator of his own people hated and killed by them for his oppressive policies only to be replaced by another brutish dictator who is also continually kept in power by being the second largest US aid recipient in the world after Israel – is that a peace at the barrel of a gun or an enduring peace with justice?

Brokering a “peace accord” that was only a new manifestation of an old “divide and conquer” plan that the peoples at least on one side of it did not want, and which only allowed Israel a freer hand to continue suppressing the Palestinians and incrementally continue to swallow up their lands without interference from its Arab neighbors, instead of one in which all could have lived in justice and peace with full rights of return for those displaced, is an imperial farce forced upon a beleaguered peoples. And the impact of precisely this “peace accord” for which Carter got the “peace” prize are visible to all and sundry in Palestine – an amazing case study in faits accomplis that become “irreversible” – a modern day genocidal resettlement of another’s land right before the very eyes of the silently bespectating world!

What about Menachem Begin? He certainly also had all the qualifications for the Nobel Peace Prize, having blown up the King David Hotel in 1948 as part of the terrorist Stern-Irgun gangs and was once the most wanted criminal in Britain.*9A

Let’s see who might be in line next? Ariel Sharon and George Bush Jr. and Sr., as well as Bin Laden and Zbigniew Brzezinski, because after all, they did defeat the Soviet Union and bring an end to the four decade long Cold War. They all appear to have the right pedigree of “blood-experience” for the Nobel Peace Prize!

So pardon me if I am not tripping all over myself congratulating the “peace prize” winners!

Don’t ever look for blood on thine hands

The entire Iran-Contra scandal in the mid 1980s remained about supplying arms to Iran illegally which was under US Sanctions, while also supplying arms to Iraq legally so that the two can kill off each other went unnoticed. Why no one brought up the primal sin for prosecution, the war crimes against humanity? Imposing this proxy war on a nation through another nation, and then arming them both to destroy them both? The rest of the world watched this soap opera, an American original, with at best cynical amusement at their imperial democracy at work on trivialities. The imposing senators with their earnest questioning of Colonel Oliver North and John Poindexter to demonstrate to their constituencies that they were earning their keeps, never once thought of asking what moral and international right they envisaged and what machinations they had hatched to get two nations to fight each other! While Poindexter was convicted only on account of lying to Congress, and not on account of any blood on his hands, him and many of the key players were issued Presidential pardons by Mr. George Bush Sr. during his presidency, including former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, to protect his own rearend from incriminating testimonies. And again, these would have only been about who lied to whom, instead of who caused the death and destruction of how many!

Nixon is known as a liar everywhere in America, he was almost impeached as a liar. But all politicians lie, as Machiavelli observed of the soulless politician. Nixon’s mistake was that he was caught. But did anyone in America ever charge him, or his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson, whose policies he was carrying out but tailored to his own megalomania, as war criminals for killing a million people in Vietnam? Was he impeached for that? Did impeachment for war crimes even enter the Senate debate or in the national discourse? “Of Pirates and Emperors”, isn’t it? That is not only a very interesting Noam Chomsky book title, but also a stark reality of the powerful, as St. Augustine had shrewdly observed at the dawn of Western Christian civilization.

And the Cold War victims haven’t even been tallied up. How many Muslims died in Afghanistan in America’s decade long war against the Soviet Union, and the aftermath ravaging and bombing of its society to prehistoric times? On whose head is their blood, the puppets or the puppeteer’s? Even as recent as March 1, 2003, the secret deal signed between the US and Turkey to allow passage of US troops through Turkey into Northern Iraq, which subsequently fell through, but a secret clause in it that later leaked out, permitted Turkey to send in 80,000 troops into the Kurdish Northern territories in Iraq to once and for all crush the Kurds with a final solution.*10

If this genocide comes to pass, as it is coming to pass for the Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government directly aided and abetted by the US government and its willing tax payers, and the Kurds are sacrificed as geostrategic pawns at the altar of oil, how many will love the United States?*11

The documented sins of America are spread out across far too many scholarly books and are far too numerous to make them easily accessible for the average uninitiated American, what with them being too absorbed in football, baseball, and basketball, and continually being trained on 15 second attention spans on mind altering television. What is perhaps needed is an entertaining series “Idiots guide to America’s Sins” or 30 minute documentaries “Bowling for America – Unraveling America’s God Given Rights to Exercise Its Global Hegemony”, in the style of Bowling for Columbine that can be run as infomercials on the same corporate television channels that the mainstream America gets their daily dose of garbage from. Marketed properly, perhaps even as a comic book series, it can be put in millions of homes, and be seen and read by millions of kids every year! Why do tobacco companies focus on kids as their long term customers? When will we learn from them? See the analysis of grass-roots activist movements and new directions in bringing awareness to the hypnotized masses in America in Chapter 7.

This is the reality of USA. Ask anyone in the affected countries and they will inform you of the injustices they have suffered at the hands of this country. The only ones who aren’t aware of this, is the American public, unless some of them happen to travel to one of these countries, dare to mingle with the people, and come back enlightened. Why is the American public the only ones in the dark? Even a simple taxi driver in the streets of any other far less affluent developing nation like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran or Syria exhibits more understanding of the world affairs than the much more literate and wealthy general American public. Does it perhaps have anything to do with them also being the citizenry of a superpower nation? Any correlation? You be the judge!

Thus, had the news media rightfully performed their jobs, we might have perhaps also better appreciated that St. Augustine did not get it all wrong when he related the story of the pirate, responding to Alexander’s question:

When the King asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘the same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.‘” *12

The Premise: If Only the Americans Knew

Let’s examine the premise behind the above discussion, that if the dirty laundry were aired publicly and contemporaneously, it would make a difference.

More and more history of the United States has become the history of United States military campaigns, as is self evident from even the few open skeletons briefly examined above. And there are many more, all 58 years worth, ever since the end of WWII. The famous Washingtonian renegade and eternal skeptic John Judge, who grew up in the Pentagon with both his parents holding the highest security clearances there, and who says he once even sat on a SAM (Surface to Air Missile) in the Pentagon courtyard as a kid implying that the Pentagon has always had the means to protect itself, maintains that this classified military history is deposited in secure 27 ‘one acre sized’ huge underground vaults and buildings in Maryland, never to see the light of day by any contemporary historian. Perhaps we will have to wait a century or more when someone might excavate one of these storage facilities, to learn what really went on in the world under the auspices of the US. Where exactly is this history held is immaterial, the point being that it is not accessible to civilian historians in a timely manner.

We often say, that those who don’t learn from their history are condemned to repeat it. When a nation loses control of its own history, forget about learning from it, they aren’t even informed about it, then what is the plight of that nation? Even what was generally made available through FOIA requests, the earnest US Attorney General has now ruled should be denied (but stated in more legalize tone that the agents should sit on it and not respond to it). Even if there was a Howard Zinn to write another “People’s History of the United States” for its overseas exploits, he wouldn’t be able to, because access to that history is limited to the military spooks, and not the civilians. Is this of any concern to the intellectuals and scholars of this nation who write histories? Or just leave it to posterity to sort it all out? So first of all, there is a problem in making the dirty laundry even available contemporaneously to generate an immediate public response.

This isn’t just a problem in America, but a systemic malfunction to varying degrees in perhaps all oppressive and authoritarian nations, that the natives are the last ones to know what their governments have been up to, whereas everyone else, especially those on the receiving end, seem to be able to rehearse it for generations without any need for written texts! But it is worse in America because the personal freedoms, the opulence, and the relative isolation in which they live, makes its population overly trusting of their leaders, making the nation a perfect prisoner of the cave! Conversely, some may argue, that the only reason the United States is able to provide such liberties and luxuries to its citizens as does the rest of the developed Western world, is through economic exploitation of the rest of the developing world backed by their big military muscles, the main impetus behind corporate globalization and WTO treaties.

This begs the stated question that if its secret military and economic machinations were revealed to its people contemporaneously in the mass media, instead of decades later in scholarly exposés that few can read, would it bring this prosperity to a grinding halt? If the media were to dutifully fulfill its obligation of being a watchdog of not just the government, but of all sources of power in the global society, political, economical, and social, and wherever there was exploitation or injustice, they would be there reporting it, would it make any difference to the people in the United States? Are the Americans very conscionable people?

Let’s see how they would react in another instance of exercising conscience for information that is already readily available, not buried in a vault, but also not advertised on the mainstream media: if the people found out that the Walt Disney company pays 5 cents per shirt to the worker in a Bangladesh sweat shop who works 7 days a week 16 hour days, getting perhaps 1 day off per month, and sells that shirt in the US for $17.99, would they buy that shirt? You can answer this for yourself, for it will help you also reflect on how much of a loss is it really that the military history of the United States is hidden from its people? And see if you would answer in the affirmative to: majority of the people of the United States are not willing victims of deception for the sake of living a luxurious life, that they have to be deceived purposely any time there is injustice perpetuated in their name, by the government, or by the corporation, and for this White House, the distinction between the two can sometimes be hard to make.

The Premise: “War On Terrorism” is a Great Pretext

Based on the preceding analysis of America’s own history of secret proxy wars, and its economic and military terrorism designed to shock and awe a civilian population into subjugation, we can outright reject the assertion that this is a “war on terrorism”. Because if it was, then the first obvious target of this war would have been the United States itself, the godhead of all terrorism as evidenced above. It is the biggest hoarder and developer of the vilest weapons of mass destruction with no qualms about using them. Its total count of nuclear bombs exceeds 10,000 according to Dr. Helen Caldicott, the founder of Physicians for Social Responsibilities.*13

America, and her favored allies including Britain, France, Russia, and China, have persisted in developing the most lethal forms of biological, chemical, and Armageddon initiating nuclear weapons of mass destruction, while America continues to insist that no one else in the resource rich developing world should possess them, even for self defense against the neocolonial marauding empires. Even while boldly threatening the non nuclear nations with preemptive nuclear first strikes at its whim, and while already commencing the development of a new generation of nuclear bombs that can be used on civilian population centers on specific targets without destroying the entire city – as a more humane method of combating the “evil doers”, others are not permitted the right to self-defense. Indeed, Donald Rumsfeld even advocating the use of chemical weapons – some nerve gas that can cripple the enemy without pain, as a more humane method of conquering the foe. Incredible disingenuousness, most surely taking the prize for the most disingenuous warfare doctrine in the Guinness Book of World Records. And even far more incredible, the gullibility of the American public, to accept this dementia as indeed the unilateral right of America to do so, surely also winning them the first prize for the most indoctrinated people on the planet – far ahead of any public in any totalitarian regime that has existed in the twentieth century. From Mars, the biggest terrorist state appears to be right here at home, with its flag waving public “United we stand” being the “brown shirts” du-jour! But you be the fair judge of that.

The second target in the revised axis of evil would have been Israel, America’s earnest ally and co-conspirator, the illegal occupier and murderous oppressor of Palestine, the only country in the Middle East confirmed to possess nuclear weapons, and a dire threat to all its neighbors according to the neighbors themselves. Israel’s nuclear weapons were first confirmed to the world in 1986 by Mordecai Vanunu, their nuclear technician working on the project in the belief that he was defending Israel. He seemed to have had a sudden realization why Israel should need so many offensive nuclear weapons including city busting Hydrogen bombs if it was only for defense. He has since been sitting in an Israeli jail in solitary confinement, serving a 18 year sentence for treason against the State of Israel for telling the world about her nuclear arsenal. A conservative estimate of Israel’s hoard of nuclear weapons is 200 – 300, circa 1986, stationed in the Negev desert and ready for the “Samson Option”.*14 While the number of ~200 is often quoted, even today, it is an old number. The current actual size of Israel’s nuclear arsenal is likely to be in the thousands, comprising an assorted cocktail of Armageddon inflicting gifts of the Jews to modern civilization.

How Israel got its nuclear weapons is an interesting tale, not to be rehearsed here. As a key ally of America through the Cold War, it is very likely that some of Israel’s warheads remained aimed at the Soviet Union, as much as Israel’s own enemies in the region. The Soviets were likely made aware of this because that is why they could never belligerently threaten Israel on the side of their own Arab client-states during the 1973 Arab Israeli war and essentially stayed out of it, while America openly supported Israel. And that is also what likely emboldened Israel to preemptively take out the Iraqi Nuclear reactor nearing completion in 1981 that was being built with Russian assistance, with no retaliation from the Soviets. And this was going on even as Iraq was being supplied with conventional weapons of mass destruction by America and the West and goaded on to fight Iran’s Islamic revolution to neutralize it – using the Iraqis as the front foot soldiers to take the brunt of the casualties, with a nuclear armed Israel as the backup armor. I am quite certain that had Iran’s counter offensive prevailed over Iraq and taken over Baghdad, that Israel would have struck with a preemptive Nuclear strike on Iran – as the immediate interests of America and Israel merged on the borders of Iran (apart from the continued out flow of oil). Thus nuclear arming of Israel was a necessity for America seen in this light – as almost an extension of America in the Middle East. An idea that JINSA has diligently pursued, to build up Israel’s defenses to have it prevail over all its neighbors by wielding its nuclear club. So who are the real terrorism orchestrators here? Who orchestrated the deaths of a million Muslims on either side in the Iran-Iraq war? Who terrorizes all its neighbors with nuclear weapons? Who is militarily occupying Palestine and oppressing an already impoverished people? Against whom should a logical and rational “war on terrorism” be waged if it was for real? What is your verdict?

Among the three of them, the United States of America, the Russians, and the Israelis – the latter most likely being the third largest nuclear power surpassing China, the Great Britain, and France, as well as the new kids on the block India and Pakistan – they possess upwards of 20,000 hydrogen and other nuclear cocktails of death, perennially holding the 5 billion population of the planet as well as the planet itself hostage. Any miscalculation of which can trigger an automatic doomsday scenario, the Armageddon wet dreams of George Bush and his terrorist Evangelical Christian Zionist fanatics. Such is meticulously documented in Helen Caldicott’s book “The New Nuclear Danger”. Come-on now, who are the real terrorists here?

Do try to keep the false patriotism in check as you endeavor to answer this question unhypocritically! It’s hard to do isn’t it? So pretend that you are a Congolese or Nepalese citizen and are looking at this issue without any strong feelings of association and sympathy with any side. Now what’s your verdict?

What is it really all about – “War on terrorism” or “War of Imperialism”?

The postulate: this war is all about controlling access to oil and other global resources for the “full spectrum dominance” of earth and its peoples, is far more convincing, because not only does it speak consistently to the facts being demonstrated on the ground, but because it also provides the basis for world conquest as outlined by ZB as the historical prerogative of a lone unchallenged superpower empire. If one stares at the map of Central Asia, Eurasia as ZB called the prize, one notices how land locked the newly independent former territories of the Soviet Union really are, and one begins to remember the Great Game played by Russia and Great Britain in the century past, and America and the Soviet Union just two decades ago in denying access to the Russians to the warm water ports of the Arabian Sea. Afghanistan is the partial access point to Central Asia control of which has been fought for centuries, and now that control is in the hands of the Americans – all the riches of Central Asia must now pass through the corporate hands of the American multinationals who will eventually control Afghanistan, and through the ports of Pakistan which the Americans already control. Thus control of the oil and gas of the Central Asian Republics, and control of the access to these treasures through Afghanistan, presents a convenient enabler for America to prevent the rise of any other nation from challenging its global supremacy and preeminence.

The much talked about oil pipeline that the Taliban drew the ire of the Americans for, was just a link in this complex chain of geostrategic dominance of Central Asia. The belligerence being shown Iran is also part of this strategy, because the entire Caspian Basin is floating on black gold – and access through Iran is the eventual goal. If Iran is attacked, that would be the prime reason – disguised of course as WMDs and Osama Bin Laden miraculously being sighted in Tehran!

This war is indeed about the battle for control of the world’s precious and diminishing energy resources, because that is what all the Western industrialized societies run on, from food production and distribution to transportation to plastics to military machines to textiles to manufacturing, all need oil and energy. One who controls the purse strings, controls the allegiance, as the saying goes. With American supremacy on world’s oil spigots, the emerging economies of the rest of the planet, including Japan, Germany, Russia, China, India, and all of Europe, would be dependent on the generosity of the United States, and thus prevented from developing their economies at growth rates that could militarily or industrially pose a potential threat to the American Hegemony. Today, the military budget of the United States is greater than the next 14 nations combined defense spending. In a few years, other nations will be increasing their economies and their military budgets as well – but not faster than the Americans – and that is the détente equation on the table enabling a permanent disparity in favor of the United States. This can only happen if the United States can control the energy availability and its cost to other nations. The Americans certainly don’t want to starve out other nations because it is ultimately trade and commerce that makes an empire. The Americans only desire to limit and control other’s growth rates by controlling their energy supply – for that is what is ultimately needed to begin rivaling the economic and military prowess of the United States. And of course, when necessary, be able to credibly threaten turning off the tap completely – and backed by its immense defense spending and “full spectrum dominance”, perhaps get away just be saber rattling!

This war is also really all about surrounding China, the likely harbinger of the new Cold War in about thirty years – the amount of time allocated for this “war on terrorism” – for beyond that will be the anticipated détente with the new emerging powers. The Americans do not think that they can hold off the rest of the world for longer than this 30 to 50 year period even with proper control of the world’s energy supply, and other challengers will eventually emerge. The American presence in Afghanistan, which China considers as its own backyard, is a direct threat to China and its intent is to send a strong message to China – to be careful, from Taiwan to reneging on trade and manufacturing contracts for the American corporations! China today has so much surplus cash that they can outright purchase all of America’s trillions of dollars in outstanding debt – and if they were to switch to the Euro from the dollar, the American economy can be brought crashing down overnight. The two nations’ destinies have now become intricately intertwined for the foreseeable short term, and the American presence in China’s backyard is an essential leverage on the Grand Chessboard to keep China “obedient” – at least for the time being! Later it will be Détente as in the previous Cold War – and having neighborhood proximity to the nemesis will always be to their advantage.

Thus in a nutshell, molding the geopolitical situation in America’s best interest today while it can still get away with bullying everyone else in order to secure an “American Peace” in the “New American Century” is the real raison d’être behind this fiction of “war on terrorism”. So long as oil remains the main energy source fueling the economic and industrial capacity of industrialized nations, and as long as no other energy alternatives become viable for fueling the growth of an industrial economy, and as long as corporate profits continue to motivate foreign polices of nations, this war of hegemony against the oil rich nations will remain a reality. Control of oil is indeed a prerequisite for global domination in the modern times, as various other economics and imperial motivations were in the past times. All this propaganda against Islam and the “war on terrorism” against the so called “Islamic jihadis” is really a pretext in order to control the oil rich Muslim lands and deploy American troops directly or through proxy servile dictators to further the American control of this enabler to empire and hence global preeminence. If tomorrow, such an enabler becomes “banana trees”, overnight the Muslim “jihadis” will be replaced by the terrible “Amazon terrorists”. Although America will still need to be in Afghanistan for the sake of China, and perhaps in Iraq for Eretz Yisrael, but the loci of interest would shift from Central Asia and Middle East to South America!

And of course, this war is also all about the Zionist agenda for Eretz Yisrael and their desperate need for cheap energy and permanent preeminence over their Arab neighbors, is also a far more convincing argument when you look at who is behind it all, even not counting Paul Wolfowitz, the mastermind Jewish Zionist Neocon. Most of the Neocons are Jews and/or Zionist sympathizers. The confluence of their interests, which are not too dissimilar from American hegemonic interests for America – since they mostly happen to be the same folks – explains the raison d’être for this war far better than “war on terrorism”. The Zionist strategy for dominating the Arab lands – or rather Eretz Yisrael – is openly outlined in the 1996 paper by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser: A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,*15 and in the letters written by the Project New American Century authors to both President Clinton and President George W. Bush, encouraging them to launch attacks on Iraq, Iran, and Syria all through the late 1990s up to the present time. Exhibit A summarizes the role of various Zionist authors and strategic thinkers in the service of America’s lifetime of “war on terrorism”. The distinguished Richard Perle developed the strategy further by employing this new serendipitous “war on terrorism” that – putting it charitably – fell into his and Israel’s lap, to achieve the same ends in his 2003 book An End To Evil – How to Win The War On Terror. *16

President George W. Bush Jr., on the eve of invasion of Iraq in search of the fictitious WMDs, on 26 February 2003, as the key-note speaker at the highly influential Neocon Zionist Jewish think-tank American Enterprise Institute at which Richard Perle is a Resident Fellow, noted with enthusiasm:

Some of the finest minds of our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed twenty such minds. I want to thank them for their service”.

So the best Zionist minds are at the helm of the American nation according to the President of the United States! Is that what the 300 million peoples of the United States want – for a handful of Zionist Jews to determine and execute the policies of their nation in the first interest of Israel? What has made the American politicians and consequently the American nation so beholden to the Zionists? A patriotic American, be it a flag waving one in Iraq or Afghanistan and potentially returning home in a body bag, or the one saluting “United We Stand” in the main streets of America, must try to understand the role played by the Jewish AIPAC, JINSA, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, the Council for World Jewry American Jewish Congress, and a dozen other high profile Zionist think-tanks lining Washington DC, in leading their nation in search of the fictitious WMDs and the fictitious threat from invisible paper tigers – the leadership for which George W. Bush Jr. offered his effusive thanks at the altar of the Jewish lobby, Jewish power, Jewish thinking, and Jewish money! America is the new Zion of the Jews – why don’t they just leave Palestine alone?

Thus it must become apparent to the American public that closing one’s eyes to the stark realities around us does not mitigate those realities anymore than an ostrich burrowing its head in the sand, nor does it curb the desires of the war mongering greedy empire for the Zionist led “full spectrum dominance” of the planet to secure a very “American Peace” in the “New American Century” – a “peace” in which nuclear armed Israel will reign supreme in the Middle East as the policing arm of the Great empire.

My humble request to the world leaders, world media, and the world’s intelligent peoples, is to stop calling this Zionist American aggression on the world a “war on terrorism”, but to kindly refer to it by its proper and correct name: “War of imperialism”!

So finally we have now arrived at the heart of this essay. Let’s quickly review what we have accomplished thus far: we have demonstrated a convincing strategic theory of global supremacy outlined for us by ZB, we have convincingly argued that this administration is aligned with this goal, we have factually analyzed the ruthless team assembled to exploit it unhindered, and we have demonstrated a realistic motive to implement the theory of global supremacy with, namely control of oil as the lever. Furthermore, we have demolished all red herrings that were thrown at us. What is the remaining problem now? The good peoples of this American nation, a populist democracy. It is only in their consideration that the imperialists do not come right out and announce that they are building the new Rome – for the American public does not want to be the new Romans, although they certainly wish to continue enjoying the benefits of living in Rome!

Footnotes Chapter 2

*1 See Shattered Illusions – Analyzing the War on Terrorism Edited by Aftab A. Malik, for a collection of exposé articles by a team of leading international scholars for understanding both America’s and Israel’s war on terrorism.

*2 See Kevin Danaher’s 10 Reasons to abolish the IMF and World Bank, to understand the devastating effect these financial institutions have on the societies of the third world – complete economic slavery.

*3 See Why Do People Hate America.

*4 See References for web sites for “Food first” and ECA.

*5 See Vijay Prashad’s Fat Cats and Running Dogs – The Enron Stage Of Capitalism. He makes an interesting investigative study of the privatization impetus and the consolidation of public commons into the few hands of multinational corporations who are the main beneficiaries of the globalization process led by the United States of America.

*6 [Added 2005] The red-herring ubiquitous argument provided is that such state enterprises are “inefficient” and do not make a profit. If you ask a barber what ails the world, he will likely tell you all those long haired lice infested people who do not get a haircut. If you ask a doctor what ails the world, he will likely list all the diseases that bite mankind. And if you ask a Western economist what ails the world, he will for sure tell you all the state enterprises that don’t turn a profit – privatize them. The first pillar of modern Western market capitalism exempted many things from private ownership and market economy, including essential public services and public commons. The laws of supply and demand of Macroeconomics only really work properly in society when there is elasticity in the supply and demand, albeit temporary inelasticity usually sees something go up, prices or shortages. And the intent of promoting market competition is to make up for it through human beings’ natural enterprising ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit for personal profit, by competing fairly and making a buck in the process. Thus promotion of private competition in many human endeavors in the market place, when one is not allowed to monopolize the markets, often leads not just to better products and services, but also to remarkable innovations and other social benefits of having an engaging and thriving polity motivated to go to work for personal profit.

That is the sane theory of market capitalism in its pristine sense, and in a nutshell. These laws and theories however, do not work in practice among a living breathing peoples, when there is a perpetual captive audience for a commodity of inherent limited supply having infinite demand; or in other words, when there is no permanent elasticity possible. What is one gonna do, starve or die if one can’t afford food or water or electricity or medicine? Thus precisely because we are a human beings and not commodities ourselves, wise governments and enlightened societies provide “profit-less” – as measured on a financial statement of a corporation – government administered social welfare benefits and other essential services to their peoples. Otherwise why not let it all be driven by market economy? And when they foolishly rush into privatizing the essential services and essential benefits without which people can’t live in today’s modernity, we get the Enron’s and the private power producers’ fiasco in California as the perfect counter example of how the primacy for profits by corporations naturally lead them to unbridled greed, and why privatizing essentials of human needs, services, and public commons into their profit-making hands is a terrible proposition for any free, independent, and self-reliant peoples – be they in America, or in Bolivia to Zimbabwe.

Suffice it to say that it is not necessary that all public services and state run enterprises turn a “financial” profit – why should they? Why should asking such a question even be meaningful in that context? To illustrate more clearly, have you recently asked yourself how you intend to make a profit from all your investments in educating your children? You did spend a fortune – where is the balance sheet? It isn’t in monetary terms is it? And similarly, neither are many national endeavors and imperatives held in for-profit corporate hands precisely because they are a public trust, a service to the people for having their needs met as the primal agenda, as opposed to turning a financial profit for Wall Street. One glaring example of a public trust is running the Government. And even better and more specific, a nation’s Department of Defense. When is the Pentagon gonna turn a profit? It’s a bloody sink hole of 400 billion dollars a year – what do they have to show for it? Couldn’t even protect the nation on 911 despite trillions of dollars in defense spending over the past sixty years.

So let’s privatize the Pentagon; instead of .gov, make it a .com, and let’s trade its Futures on Wall Street. It will for sure get efficient, and finally stop wasting tax payers’ hard earned monies that are desperately needed for their own domestic social spending, on frivolous big toys. Since they would now have to account to at least some entity, even if it is only the greedy hydra of Wall Street, perhaps they might finally turn a profit. The new Chairman of the Board will surely be uncompromising, exclusively for-profit, and non-forgiving as a task master, unlike the dot gov which does not seem to be immediately accountable to anyone, least of all to the people on whose account the public trust is held, i.e., the trust to protect the nation from all invaders, external and internal.

It is indeed rather incredible how the Pentagon is actually privatized. Its income is derived forcibly from the public by levying taxes, yet its unaccountable spendings are largely made to private corporations in the giant military-industrial complex of America with a revolving door between the Pentagon, the Government, and the Corporations. See The Iron Triangle by Dan Briody for an eloquent exposé of this incestuous self-reinforcement among the ruling elite in America, including past US and European heads of state.

So what I mean by privatizing here is to have the Pentagon stock itself traded on Wall Street – because that is the equivalent of the privatization that the lending agencies and free trade agreements seek of the developing nations’ public goods, public services, and public commons under the market liberalization regime of neocolonialism. If it is good for the goose, it must be good for the gander too – right?

Well no, because even in America we will only privatize those things that actually make sense to the ruling elite making more profit. If they privatize the Pentagon, how in the name of Christ will they perpetually and unaccountably dish out the multi-billion dollar perpetual contracts at the public’s expense to the military-industrial complex of America, always under the pretext of fighting various boogie men and boogie ideologies du jour for which “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”? Do you finally begin to comprehend this racket now? Thus once again note the following statements from the PNAC report (already quoted in Chapter 1 at length, also see Exhibit A for the names of its authors): The Price of American Preeminence: The program we advocate – one that would provide America with forces to meet the strategic demands of the world’s sole superpower – requires budget levels to be increased to 3.5 to 3.8 percent of the GDP… They want more money from the American public – and are afraid the public won’t give it to them unless there is a boogieman to scare them with: … Until the process of transformation is treated as an enduring military mission – worthy of constant allocation of dollars and forces – it will remain stillborn. … Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.

See Chapter 9 for how this new boogie man du-jour of “Islamic Extremism” and “evil jihadis” is easily dismantled for the benefit of Plato’s Cave dwellers, only before whom, the Secretary of Defense of the world’s mightiest superpower and the boss of the Pentagon, could have the “courage” to boldly state with a straight face on mainstream television: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”! I would have died laughing if this were a movie, the stark reality however is instead making me furiously pen this exposition of the real evidence for the Cave dwellers.

Okay so all you Western economists who win Nobel Prizes in “science” as you dehumanize human beings and their inherent and essential needs, into commodities to be bought and sold based solely on mathematical relationships and models, what is your answer now? I haven’t ever seen a single paper by one of you stalwarts of capitalism and experts on market economy, on privatizing the Pentagon! But you are very happy privatizing everything else, from prisons, to healthcare. Crappy science behooves crappy results! See John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman for one such crappy science in action – not just from some hole in the wall university in a third rate developing country, but from the top engineering and science institution in the beacon of all science and technology, the United States of America, my own alma mater, M.I.T. John Perkins’ describes how he used a mathematician from MIT to derive Markov econometric models in the best example of pseudo science to come out of Academe, to put more developing countries under the lenders’ prisons. If this is what Western “Modernity” is all about as Mr. Bernard Lewis, the infamous doctrinal scholar and author of What Went Wrong – The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, seems to prognosticate as the hegemonist imperative of a dominant civilization, the peoples of the world desire none of it. Hence we need the “War on Terrorism” to make sure they accept it. Also see Chapter 9.

*7 Christian Science Monitor, 29 Dec. 1999, noted in Why Do People Hate America.

*8 George Kennan in the once-classified Policy Planning Study 23 from 1948, quoted by Noam Chomsky. Quote excerpted from Mark Chmiel’s Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, page 16.

Original citation: Memo by George Kennan, Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff. Written February 28, 1948, Declassified June 17, 1974. George Kennan, Review of Current Trends, U.S. Foreign Policy, Policy Planning Staff, PPS No. 23. Top Secret. Included in the U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, volume 1, part 2 (Washington DC Government Printing Office, 1976), 524-525. Can be read in its gory details at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memo_PPS23_by_George_Kennan.

*9 See Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1998 interview to French magazine “Le Nouvel Observateur”. Translation by William Blum at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html.

*9A See Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the age of Dictators ch26 http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/, and The Iron wall ch9 and ch5 http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/index.htm.

The obituary for Menachem Begin ob’m http://www.ou.org/chagim/yomhaatzmauth/begin.html noted the following: “Begin’s picture, that of a wanted terrorist, was posted in all British prisons and offices in Palestine. The British conducted an extensive manhunt for Begin, who had a price on his head that began at $8,000 but was raised to %50,000. Begin escaped the British dragnet by disguising himself as a bearded Orthodox rabbi.

The obituary, characteristic of history written by the victors to write of their monumental crimes as if it was a badge honor or some “ubermensch” imperative to have committed them (just as the history of the settlement of America is remorselessly written upon the blood and genocide of 10 million of its native inhabitants), also noted the following:

Begin’s critics saw him as a narrow-visioned fanatic and dangerous adventurer. But despite the decades he spent on the margin of the political mainstream, Begin’s impact on Israel’s first generation was surpassed only by his arch political foe, David Ben-Gurion. Begin was the first prime minister to refer to the west bank as Judea and Samaria, considering them an integral part of the Land of Israel. No sooner had he been elected than he went off to visit an Israeli settlement in the west bank, Ekon Moreh, and declared it to be part of “liberated Israel.” It was under his tenure that Jews embarked on the wholesale settlement of the territories.

And who permitted the Israelis this license? The United States of America with its open check book, the unquestioned support of its silently bespectating “democratic” public too busy chasing their own “American Dreams” and conveniently co-opted by the special interests of a handful that runs their nation in their name, its smiling front-men presidents who pay regular homage to these special interests to get elected, and those who glorify them by bestowing Nobel Peace Prizes upon them for their monumental crimes against humanity! An Orwellian touch of Kafkaesque proportions!

And what’s the difference between then and now? Carter shared the prize with Begin and Sadaat, and George Bush calls Ariel Sharon a “man of peace”!

In an age where genocidal wars are waged “by way of deception” and the history is written by the victors, while the process contemporaneously goes on, is it very surprising that some silly peoples on the receiving end of this largess may hate us? Them hating us after the faits accomplis are long sown and the old have been killed off and the young have forgotten would be rather ineffectual and meaningless, wouldn’t you agree? David Ben-Gurion’s observation has more Machiavellian elements of sociological significance than meets the eye! It permits writing great exposés and erudite works of history after the fact, and also provides great intellectual fodder for obit columns!

*10 Reported by Connie Zulam, the Kurdish activist, on Pacifica Radio.

*11 See Tinderbox by Stephen Zunes; Blowback – The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson; and John Pilger’s The New Rulers of the World, in order to understand some of the dirty laundry that the United States has generated that needs to be aired out in front of the flag waving mainstream public. Instead of broadcasting the sins of their Government as the constitutional watchdogs on the corridors of power, the amnesiac corporate controlled mainstream media and the American press have become cheerleaders for the Government dutifully echoing their every word as “sanctified” and unquestioned news, indeed often vying with each other to get the choicest seats in the “embedded” space.

Also see an interesting simple tabulation of America’s sins in Zoltan Grossman’s ‘A Century of US Military Interventions From Wounded Knee to Afghanistan’ in the book Why Do People Hate America by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies.

See Noam Chomsky’s collection of his thoughts in Understanding Power – The Indispensable Chomsky to understand the minds and deeds of the United States of America as the global power broker. Also see his very popular booklet 9-11 for insights that the media won’t provide on why they hit us. Although Chomsky has inexplicably chosen to unquestioningly accept the US Administration’s version of the events of 9-11, he provides a typical and now familiar Chomskyan perspective of why such an attack might be considered inevitable and not at all surprising, and that it is a criminal act rather than an act of war and thus must be approached like any crime – first investigated, and the culprits found, charged, and punished in a court of law; instead of bombing Afghanistan to oblivion.

Noam Chomsky however has suddenly decided to trust his Government and has chosen to ignore the “new Pearl harbor” aspects of 9-11, but that does not diminish his position which I would generously interpret as: were such an attack indeed unilaterally designed and carried out by someone in the world upon the USA (now or in the future), it should not come as a surprise to the American peoples, and this is how they should react to it – and Chomsky lays it out for them as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”.

My problem with this generous concession to my old college professor is that it is built upon a non-intuitive and non-substantiated premise – that one must never wonder that rogue elements within the United States Government, including in the White House itself, including even the President or any of his cabinet members or his intelligence agencies, may be a criminal party to covert-ops contemporaneously. If one wonders that out aloud while it is still ongoing, as the 9-11 spawned global adventures still are, then one is a “conspiracy theorist”: for there is no “concrete evidence” to ponder such a complicity – but there is certainly an abundance of concrete ironclad evidence to implicate Bin Laden right off the bat, the true hectoring hegemon on the planet who even describes himself in such bombastic words (for the sarcasm impaired and those who deliberately like to misquote and misinterpret for doctrinal penmanship, that is sarcasm – see the author’s field in the PDF: http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf )!

Chomsky’s unwarranted assumption that it could only have come from Muslim criminals outside the American shores as a “blowback” story, and not for instance, from Jewish Zionist neo-con criminals in Israel or America, as his newly developed faith in the non-mendacity of absolute power and his own peoples compels him to opine rather vociferously, is selling God only knows how many hundreds of thousands of copies of his 9-11 booklet. Seven Stories press, its publisher, is ecstatic I am sure, and so is the White House, the Pentagon, and the Knesset, to have discovered a new friend in “arguably the most important intellectual alive”.

Although Professor Noam Chomsky is my esteemed college teacher and once upon a time lifelong mentor, esteem stops at the gates of hell. It is indeed hell on earth for the innocent victims and nations in this “war on terrorism”, and those who aid and abet it, even if inadvertently by virtue of the positions they take publicly that lends any credence to the unwarranted axiom of foreign invasion for this new pearl harbor, have blood of the innocent on their hands.

911 is is a point of departure for me from distinguished Noam Chomsky’s views – wherein I see the deliberate hands of the American-Israeli intelligence agencies and/or “Second Foundationers” from deep within the American ruling elite in orchestrating this New Pearl Harbor. For a country that can sense what is deep within the bowels of the Earth and in the farthest reaches of the heavens, that seeks “full spectrum dominance” of air, land, sea, space, cyberspace, et. al. in its own military doctrines, and that publicly warns in its strategy documents that the only way for it to embark on this “imperial mobilization” is an increased military budget that can only come about in a “new pearl harbor”, 9-11 has only one reality – self-inflicted.

The hard and concrete signed receipts for 9-11 will of course only be forthcoming either in another fifty years as the Congressional records recently declassified betray the knowledge and connivance of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in significantly increasing the probability of the commissioning of the original Pearl Harbor – President Nixon himself believed this to be true; or upon the defeat of the Fourth Reich just as the Nazi secret documents became available to the victors; or upon their complete full spectrum dominance of the planet whereby in the bragging rights for world conquest will be their shinning glory – similar to ZB openly claiming his role in the defeat of the USSR by handing them their “Vietnam war” by virtue of knowing and deliberately provoking the Soviets starting six months before their invasion: “the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. When you kill one man it is murder, when you kill six million Jews it is “the” holocaust of history, when you destroy entire nations from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, and now preparing to do the same to Iran, it is only “American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives” on “The Grand Chessboard” – the new “Modernity” of Bernard Lewis. And Noam Chomsky still thinks Bin Laden did 911 and waits for evidence before he will look into examining any other premise?

History is a man’s best friend in the Machiavellian-Straussian world of geopolitics and disinformation. Knowing this history better than anyone else and yet still holding on to the positions that my distinguished Professor Noam Chomsky does on 911, is an enigma that continually begs the question, why? Why has Noam Chomsky not served his self-appointed duty as he so vociferously proclaimed for himself in “Responsibility of Intellectuals”? And perhaps that’s why he is indeed “arguably the most important intellectual alive”! The absence of any questioning of the fundamental axioms of the 911 discourse is so disturbing that it needs to be unraveled further.

Chomsky generally relies on officially disclosed facts, often from the New York Times itself (as from other newspapers and “official sources” of the Government such as declassified documents and autobiographical confessions of glorified murderers and thugs after they have left office as prime ministers, presidents, and cabinet members), mainly through careful culling and back-reading of past coverage to piece together a picture from disparate pieces of “officially disclosed” information, and usually in the words of his antagonists themselves, as evidenced in his prolific books. It is also an analysis skill I learnt, I presume from him, by I suppose reading his many books over the years and attending his famous American foreign policy courses at MIT circa 1980. That’s how I also sometimes read newspapers (on the rare occasions that I do anymore) when I want to track down a particular obfuscating issue – lookup the topic in back issues, unwinding the clock backwards. It works sometimes, but not always, and it does not work on secrets, especially contemporary covert-ops!

Thus what happens when the New York Times chooses not to disclose the facts, whether deliberately, as it only prints All the News That’s fit to Print” according to its own motto, or because they don’t have the facts either, and there is no Daniel Ellsberg secretively disclosing the “Pentagon Papers to the newspapers, willing to risk going to jail for a hundred years for his conscience, and the petty thugs and murderers are still in high office and haven’t had time to write their confessionals yet for their obligatory book tours?

Then what, pray tell, is the responsibility of the erudite intellectuals and their famed self-proclaimed moral imperative of rational cynicism which:

should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity (Vaclav Havel: “Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala”, quoted by Mark Chmiel in “Moral Leadership”)?

Are they to wait to be a credible “witness to their mendacity and not perform their profound retrospective analysis of lessons already learned from history until the forward historians and perpetrators write their new official histories and autobiographies, and the courageous conscientious objectors leak new secrets?

Should they further wait to discover Hitler’s written orders to Eichmann for genociding the Jews before becoming convinced that the Holocaust occurred?

For such signed receipts and concrete evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors are rarely left behind as calling cards, and only in Pink Panther movies if at all; if they are ever written down, they remain very closely guarded as top secret national security imperatives as Brzezinski himself states in his interview quoted in the main text, and “shredded” the moment knowledge of their existence is feared in a contemporary setting as Iran-Contra’s gorgeous secretary is testimony – official disclosure is a far cry and must usually await 50 years when there is no potency left in its secrecy. For something like 911, If I was a superlative “ubermensch” Hari Seldon plus Daarth Vaider all rolled into one, as I posit my adversaries likely are (see Chapter 1), I would not write anything down either because I would like to maintain “plausible deniability” – a term even ordinary peoples learnt for the first time in the Iran-Contra Congressional hearings. Is there some new electromagnetic radiation weapon that the Pentagon has deployed in the American Academe that is zapping their powers of cynicism and critical analysis based upon direct experience of recent history?

Please see Chapter 5 where the absurdity of accepting the Government’s position on 911, given what we already do know as facts, and also what is missing as concrete evidence, and what is commonsense and rational based on wisdom, and what is emotional and illogical based on whim or collusion, is further made manifest.

Also see Daniel Ellsberg’s memoirs Secrets – A Memoir Of Vietnam And The Pentagon Papers, for a first hand, first person, glimpse into the mendacity “of systems, of power and its incantations”, the bold faced lies, the purposeful and deliberate Governmental deceit – for those who may be too young to remember Vietnam. As the only outspoken Muslim present in one of his antiwar talks, I had a long chat with both Daniel Ellsberg and David Harris after their speeches near San Francisco at the College of Marin’s Olney Hall, on April 29, 2003 in a Town Hall Forum titled: “Reclaiming American Democracy through Awareness and Action”, organized by the Ruth Group (ruthgroup.blogspot.com). I also gave them an earlier draft of this book for their comments. Unfortunately, I never heard from them. But in any case, the remarkable comment Daniel Ellsberg made at that meeting is a lesson for all conscionable peoples – he said his biggest regret was why he did not do it sooner (i.e. the Pentagon Papers), for he could have perhaps saved thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives. He has repeatedly, publicly called for conscionable peoples working in the corridors of power to leak internal secret documents that can show concrete proof of Governmental lies akin to what his Pentagon Papers showed, for that seems to be the only way that both ordinary denizens and their brilliant intellectuals of the “show me” nation when it comes to the crimes of their own emperors, will believe. I am just incredibly impressed by this man, and meeting him and talking to him privately was an honor for me, as it was to talk to David Harris who is even more remarkable – as a young idealist student at Stanford, and the president of its student body, he pointedly refused to be drafted and willingly spent three years in jail instead. Imagine doing that at 21 or 22 – like Rachel Corrie. His hands are clean. Clean hands are infinitely better than soiled ones even after the latter have been washed through a belated mea culpa and attempts at restitution. Blood can’t be washed off.

Please see Chapter 8 for their advice to me and to all the Muslims living in America, and David Harris’ incredible comment, that they, the white Americans, must stand up for the minority Muslim community in America today, because tomorrow, all Americans may experience the same fascism being unjustly dished out to the Muslims.

This book is the analysis that ought to have rightfully come from the mind of Noam Chomsky – and given my much smaller brain and unknown name, its impact and calibre is likely to be commensurate. But for reasons of sanity, I have stopped following intellectuals and mullahs of all stripes – now I only follow myself, for it’s far better to be led to hell through the arrogance of one’s own best efforts to avoid it, rather than by the allegiance to a pied piper, branded or not. I find it extremely ironical, and profoundly disturbing, that contrary to all his past writings in which he has called his own superpower nation a “rogue state”, Noam Chomsky has rushed to accept the very same “rogue state’s” explanation of 911. See Chapter 5.

*12 See Cambridge edition of St. Augustine’s seminal book The City of God against the Pagans, page 148.

*13 See Helen Caldicott’s book The New Nuclear Danger – George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex for a detailed break down of the US nuclear arsenal.

*14 See Seymour M. Hersh’s revealing book: The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.

*15 An essential reading for how monumental criminals hide under the legal covers when they are on the empire’s teams, a version of this paper can be found at: http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm or http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm. Compare to when the empire handed its victor’s justice at Nuremberg to the vanquished who had committed the same crimes: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/07-26-46.asp.

*16 See Advance Praise for ‘An End to Evil’ by Karen Kwiatkowski at http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski53.html. A good succinct summary of the war planners in their own words can also be read at: http://www.masters-of-war.org/pnac.html. Also see Learning To Love Big Brother – George Bush Channels George Orwell By Daniel Kurtzman, San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 2002, http://www.masters-of-war.org/georgeoforwell.html

Is Democracy Inimical To Empire Building?

ZB asserts quite candidly: “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization. Well! If this is indeed the case, then that would explain many things wouldn’t it? At the least, it would explain the ignorance of the US public with respect to it’s government misdeeds abroad, for if informed, they just might hold their rulers accountable, and not allow atrocities to be committed in their name in the guise of protecting or extending “national or geopolitical interests”. ZB has perhaps also made the unstated assumption that in a democracy, its people are basically kind and not blood thirsty war mongers. This is why he observes that they will only agree to war if they perceive a “direct external threat” or a “challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being”.

Let’s examine this assertion by ZB. How does one define well-being? For instance, would the US public go to war if they couldn’t fill up their SUVs anymore? Or will they only go to war upon a Pearl Harbor? What is their national threshold? History further demonstrates the execution of Socrates at the hands of a democracy, and a cynic could perhaps argue that democracy is necessarily ignorant, and ZB is being unnecessarily optimistic. He could also argue, that the self indulgent population of this opulent country couldn’t care less even if they knew what was going on in their name, and may point out the example of Israel.

Israel is billed as a Democracy in the midst’s of a barbaric and dictatorial Middle East, an enlightened Europe in the Arab heartland, a beacon of education and civilization among the backward and unruly Arabs – as Moshe Katsav, Israel’s President had so dramatically pointed out about the Palestinian Arabs living under Israeli military occupation:

people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to different galaxy.*1

A cynic may well argue that ZB’s theory of Democracy being inimical to empire building seems to be hogwash when applied to Israel. Everyone admits that Israel has a freer printed press than the United States, with a broader range of opinions being expressed there, and furthermore, that it is a democracy, even if only a racist one and primarily only for its Jewish population, at least they do elect their leaders. Then how comes Israel can persist in its illegal occupation and systematic genocide of their own Semitic brethren and cousins, the Palestinians, and the same war criminals get re-elected time and again? How can they persist in enjoying ecstatic visions of owning all the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers? Perhaps this “informed people” concept of the “populist democracy” is overblown? The cynic might even argue that the premise of people giving a damn just because they live in a democracy, even when they might have strong moral traditions, is beguiling. Aren’t the Jews in Israel supposed to be very moral and highly aware people, especially given their own recent history of a terrible holocaust, and a free press? Then how do they still end up being led by known killers and war criminals?

The cynic might further protest that if the chief proponent of the Holocaust museum, himself a Holocaust survivor, and a Nobel Laureate author of such works as “Night”, who while vociferously argues that the world should never forget and condemns the silence of the people that led to the holocaust: “and I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent”,*2 is silent himself to criticize Israel’s own racial genocide in their own back yard, then how do you expect the ordinary citizenry to behave any differently?

The cynic would suggest that America is no different than Israel, aren’t they ideological allies? Why should democracy be inimical to imperial mobilization in one case, and not the other?

Faced with these basic contradictions that few in the mainstream media would dare enlighten him about, perhaps because of their own ignorance as the basic qualifications for them seems to be “good looks” rather than “good minds”, our cynic would have to go to Mars and seek counsel from the alien observers to learn that over there on Mars, they call it hypocrisy and thuggery. But here on Earth it is called Anti-Semitism and “war on terrorism”.

An Empirical Model of Apartheid Israel

Our cynic would be informed by the alien observers from Mars that all of Israel’s funding comes from the United States, therefore their own populace don’t have to shell out the money to finance their country’s economic growth or militarization. He would learn that Israel is a fraudulent creation born of a fraudulent motto a land for a people, for a people without land, for a land without people (how do they keep that going?). A country acquired by mercilessly displacing the local Palestinian population and making them refugees in their own homeland, while inviting the Jews from the entire world to come live in Israel. Founded on the racist ideology of a Jews only country much like apartheid South Africa’s ‘white only neighborhoods’, born of the Zionist vision of a handful of ideologues over a century ago to re-gather the Jews of the Diaspora of over 2000 years into a single homeland before any holocaust had occurred, they dream of conquering all the Arab lands from the “Nile to the Euphrates” as the greater Israel. The Zionist among them, living both in Israel and in the United States, continue to plan for the realization of their vision in the corridors of power in Washington. They seem to be succeeding.

The cynic will learn that the Zionists founded the organization JINSA in the mid 1970s with the explicit charter to make US strong in the Middle East, a land of oil and natural riches coveted by the US for fueling its own Hegemonic plans, with Israel as its core instrument of execution. Israel maintains a very influential lobbying group AIPAC, to not only influence the elections of politicians that support their cause and to defeat those politicians who oppose them, but also to systematically and continually influence the policy decisions of the law makers in Washington to favor Israel’s interests, and actively discourage those policies that even while in favor of US interests may not be in Israel’s best interest. The American politicians from both its parties dutifully report to AIPAC and show their true bipartisan spirit of working together for the sake of Israel by candid remarks like:

I have always fought for the vital economic and military assistance that Israel needs. … I called upon President Bush to respond to Israel’s urgent request for assistance to confront its unprecedented economic and military crisis. The President answered with the [$9 billion] aid package he submitted to Congress last week. As House Democratic Leader, I pledge to you today: Democrats in Congress will be in the lead in the fight for passing this emergency package. … Let no one ever question our unshakable commitment to the security that Israel must have and the safety of the Israeli people and to its qualitative military edge. Israel will never stand alone, because America will never abandon Israel.*3

The Zionists have organized other powerful think tanks and institutions to maintain their influence over the United States’ politicians and upon its all important public opinion – the key to their continued survival in the Middle East. They are also a direct beneficiary of this US “war on terrorism”, which is a pretext to redraw the map of the Middle East, with Israel exercising its own mini Zionist hegemony in the region in service of their benefactors in Washington.

The Israeli governments regardless of their stripes (Likud or Labor), usually dominated by Zionist ideologues, continue to oppress the remaining Palestinians now living in less than 22% of their original pre-1948 land, known as the West Bank and Gaza strip. The Zionist desire is to grab even this region in the West Bank (the thin densely populated Gaza strip being useless for them for anything besides a giant prison camp for the unwanted Palestinians) which contains all the waters of Palestine underneath its rich fertile soil that Israel desperately needs for its own Jews only cities. The successive governments purposely force one crisis after another to make pretexts for building more settlements and partitioning the area into disjointed Bantustans. Their hope is that the Palestinians will finally give up and just leave out of desperation.

The Zionists look towards the “settler” model of apartheid South Africa and the Pilgrim settlers of the United States of America. They seem to be following the same polices that put the majority of the black South Africans in their own mineral and diamond rich homeland into poverty stricken slums and disjointed Bantustans, and the native American Indians resettled into isolated barren reservations as the white man took upon himself the burden to civilize them, taking over their choice lands in the process to construct the egalitarian United States of America. Egalitarian that is, for everyone else except the native Indian. The Zionists well understand that justice will be hard to administer once a new Jewish generation is born and raised on the soil in Palestine, for they were born there, it’s not their fault that their ancestors stole the land from the Palestinians. They will defend themselves as vigorously from eviction as a Californian would if the lowly Mexican were to come knocking at their door.

Thus one sees the Zionist rulers of Israel delay making any reasonable peace because they know that time is in their favor, that making any kind of just peace in the future will have to take into account the facts on the ground that they are busy seeding! They also learn from the post apartheid South Africa that once the wealth and power is accumulated in the hands of the minority ruling class, its just and equitable redistribution later, when justice purportedly prevails and peace has been established between the warring factions, is next to impossible.

As a consequence of this “settler” policy that most everyone in Israel would admit to themselves, but perhaps only in their bathroom mirrors, they also live in perpetual fear that the injustices and oppression they have afflicted on the Palestinians and the region, would one day come to haunt them. They especially fear that the Palestinians and their surrounding Arab neighbors may one day become strong enough that they will come back and demand their homes and their lands back. Having studied their own histories quite carefully, they well understand that they have bit the hand that has fed them in the past, when the Christian West was persecuting them for centuries, the Islamic East offered them refuge and shelter in their dominion. The Zionists can also recall the hand of Islam on the necks of the Jews in the battle of Khayber during the early period of Islam, when the residents of Khayber were paid back for their treacherous subversion of a peace treaty, by the Prophet of Islam with Justice prescribed in their own Torah and of their own choosing. They further realize that every Muslim in the billion plus population is also aware of this history and may seek retribution one day:

It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood.*4

They are afraid of the day of reckoning!

This fear, has now become so deep rooted in the very fabric of Israeli society, that they are blinded to any suffering they continue to inflict on the Palestinians, as they feel it is either them or us, and this is a positive feedback loop. More brutally they suppress the Palestinians, more paranoid they get when the Palestinians hit back with whatever little means at their disposal. Thus as a nation, the Israelis are on permanent war footings of their own deliberate making, and as per ZB’s threat perception model, their populace will tend to elect people whom they see will protect them from the enemy. The killers of their enemy are their saviors. They regularly send their young sons and daughters to fight their enemies in the military. Almost every household in Israel has some family member having served in the armed forces, many of them stay on reservist duty. For Israel, democracy isn’t inimical to their expansion plans, because the majority of the public is complicit in these goals, either through direct contribution, tacit acceptance, or willful ignorance.

Moral ambiguities of Elie Wiesel – a HolocaustTM survivor!

These however do not include the small percentage of pathological cases so traumatized by their holocaust memories and sufferings that they are psychologically unable to see Israel do any wrong. Some of these survivors have become very high profile writers, and exercise a great deal of influence in policy making related to Holocaust remembrance that helps sustain support for Israel. They argue that their suffering is so unparalleled that

It is a mystery whose parallel may only be the one of Sinai when something was revealed”,

and therefore they deserve special moral privilege as victims of the Holocaust. They generate a lot of controversy among Jewish moralists themselves who point out that:

Although the Holocaust inflicted horrible injustice upon us, it did not grant us certificate of everlasting righteousness. The murderers where amoral; the victims were not made moral. To be moral you must behave ethically. The test of that is daily and constant.

Their consequent and sustained subjecting of the Palestinians to immoral and illegal occupation and daily persecution is debated heatedly among the moralist and academics. But it’s mainly that, a source of intellectual debate and polemics, because the reality on the ground has been there for more than half a century, if their debate had any value, they would have surely figured it out by now and rectified their injustices.

Those unable to see ‘Israel do any wrong’ due to their own Holocaust experience are clearly psychologically unable to deal with it and unable to reason or tell the difference between right and wrong any more. For them, perhaps it was the cataclysmic and apocalyptic event they feel it to be. Albeit not all Holocaust survivors have lost their ability to reason as traumatized they might be, this is the case with the author of “Night” as stated in his own defense for his censurable silence on Israel:

Do not ask me, a traumatized Jew, to be pro-Palestinian. I totally identify with Israel and cannot go along with the leftist intellectuals who reject it. Perhaps another generation will be free enough to criticize Israel; I cannot.”;

My loyalty to my people, to our people, and to Israel comes first and prevents me from saying anything critical of Israel outside Israel. That is the price I pay for living in the Diaspora. As a Jew I see my role as a melitz yosher, a defender of Israel: I defend even her mistakes. Yes I feel that as a Jew who resides outside Israel I must identify with whatever Israel does – even her errors. That is the least Jews in the Diaspora can do for Israel: either speak up in praise, or keep silent. Therefore, I believe if I have something to say about certain things I do not like about Israel – and there are some – I must go there”.

These words are not from a rational mind, rather a severely scarred for life person by his own admissions. Hence when he says the following about the Palestinian occupied territories:

Israel did not want those territories; they were imposed on Israel in war.,*5

it is unfair to label that as hypocrisy, but rather someone who cannot see reality because he is so wrapped up in his own trauma. Hence those who criticize this prolific author and Holocaust survivor for his hypocrisy, must realize that he is not a rational person. For a rational mind, it would indeed be hypocrisy. Those psychologically ill may perhaps be forgiven for what appears to be their moral ambiguities, just as those not able to reason are not held to account in any judicial system. By the same token, they are also unfit to hold important positions of influence where their inability to tell right from wrong due to their own loss of objectivity and rational thinking, can lead to another’s suffering.

If they do hold such positions, as the author of “Night” does, then they must be removed from those positions. The fact that they are not removed, and continue to be given prominence and influence that helps perpetuate the occupation of another people, is not an indictment against them. But against those who keep them there, in order to exploit the personal and collective sufferings of the Jews in the Holocaust, in the service of their own nefarious Zionist agenda that was planned in the centuries past to occupy Palestine, before the Holocaust even transpired. Those who are so indicted, and justify the stealing of the land and the lives of another innocent people, shattering their tabula rasa, are hypocrites and plain old thugs, and will not be forgiven. The Zionists have hijacked the holocaust memories and Judaism itself, one of the great religions of the world, and the rational and moral Jews themselves will not forgive them. They are orchestrating and perpetuating such crimes against humanity, their complicity and contrivance in this fictitious “war on terrorism” bringing such worldwide destruction and economic exploitation, that humanity itself will not forgive them.

The motivations and achievements of bringing the plight of the European Jewry who were hitherto oppressed themselves in many Christian European countries of the world, into the limelight of the world, and freeing them of their social bondage, and honoring and remembering the plight of its victims of horrors of WWII concentration camps, is indeed a prerogative and a right dutifully exercised by its people, in fact by all people as such atrocities are a calamity for all mankind. But not at the expense of victimizing another innocent people and subjecting them to such sustained sufferings, that their plight now begins to rival those of their oppressors.

While the Holocaust suffering of the Jews lasted for six long apocalyptic years, the suffering and persecution of many Palestinians has gone on for more than three decades and is no less cataclysmic for the victims, some displaced in 1948 are still living in refugee camps with generations growing up and dying in these camps. With children being born in refugee camps in appalling conditions in the sniper gun-sights of the Israeli soldiers, and dying in the same camps under a hail of Israeli tank shells, never having seen the outside world, and never having entertained any hope of escape from their predicament, in their innocence they ask what makes the Jews suffering an holocaust and theirs merely murder that the world can tolerate as if it was an ordinary street crime? Millions are being held captives in their own homeland with daily humiliations and torture, treatment that one would not met out to a dog.

Those who advocate support of Israel at the expense of enslaving Palestinians and killing them in small numbers at a time on a daily basis and wounding many more so that they would eventually die off as cripples but not raise the alarm in the rest of the world because numbers seem to define when mass killing is called a genocide and when it isn’t, or removing them forcibly from their homeland euphemistically calling it a “population transfer”, are guilty of the same crimes of genocide they accuse their own oppressors of. Their claims to ancestral lands as justification for their destruction of the indigenous population that has existed for 10,000 years, far older than their own claim of 2500 years, and in justification of their own sufferings at the hands of quite another people, ring hollower than an empty drum, and not able to withstand the scrutiny of any court of law, penal or moral, not just on Earth, but also here on Mars. And indeed, any such claims if entertained, need to be argued in a court of law, not at the barrel of a gun, and certainly not against a defenseless civil population using the animalistic “might makes right” morality long outlawed in the developed Universe, but somehow still being practiced ubiquitously on earth.

Were it not for the Zionists and their machinations to forcibly create “Der Judenstaat” – the Jewish State – as envisioned by their founding father Theodor Herzl in 1896 in modern day Arab Palestine, the Jews and Muslims would be living in peace, cousins that they are, sharing many of the same ancestral Prophets and traditions, all being children of Prophet Ebrahim (Abraham), and there perhaps would also not be this fictitious “war on terrorism” being waged now. Before the Zionists set their eyes on Palestine, the Jews, and Arabs, Christians and Muslims alike, were living in Palestine peacefully, side by side, culturally intermingling, and it used to be difficult to tell them apart except by their respective religious clothing if they were religious, and not at all otherwise. Now they are at daggers drawn. How the Zionist thugs will be brought to justice on earth remains to be seen. They are for the moment very powerful, and this power may ultimately also spell their death knell, and that of their people, as it did for Firoun (Pharaoh) and his people. The silent prayers of innocent victims, be they Palestinian, Jews, or any peoples, are never ignored! There is a day of reckoning, for everyone!

Ineffectiveness of the minority Jewish Voices of Dissent

There is also a small minority of conscionable and outspoken Jews living both in Israel and in the United States, who actively oppose this ‘moral ambiguity’ and the vicious cycle of violence, and argue that this will lead to their collective suicide, both morally and physically, and they must stop oppressing the Palestinians and make a just peace with them. They come from all walks of life and professions, from the intellectual professors to teenagers. They oppose the Israeli government’s oppressive policies and many of them even refuse to serve in the Israeli military preferring to go to jails instead. To last count, there were approx. 750 such Refuseniks. Some Jews even bravely put themselves in the path of the Israeli military onslaught in order to protect the innocent Palestinian homes, and sacrifice their own lives as moral witnesses to the crimes against humanity being committed in the name of Jews, putting to lie the Zionist claims to Judaism. But these voices for peace are presently a small minority and not very influential on the government or the elections. Their ideas of justice and morality also vary widely, from a single democratic non racist homeland for all the indigenous peoples, including the Palestinian Muslims and Christians in accordance with principles of modern statehood in the civilized world and with full rights of return restored for all Palestinians earlier displaced and as demanded by the UN resolutions, to a further partitioned two very co-dependent and unequal states with Israel kept much stronger than Palestine along the 1967 borders to continue to serve the imperial interests of the power-brokers on Earth, and the Zionist Jews allowed to hold on to majority of stolen Palestine.

The proponents of the latter, and there are many, do not really understand the realities on the ground today for the Palestinians, and the Bantustans that have been created by annexations and appropriations by Israel, nor the stratification in Israeli society where the wealth of the region is concentrated in the hands of an elite few. The facade of the peace process also revolves around this latter idea and intentionally ignores any redistribution of wealth, return of the refugees, significant compensation for pain and suffering, and return of all the appropriations and land theft done by the Zionists since 1948. There are only a few proponents of the former more just and equitable solution.

In either case, the very courageous Jews who dare to speak out against the Jewish State and its systematic and genocidal oppression of the Palestinian people are often derided and labeled by the Zionists as “self-hating Jews” and “Judenrats”. For Christians, the honorific becomes “Nazis” and “anti-Semites”, and for Muslims as for the rest of the world opposed to the Jewish State and its theology of Zionism, it remains the rallying battle cry “rise of anti-Semitism” in the world. The memories of the holocaust are deftly splashed across the globe in movies to television in response so that the world may never forget what they did to the Jews, and because of which the Jews today deserve special considerations and are beyond the pale of ordinary morality and law, for they follow their own god’s law as the chosen peoples. It is often very effective in silencing the critics. Indeed, not only is this theology preached to the world, but to the Jewish populations themselves both in Israel as well as in the Diaspora so that they too may be convinced that Zionism is Judaism that Moses brought from the Mountain exclusively for them. Thus all its moral commandments are interpreted to only apply to them and as such being endowed with a super morality above all else as god’s chosen peoples. The teachings are kept well hidden in Hebrew but are an open secret among the Hebrew speaking populations as composing the essential Jewish ethos of domination of the lowly goyems by the chosen ones. All this ultimately results in most Jews having attended such Hebrew schools growing up believing in this theology of “superiority”, leaving only a handful of rational dissenters behind who are easily dismissed as “self-hating Jews”.

Help: those nasty boys are pelting stones at our tanks!

Finally, our cynic will learn that in order to maintain the very essential US public opinion support, and knowing quite well that the US is a democratic nation where the populace will not stand for injustices committed on an innocent people with their tax dollars, the Israelis and their Zionist supporters spend considerable resources and energies in spinning myths and rewriting history. Their most impressive and successful myth, that will one day perhaps rival those in ancient civilizations, is that “it is the poor Israel that is under siege by the evil and barbaric Palestinians illegally living on land given to the Jews by God Almighty Himself and it is so written in their ancient scriptures”. This is the dominant image in the minds of the mainstream Americans when they see the stone throwing Palestinian kid protesting his slavery of a different sort – he is free to flee but not to stay on his own land! The myth is now so powerful that it has swept over the usually rational minds of even the educated and the scholarly, the newsman and the congressman, such that the truly innocent among them do not even stop to ponder simple questions like: where are the tanks, the check points, the homes being demolished, the UN built refugee camps slum dwellers, the curfews, the midnight knocks on the door, the arbitrary beatings and imprisonment of men of all ages, the bulk of the dead kids shot in the head or the eyes, and permanently crippled casualties in this ultimate battle of biblical proportions between good and evil? In Tel Aviv Or in Jenin?

As a parting shot, our cynic was warned by the alien observer from Mars about tolerating hypocrisy in the earthly societies, and the consequence of turning a blind eye towards it. While not being a penal crime on earth, it was a moral crime in every religion and value system in the Universe, and especially in the Earth’s major religions it was the gravest of sins punishable by eternal damnation in the lowest recesses of hell. The reason why hypocrisy is morally so repugnant, our cynic was informed, is because it is the essential seed that enables spreading of the “banality of evil” possible in society.*6

This is what had led to the holocaust of the Jews in the first place, and is indeed responsible for spreading oppression and misery wherever it flourishes, on Earth, or elsewhere in the Universe. There would be peace and justice in the Universe, if all its inhabitants eschewed hypocrisy and adopted the simple universal moral truth logically stemming from not being hypocritical in the self-interest of survival:*7

what is good for me to do to you, should be good for you to do to me,

what is evil for you to do to me, should be evil for me to do to you too!

But of course mortals forget sometimes. A gentle reminder is all it takes to put them back on track, their sense of self preservation and conscience being deadly weapons against hypocrisy. Those Neanderthals who argue that human beings came about because of the struggle for “survival of the fittest”, and “might makes right” is the only evolutionary path to higher life forms and progressive civilizations as it winnows out the weak, can perhaps be asked to explain why those who willingly sacrifice themselves and their offspring at the higher altar of “truth and justice” in their courageous battles against corruption and oppression, with no guarantees of success within their own or even foreseeable life times, are immortalized as heroes and role models for all future time, while there is no memory left of the “arrogant and the mighty”, who are only derided even when remembered?

Phew, what a lesson for our cynic! Better not visit Mars anymore, lest more hypocrisy gets revealed. They seem to have a dossier prepared on the earthlings!

These “reflections from Mars” are first order models to help understand what is really going on in the Apartheid Israel, and are only accurate to the extent that they explain the observed phenomenon.*8

The fraudulent creation of Israel in Palestine through Machiavellian machinations are plainly manifest in the writings of David Ben Gurion and his political Zionist progenitor Theodor Herzl. Even a simple search in Google on the internet will reveal their dastardly plans for systematically depopulating Palestine of its indigenous Arab people in their own Machiavellian words a plenty: “What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times” as David Ben Gurion insightfully noted, and which Ariel Sharon is diligently putting into practice in annexing the rest of Palestine piece meal by deceitfully inventing the “revolutionary times” as did all his predecessors. Unlike the ordinary person in the West who seeks immediate gratification, the Zionists are long term strategic planners as evidenced by Herzl’s own statement:

In Basle I founded the Jewish state … Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realize it.

They take baby steps in accomplishing their goals, which become irreversible steps once taken. This Zionist strategy is also what is at play in the Neocon occupation of Iraq as will become apparent through the course of this book – which is why neither the front face in the American White House, nor the front face in the Israeli Knesset, really matters a whole lot so long as the overarching goal of Eretz Israel: “from the Nile to the Euphrates” is employed as a political ideology, and its realization, a national mandate.

Information today is easily accessible to anyone – if they seek it. We don’t even have to go very far in history. The Israeli contemporary scholars keep reminding themselves of how they acquired the Palestinian lands, as in the recent short book from a courageous and outspoken Israeli Jew, scholar, and writer, Tanya Reinhart: Israel/Palestine – How to End the War of 1948. A brief excerpt from its very first page is reproduced below. Her own introductory words are a telling example of the brain washing that goes on in the Israeli society to convince its new generation, and whatever conscionable population there might be, to tow the Zionist’s ideological fiction much like in the United States:

The state of Israel founded in 1948 following a war which the Israelis call the War of Independence, and the Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe. A haunted, persecuted people sought to find a shelter and a state for itself, and did so at a horrible price to another people. During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time – 1,380,000 people – were driven off their homeland by the Israeli army. Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after 1948 war. Thus, the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This is not a process unfamiliar in history. Israel’s actions remain incomparable to the massive ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by the settlers and government of the United states. Had Israel stopped there, in 1948, I could probably live with it. As an Israeli, I grew up believing that this primal sin our state was founded on may be forgiven one day, because the founder’s generation was driven by the faith that this was the only way to save the Jewish people from the danger of another holocaust.

While Tanya Reinhart is courageous enough to openly admit the hypocrisy that she was raised in, other academics who presumably are also “leftist” dissenters and the voice of conscience of Israel – or so they project themselves, aren’t quite as forthcoming. They celebrate the existence and accomplishments of Israel as their Jewish State, albeit sometimes with mixed feelings and occasional pangs of guilt that they are famously known for in the Middle East – they will first plan to kill you with a design most brutal, and then come to your funeral lamenting:

We can forgive them for killing our children, we cannot forgive them for making us kill theirs.*9

And during this show of “profound remorse”, they still continue to inhabit the same lands that they have militarily usurped under self-righteous prerogatives that they have given themselves as god’s chosen people, and where they weren’t even born to start with. Here is one such voice – Israeli Professor Barauch Kimmerling, a self proclaimed leftist dissenter and teacher of sociology in Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writing in an article “My Holiday, Their Tragedy”:

As a Jew, an atheist and a Zionist, I have two memorial days in my country, Israel. One for the Holocaust and one for soldiers who fell in wars. I also have one day of celebration, the anniversary of the day Israel declared its statehood. [...] Independence Day is a holiday for me, but also an opportunity for intense self-introspection. A person needs a state and land, and this is my land, my homeland, despite the fact that I was not born here. I am proud of the unprecedented accomplishments of this country, and feel personally responsible for its failures, foolishness, injustice, evil, and its oppression of its citizens and residents (Jewish, Arab, and others) as well as of those who are defined and defined themselves as her enemies. I know that my holiday, a day of joy and pride for me, is a day of mourning and tragedy for some of Israel’s citizens and, more so, for members of the Palestinian people everywhere. I know that as long as we, all Jews everywhere, do not acknowledge this, we will not be able to live here in safety, every man and woman under their vine and under their fig tree. Happy holidays, Israel.*10

I am still trying to parse what it means to be a “Jew, an atheist and a Zionist” all at the same time. Only intellectual moralists living in Israel can perhaps unravel such intricate conundrums and still sleep well at night and be able to look at themselves in the morning. While David Ben Gurion can claim god gave the Jews Palestine thousands of years ago in one breadth, and in the other find it okay to use god’s name to bring misery to another peoples by his own hands:

If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?*11

We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return … The old will die and the young will forget.*12

As now, there is no fear of a god anymore. Nietzsche had made sure of that in the nineteenth century for them as the elite prerogative of the superman having their own super morality beyond that of the ken of ordinary men, as no one morality may fit all sizes of peoples – some chosen by god, others chosen to serve the ones chosen by god, and then god died after issuing substantial land grants to his superior and choicest peoples:

According to Halachah, classic Judaism’s laws and customs, for example “compassion towards others” extends to Jews only. Murder or manslaughter is judged mildly when the perpetrator is Jewish and the victim a non-Jew. Also according to Halachah, it is accepted for a Jew to kill a non-Jew if he is laying claim to “eternal Jewish land”. This is what the settlers’ religious organisations are alleging. There is no corresponding law in Israel’s judicial system but in effect it influences the system as punishment of such crimes is very mild. Israel’s state terrorism, theft of land and occupation, demolition of houses, the building of the Wall etc including the so called ‘extra-judicial killings’ (assassinations), are seen by Zionists as legitimate defence of the Nation and therefore fall under international law – which Israel ignores [..] Buber critisised Nazism while commending the Jewish Religion (Hassidism) but keeping quiet about its dehumanising of non-Jews (goyim). These double standards act to increase Israel’s chauvinism and hatred of all non-Jews.*13

There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, they are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to different galaxy.*14

‘“The bitter irony of fate decreed that the same biological and racist argument extended by the Nazis, and which inspired the inflammatory laws of Nuremberg, serve as the basis for the official definition of Jewishness in the bosom of the state of Israel” (quoted in Joseph Badi, Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel NY, 1960, P.156)*15

And the divine sanction to acquire the Promised Land with a now dead divine made it entirely reasonable to destroy indigenous Palestinian history, culture, villages, and society entirely from the face of the earth with open unreserved declarations, as there is no fear of retribution by the God of anger and Retribution – eye for an eye – of the Old Testament:

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.*16

We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” and “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.*17

One could argue as did the Martian, that it is actually the “superiority” complex imparted to the Jews by their Zionism theology that makes them so inhuman. But in reality, the majority of Zionist power-brokers and their executers are atheists and “cultural Jews”! So it must only be that god died for them after giving them the fantastic land grants. If they had remained religious and then carried on with their murder and mayhem, the Martian observations may have been more correct that they are imbued with this sense of superiority over others. Indeed, I have not been able to discern any visible signs of this superiority in them in much closer examinations – they only appear to be common criminals perpetuating monumental crimes because they can get away with it due to the support of their super-power sponsors, and possess no more extra-ordinariness about them then did their arch nemesis Eichmann. They only have courage to wage wars by way of deception, and on defenseless civilian populations; they live off hand-outs from the American tax payers, and offer only spying on their generous sponsors in return.

It might be worth an American asking the questions:

What does the Jewish State do for America for all their tax dollars except be its thuggish bouncer in the Middle East? Could they use that money on themselves in improving their own schools, social security benefits, and healthcare? The $9 Billion that was just given to Israel, how many public schools and libraries could that have kept open and properly funded in America? How much more Federal tax refund could they have got back, and continue to get back for all the Pentagon Defense contracts and military aid given to Israel for it to remain an effective bouncer? Do they want a bouncer in the Middle East? By what moral right? The one of law of the Jungle, that “might makes right”? Then how would they claim to be anything more than just glorified baboons in T-shirts and slacks? A civilization of sunglasses wearing baboons?

Now that we have discovered the true reality of Israel, mainly in the words of the Israeli Jews themselves, and also tried to answer some hard questions for ourselves (which I hope the astute reader has done before reaching here), where does that leave us today?

We can write and lament all we want, but so long as the American peoples continue to finance and arm Israel with their tax dollars and permit this genocide and hypocrisy to continue, there will be more and more books written in the future about the “banality of evil”!

The all and mighty Zionist military machinery in Israel is operating with full impunity and with extreme prejudice against a defenseless peoples using the same terror regime as they employed to create the Jewish State in Palestine in 1948 (see Rachel Corrie in the next Chapter). Especially in the backdrop of this fiction of “war on terrorism”, they have acquired the “license” to take over whatever remaining land there is in the fertile West Bank in the guise of fighting the “terrorists”.

Only the American public can stop them and force them to roll back – indeed to return to the land they were born in, the United States of America (and Eastern Europe), and return what they stole in 1948 back to its real owners as the only Just and moral solution to the Question of Palestine.*18

And this is also why the American public is deliberately kept the least bit informed about Israel lest they should demand just such a moral solution for their brethren in humanity suffering entirely due to the American sponsorship of their oppressors. But you be the judge of that as you also peruse through the next chapter about the media’s role in keeping you locked up as prisoners of the cave, and reach your own thoughtful and conscionable conclusions!

It is possible that some may dismiss my “Martian discourse” that I have employed here, a tool of objectivity I learned from my honored college Professor Noam Chomsky, as liberal (or conservative) propaganda (as the case may be). These labels have become a convenient modus operandi for both sides in the very narrow spectrum discourse on any issue that exists in America, to discredit the other side. There is of course no need to evaluate what one is hearing, since one owns the truth, everyone else is a liar. For these people, my only message is ‘you can bring a horse to the pond, you can’t force it to drink’, and if Socrates were alive today, you would be leading the charge of ‘drink the hemlock’!

However, the critical reader experiencing that slight tug at their conscience, and perhaps hearing the fleeting whisper of clanking chains for the first time, might wish to look into this further. They might hear a ring of truth in this Muslim writer, whose politics cannot be captured by the narrow straits of American labels such as Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, fundamentalist or secular, because Islam encompasses elements from all of them, and then some. But they are perhaps daunted at the prospect of reading all these books and undertaking the massive amounts of research needed to uncover truth which is always kept a Herculean effort away in this society. They may start by referring to the series of educational but brief pamphlets brought out by the grass-roots organization “If Americans Knew”. Get their pamphlet “Rachel’s Letters” to hear from a conscientious 23 year old Jew in her own words, why she gave her life in safeguarding her Jewish ideals to an Israeli Caterpillar bulldozer that was made in the USA and paid for by the American tax payer as part of America’s continued billions of dollars in annual financial aid to Israel. See next chapter for an excerpt from her letters to her mother.

The mission statement of this organization ably captures the sentiments of the founding fathers of this nation when they made Freedom of the Press an integral part of the very first amendment to the US Constitution. It reads:

In a democracy, the ultimate responsibility for a nation’s actions rests with its citizens. The top rung of government – the entity with the ultimate power of governance – is the asserted will of the people. Therefore, in any democracy, it is essential that its citizens be fully and accurately informed. In the United States, currently the most powerful nation on earth, it is even more essential that its citizens receive complete and undistorted information on topics of importance, so that they may wield their extraordinary power with wisdom and intelligence. Unfortunately such information is not always forthcoming. The mission of If Americans Knew is to inform and educate the American public on issues of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media. It is our belief that when Americans know the facts on a subject, they will, in the final analysis, act in accordance with morality, justice, and the best interest of their nation, and the world. With insufficient information, or distorted information, they may do the precise opposite.

Is America really different from Israel? Why is ZB so concerned about American Democracy?

America is a very unique country in modern times, with a relatively free civil society, its composition highly multicultural, and the majority of its population generally not seeking to dominate the world unlike the empires of colonial times. At least ZB does not think so, and neither does the 1996 public opinion poll that ZB cites betray so. I dare to presume that ZB is likely rather surprised himself by the sudden prominence of the crusading Evangelical Christians and their influence over an American President. But since they do not constitute a majority in this multicultural nation, ZB might tend to dismiss the impact of their ‘la mission civilisatrice‘ crusading adventure, while still endorsing the “doctrinal motivational” value that can be squeezed out of it to rally the larger multicultural majority against the evil enemy of the West and hence garner their sustained support for imperial mobilization. However, for the Muslims at the receiving end of their “love of Jesus”, they are a significant menace, especially when their convoluted fanatical beliefs motivate major policy decisions in the White House – like support of Ariel Sharon and Israel over the beleaguered Palestinians, or making it “morally easier” for the American President George W. Bush Jr. to launch invasions upon Muslim nations driven by some insane religious zeal with “god” whispering in his ears:

God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.*19

Apart from this mutational aberration however, ZB’s thesis appears correct for America, as evidenced by the massive antiwar protests that brought Nixon to his knees and an end to the Vietnam War. Indeed, at least in theory, accurate and timely public knowledge has the ability to forestall governmental and institutional misdeeds in a democracy. And ZB would argue (I presume again) that in fact, it can even derail this new Crusade if the American people begin to understand what is really going on in the White House, because the majority of Americans are not motivated by such outdated passions anymore than they are motivated for imperial mobilization. But if they perceive an enemy (real or imagined) is out to get them, they will rise in self defense, as any self respecting nation would. ZB boldly recognized this about the Americans and cleverly argued that only a new Pearl Harbor will mobilize them for war, as otherwise: Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.

Some might argue however that despite his sagacious insights into the makings of empires, ZB could be too optimistic about Democracy. That this lofty ideal of Democracy, what Winston Churchill called the ~worst form of government except for all the others”, can only become a reality in practice if the democracy is a genuine public franchise and not a carefully crafted deceptive process to support the democracy of the elite few; if the face of the elected leadership and presidency is not just a public image over behind the scenes policy makers who remain constant across administrations, and remain beyond the pale of democratic selection by the populace; if the election process offers real choices for intelligent candidates and is not a selection between carefully crafted dumb and dumber clones who invariably carry out the policies of the same “imperial thinkers” and “special interest” groups; if the majority public gets out to vote and does not remain apathetic even to the timely and accurate information delivered them; and if their votes are honestly counted in an unrigged election process. ZB does seems to have conveniently neglected to mention any of these self evident truisms of Democracy in his idealized projection of American Democracy, even while he is not unaware of them.

These are a lot of ifs. Does America really behave as the democracy ZB projects? Or does it act more like an oligarchic empire (or dare I say oily-garchic) with the veneer of democracy where the populace indeed does vote in elections but has little impact on essential imperial policy? An oilygarchy composed of the hydra of the military-industrial-financial-media-corporate-academia-special_interests complex largely run by the same small coterie of enormously wealthy institutional elite. How useful would accurate and timely public knowledge of their ruling elite’s misdeeds be in such a case even if it were possible? Wouldn’t it just change the actors at best every 4 years, the script remaining the same?

ZB, knowing full well the true makeup of American democracy, having been associated with both the Democrat and Republican Administrations for decades, and having claimed the dubious credit for handing the Soviets their Vietnam three decades earlier whose aftershock enables this “war on terrorism” today, is still worried that even in this bastardized democracy, adverse public opinion can be dangerous – primarily because he fears that the present generation of ordinary American people are not out to get the world (unlike the Zionist public of Israel forcibly occupying another’s homeland), and can potentially fill the American main streets in protest! That their refusal to cooperate can bring the giant industrial wheels of the country to a grinding halt, send her lifeline – the Wall Street tumbling, and eviscerate the imperial pipe dreams in short order. Just think what could happen if just the dock workers refused to load and unload containers, and the truck drivers refused to drive? There’d be no food on the American tables and riots in the streets in no time! What forced the South African white apartheid leadership to accommodate Nelson Mandela and lift the ban from ANC? It was the millions of black South Africans in the streets – and they didn’t even have a democracy for the blacks at the time! What toppled the Shah of Iran was not democracy, but an angry people each willing to loudly proclaim: ‘I have had it up to here and am not gonna take it anymore’. The power of an angry peoples willing to lay down their lives for their rights and justice worries all tyrants and empires.

And it is all the more worrisome when a nation’s Constitution has awarded its informed citizenry the rights to protest, to be armed, and to gather in the streets – regardless of how the Government is elected or constituted!

There is indeed a lot of thought behind his deceptively laconic statement “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”, for what it really states is that public protest can be destructive to the oilygarchy interests. ZB surely realizes that the latter needs the public more than the public needs them. Thus the formulation of the Patriot Acts by the Neocons and kept on the back burner until just the right moment, then hurriedly rushed into Law by the current administration just before launching World War IV. This is according to a preemption plan for democracy, to systematically and in stages, deprive the public their Constitutional rights to legally protest and voice their dissent by creating a climate of fear, persecution, derision, and incarceration on any pretext and without producing evidence or criminal charges. Whereas note that in Israel, there is no such plan of record. Their press, their scholars, and their politicians openly debate all aspects of their colonization and “resettlement” of the Palestinians. Even the dissenters and Jewish peace activists get their voices prominently heard in Israeli press, primarily because the majority of the citizens are complicit in the Zionist aspirations of the state.

Also noteworthy is what is common with Israel – fear psychology. While Israel has set herself up on permanent war footings with Palestinians and is in perpetual state of war with them, America is also attempting to create a similar and permanent war footings with “World War IV”. The constant barrage of red alerts and threats from the terrorists as Pearl Harbor scenarios convinces the populace into accepting the ideas of “invasion”, “preemptive aggression”, oppression, and long term occupation of the enemy in the name of self defense.

Thus we see that ZB’s observation for imperial mobilization has necessitated both a new Pearl Harbor, and the curtailment of civil liberties in order to counter the democratic instincts of the American public against imperial mobilization. Perhaps the Americans should create a new Prize in Honor of Zbigniew Brzezinski: “The Brzezinski Peace Prize”, awarded annually to the person creating the shrewdest Machiavellian doctrine in the world!

A word about the Swiss Cheese State

We hear about the “Palestinian state” and the “peace process” a lot. Can anyone draw for me what the Palestinian state looks like? Can you then spell Swiss cheese? Would you accept such a Swiss cheese as your country with no rights to air, sea, or a proper military for self-defense, with your economy entirely subservient to the larger nuclear armed neighbor’s who controls all the ingress and egress into your country at all the borders with military checkpoints, and who not only has you completely surrounded by a fourteen foot high wall, but also controls transitions from one Swiss hole to another? Before anyone utters another word about the “Palestinian state”, please think if you would accept such a state. If not, why would you compel a poor defenseless and beleaguered peoples of over fifty years under miserable military occupation to accept it on a Buntustan’d piece of their own continuously inhabited ancestral lands at the hands of American and European Jews who weren’t even born there? But wait another 50 years and they will all be born there. That is the Israeli plan!

Footnotes Chapter 3

*1 Moshe Katsav, President of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001.

*2 See Elie Wiesel’s memoirs All Rivers Run to the Sea.

*3 This bipartisan American institutional support of Israel was declared in a speech to AIPAC by Nancy Pelosi on April 1, 2003. It’s a twain twilight zone, President Bush, a right-wing Republican, calls Israeli Prime Minister a “man of peace” as he seeks to dispense justice to “evil doers”, and House Leader Pelosi, a liberal Democrat, assures Israel of her unflinching allegiance, as she leads the supposed opposition party in the legislature. And they intend to compete with each other in kissing the Prime Minister’s enormous gluteus maximus to see who can get there first, when she states that “Democrats in Congress will be in the lead in the fight for passing this emergency [aid] package”. Some fight between two combatants who have identical aims!

*4 William Shakespeare in Macbeth (3:5:121).

*5 The quotes of Elie Wiesel, author of Night, are from Mark Chmiel’s study of the sources of this lamentable hypocrisy in Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership. This is quite an illuminating exposé and a must read for every conscionable student of Zionism to appreciate how Zionist Jews have become so mentally chained to Israel – the Jewish State – that they have lost all sense of morality when it comes to Israel’s barbarism on an innocent civilian peoples. This deceitful self-imposed blindness – perhaps derived from their millennia in Diaspora and their intense subjugation at the hands of the Christian goyims culminating in their abominable holocaust at their hands – may eventually be their own undoing.

Unless of course other Jewish and Christian intellectuals start speaking up loudly against such hypocrisy and moral perversion, denounce Theodor Herzl as a traitor to the moral teachings of Moses, denounce the duplicity of Elie Wiesel loudly, and demand the dismantling of the perverse apartheid state Der Judenstaat. There is a lot of empty space in California where the Americans can provide all the Jewish settlers from New York, Eastern Europe, and Russia now living in Israel, a reservation that they can call Der Judenstaat if the Americans wish somehow to compensate the Jews for two Millennia of Christian persecution in Europe and the Holocaust. They can have the Hollywood set designers and architects even build them a replica of the Wailing Wall and all the Biblical cities of Eretz Yisrael. After all, America is the Zion that will light up all the world and that’s the rightful place for Der Judenstaat as well. Now why don’t the Christian majority and the American mainstream chew on that a little bit?

A failure to combat intellectually what was seeded intellectually, is the prime source of the problem today not just in the Middle East, but in the Zionists’ conquest of America itself. The battle front is not with missiles, but in the intellectual space – a counter Balfour Declaration is urgently needed. Who has the courage in America to take the lead? Any takers? It is far easier to write messages on bombs that are dropped on defenseless civilians isn’t it? Or write useless books of history with no concomitant demand for redressing of injustices and restitution. Well let’s change all that!

*6 For reference to “banality of evil”, and for a better understanding of what led to the Jewish holocaust and what helped perpetuate it, see Hannah Arendt’s seminal work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. I had studied this work over a quarter century ago, along with another: From Genesis to Genocide by Professor Steve Chorover, my college teacher at M.I.T., the lessons of which still ring true to me today as I witness what is beginning to happen to the Muslims in America, as discussed later in this book. It is interesting to note that Hannah Arendt had observed that Eichmann seemed to have been such an ordinary person, there appeared nothing remarkable or outstanding about him as he pathetically sat there during the Jerusalem trials – and yet having committing such extraordinary terror and genocide upon an innocent peoples.

What would she observe of George Bush and his Neocon advisors, and Ariel Sharon and is terror machine in Palestine today when these monsters are ever brought to trial for monumental war crimes against humanity? It is a separate issue altogether that such war crimes trials have not deterred perpetuation of new war crimes by successor tyrants – the deterrence factor of such post crime persecution is nil and perhaps requires a gestalt shift in thinking if humankind is actually going to successfully and preemptively deter such monumental crimes being visited upon innocent civilians in the future. There isn’t any atonement possible after the fact for the shattering of the tabula rasa of a peoples.

The eye witness testimony of a holocaust survivor is also provided later in this book that draws parallels between the early stages of Jewish persecution in Germany, and the xenophobic fascism being experienced by Muslims in America today. While the fate of the Muslims in America will likely be a lot subtler than extermination obviously, the fascist trends are unmistakable and there is no justification for tolerating American-fascism today anymore than there was for tolerating Nazi anti-Semitism yesterday. Both are crimes against humanity whether or not the Americans recognize it. The Americans also did not seem to show much concern for the fate of the Jews during World War II as is well documented in history. Going overboard today in compensation to the Zionists at the expense of Palestinians and Muslims is as much a war crime today as the failure to act was then.

*7 The source of this universal moral truth is the Biblical commandment “Do unto others as you have others do unto you” (Luke 31). However, much like the philosopher Bertrand Russel’s approach towards morality, as being composed of those laws and principles that increase the common good of all the people and minimize social conflict (see his essay “What I Believe” in “Why I Am Not A Christian”), this cliché too expresses a similar morality that does not necessarily require belief in any particular religion or social order in order to follow it – obeying it increases the common good universally and minimizes social conflict. It is a common uniting principle for mankind, that if incorporated in the Constitutions of all nations, like in the Declaration of Independence in the American Constitution, and if it became the guiding principle behind all foreign and domestic policies, there might yet be lasting peace among humankind, and among nations of differing civilizations. But then how would empires be built?

*8 For reference to the concentration of wealth in Israeli society, see Middle East Illusions by Noam Chomsky. For issues related to the return of refugees and just compensation, see Palestinian Refugees – The Right of Return, edited by Naseer Aruri. For further discussion of a combined democratic non racist Palestine from a conscionable Jew’s perspective, see the writings of Israel Shamir on the web.

Question for Noam Chomsky

It is inexplicable that Noam Chomsky, while being fully cognizant of the history of the usurpation of Palestine at gun point in 1948, has not publicly called for the complete dismantling of the Apartheid state of Israel and returning of all of the stolen lands back to their rightful owners. He has instead, supported the arbitrary two state solution, with Israel retreating back to the 1967 borders and a new Palestinian State in the rest. Would he himself accept such a solution for his own country if he were a Palestinian? Would any Zionist, if the roles were reversed? Chomsky had however, not called for a similar two state solution for Apartheid South Africa earlier, with the Swiss cheesed Bantustans going to the indigenous majority black African inhabitants, and the rest of their mineral rich lands going to the white South African usurping minority as the latter had persistently demanded. Why this difference in positioning in the case of Palestine? The two situations are more than just identical, the Palestinian case is far more egregious, far more brutal and genocidal, and a contemporary usurpation within our own lifetimes. And they also share the support of the American Government to sustain the Apartheid status as demanded by their favored allies and “man of peace”, with the present American Vice President Dick Cheney, as a Congressman in his earlier career, even voting against a House resolution for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Indeed, the only thing uncommon between the two situations, is an uncompromising honest leader and statesmen like Nelson Mandela. And for a cynic, the other thing uncommon might be the Jews and their power in America. But Noam Chomsky has never been influenced by such banal considerations.

So why is Noam Chomsky agreeable to grant any portion of Palestine to the Jews for a Jews-only state when he does not even like the idea of any “religion-only” state to start with? Is it a) because God promised them Palestine and Eretz Israel; b) because it was a terrible holocaust and the Jews need a homeland; c) because “might is right” and Israel was exclusively sanctioned by the victorious Allies of World War II, built upon another victorious Allies’ loot of World War I, and that is the international reality today; d) because now that the Jews have already been there for over half a century, they might as well keep some of the stolen property; e) because it is time to have mercy on the victims who are needlessly suffering the wrath of being alive on Eretz Yisrael, so make peace at any cost under the diktats of realism rather than hopeless idealism for the sake of the suffering victims; or f) because of self-interest as he is also Jewish.

As for a) David Ben Gurion himself clarified it that: “we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. As for b) perhaps those so sympathetic to the Jews can give them a piece of their own real estate, perhaps in Boston, Michigan, New York, California, or London, or even Basle where Israel was founded to start with. On what basis can they award Arab lands of continuously inhabited peoples to another in compensation for their own European Christian crimes of anti-Semitism and holocaust upon the Jews? As Ben Gurion again clarified it: “There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that? As for c) does international sanction i.e., agreement among the superpowers, then becomes a legitimate method of genocide and displacement of an indigenous peoples and defines a new morality? As for d) does longevity of occupation lend moral legitimacy to land theft and genocide of an innocent population? As for e) is it another disingenuous attempt to legitimize the existence of a usurper in the name of minimizing the suffering of its victims? See Noam Chomsky’s omissions unraveled in the article by this scribe: “Endless trail of red herrings”, February 28, 2007, URL: http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/endless-red-herrings.html

As for f) only Noam Chomsky can answer that question completely, but actions speak louder than words, and my appreciation of him stems from the fact, which he disclosed publicly, that in 1950s when he realized the realities on the ground, he left Israel to return to the United States. Actions still do continue to speak louder than words – for claims to morality is one non-stop continuous action with every breadth we take, until our very last one, as demonstrated by another moral Jewish princess, Rachel Corrie.

Those who who accede to c) and d) also accede to the morality that is espoused in them. If it is indeed either of these, then is that what an intellectual is ultimately reduced to in the real world as the bottom line when the rubber meets the road and all the talk of crimes of the emperors has been peeled away? How is that any different from any petty timeserving politician who says all the right things to his constituency but recognizes the reality of power-plays and modulates his opinions and morality to suit the reality of the times when it comes time to vote on issues?

I have no doubt that Noam Chomsky would agree with the following job description of an intellectual in the eloquent words of another intellectual – for his own conscionable life’s work is but a reflection of these very ideals: “I too think the intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity. For this very reason, an intellectual cannot fit into any role that might be assigned to him, nor can he ever be made to fit into any of the histories written by the victors. An intellectual essentially doesn’t belong anywhere; he stands out as an irritant wherever he is; he does not fit into any pigeonhole completely.” (Vaclav Havel: “Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala”, quoted by Mark Chmiel in “Moral Leadership”)

Hence that being the imperatives of an intellectual, especially of one who espouses the Golden rule “Do unto others … ” and specifically if it is good enough for you to do to me, it must be good enough for me to do to you, why support anything short of the Just and moral solution for Palestine – the complete and immediate dismantling of Israel and complete restitution of the Palestinians forced into the new Diaspora; allowing those Jews who are born in Palestine to stay as a compromise, but evicting everyone else transplanted from New York, Eastern Europe, Russia and South America? If South Africa could be disarmed of its nuclear capability, so can Israel of its Samson options.

The demand for Israel’s dismantling starts in the intellectual space, just as the demand for its construction was started in the intellectual space by Theodor Herzl when he wrote Der Judenstaat and asserted: “In Basle I founded the Jewish state … Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realize it. A delaying tactic only brings to fruition Ben Gurion’s predictions: We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return … The old will die and the young will forget. Those who indulge in it, once again demonstrate that they willingly accede to the morality espoused in such tactics – the law of the jungle. Then how is one any better than the baboons who espouse the same morality?

One is known by the morality one keeps! Politicians are already lost to Machiavelli. The latter day Zionist Neocons to Strauss. The moral scholar however carries the mantle of Plato and Socrates! He cannot compromise to the reality of power-plays, to international sanction and recognition, and what the majority of his antagonists may want – for the majority killed Socrates.

Who better person to demand such a dismantling of Der Judenstaat than “ arguably the most important intellectual alive”?

Who can more persuasively argue for its deconstruction than Theodor Herzl argued for its construction?

Only one among the Jews today, Noam Chomsky, leaving a legacy of moral greatness for the successive Jewish generations to overcome the one Herzl left them of depravity and perversion!

Anything short of that is but an eyewash and a morality of the baboons. There are no illusions in the Middle East – only lack of full spectrum moral courage from those who proclaim it as their inheritance.

Your response please Professor Noam Chomsky?

Other references for the main text

For reference to the long ancestral lineage even identifiable today and dating back millenniums, far older than the Jews, see the research done into ancient history of Palestine by Professor Hatem Bazian, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, who has argued that why should the history only begin 2500 years ago when the Jews first arrived? There were people still living there for far longer. When the premise of 2500 years is accepted as the starting point of debate that is already a red-herring to start with, more than half the argument is already conceded. The argument really needs to stay focussed on how Palestine was usurped by super-power blessings, not whose ancestors where there earlier or whose god gave them what land grants. But if the antagonist do throw that red-herring, then the Palestinian ancestry still prevails as the continuously living inhabitants of that land, as shown by Professor Bazian. As for god’s promise argument and the Biblical theological red-herring, please see William W. Baker’s Theft of a Nation. There is not a single red-herring that the Zionist mind has ever synthesized that has not been cogently repealed, ultimately leaving one, and only one proposition on the table for the raison d’être for existence of Der Judenstaat in Palestine – the big stick of super-power primacy and its geostrategic imperatives. I don’t have any problems if this Jewish State is moved to America or Europe where it belongs (if at all) in compensation for past crimes of the Christians upon the European Jews. It is not the problem of the Muslims or the rest of the world – we have treated the Jews fairly in our own civilizations and we did not culminate any holocaust upon them, and nor did we then, or do we now, espouse any anti-Semitism towards them, as they are our brothers in religion and in humanity. That however does not relinquish our right to fight them if they impose injustice upon us. Their plight through history is entirely an internal matter of the Judeo-Christian civilization around which Samuel Huntington has already drawn a protective fault-line. Well live within those civilizational lines my friends, and solve your own problems amongst yourselves only.

For reference to inequitable redistribution of wealth and just compensation in South Africa post apartheid, witness that after years of oppression and suffering, and despite all the promises of just compensation by the reconciliation efforts, the blacks were awarded a mere $4000 per person recently. No more than 5% of the land and wealth has been redistributed since apartheid officially ended a decade ago. The vast majority of wealth in South Africa is still in the hands of the white minority.

*9 Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir – another born and bred in the USA Zionist leader.

*10 Baruch Kimmerling: “My Holiday, Their Tragedy”, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/KimmerlingHoliday.htm

*11 David Ben Gurion – Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), 121. Culled from the web.

*12 David Ben Gurion, 1948. Culled from the web.

*13 Lasse Wilhelmson: “Zionism as Jewish National Socialism”, http://www.israelshamir.net/english/wilhelmson.shtml

*14 Moshe Katsav, President of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001. It is incredible how powerful the lapses of some short term memories can be – perhaps Moshe Katsav has forgotten the Jewish Ghettos from New York to Poland that the Jews inhabited not too long ago. Furthermore, this was their state of being when they were free and no military occupying power was constricting them to death.

The people whom Katsav is belittling on the other hand are living under a brutal Israeli military occupation – generations have been wasted under the murderous occupiers watchful gun turrets. Shame! What has happened to the humanity of these Israelis? Why should the world take any sympathy on these peoples anymore for their holocaust? They are handing the same systematic genocide to another innocent peoples – only spread out across generations and in plain sight of the silently spectating world. Witness the following comments of an American President Harry S. Truman from his Diary July 21, 1947. Every word of it is reflected in the Zionist Jews’ own merciless actions in Palestine since the founding of Israel in 1948. If the American public does not know it, or if the Campus Watch does not want it debated in American academia, it does not mean that the rest of the world does not know it, or that the victims of Zionism do not exist.

Read and weep if you are a Jew and have a conscience, as to what bad name a minority among you have brought your entire peoples: “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler not Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.

*15 Haim Cohen, former judge of the Supreme Court of Israel, quoted by Tariq Ali in “To be Intimidated is to be an Accomplice”, http://www.counterpunch.org/ali03042004.html

*16 Moshe Dayan: Haaretz, April 4, 1969. Culled from the web.

*17 Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the IDF: “New York Times 14 April 1983”. Culled from the web.

*18 It would be interesting to count all the American Israeli Zionists since 1948 until the present who have made Israel their homeland and are born and raised in the USA. Under which Western “human rights” regime can they displace the indigenous and continuously living population in Palestine?

I rather fear for the fate of the Jews, the recipient of God’s Messenger Moses (Peace be upon him) – if they are Jews in the sense of religion – for a coterie of misanthropic fanatics among them have hijacked their religion, their ethos, their morality, their history. And ultimately, they will surely all be made to pay, and with compounded interest! This is the Greek tragedy of the Jews – perhaps that is what is meant by “chosen”? Chosen to create mischief among mankind, the fourty year punishment by God Almighty Himself to the entire Hebrew peoples for the disobedience of a few among them to His Message, being the manifest evidence of this mischief from the very inception of the Hebrew religion. And then to be paid back with compound interest by other anti-Semitic mortals down the ages – and repeat? How would a conscionable Jew respond to such a cynical assessment of the Zionist led Jewish peoples by the vast majority of Muslims du jour, apart from the usual “anti-Semitism” slogan? Rachel Corrie responded by courageously standing in front of the murderous Israeli Bulldozer to save an innocent Palestinian home from the aggression of her own peoples, and reclaimed for herself her hijacked moral Judaic identity from the clutches of the misanthropes! Israel Shahak responded by producing works like “Jewish History Jewish Religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years” and “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Lenni Brenner responded with works like: “Zionism in the age of Dictators, The Iron Wall” and “51 Documents”. Tanya Reinhart responded with: “Israel/Palestine – How to End the War of 1948”. Israel Shamir responded with “The Writings of Israel Shamir For One Democratic State In The Whole of Palestine (Israel)”. The Neturei Karta Jews respond by having nothing to do with the murderous Israeli Zionists du jour: http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/. How thou’st respond? And not just with lofty words, but with thine pocket books?

*19 Haaretz June 24, 2003, ‘Road map is a life saver for us,’ PM Abbas tells Hamas

The Role of Mass Media in Empire Building

After dispelling any cynicism about ZB’s rational fear of democracy being inimical to empire building, and countering the myths about Israel as an argument against it, let’s continue with our analysis of empire building.

What is the first thing one should do if empire building is indeed the goal and the democratic people are blocking the way?

Let’s just get rid of democracy and civil rights. We saw portions of that at work in the rise to power (See Best Democracy Money can Buy). And once in power, curtail dissent, and have the population patriotically cheer the president every time he comes on TV. But how? Through sustained indoctrination of the masses – sounds like such an antiquated Marxian term doesn’t it! But how can this be done in a democracy, even a subverted one when the media and the press are supposedly free? Use a boogie man to create the perception of an external danger that threatens their domestic well being and that can rally the people around the flag, and get the mass media to comply in perpetuating this threat perception through sustained propaganda. Especially if that threat perception is more than an abstract perception, and actually been observed in reality on television by the masses, as the events of 911 were. Hitler too had needed some physical action as propaganda alone had not been sufficient to rally the public. And he had contrived various pretexts to launch his invasion of Europe as history has amply documented. America too got its own New Pearl Harbor. How or who is not relevant in this chapter, only that it enabled giving reality to the threat perception propaganda, which now could be put into full motion as the actual “war on terrorism” against an irrational and powerful enemy in self defense. The role of the American media in using 9-11 to further the American administration’s “war on terrorism” and thus becoming complicit in expanding empire contrary to the will of the American public, is the subject of this chapter.

Let’s take the media first and observe its complicit behavior

If the media was not complying, why would one get more in-depth analysis and dissent expressed in foreign press than one sees in the local US print and TV media, the occasional courageous and revealing article in the New York Times and Washington Post not withstanding? Isn’t the main purpose of the Freedom of the Press as enshrined in the sacred Constitution mainly to “monitor the centers of power”, as Robert Fisk never tires of quoting Amira Haas (both courageous journalists, former writes for the Independent in the UK currently reporting from Baghdad – how many in the mainstream have seen his reports of vaporized dead remains of the young and old civilians; the latter for an Israeli newspaper)? Why does the US television news media, press, and the vast majority of US journalists (though not every one to be sure) predominantly behave as if they were the TASS news agency of the former Soviet Union, dutifully reporting Pentagon and White House blurbs as their “faithful stenographers” (as Dennis Bernstein prefers to call them)? Read on to understand how corporate America brings what is called “news” to the American public.

Amy Goodman’s appearance on Charlie Rose on PBS

Even Dan Rather, the earnest and respected anchor of CBS news stands up to salute his commander in chief on a late night talk show with an unquestioning show of reverence, then later reveals to Greg Palast in an interview on BBC in London that due to fear and repression at home, he is unable to ask the kinds of questions he should from the American leadership or else he would be neck-laced with the burning tire of unpatriotism put around his neck!*1

When Amy Goodman, the award winning journalist and very courageous host of DemocracyNow program on the Pacifica Network, repeats this quote from Dan Rather on her maiden appearance on the Charlie Rose program on corporate sponsored American public television, what does Mr. Rose do as a reputed commentator himself? Instead of asking Ms. Goodman for further elaboration of what Dan Rather might have meant because he had never heard the quote, and perhaps request a source for that quote, he gets all defensive about how Dan Rather could never say such a thing!

Charlie Rose must be commended for really being the first major talk show host to put such a prominent voice of dissent on any mainstream TV program in the US. However I am a bit puzzled by his interlocution of Amy about Dan Rather. Why did Charlie Rose, instead of asking the obvious follow-up questions about the quote, start defending Dan Rather as if his friend had been insulted or something, when it was a quote of Dan Rather himself that Amy gave him, and she was not making any ad hominem attacks on Dan Rather nor did she bring him up on any other point in the conversation? The same situation had occurred at the very start of the program, almost right off the bat. He introduced Amy very nicely, and then Amy introduced Pacifica network and said: “we need independent reporting”, to which Rose seemed puzzled, and rightfully asked what do you mean, by “independent”. Amy then rattled off a list of mega corporations that own various American mainstream television networks: NBC owned by GE, CBS owned by Viacom, and ABC owned by Walt Disney Co. What does Mr. Charlie Rose do? Instead of asking Amy if she could support the underlying allegation that being owned by a corporation implied being influenced by them in the newsroom (and that would have been like asking can you support the allegation that GE, Viacom and Disney are in business to make money – perhaps that is why he did not ask it!), he says, and this quote is from the television broadcast, not the transcript:

I promise you, CBS news, and ABC news, and NBC news are not influenced by the corporations, it may own those companies, since I know one of them very well, and work for one of them.

He left Amy looking taken aback, because here was her maiden appearance on such an important show, and in the very first minute, she had run into a potential sticky wicket. Wisely, she did not follow-up right then, perhaps also because Charlie Rose looked down at his desk, dropped the eye contact, and started on the main topic.

Again, I am very puzzled by Charlie’s blanket defense of the entire corporate news industry like that, as if he was their “Ari Fliesher”, i.e., their spokesperson! How would Charlie Rose know what the corporate board rooms think, or what unwritten criteria they use to hire the senior management, senior producers, and senior editors of their news divisions? When he says he knows them well, what does that mean? Is he privy to their decision making process in their board rooms and corporate head quarters, or does he mean he knows them socially? Even if he works for one of them, where is he in the food chain? Is he the CEO of the news division? On what rational and factual basis can he assert that promise to Amy Goodman?

We see here on two instances, within a matter of minutes of each other, Charlie Rose rising to the defense of the status quo, and that is very telling. Whereas he showed all his extensive journalism skills in asking the right sort of questions of Amy regarding everything else, but any examination that would have led to questioning the status quo position on either the corporations role in the news media, or this war on terrorism that the media is dutifully supporting, he issued the typical denials, and not refutation (former is just saying no it isn’t so, latter also offers some evidence to back it up), candidly revealing the style of journalism in vogue in this country, even when it is supposedly public television! This self imposed censorship in the mainstream media is what this essay is all about in its exploration of the prisoners of the cave, of which this is but one manifestation. A uniquely American phenomenon. I would nevertheless, applaud both Charlie Rose and Amy Goodman for not making these sticky wickets a point of contention, as that would have certainly detracted from the value of the show as the main topics were not those points, but the antiwar dissent and exposure to Pacifica that Amy Goodman had come to deliver. This is also valuable learning experience for others who may get other opportunity to present their dissent on mainstream, now that Amy has set a precedent, choose your words carefully and avoid red herrings like the plague. See the Pacifica website for the transcript of this show, and reach your own conclusions.

Any meaningful and fair analysis of the coverage between local mainstream news media and foreign news media will substantiate the claim that the US coverage generally tends to be one sided and faithfully tows the government’s policy line when the subject is one of ideological alignment.

Whether it be on this fictitious “war on terrorism”, or on its unequivocal support for Israel, or other matters, one can plainly see the congruence of views between the mainstream news media and the government du-jour on all ideological issues as if they were the natural extension of the government’s Public Relations arm, instead of being the government watchdog they were meant to be by the first Amendment to the Constitution.

For instance, see if you can spot any significant contrarian discourse, dissenting commentaries, or even any substantial analytical coverage in the mainstream media for the following American government ideologies and/or policies, quite unrelated to Israel:

I.1: America has the god-given right to dictate terms to the world and is allowed to unquestioningly have 10,000 nuclear bombs along with a foreign policy that advocates preemptive nuclear first strikes on non-nuclear nations, but other nations not among her favored allies may not claim the same rights, even for self defense; if they do so, then they are “evil doers”;

I.2: any self defense against America and her “favored” allies is terrorism;

I.3: unbridled market capitalism controlled by American corporations, is the only sacred religion that all nations must be converted to, and if they don’t open up their markets for America, they need a regime change;

I.4: those against the WTO are terrorists.

To illustrate this concept with an example at the risk of slight digression, how many Americans understand why WTO is bad for the developing countries and only good for large multinational corporations of the industrialized economies; and how the former are being brow beaten to acquiesce to these unfair trade agreements at the expense of adversely affecting their own domestic development – from agriculture to industrial factory production to worker wages? But that is okay, because America will sell it all to them. The American government says WTO is good for everyone, and the American mainstream media complies by not expressing any analysis of it, nor allowing any of the scores of qualified experts a voice on the corporate airways who can explain to the common man in America why they must oppose these unfair trade treaties as only they can help bring justice to the inequity their government is forcing upon others.

Palestine-Israel Conflict and the media mindset

Let us examine Israel in the US media briefly, where there is much confluence of ideological interests between the US and Israel, global Hegemony for the former, and local domination of Arab lands for the latter. Support for Israel is institutional in the United States as was noted by our Martian observer friend earlier in this book.

The systematic “population adjustment” of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces, a sick euphemism for the reduction in their numbers through daily killings and infliction of serious crippling injuries, is a matter of open record for most anyone in the world. The daily oppression and dehumanizing treatment of the Palestinian is indescribable, a sustained climate of oppression and fear with life made so inhospitable and unlivable that if it were any other people oppressing them except the Zionist of Israel, the world would be shamed to come to their rescue. But because of the support Israel enjoys from the US, the world has become impotent to aid them, although the coverage of what is happening to them is seen by almost every country on the planet, except in the US. In America, their plight is generally unknown, the coverage in the media non-existent, or completely de-contextualized. For any other people, at the hands of anyone else, it would be called ethnic cleansing, genocide, and holocaust, right here in the US. But not for the Palestinians when it is at the hands of the Israelis, god’s “chosen” people. The media does not show how the Israeli soldier in his twenties deliberately shoots Palestinian children in their eyes. Maiming and killing sprees by Israeli soldiers is of course ignored, as is the torture and arbitrary jailings in the most inhuman conditions of young men between certain ages for months without charges. The daily shelling from US made helicopter gunships and F16s of civilian homes, house demolitions by US made Caterpillar bulldozers, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, their civil records, and their histories, either totally ignored or covered partially as “Israeli incursion into the West Bank led to some civilians being killed in the crossfire.

How many ‘diaries of Anne Frank’ must exist in the West Bank and Gaza? Does anyone tell their stories? How many “Nights” of Elie Wiesel get enacted on a daily basis, are there any readings of that in the US mainstream? Or is it only when the victim is burned in an oven that it becomes a holocaust? A Palestinian child in the West Bank in a video documentary eloquently captured it by noting that being a dog in America was perhaps better than a child in Palestine, at least the dog gets to walk twice a day outside his home, gets water whenever it wants, and no one dare terrorize it ever, let alone on a daily basis, lest the police be called for animal rights abuse. But Palestinian rights? Are they less than animal rights? The silence in the media about the plight of the poor beleaguered Palestinians is most deafening, affirming the worldwide impression about America that it perhaps considers some victims inherently more worthy than others. And as Noam Chomsky calls them, the “unworthy” victims, not worthy of media’s attention because they only suffer from the policies of the US and its allies. But if they suffer at the hands of anyone else, then they are considered “worthy” victims, courageous freedom fighters, and “morally equivalent of our founding fathers” as President Reagan referred to the Afghani Mujahideen invited to the White House not too long ago when they were fighting the oppression of our mortal enemy, the Soviet Union.

Even when a brave and courageous young American puts her young and innocent life in front of a US made armored D9 Caterpillar bulldozer demolishing a Palestinian doctor’s home and gets murdered in cold blood by the Israeli soldier driving it, is there any outrage in the public media? When International Solidarity Movement observers (ISMs) get killed by American bullets shot through Israeli hands, do we see any processions coming out in the streets protesting their murder?

Rachel Corrie – the voice of conscience for humanity

Rachel Corrie, a 23 year old very courageous young Jew American woman, met that fate very deliberately under a D9 Caterpillar Bulldozer on March 16, 2003, as she stood in front of a Palestinian doctor’s home in the village of Rafah in Gaza Palestine, trying to protect it from being unjustly demolished. With a megaphone in hand she had been interrupting the Israeli soldier driving the huge machine from demolishing the home. This had been going on for several minutes according to eyewitness testimony, and had succeeded in stopping the bulldozer momentarily as they faced off each other. Then suddenly, getting impatient, he blithely rolled over her as she at the last moment tried to move out of the way and stumbled. According to eyewitness and fellow ISM member Alice, another Jewish American activist who herself puts her life in jeopardy daily in order to bear witness against her own fellow Jewish killing machines, it was a deliberate murder. Alice was also present at the shooting of fellow 21 year old British ISM member Tom Herndel in the head, who is now in a coma. She provided a detailed description live from Rafah to Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow, of how both Tom and Rachel, wearing brightly colored reflective vests, were deliberately executed. The broadcast date was April 14, 2003. Visit their website to hear Alice describe it first hand. Also interviewed were Craig and Cindy Corrie, the bereaved parents of Rachel, and it is very instructive to hear what they have to say. I wonder if the American public got an opportunity to hear Alice or Rachel’s parents on mainstream media? Also shot in the face about the same time by an Israeli tank was ISM member Brian Avery from New Mexico, his tongue sliced into two.

These murders were a deliberate and sadistic attempt at sending a message of intimidation to all those foreigners who are witnessing first hand the systematic annihilation of the Palestinians and attempting to report it to the rest of the world. And in many cases providing a human shield to the miserable poor Palestinian family whose Arab life isn’t considered to be worth much, but the Internationals perhaps thinking that their European and American heads and passports may command a higher premium and may be able to hold off the Israeli brutality also quickly learn that in the modern day inebriation of Israeli power with American institutional backing, even their Jewish blood isn’t worth very much.

The message is quite clear, that your members of Congress, the President, and the media aren’t likely to come bat for you, or protest your death too loudly other than perhaps a public relations bark, because we are ideological partners. So begone! Don’t interfere in our cleanup operation for our new settlements and our vision of a greater Israel as we turn our swords into plowshares! Is this just editorializing on my part, all unsupported assertions? Perhaps you can become a better judge of that after reading the following statements from Jewish Israeli Statesmen of their own fanaticism for Zionism, not even letting Jewish blood of conscience stand in their paths of destruction of an innocent population in their murderous quest for “Der Judenstaat”. Thus Rachel Corrie’s killing was consistent with this history of Zionist terrorism in Palestine:

In 1943, current Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir wrote an article entitled “Terror” for the journal of the terrorist organization he headed (Lehi) in which he proposed to “dismiss all the ‘phobia’ and babble against terror with simple, obvious arguments.” “Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war,” he wrote, and “We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle.” “First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today, and its task is a major one: it demonstrates in the clearest language, heard throughout the world, including by our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war against the occupier.”’*2

We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to the rid the Galilee of its Arab population.*3

We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai.*4

We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return … The old will die and the young will forget.*5

We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” and “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.*6

We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves*7

If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?*8

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.*9

But we don’t need the testimony of the older generation of Israeli Statesmen to corroborate the condition of the Palestinians and the fanaticism of the Zionists. Rachel Corrie’s own eyewitness testimony on the plight of the Palestinians, published in the U.K. Guardian, in the form of emails to her mother, is sufficient to wake up the conscionable Americans from their ignorant slumber if they are exposed to the pain contained in them.

This is a 23 year old conscientious American Jew talking to her parents after her first exposure to the horrors of Palestine:

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here … I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me “Ali” – or point at the posters of him on the walls … I think about the fact that no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here … once you have experienced the reality of a world that isn’t surrounded by murderous towers, tanks, armed settlements, and now a giant metal wall. I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years of your childhood spent existing – just existing – backed by the worlds only superpower – in its attempt to erase you from your home … Currently the Israeli army is building a fourteen-meter-high wall between Rafah in Palestine and the border, carving a no-mans land from the houses along the border. Six hundred and two homes have been completely bulldozed … the wells destroyed last week provided half of Rafah’s water supply … many of the communities have requested internationals to be present at night to attempt to shield houses from further demolition … If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours – do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragment means remained? … When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here … Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.*10

A letter included in her emails from reserve first sergeant in the IDF, named Danny says the following:

The amount of AWOLS and refusals to serve are unprecedented in our history … refusal to carry out orders that involve firing on targets where civilians may be harmed … many career soldiers – among them pilots and intelligence personnel have chosen jail and unemployment over what they could only describe as murder … I am supposed to report to the Military Justice department – it is my job to hunt down runaway soldiers and bring them in. I have not reported for 18 months. … I believe that Israel is under the leadership of some very bad people right now. I believe that settlers and local police are in collusion with each other and that the border police are acting disgracefully. They are an embarrassment to 40% of the Israeli public and they would be an embarrassment to 90% of the population if they know what we know … Please document as much as you can … the media here serves as a very convincing spin control agent through all of this …”*11

Okay, so having read Rachel’s own testimony along with that of an IDF soldier, and seeing in our minds third eye the eloquent image that they have drawn for us, now let’s examine the coverage in the US media and ponder the enslavement of the American public – is it all that much different from Plato’s mythical prisoners of the cave?

Yes there was some wide coverage of Rachel’s life and a brief description of what happened in many US news papers on March 17, some giving it front page coverage (see below for detailed analysis of how it was covered in the San Francisco Chronicle). Where there had been a complete silence before, there was now some explanation of what Rachel was doing there. The next day the story pretty much disappeared, except for some bylines here and there. The question however is, why isn’t there a huge public outcry of the scope that we might see, if for example, something similar had occurred to an American at the hands of Sadaam Hussain? They would have been bombs flying all over if it was Sadaam, but since it is Ariel Sharon, the “man of peace” according to the US President, it is treated almost gingerly. What’s the difference between the two, one is the butcher of Kurds in Halabja, the other is a butcher of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shattila? Neither of them physically pulled the triggers themselves, then why is one of them a killer and the other a “man of peace”? What a conundrum!

This is the key question to understand as we honor the memory of Rachel Corrie, who in her superhuman sacrifice of her beautiful young life for a cause that she passionately believed in (while the Palestinians do not have a choice but to suffer, she did have a choice of not going to Israel to bear witness), even left us a further lesson in her martyrdom, as she laid thread bare this hypocrisy in her country, in the hope that where her living couldn’t do much to end it, perhaps her death might. So let’s understand where this hypocrisy stems from so that we may give the credit where it is due.

Usually (though not always, but the coverage is similar), any mainstream media coverage of the Palestinian plight only comes about when a young Palestinian retaliates for the unbearable and systematic daily Israeli oppression, with a suicide bomb as he does not possess any F16s and cruise missiles or else he certainly would have used them for even more devastating revenge in his struggle for liberation. Surely many innocent lives are lost in this attack. The media coverage gets focussed on its victims as it should, while the human toll on the other side due to Israel’s F16 and Apache helicopter attacks on a civilian population is either ignored, or continues to simply be “caught in a crossfire during Israeli incursion into the West Bank.” The viewer’s attention is drawn by the endless chatter of the talking heads on television on how the Palestinian mother can send her children to commit suicide and what a bad religion Islam must be that it encourages Jihad and this sort of random purposeless violence. Okay, not that the assessment is either fair or sheds any light on the history of the occupation and the reasons for this conflict, but how about also condemning the Israeli mothers at what sort of sons and daughters they are raising that they would systematically shoot to cripple and maim young children and old men without any moral compunction!

Perhaps there is a new declaration of human rights in the media in which some innocent victims are more worthy of sympathetic and humanizing coverage than others! De-contextualized from history, the American viewer, generally isolated that he is from what is happening in the rest of the world, and as Noam Chomsky often observes “the most important things for him always happen down the street”, is left completely perplexed at the wanton randomness, and utter senselessness of these suicide bombings, and automatically comes to the appropriate and desired conclusions. What might those conclusions be?

Thus is it any wonder that the US public opinion, compared to the rest of the world’s public opinion, so much supports the Israeli adventures in the West Bank and Gaza. Might it perhaps have anything to do with what the American mainstream sees on their televisions and what the rest of the world sees on theirs? And might it also have any basis in the myths that are perpetuated on them in the US media that Israel is fighting for its survival against these unjust and evil forces? Or is it perhaps that the US public is just inherently evil, too stupid to understand, or just do not care? Which proposition sounds more preposterous? You be the judge!

Perhaps now we can begin to see why Rachel Corrie’s death has not created outright condemnation of Israel in the US media and the press, and there are no missiles being launched in retaliation. Because Israeli military can do no wrong, the poor guys in their tanks and helicopters are being besieged and harassed by those nasty looking stone-throwing evil jihadis, and yes the bulldozer did run over her. But as the San Francisco Chronicle of March 17, 2003 in its front page paragraph 3 quotes the Israeli military spokesman even before it elaborates on the circumstances of her death thus:

This was a very regrettable, accident. We’re dealing with a group of protesters acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger – the Palestinians, themselves, and our forces.

Yes it must have been an accident! She was just being reckless being there in the first place. That seed is planted right in your head in the very beginning of the article. And what was the bulldozer doing there trying to demolish the Palestinian home on his own land in the first place? No, we don’t ask that question. The fact that it is against the Geneva Convention that an occupying army should destroy civilian homes with bulldozers is not raised either. Again, don’t ask the ‘why’. Israel can do no wrong. So murder it’s not.

The San Francisco Chronicle continues on Page A10:

State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said the US government ‘deeply regrets this tragic death of an American citizen.‘”

Okay there is the American Government’s vociferous protest. And it further attempts to provide a context for these home demolitions:

the army has destroyed dozens of structures in a volatile border zone that is rocked by near constant fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen.

So now one is supposed to be quite enlightened as to why the Israeli army is destroying these ‘structures’, and just what these structure might be is not mentioned, leaving the impression that perhaps they were some obstructions lying on the road, or empty abandoned buildings with no human beings living there. There was no mention of the hundreds of Rafah civilians including large numbers of children killed by the Israeli army, or the suffering of the Rafah residents such as 70% of its children being anemic because they are too afraid to eat as the Israeli army goes about its demolitions.

It’s not just what the papers say, but also what they don’t say, that informs the reader. This is why it is so easy to deceive. The uninitiated reader does not know what he does not know, hence has no way of knowing that he is only getting half the story. Perhaps the same thing may apply to the journalist too. Their ignorance however, if indeed it is just that and not deliberate obfuscation, is inexcusable and some might allege positively criminal. Why such ignorance may occur so frequently in US news media, and not as much in foreign and even Israeli press is an interesting subject and Noam Chomsky has dealt with it at great length. It is further discussed from my perspective towards the end of this essay.

To the uncritical eye, this was a pretty decent article, front page coverage and all. After reading it, one cannot but help think that it was perhaps Rachel’s own fault that she was there in front of the bulldozer, in her reckless zeal fueled through a bit of idealism and noble motives, and the Israeli army while expressing its regret, is not to blame, or at best it was a tragic accident as the State Department says too. So who are we (the mainstream public) to think otherwise. So no Tomahawk cruise missiles to be deployed here, no equivalence with Tianamen square to be drawn here – the courageous front page picture of Rachel momentarily holding up the gigantic bulldozer with a megaphone in her hand does not remotely resemble the television images of the equally brave Chinese student holding up a tank, so no sanctions to be imposed, no regime changes to be contemplated!

This is the psychological makeup behind Rachel Corrie’s front page coverage in the US press! See no evil and hear no evil isn’t just a Confucian saying in fortune cookies. Noam Chomsky might say this another way, that Rachel Corrie was an “unworthy” victim, using his “worthy” and “unworthy” victim models mentioned earlier. The former of course being worthy of America’s wrath as they have been victimized by the enemies of the US or its allies, and the latter being unworthy of America’s wrath and retaliation as they have been victimized by the policies of the US itself, or its favored allies and client-states. You can judge this for yourself. Look at all the oppression around the world, then see which victims get what sort of coverage in the mainstream media, and what sort of alliance those governments have with the United States.

Please see the award winning and highly respected journalist Robert Fisk’s many articles on this subject in the U.K. newspaper The Independent about how the US media sanitizes Israel’s coverage with interesting choice of words. Often “occupied territories” is replaced with “disputed territories”, “settlements” with “neighborhoods”, etc., and not just by the journalists on their own initiatives, but under explicit directives from the corporate board rooms above. And even when the American press borrows stories directly from the Israeli press, and when Robert Fisk’s own reports on Israel’s misdeeds are run in syndication, these often end up being edited and modified to suit the “American tastes”, sometimes even without the original newspapers permission.*12 Please review the foreign press, and even the Israeli press which often carries more unsanitized news and dissenting opinions about Israel’s own actions than the US press does. Why should this be the case? Why do you think?

The first response that might occur to the mainstream American reader is denial, that this isn’t the case. For such obdurate critics, the grass-roots organization “If Americans Knew” is compiling detailed statistics on American media coverage of Israel-Palestine and a visit to their web site might convince the recalcitrant of the veracity of these observations regarding the gross imbalance and deliberate deception in American reporting. Modern marketing was pretty much invented in America on Madison Avenue in New York (okay London too). However, its deployment is not limited to selling diapers! Why is the American media trying to sell a sanitized Israel to the American public? And how are they able to do it consistently, persistently? Who owns the media, who runs the newsrooms, and who sits on the corporate boards of the parent corporations? Who do you think?

Please also see the two books The Other Israel – Voices of Refusal and Dissent edited by Carey and Shainin, and Israel/Palestine – How to End the War of 1948 by Tanya Reinhart, for a sampling of what enters into Israeli discourse but not in the American discourse. And this is while their own right-wing war criminals in the government continue to annihilate the Palestinians. Refer to my model of apartheid Israel earlier to review how is it that despite having a freer press, Israeli population continues to elect and reelect known killers and war criminals to be their leaders.

The Prime Minister of Israel, General Ariel Sharon, cannot travel to Belgium as he would be arrested for war crime charges for his complicity in the cold blooded revenge killing of 1700 to 2000 unarmed Palestinian men women and children in two refugee camps in Southern Lebanon in 1982 by an Israeli backed Christian militia. Condemned by Israel’s own inquiry commission for his role in it that led to his resignation as the then Defense Minister – Ariel Sharon is now back as the Prime Minister – some way to recycle garbage! I have very rarely seen this rehearsed on mainstream American television (that should actually read never ever seen on mainstream television), even when the American President called Sharon a “man of peace”!

Continuing with the references for self-study in order to form your own conclusions on how the American mainstream mass media has grossly indoctrinated you and purposely misled you by sheltering you from the miserable realities of American power politics outside the shores of the American landscape, please see the voluminous Pity the Nation – The Abduction of Lebanon by Robert Fisk for a description of the murderous adventures of General Sharon and reflect on how even the US President could possibly refer to him as a “man of peace”. Probably the same way, I suppose, as Menachem Begin, the past president of Israel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after he had been the most wanted criminal in Britain for his role in the 1948 blowing up of King David Hotel as a member of the terrorist gang Irgun, killing the British soldiers staying there. Short memories, these power brokers of the West have! Ronald Reagan now appears to be a sagacious old wise man as we revisit his famous quote once again: ~“I am told politics is the second oldest profession, it seems to have a strong resemblance to the first one”. Then they write scholarly treatise explaining it all as a “Clash of Civilizations”. The erudite Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington is only partially right, although many argue that he got it entirely wrong. Some of the boundaries of world conflict may indeed end up aligning around civilizational “fault lines”, but not for the reasons he argues, that other civilizations are naturally incompatible with the Judeo-Christian centric highly developed and culturally dominant civilization of Europe and America, as well as with each other. Huntington’s entire scholarship was unwittingly summarized by the highly educated US President (another Harvard alumni) in response to why do they hate us: ~“because we are good and democratic and they are evil”. I didn’t attend Harvard, so perhaps I am just too naive when I ask the obvious that could it perhaps also have anything to do with the systematic economic oppression and exploitation, as well as the economic and military domination of other emerging nations for the “full spectrum dominance” of the entire planet, also largely being along these “fault lines”?

Please do read Huntington’s book alongside ZB’s book. I am sure the other mediocre and wannabe superpowers have their own ZBs and George Kennans framing similar policies but more suited to their station in the imperial food chain. Then you be the judge whether it is a clash of civilizations, or a clash of haves vs. have-nots, oppressor vs. the oppressed, developed vs. trying to develop and not being allowed to be self-reliant and independent? It does not take rocket science to observe this!

Nor does it take a prophet to suggest that were justice to prevail, if resources were justly shared, if relations were justly formed, if no nation tried to exercise its hegemony over another, if no civilization gave itself the license for ‘a mission civilisatrice’ upon another, if the past exploited were justly indemnified, and if ruthless primal merchants of death like ZB did not prevail over nations policies, there would be no clash of civilizations at all!

For a concise understanding of the history of the Palestinian lands that the media denies you, see the wonderful book by the Professor of Biblical History and Archaeologist and past US marine, William W. Baker, Theft of a Nation (it might be out of print but the author had told me that he was working on an update; I am lucky to have an autographed version) in which he superbly deconstructs the biblical mythology spun by Israel. And he is a Christian scholar, not a Muslim one! Truth in the hands of an honest broker can sometimes be so religion blind! If we dare to know it, that is. When this book was first published twenty years ago, Baker was issued death threats by the Zionists and Meir Kahane of New York. In his characteristic marine style, he responded to the phone call he received from Kahane, by saying “okay, where shall we meet, outside your house or mine?” When FBI offered him protection and suggested he carry a weapon to protect himself, his response? “InshaAllah”! And the FBI was confused, “what do you mean?”, they asked. Having lived in Jerusalem, both among the Muslims and the Jews, Baker could perhaps speak Arabic, and InshaAllah is a typical exclamation from a Muslim when he wishes to signify that he has left matters in the hands of his Creator. While William Baker is not a Muslim, this exclamation from him greatly impressed me as someone not at all afraid of going wherever the truth takes him, even if of alien origin. How about the rest of us?

To further understand the fraud being perpetuated with this mantra of “restarting the peace process” ad nauseum in the mainstream media that parrots both the US and Israeli governments, please see The End of the Peace Process – Oslo and After by Edward W. Said, a Palestinian Christian intellectual and Professor of English Literature at Columbia University, again not a Muslim! How many Americans even know that both Christians and Muslims are equally resident of the Palestinian refugee camps dotting Lebanon, Jordan and the slums of West Bank and Gaza, and indeed in the Palestinian Diaspora the world over? Also see Naseer H. Aruri’s very critical analysis of America’s role in the so called peace process: dishonest broker – The US Role in Israel and Palestine. And in accordance with the approach of this essay in quoting the antagonists themselves, see Tanya Reinhart’s Israel and Palestine referenced earlier, for a lucid description of the plight of the Palestinians post Oslo. While not an antagonist herself but a conscientious critic of the Israeli government, she writes from within the belly of the beast, as a reputed Professor in Tel Aviv University and regular contributor of a column for Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. Finally, see Noam Chomsky’s new book Middle East Illusions, for a detailed and chronological political history employing his usual insightful and analytical wit, of this conflict pre and post 9/11.

After all this self-study, what do you think? Do I convince the most pigheaded but fair critic of the devious role of the Zionist sympathetic American media in enslaving the American public in the proverbial chains of the prisoners of the cave? Not yet? Don’t have time to read and research on your own? Okay there is more. Please read on further.

Empire + Military-industrial complex + Globalization = mind control

It is interesting to observe that one has to exert considerable time and effort to get to hear reasoned arguments and truthful reporting in this country, whereas drivel is always kept one click of the remote control’s button away. Who has the time to read all these books in America? I doubt very much anyone reading this essay will ever bother to follow-up on any of the references cited here, unless they happen to be researching something. Thus it’s okay to allow publishing them because they are not a big determinant of the majority public opinion, unless the State wants an excuse to get rid of the author, then it will be called anti-Semitic and subversive, the author labeled “enemy combatant”, and the Patriot Act will kick in to send him off to Guantanamo Bay. As I had stated earlier in my essay about the FBI’s visit to my home, and perhaps it can never be restated enough times for no one seems to be listening: Free speech only means something when there is someone listening. I can have all the free speech in vacuum and die from asphyxiation.

This is also why we don’t see these debates on television, because everyone watches TV. First amendment free speech has become limited to obscure printed books in this country. When print was the dominant source of information, as in the McCarthy era, what appears in books today could not appear then. Most everyone in this country misunderstands freedom of speech and their own constitution. It is not freedom to speak, but freedom to think differently and freedom to be heard, especially on political matters but certainly not limited to it, that is enshrined in the US Constitution. Unfortunately, while there is some freedom to speak, and to publish, there is no freedom to be heard on the mass media television in this country, especially in matters which conflict with the interests of the elites controlling this country and its corporate mass media. If a voice remains unheard, or can be drowned, publish all you want, talk all you want.

The hijacking of free speech in America to mean the “ability to speak”, rather than “the ability to be heard”, has been the biggest unrecognized public theft since the Pharaohs stole the lives of their peoples who built the pyramids for them.

Note that now, in the emerging police state in America, even the freedom to speak is under attack – lord knows some “evil doers” may hear and do some thinking for themselves. Witness the emergence of the new military thought police on university and school campuses under the auspices of this ultra right-wing ruling party, called the Campus-Watch that monitors what is said and talked about on campus. In addition, a surprising new Orwellian legislation pending in Congress makes it illegal to criticize Israel and Israeli occupation of Palestine in university and school campuses. It is not clear whether only in publicly funded ones or in all of them. Together with campus-watch, this is designed to quell any free speech and open debate on matters critical of Israel in the foremost and highest places hitherto protected from such intrusions, the academic freedom to think and debate freely.

But for other matters, yes there are 500 channels, all the sports you can watch, and all the possibilities for self expression, even self mutilation, and the masses are kept happy and well fed. Even the Roman empire did not have it so good. Attempts are being made to exercise dominance to quell critical debates not just in America, but throughout the world by influencing the world media as the entire planet now gets their news and forms their opinions on television viewing. If it cannot be bought or intimidated into compliance, it is bombed into compliance. An alien observer on Mars monitoring microwave transmissions from earth watching all the Hollywood movies and FOX news might conclude that only Anglo-Saxons live on the third planet, and the third Reich is back in power pursuing full scale military style psychological operations on the denizens.

Even the internet, once heralded as the great equalizer and democratizer in the world is not immune to the slowly encroaching barriers to free, unhindered, and unintimidated speech. But since its penetration in American households, though growing, is not as pervasive as television, its policing through corporate policies and new laws is only growing in proportion to its prominence and ability to effect public opinion in any significant numbers. Thus it remains open to free speech and a good source of alternate information at the present. However, it is routinely being scrounged by law enforcement and intelligence communities for evidence of subversive talk. And who defines subversive? The US Justice department? Several states have enacted laws that makes anonymizing a users web and email submission illegal, on the pretext of safeguarding against identity theft. With regular trolling of the internet by even employers to check what type of comments their prospective employees might have made in the past, and profiling and data mining tools proliferating even in the most innocuous operations, it may not be too long before the internet is primarily relegated to another shopping channel for the masses and a transaction channel for businesses, or for the harmless irrelevant non political chatter of the pop culture which will be called free speech in America. Being able to earn a livelihood can be a powerful chiller for political speech as observed during the McCarthy era. Furthermore, ownership of the internet is already beginning to fall in the hands of the mainstream corporate media moguls such a AOL-Time Warner. Before long, the likes of Rupert Murdoch will be owning a big chunk of the internet pie and beaming another 500 websites of entertainment chatter into our home.

A conspiracy at dumbing us down? This is no conspiracy theory. It’s far more insidious. It is institutional! A natural outcome of the imperial path to world conquest, dominated by the rise of the military-industrial complex acquiring the rights of “person-hood” and constitutional protections over the past century, and now owning all of the mass media and driven by the new mantra of corporate globalization. Giant oil, auto, and agriculture corporations now dominate Wall Street, and are far richer than majority of nations on the planet – and they have now claimed for themselves constitutional human rights of free speech including the right to influence legislation, politicians, and make donations to political parties. According to Thom Hartmann, before 1886, it was not like this, most states prevented corporations from meddling in politics. If they cannot vote, why should they be talking to the politicians? Now, there is much in common between the fictitious “person” modern corporation, and this fictitious “war on terrorism”.

The interests of these elites now control the planet. They comprise less than a measurable fraction of one percent of the planet and monopolize more than 90% of its resources and its wealth. Just look at the wealthiest people on the Forbes list, look at the wealth commanded by the top few Fortune 500 companies, and compare it to the ownership of wealth and resources of the rest of the nations on the planet including their GDP.*13 Also review the earlier example of young labor sweat shops in Bangladesh run by the Walt Disney Company that pays 5 cents per shirt. And who owns ABC news? Why would ABC news broadcast an exposé of these sweat shops – contrary to what Charlie Rose might unreservedly proclaim? What does your own commonsense tell you?

The “war on terrorism” being waged from the White House is not about battlefield deployments against “Islamic jihadis”. It is mainly about privatization of the world’s resources and public commons into the hands of the military-industrial-corporate-multinational complex of the United States. Even Afghanistan was about oil pipelines and getting physically closer to Central Asia and China. As late as the summer of 2001, months before 9/11, the Taliban were told by US representatives to either accept the US offer of a carpet of gold or they would be buried in a carpet of bombs, that in either case the Americans would have their oil pipeline from the oil-rich nations of Central Asia to the Indian ocean through Afghanistan. Again, Iraq is about the control of oil spigots.

In general, America would be very happy to give the whole world their freedom to do absolutely whatever they want, have any kind of government they want, as long as they spend their money to buy American products in US dollars, and sell back all of their natural resources including their labor! Yes sell. Americans aren’t thieves. After all, we buy what is under your soil or the fruits of your hard labor, and pay you what we think is a reasonable price for it. It is nothing more diabolical then a race among the corporations of the industrialized world for who can stake their claims first on which resource, with America being the dominant hog as it happens to own the biggest guns. Nor is it any more complex to understand than corporate greed, an extension of the age old human greed. The Enron and other fantastic debacles of late in which the CEOs of those bankrupt companies pay themselves millions in bonuses and even protect their wealth from any reclaim from bankruptcy proceedings is evidence of this greed.*14

The reconstruction of history by the official mainstream historians that is faithfully reproduced on the minds of the Americans by the media is also mind boggling! What is even more mind boggling is the cavalier attitude with which these texts refer to their sins of at least a 100 years ago (anything closer in time would be too close for comfort). For example, my kids came home talking about how the US army had given small pox laden blankets to the native Indians which killed tens of thousands of them. Okay, many of their descendants still live in appalling conditions on reservations – get them into gambling casinos, but not indemnify them for the sins of the past, nor bring these moral points up for discussion in the text books – but show them from the detachment of the sins of the past of a generation long dead! They did it; it’s not our burden.

When is it our burden? When it is happening right at our door steps? Only when we are eyewitness to it? Only when we pull the trigger with our own fingers? I do not see and national contrition, restitution, and accountability, or memorials going up to the victims of America in America. What have I missed? I am 100% certain that in a 100 years the American historians will write text books about the devastation of Iraq and Afghanistan with similar detached regret. Then it will be out in the open, and perhaps my posterity might come home with similar official stories of tens of thousands Muslims dead from bombing the cities, from sanctions, from imposed dictatorships. But today, when this knowledge can be crucial to the American public who still choose or “select” their governments by some sort of voting, and can do something about it to get rid of them and bring them to justice, this information is conveniently not available.

All this is what inevitably and institutionally leads to mind control of the populace in America like the chained dwellers of Plato’s mythical cave, for all sources of education and information are now under the corporate control of the military-industrial complex, including the law makers and the politicians.*15 The corporate influence in the White House, and vice versa, along with a confluence of other ancillary interests such as the Zionists alliance with Israel and their direct and indirect control of large chunks of US economy, its news outlets, and its politicians, make it impossible to hear and see images of the worst atrocities being committed in order to pursue empire.

If the American public saw and read what others in the world are seeing and reading, what would be the public’s stance on Israel’s occupation and its systematic extermination of the Palestinians? How much should we credit the corporate news media for not asking the ‘why’, for not showing us the powerful images that tell the story from both sides, and thus enhancing our obfuscation, that allows our government to continue aligning itself with Israel since we don’t know any better and do not protest, and that emboldens Israel to carry on its planned genocide of the Palestinians with impunity, even being so emboldened as to kill a young American activist who dared to challenge them?

Thus, how much is the mainstream news media to blame for Rachel Corrie’s murder, indeed for the wholesale slaughter and destruction of an entire people, in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the world, and how much are we, the silent ignorant majority, in whose name and with whose tax dollars, these war crimes are being committed? You be the judge!

Media non-coverage in this “Slaughter On Iraq”

Now let us look at some media non-coverage in this war of conquest and ponder the cause for the ignorance of the mainstream Americans.

Someone might perhaps argue that if the US President were to listen to Pacifica instead of his advisors, he might be less inclined to take Ariel Sharon as his mentor and not call him a “man of peace”! Not so. The Israeli soldiers have been training US soldiers on how to conduct Urban warfare based on the Jenin model! (The US President is quite aware of what is going on, not that it matters now, but on impeachment day perhaps?) Never made it on the mainstream news. There is so much confluence of interest between Israel and this war of aggression in the Middle East and oil that it is quite sinister to not see it even brought up on CNN, ABC, FOX et. al. as experts after experts are paraded before us. In this entire coverage, not one word has been mentioned of the Israeli interest in reviving the oil pipeline between Mosul and Haifa that I am aware of. That Israeli commanders have unprecedented access to the Central Command (CENTCOM) in Qatar, that they monitor and consult on real-time developments as they unfold in Iraq, lending their superior expertise in urban warfare that they learnt on innocent Palestinian homes in their own back yard, to the US military is not newsworthy. I guess the historians who will be rewriting the new text books of history will mainly be consulting FOX, CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the glossy presentations of the Pentagon Generals and the Secretary of State General Colin Powell.

The threat facing the Dollar from the Euro, as Baghdad switched to the Euro for its oil transactions, and potentially Iran, Venezuela and all of OPEC also contemplating this move, which could break the dollar monopoly as an international currency for oil trading and threaten the US economy already loaded with trillions of dollars in debt, has not been raised as a motive for the war. See William Clark’s detailed analysis on this topic on the web. A potential warning to these countries of what could come if they persisted in their blasphemy. It would provide an interesting empirical evidence of this motive if now none of these countries switch to the Euro. Retd. General J. Garner, as the new power in Iraq, is now a voting member of OPEC, in full and eager anticipation of falling price of crude oil from $22 to $8 – $10 as Iraq’s production ramps up, with the oil companies pocketing that difference as profits. Can you see their stocks going up? Then there are the pipeline development contracts, oil fire put out contracts, military bases development and support contracts, and of course, Iraq rebuilding contracts. There are of course no oil men, or oil woman, and other corporate interests in the White House, right?

But why go to Iraq, why not twist the arm of Saudi Arabia to simply pump more oil if this was indeed the case, don’t we own that country anyway? We took that country having no income tax before 1991, and made it one of the most debtor nations in the world by making it pay for the first Gulf War that the US convinced it fraudulently to fight by showing it doctored satellite pictures of Sadaam’s supposed armored troops tracks in the sand poised to attack Saudi Arabia. Later, the photos were shown to be of highly questionable merit. Of course we won’t bother going into the details at the moment about the late American Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, who gave Sadaam the proverbial “American green light” under orders from the State Department:

We have no opinion on your Arab – Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960′s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.*16

The internal dispute had been Kuwait continually over pumping more oil than its agreed upon fare share from the disputed region between Iraq and Kuwait thus keeping the oil prices low, apart from the fact that Kuwait was artificially crafted out of Iraq by the colonial imperialist like all the modern countries of the Middle East. This “green light” to Sadaam was a an obvious trap as the subsequent history is evidence; and within a few hours of Sadaam’s invasion of Kuwait, Iraq’s substantial dollar assets were frozen in the United States.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait enabled the US, under the stewardship of George Bush Sr., to finally enter the land of the Muslims, after years of trying, and finally set up military bases there, all paid for by Saudi Arabia from its oil revenues. And we also won’t go into the fraudulent testimonies provided by the teary-eyed daughter of the ambassador of Kuwait to the US Congress about how the Iraqi soldiers were throwing babies out of incubators, to win over the US public opinion about going to war. All of these fraudulent testimonies were televised on all the news channels, without informing the public that the witness was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States having come here begging the superpower to come to its rescue. It has all been documented by others, and is accepted even by the mainstream journalists, but of course never to be rehearsed openly, especially now in the time of war, lest they inadvertently end up asking some really tough questions of the government, as it perpetuated new frauds on the public in the United Nations. Mafia aficionados, take notes on extortion racket.

But if you did ask this question, good job, you are relearning what you were forced to unlearn as a child, not to ask ‘why’ by giving you Ritalin and diagnosing you with ADD. The response, which the eloquent mainstream media won’t give you, Pacifica provides you. Michael Ruppert, publisher of “From the Wilderness” explained it as the cost of producing a barrel of oil. In the rest of the world, the oil production has “peaked”, in other words, more than 50% of the oil has been pumped out from under their soil. The cost of production to pump out the next barrel of oil is now much higher, up to approx. $10 per barrel. Whereas in Iraq, the oil is floating about 600 feet below the surface, it has not “peaked”. It would cost less than a couple of bucks to pump that deliciously rich Mesopotamian thick black gold. Chink, the Wall Street just rallied!*17

New intellectual property laws are currently being drafted in Iraq by a representative of the recording industry so that the newly liberated Iraqis may not start copying Madonna songs! Weren’t they supposed to be liberating the Iraqi people from Sadaam, now only to have them be under the diktats of the recording industry (courtesy of Pacifica)? Pillage and plunder aren’t just words in history text books applied to colonizers past. And it’s not just over there, it’s right here too. Look at the company called ChoicePoint and watch your next presidential election results! See Greg Palast’s new investigative reporting and articles in the U.K. Guardian newspaper available on its website on the many sources of profiteering and their immediate beneficiaries from this “war of conquest” that you will not hear in the US news media. It is a full Mafia ops for dizzying profits.

Perhaps it is not the media’s fault – is it the economy stupid?

Mainstream America sees nothing, rallies around the Flag

Is this why the press and the journalism profession were accorded constitutional protection, the “freedom of the press”, so that special interests would push their agendas on the public mind? Especially the TV coverage from all of them, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, FOX, and CNN (I love their new acronym Censored News Networks courtesy of Flashpoints) is pro-war and support the troops and support the President – regardless of what war crimes against humanity get committed! That is an observation, and a fact, though frequently denied by the media participants themselves but never convincingly refuted. Compare their TV coverage with foreign broadcasts. Dish antennas are now quite pervasive and cheap – you can do your own experiment!

Remaining ignorant is no longer an excuse for complicity – and the assertion of innocence in the face of these atrocities being committed in our name can at best ring hollow – and at worst stand the same accusation of history that now the world levels at the German nation for their allowing Fascism to rise in their own country. To understand “why they hate us”, getting exposed to their story as told by them, not by the media pundits echoing the Pentagon or the White House, is a prerequisite. To understand why someone may lose all compunction in wanting to kill innocent civilians at the expense of their own lives, it is important to see what this country may have done to them in the past so many decades, and to remember one’s own history and what Patrick Henry said “give me liberty or give me death” when England held sway over the fates and riches of this nation not so very long ago. Not to say it is ever justified to kill even a single innocent person, but do we not ask “why” when Tim McVeigh blows up a building in Oklahoma? Do we not try to unravel the crime in a sea of false trails and red herrings? So if “why” isn’t being asked, what should one conclude?

Is the mainstream news media willing to take us there? When the leader of the free world asserts: “either you are with us or with the terrorists”, the media actually blocks us from seeing that there is also another alternative, that we can be neither. Hear the wonderful Arundhati Roy’s eloquent speech that she made in Porto Alegre in Brazil titled “How to confront Empire?” that never made it on the 6 o clock news on any channel, but was broadcast on Pacifica, and whose transcript is available on the Internet. Her response to the President of United States of America is very simple and rational:

‘No thank you.’ We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs.

Nor was Nelson Mandela’s speech ever broadcast on the mainstream media but was heard on Pacifica. Had the American public been allowed to see him on their televisions at prime time, they would have heard the world’s most revered leader and acknowledged elder statesman stating that the world’s most powerful person “cannot think properly”, and perhaps pondered on it.

It’s not the economy, it’s the media stupid!

What were to happen if the television news shows, the Sunday morning and weekday talk shows, the late night comedy shows, and the public radio shows, started featuring commentaries and rebuttals from the large number of very articulate voices of dissent in this country and the world over? Do mainstream Americans even know that these popular voices of dissent exist: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, the past US attorney General Ramsey Clark, Asad Abu Khalil, Michel Chossudovsky, Rahul Mahajan, Tariq Ali, Greg Palast, Dennis Bernstein, Arundhati Roy, Amy Goodman, Nelson Mandela, Scott Ritter, Dennis Halliday, Michael Moore, Helen Caldicott, Robert Fisk, Daniel Ellsberg, David Harris, Congress member Barbara Lee, former Congress member Cynthia McKinney, the names of dozens of family members of 9/11 victims who openly state “not in our name”, leaders of foreign governments, and the list is endless. What if debates are held between them and the members of the government? What would happen if direct coverage from such courageous un-inbedded journalists like May Ying Welch and Robert Fisk (both phoning in their eye witness testimony directly from Baghdad to Pacifica), or the detailed footage of civilian carnage from AbuDhabi TV or Al-Jazeera is beamed into our homes alongside the made for TV canned coverage of the inbedded reporters showing how US soldiers eat their lunch and how the Iraqi children are welcoming them?*18

Incidentally, it has been widely reported in the overseas press that these smiling bare footed children greeting the US soldiers at the barrel of their M16 rifles are welcoming them with “$#@&^%” swear words in colloquial Arabic while enthusiastically shaking their hands. Even the embedded journalists have expressed their surprise privately to un-embedded journalists at why they are not being greeted with open arms, although this is not reported by them in the US mainstream media. They are surprised? Invading a country with “Shock and Awe” terror, right after they have been starved and bombed daily for 12 years, surprise would be the last feeling anyone but a complete moron would have. Just imagine, what would happen if American public saw and heard this stuff that the rest of the world is watching and listening, or heard critical debates instead of the mindless drivel. Would they still tolerate it in their good name? Are they incredibly indoctrinated or are they incredibly self-serving?

Since such critical debate and meaningful information is non-existent in the American mainstream media, the American public must seek out other sources of information, analyze why there is a difference between what their mainstream media and Government officials tell them and what these alternate sources tell them, and reach their own conclusions. This requires considerable time and effort, and a continuous desire to remain informed despite the immersion in the materialistic consumer culture that keeps most of us perpetually occupied pursuing our “American Dreams.” By the time we get home, there is only enough energy left to throw off our shoes and turn on the television. This is also understood by the ruling elite who incessantly bombard us with further self-reinforcing consumerism in the two hours we will watch television informing us about the newest gadgets and gee-whiz techno-babble in between mindless episodes of “Friends” and captivating new car advertisements. So who can muster such motivation to seek out alternate news sources? Only the nutty few, who can easily be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” or “fanatics” or “leftists” or a focus group, and yes, if they become so bold as to voice their courageous dissent loudly with a potential of it being heard and believed, then even “terrorists”!

Not that these alternative sources of information are inherently more reliable or that they necessarily represent the sole truth or even any truth, but only in the differences in perspective, in the public expression of alternate viewpoints and information, and in the open public debate in the mainstream among contrarians, can a polity become informed – for being informed is the lynchpin of any progressive self-empowering human existence under any system, from dictatorships (in order to overthrow them) to democracy (in order to maintain it).

Does mainstream America want to build an empire by subjugating everyone else – with bombs and/or imposed dictatorships? ZB does not think so. I do not believe so either – or writing this book would have been rather pointless. But you can better adjudicate on this question for yourselves!

So now we clearly come to see why it is necessary for the US news media, and especially TV news to be so compliant. Images speak volumes, and in this nation of television junkies, it is the primary source of information for most everyone, with few exceptions. This is also why, it is permissible to occasionally allow critical dissenting articles in the back pages of New York Times et. al., sometimes a few even make the front page – but how many people read these newspapers in this country? So long as it is ineffectual, it has all the freedom of the press and speech! So long as not too many people are exposed to it or believe it, it is allowed to be expressed – for it also aids in the essential propaganda of the ‘freedom of speech and the press’ to make the American peoples proud of the accomplishments of their democratic ideals and nationhood. This is also why so many books on current affairs that critically challenge this “war on terrorism” are allowed on the American bookshelves – the reading public in America is miniscule, and especially the audience for such works that require critical thinking and reflection is almost non-existent, and roughly the size of the protest marches in American streets that Bush eloquently dismissed as a “focus group”. Thus all the freedom to publish books – but not to have them discussed and their authors presented on mainstream media and television!

The preceding suffices to lend credence to ZB’s assertion on the role of mass media in a populist democracy in molding domestic public opinion. While ZB presented his argument as the mass media making the public war averse, we have convincingly demonstrated the converse – that mass ignorance perpetuated by the mainstream mass media has molded the US public opinion towards ignorance, and this has allowed America to wage unspeakable wars in the name of national interest against sovereign nations from WWII until today.

War on terrorism”? Give me a break! But what do you think?

Footnotes Chapter 4

*1 See Greg Palast: Best Democracy Money Can Buy, 95 – 96. A must read for all Americans.

*2 See Noam Chomsky: Western State Terrorism, Chapter 2. Also available online on the web.

*3 Israel Koenig: “Koenig Memorandum”. Culled from the web.

*4 David Ben-Gurion, 1948. Culled from the web.

*5 David Ben-Gurion, 1948. Culled from the web.

*6 Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the IDF: “New York Times 14 April 1983”. Culled from the web.

*7 Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983. Culled from the web.

*8 David Ben-Gurion – Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), 121. Culled from the web.

*9 Moshe Dayan: Haaretz, April 4, 1969. Culled from the web.

*10 Excerpted from the pamphlet containing Rachel’s letters published by Alison Weir of If Americans Knew. This pamphlet was distributed at Rachel’s martyrdom commemoration gathering in a small church in Berkeley California which the author attended with his young children.

*11 Weir, Alison Pamphlet, Rachel’s Letters published by ‘If Americans Knew’

*12 To gain a better understanding of the choice of words and the use of language in molding public opinion, please see Collateral Language – A Users Guide to America’s New War, Edited by John Collins and Ross Glover.

*13 See the book Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Domination and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann for some interesting statistics and to understand the rise of modern multinational corporations, the primal cause of injustice in American foreign policy after the end of the Cold War. Also see After Capitalism by Seymour Melman for an understanding of where unbridled and unfettered capitalism under the market economy of ever expanding corporate globalization without the checks and balances can take us.

*14 See Vijay Prashad’s Fat Cats and Running Dogs – The Enron Stage Of Capitalism for details.

*15 See The Iron Triangle by Dan Briody for an eloquent exposé of the revolving door between corporate America, military, and government leaders including past US and European heads of state. The linkages drawn here might be surprising to some, but are nevertheless quite real and easily observable in the American system.

*16 Excerpt from the transcripts of conversation between April Glaspie and Sadaam Hussain. I found this transcript on the internet, and its authenticity is unknown. However, the occurance of this conversation and Glaspie showing the green light to Sadaam Hussain is well known. The transcript details are as follows:

Transcript of Meeting Between Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, July 25, 1990 (Eight days before the August 2, 1990 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait)

July 25, 1990 – Presidential Palace – Baghdad

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait. (pause) As you know, I lived here for years and admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. We know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. (pause) We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threat s against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship – not confrontation – regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?

Saddam Hussein – As you know, for years now I have made every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait. There is to be a meeting in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief chance. (pause) When we (the Iraqis) meet (with the Kuwaitis) and we see there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – What solutions would be acceptab le?

Saddam Hussein – If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab – our strategic goal in our war with Iran – we will make concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole of Iraq (i.e., in Saddam s view, including Kuwait ) then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States’ opinion on this?

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – We have no opinion on your Arab – Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960′s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

On August 2, 1990, Saddam’s massed troops invade and occupy Kuwait. _____

Baghdad, September 2, 1990, U.S. Embassy

One month later, British journalists obtain the above tape and transcript of the Saddam – Glaspie meeting of July 29, 1990. Astounded, they confront Ms. Glaspie as she leaves the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Journalist 1 – Are the transcripts (holding them up) correct, Madam Ambassador?(Ambassador Glaspie does not respond)

Journalist 2 – You knew Saddam was going to invade (Kuwait ) but you didn’t warn him not to. You didn’t tell him America would defend Kuwait. You told him the opposite – that America was not associated with Kuwait.

Journalist 1 – You encouraged this aggression – his invasion. What were you thinking?

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.

Journalist 1 – You thought he was just going to take some of it? But, how could you? Saddam told you that, if negotiations failed , he would give up his Iran (Shatt al Arab waterway) goal for the Whole of Iraq, in the shape we wish it to be. You know that includes Kuwait, which the Iraqis have always viewed as an historic part of their country!

Journalist 1 – American green-lighted the invasion. At a minimum, you admit signaling Saddam that some aggression was okay – that the U.S. would not oppose a grab of the al-Rumeilah oil field, the disputed border strip and the Gulf Islands (including Bubiyan) – the territories claimed by Iraq?

(Ambassador Glaspie says nothing as a limousine door closed behind her and the car drives off.)

*17 Not being an oil expert, I have no idea to the actual validity of this “peaking theory”. The point however is that if this theory is also openly debated in the media by contrarian experts, we might know better.

*18 Also see Asad Abu Khalil’s Bin Laden, Islam and America’s new war on Terrorism; Before & After – US Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis by Phyllis Bennis; and Clash of Fundamentalisms by Tariq Ali, to help remove some of the obfuscation that the media deliberately helps perpetuate by controlling what is aired and what isn’t.

These are all contrarian viewpoints and whether one agrees with them or not is besides the point – what is to the point however is why we have never heard either Asad or Tariq Ali or Phyllis Bennis on mainstream television, on Sunday morning news talk show circuits, and in debate with Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? All three intellectuals are incredible speakers, exceedingly eloquent, highly media literate, and very presentable on television. Depriving the mainstream American public from seeing and hearing them, and seeing and hearing a hundred others like them, is the tragedy of modern America.

Additional Resources

Danny Schechter, Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception : How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq, Prometheus Books, October 2003

Danny Schechter, Weapons of Mass Deception, media documentary 2004 – 2005, http://www.wmdthefilm.com , watch online at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4437853756074043715

The Role of a “Pearl Harbor” in Empire Building

Now let’s come to the other part of ZB’s equation, the threat perception needed to rally the public around the flag, or in his own words: “sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being” and “truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat”.

In other words, the boogie man. Where to find one?

Embarking on Empire Building – a pretext is found

‘Osama O Osama where art thou? Please do something stupid and come to our rescue’ (Michael Moore can probably say it a lot better)!

How bloody convenient! They trained him, they educated him, they funded him, they made him. That is all facts! Why isn’t there a public investigation of this horrific event that has very conveniently provided a “sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being, just as ZB predicted almost 6 years ago would be needed to galvanize the public? The fact that both the President and Vice President asked Tom Daschle to limit the congressional investigations into September 11, as reported by CNN online, begs many questions the former Georgia Congress member Cynthia McKinney has been asking about the wheelings and dealings of this administration, as she recently noted in her speech in Santa Fe, New Mexico and was heard on DemocracyNow with Amy Goodman.

The two investigative books from Europe: Forbidden Truth: U.S. – Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy And The Failed Hunt For Bin Laden by Brisard and Dasquié, and War on Freedom by Nafeez M. Ahmed, as well as Michel Chossudovsky’s War And Globalization – The Truth Behind September 11 from Canada, also present some interesting evidence of credible foreknowledge that beg the obvious questions of why there was no positive response to the credible warnings, but rather a deliberate “stand down” from normal operating procedures and hence evidence of complicity. The former US federal prosecutor John Loftus is on record stating:

The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9-11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.

Why is Congress not investigating? What are they there for? What is all this theory of checks and balances of the famed American constitutional system of Democracy? When will we see it in action to really know if it is worth the Muslim dictatorships in all those oil-rich countries being bombed to bits to herald in this famed Democracy? All what we have seen so far is how to steal an election and have Congress nicely comply. This is nothing new and most third world nations witness it on a regular basis when they are lucky enough to have such an election that is. What we haven’t learned in the third world and have been anxiously waiting to acquire it from the white man’s burden is how checks and balances actually work.

While most everyone is confused about the events of 9/11, and no concrete facts have emerged to unequivocally support the idea of a deliberate and premeditated “New Pearl Harbor”, such as an incriminating document leaked from the Pentagon showing a written command for the “stand down” orders that apparently did take place on that fatal day and subsequently attributed to “incompetence” of the system, there is sufficient empirical evidence to at least ask the forensic questions that this nation’s crime fighting divisions pride themselves on. For the Government to not not conduct an investigation itself, but to also deliberately prevent others from doing so, is incriminating by itself, and at a bare minimum, an obstruction of justice for any other crime, except of course this one. In a world of “fiction” and wonderland where Ariel Sharon becomes a “man of peace”, and Colin Powell a magician making WMDs in Iraq disappear with the wave of a hand, it is little wonder.

For the sanity of this nation, it is important for the American public to refute allegation of complicity of their government for 9-11, by having actually understood the issues being raised, and then trying to refute them logically and convincingly, instead of just blanket patriotic denials based on blind trust that ‘my government can do no wrong’. George Orwell would call that “indoctrination”. What would you?

There are ample precedents in history that posterity will condemn us on for not being cognizant of, as we bomb the rest of the world in retaliation. Richard Nixon, as evidenced from his own tapes, and as reported by Daniel Ellsberg in a speech, himself believed that there was foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor. Whether or not there actually was is a moot point, Nixon happened to believe that there was. While Nixon’s personal beliefs are not a testimony, but another way of stating it makes the point more poignant: at least one past US President happened to believe the idea that there was foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor and nothing was done to stop it in order to generate a pretext to enter WWII. And more recently, under the FOIA, Congressional records confirm Nixon’s suspicions that Roosevelt not only allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, but may have substantially increased the probability that it would happen so that the Americans could enter World War II in self-defense as now the war apathetic American public would be willing to shed their blood – they were attacked! The exact same scenario has transpired this New Pearl Harbor – only the gullible and the historians are waiting for cash receipts. Neither of them serve any useful function in society I am forced to conclude, except to assist the Machiavelli, and the latter have come to count on it.

Another infamous example of covert-ops upon one’s own nation to mobilize its peoples for war is the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany in 1933, a plot hatched by Hitler to stay in power after he was named Chancellor.*1

However, as Robert Fisk observed when I asked him this question about his opinion on complicity, during the question-answer session after his public talk: ~“I live in the land of conspiracy theories (in Beirut, Lebanon, but he meant Arabs in general have this proclivity), and since there is no concrete evidence to demonstrate there is one, I am not going to go there.” The problem inherent in this sort of thinking is that the “incompetence” implied in the “surprise attack” will never be investigated because few reputed journalists and investigative scholars even want to go there. Well if you won’t go there, how will you get there?

The few daring habitual skeptics who have the temerity to ask such questions are easily dismissed by the mainstream as “conspiracy theorists”. Labeling has become such an effective tool of silencing any opponent that even journalists fear being labeled and refrain from asking rational questions. Robert Fisk has himself written a lot about this “labeling technology” and the dexterous use of language to intimidate and confuse the public in newer forms of Psy-ops. And to be clear, I am not accusing him of being afraid of the same, for he is a fearless journalist putting his life on the line in actual war zones, and I listen to his every report from Iraq as undeniable testimony of an unimpeachable and courageous “un-embedded” eyewitness.

But the fact that even Robert Fisk would not address my question of complicity publicly beyond what I quote him shows the power of labels, or at least momentary prudence. Why such prudence? The responsibility of fearless journalists is not to prudence, but to investigate!

If Fisk won’t even entertain the thought of complicity now, how will he ever investigate 911 when it is still a contemporary crime in progress? This is why he, like Noam Chomsky, only writes about crimes of history – the faits accomplis – a lot safer since the receipts are already in hand! Little good does that do to the victims in progress since the authors themselves don’t seem to want to learn from the lessons of history they so prodigiously write, to unravel an existing crime and prevent more victims from happening, until the crime and the victims have both passed into history! Then both Chomsky and Fisk will publish volumes, get more following from the handful of rabble rousers in society, and bask in their accolades signing more books. Just as Fisk autographed “Pity the Nation” for me as I foolishly stood in the long line of fans with my kids.

It is already obvious that incompetence alone does not rationally explain many of the observations that have been recorded about 9/11, such as the simple timeline of events and absolute lack of response, when such response is part of ordinary operational procedures and routinely performed on any other day except that one. It is part of standard FAA regulation and a legal requirement for FAA and NORAD and the other civil and military agencies vested with the obligation for defending the United States homeland from air attack, to automatically scramble interceptors even when a civilian aircraft innocently gets of course, let alone a hijacked one.

Such procedures have been in place for years and routinely employed. As reported by the Associated Press, between September 2000 and June 2001, the US military launched fighter jets on 67 occasions to investigate aircraft gone off their flight plans. There are two concentric prohibited air space rings around the Pentagon and the White House. An inner ring, and an outer ring. The defense of these hallowed institutions of world terror does not wait for the plane being on top of them before they are intercepted or shot down. An alarm is issued when a plane or any flying object enters the outer ring and fighters are scrambled within minutes to intercept. Furthermore, both the Pentagon and the White House are armed with surface to air missiles and able to shoot down any flying object regardless!

Look what briefly transpired on the day of 9-11 (as pieced together from various publicly available reports): The first plane hijacking is noted at 8:28 am; the third hijacked plane reportedly hit Pentagon at 9:38 am. And in the interim the towers in New York have already been hit. Andrews air force base is within minutes of flying time from Washington DC and routinely used for scrambling interceptors upon detecting air space violations. Why no planes are scrambled until after the plane hits the Pentagon a whole hour and ten minutes after the first hijacking?

I am told by Washingtonians that announcers on radio in Washington DC were already warning that a hijacked plane was perhaps headed towards Washington. Even the radio announcers and the public knew, and the defenders of these hallowed institutions did not? The third hijacked plane made a very difficult and tight U-turn that experienced pilots themselves attest is very challenging in that confined air space above Washington, let alone for someone who allegedly learned to fly only on a flight simulator with no actual flying experience of a massive airliner. And the plane hits the unoccupied side of the Pentagon with dead precision when it could much more easily have hit the occupied side without that U-turn. None of the Pentagon’s own munitions even fired a single round even as the plane approached the inner prohibited air space, crossed it once, and made that fatal U-turn!

How many minutes does it take to fire a missile? The Afghans in their rugged mountains shot down far more Soviet jets and helicopters with their American supplied shoulder fired missiles – which the CIA is now desperately trying to buy back from the Afghans who are now the new terrorist, previously known as the Mujahideen. Reminds me of a saying of Henry Kissinger: ~“It can be deadly to be America’s enemy, it is fatal to be its friend.” It is the same Henry Kissinger who is initially assigned by the White House to investigate 9-11, after very reluctantly agreeing to even look into the reasons for failure to act, giving new meaning to the adages “the fox guarding the coup” and “honor among thieves. *2

Here are the top five fundamental and simple questions that just bedevil me as a rational person still in possession of his mental faculties but slowly loosing it at the insanity of the supposed wise: a) how did the Government so quickly discover the identities of the 19 suicided hijackers; b) how comes at least six of them are alive and law abiding citizens living peaceful lives halfway across the world; c) how can people who learned to fly on flight simulators perform such complex maneuvers that licensed commercial and military pilots have personally informed me (as I have repeatedly searched them out and asked them their professional opinions) is impossible to perform if only learnt on flight simulators, and perhaps only fighter pilots could be trained enough to handle them reliably, not even ordinary commercial pilots can do them reliably enough to be able to count on doing it successfully on demand; d) why the normal operating procedures already laid out by FAA and NORAD not followed once it was discovered that planes have been hijacked; and e) why was the forensic evidence of the crime and the crime scene not secured for postmortem analysis counter to normal procedures as in the case of every other airliner crash, and instead disposed off in such a haste?

And I am quite willing to dismiss all forewarning issues as it is indeed quite possible that everyone in the CIA, DIA, and NSA are just blithering idiots and nincompoops. All their sophisticated capabilities could also be just a Psyops on the public with the help of Hollywood and James Bamford to scare the peoples in order to keep any hidden revolutionaries in check – after all they did also fail to detect the Iranian revolution even as it stared them in the face for three years 1977-79. A late as 1978, they had President Jimmy Carter toast to the health of the Shah of Iran while the natives were out for his blood – it took only a few short months after that. How much more incompetent can one get? Well here is 911. So let’s just ignore pre-warnings as a possible red-herring and focus on the real meat of the issues, my personal top five being the aforementioned, and they start on the very day of 911 at precisely 8:28 AM and not any earlier.

More timeline details and further in depth analysis of recorded facts pertaining to the events of that infamous day starting 8:28 AM can be gleaned in the already mentioned book War on Freedom. Just the fact that this book could compile all this publicly available information is mind boggling – how can the CIA, DIA, NSA, not compile it even now to tell their own President about it, that all the available public evidence suggests that there must be deep “Second Foundationers” running amok in the intelligence and the Pentagon – are they still incurably incompetent?

Pray tell dear American reader, what is a rational explanation? Especially in the light of 50% of the US budget, at least $400 billion annually going towards defense spending, a number greater than the defense spending of the 14 next largest militaries combined, a failure of this magnitude should have seen some heads roll at such a dismal failure to protect the nation from “evil jihadis”. Right? Well no. Instead, we see subsequent promotion of those directly responsible for safeguarding the country, General Myers to Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff!

It may ultimately be a moot point, whether there is complicity (of commission or omission) by agencies of the state, past or present, as we have as much likelihood of ever penetrating its deeper secrets as we did about the JFK and MLK murders. Or whether Osama Bin Laden, the great military strategist and master planner and unsurpassed executor, skilled enough and equipped enough to outwit a super-power and its half trillion dollar annual defense budget, actually did surprise a sleeping giant now that the world was at peace and the giant had let its guards down asking both NORAD and FAA to relax and take a break from watch-duty, in retaliation for the truisms of blanket American support and unconditional arming of Israel in its subjugation and oppression of the Palestinians; American support of the oppressive dictatorships and kingdoms in the Middle East; and America’s deployment of its military in Islam’s holiest place, Arabia.

Perhaps he was on dope in a cave somewhere in the deep recesses of Afghanistan to have articulated such ridiculous and patently untrue motives for his hatred of America! Perhaps this is why the media never focussed on the question of ‘why’ even under the impressive assumption that Bin Laden had the impeccable credentials to plan and execute this kind of an attack, and they probably shouldn’t for any other crime that is committed after 9/11, just to remain consistent with their new “whyless” journalism! Robert Fisk, who had interviewed Osama Bin Laden a few times in Afghanistan, when he first heard about it enroute his flight to NY on 9/11 from Europe, said he felt it must have been Osama, because Osama had once told him ~“Mr. Robert, I will destroy America from this very mountain top that you are sitting on just as we destroyed the Soviet Union.*3

Whether there was a deliberate confluence of interests between, a) Osama Bin Laden hating America, b) America wanting to build empire and wanting a pretext of a “new Pearl Harbor”, either encouraged Bin Laden just as Roosevelt and Churchill had encouraged the Japanese for the original “Pearl Harbor”, or just found a nice happenstance falling in their laps leading to: ‘now that it happened, here is a great opportunity for “imperial mobilization” and higher defense spendings as both JV2020 and our PNAC boys wanted in order to achieve America’s “Full Spectrum Dominance” and our military’s radical “transformation”, so let’s just seize the moment‘, will remain a matter for debate for a long time to come. There are also other theories and explanations that are more plausible, as they explain a lot more of the observed facts on public record than the Government’s facile explanation of who did 911.

A rational covert-ops model (ahem, conspiracy theory)

The long lived “Second Foundationers” self-inflicted the wounds of 911 like Hitler’s Operation “Canned Goods” and the “Reichstag fire”. In this case, they hijacked the planes with a combination of patsy human hijackers and eventual remote control of the flights to hit their targets; such remote control capability “home run” already existing on several airliners including the hijacked ones, according to several disclosures from private and industry sources. That logically explains the complete lack of air defense response on that day – the ones controlling the airplanes are also the ones supposedly guarding the airspace. It explains many more things than the facile explanations of the Government that people who learnt to fly on flight simulators did it entirely on their own.

As an engineer attuned to thinking in terms of models and rational theories to explain the observed phenomenon, only this rational model makes better sense than the official conspiracy theory that Osama conspired and executed it all by himself without some “Second Foundation” guiding hand – if he did it at all.

Bin Laden himself has denied his own personal involvement in his own directly interviewed statements published in local newspapers in Pakistan*3A, as opposed to the “doctored video” confessions conveniently found in some cave or someplace else in Afghanistan, which means either some other patsies were found and Bin Laden was just blamed to find a reason to enter Afghanistan as had been forewarned to Pakistan months earlier to prepare for attack on Afghanistan in October, or there were no hijackers at all and it was entirely a home-run operation from start to finish.

All the in-flight conversations broadcast to the world as evidence of hijacking were synthetic, as were the Muslim names created for the fake identities. Just by ordinary probability of name collisions, some of these fictitious names had real peoples existing behind them.

Okay try to beat that ‘covert-ops’ based explanation, especially knowing two concrete facts about the Government of the United States of America, a) the book: Secrets – A Memoir Of Vietnam And The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg showing character and proclivity towards mass deception to wage unpopular wars, and b) the book: The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski showing motive. The PNAC report and Pentagon aspirations of “Full Spectrum Dominance” disclosed in JV2020 further adds to the motive making it even more concrete. The Straussian political philosophy of “ubermensch” deception being the underlying morality of the Zionist Neocons running this Administration completely seals their credibility. See Chapter 1 to refresh your memory in case you have forgotten.

However, it is true that we may never really know the precise concrete evidence behind 911 unless another courageous Daniel Ellsberg or Mordecai Vanunu somewhere in the White House, or the Pentagon, or the NSA, or the DIA, or the Israeli Mossad, comes forth with the deep dark secrets of a ‘black-ops’ upon the unsuspecting American peoples, or a future historian is damn lucky enough to discover these receipts, or another “Zbigniew Brzezinski” decides to brag about this conquest of the New American Century as did the original Brzezinski about “giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” for the “liberation of Eastern Europe”.

This analysis actually means only one thing at the moment. In the best of circumstance, the Government of the United States of America is the main suspect, and while evidence is being sought, nothing it says can be trusted given its manifest character of history of deceits and its own vested interest in the crime for “imperial mobilization”, and towards which end it also conveniently rushed to obliterate all the forensic evidence including the crime scene itself. And least of all, its own explanations of 911 cannot be trusted, and must not be accepted by any rational and fair person still in possession of even a modicum of commonsense.

This further means, that all those intellectuals and brilliant academic peoples – institutional scholars to gadflies – in America who are accepting the Government’s explanations, are in some way, embedded with the Government, for even a modicum of intelligence would indicate to not take the word of a suspect with vested interests, motives, and opportunity.

But fortunately, for the intended purpose of this essay, it is entirely immaterial who did 9-11, that being an appropriate subject of inquiry during impeachment proceedings and war crime tribunals, or upon the execution of firm retributive “victors justice” when a new Baboon comes out on top.

The issue of foreknowledge and inexplicability of the 9-11 attacks and an absence of air defense response is also irrelevant for this essay. These issues are only explored here in the background context of fleshing out the reasoning space by obliterating all red-herrings, and to ask why serious forensic investigation hasn’t been conducted into it even more than 18 months later. 18 whole months have gone by without investigations, but two civilizations have been bombed to death based on the events of 911! Why, pray think?

That in itself adds to the self-interest evidence pool in the reasoning space. This is indeed what is relevant for this essay. What did the US Government do after 9-11, and not on, or before 911, and how that relates to ZB’s blueprint of “imperial mobilization” and under what conditions of “Pearl Harbor” could it actually take place.

What the Americans did afterwards is fortunately open for all to see, and there is no reason to speculate and conjecture who knew what, when, and how. There is concreteness and irrefutable evidence of monumentally criminal barbarianism in their subsequent acts in their “ubermensch” quest for “full spectrum dominance”.

And one of the things they did, was not to conduct a forensic investigation of the plane crashes. Rather, they immediately destroyed the evidence of the crime under the pretext of quickly overcoming the national trauma. I am certain no people were more traumatized by 9-11 than the grieving family members of the passengers on those flights and of the victims under the rubble of those buildings.

Did anyone ask these families and victims if they wanted to not have any investigations conducted into this heinous crime of hijacked planes running into tall buildings that took the lives of their beloved ones? When even in ordinary plane crashes, all sorts of investigation teams immediately gear up for detailed forensic analysis, and not only is all the evidence carefully salvaged and preserved, but the entire plane reconstructed from usually the vast debris field. Why the rush to destroy the evidence in this case under false pretexts of avoiding “further national trauma”?

This essay connects all the dots to demonstrate that everything the US government did after 9-11, is indeed consistent with ZB’s assertions that the primal imperatives of a “populist democracy” like America, can only be realized under an impending perceived threat to the immediate well being of its peoples, and only the shock of a “New Pearl Harbor” can galvanize its public towards war and “imperial mobilization”.

Thus any forensic investigation into the numerous questions raised by this new “Pearl Harbor” by a committed investigative team could easily derail its shock value – how many people would they need to buy-off to keep silent? Hence the best silence is achieved by just hushing up the investigations. The use of “Pearl Harbor” as an essential catalyst in “imperial mobilization” is all documented by the imperial planners themselves. Thus the quick passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 without any debate in Congress, the quick rush to war in the guise of revenge and protecting the Homeland, the protection of the oil ministries instead of other civilian infrastructure in Iraq, all empirical evidence of collusion, mass deception, and imperial conquest. This is my rational connection of the dots. What is your view?

This phenomena of advertising one’s imperial intentions ahead of time is also not unique to America. Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf” for that reason too, and all his subsequent conquering of Europe came as a surprise! Why? Because no one chose to believe him. Here too, the empire is making its claims obvious. And I am connecting the dots for you to let you know that all of us as tax paying denizens of this empire have blood of the innocent on our hands. But you be the judge of whether these dots are properly connected, and whether or not the American public is indeed “innocent of knowledge” or deliberately just “be[ing] innocent of knowledge”!

The emperor is indeed afraid of this human frailty that comes with bloody hands. Not for himself, although he too possesses it, but for the mainstream Americans! He is holding them prisoners in the cave of deception so that they may never uncover it. I will leave it up to the reader to name this human frailty, and judge themselves accordingly upon its yardstick.*4

Extending the Empire

So now that we have launched the imperial adventure, how do we stay the course? How do we prevent the good conscionable people from rising up when they learn the truth through what will invariably leak in from foreign press and other alternate media?

Well, start curtailing civil liberties, one at a time, for if we do it all at once, people might rise up and object too loudly – much like that frog who can escape from sudden boiling water but not from gradually heated water raised to a boiling point over time. So how to curtail civil liberties in stages and present a persistent danger to enable it?

Invent a fifth column and declare a perpetual war against them. Invent the TIPS hotline and set neighbor against neighbor, creating a climate of fear and nervousness, requiring more laws to find the culprits. The media totes the line, and people go along. Machiavelli take notes!

So now we have our internal enemy to scare the people with. How about that external enemy? Don’t we need both perception of threats to successfully mobilize the public for an imperial adventure and contain dissent? For “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization is the gospel according to ZB.

Brilliant! Create an axis of evil deemed to possess such weapons of mass destruction that people would forget about their own country’s immense store of the most deadly and vile weapons of mass destruction, invent ‘fictitious facts’ and ‘fictitious linkages’ and ‘fictitious reports’ and present them to the UN Security Council and to the American public, and try to rally a ‘coalition of the coerced’ to prosecute the ‘fictitious war’ to prevent any ‘fictitious future threats’.

Now after 22 days of sustained bombing the already impoverished Iraq, a country that has lived through hellish 12 incredibly long years of devastating sanctions and bombed out industrial and civil infrastructure from the first Gulf war, no weapons of mass destruction are found. So just in case before someone is thoughtful enough to ask where are those touted and much feared Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and to find the next pretext to attack the next new country in the new axis of evil (now that Iraq has been flagged with the stars and stripes), the war Secretary Rumsfeld comes out and says “all of these weapons have been smuggled into Syria!” And the media dutifully informs us as if it has been eye witnessed by Rumsfeld himself!

How about if one alleges that all of these WMDs have been smuggled into Rumsfeld’s closet? Would the media report that? In fact there is far more evidence for looking into Rumsfeld’s closet because he was seen shaking the hands of Sadaam Hussain as far back as 1984, whereas the Syrian leadership has since 1978 been politically at loggerheads with Baghdad, ever since Sadaam came to power. They only did limited trading between 1997 – 2002 under the supervised UN’s oil for food program (source DemocracyNow), and the current Syrian president only took office in July 2000 after his predecessor died. There is no empirical evidence of collusion between the two countries, nor has any been presented as the rhetoric against Syria is ratcheted up. But evidence of course is immaterial, because the real goal is to keep making up pretexts.

The pretext to go to war on Iraq itself was as phony as a child telling a lie about the cookie jar when the crumbs are all over his clothes – except in this case it is a grown up General trying to annihilate an entire people by his deceit. Much has been written about the absence of any linkage between 9-11 and Iraq, the fake reports and fake and plagiarized evidence that the Secretary of State waved in the UN Security council that was collected from the Ph.D. thesis of a student from data 12 years old, or the aluminum tubes and what not. All put to a lie by the UN experts testimony Hans Blix et al., Scott Ritter, Dennis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, all of whom repeatedly stated that not only has Iraq been disarmed, but it does not even possess adequate means for self defense, the 12 long years of sanctions having taken its massive inhuman civilian toll. In the first 8 years of the sanctions alone, 1.2 million died, including 567,000 – 750,000 children according to the UN. When Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State was asked about the horrible price the children of Iraq were paying because of the sanctions with more than 5000 dying each month, she had remarked “we think the price is worth it. Muslim babies are worth it? And that from a Jew who cry over their own and vow never again?

Why are criminals like that not challenged in the media and are allowed to rule the ‘free world’? Why does the obsequious world watch silently? Has the entire planet been castrated? With the rise of “modernity” and the inter-linking of economies and destinies of peoples, it is far easier to annihilate and destroy than it has ever been in the history of the planet. And we call this progress of the Western civilization! Progress that is aimed at the conquest of the Orient!

See the UN reports compiled by Ramsey Clark in the children are dying – The impact of sanctions on Iraq, and look at those pictures of young babies and children, victims of the barbaric economic sanctions and DU munitions. Or hear Barbara Lubin, Executive Director of MECA (Middle East Children’s Alliance) describe her eyewitnesses account of misery and suffering visited upon the Iraqi children due to lack of simple medicines over the past 12 years! The US bombed Iraq’s entire civilian infrastructure, against the international conduct and rules of war where civilian facilities are protected from destruction. In a 1999 Wall Street Journal article,

After eight years of enforcing a no fly zone in northern [and southern] Iraq, few military targets remain. ‘We’re down to the last outhouse,’*5

Now look what Protocol 1, Part 1V, Section 1, Chapter 111, Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions 1977, to which the United States is a signatory, and hence obligated to implement according to the laws of its own Constitution, states:

Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited. It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of destroying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

So it is not enough that America is patently guilty of heinous war crimes against the civilian population of Iraq in her disingenuous attempts to contain Sadaam Hussain that she herself installed and actively supported for decades, now she maintains that a totally devastated bombed out nation is such a threat to her that it must be invaded? The sole superpower in the world that has an annual defense budget of $400 billion, ten times the size of its nearest potential challenger, is so scared that she even feels threatened by a totally devastated people? Come on, I have a bridge I would like to sell you! One of administration’s own George Tenet, the Director of CIA, testified before Congress about Iraq’s threat level to the US: almost zero, unless Iraq is attacked first. Iraq’s own neighbors repeatedly stated they are not threatened by Iraq.

But so little rational and factual discussions made it into the mainstream TV coverage, forget any follow-ups or analysis, and never mind raising the fundamental question why should Iraq be disarmed when Israel poses the larger threat in the Middle East, as testified by all its neighbors, and is known to possess ~200 – 300 nuclear weapons? The discussions on television news programs always, always revolved around “how” to attack Iraq, the pros and cons of various gee-whiz methods, and never around “why” to attack Iraq. The morality of hitting a severely and deliberately weakened opponent who did nothing to you, who cannot defend itself because you deliberately disarmed it of even its self defense capacity, and hitting with a “Shock and Awe” campaign of cruise missiles and long distance bombers on cities populated with innocent men women and children, is never raised. Have cowardice and immorality only become words in a dictionary never to be uttered? Not a word about this is to be heard from any of the champions of freedom who support this war. And war it ain’t, but a slaughter of sitting ducks, except that it is people and their properties and their histories. “Slaughter on Iraq” is a better moniker.

It is also mind boggling that the administration can be so arrogant in their power, that they don’t even want to take the time to lie properly – the US public is in their pocket, the media is in their pocket, and the world does not matter since they wield the biggest sticks. Several US policy analyst even openly argue that the UN structure is antiquated because it was made at a time when the world power was shared by the victors of WWII, and does not take the new realities of a single global superpower into account.

Hence note the exemption that US has claimed for itself from the International court of justice, any crime it commits on the world scene it is exempted from prosecution for it. Any charges, if someone may be so bold to make, have to be referred back to the US courts. How convenient that the perpetuators should try themselves!

It is all there, in black and white and color, many snippets of it sometimes even present in the mainstream media. But with no one to follow up, analyze, dissect, and assimilate the widely spread out information, provide historical context, question official assertions presented as evidence, and journalist all vying with each other to get in bed with the military for that first shot at made for TV story, and the 15 second attention span of the TV audience systematically dumbed down over the past years, the real story is quietly allowed to die away. Whereas the media was fixated by former President Clinton’s personal fantasy world with weeks of sustained sensationalistic coverage about stains on dresses, no one wants to dig into the real “fiction” being perpetuated on the entire American people, and indeed on the entire world. Michael Moore was brazen enough to point out this “world of fiction” so eloquently even in the brief 45 second Oscar acceptance speech he gave for his “Bowling for Columbine” documentary, in front of a TV audience of a billion viewers. The entire world probably cheered, but most in the audience booed him.

If the poor performance of the mainstream news media is not evidence of their direct (and not just inadvertent) collusion in orchestrating and culminating this “Slaughter on Iraq”, then I don’t know what constitutes evidence. Not only are they complicit in war crimes against the people of Iraq, but because of the fact that they are charged with a specific charter under the Constitution to monitor the centers of power in order to safe guard the proper functioning of democracy and for which they are offered the protection of free speech, they are also guilty of subverting democracy itself. Hence guilty of treasonable offense against their own nation, the people of America. This theme of their culpability permeates the book because of the singular importance of their role in a country like America, where the public is not only constitutionally empowered to make or break administrations, but has in practice demonstrated their ability to eviscerate malignant tumors from their midst when properly informed.

So now, with the media’s active connivance at not telling the true story, the State has succeeded in creating both an internal and an external threat to scare the public into rallying around the flag: “United We Stand”. Just as ZB quite candidly stated, is required to get the people in a democracy to tow the line! But you be the judge!

Wow, even ZB might not have imagined such a brilliant execution. Or did he? As cited earlier, he is known to have taken credit for the fall of the Soviet Union by “giving to the USSR its Vietnam War” in Afghanistan at the expense of devastating an entire nation without much compunction. Also see his NSC Memorandum No 46, where he argues on how and why to prevent any alliance of the blacks in America and the African nations from developing, to gain further insight into the thinking that goes behind making empires. Perhaps he might be next in line for the Nobel Peace Prize, the former President that he worked for already got his award where no one thought of asking the former President about the blood of Muslims upon his hands for signing off on “giving to the USSR its Vietnam War” in Afghanistan.

The fictitious Fifth Column: Islam under attack

Yes this also explains why all of a sudden, we see an entire sacred religion along with its billion plus followers being systematically demonized, misunderstandings perpetuated, and a climate of fear created around them. While there has always been some bias in covering Islam by the Western media, especially in the US media as documented by Edward Said in Covering Islam, there was never this vitriolic virulence that we see today. Through confluence of interests, the extreme right-wing Evangelical Christian coalition being a major backer of the Republican Party and their present influence in the White House being considerable, had one of its leaders easily come out accusing the noble prophet of Islam as a terrorist and other unmentionable name callings. No pundit in the mainstream media even raised their customary “anti-Semitic” slogans to protest this outrage that I am aware of – perhaps they are not aware that the Prophet of Islam is also a Semite! Or is it only certain kinds of anti-Semitism they are against?

And great, inflame the passions of the masses in the Muslim countries by abusing their sacred Prophet. When they take out protest processions and burn a few effigies and flags, then we can conveniently show those images on all mainstream media and label them as those “barbaric and terrorist” Muslims – and extract our PR mileage that these Muslims are not developed like us Westerners, it is okay to kill them. Nothing new here, standard US army issue for dehumanizing your enemy so that it becomes easier to tolerate and indeed perpetuate their subjugation, humiliation, and exploitation in the oldest colonial style known to man – then we incredulously ask “why do they hate us”?

There is now a sustained and deliberate attack against Islam and Muslims by the Christian far right in the US. People like Franklin Graham – who works for Reverend Dr. Marion “Pat” Robertson of the 700 club often seen on CBN television spewing out hateful messages of his own against the Muslims – openly call Islam a “very wicked and evil religion. While these bigoted Christian fanatics might believe so, and perhaps privately shared these tortuous views in the past amongst themselves, the public utterances of these derogatory islamaphobic rhetoric betray the primacy of their arrogance. Namely, that now, since they are in power in the White House controlling the reins of the world’s only superpower, let’s also redraw the religious map of the Muslims while they were redrawing their political and cultural maps, as their new found ‘la mission civilisatrice’ in a revived ‘Crusade’. The inadvertent slip of labeling this fictitious “war on terrorism” as a “Crusade” by George Bush, and one of the battle field monsters in the US military arsenal being called the “Crusader”, are telling signs of the psychology and alliances of the “civilized” barbarians unloading their white man’s burden from 20,000 feet upon the defenseless Iraq and Afghani Muslims. Franklin Graham was subsequently invited to the Pentagon to lead a Good Friday service despite strong protests from many quarters and was instead strongly endorsed by the Secretary of State Colin Powell! I am not sure why the world is tolerating this spectacle, obsequencing itself toward the new ‘Mecca’.

And now these same guys are going to Iraq to provide “humanitarian” aid to the Iraqis! In an interview on Pacifica, one of the missionaries from this group despite repeated questioning whether he would repudiate Franklin Graham’s malicious attacks on Islam, continued to dodge the question by saying how could he repudiate someone else’s statements! He further stated that their mission in Iraq was to show the people of Iraq that “God loves them” by giving the people free packets of food. This bringing “Jesus” to the ‘infidels’ effort is being headed by the Christian fundamentalist son of the famous American Evangelical icon Rev. Billy Graham who has presided over religious functions in the White House for so many American Presidents. One does not even have to exclaim: beware the Christian missionaries bearing gifts! They are in for some rude awakening. So little do they know or understand of Islam, Muslims, or the Middle East, let alone about Iraqis and their ravaged land, the cradle of human civilization. Shame!

Then there are people like Daniel Pipes who have for years argued that Muslims in America should be put under surveillance and that at least 10 – 15 percent of these Muslims of America could be potential killers! And the White House just nominated him to serve on the Board of Directors for US Peace Institute! All these guys have the tacit blessings of the government to drum up fear and hatred against the Muslims. Even the Republican Party leaders now openly betray their true sentiments. Shawn Steele, the former Chairman of California’s State Republican Party, offered perhaps the most extreme example of this. While giving a pro-war rallying speech at the University of Southern California, he stated the following which needs no further comment:

The Islamic community has a cancer growing inside of it – which hates Jews, hates freedom, and hates Western society. The disease of Islam must be rectified – it’s kill or be killed.*6

All of these atrocious statements coming from very powerful people, are again eerily reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s verbal vituperative onslaught on the Jews, followed by its actual implementation through systematic and ever increasing harassment by the Brown Shirts. Albeit I hope this will not happen here in the USA, it is possible one might find bands of vigilantes, feeling compelled to follow the guidance of their earnest leaders, physically harassing the Muslims, attacking their homes, their mosques, and their businesses. It would be laughable to imagine this would occur in the twenty first century in America, were it not so tragic that it actually is occurring, and there is no uproar in the mass media about such an assault on Islam and the Muslims. Quite reflective of course of the government’s behavior overseas. Ideological Allies! This tacit affirmation by the mainstream media of this hate mongering through their deafening silence, and should it lead to actual physical violence upon the Muslims in the USA, will be further grounds for their indictment for war crimes against their own people. Thanks to Pacifica, which is the only independent grass-roots funded public media that is courageously speaking out against fascism in America. If there was a Nobel prize for standing up to fascism, Pacifica and its programmers would be the first in line.

Why are Muslims under attack?

Let’s return to the favorite question of this essay, the ‘why’, and ask, why is this happening to the Muslims in the US at this time, and why now? The malevolence for Islam in the hearts of the bigoted fanatics is nothing new. Then why all of a sudden is it finding this virulent expression? Doesn’t the US already have its hands full with battles of conquest overseas? Commonsense would dictate that they should not take on domestic problems at the same time. Furthermore, ZB’s framework has nothing to do with religion, it is all about resource, economic, and political hegemony. So why target the entire 6 – 8 million Muslims living peacefully in this country and make them objects of FBI investigations, map out their mosques, interview their members, monitor their communications and their finances, take down their credit card numbers, examine their wallets upon exit and ingress into the country, and who knows what else they are doing? Perhaps the government is thinking, that surely the Muslims have the motive, aren’t we bombing their people, they will react and do something criminal and terroristic, and we have to protect the good people of the United States?

First of all, there is an adequate statistical sampling of terrorists and criminals in every ethnic group in America, including the majority, their most infamous one being Tim McVeigh. What about Alqaeeda, maybe some of them are really hiding in the mosque? If they were, the government would know exactly who they are and what their phone number and SS numbers is, because remember they trained them. The testimony provided by an ex. US official of the US embassy in Riyadh Saudi Arabia is quite telling. I heard him on Pacifica, describing how he was a visa officer and he would get these strange type of people applying for US visas in Saudi Arabia, from all different parts of the Arab world. Upon being asked the usual questions why they wanted to visit America, they would say strange things like: to attend a technical conference, and upon further inquiry have no clue about that subject area. So he would reject their visa application. Having rejected one too many visas, he was called up before his superiors and told to give out the visas regardless! So he issued the same people US visas the next time they visited, after already having rejected them the first time as dubious customers! Later he figured out these were the CIA operatives recruited from around the world and trained in the US for various “freedom fighting” activities. Their identities, mug shots, finger prints, dental profiles, DNA profiles, urine samples etc. are probably all on record with the government. It was reported that the CIA/FBI even had an informant working within the inner circles of the hijackers of 9/11 for what that’s worth. Suffice it to say, the government is not really looking for terrorists in the mosques any more than they are looking for them in synagogues, or churches, or temples.

Stifling activist dissent is the real reason

Okay, what is the answer? Muslims of America make a very convenient fifth column to be vigilant against, to be investigated and dug out of their mosques, requiring new laws for surveillance and new powers for security agencies. To successfully deploy this, any and all confluence of interests are being employed, including the hatred and arrogance of the ultra right-wing Christian fanatics who seek Armageddon to get closer to Jesus.

How convenient! Muzzling the dissent of the very vocal minority of brave activists, and the likes of Daniel Ellsberg that might rise up to challenge the oppression and destruction of innocent people around the world in the process of executing this American global conquest, would require some draconian measures. Why? In order to curb their civil rights and create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation so that they would not be vocal in their protests, lest they are able to successfully mobilize and dethrone the emperor! Well the persecution of the “fictitious fifth columnist” is conveniently giving the perpetuators of world conquest the much needed despotic laws to control and contain any sort of public outrage.

These oppressive laws via the USA Patriot Act 1 passed by Congress in the wake of 9/11 without any debate, and now its even more oppressive successor Patriot Act 2 waiting in the wings for an opportune time, and the concomitant erosion of civil liberties, is really intended for the rest of the US population, and not so much for any “fictitious danger” from the “fictitious fifth columnists”.

It is a preemptive strike at domestic dissent, consistent with the doctrine of preemptive strike at imperial targets abroad. Both are part of the same foreign policy agenda, as per ZB’s “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.*7

Test this hypothesis yourself. How much danger are the Muslims to the state in the prosecution of their global hegemonic plans, and how much danger are the activists? In fact, any terrorism done by any Muslim in the US would play right into the hands of the state, now wouldn’t it? But a Daniel Ellsberg or two leaking out privileged information from the “inside” like the infamous “Pentagon Papers”, that can provide concrete evidence of lying and deceit of the kind impeachments are made of, difficult to wriggle out from, can put a quick stop to the grandiose expansion plans of the state, now couldn’t it? Or a mass mobilizations against the war as witnessed during Vietnam might awaken the real sleeping giant, the good hearted but dormant public, mightn’t it? Richard Nixon, October 15, 1969, inside the White House, talking to Henry Kissinger, while a million people protesting outside the White House, briefly contemplates dropping an atomic bomb on Vietnam, but allows sanity to prevail because of his fear of what the million marchers might do to him.*8

Conclusion

When obscurantists reign supreme over the media and the academia, it isn’t too difficult to convince the unsuspecting and largely self absorbed public to go along. Is it then such a surprise that Fascism and global supremacy are linked? How many times does Mr. Joe Six-pack even see this kind of analysis discussed on the television as he sits down to watch his war video game and wave his United We Stand flag and salute the boss? There are a hundred more eloquent analyses than this, the points raised here having been raised countless time before, by distinguished academics, statesman of other countries, investigative reporters, eminent scholars, past UN weapons and humanitarian experts, at least one former US attorney General Ramsey Clark who is in fact seeking to impeach the President but with little success at the moment, and a host of other concerned citizens, military personal, and scientists. Why are they never given an opportunity to present their dissenting view points to the mainstream public on mainstream media?

The airways while being a public resource, are controlled by vast media conglomerates who decide what the public can see and not see. Why?

And why are all of these very distinguished people who dissent labeled as ‘leftist’ and dismissed? I am not a leftist or rightist or centrist or upist or downist or fundamentalist. One does not have to be an ‘ist’ to tell the truth, or not tell it. Would our alien friend on Mars concur?

Even if the dissenting voices and their analyses be entirely wrong, where is the opportunity to debate in this “war on terrorism” discourse? Let both sides argue it out publicly, each presenting their analysis and evidence to back it, and let the public decide what they want to believe.

But all we see on Sunday morning talk show rounds are moth balled generals, and the administration mouth pieces repeating the simple mantra of “weapons of mass destruction” and “fighting terrorism” and “Muslim fundamentalists” and “militant Islam” over and over again, even using so called experts who have been time and again discredited for their blatant lies, such as Steve Emerson. Uncle Goebbels, the Reichsminister for Propaganda and National Enlightenment for the Third Reich, would be proud indeed of his legacy in the up coming Fourth Reich!

William L. Shirer lays it all threadbare in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and Hitler in his own Mein Kampf explains the propaganda model and very eloquently shows how to control the sheepish masses in any society:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. … The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.*9

Only ZB said it more eloquently and succinctly: “that exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification.

Are there any similarities with what is happening today? You can go read these two voluminous books, read them side by side, as I did, and judge yourself!

Oh boy, it’s a lot of effort to dig the truth out, isn’t it? Especially for an average citizen caught in the daily grind of keeping food on the table and making ends meet. All they have time left is to turn to television to get their summary and analysis of current affairs.

But it is something the US mainstream media can so easily do with their scores of investigative resources, and tens of millions of dollars of budget, and yet they don’t. Or they can just as easily present the dissenting experts who do possess the skills and the knowledge to dismantle the fiction being perpetuated on the public, and yet they don’t.

Do you wonder why? Could the answer perhaps lie in the overarching unstated mission statement of the media?

So let’s look at the media a bit further. How does the mainstream media actually end up towing the line?

Footnotes Chapter 5

*1 See The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (191 – 195) by William Shirer.

*2 See Christopher Hitchen’s The trial of Henry Kissinger; and the seminal Pentagon Papers that Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media, as well as his recent autobiographical Secrets – A Memoir Of Vietnam And The Pentagon Papers which gives a first hand account of how senior American Government officials deliberately lied in the not too distant past during the Vietnam war, in order to glean the significance of putting Henry Kissinger in charge of truth discovery. It is indeed, only because Henry Kissinger’s own ass is on the line after Augusto Pinochet was indicted.

*3 This is an approximate quote from memory of what I heard Robert Fisk state in a speech that I attended.

*3A See for instance, Dawn November 10, 2001, interview with well known journalist Hamid Mir. It was their top headline story of the day, in which Bin Laden merely echoes the American disinformation mantra of 19 Muslim hijackers, the booga booga mantra of WMD, but does not, most interestingly, claim any responsibility for 911. Why the hell not? His crowing moment of glory, going out of his way to bring this courageous journalist to him at some secret hideout and risking it all, just to say the following? This live interview with a credible and reputed journalist, is far more credible than any ‘doctored videos’ and anonymous ‘internet statements’ attributed to him. He stated:

Hamid Mir: After American bombing on Afghanistan on Oct. 7, you told the Al-Jazeera TV that the Sept. 11 attacks had been carried out by some Muslims. How did you know they were Muslims ?

Osama bin Laden: The Americans themselves released a list of the suspects of the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that the persons named were involved in the attacks. They were all Muslims, of whom 15 belonged to Saudi Arabia, two were from the UAE and one from Egypt. According to the information I have, they were all passengers. Fateha was held for them in their homes. But America said they were hijackers.

*4 See William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment to understand the literary references here to a real human frailty once the knowledge of guilt encompasses one; see if you can still remain one of those that can sleep “holily” at night afterwards.

*5 Quoted from John Pilger’s New rulers of the world.

*6 Source: Flashpoints on Pacifica.

*7 See “CommonDreams”, “WhatReallyHappened”, and “antiwar” websites for articles of current interest including these Patriot Acts which portend an ominous police state already in the making. One does not have to believe everything one reads, and no fallible source may claim exclusive monopoly over truth – but a rational analysis based on differing viewpoints and multiple sources of information makes for an enlightened and empowered polity.

*8 Disclosed in the Nixon tapes and explained to the public by Daniel Ellsberg in a recent anti-war speech carried on Flashpoints on the Pacifica radio.

*9 Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, 180 – 181.

How does the US News Media end up towing the line?

Absence of useful dissent in the mainstream

America isn’t a totalitarian nation, the press is indeed free to print whatever it wants. If one were to deliberately ask them to not publish something or even mention censorship, they will likely go ahead and print it out of sheer indignation, because they all labor under the presumption of a free press. Then how is the American readership the most clueless in the world? How does that work? Perennial gadfly Noam Chomsky has written a lot on this subject in his “Manufacturing Consent”.*1

Here however, I am going to share with the reader my own humble and much less profound experience and observations of the American news media based on empirical reality. Some interesting aspects of its manifest coverage have already been examined in earlier chapters. This chapter briefly explains its DNA imprint as I perceive it.

The elephant in the bedroom, so to speak, that all must be able to commonsensically see and yet don’t, is the private profit-making ownership of almost all American news media by mega corporations. A national public service intended to keep the public informed as an essential pillar of its democracy entirely in the profit making hands of the ruling elite which also just happens to be part of the same “military-industrial complex” of the nation? How can that ever work when the interests of the ruling elite become aligned with those whom the news media is supposed to watchdog over?

Just as there is a theoretical separation of power into three independent branches of the Government, the same co-optation that aligns them all “United We Stand” in this fiction of “war on terrorism”, also co-opts the supposed independent public watchdogs upon the democratic process so all in the system can efficaciously “United We Stand”! Let’s see how the latter comes about so darn efficiently.

The single most visible process that enables it, is the immense consolidation of news media from several dozen just 30-50 years ago, into five dominant corporate controlled hands who are now the giant conglomerate parents of: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and FOX, along with more than 1200 local radio stations being owned by the single company: Clear Channel.

Clear Channel’s holdings amount to approx. 9% of all radio stations in America, and they are also large donors to the political parties (it is not clear if only to Republicans or also to Democrats, but invariably, most corporations, like special interest groups such as AIPAC, “payoff” both sides as evidenced by public records of their donations to election campaigns and the political aspirants obsequies before the key power-brokers of high office, wherefore, the politicians subsequently serve primarily the interests of those who paid for their ticket and who will also only do so in the future elections if the illustrious democratically elected leaders of the Republic go along in the present).

During this “war on terrorism”, in response to grass-roots antiwar protests erupting all across America, Clear Channel organized pro war rallies and sent its reporters to cover these support marches as news, giving all new meaning to “manufacturing news” (see the movie 1984 for a reminder).

It used to be “manufacturing consent” through subtle power pyramid structures of ownership and cross pollination of corporate interests where the board of directors of the TV news corp., the printed press, and the magazines, may all have had many common members or common parent corporate ownership that disproportionately increased the influence of like minded people controlling the mass media and thus enabling the preclusion of dissent in a self censorship sort of way, as perhaps the erudite academic pundits might argue, is now evolved to the next step up to active synthesis of “news”.

The biggest beneficiaries of the pending FCC ruling to approve further news media mergers – whose chairman, Michael Powell, is the industrious son of US Secretary of State Colin Powell – will be FOX and Clear Channel. And perhaps you might have noticed that the biggest cheerleader for this “war on terrorism” is also FOX TV news, with the others not too far behind! Despite public uproar in opposition to further privatization and consolidation of public airwaves, the White House is adamant that it should pass.

Please reflect on why this is being pushed so hard. What happens when the news media, the essential watch dogs for the proper functioning of a “populist democracy”, is not only held in the cheer leading profit making hands of corporations that are an integral part of the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned us about, but also in very few corporate hands. Essentially a state run media without the need for a totalitarian system? You can judge for yourself too!

The media barons are really a key part of the same military industrial complex whose surplus power needs exuding into the rest of the world. The latter has been demonstrated in the earlier chapters in the words of the hectoring hegemons themselves. Well, the media turns out to be a part of the same infrastructure. Thus it isn’t just a coincidence that the parent companies of the mainstream media giants are also defense and military equipment contractor super-giants. It is not necessary that the chief editor or lead anchor be told what to do. He or she automatically knows what to do! Or else they would not have been in those positions!

Dan Rather, the distinguished news anchor of CBS for over 40 years, is a living empirical proof of this statement. He openly admitted the fear of being “neck-laced”, and golden silence as “patriotism” (as asking the commonsensical questions he conscionably wished to ask in order to perform his duty as a journalist would have been “unpatriotic”). *2

How about all those other honest reporters who put their lives on the line to cover the war, and who are not so cowardly or so easily co-opted by board rooms and million dollar salaries?

The military quite wised up to the power of battle field reporting after the Vietnam War, the images and reporting of by a few courageous journalists were a crucial galvanizer of the anti war movement that ultimately brought a halt to that ideological atrocity. Hear Daniel Ellsberg speak of the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon White House and you might also wonder, as Ellsberg did recently in an antiwar speech, whether there are similar scenes being played out in the current Bush White House as they were in the Nixon White House not too long ago?*3

Hence now we have the Pentagon invention of directly “embedded” news media whose access to the battle field is strictly controlled by the military. This does not need any further elaboration, as the “reporter pools” and “embedded reporters” are self describing. Talk of a cozy relationship. So we don’t get to see either the body bags, nor the death and destruction of the “fictitious” enemy, nor the blood of the real civilians, real peoples, real men, women, children, babies, and wedding parties. Much easier now than it was in the Vietnam war era where the sights and sounds of war had become uncontrolled through independent reporters!

To understand the mindset of the types of journalists who willingly become party to the “reporter pools” and become “embedded” pentagon stenographers (EPS), the testimony of a non-embedded US journalist who reported from Iraq is very telling.

May Ying Welch, an independent reporter and videographer, upon her return from Baghdad after the fighting had ended, stated the following in an interview that I heard on Pacifica: She had gone with an embedded reporter on a visit to the local hospital in Baghdad. The embedded reporter was wearing the army fatigues even though the fighting had ended for at least three days. In the hospital, he seemed the least bit interested in the visible agonies and the heart wrenching stories of the women and children in the hospital, all suffering from the “Shock and Awe” gift from the US Secretary of State. He suddenly seemed to latch onto a small baby who was born the day the American army entered Baghdad. While there, some bombs went off outside and the windows shattered, and the mother of that new baby started screaming uncontrollably.

The reporter looked startled as he had for the first time it seems, witnessed from the inside, the hell being experienced by the citizens of Iraq, and this was just the tiniest exposure as the major war had already ended. But he soon seemed to get over it, and not a word of anything he saw in that hospital made it into his article which he solely focussed on the first liberation baby of Iraq, a fluff piece for the US mainstream public consumption. Later May Ying Welch saw him riding atop a an American tank in the streets of Baghdad, and when he saw her, he waved at her and shouted: “welcome to my country” in harmonic resonance with the inadvertent moment of truth from Tom Brokaw, the earnest news anchor at NBC when he candidly let it slip ~“one of the things we don’t want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we will own that country.

I will leave the analysis of this story to the intelligence of the astute reader, who having made it this far in this long essay, must surely possess a fair degree of critical thinking skills to be able to judge the value of such “journalism” to the expanding empire as their own private eagerly willing and obliging spokespersons!

Well what about the independent and foreign reporters, won’t they let the cat out of the bag? These guys have been a real nuisance for the military. How dare they show coverage of death and destruction, of civilian casualties, of US POWs, and hurt the sensibilities of the American audience and interfere with the war effort? Well just bomb and kill them in cold blood and make an example of them. On April 8, 2003, the Al-Jazeera and AbuDhabi TV reporters in Baghdad were bombed by the US military, killing 3 foreign reporters and shutting off their TV coverage. The description of how it occurred is again quite telling.

The entire world is condemning it as a deliberate act of murder for the purpose of intimidating journalists to stop reporting the truth. But the coverage in the US is the usual denial, that the military responded in self defense as someone was shooting at them from inside, whereas all foreign eye witness accounts testify that this was not the case, and the US military very well knew who was inside the buildings because they had been given the information ahead of time.

In fact the exact GPS coordinates had been provided to the commanding US officers in triplicate by the head of Al-Jazeera for the static building location of its reporters, and the AbuDhabi TV station had very large visibly marked signs on its walls and on its roof that we are journalists. After their experience in Kabul, they had perhaps felt that this might protect them from the American missiles. Those very same coordinates were later hit to the utmost guilt and horror of the senior staff who had provided this information to the US army. But the erstwhile guests on NPR (some say it is National Pentagon Radio while others suggest that the acronym stands for National Public radio) argued that the reporters knew that it was a war zone, and hence their death was a calculated risk that they took – not our fault. This is what the US public is seeing and hearing.

Is this an isolated incidence? Al-Jazeera TV was bombed 3 times in Kabul. Oh the precision guided weapons aren’t so precise after all? 10 land in Iran, several in Syria, and of the more than 12000 missiles and rockets and bombs dropped on Iraq, how many hit Sadaam? How many innocent people were maimed and killed, and civilian homes and infrastructure destroyed by the “Shock and Awe” bombings? And who is reporting this? Al-Jazeera of course.

Similarly, of the 224000 similar munitions dropped on Afghanistan, more than 50% missed their targets. Did they even get the “Osama Bin Laden” or “Mulla Omar”? How many innocent civilians paid the price in the destruction of their nation, their homes, their children, their wedding parties, their environment polluted for billions of years from Depleted Uranium which the US has no plans to cleanup? And even if they tried, they could not clean it up, nor ever bring back the pre-1991 Iraq despite all their claims of reconstruction, which is another way for their corporate interests to make money from Iraqi oil. Who showed this devastation? Al-Jazeera did. The whole world saw it. Except the Americans!

Let’s digress briefly to look for Sadaam’s body, the only man who supposedly inhabited Iraq given the fury of the indiscriminate bombings in the hope that one of the precision guided bombs might get him. Where is he? There is speculation that perhaps Sadaam cut a deal with the US and was squirreled away somewhere, perhaps into Russia with the last departing Russian convoy. The US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Moscow just days before Baghdad fell bespeaks of the Baathist mercifully having cut a secret deal with the Americans that surely prevented the massive civilian casualties that were expected by the US war planners if it got down to street fighting in Baghdad. How else would the heavily defended Baghdad collapse so suddenly without a major fight, when other cities, even the lowly Om Qasr, put up such a spirited defense?

It should not surprise anyone if many members of the old Baathist regime resurface in a new uniform to regain their effective control of the Iraqi population, this time in the service of their new masters! Impossible? The history of United States weapons program after the end of WWII is an undeniable testimony of it, where many of the Nazi scientists were gainfully re-employed in the service of the victors to continue making their killing machines. This is where their now famous remark comes from: ~“our job is to send it up, what do we care where it comes down”! The Japanese soldiers after the surrender of Japan in WWII were also re-employed by the victorious Allies to quell the native rebellions for independence in some Asian territories that the Japanese military had been familiar with during their rampage and plunder of that region. “[D]eal in straight power concepts” as George Kennan had advocated in 1948. America today is doing just that.

Bombing the journalists and disrupting their coverage is an essential part of this war effort. Another example of preventing the truth from leaking out, is when on April 14, 2003, large demonstrations broke out in Nassiriya protesting the US convening its “invitation only” conference for deciding on the future leadership of Iraq under the auspices of General J. Garner, with crowds chanting “No to Sadaam, No to US”, the US military tried to stop the TV reporters from filming the protests, as reported on Pacifica. Geez, why should they try to stop a free press? As of April 15, 2003, 13 journalists had been killed in Iraq, as reported by Amy Goodman. Or perhaps Pacifica, Al-Jazeera, and all the other foreign and independent correspondents only report lies and misrepresentations? You be the judge!

With this kind of fear and intimidation campaign through the killing of the independent and foreign reporters on the front-line, few may dare to venture. But some still do. May Ying Welch and Robert Fisk, the Indy media, and many others from several different countries, all bearing witness to the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in our names. However, ZB’s fear of mass media spilling the guts on television and encouraging democracy to take action, has indeed been mitigated to a certain extent, at least for the moment. Occasional truth may still leak out here and there, but the well trained audience with a child’s attention span can take care of it with some assistance from the media spin doctors.

A case for indicting the news media for treason

It would be interesting to hear what the distinguished TV anchors and other ‘star’ mainstream American media and press personalities like: Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel, Jim Leherer, Barbara Walters, Charlie Rose, Tim Russert, Cokie Roberts, and many others like them would have to say about this analysis.

When trying to refute it, as they should indeed try, or else they must accept it and resign – “times up” as Michael Moore might say, would they think of their colleague and mentor I.F. Stone, who taught journalists the importance of questioning powerful governments, by always assuming they lied and having them prove they were telling the truth, rather than the reverse we see now?

Or would they think of one of their own respected colleagues from the New York Times, Chris Hedges, explain in his autobiographical musings “War is a Force that gives us Meaning”, the horrors and depravation of war that leaves everyone a ravaged victim, both soldier and civilian, that there is no clean surgical war, that war in the modern times indeed cannot be, and must not be fought, because the overwhelming majority of its victims have been, and will always be, the innocent civilians?

Or would they continue to fear being neck-laced with burning tires of lack of patriotism put around their necks and think only of their million dollar careers?

Perhaps there ought to be a reckoning day for the press and media too!

The good people of the press and television media, those who are chartered with the responsibility of keeping the citizenry informed, and to allow them to do this unhindered, they have been given the explicit protection of “freedom of the press” in the constitution, what should be their punishment when they fail to do their jobs? Their deliberate or contrived silence from monitoring the centers of power, and thus contributing to the death and destruction of millions that they could have put a stop to had they reported honestly to the public, is inexcusable – because the functioning of a populist democracy fundamentally relies on the watchful eyes of the press. Ask any constitutional or political science expert and he will agree.

Then if it can be proven in a court of law that the news media has shirked it’s responsibilities – either through fear and intimidation, cowardice, greed, or simply ignorance, all being equivalent because there can be no excuse for “I did not know” when they could have known – wouldn’t that prove that they have willfully subverted democracy?

Isn’t that a treasonable offense for a US citizen? Perhaps the USA Patriot Act might get invoked here? Why should this be any different than John Walker Lindh’s case?

One fought against his own government, the other fights against their own peoples!

Should the members of the press and news media be brought before war crimes tribunal for the crime of deliberately keeping the good public misinformed, especially in times of war, that allowed further war crimes to be perpetuated on innocent civilians? Who would preside over such a trial? Perhaps a civil or class action law suit in US federal courts against all US embedded journalists might be a good place to start, because the evidence incriminating them is readily available. The defendants would have to prove that they were following orders, as otherwise they would surely hang by default as the evidence against them speaks volumes.

And thus we can see how their superiors could be roped in as those who issued the orders, until we reach the Pentagon, and the White House. Did Al Capone pay for his murders or for his tax evasions? In either case, he sat his life out in jail!

Where are the strategists for peace and justice? It is indeed a grand chessboard similar to ZB’s, only the prizes are different. Both require looking ahead many moves, and employing both strategies and tactics to gain control of the ever evolving and changing Chessboard.

But you be the judge! Being a judge however does entail passing judgment you know – sooner or later.

Sigh! Whence the day of reckoning? When people wake up and charge the gates of Bastille!

So now we arrive at the next stage in this analysis – wake up strategies. How to empower the sleeping public and have the proverbial pawns finally gain control of the entire Chessboard?

Footnotes Chapter 6

*1 See Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, co-authored with Ed Herman.

*2 See pages 95-96 of Best Democracy Money can Buy by Greg Palast.

*3 See Daniel Ellsberg’s autobiographical account of those war years in his new book Secrets – A Memoir Of Vietnam And The Pentagon Papers. I had the privilege of meeting this courageous gadfly and talking to him about the “war on terror”. He graciously signed my first edition copy of his book and dedicated it to my kids upon my request! He unfortunately never got the time to review an earlier manuscript of this humble book that I gave him in exchange. See Chapter 8 for more on our interaction.

Resistance to Empire – New Directions

American Grass-Roots and the causes of its dismal failure

Okay so now we understand all this empire building, you might say. We know we are screwed as a people, not just of the United States, but the whole world. Now what? Weren’t revolutions phased out in the last century?

We witness that the entire world is impotent, unable to standup to the hectoring hegemons in Washington, either through direct intimidation, or through confluence of political self-interests, or through some expectations of sharing in the leftover crumbs from the spoils of war after the lions share is taken by the American corporate interests.

While there have been large protests both within and outside the United States, and the overwhelming world opinion is antiwar, these have had absolutely no impact on the devastation suffered first by Afghanistan and now Iraq, and more is to come.

Fortunately, the key to deflating and taming this bestial desire for world conquest of the hectoring hegemons – the secret sauce to the recipe so to speak – also lies within the belly of the beast.

To the first order, it is access to the US public opinion through access to the mass media. Is this a truism?

The same public who is presently rallying around the flag supporting the President, supporting the troops, saluting ‘my country right or wrong’, is an untapped vast pool of protesters just waiting to be galvanized into action, if only their chains can be made visible to them. It would present a nonlinear mobilization of protesters as within a month, the streets could be jammed with 50 – 70 million people angrily demanding the impeachment of their leaders, and even marching on the White House. The only way to reach them is to let them see the images, hear the voices, and shock and awe them with the naked truth of death, destruction, plundering, profiteering, corruption, and how the emperor was throned. The same model that brings them rallying to the flag ala ZB’s threat perception and danger to “domestic well-being”, can be used to turn the tide against the monumentally criminal occupiers of the White House.

If we believe ZB that “democracy” is indeed “inimical to imperial mobilization”, then we have to turn to mass media to prevent such mobilizations. It is not sufficient to simply analyze and criticize the media, and then walk away expressing our inaccessibility to them. Rather, such analysis must be used to arm ourselves with understanding, perspective, insight, and new thinking “outside the box” so that we may perhaps exploit their own strengths for our purposes. It’s the Aikido and Judo principles of self-defense!

The antiwar protagonists should not fool themselves by comparing the US antiwar mobilization with the world wide antiwar mobilization and pet themselves on the back just because they got a few million mobilized before the first bombs fell. In fact the mobilization dropped after the bombs started dropping! As if what is happening in Iraq now, and the profiteering, corporate globalization, and the election scam that brought them to power in the first place are not wars. In the rest of the world, the grass roots effort has brought out far more numbers than anywhere in the US.

For President Bush to respond to the antiwar protests by saying:

It’s like deciding – well I am going to decide policy based upon a focus group

is not so surprising. If you think about it, the requirement of the task was 10s of million to march in the streets of America to effect policy. Falling far short of that, what is it but a focus group? At no time did the maximum size of protest in America even reach 1% of its population – even taking the average of estimates. About 2 million reportedly came out in Italy alone. The fact that 10 to 11 million marched on 15 February 2003 on five continents throughout the world was a good thing (We were part of that historic march), and perhaps a record for mass mobilization on a global scale for one common cause. But the fact that it was mostly outside America was its impotency. This I believe is one of the biggest problems facing grass-roots resistance in America. I do not believe that this is still very well understood as everyone congratulates each other on the size of the turnout. So what? It still was not big enough to get the job done. As I always teach my own kids, “good effort” was good in elementary school, in high school “it’s only the results that count”, and in Olympics “only the gold counts”. Is what we are facing anything less than Olympics?

The main reason US antiwar protests sizes were smaller than in other countries is that their public are not shackled in the invisible chains like the Americans are. The ultimate goal is to stop the global conquest now, not to build a movement that slowly ramps up until we are in the tenth war that they are stopped – they will stop by then anyway because they would have done their deed, and all this may take less than a year to accomplish! Of course this isn’t a soccer game, we lost this match, but we will win the next one, but using this as a metaphor, we must think we are in the World Cup finals today and there are no other matches, and we have to win right now. It is the life and death struggle. To say that people marching in the streets in America despite its climate of repression are as brave as those children taking the bullets in their heads in Palestine or babies born without eyes and limbs in Iraq due to depleted Uranium, is to belittle the suffering of those on whose behalf these protests are undertaken. There is nothing to clap about. We have to awaken the other superpower right now, break its invisible shackles now, and stop the emperor now, legitimately, using the constitutional tools of Bill of Rights, before they all get taken away by the Patriot Acts!

The government is marching very quickly and very strategically to contain the only other power that the emperor really fears! The 350 plus page Patriot Act 1 document did not just come about overnight, any more than ZB’s framework of global conquest just magically materialized from thin air. It was introduced within a month of 9/11, and approved hastily by Congress in October 2001 without any debate. Nor did the 60 plus pages of the clandestine Patriot Act 2 come about in response to any real developments in this fictitious “war on terror”. This is the most insidious piece of proposed legislation, that if passed, will strip a United States citizen of their citizenship, even when born in this country, if they are found to have contributed to any organization that the Justice department has labeled terrorist!

This is at least three orders of magnitude more perverse than Senator Joseph McCarthy ever dreamed he could be, and to my knowledge has never been done in any modern nation regardless of how despotic it might have been. It was mercifully leaked to the press as it was being circulated in the inner power sanctums of Congress, the majority of its members only hearing about it after it was leaked, and that was the same day that the nation went to “Orange Alert” or whatever is that next color level designating impending threat. A threat from whom, the patriot within? Given the speed of this oncoming juggernaut, how can the antiwar protagonist simply contend with it as “growing a movement”? Can you hear the “Jewish voices for peace” or “International ANSWER”, two of the many active antiwar organizations being labeled terrorist in the near future? How many will continue to work in it?

That is the only purpose behind all the Americans forfeiting their civil liberties with these insidious new laws – for the sake of keeping in check the very few who will invariably always dare to raise their heads in genuine patriotic protest. The only thing unpredictable about them is one never knows how contagious they might become and how quickly the “disease” might spread – as it did during Vietnam, where it took years after President Kennedy first initiated the reign of terror on ideological grounds, to reach its climax during the Nixon second term. The Pentagon and all the Zionist think tanks lining the streets of Washington D.C. witnessed it too as evidenced in ZB’s book itself. Restating his earlier quote from Chapter 1:

Public opinion polls suggest that only a small minority (13 percent) of Americans favor the proposition that ‘as the sole remaining superpower, the US should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems’. … Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. …. More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification. … Mass communications have been playing a particularly important role in that regard, generating a strong revulsion against any selective use of force that entails even low levels of casualties.

What we see today is nothing but Machiavelli 101 updated for epoch – I don’t understand why people don’t just see it immediately? And those who do see it, why don’t they realize the implication that they have very little time to mobilize at the grass-roots as the barrier to such mobilization is continually going up?

Look at Iraq, despite the overt despotism of decades by its murderous ruler, its people could not do anything, while at least 99% of them were fully aware of his misdeeds, and the majority opposed him. Do the people in the United States think that the Homeland security department consolidating all the security functions under one umbrella is going to be qualitatively different in its logical conclusion from the Baath party security apparatus in its ability to curb dissent and any opposition to the regime? In fact, it will be worse in this country, because the American public is already Prisoners of the Cave! This country is now becoming the new Germany, except that there is no rival of it. Indeed, in 1936, Hitler also consolidated its police functions for the first time in German history as a prelude to the Nazi police state. Just as ZB believes that the window of opportunity for the US to exercise its hegemony is limited to 30 or 40 years, the window of opportunity for their domestic detractors is also limited to before the next presidential election of 2004, and perhaps a lot sooner!

The linear paradigm of the “Vietnam protest model” of grass-roots mobilization, is very tactical, and seems to require a very long time constant to reach critical mass in a society that is invisibly chained. I do not believe that for the realities of warfare today, this fictitious “war on terrorism” can be fought by tactical grass roots activities alone in the US. The relatively short duration of intense “Shock and Awe” high tech campaigns from the air, with very few US casualties, as opposed to the years of sustained bombing of Vietnam with thousands of young Americans coming back in body bags, which was the main catalyst for the success of the antiwar movement at the time, limits the effectiveness of grass roots.

Note that only after millions died in Vietnam and tens of thousands of US casualties, did it stop the war. Plus its focus of antiwar implies it is activated only when the actual physical combatants are facing off in the battle field. And that is how it is presently implemented. The problem is not just in the battlefield, it is the global conquest, of which war is only a component, the others are being played out behind the scenes, off the radar screen, in corporate board rooms, around oil wells, in election voting machines, in the children wards in Iraqi hospitals, and in wreaked civilizations. What price empire? In his book Is there no other way? – The Search for Nonviolent Future, Nagler discusses some thought provoking ideas on how nonviolence as a society value system and as an all encompassing philosophy can end wars. While perhaps something the Americans as a society may aspire towards in the long long run, the realities on the ground are quite compelling and demand an immediate call to pragmatic action now.

New Directions in Resisting Empire

Immediate Challenges

The short to medium term requirements are obvious. It is to reach the comatose and hibernating peoples of the United States right now. I believe it can only be done through television and other mass media outlets. In order to win this war, the protagonist have to commandeer access to the mass media. There is no other solution. Below is one direction to pursue. There might be other approaches as well.

Buy time slots on prime-time and local television channels to run infomercials

Air professionally made infomercials on prime-time television every day. Air them on major networks, as well as in local markets, in prime time slots, as well as late night slots and day time slots. Feature the prominent voices of dissent, along with a host of other poets, artists, and scholars. Include footage from Al-Jazeera and AbuDhabi TV. Use Tony Robbins and Bose Infomercials to gain an understanding of the professionalism that is needed to execute this. It cannot be just a simple intellectual conversation with some prominent but platitudinous gadfly, like Noam Chomsky as in “Power and Terror” for instance, which only an ardent fan can sit through and ends up preaching only to the converted! It must be made as engaging to the ordinary mainstream public as “Bowling for Columbine” was.

Get prominent Hollywood producers and directors to make them. Seek professional media advice and consultation on how to best market truth. What a society this has become, that truth now has to be packaged and marketed like diapers before the public will buy it!

Think like a business man for generating big bucks needed to finance the above

Preach to the influential and rich millionaires to get them to see their invisible chains too. Not all of them are greedy oil barons, they are people just like you and me, except with a lot of money that can fill the coffers of a “peace and justice fund” for a non linear amplification of the message. Develop business plans and talk to investors. Think of this cause as a product that needs selling, and the ROI being good conscience, freedom from chains. This is what the Christian Evangelist do all the time on TV, as they seek to collect donations to relocate more Russian Jews to Palestine.

Targeted infomercials that attract donations from different segments of society by targeted marketing is a known art form today. Seek out big donors including foreign donors.

Pose legal challenges and force legal battles all the way to the Supreme court

When the corporate media will fight back refusing to air the infomercials, sue them in federal and state courts, simultaneous and multi-fold law suits, making the cost of not airing the infomercials very high. So high in fact that for their short term profit horizons, they will rather not enter into the ideological war. So the first point here would be to win by making the cost high and to stay on the airwaves continually staying in touch with the public. But more strategically, force a legal battle that can perhaps eventually lead to freeing up the air waves from the clutches of corporations, and the making of new laws for media ownership that will entirely serve the primary function of the news media as a watchdog for democracy!

Employ the best legal minds in the country just like Microsoft does when it fights the government.

Win over influential high profile individuals for nonlinear amplification

Focus on specific media individuals and get them to see their chains. Though it may take a gestalt shift to get them to jeopardize their big bucks careers, use any means necessary to motivate them. Target day time talk show hosts, late night comedy hosts, etc. Yes it is true that the higher ups make the decisions, but if the person in front of the camera the American public sees everyday and in many cases love, can be made to break their chains, things can happen. Conscience can be a wonderful ally and we see this occur all the time. Just recently, a high ranking diplomatic staff member from the US mission in Greece resigned, stating reasons of conscience. What would it take to make Dan Rather break his chains now that he has seen them?

It may be my naiveté of the realities of American mainstream media control that perhaps leads me to think of the nonlinear approach of using the system against itself. Having seen my kids practice martial arts for the past six or seven years, I am inclined to believe that using the opponents strength against them isn’t just an invention for self defense in rice patti fields. I think it is possible to overcome the media hegemony. It’s all in the execution and the skillfulness of the combatants, as any martial arts demonstration will inform us. I refuse to accept the premise that rich and influential cannot be made into allies for peace and justice, if nothing else, then at least allies of convenience. If the Crusading Christians can work together with the Zionist Jews in an alliance of diabolical convenience against the Muslims, why can’t the grass-roots work with the rich and famous to break into the media monopoly? Why can’t Bill Gates or George Soros or some Arab prince, be convinced to set up a Television channel like Al-Jazeera in America? If there can be a CBN, why can’t there be a GBN (Grass-roots Broadcasting Network)?

The “person-hood” of the corporations that gives them the tremendous influence with the law makers can itself be used for the purpose of peddling a different message too. I think that in this battle, one is only limited by one’s imagination.

Longer term Challenges

If this immediate battle is ever won, the protagonists in the future have to begin thinking like the deep Neocon strategic thinkers in Washington, with 5, 10, 20, 50 year domestic and global strategic horizons. They have to attack the source of the disease, not just its symptoms. The main ideas developed in this essay revolve around control of mass media and the influence of corporations on US foreign and domestic policy. I believe these are the twain root godheads of all subsequent tyranny at the hands of the United States, both domestic and international. The protagonists need to focus their energies on these two genetic roots instead of wasting their time and resources on all the leaves and branches:

I.1: Wrestle control of mass media public airwaves away from the for-profit corporations;

I.2: News Media as an independent public service serving only the interests of the peoples of the Republic is as important as the independent judiciary serving only their own judicial charter and remaining apolitical

Many evils are simultaneously mitigated by focussing on the airwaves and the rights to populate it with any content along with the concomitant social responsibilities that must accompany it. A legislative focus on amending the FCC licensing requirements for broadcasting on all frequency bands in America if made pre-conditioned upon x-hours/week of gratis community service, of which an equal amount is apportioned to all campaigning for office – from local to presidential candidates – easily solves the boondoggle of campaign financing, equitably reaching the “populist democracy” constituency by all candidates, and perhaps even efficaciously seeing a third party in the White House because of it without needing deep pockets and co-optation to the king-makers with their ‘suitcase full of cash’!

Thus either work on new laws to prevent ownership of the media by the military-industrial complex that ends up co-opting the watchdog function when the ‘dog’ has to watch its own owners to prevent a crime, or make judicious and strategically well thought out amendments to existing laws that can potentially have non-linear paybacks. This has to be fought in the courts, in the legislature, and along multiple simultaneous imaginative fronts, from suing the individual journalist for treason against the state, to their parent corporations on provocative grounds, to populating the election campaigns and offices of Congressional leaders with justice minded staffers and student interns who can seed such thoughts and advocacy in the election campaigns and endeavor to make it part of the political platforms.

This battle cannot be fought in the legislature alone exclusively, as the legislature is complicit with the corporations and special interests, and entirely co-opted by the hands that put them there thus posing a general bootstrapping problem. Well, as a society that is relatively advanced in the high-tech principles of engineering and technology, bootstrapping problems are usually solved going ‘out-of-band’ and thinking creatively ‘out-of-the-box’. Thus noting that while there is an ‘incestuously self-reinforcing’ system at play in the legislature, the judiciary is relatively immune, except perhaps through common ideological alignment of having been appointed by Republican or Democrat Presidents. But I dare think that this argument of ideological sympathy is a red herring and entirely specious (see below). This battle can be seeded in the courts for the most efficacious approach to genuine and peaceable transformation in the laws of the land! It does however require strategic thinking and a penetrating focus in the babysteps needed to get there. Big staid money can only be co-opted through big thinking and egregious surprises.

Also important in the longer term, and perhaps more importantly, the ability to efficaciously monitor the watchdogs themselves, that they are honoring their Charter awarded them by the Constitution as the fourth pillar of Democracy, is required. And beyond just monitoring, to also hold them publicly accountable via some tangible ‘detriments’, or ‘punishments’ if you will, that is commensurate with the grave national responsibility and charter that the watchdogs hold. Grass-roots Organizations like “If Americans Knew” are already monitoring the biased coverage of various local and national newspapers on the subject of Palestine-Israel with compiled statistics and data up the wazoo, and yet so what? It has had zero efficacy in its impact in making any change in the coverage. All efforts that lead to zero measurable and impacting change in the behavior of those being monitored is a waste of time. I am sorry for being less than impressed by all the gut-feel induced ‘good efforts’ that actually end up leading nowhere! Monitoring without teeth is as useless as a whittle-less tooth brush!

Sooner one recognizes the importance of the hard-core engineering principle of ‘efficacy of effort’ to produce real working and useful systems with measurable utility and not just merely ‘laudable good effort’ that produce absolutely nothing except perhaps the ‘stroking of the ego’, and sooner it is employed as a principle for social reconstruction and for inducing measurable change, sooner will we begin to see genuine transformation occurring.

Thus in the final analysis, in the absence of such monitoring efficacy, it makes no difference to the news organizations because ultimately, they are not accountable to the American public. There seems to be no current mechanism available to make them accountable, for they can eventually always hide under the umbrella of “freedom of the press” as they conceive it, and when even their antagonists attempting to hold them to account haven’t quite understood what that means, such monitoring becomes a moot point.

The first phase in this long term agenda of responsibly reclaiming the airwaves as a public commons and as an efficacious watchdogs on the corridors of power in order to make a “populist democracy” work, is to initially focus on mechanisms like the aforementioned strategic battle fronts before the judiciary to get the communication and broadcasting laws re-crafted.

The ‘accountability of the watchdog’ aspect however is a much more theoretical debate that will necessitate amendments to the Constitutional framework itself, much like the system of checks and balances that supposedly exists for the other three pillars of Democracy. Without such a system, just relying on the voluntary good judgment of the media to execute their charter is as meaningless as expecting the President of the United States to make fair decisions without any checks and balances imposed upon the office. And this is even required after the President is actually publicly sworn in, for executing the Constitutional Charter faithfully. Whereas there is no such swearing in before the public for the newsmen for faithfully executing their own Constitutional Charter. And we can see how efficacious such ‘swearing in’ is for keeping the President reined!

Thus note that not having for-profit corporate ownership, or having the right set of laws and formalisms on the books to permit open airwaves, by themselves do not solve the problems of accountability. Accountability requires a ‘closed system’ of checks-and-balances, not an ‘open-loop system’ that has no ‘modulating feedback control’ (borrowing geek speak from principles of engineering). This aspect is something that the Constitutional scholars are more competent to get their teeth into than the ordinary activist given to street demonstrations. However, without these courageous activists leading the public demand for such Constitutional accountability to be created, even in the streets if necessary, nothing will transpire.

Note that there is a fundamental difference between the independence of the judiciary, and independence of the journalist. Anyone can be a journalist. Even I claim to be one (amateurish, investigative, not affiliated with anyone – i.e. independent). If I ever choose to get formally employed in the news media and get an official business card, I become a bona fide “professional journalist” overnight as far as the world is concerned. Whereas a judge obviously is under much more scrutiny, has many more legal and academic requirements even to become a judge, and when he or she comes up for confirmation to higher benches, there is even Congressional scrutiny and affirmation or denial of recommendations for appointments by the legislative body (that is itself presumably elected by much scrutiny by the polity). Thus at least in theory, the governing structure that selects judges enables much pruning along the way – which is both good and bad of course. But just as being a qualified and certified doctor in the medical profession is mandatory over the theoretical abstraction of allowing any quack to practice medicine on unsuspecting patients, the judge’s profession has that structure that lends them much credibility for both competence in their profession, as well as independence from external pressures and manipulations. The structure enables them to solely adjudicate based on their conscience by virtue of guaranteed appointments where they don’t have to worry about where the next meal is going to come from if they go against the grain. In America, it is non-trivial to co-opt a judge, or the judiciary in general.

There is nothing like that for the media. Just about anyone can own and operate a news organization given sufficient funds – that is more a criteria than any academic or intellectual prowess, or self-asserted claims to integrity, morality, or competence. The morality for the news organization is entirely defined by the morality and world views of the owners of the news organization. If a journalist or reporter does not fall within the broad purview of the imperatives that fall out from such morality, they cannot survive very long in that news organization, or make a great deal of impact even when they do limp along. The freedom of the press is defined by those who own it – only the New York Times is honest enough to openly proclaim it in every edition of their newspaper in the upper left hand corner of the front page: “All the News That’s fit to Print”. Its editorial staff, itself carefully chosen by the Corporation, entirely determines what’s fit to print. But in reality, this is true the world over, whether it be for Al-Jazeera Television, corporate funded Public Television like the PBS, Government funded public news organization like the BBC, or the grass-roots publicly managed non-corporate network of Pacifica and its affiliates throughout the United States of America. Indeed, there is even less scrutiny in the grass-roots organizations – for it is by definition funded and managed by ordinary peoples from the public, whereby its ‘plebeian democracy’ defines their morality. One ought not to forget that it was indeed just such a public morality that also killed Socrates. These observations are not a critique, only statements of truisms that are open for all to see.

The word “independence” also bears more specific definition. In this context, as we compare it to the judiciary to claim the independence of the press to be the fourth pillar of Democracy, the independence of the judiciary being the third, the word “independence” must be defined to mean whatever it means in the judicial context. Thus for instance, my describing myself as “independent” as in “I am a part-time independent investigative journalist”, is not within that purview of independence, for I only mean by it that I am not affiliated with any formal news organization. Although I am not an expert, but I believe that in the judicial context it generally means (at least to lay peoples):

‘to be free from external pressures of all kinds spanning the gamut of earning a livelihood to political arm twisting, in order to competently be able to analyze and adjudicate solely on facts and conscience.

Additionally, all may claim a conscience, such as the Jury of Twelve in the American judicial system, but can all claim competence? Indeed it is not even part of the job description of a jury to be competent in anything specific, only in being free from bias. However in the press profession, as in the judicial and medical professions, demonstrated competence must be made the first standard for the journalist. And just as standards for measurable competence have been defined in all professions, so it must be too for the journalism profession which at present really has none, except perhaps a general college degree and the ability to write. There is certainly a lot more to it than that, the most important in my view being the ability to think and reason through obfuscation and mendacity of all the incantations of power in society – for that is the turf of the journalist if they are to be anything more than just glorified stenographers and actors on television.

Thus it is one thing to raise the slogan of “independence” of the media as analogous to independence of the judiciary, but quite another to implement such “reliable”, “accountable”, “competent”, and “free from the pressures of earning a livelihood” independence for the former. I do not have solutions for this. Only that such solutions must be devised somehow through a gestalt shift in our thinking and our assumptions about a) what is the meaning of the Constitutional protection for the “freedom of the press”, b) how to hold the press legally and judicially accountable for this legally granted Constitutional charter, and c) how to constitute the press profession so that it reliably and competently serves the needs of not just the immediate local society, but the greater global society as well.

Wrestle control of the rights of ‘person-hood’ away from Corporations and special interest Groups

These rights of ‘person-hood’, originally intended for human beings by the US Constitution, including the right to free speech, influence elections and new laws, have been adduced by the corporations to themselves. They now have a bigger say in making of laws that favor them then the electorate. “A corporation is a legal fiction” according to a rebellious ordinance passed in the Porter Township in Pennsylvania, see article by Thom Hartmann on the CommonDreams web site titled: “Americans Revolt in Pennsylvania – New Battle Lines Are Drawn” to see how one community is going about taking their rights back. This battle ultimately will belong in the federal courts. The side better prepared will win.

The Congress will do nothing until the influence of the corporate lobbyist is broken through the Supreme Court making new rulings.

One of the key investments that the protagonist must make is to develop a sharper understanding of how their system actually works, what its weaknesses are, and how it can be exploited for their purpose. The best chance for success is to defeat the system using the system itself! I do not subscribe to the idea of a French revolution in America. It cannot work here and nor is such a revolution very desirable as it will tear this society apart. Those who speak of revolutions only discredit themselves in the eyes of the mainstream. The goal should be to attract and build a bigger constituency in America by attracting the mainstream by way of exposing to them the misdeeds of their government, and not by wanting to destroy their society. No one wants that.

There is much good in this nation and its system of laws. The only reason many don’t see it perhaps is because they have likely never lived in other countries. And of course there is also much that is wrong with the system. Can one not fix what is wrong without also fixing what ain’t broke? One should not confuse marching in the street for impeaching the White House for its misdeeds, by making a show of force of 50 million people (even if such a sizable protest was possible), with being able to take ‘rights’ away from corporations. The two are entirely different things and the latter is a whole lot harder to do. No amount of marching alone is going to instrument its change. But don’t pick up the garbage for months, jam the streets with millions of bodies, and argue in the court with skill and competence, reflecting the voices of the millions outside, makes a very compelling threat indeed. And a real serious threat always impacts Wall Street to Main street. It does not require the majority to participate, only a significant minority. And it is legal and constitutionally within one’s rights. Whereas for a revolution to succeed, you need the majority of the population against the system.

I do not think such battles as needed to “de-constitutionalize” the corporations can be waged by a grass-roots without deep pockets and deep financing, or by well intentioned people adopting extreme utopian positions that make little practical sense, such as capitalism is bad. Why is it bad? Only unfettered unregulated capitalism that has acquired the rights of “person-hood” and can influence domestic and foreign policies over and above the rights of the individual peoples is bad. I don’t think small businesses are bad. I don’t even think large accountable business are bad or even regulated multinationals are bad.

But multinationals exploiting foreign or domestic labor is bad. Privatization of public commons is bad. Putting essential services in the hands of the profit making private sector as opposed to leaving it as a national benefit for all citizens is bad (such as medical coverage in the hands of insurance companies rather than a non-profit social benefit as a public commons). Unjust clauses in the WTO rules are bad, having unregulated financial lending institutions are bad. But that does not mean all trade treaties are bad or all financial intuitions are bad. How would you Americans even buy a house without one? And what if the World Bank gave loans not as an instrument of economic hegemony through further indebtedness of poor nations where they are forever paying off interest on the loan, but as the purposeful altruistic arm of a true third world development agency? Well why is that not possible? Because these world lending institutions are purposely designed to serve that purpose by the state institutions – and their policies and agendas are set by the elite few who also cross pollinate the military-industrial complex of America. Thus reforming this infrastructure is going to take more than protest marches in the street by a dedicated minority of radicals.

It is going to take justice-minded people to come to occupy the same positions of power and authority that is presently occupied by the Neocons, the Zionists, and the corporate elite who only crave for profits at the expense of all else!

So fix what is bad and strengthen further what is good. One has a better chance of being successful working through the court system while simultaneously putting pressure on the law makers and doing local community level action, but all consistently aligned with the big picture strategies, rather than by the traditional grass-roots distributed and decentralized local actions alone. This battle needs strategic thinking and an arsenal of tactics, money, influence peddling, and constituency development in the mainstream. The protagonist stand a much better chance of achieving success in the courts than on the streets alone.

Notice how Bush won the White House? And what did all the anemic booing and pelting his inauguration motorcade with the contents of a good old fashioned omelet do (see Stupid White Men”) except relieve the frustrations of a few and ruin several dozen omelets? Instead of the few thousand, imagine if there were two million blocking Washington streets a month earlier, and Al Gore’s team waged a competent battle in the courts and in the press?

It might perhaps be my naiveté of the American judicial system that leads me to think that it is irrelevant that the judiciary might be appointed by one ideological side or the other. I do not believe they are corrupt, and having an ideological bent is not corruption. Who in the world does not have an ideological bent of one form or another? Only morons. Even robots have an ideology (see Isaac Asimov’s laws for robots). Taking bribes, kickbacks, or cowering to political pressure is corruption, and at least that is how judiciary is compromised in dictatorships. Is there any evidence for it here? I don’t know.

Two of the Supreme court conservative Justices (William Rehnquist and Sandra O’Connor) have been waiting to retire during a Republican administration so that their successors will be like minded, and they might indeed retire before the 2004 presidential election, and President Bush might nominate two 40 year old Neocon judges to these lifetime positions. Many argue that this is a bad thing. Well this is part of your system. If you think any one ideology should not prevail in the Justice system, you have to change the system, and not lament the fact that it is conservative dominated. At another point in time, perhaps it was liberal dominated? Aren’t the two parties equally entitled to this privilege? All this talk of conservative judgeship is a red herring and self defeating, it is a fundamental characteristic of this form of democracy and if now you discover a flaw in it, just as many also feel there is a flaw in the electoral college system that enables one getting the popular vote to not become the President in a populist democracy, then the system is in need of adjustment, and not who at an given time gets the upper hand and the others lament it to their grave.

There is sufficient room to wage a legal fight despite the judges’ personal inclinations. To point to the judiciary for their bringing George Bush to power is also to not understand the poor fight that was waged by the Democrats. As I have argued earlier, it’s the overall skill of the combatants, and how badly they want to win, that determines the outcome. The loss of Al Gore is squarely his own fault for the lack of adequate skills to match his opponents who were just better prepared. As a lay person only looking at other people’s arguments and having no first hand knowledge of it myself, I am not convinced that the supreme court outcome was inevitable as many do. Assertions do not make arguments, arguments do. And I have not seen any compelling ones yet. It just seems that one team was exceedingly polished and competent, the other was a bunch of amateurs in comparison and failed to play the proper opposition role as envisioned when the two party system was established.

This is even more obvious when watching the PBS video documentary by Danny Schechter Counting on Democracy. If one side is stealing the election and the other is just standing by pretending to not comprehend and not mobilizing millions to pour into the streets of America like any decent political party worth its salt would do in any developing country, what do you expect? There is no innate law abidingness in politicians and political parties, only to what they can be held to account for, as evidenced even by the system of checks and balances designed by the founding fathers of this nation, and quite forthrightly admitted to by former President Ronald Reagan when he observed: ~ I am told politics is the second oldest profession, it seems to have a strong resemblance to the first one”. Furthermore, watching the media’s role in calling the elections makes it all the more important that media consolidation in corporate hands of the military-industrial complex not go through, and the pending FCC ruling defeated, as discussed earlier in the essay. I still don’t see anyone showing much concern from the mainstream or the Democratic party organizing mass rallies!

There is clearly a systemic malaise in the American political and governing system.

But arguing for radical reforms to the system of checks and balances of how justices are nominated or presidents are elected/selected is not likely to make it happen in anyone’s foreseeable lifetime, at least I do not think so.

Both parties are equally pragmatic, and equally politically expedient in their overall politics, neither has much use for idealism, for the pursuit of justice, truth, and fairness, and both are run by the institutional elite from the military-industrial-corporate complex of America. One is not holier than the other.

Effort will be better served in pursuing strategies and battles in areas where it can produce results and successes which mean something. Being able to have a protest of half a million but achieving no end other than that is “failure”. Understanding that distinction is crucial to waging a successful resistance to empire. Every tactic and every strategy must cause the empire concern. Whatever has been done thus far, President Bush has simply dismissed as a “focus group”. Instead of making fun of that comment, one must learn from it. Think Aikido and Judo – using the adversaries own strength against them. Or live in the Fourth Reich.

Where are the “ZBs” and the ”George Kennans” of peace and justice in the world?

According to some UN experts, only $9 Billion is needed to end world hunger and poverty as of 2003. The US appropriated $80 Billion from congress to kill people, of which it gave $1 Billion in cash and $8 Billion in loans to Israel. Imagine if Peace and Justice had a JINSA and AIPAC of their own and were this strong and had similar ideological allies in Washington? What if there was a PNAC report for bringing peace and justice to all the ordinary denizens of this singular humanity on earth instead of their conquest and enslavement for the benefit of the few? Surely this would be a different country! Nay, a different world!

Unfortunately it will be a different world – but not the desired one. Nor the one being planned in Washington and Tel Aviv by the insane murderers and megalomaniacs.

I believe that future rests in the hands of the ordinary people of the world as injustice can never become a fait accompli. Its eventual global redressing will happen, whether by hook or by crook, by a people unwilling to continue to endure the poverty, misery, depleted uranium, and imperial subjugation amidst the luxury and freedom of the privileged few. Before the world is pushed into that corner where the “fight or flight” response is the only response left, where death becomes the preferred option to economic slavery and humiliations and the world is mercilessly thrust into a global chaos by suicide bombers and popular uprisings, those with vision and wealth must step forward to counter the forces of exploitation, corporate greed, and imperial conquest by studying the methods and techniques of the antagonists, and effectively countering them in an ongoing and perpetual game of primacy on the “Grand Chessboard”.

Just as “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization” in a “populist democracy” became a major consideration for Zbigniew Brzezinski which necessitated this Machiavellian orchestration of “war on terrorism”, the well organized and powerful hydra of global justice is inimical to imperial mobilization, should become even more of a concern, and a genuine impediment for all future Hectoring Hegemons and their infantile drive for imperial conquest.

There is no other way out as there will surely always be hectoring hegemons and their ‘primacy imperatives’, as “Hegemony is as old as mankind”!

The Role of American Muslims in Empire Building

(by their noticeable and uncourageous silence)

Waking up the Muslims of America

Muslim communities in the US should not fool themselves into thinking that this trend of increasing Fascism is not going to impact them if they just keep their heads low as they go about their daily routines, if they just stay inside their mosques busy in prayer, if they keep shaking hands with President Bush in the White House or have him come visit them in their mosques even taking his shoes off, and if they leave all the issues of protest to the few prominent activists from CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) or ADC (American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee). As stellar organizations as CAIR and ADC are, they alone cannot fight against this.

The Jews thought something similar not too long ago in Nazi Germany as the Nazis led them through a tarantula mating dance with an on-again off-again relationship as Fascism rose over time into the devastating crescendo that we rather not think about. To this day, the Jews ask themselves why the Jews in Germany did not fight back? Why they showed no resistance? They argue, that with each turn up of heat, the Nazis would step back and wait for a response, and had there been a very strong response right off the bat, there may not have been a Holocaust at all. The Jews lament to this day, that perhaps what emboldened the Nazis to go through their sick scheme, was the lack of interest shown in the fate of the Jews of Europe by the US and the Allies, and their own passivity at what they perceived destiny befalling them. The Daniel Pipes and Pat Robertsons of America, are spreading the same distrust that the Germans spread about the Jews in Germany, which they claimed they had in fact learnt from America’s own mistreatment of the Jews in the early twentieth century. It’s a deja vu. Look at their simple message that is now directed against the Muslims that they repeat ad nauseum to their congregations and on TV: the Muslims are unlike us, their Islamic civilization is unlike our Judeo-Christian civilization, their religion is unlike ours, they have come here to take over America and destroy our civilization, they are terrorists. Rings a bell? Wisen up Muslims of America!

In a talk given by an 83 year old extremely articulate lady, Evelyn Fielden, whose six family members were made victims of Nazi xenophobia in the concentration camps, and who barely managed to escape Berlin as a 17 years old young girl in 1938, recalled the parallels between how ignorant they were as citizens of Germany about what was to come just a few years down the road, as late as 1938, and the current climate of mass ignorance in America. She openly remarked that the main difference she sees between George W. Bush and Hitler, is that “Hitler never lied to us.” He had stated it all up front in his Mein Kampf years earlier, albeit no one chose to believe him. In response to my question to her about what parallels she saw between the early stages of the harassment of the Jews in Germany and what is occurring to the Muslims in America today, her chilling remark sent goose bumps down my spine. She said there were strong parallels with a few differences, one in favor and one against. The one in favor being that while there was a long history of anti-Semitism in Germany and indeed most of Europe against the Jews, there is no such history against the Muslims, this anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim bashing being of a relatively recent contrivance. The point not in favor of the Muslims being that we look different. We easily stand out by the color of our skin and our attire, and are thus easily identified. Whereas the Jews in Germany looked and dressed just like the mainstream, they could not be told apart except by a peek at their passports which had a big “J” stamped in it.

I also asked Dr. Daniel Ellsberg and David Harris, the two famous anti-war heroes of the Vietnam era, the voices of conscience of this nation, the same question in a talk they gave about “Reclaiming American Democracy through Awareness and Action” at the College of Marin near San Francisco on April 29, 2003. The former had leaked out 7000 sheets of documents that later became the Pentagon Papers risking 135 years in jail, and the latter spent 20 months in jail for refusing to serve in Vietnam, interrupting his education at Stanford for a higher cause. Both predicted that it was going to get hotter for the Muslims, that the ‘white’ progressive Americans must stand up and fight for them, because the circle of persecution was going to widen to net in all the groups that the government did not favor, especially the antiwar and anti-globalization activists. David Harris commented that “We are no less Americans for our dissent whenever we choose to exercising it” and “we are not better than the rest of the world – only better off”, hence it behooves upon us to fight back. He told me very emphatically to not leave the country but to stand up and fight, the message being directed at all the Muslims in America.

Already the profiling of activists as well as Muslims at the airports have started, with most brown skinned Muslims and males of Arab origin, even those carrying American passports, are separated from the main passenger queues both upon entering and leaving the country, and in many cases, their wallets are checked, their credit cards are photocopied, the cash is counted, and personal questioning that can last for hours is conducted, in the course of which many miss their flights, only to be offered sheepish apologies later! These are facts reported by several travelers that I questioned recently myself, and have also been reported on Pacifica.

There is also an ominous and very powerful alliance brewing between the Jesus seeking Evangelical Christian far right fundamentalists represented by the likes of Dr. Pat Robertson, and the Zionist ultra right-wing fundamentalists living in Israel as well as in the US who dream of Eretz Israel and taking over Muslim lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Robertson is a family chum of George Bush Sr., and was very instrumental in getting the needed votes for electing George Bush Jr. in the Bible belt by helping defeat the presidential contender Senator John McCain in the Republican primaries in South Carolina and Virginia. Robertson’s father Senator Willis Robertson had a mentoring relationship to George Bush Sr.’s father Senator Prescott Bush. Robertson’s alliance to the Bush family is legendary. In the 1992 elections, Robertson was prepared to assist Bush Sr. by the distribution of 40 million voter guides. Robertson is also the founder of the 700 Club, and the multi billion dollar CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network), an earlier version of which he sold for $1.82 Billion to Rupert Murdoch in 1990. According to Greg Palast in Best Democracy Money Can Buy (237 – 250), the combination of Christianity and cash, mixing God and Republican campaigns, has made Dr. Robertson a man whose net worth is as high as a billion dollars. Robertson is cash rich and not squeamish about investing it in his ideology of hastening the arrival of Jesus Christ on Earth.

The proponents of this ideology maintain that the return of the Jews to Israel is a sign of Rapture. That it is now their duty to convert all the heathens of the world to Christianity, that when Jesus arrives, the Jews will automatically be converted to Christianity, and the rest of the recalcitrant world will bake in hell fire for rest of eternity. So they hurriedly want to bring as many as possible to Christ, even if it means dropping bombs on them to save them, or even risking a nuclear Armageddon, because all it does is bring the arrival of Jesus and the last days closer into reality.

The Zionists and even the non Zionist Jews laugh at these ridiculous notions of these fanatics, but many find them to be very convenient allies in their quest for domination of Arab lands. Hence for instance, every time Nethanyahoo, the previous Prime Minister of Israel ever came to Washington, he made it a point to pay homage to these fanatics and tour the bible belt, to make a point to the ex President Clinton who did not much seem to care for Nethanyahoo, that he has support in the crucial bible belt in America. Ariel Sharon the bulldozer, also sent his tourism minister to do the same. And Robertson gave a sermon at Passover this year in Temple Beth Shalom, a Jewish Synagogue in Framingham Massachusetts, to further cement their alliance with each other.

In the same talk, Robertson is reputed to have stated “Why not begin educating the Arabs, take down their TV as their propaganda and [substitute our message]”. The Christian Evangelist believe that “Israel is the Divine Destiny”, and they see the United States playing a key role in that Destiny. Hence note that the news and media company, Grace Digital Media, which is Evangelical Christian, has been given contract by the US government to make television programs for Iraq! The Zionists have made the statement that “Islam is disappearing”, and that in the next few years reviving the Crusade in alliance with the Christian right will be an opportune moment in history to rid the world of the Muslim menace!

So there is now a business competition to see who can do them in first, and also make a few million or billion bucks at it. Robertson is also reputed to have stated in that sermon in the Synagogue that “Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush understand the Spiritual significance of this”. This was reported by a Jew protester and observer who was there to protest the presence of Robertson at the Synagogue and his vile ideological links with the Zionist fundamentalist in Israel. He disclosed these statements by Robertson in an interview on DemocracyNow to Amy Goodman. Also interviewed was Elaine Hagopian, Professor Emeritus at Simmons College, who also noted with ominous foreboding this growing alliance between the two antagonists of Islam.

The Muslims the world over must wake up and take cognizance of the revitalized Crusade being hatched against Islam and the Muslims in order to perpetuate the fiction of “war on terrorism” – the lifetime of war, also affectionately known in the intelligence circles as “World War IV”. There are big bucks and big guns backing this effort for the explicit purpose of extending empire for the full spectrum dominance of the Planet. It’s nothing personal against Islam or the Muslims per se, there is a confluence of interests at play here and we just happen to be convenient enablers in the current geopolitical reality. A recognition of this reality is imperative in order to even begin addressing the issue of self-defense against this barbaric onslaught.

While the stupid Arab billionaires and Muslim dictators the world over under the tutelage of their foreign masters, steal the oil wealth and other resources of their nations to buy useless properties on Bond Street and Wall Streets, the antagonists are spending their wealth and their political power for ideological warfare against Islam and the Muslims for a deliberate purpose. While the world appears powerless, the Muslims in America have a remarkable opportunity to do something about it.

We already have undeniable empirical evidence for the high regard for Muslims and the respect for their basic human rights, in the behavior of the American policy makers. Witness the uninhibited killing of Muslim civilians with long distance bombers, or starving innocent children through 12 years of strait jacketing sanctions and subsequently shock and awing them by raining democracy on their heads, or standing by watching the easily preventable crimes of looted national heritage and burnt down national libraries in Iraq. Or witness the imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay of POWs from Afghanistan to whom they even deny POW status, inventing an hitherto unheard of new category, “illegal combatants” against all international norms for treatment of war prisoners. They are housed in cages, literal cages, according to reports aired on Pacifica. According to recent Amnesty International and other legal organizations’ protests lodged with the US government, among the prisoners are 13 year old boys and 80 year old men. Torture is the norm for interrogation, including prolonged painful positions, denial of food and sleep, and solitary confinement without access to lawyers, the outside world, or communication amongst each other.

Without being charged for a crime, without access to the famed due process that the civilized Western world lays claims to as having invented to save the world from barbarism, this legal limbo exposes their valuation for anyone other than their own kind: being of the same race or religion counts for more than being of the same species. Can you imagine how hearty and tough an Afghan is living in those rugged barren mountains of Afghanistan and perhaps some of them having lived a life of warfare with minimal rations? Suicide is unheard of in Afghanistan. While they have fighting in their blood due to their history of defense of their land over several centuries from all sorts of invaders, and are used to fighting, even each other, suicide is anathema in their culture. If more than 20 of them have attempted it in Guantanamo Bay prisons in a population size of 600 – 700, what kind of condition must they be in that they prefer to try suicide, even though perhaps being religious they would know that they will go to hell for doing so? They are choosing eternal damnation to their current predicament? I cannot imagine how unbearable that must have to be for an Afghani to give up!

Arundhati Roy’s eloquent summary of the US behavior in Afghanistan captures it all. In an article in the U.K. Guardian (Sept. 29, 2001) on the eve of preparations to bomb Afghanistan to prehistoric times, titled the “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”, she wrote:

Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while waiting to be killed”,

in response to the US forcing Pakistan to close its borders to fuel and food supplies that provided much of the meager daily sustenance to the starving population of Afghanistan. Dropping food packets on their heads from 10,000 feet that looked similar to cluster bombs is beyond civil description in the English language, though I am sure there are very eloquent expressions for it in Dari, Pashto, and Farsi. Or is it that this is happening to those ‘bad’ Muslims over there, we are Americans, we are ‘good Muslims’ and not like them?

It is interesting to note how this ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslim discourse has all of a sudden cropped up among the apologists for Islam in America. Now you hear them in Friday khutbas, in speeches and seminars by Muslim sheikhs and scholars, and even among the US policy makers who refer to the fundamentalist or those fighting for their liberty from tyranny of one sort or another as ‘bad’ Muslims, and those nice and docile sheep who come running at the first bark of the sheep dog as ‘good’ Muslims. The very first time I heard of this was right after 9/11 when a well known Muslim American scholar, who has a large following in the United States, and is frequently invited as a khatib (speaker) and scholar to various kingdoms, even by the kings themselves, and was also invited to the White House as a token symbol that this war against terrorism was not against Islam but the ‘terrorist’ among them, mentioned this distinction to distance himself and other Muslims from the supposed perpetuators of 9/11. Since then, it seems to have caught on as the lingua franca of both the press and the US Administration.

It is ironically funny, because when the Taliban were destroying the statues of Buddha in Afghanistan just a few months earlier, to the much consternation and uproar in the entire world, including the Muslim world, as a heinous destruction of world’s heritage, the same Friday prayer khatibs were suggesting in mute tones that the west does not understand the religious sentiments and ‘purity’ of these ‘pious’ people in Afghanistan. I heard this with my own ears, and was totally disgusted that destroying the statues of Buddha, a sacred religious figure not just to Buddhist, but to all mankind, was only condemned with muted tones as “the west does not understand”. Hypocrisy is alive and well everywhere!

Once the discussion starts on the premise of “good Muslim” vs. “bad Muslim”, instead of innocent vs. criminal, the argument is already conceded because now the religion has unjustifiably been brought into the picture playing right into the hands of the antagonists. Rather than being apologetic, it might have been more productive to remind the US President that these criminal elements were the creation of the United States herself to defeat the Soviets, and that at the time they were called ‘mujahideen’ and “moral equivalent of our founding fathers” by the American President Ronald Reagan. Such advice would have been worthy of a true religious statesman on ascendance to Irfan (state of purification). This is also the “Furqan” (criterion) of judging someone in Islamic wisdom. If you see a sheikh sitting in the company of kings, eschew him. If you see kings sitting in the humbleness of his company, embrace him. Where has courage disappeared?

While no credible evidence linking Bin Laden to 9-11 has ever been produced and there are only assertions of his guilt by the White House, as well as only assertions that the dastardly events of 9-11 were a complete surprise attack by suicidal “Muslim terrorists” and a spectacular and spontaneous failure of US intelligence and military agencies, there is a bigger picture that has been developed throughout this book, that of the new “Pearl Harbor”. In that context, it is astonishing to see the Muslim leadership, many Muslim scholars, and various and sundry mosque leaders in America completely befuddled and on the defensive. Instead of rationally challenging the White House on their lack of producing even a shred of evidence, and demanding to know why Muslims are being so scapegoated by most of the officials who also happen to be Neocon Zionists, they have accepted the official line as a foregone conclusion that Bin Laden, and the list of 19 Muslim sounding names released by the US government, are to blame. At least, this is the basis behind their apologetic public stance and their behavior. I have heard them myself announce from mosque pulpits that “we support our President”, that “we support our troops”, that “we are Americans”, and that we must help the authorities find the “bad” apples among us! It matters not that in the privacy of their thoughts they might feel differently. What matters is their public pronouncements, for that determines the fate of the Muslims in America, as easily lead sheep to the slaughter.

It would be very funny were it not so disturbing to observe the FBI being sheepishly invited into mosques to give talks on Civil Rights, with a dumbfounded audience listening and nodding their heads. What is wrong with the leadership? Why would you want the wolf to advise the chicken how to protect itself? If you want Civil Rights education for the community, get Civil Rights attorneys to do it! I even sat through one of these talks, and was quite disturbed at the seriousness with which the participants were listening to it and asking simplistic questions from the FBI and the police. The questions almost all being about what they should do if they are harassed by someone or there is a hate crime. And what is billed as getting to know your rights, is invariably about how to find the terrorist among you!

If indeed the playing field were level, and the FBI were not out monitoring the mosques and profiling the Muslims, then cooperating with law enforcement is a civic responsibility. But if no crime has been committed, and the citizens are being monitored and profiled because of their religion and their ethnicity, and this is America we are living in, not the oppressive dictatorships of our own native lands where there are indeed few Civil Rights for the ordinary citizen, then not exercising these rights that this great country affords us, and not protesting when these Civil Liberties are getting eroded at the hands of a government that isn’t even elected, and instead inviting their agents to further monitor us in our own mosques and at Eid celebrations, is at best, Kafkaesque! At worst, a grave short sightedness and potential disservice to the community.

The argument that these prayers and religious celebrations are open public services and we have nothing to hide, misses the point that this intrusion is against the US Constitution protecting religious institutions and their places of worship from the state, and the basic edict of this nation. Protection of the minority from the tyrannical rule of the majority is a fundamental right that the founding fathers of this country envisaged in their democratic ideals, despite their own short comings as landlords living with the world view of accepted slavery. Many khatibs now routinely pay their allegiance to George Bush in their Friday sermons, as the FBI and other local non Muslim residents and city officials sit through these Friday prayers, seated in specially designated areas, and attentively trying to discern what the Muslims and Islam are all about.

My advice to these non Muslim folks who want to learn about Islam, don’t learn it from the Muslims, especially through the speeches of their supposed leaders! The orchestra is unable to play Beethoven’s symphony in any other way except a garbled cacophony! Learn about Muslims by getting to know the rich lives of individual Muslims and their families. Make friends with them. And to know about Islam, go to the sources! What passes for Islam in most of the mosques these days is the dry ritualistic shell. The fruit of Islam, its spirit, is usually lacking. I see more Islam in the outspoken dissent of the Jew or the Christian or even the non-religious activist, than in the thousand prayers of the congregation that ends in “United We Stand”. No thanks for your obsequious leadership! We need courageous grass-roots!

Shake the cobwebs of slumber off your minds, Muslims of America. We are not better than the rest of the world, nor any safer – only better off, and only temporarily so. Each one of us has to loudly protest and do our part in taking a stand against this bigotry and the double standards that seems to have become an acceptable part of mainstream discourse in this country. One cannot rely on someone else to do it for us. To think that the untiring efforts of a few courageous individuals and activists will take care of the problem, is abdicating one’s own responsibilities and dereliction of one’s duties as citizens in a minority community.

Until the day when 1 – 2 million Muslims do not march in the streets of America to protest for their rights as equal citizens and residents of this country, and do not demand a stop to racial and religious harassment and slander, it will only get worse. Rosa Parks didn’t just let Dr. King do all the work, she went to jail for refusing to give up a bus seat!

Freedom in this society is a continual battle for everyone, not just Muslims. It is only won through struggle, and easily lost through complacency. See the wonderful grass-roots history text “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, to understand how the fruits of freedom, and the comfortable work life that we have been enjoying this far, have been hard won on the backs of many a movements waged by ordinary citizens, just like you and me. And invariably all of these struggles have been against the institutional elite who initially demonized them, and later eulogized them. The Muslim communities in America must start fully participating in the civil society and political movements in America.

Such a participation however does not imply a headlong embrace of exploitative institutional wisdom, prejudicial government policies, and intrusive encroachment of state apparatus into constitutionally protected private affairs of the community. Ask to see the warrant before you let the cops in. Participation does not mean that you just let them walk in because you have nothing to hide. Making the distinction between participating in your own persecution through either silence or acquiescence, and participating to courageously fight back to protect your rights and dignity as a people, is the key to survival as a minority community in America. And the responsibility for participation rests with each member of the community. A dynamic, outspoken, not easily bamboozled, and not so easily intimidated community is the only one respected.

Partially because of our pusillanimous attitudes in the face of this new wave of anti-Islamic sentiments that has gripped America, at the dawn of the twenty first century, we have become the new Jews of America of the early twentieth century. Unthinkable only a few years ago! Even as late as the early 1970s, the ordinary Jews were stereotyped and treated unfairly in this country. Their history of immigration to New York and quartering them into slums, with real anti-Semitism directed against them (not the type that has now become the weapon of choice to silence any and all criticism of their actions especially in relation to Zionists of Israel), is a telling tale of how America treats its new immigrant communities. The same is true of the Chinese, the Irish, and perhaps to some extent the Italians. Each one of them has lived through stereotyping and labeling of one sort or another. They only won respect after much sacrifice, and when they fought back.

The conundrum some Muslims are facing today in America is that it is difficult for them to assess whether this is just the usual immigrant’s rites of passage that can perhaps be overcome with perseverance, or something far more insidious and dangerous to our collective well being in this country. While leaving America for our home countries might be the choice for some, and many hundreds of families have already fled, for others, America is our home and we have no place else to go. We have to deal with this problem one way or another, and cannot count on someone else doing it for us.

There must no longer remain any distinction between those who stick their necks out and are called activists, and those who sit complacently at home in the hope that it will all magically blow away. While it is for each one of us to decide for ourselves what our moral imperatives are, and the price of our conscience, our collective security does lie in the collective action of our people, and our institutions! There needs to be a nation wide consistent policy adopted by all of our local and national institutions in how to communally and individually address the threats we face, and how to educate our citizens in bringing them out of their shells into active and very vocal grass-roots political participation. Squeaky wheels get the most attention, as the saying goes. Silent and passive suffrage is not what is meant by “Sabr” (patience) and neither is it called for. When our house is on fire, that is not the best time to become “good Muslims” and quietly raise our families as some suggest, but it is the time to put out the fire. And when the house is burning, that isn’t the time either to bicker about our religious, sectarian, ideological, or social and cultural differences.

Step 1 in this direction is to recognize the global and domestic situation for what it is, and stop calling it the “war on terrorism”.

Just to take this step requires foresight and courage! Many of the leadership of our current institutions are likely good hearted and well meaning citizens who had stepped up to the plate to help build these institutions in the times of peace, when there was no persecution and no war on terrorism. The policies of appeasement and conciliation that worked then, as was indeed necessary in building a new community from scratch, does not necessarily work now. This is evident just by listening to their speeches, they are as confused as anyone else. Due to their lack of understanding of the complex issues, and often simplistic attitude towards life such as: “God will take care of it all, let us just go back to the basics”, and their fear that the US Justice department might shut down their mosques and institutions if they did not cooperate with every intrusion of the FBI, though well intentioned these leaders be, in the long run, they can seriously jeopardize the safety of our community. Something they have struggled so hard to develop all of their lives.

This is the time to stand up for our rights, or lose them. That requires a very different kind of people in the leadership. Those not capable of exercising such leadership must now step down and make room for fresh cadre to take over the baton. This is a relay marathon and front runners will need replenishing very often.

Step 2 is stop using the mosque pulpits to preach “we support our troops” – support them in what?

Can you mullahs with Ph.D. and masters degrees who seem to think the pulpit is your private inheritance that you make a beeline for it every Friday just because you have an Arabic accent, can you even enumerate all their acts from the pulpit? Does the sanctity of the pulpit even allow it? Have the courage to call the spade a spade – for while all your admirers are nodding their heads in the congregation, your guardians are also busy recording the evils that follow from your speech – the evils of inaction, of complacency, of silence, that is directly responsible for the deaths of innocent peoples throughout the world at the hands of the troops you support. It is bad enough that we pay taxes.

Stop filling the mosques and start filling the streets. I wish I could translate some poetry for you from my language for I am bursting to exclaim them – but it’s all lost in translation.

Learn from the Jews and their misfortunes. Try to understand their reasons for their strong support of Israel now, despite Israel’s blatant and systematic oppression of another innocent people. After centuries of silent sufferings and acceptance of their own persecution as divine destiny, they have said: no more. Even if it means screwing someone else. That is the ethos that makes Elie Wiesel comment: “don’t ask me to criticize Israel”, and an Israeli soldier shoot Palestinian children in the eyes. Monumentally criminal yes, but what is the psychology behind it? An Israeli Air Force training Instructor was a friend of mine at work. A very rational and logical person normally, he would turn quite illogical when we debated the Israeli occupation of Palestine, until one day he set me straight by saying that if he gave into my arguments, he would be driven into the Red Sea. That was the last time we talked on the subject. The point being that centuries of oppression has made the Zionists among them, grotesque! Not that he stated it that way, but it was my point to infer after which I left him alone.

While the Jewish ethos for the “Promised Land” remains an enigma to me, especially since the vast majority of the Jews are secular, and largely cultural Jews, and the Zionist among them who have ventured to make Israel their home are primarily atheists with a yamaka head gear, and certainly the Muslims share little with them in this ethos which is peculiarly theirs, but the point here is one of victims beginning to identify with their past tormentors as a cultural memory.

For the Jews, this cultural memory is two Millennia long in antagonism with their favorite goyems – the Christians – and their Diaspora is even longer. And clearly Muslims cannot relate to this longevity of suffering because we have not experienced what the Jews have experienced and aspired for over the past 3000 years. Some Muslims might feel what is this hogwash psycho-babble. But oppression breeds oppression, and there is no denying it:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do Evil in return
.” (W.H. AUDEN, “September 1, 1939”)

The empirical evidence of the veracity of this poem is clearly visible in the Zionist Jews as a peoples, who are today perhaps the most cruel, inhuman and oppressive on the planet. It is silly to just dismiss them as ordinary thugs, although they will certainly appear to be no different, whimpering, when in the docks like “Eichmann in Jerusalem”. There is however far more going on with them while they have the ‘upper hand’ that any one can rationally figure out without first putting them on the psychiatrist’s couch in a jail cell!

Are we going to suffer for a century before we wake up, and then in rebellion become grotesque like our oppressors? Longer we spend in servitude, harder will be the recourse, and stronger will be the retribution when the succeeding generations wake up and fault us for not taking a stand with far less pain and suffering, when all we had to do was stand up for our rights while we still had them!

Having lambasted the Zionist Jews above, it is important to recognize that (at least I like to think so) while they are the most visible among the Jews, and seem to have hijacked the common perceptions about Jewry and Judaism, they least represent the Jews as a peoples. Rachel Corrie was a Jew, and so is Dennis Bernstein, the proud grandson of a Rabbi who lambasts the Zionists on a daily basis on air. The only way a non-Palestinian likely even hears about Palestine in America is through his radio show. A substantial majority in the antiwar activist movement are Jews. And so is my long time ago roommate, a Ph.D. from MIT in Electrical Engineering, who didn’t even know what the hell this whole fuss was all about and nor did he wish to learn – designing optimal servo-control for disk drives is infinitely more pleasurable, a sin no more significant than yours and mine who came here to America in search of the American Dream and then slogged day and night forgetting about the misery that we mercifully left behind. Indeed his ancestors came here generations ago. Whereas we are mostly first generation immigrants and yet we force ourselves to forget the plight of our brethren. Who is more guilty?

All Jews in the world are not our mortal enemies, only the murderous Zionists among them appear to be, and only on account of the “question of Palestine” which entirely colors their view of friend and foe based on who helps or hinders them in achieving Eretz Yisrael!

Indeed, many prominent Jews have also been our most vocal and outspoken supporters against the fascism of their own brethren. I am told that a majority of world’s Jewry do not support this fictitious war on terrorism, do not support Bush, and do not support Israel in its persecution of the Palestinians, even though they may still support Israel in general. If this is true, and there is really no way to verify how the majority of the Jews feel – their uncourageous silence is equally deafening in sympathy with ours – but assuming it is true, then we have many more allies among them then I had imagined, at least in so far as what is common. Albeit in my way of thinking, how anyone can morally support the apartheid misconstruction of Israel, and its colonization of Palestine, even up to the 1967 borders, is beyond me. One day, before the Most Just Judge, one will surely have to account for all of this. Perhaps that is why most of them are atheists and secular? But I needlessly digress.

Nor are the Christians our enemies, only the ultra right-wing ideologues and malicious bigots among them are. Both the Zionists and Christian fanatics seem to be running the show in the White House along with the vested interests of the military-industrial complex institutional elite, whose only religion appears to be the mighty US dollar. Fortunately, none of them represent the vast majority of voices in this country. We must be able to distinguish them apart, and make alliances and associations with the rich heritage of this nation of immigrants. The Japanese have already experienced the internment camps, and have also received sheepish apologies by a US President decades later. They can be formidable allies of the Muslims in this climate of oppression. The multicultural society of America affords us a tremendous opportunity to get to know one another and perhaps break our own stereotyping of many ethnic communities, much as we ask of Americans to do for us.

As Jacques-Yves Cousteau suggested on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday celebration, there wouldn’t be any wars in the world, if every child between the ages 8 and 10 years got a chance to spend a year on the other side of their fence. That should be the very next collective priority of all humanity, right after we have clothed and fed and educated every child on the planet. I doubt very much that the bigots who make these horrible statements about Islam and our holy Prophet, and those who would annihilate us in their religious fantasies, have actually ever even met a Muslim, let alone have one as a friend! So what price silence and isolation, keeping our head low, trying to be good Muslims by quietly raising our families?

By taking a firm and courageous collective stand against the bigots now, today, this very moment, before this country becomes a complete police state, before Patriot Act 2 and its follow on get passed by an eager Congress, we not only protect our immediate survival in America, but by exposing their hypocrisy, their insane fanaticism, their unjust alliances, and their detriment to the American public interests and the American public themselves, we have an opportunity to defeat this minority cabal and their grandiose conspiracy to wage a Crusade against us and against the world.

Those ‘cultural Muslims’ with the ‘laissez faire’ attitudes busily pursuing their own “American Dreams” who might feel: leave it all to God; let the enemies plan, but God Almighty has His own better plan; or feel that this is too big for them, that they should wait for the ‘promised Messiah’ or ‘the Awaited Savior of humanity’; etcetera, etcetera, the following guidance and promise from the Qur’an should be sufficient to awaken one (paraphrased):

God does not change the condition of a people unless the people strive to change it for themselves first.

The above rational and self-empowering teaching of Islam entirely negate the idea that history just happens, or that it is preordained, despite all the self-defeatism that seems to have crept into the vast majority of Muslims’ understanding of this lofty religion through the passage of history that was entirely dominated by tyrannical kings and Caliphs in whose self-interest it was to diligently support such nonsense which tended to keep the flock in their proper “opiate” slumber busily pursuing their own ‘Islamic Dreams’ leaving the rulers to continue on with the business of the ‘state’.

Even empirical evidence suggests that it is our collective wills and our collective actions that make history. Islam’s key message is indeed this empowerment of the individual to do good in this life, and to act on the side of justice, to fight injustice with justice and not to exceed the prescribed bounds lest one in turn became the transgressor, and to do the best in life to the extent that one is maximally able to using all the gifts that one has been endowed with, and this is what one is held accountable for (on the day of Judgment).

This is an empowering and dynamic philosophy of Islam. It would make no sense if the outcome was indeed not controlled in the voluntary actions of people. Any philosophy, any leadership, any historical context, and any personal excuses that one might make, that detracts from this self-empowerment of a people, is antithetical to Islam’s ideals. To suggest that the present course of tyranny in the world is somehow inevitable and there is nothing one can do about it, is to deliberately disempower us. Whose interests does that serve? Ever wonder about that?

The Marxist used to think that way, except that it was about the inevitable march of the proletariat and the class struggle. Look where they are now!

And today it is the alleged inevitable march of corporate globalization and the capitalist’s struggle for ever more capital, supported by George Bush’s new global “crusade” of “infinite justice” against the “evil doers”. They will be defeated too, eventually. Unnatural systems of existence, exploitation, hegemony and oppression can only endure so long, provided of course, people stand up and do something about it. A truism that is all too easy to forget for many in intense hardship and suffering, where sometimes, it is easiest just to barely exist!

History is made each and every day by the choices each one of us makes, as Professor Edward Said noted in a speech recently. It was made on that fatal night that the Noble Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him) passed away and some Muslims quarreled on who should lead the people. It was again made at a few critical junctures in the history of Islam by only a handful of individuals, and that has changed the outcome of Islamic history entirely, so much so that the face of Islam looks entirely different today, with kingdoms, dynasties, and sectarian schisms galore. It is entirely nonsense to suggest that all this was, or is, inevitable.

If you hear Physicist Fritjof Capra explain this phenomenon, actions of human beings form a ‘non linear’ system. There does not have to be a majority action, only a significant minority action, and the outcome can be radically different. Even an action by one can change the course of history, for good or for bad. It is the model of the butterfly flapping its wings in Australia and effecting the weather in California. It is the premise behind the complex non linear weather prediction programs that run on super computers and sometimes lead to egg on the faces of the weather man because it could not predict the affect of the butterfly ten thousand miles away. Even this theory of non linear systems teaches us to act as individuals to affect change, consistent with the wisdom of the religion of Islam that to affect change, one must act, God ain’t gonna send a magic bullet!

Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry, a revitalizer of Islam’s cherished ideals of self-empowerment, is replete with this motif. He never suggests that a specific destiny is inevitable, but that its key is held in our own hands, in the hands of ordinary people when they rise to do extraordinary things (sure sounds like a Anthony Robbins infomercial, but perhaps he too got it from the wisdom of the East, actually it is the teaching of Islam – that is why I like listening to him sometimes because he seems to have spent effort to absorb certain wisdom and is applying them to the domain he is most familiar with, making money with his motivational seminars on self empowerment – nothing wrong with that – but shows the power of wisdom we seem to have lost while others are using it for building empires of one sort or another).

Iqbal argues in his very famous couplet for raising one’s notion of “self”, through its empowerment, to such lofty heights, that destiny itself is compelled to ask what the mortal desires. A far cry from being the slave of destiny.

What is even more ironical is that despite such a demanding heritage, the Muslims have become more fatalistic and self defeatist, waiting for this savior or that savior to do it for them. While the Westerners instead are taking the lead because they do not believe in a destiny any other than the one they create for themselves. The mark of free men. While the Muslims live in slave states with a colonized mind set that leads them to cower and compromise at the first sound of their masters voice – the first generation immigrants into America being emblematic of that mentality their high tech education and Ph.D. degrees not withstanding – the Westerners, and especially the Americans, have lived in free states, their lack of awareness of the world not withstanding. Try giving an order to an American kid!

The American Muslims, born and raised in this country, carry within them the dominant genes of freedom, and of free men, that the Muslims around the world seem to have laid dormant while attempting to survive in the despotic client-states of the Western world.

It is about time that the old immigrant guard in America carrying their enormous subservient cultural baggage gave way to their own free offspring to run their institutions like courageous and unfettered free men. No FBI and no Homeland Security can dare brow beat them into being invited into mosques for overt surveillance anymore than the White American churches of George Bush and John Ashcroft would allow the FBI in because of Timothy McVeigh!

A reminder to the Muslims

It cannot be emphasized enough that the Muslims of the world should remain cognizant that the FBI, the CIA, the Mossad, and other secret and intelligence agencies as well as strategic think tanks around the world, while not understanding and not appreciating the religion of Islam, do understand and do appreciate the psycho-social aspects of Islam and Islamic history. They know its perceived strengths, its perceived short comings, and its perceived influence on the Muslim masses, with the surgical precision of an experimental science. And I must begrudgingly admit that generally they know it far better than Muslims themselves, including many of our very “learned” rulers, leaders, and “scholars” of Islam.

Witness how ‘Jihad’ has been hijacked for their own nefarious ends, first to defeat the Soviet empire, and now to build a new American empire. The ‘evil jihadis’ who hit on 911, even taking everything at face value, are indeed their creation. That is a fact. And while in this essay it has not been necessary to imply the two working in cahoots to build empire, as other empirical facts have been sufficient and plentiful, a hundred years from now, someone else may write about how jihad was strategically and deliberately misused on 9-11 to deliberately create a diabolical pretext for world conquest.

Just read the callousness with which many American historians today write about how the American Indians were strategically removed from existence to make room for the enlightened ‘white-man’. The American designs and its executions have been brilliant, as the military strategists and historians of the West will surely gloat in the future. I sometimes wish these guys were on the side of the Muslims, but not with their bombs and prejudice, rather with their brains and their zeal and commitment in putting their money and efforts where their beliefs are!

There is also ample precedent in colonial history of the British misusing jihad when they owned the “empire on which the sun never set”. But in their case, it was to endear cooperation from the subjugated Muslims by attempting to subvert the meaning of Jihad through the invention of new leaders who argued for the “divinity” of British rule and hence no opposition to it.

We are up against the imperialistic, hegemonic, corporate, crusading, and Zionist confluence of strategic and diabolically well planned interests. But our response to them to date has been reactionary, tactical, and anemic, and mainly one borne of a lack of understanding of what we are up against.

One cannot fight long term well funded strong arm strategies with short term reactionary tactics of appeasement. Unless that appeasement happens to be part of some well defined strategically determined tactic to save oneself to fight another day. That day might end up being a millennium away, separated by eons of misery.

So wake up Muslims of America!

Take to the proactive safeguarding of our essential civil liberties. All the empirical evidence suggests that our actions can and will make a difference. Our timely, concerted, and loud protests, from Wall Street with our wallets, to the main streets with our voices, can play their part in defeating the Fourth Reich.

Our silence will only beget us the curse of posterity, so eloquently expressed by Elie Wiesel. His own silence today begets him the same curse he uttered for his tormenters.

So let’s review where we have reached thus far.

We have conclusively reached the point where we understand in totality the reality of Empire and why it is imperative for the American nation to be perpetually kept Prisoners of the Cave. And we have also learned how to wakeup from this hellish nightmare. And we further understand that this empire is being seeded by maligning Islam – a world religion, and Muslims – its 1.5 billion followers worldwide. We now perhaps also realize that the “war on terrorism” could indeed be largely a setup against “Islamic jihadis” to frighten the American and Western public into supporting this fiction further until the “full spectrum dominance” by the American superpower is complete and a very “American peace” has been secured for the planet.

But we still don’t know whether there is something inherently fearful about Islam and the Muslims. After all, Islam does espouse Jihad – and the “Islam experts” in America and various “Western Scholars of Islam” tell us that we need to fear it.

It is now time to dismantle and deconstruct this anti-Islam sentiment in the West by exposing its intellectual and academic roots and the abhorrent fraud that it has deliberately committed on the world public for the sake of “war on terrorism”.

The unraveling once again begins with the deep thinking Zionist-Neocon-hectoring hegemon nexus of evil in the hallowed halls of the American Ivy.

The Role of Doctrinal Motivation in Empire Building

A Revised Report on the Banality of Evil

[Abridged Version - Introduction Only]

From Islamic Fundamentalism to Imperial Mobilization: Deconstructing the Intellectual Underpinning behind Islam Bashing

Let us recall from Chapter 1 what ZB so very insightfully observed of America:

More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification. … Mass communications have been playing a particularly important role in that regard, generating a strong revulsion against any selective use of force that entails even low levels of casualties.” (The Grand Chessboard, pages 211-212)

Now let’s ask the following questions:

Those maligning Islam these days in the guise of scholarship, the Bernard Lewises, and the Fouad Ajamis, the Judith Millers and the Steve Emersons, the Robertsons and the Grahams, the FOXs, the CNNs, and the CBNs, what do they hope to gain from this? They can certainly discover Islam from the sources. It is not a secretive or particularistic religion. Why would they conveniently omit the lofty ideals and moral teachings of Islam from their farcical renderings on Islam? Why would they display the miserable plight of the Muslims today – indeed largely of Muslims’ own making, for we willingly slave under the yoke of dictatorships in neo-colonial client-states of the Western hegemons who subsequently bring us ‘democracy’ – as the “Crisis of Islam”? Why would they vilely project the havoc being wrecked by Zionism and American Imperialism in the ‘Muslim world’ as the clash between Islam and Modernity as if something has gone wrong with Islam itself: “What Went Wrong? – The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East”, and which is leading to the inevitable “Clash of Civilizations”?

After all, America is the bastion of scholarship and information technology today, their erudite scholars must surely know better? Even if we account for the Orientalism of the yore and its prejudicial translations of Eastern religions and literature, especially Islam, by British imperialists when Westerners’ access to Arabic and Persian languages was difficult and most had to go by whatever the British Empire translated for them, that isn’t the case today. Arabic and Persian languages and literature are even taught in many of the top universities in America. There are also plenty of knowledgeable and un-jaundiced Muslim scholars living in America and the West. They can easily be sought out for help in understanding Islam if acquiring an understanding of the religion is indeed the goal. With all the world’s information on America’s finger-tips, why do America’s scholars persist in weaving a tortuous context for Islam that is brazenly inimical to Islam, and yet get so much prominence in the intellectual elite circles, in think-tanks and universities, in the press and television, that their distorted works become guiding beacons for US foreign policy initiatives? This can’t be just Alice in Wonderland! So, what’s up doc?

As a critical reader, do you see any connections between this and the “doctrinal motivation” needed in ZB’s plan for enabling the sustained exercise of “Imperial power” abroad? What better “doctrinal motivation” than reviving the “Crusades” against the infidel terrorists? That word even slipped out of President George W. Bush’s mouth. Inadvertently, or not, is immaterial. We directly see the philosophical underpinnings of this in the intellectual discourses of famous IVY scholars from Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and a number of other prestigious universities in America.

My reaction to their Islam bashing is very strong, not only as a Muslim whose religion is being attacked, maligned, and vilely mis-represented, but as an intelligent person seeing such monumental distortions that it boggles the mind how they are allowed to be so openly perpetuated – until one recalls the first principles of Propaganda from the Third Reich.

Propaganda and doctrinal warfare is always aimed at the masses, the approximately 75-80 percent of the general public who know very little about the subject matter in question, and who don’t like to think even if their lives depended on it. Philosopher Bertrand Russell had insightfully observed of this behavior: “Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do”. Dr. Joseph Goebbels capitalized on that sociological observation of a general population distribution to domestically sustain Hitler’s international quest for Lebensraum. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had accurately recognized that the key to the domestic success of “imperial mobilization” was to directly influence “the mob of the simple or credulous”:

Journalistic circles in particular like to describe the press as a ‘great power’ in the state. As a matter of fact, its importance really is immense. It cannot be overestimated, for the press really continues education in adulthood. Its readers, by and large, can be divided into three groups:

First, into those who believe everything they read; second, into those who have ceased to believe anything; third, into the minds which critically examine what they read, and judge accordingly.

Numerically, the first group is by far the largest. It consists of the great mass of the people and consequently represents the simplest-minded part of the nation. It cannot be listed in terms of professions, but at most in general degrees of intelligence.

To it belong all those who have neither been born nor trained to think independently, and who partly from incapacity and partly from incompetence believe everything that is set before them in black and white. To them also belongs the type of lazybones who could perfectly well think, but from sheer mental laziness seizes gratefully on everything that someone else has thought, with the modest assumption that the someone else has exerted himself considerably.

Now, with all these types, who constitute the great masses, the influence of the press will be enormous.

They are not able or willing themselves to examine what is set before them, and as a result their whole attitude toward all the problems of the day can be reduced almost exclusively to the outside influence of others. …

Today, when the ballot of the masses decides, the chief weight lies with the most numerous group, and this is the first: the mob of the simple or credulous.” (Mein Kampf, pages 240-242)

Just like Zbigniew Brzezinski’s masterful sociological observations of the American masses some seventy five years later also concluded that the “chief weight” for “imperial mobilization” was with the “most numerous group”, as “democracy was inimical to imperial mobilization”:

It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. … Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” (pages 35-36, see Brzezinski excerpts in Chapter 1)

And the Third Reich had indeed mobilized on precisely such acute psychological observations, diabolically fabricating the “conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the [German] public’s sense of domestic well-being” with Operation Canned Goods which gave the German public their own “pearl harbor” and Hitler “a propagandist reason for starting the war”. Hitler, by his own admission, well understood the age old victor’s prerogative which can never imagine defeat at the peak of its hubris: “the victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not the right that matters, but victory” (as previously quoted from William Shirer in the Introduction Chapter). Hitler had also mastered the art of propaganda very well:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction. …

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. …

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” (Mein Kampf, pages 180-181)

The American hegemons have been inflicted by exactly the same hubris and the same psychological cataracts! The unchallenged sole superpower has its victory too guaranteed to feel inhibited in its use of lies, deception, propaganda, and the most barbaric aggression against the ‘untermenschen’. For who is to ever challenge the supremacy of the sole superpower at some Nuremberg? There are no rivals. Whereas Hitler still had rivals in the British and American Allied powers, and even that hadn’t inhibited him!

So, inventing their own “new pearl harbor” as the “catalyzing event” to match Hitler’s Operation Canned Goods, and harvesting the core “doctrinal motivation” under cultivation at least since 1990 to launch their “imperial mobilization” by employing the simple propaganda slogan of “War on Terrorism against Islamofascism”, is right out of the pages of the Third Reich. All other propagandistic mantras for each specific warfare in the lifetime of World War IV then easily follow on its heal once the core premise is accepted by the masses and becomes the axiomatic “truth”. It then forms the presupposition for all further news and policy debate, dissent as well as consent, in short, for the entire social discourse on the ‘war on terror’! This is Machiavelli at its finest, for it automatically synthesizes consent even in its dissent!

Thus, absurdities like: “WMD” in Iraq imminently threatening the United States, is a simple stretch once the core axiom of “Islamofascism”, of Bin Laden doing 911, is established as the core untouchable truth. I.e., an external enemy, ubiquitous, powerful, mysterious, jihadist, militant, triumphal, suicidal, and “irrational” enough to take down America’s mighty towers in its most guarded heartland killing 3000 of its citizens without fear of consequences to themselves, is an unpredictable enemy that can strike at any place at any time, and therefore must be dealt with preemptively!

And that propaganda is incessantly beamed at the television watching “mob of the simple or credulous” to make the imperial “shock and awe” visitation upon innocent civilian populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout The Global Zone of Percolating Violence (ZB, page 53) palatable to the American and Western masses. After all, the public is now made to believe that America is only hitting back either in retaliation (Afghanistan), or preemptively (Iraq), against the most resourceful and “irrational” enemy on the planet! Never mind that it lives in a cave on a dialysis machine and brought the towers down with nothing but box-cutters; or that Saddam’s crippled Iraq after 13 years of Allied bombings, no-fly-zones, and economic sanctions had no weapons, and had nothing to do with Bin Laden or 911! Indeed, “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

The propagandists are thus the first cause murderers.

Islam bashing therefore, as infantile as it is, cannot be ignored. It is in exact realization of ZB’s overarching agenda for American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives which requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment,with momentous consequences for Muslim nations in the twenty-first century. It has to be exposed as an intellectual fraud for seeding propaganda in the service of hegemonic statecraft which spans the gamut of Machiavelli from the highest levels of intellectual circles in America, down to its nitty-gritty lying politicians and left-right-wing scumbags who knowingly parrot mantras for their own narrow selfish interests. Since “Islamic Fundamentalism” is the core axiom of propaganda upon which the entire house of cards for “imperial mobilization” is singularly fabricated, demonstrating it to be just that, a vile propaganda, also brings down the entire house of cards! The following discourse is therefore entirely for the benefit of the unsuspecting American and Western public before whom a daily parade of “experts” is enacted to promote the “clash of civilizations”. The Western world is told to prepare to fight this new “evil” under the stewardship of the lone superpower cop utilizing new bunker busting nukes.

It is now taken for granted in mainstream America that 9-11 was the dastardly act of religious fanatic Muslims who hate America because they are jealous of this country’s successes – or want to impose barbaric and antiquated Islam upon everyone. And this isn’t just in the abstract rhetoric. Concrete evidence is brought forth of the revival of the ‘Taliban’, and fears of ‘Talibanization of this or that country’ at the hands of fanatical and backward firebrand Muslims, to continue fueling the perception of the threat from “radical Islam”. Thus the American public is kept sufficiently motivated into sustaining the never ending war on terrorism because there will continue to be a never ending supply of “terrorists” to defend America against – now that the communist have become defunct. Through fiction or fabrication, synthesis or provocation, by hook or by crook, the infernal “terrorist” is made existential – the military-industrial-Zionist complex and the wet-dreams of the Neocons for “full spectrum dominance” depend on fighting it as “counter-insurgency”.

The mantra is even calculatingly spin doctored as a historical struggle between Christianity and Islam. The Evangelical Christian fanatics grab that “doctrinal motivation” with much “patriotic gratification” in fighting off a “very wicked and evil religion”, as Pat Robertson called it. They can renew their own white man’s burden easily if the foe is made out to be especially barbaric, as Shawn Steele, the former Chairman of California’s State Republican Party, annotated it: “The Islamic community has a cancer growing inside of it – which hates Jews, hates freedom, and hates western society. The disease of Islam must be rectified – it’s kill or be killed”. The politicians grab that theme because it suits their narrow interests or hegemonic plans, as President George W. Bush did: “God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East”, and embark on their new 30 – 50 year lifetime of “World War IV”.

Imagine if American public officials, politicians, and prominent Christian preachers publicly made the same statements about the Jews today! It’s not like the Zionists don’t deservedly call for rallying such “patriotic gratification” against themselves. Muslims have clearly traded places with the European Jewry of the 1930′s when fulminating such hatred against the Jews was considered high patriotism in the service of the Fatherland by the right-wing Nazi Socialist Party.

Only by actively rejecting the absurdity when they are no longer “innocent of knowledge”, can the Western peoples finally stop soaking their hands in the cold blooded genocide of innocent Muslims.

I deconstruct two provocatively titled books of Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, a historian of repute in officialdom who is billed as one of the premier “leading Western scholar of Islam” whilst he betrays little visible scholarly command of Qur’anic Arabic or of Islam’s primary textual source, the Holy Qur’an, relying almost exclusively on narrative translated works of history and secondary/tertiary sources for his “Islamic scholarship”. I also dismantle the pertinent core of the famous book by Samuel P. Huntington, Professor at Harvard University, a reputed political scientist, whose “Clash of Civilizations” has made that mantra an overt instrument of the hegemonic American foreign policy today. And lastly, I unmask the cleverly masked prejudices of Fouad Ajami, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, whose fanatical spin of ‘war on terror’ on American mainstream television is analyzed through his autobiographical reflections in “The Dream Palace of the Arabs”.

The first two scholars provide the core building blocks for “doctrinal motivation” but are rarely if ever brought on mainstream television as circus clowns. Whereas the latter, as a renegade ‘Uncle Tom’ from the Middle East, is routinely paraded on prime-time television as an “expert” on the Middle East situation. Propaganda wise, Fouad Ajami is the most interesting of the trio. He is calculatingly brought on mainstream television to willingly parrot the white man’s burden when he also honestly affirms in his own aforementioned autobiographical book: “I knew little of religion. My family were Shia Muslims… None of my peers I recall, observed religious ritual or went to the mosque for Friday prayers. We were not a religious breed. Our lodestar was the secular political and cultural world…. Today in Arab World – I left for America a day or two short of my eighteenth birthday, in 1963 – I am a stranger, but no distance could wash me clean of that inheritance.

With that description of himself, even to present Fouad Ajami as an “expert” on Middle East affairs, never mind as an objective one, patently demonstrates an axe to grind in doctrinal hands. Fouad Ajami provides the much needed blowing to sustain the flames of perpetual war which Brzezinski, Lewis, Huntington et. al. provide the essential primacy motivations and doctrinal ingredients for. The doctrinal craftsmanship of these three prominent imperial scholars whom few in the American academe seem to want to take on in their popular writings – perhaps because of the tacit support from the elites of this country which affords all doctrinal scholarship a protection-jacket that is denied to dissenting voices unless it constitutes controlled opposition – is detoxified in the following pages. I hope that in all fairness of the real right, the freedom to be heard, not just to speak, my Prisoners of the Cave is placed adjacent to Crisis of Islam in popular chains like Barnes and Noble where the voting “mob of the simple or credulous” who might even bother to enter a bookstore can easily find it.

Let’s begin, but with a personal note and statement of overarching objective.

Every time I pick up any of their books, or hear their “expert” analyses that is invariably beamed into my living room, even while I am not a scholar by any means, I can call them on a hundred different misrepresentations, half-truths, and omissions. Their vile rhetoric not only angers me as a direct personal attack on me and my family and on all my billion plus fellow Muslims by way of maligning our religion through purposeful intellectual deceit, but also frightens me that they are providing the powerful “doctrinal” basis to wage this “war on terrorism”. They are directly guilty of orchestrating not just the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Muslims, but also in making tens of millions of mainstream Americans guilty of complicity by way of deceiving them about Islam and generating support for the fabricated “war on terrorism”. These doctrinal scholars are the philosophers outside the Cave spinning the tortuous Alice in Wonderland absurdities for the Cave dwellers.

I make the unarguable case for trying and hanging them as despicable war criminals of no less culpability than the embedded journalists that have already been dealt with earlier. We already have a precedence in the hanging of the chief Nazi philosopher and propagandist at Nuremberg, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, with Dr. Joseph Goebbels only able to cheat the hangman’s noose with some foresight! You, dear reader, can judge for yourself if the American propagandists are anymore innocent of the blood of Iraqi and Afghani civilizations on their hand after you read through this. Also read their cited works with the backdrop of the rebuttal done here and draw your own conclusions. One does not have to be a hoity-toity “intellectual” to reach such conclusions, as that is the sole basis of the jury system in America wherein, just plain ole ordinary citizens sit in judgment over any accused. The world’s most powerful people behind their own distinguished garb still remain just plain ordinary folks too – they shit and fart like the rest of us, some do good works serving humanity, and some others only bring infamy and misery to mankind.

The Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt ably demonstrated that in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. That “banality of evil” isn’t just about the “Good German” Nazis who enabled the Third Reich.

It is about the “Nazi” in each one of us which makes anyone a “Good American” United We Stand for the Fourth Reich! It is about boldly confronting all “Nazis” and hanging or neutering them.


Conclusion

We are made wise not by the recollections of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”

George Bernard Shaw

At the expense of being repetitious, it is once again instructive to reflect over the moral of St. Augustine’s story of the pirate, responding to Alexander’s question – for that is the essence of the reality behind the “war on terrorism”:

When the King asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘the same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.‘” (in St. Augustine’s “The City of God against the Pagans”, Page 148)

In the entire public discussion on this “war on terrorism” and “World War IV” in the United States of America, this aspect of defining the “terrorist” has been starkly ignored. When President Bush stated: “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done”, it might have helped him locate the terrorists a lot easier in his own backyard if he had only been well read enough to consult St. Augustine.

I sometimes feel optimistic that if President Bush were to become intimately acquainted with the definition of “terrorism” according to St. Augustine, he would fire all his advisors – forego the exemptions claimed by the United States against being indicted for war crimes in the World Court, and bring his entire Cabinet, including all the Zionist Neocon war mongers, the embedded reporters, the ubiquitous television and press stenographers, and the Zionist doctrinal scholars up on war crimes charges! He would irreversibly commit his nation to pay restitution for his war crimes to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, and then resign himself due to a guilty conscience the size of which would make Shakespeare proud (his decimated fingers would rewrite Macbeth) – and perhaps even spawn a new generation of Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment rewritten in the New American Century genre). This would be a Nobel Peace Prize truly well deserved, even as a lifetime resident in Guantanamo bay.

But alas, this simple failure to recognize the large motes in their own eyes has lead to countless thousands of innocent men women and children dead, and many more soon to meet the same fate at the hands of the self-righteous and all powerful neocolonial terrorists in Washington and Tel Aviv.

That is the most bewildering thing about America. Deception is committed openly, even while evidence is there in plain sight, but only for those with the determination to plough through the deceit and spin doctoring propaganda that invariably surrounds all senses 24/7. The public only gets exposed to the truth a decade, or a century later – depending on the gravity of the crime, and the conscience of the people willing to risk exposing it. By then the destruction is complete, and many thousands have paid the ultimate price. Perhaps tears of incredulity are shed by all and sundry, both pundits and public alike, but mostly a detached statement of fact is recorded in history and current affairs books, without any expression of remorse, or attempt at restitution and compensation by the shocked nation. Then it all seems to begin again as if there was no history!

This process whereby the crimes of the emperor require enormous self incriminating proofs to convince the populace of imperial crimes, as well as for the media to air them, when the crimes are actually occurring and something can be done to stop them, has something terribly wrong with it. Emperors generally do not leave receipts behind. It is like looking for Hitler’s written orders to Eichmann for gassing the Jews before being convinced that the Holocaust occurred! The concentration camps or the testimony of the victims aren’t proofs enough? Yes they certainly are, but perhaps only when the emperor has been safely vanquished. For a reigning emperor, such empirical evidence of their wrong doing does not seem to be quite sufficient, and indeed usually suppressed. Otherwise it would threaten the reign of the emperor.

Anticipating this dilemma is perhaps why the framers of the American Constitution made the press, the prime watch dog over the government, by legally guaranteeing them free speech. A privilege and responsibility that the popular press seems to easily squander on mindless drivel and entertainment to keep the public happy in their basest desires. Their role in a democracy is not just “All the News That’s fit to Print” as the New York Times motto always says on the upper left hand corner of its front page. It is to closely monitor and make the public continually aware of the inner workings of their government, even when it may not be deemed “fit to print” by those in power. When the popular press fails, democracy fails. And Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, the religious fanatics, the Zionist war mongering Neocons, and their patron saint Ariel Sharon, win!

According to Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon papers showing the lies and deceit of the Nixon administration, had these secrets become known just a bit earlier by the public, hundreds of thousands of both Vietnamese and American lives could have been saved. Having met Daniel Ellsberg and been inspired by his speeches and entreaties to those within the corridors of power to leak secrets that will prove to the mainstream public that their leaders are spinning a Machiavellian deception yarn to wage “this war on terrorism”, I decided to make this entreaty to the common American folks to also use their own conscience to rationally evaluate what they already see, as they rise to salute the flag “United we stand” and watch the “Shock and Awe” of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “imperial mobilization” and the emerging police state atmosphere is not an overnight phenomenon that just happened due to 9-11. It has required a host of diverse institutional structures and pieces to come together over many decades to make it possible. Taking the country back to its roots of a “populist democracy” requires a lot more than just defeating George Bush in the 2004 elections – although that is certainly a significant step in the right direction. But as I learnt in fifth grade in a school-play in which I had a small role, this one line that has stayed with me: “the mayor may come and the mayor may go, the town clerk goes on forever”; changing the front face in the White House will hardly change the power structure behind it.

The following are the essential preconditions that had to come true before this “imperial mobilization” could happen. Hence understanding and neutralizing them is essential for a more harmonious, equitable, and peaceful co-existence of America with the other nations of the world.

This is not a complete list, only an essential one:

I.1: Policy think-tanks and academic scholarship create long term imperial strategies in order to perpetuate America’s preeminence and its ‘natural’ primacy prerogative upon others;

I.2: Congress makes laws to corporatize public airwaves – a for profit enterprise – that constricts a public commons held in trust by the Government for all its peoples into a tiny minority hands;

I.3: News media consequently falls into the hands of the military-industrial complex through consolidations and becomes beholden to the special-interests of the ruling elite;

I.4: The lobbying power of corporations and special interest groups control the law makers;

I.5: The political parties become beholden to special interests to get elected;

I.6: The Zionist Jewish lobby AIPAC acquires disproportional clout to their actual numbers in the society, and disproportionately influences law makers to favor Israel often to the detriment of the National Interests of America itself;

I.7: Intellectuals seed prejudicial and self-serving “doctrinal motivation” to lead the public into “imperial mobilization” the moment a pretext is available, by abusing academic freedom and freedom of speech to systematically orchestrate the maligning of a world’s religion as boogiemen du jour to coerce the public into fighting a lifetime of wars against!

Developing a deeper understanding of these essential preconditions that has now led to this hijacking of America is the responsibility of every American who cares about their nation.

With the above preconditions becoming realized over a period of several decades, it was now only a matter of time before a tactical opportune moment for alignment became available. This is captured in the algorithm below to effectively counter “democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”:

wait until

I.1: alignment of all branches of government

I.2: alignment of all international conditions with no viable challengers

I.3: assemble good team of hawks

I.4: claim exemption and immunity from prosecution for war crimes

I.5: acquire pretext: a new “Pearl Harbor”

I.6: media complies in creating fear – rally the public to fight the treacherous new “enemy”

I.7: pass new laws to suppress civil rights in anticipation of dissent by the courageous few

then go to war

I.8: control the images and contain dissent

I.9: continue making war

until done or when people wakeup

This is exactly what happened after the 2000 elections. Everything was ready to go when the 9-11 “Pearl Harbor” occurred. The rest is history – until the 2004 elections, and then the 2008 elections, and so on, unless something is radically changed. It is naive to believe that changing the front face in the White House will accomplish any meaningful change. Clinton pretty much carried out all of the foreign policies set into motion by George Bush Sr. for the 8 years he remained in the White House. Any Democrat winning over George W. Bush Jr. will carry on in the same vein until the next time the Republicans win. This is guaranteed. The power brokers support all faces and both parties – which often compete with each other in who can better represent the special interests funding them. This is no more apparent than in the Israeli and Jewish lobby relations with all power brokers in Washington – they are a truly bipartisan special interest group. The Democratic front runners whoever they turn out to be, will only promise cosmetic changes, and in reality will be as impotent to affect a change as anyone else enjoying institutional support from the military-industrial-Israeli complex. And if they did not enjoy this institutional support from the 1% elite of America, they will not become front runners. This is the untold tragedy of this American Democracy!

Just replacing the front face in the White House (although necessary), but not making structural reforms to the essential preconditions mentioned above will only postpone the re-realignment of these steps at a future time. The American public must insist from their elected officials to move in these directions of structural reforms with utmost urgency and alacrity in order to remain or become your representatives in the hallowed institutions of power. After all they represent you and always act in your name and on your behalf. All their wars, both overt and covert, and commissions of war crimes against humanity, are on your behalf. You cannot let that continue. Such is the responsibility for living in a democracy – the public can never fall asleep, for they are the ones who must ultimately and continually watch those in whom they vest the power to watch over them. In order to do so, the public must remain an informed citizenry – a task as important in the pursuit of the “American Dream”, as industriousness and hard work.

Perpetual vigilance is the price of democracy.

If there was no oil in the Middle East, would this “war on terrorism” still have been launched? Zbigniew Brzezinski would probably have no interest in the region if it did not further the American-Zionist Hegemony in some way. I don’t believe that he harbors any ill will toward Muslims or Islam per se (unlike the mission of George Bush Jr. and his fanatic Evangelical Christian cohorts); it’s all a chess game to him. Everyone is a pawn in his perception, including even the American people, on his Grand Chessboard. But from the Zionist point of view? They still want that land under the Muslim soil! And from the corporate globalization point of view? They still want those billions strong consumers and sources of cheap labor! And to be free from dictators? That would be setting a bad example for those they still want to enslave! Freedom can be contagious. Thus a new enabling pretext would have been found to propagate America’s Hegemony in the World. The American public needs to remain mindful of the fundamentals that motivates this “war on terrorism” – the much coveted American imperialism in irreversible baby steps, while America can still can get away with it. It is oil today, it might be something else tomorrow, as evidenced by keeping North Korea on the back burner. They have yet to discover oil under the Korean peninsula.

Some final concluding observations are mandated on the irreversible baby steps, which few in America seem to comprehend today as faithful subjects of the American empire. As the history of Israel in Palestine has demonstrated, what has once been done, may not be undone. From the very fraudulent creation of Israel by alleging “a land without people, for a people without land”, to piece meal usurpation of more and more Palestinian lands through settlements created on land acquired during military occupation and war, the reality is becoming irreversible. As David Ben Gurion had shrewdly prognosticated: “What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times”, Israel has deviously sown these irreversible seeds in small incremental steps during moments of tension and “revolutionary times”. The peace makers in the world who beseech Israel to come to the negotiating table do not seem to comprehend this reality: the Machiavellian tactics of take a little bit more, return a small portion of that to appease, then take some more, and repeat; the “taking some more” always occurring during “revolutionary times”. The only way for Israel to be brought to the negotiating table in earnest peace is when the Zionists have taken all the useful land they want, then they will throw back all the useless land they took just for this purpose – as they did with the return of the Sinai to an eternally grateful Egypt that now bows in subservience for this gift. This is the fate of Palestine. This is also the fate of all Arab countries from the Nile to the Euphrates – as Churchill had noted: the new colonialism of client-states in the post colonial world is far cheaper to maintain with far less headaches than overt occupation, and as Israel is finding out in the West Bank.

These irreversible baby steps are also plainly visible in Iraq. Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of World War III (Cold War label by James Woolsey), the hegemonist planning for Iraq was set in motion by George Bush Sr. This was part of the New World pecking Order in which America was envisioned as the top dog with first rights to all things valuable in the Universe. Other nations were assigned their rightful places in the pecking order, and so long as they didn’t interfere with America’s privilege to the choicest treasures, they could do whatever they wanted in their own backyards and spheres of influences. It took from 1990 to 2003 – a period of 13 years to realize the conquest of Iraq. Iraq had to be left intact after the First Gulf War because the pretext was liberation of Kuwait, the real reason however was to disarm the Iraqi dictator that George Bush Sr. had willfully armed to fight off Iran’s Islamic revolution as the Vice President in Reagan administration. After Iran had been neutralized, the armed-to-the-teeth Iraq could threaten Israel and had to be disarmed first before its natural treasures could be harvested. But they had to keep the disarmed dictator in power over his own people until the proper play on the geostrategic Grand Chessboard emerged. This is why General Norman Schwarzkopf was really held back by George Bush Sr. even though the general had insisted that Baghdad was only at a stones throw and he could take all of Iraq in 1991. Knowing and understanding full well that sanctions only strangle civilians and only consolidate the power of dictators over their own people, America forced UN sanctions on Iraq to buy time.

Then George H. W. Bush Sr. was thrown out of office in 1992 for eight years. But that wasn’t really a set back, only a minor delay. During this entire period, his worthy successor Bill Clinton kept up the policies already set in place by Bush Sr., in obedience to the Zionist lobby who are the major benefactors of the Democratic Party. Until the next opportune time, the return of the prodigal son, George Bush Jr. to the pulpit, President Clinton could no more rectify what George Bush Sr. had set in motion despite his popularity, than the successor of George Bush Jr. in the White House will be able to reverse what has now been set into motion in Iraq by Clinton’s successor. This is a fact. Even if a new future President has all the right intentions, the overarching goals of the empire will tie his hands, as is evidenced by Clinton keeping on the Zionist barbarian Madeleine Albright as the Secretary of State, who stated that the death of 5000 innocent children per month in Iraq due to America’s economic sanctions was: “we think the price is worth it” – always disingenuously maintaining that the stifling sanctions were to throw the CIA implanted dictator out of power. A Secretary of State of the most powerful nation on earth, made this public statement about innocent Muslim children. This contemporary fact of history, and the images of suffering Iraqi children documented in UN reports, may neither be forgotten, nor minimized, nor dismissed, and nor any of them brought back to life. While the buildings may be rebuilt, generations lost cannot. Many a hand is stained in their blood, no less red than the Holocaust victim’s.

These are the irreversible baby steps that courageous historians in a hundred years will discover receipts for, and will write about how America and Israel attempted to extend their respective empires, just as today we see historians bravely write about how the (now vanquished) Her Majesty’s Government and Mein Fuehrer extended their respective colonial and military empires through chicanery in their heyday. Who has not heard of the East India Company, and divide and conquer? In a hundred years, the American public schools might be teaching all about “false flag operations”, and the deception game Bush Sr. and Jr. played to conquer the world – and how they dismally failed! But writing and speaking this truth today in any voice that can be popularly heard, will only get its honest articulator calumny and discredit, if not outright elimination or incarceration in Guantanamo Bay as an “enemy combatant”. Truth, only when it does not and cannot matter, is the topos of the corporate controlled American Democracy today – the distinguished garb of the civilized barbarians.

This, all this, is the only reality behind the fiction of “war on terrorism”. Would you concur?

My humble appeal to the heart and commonsense of the American people

Wake up mainstream Americans before your hands are so stained in blood that all the oceans of the world will not wash it off nor “all the perfumes [oils] of Arabia sweeten it” for thou will be unable to remain “[willfully] innocent of the knowledge” and become thine own worst enemies. Take back America from the “Second Foundationers” before the country either implodes from the barbarism that She is allegedly fighting just as the Athenians succumbed to the traits of the Spartans, or explodes as the victims of the world will one day get together for “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood”, said the master of human psychology and politics, William Shakespeare.

I do not believe that you are the type of people who will “be [willfully] innocent of the knowledge” once that knowledge comes to you, even if it means hardship and struggle. That has been the history of America, constant struggle to right the wrongs of the elite ruling class. While it is true that America is a dominant power today, who knows what tomorrow can bring. The innocent victims who have seen their parents, brothers, sisters, and children blown up in front of their very eyes as they screamed and yelled for help with the deafening anguish that only the sounds of innocence can carry, a “mystery whose parallel may only be the one of Sinai when something was revealed” that Elie Wiesel mourned, may one day find the means to exact their ounce of revenge in a manner no less grotesque than the one reigned on them in the guise of bringing democracy. Would you do otherwise if the shoe was on the other foot?

You can either continue to build a fortress around yourselves and become the prisoners of your own worst fears as your leaders continue to exploit others, or truly live in peace and openness in the amity of nations that your leaders always claim they are doing while they are out screwing the world and keeping you, the American public, in the dark. A society built around the worst fears of its members can only lead to a martial law based military police state of Orwellian proportions, because nothing short of it will give the illusion of complete security.

It is already happening in the Homeland Security state with centralization of all the previously distributed security functions under one umbrella for the first time in American history. Hitler did the same thing in 1936 for the first time in German history which had a much older pedigree. The Orwellian police state that America is headed for is not exactly the type of “1984” and “Animal Farm”, but close. You Americans will still have plenty of choices for TV channels and sports, music, food and clothing. What you will not have is the ability to think freely, to disagree openly – especially with the ruling elite, and raise new generations with critical thinking skills, enlightened scholarship, and valor. You will have all the freedoms of the body, but none of the mind. Even if you look around yourselves today, you can see that this is the goal that your ruling elite is herding you towards. While you can get your tongue pierced in a hundred different ways, and see promiscuous episodes of Friends 365 days a year, you cannot get a single dissenting point of view heard or seen on mainstream media.

People of America wake up!

Even if you dismiss the logic of this essay and claim for yourself the right to defend against 9/11: “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, [infinite] justice will be done” in a “Crusade” of “Operation Infinite Justice”, recall that the misery you are imposing in doing so with your “algebra of infinite justice” on other innocent civilians across the planet for generations far beyond those whom America holds responsible, using munitions that keep on killing long after the battle is over, is being written down, in precise details, in the book of reckoning, “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on” and no one can erase a word of it, reminds Omar Khayyam, the sage of the East.

We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation”, prays a CIA agent as his three CIA teams are about to launch into Afghanistan on Feb. 5, 2002 from Pakistan, writes Bob Woodward in “Bush at War”.

No one stays on top forever, and “[retributive] justice is [not just] the advantage of the stronger”, asserts Plato in his “Republic”.

America’s own “MBA President” warns “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war. And we know that God is not neutral between them”, in his address to Congress on September 21, 2001.

And Plato again trumps that by observing “Only the dead have seen the end of war”, for both the victims and their victimizers.

Is this what you Americans really want as you drape yourselves in red white and blue? Do you recall which one of your founding Presidents warned you ~“Beware of the false patriots who wrap themselves in the flag”?

You are no longer living on an isolated continent but are the denizens of a global imperial superpower – what your government does in your name, you must be held accountable for. To remain “innocent of knowledge” can only take you so far, before it will become labeled as “willful ignorance” and elicit a concomitant imprecation of posterity.

You are indeed far more accountable for the actions of your leaders whom you willingly choose and select, than those living in imposed dictatorships who did not get to choose or select their military juntas and various and sundry Mafioso wearing kingly and local uniforms reigning over them with your government’s and West’s active financial, military, and political support.

If you can gladly accept the indiscriminate “Shock and Awe” bombings of entire innocent populations for the ostensible sins of some of their tyrant leaders of your own government’s creation, it is only fair that you should call for the US Air Force to also bomb American cities with the same “Shock and Awe” for the sins of your own leaders, the casualties of which is now at least an order of magnitude higher than what you suffered on 9/11, and immeasurable for the shattering of their tabula rasa and destruction of their heritage as old as human civilization. Moral consistency demands it.

The only escape from this conundrum is to realize that a) We should not bomb other people, or b) We are living in a far worse dictatorship hence we are not accountable for the sins of our rulers – or as Chomsky would say it, that we in America are terribly “indoctrinated”. Any unhypocritical decent human being can only come to one of these two logical deductions, provided they become aware of the sins of their leaders. Our leaders want to ensure that we will not reach either of these two conscionable conclusions. Hence they allow the public to “believe anything – but to know nothing”. Will thee not see this?

Do you not see your nakedness as you cheer your successes that are borne of few casualties to your own soldiers but devastate the other side as you debate whether or not to go to the next war of conquest? The question of right or wrong never occurs to you, outside of the parameters of your own casualties – it’s wrong if the cost is too much, right if you don’t see body bags? It’s only wrong to do if it is found out, but okay if it isn’t?

Do you not see the extortion racket: install a stupid and brutal dictator as a pawn on a grand chessboard, after he has served his ugly purpose and a newer grander chessboard has emerged, destroy his nation and its infrastructure using the fact that he is a brutal dictator, but still keep him in power because the chessboard isn’t fully developed yet, then 13 years later when realization is practicable, again using the pretext of saving his oppressed people from his tyranny, invade and occupy the country, plunder their wealth, install a new dictator, and repeat!

A clash of civilizations, or good old fashioned colonialism dressed in American Levi’s? What do you think your founding fathers were fighting when they threw all that perfectly good tea overboard? What were George Washington and Patrick Henry when they argued “no taxation without representation” and “liberty or death”? Terrorists “who hate[d] freedom”? The British surely must have thought so.

Do you not see who is financing this “war on terrorism”? Two million jobs have been lost in America. Its economy is trillions of dollars in debt. Its social spending is down to all time lows. In 2002, various states cut social spending for public services, education, and welfare to the tune of $49 billion, and this year (2003), they are expected to cut another $25 billion, for a total of $74 billion. And George Bush got $80 billion approved from Congress to expand empire, of which it gave $9 billion to Israel which already has one of the highest per capita income of any developed country and the best social services for its Jewish denizens and settlers. Who is paying for this empire and its funding of Israel with social spending cuts? The few percent wealthy who own most of America’s wealth, or the vast majority of the American population?

Who serves in the military to fight for this empire? In this all volunteer army, only one member from both the house and senate has a child in the military. How many CEOs and corporate executives have their kids serving in Iraq? While voluntary, the military is a draft for the poor who see it as their only opportunity for employment, education, and getting ahead in life. The poor, the minorities, the Latinos, the Blacks, and the lower income class are the ones fighting for America’s predominant white corporations.

And who is benefiting from all the reconstruction projects in Iraq slated to be of the order of $100 billion dollars, but probably more? Those fighting for it or their masters? Who is experiencing the tax cuts benefit, massive layoffs, diminishing medical benefits, even further reduced veterans benefits? You or the military-industrial corporations?

Did the British label the American revolt against them with any other label but terrorism? For them too, it was a clash of civilizations! Even when it was them who burned down the White House and the American Capital. And now they are your best of friends!

Do you ever ponder on this alliance between your country and England? Is it only because you saved England from Hitler? Or is it perhaps because all the wolves are rallying around the top dog for their share of the night’s frenzied kill? An empire reminisced? A new empire to beget on the backs of the new global superpower?

Do you ever ponder an entire world united against America? And all for what – to fill the coffers of the military-industrial complex and the <0.1% ruling elite of the world?

Epilogue

But for now, while we intellectualize and philosophize, and write essays and exposés to point out the large motes in one’s own eyes, the good and kindly mainstream people in these United States continue to rise and sing hail to the chief every time he comes on TV, while the ‘fictitious’ war on terror goes on, one Muslim life at a time – quite democratically too – men women children young and old alike are equally delivered death and misery – we can’t use democracy at home, but at least we can let them have it. And the American flags go up on the far and remote oil wells of the world, its dominance reaching almost every corner of the globe. And where its dominance is still not complete, the place is made part of the axis of evil, and inducted in the battle plan for the next wars of conquest.

  • end.

This book arose out of essays written during the months of April and May 2003, through the heart wrenching period of invasion and merciless bombing of Iraq under the Machiavellian deception of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. References to concurrently occurring events that are not specifically dated are during this period.

I have endeavored to check and double check all the facts presented here, and sources of all the quotes when possible. I use ~ before a quote to indicate that it is an approximate quote when I am not sure of the exact wording as it’s from memory, but it has publicly been reported on; it is more than a paraphrase and close to the actual wording, but may not be exact in every letter. The purists may treat it as a paraphrase.

Unlike most Current Affairs books that are written after extended research with the objective of writing a book, this book came about quite extemporaneously. All the research for it being the life time of experience in America. These essays came out of my mind quite spontaneously, partially as a cathartic reaction to the FBI visiting my home twice in March/April 2003. The central part of it being written over a concentrated period of 18 – 20 hour days of furious typing for ten consecutive days in April 2003, right after the second visit from the authorities. It took another month of intense day and night editing and elaboration through May 2003, to make it into this book form. The war time facts cited here are current only through April 2003. Some of these facts and quotes are obviously only as accurate as the original sources of information. All facts and quotes are publicly reported, and most are empirical observations publicly available for anyone on the planet to perceive.

The purpose of this work is mainly to connect the dots; to demonstrate with rational logic and commonsense reasoning, that two plus two equals four and not five, even when the emperor might insist so. This work is a public stand by an ordinary person against ignorance and deception, against the perpetuators of the most heinous and murderous Machiavellian game in history.

It is a direct message from my heart, to the other ordinary, peaceable, non-Zionist, non-empire-building, non-crusading mainstream American people.

This is a time of deep anguish for me. What is clearly visible to me as fraud and deception, makes the murder of innocent civilians through some sort of “official sanction” of “Shock and Awe” acceptable to the majority of this nation. How can this be? I have found myself discussing with my American friends even the simple ABC’s of their own history of lies and deceit by their government, all of which seems to have been magically erased from their memories as they line up to salute their flag “United We Stand”. To that slogan I often feel like adding United We Stand For Tyranny Through Ignorance, for I cannot bring myself to believe that the majority of American people, amongst whom I have lived quite content for almost a quarter century, are a nation of barbaric conquerors out to impose their will on others.

For the first time in my life, along with my family, I find myself participating in protest marches in the streets of America voicing my dissent against the war, including in the historic protest march in February 2003, where over 10 million people world wide said NO to George Bush – but could not stop the invasion of Iraq as the President summarily dismissed them as only a “focus group”. The failure to stop the war was very frustrating, and I felt like shouting out to mainstream America to get out in the main streets of America and protest the crimes of their emperor – especially when only they, in sufficiently large numbers, can stop him. The FBI visits somehow became just the catalyst for me to bring this message to the American public.

Due to this message being written through war time coverage, the facts and figures will likely change over time as new updates and situations arise. The central thesis of this message however will not change. It is really up to the American public themselves to break out of their prison of ignorance and gullibility, to shatter the chains holding them captives as prisoners of the cave. Until the American people wake up and reclaim their democracy and their country from the special-interest cabal running it, this book will likely remain current regardless of who might occupy the White House in the future.

It also does not matter who is finally appointed to administer Iraq, or how it is administered. It will remain a client-state of the New American Century. The ideas outlined in the PNAC study will be closely followed. Thus it is easy to predict what they will attempt to do to Iraq: to remake it in the mold of Turkey’s capitalist economy, away from its Arab roots and heritage; to create a governing structure that is not inimical to the interests of the American-Zionist hegemony, with the majority of its wealth and its consumer markets going into the coffers of the American multinational corporations, and control of oil staying in the direct or indirect control of the American policy makers. Will the people of Iraq defeat them? Will the American public wake up and come to their rescue? It is my faith, and my hope, that the answer is a yes! The battle plan is to do the same with other countries in the region, if they don’t. To know what comes next, read their own imperial words; use a bit of commonsense to judge facts; reach conclusions based on evidence and not vague feelings of false patriotism; and act before it is too late!

The title of this book is obviously inspired by Plato. The title of Part-2 is inspired by William Shakespeare’s character Lady Macbeth, whose guilty conscience for the crime of murder drove her insane as she repeatedly tried to cleanse the blood off her hands, but it would not go away. And she had not even committed the dastardly deed herself. But she was actively complicit in it. Her husband advised her “Be Innocent of Knowledge” (Macbeth 3:2:45), i.e. pretend that you don’t know anything about it, and perhaps that might ease your burden. But her conscience would not allow her to lie to herself, once the knowledge of the crime was already in her mind. To sleep “holily” at night is to have a dead conscience. The Shakespearean term “holily” is used here in a slightly different sense from that used in Macbeth: “Yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds. (Macbeth 5:1:47-49). It is instructive to reflect on this insightful line by Shakespeare, and ponder its many levels of meaning. See how many Nobel Peace Prize winners might it apply to. It is a shame that Shakespeare is not studied more as a social scientist and father of all psychoanalysts, predating Freud by several centuries, for his shrewd insights into the human condition and plight of power. The famous quote “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” (Macbeth 5:1:41), is of course symbolic of a guilty conscience, that will simply not go away – a merciful gift to humanity to help us police ourselves.

I am betting that when knowledge of the crime of the emperor comes to them, and their complicity in it is realized by them, that like Lady Macbeth, the American public will be torn by their good conscience, that they will be as unable to remain “innocent of knowledge” as Lady Macbeth, and will endeavor to right the wrongs done in their name by their successive governments. As Arundhati Roy put it in a speech: “Yours is by no means a great nation – but you could be a great people – history is giving you the chance – seize the time. I am betting that the conscience of its own people will prove to be the real fifth column in the United States of America. Perhaps somewhat idealistic, but it is precisely ideals that seem to be lacking in the collective wisdom of this nation, where mostly everything is viewed from the distorted prism of the pragmatic, the expeditious, the instantly gratifying, and the “might makes right” imperial sight. Its injection into the American polity cannot be a bad thing. I don’t expect everyone to necessarily agree with my work, the point of it being not to make you agree with me, but to motivate you into examining your invisible chains in the hope that if you earnestly look for them, you will likely find them.

The quote “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood” (Macbeth 3:5:121) is the cycle of retribution that Israelis and the Palestinian are projected to be caught in. The question not very often asked in America, is what is the cause of this revenge cycle – the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or Palestinian occupation of Israel? A struggle for independence from an oppressive occupying military force is always projected in the American media as only a revenge cycle of senseless violence, with the stone throwing Palestinians responsible for starting it, and Israel only acting in self defense! The purposeful provocations – for “What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times” as stated by David Ben Gurion, one of the pioneering founders of the state of Israel, remain unmentioned. The preferential treatment of Israel by American politicians and the American press, and the delicate way in which the American society today approaches any and all issues which involve the Jewish people, is to the significant credit of the Zionists whose influence permeates America, and to the significant detriment of the Jews themselves, the proud inheritors of a moral tradition that is being trampled afoot by criminals whose only religion is Eretz Israel, and (neo) Zionism.

Only approx. 4 million Jews live in Israel, the rest, somewhere between 20 to 40 million according to some estimates, live in all parts of the world, in almost all civilizations and nations. This larger identity of the Jews is now getting besmirched by the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians, and this will surely come to haunt them in the future. A wake up call to my cousins and brothers in Semitic heritage, descendants of the same Abrahamic traditions and believers in the same Prophets (at least up to Moses, peace be upon him), whose new alliances with their own oppressors of the past, to avenge themselves on the innocent Muslims, their own benefactors in the past, is not lost to anyone in the world, least of all to the Muslims. Powers of state rise and fall, the people however do live on beyond that. The seeds of poison now sown, will be reaped in abundance by the generations downstream, and instead of offering prayers for their ancestors, remain mindful, that they may offer a curse. This is a lesson to be remembered by all of us, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all the rest of people – including emperor George Bush.

In his Christian fanatic zeal to bring on Jesus, and in his gullibility in being manipulated by his Neocon handlers to bring “Infinite Justice” to the “evil doers”, Bush is only using the Zionists to his own ends, as much as they are using him to fund their military and endorse their continued annexation of more and more Palestinian lands. And in so doing, George Bush is performing a major disservice to the Jews as a people. Especially a historically victimized people at the hands of fanatic Christians, all the way down to World War II. And now, by shaking hands with Ariel Sharon and calling him a “man of peace”, Bush is once again victimizing the Jewish people in World War IV. Conversely, the handful of Neocons who are predominantly Zionist Jews are taking the peoples of the United States of America for a ride of deception toward world conquest for Zion at the expense of the blood of America’s sons and daughters. Amazing synergy here with each thinking they have the upper hand. Sometimes Bush scares me, for what if he really is the mule (Isaac Asimov’s character)? That could spell the end of the Jews and Zion and the rest of the world for his only interest is Armageddon! But for those on the receiving end now, it is already Armageddon.

Don’t think that these images of death and destruction are not seen around the world. While the American public might appear dumb and muted, the rest of the world is not – even though their leaders are silent bystanders to the mayhem in Palestine. Instead of supporting Bush, which many seem to be doing, the majority of the Jews in America should be adding to the minority of conscionable Jewish voices of dissent, and all of them should be openly and very loudly calling for his public trial for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, along with Ariel Sharon. With their incredible power and influence in America, as perceived by most people outside America, even by the Israeli public and the Israeli politicians themselves – that they control America and its public opinion – the American Jews can collectively take a moral and courageous stand against this inhumanity being done in their name.

For the Jews to stay silent bystanders today, will impose on them the same curse of Elie Wiesel that they impose on the Nazis: “I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent.” But far worse than that; victims have long memories transcending generations.

To appreciate this truism, all the Jews have to do is to look at their own memories through 2000 years of Diaspora. Wake up Jews of America! Join Rachel Corrie in reclaiming your heritage and your inheritance, as the chosen and moral people of God – for such an endowment is not without its responsibilities. Nor is such a momentous endowment, an absolution from all moral duties, as the Jewish moralists themselves will frequently remind their flock wont to forgetting. This perversion of supermorality that has transpired in your ethos will be your undoing. Recognize it and dismantle it yourselves. Just think what Samson option means – it means your own destruction along with the enemy. What if the enemy is willing and they are plentiful? You perish my friends and brothers, for if that is the price of getting rid of the handful of Machiavellis and Shylocks from our midst that is the source of our perpetual misery and oppression, it may be considered an honorable Faustian bargain by many. Your best and guaranteed survival as for all the rest of us in an amicable and prosperous existence is only through your dismantling the Apartheid Der Judenstaat in Palestine, returning it to its original inhabitants, and hanging your own supercriminals in the same kind of trials as those held for Eichmann in Jerusalem. Only that can begin to atone for what you did in Palestine and what your supercriminals have done in Iraq, Afghanistan, and are planning to do to the rest of the world. Do it now – for it will be done one day anyway but at much greater cost if history is any guide.

In exercising my “inalienable” free speech rights for the first time in my life, I am unaware that I have crossed any limits, or that indeed there are any “limits” to telling the truth. There certainly don’t seem to be any for lies and deception. I have endeavored to speak freely and honestly, despite the prevailing climate of repression in the United States, and despite caution from attorneys that since the passage of the Patriot Act, there is no freedom of speech for US permanent residents. They can lock me up or deport me at their whim, if they choose to – a legal right they have acquired through the passage of the Patriot Act.

I only speak for myself and make no representation on behalf of anyone else. It has not been my intent to offend anyone, but it has also not been my intent to fear speaking the truth for the sake of offending someone. If you are offended by mere words, imagine the offenses your bombs have wrecked on the tabula rasa of innocent peoples. Silence is the “banality of evil” that will only incur this wrath upon me: I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent.

Writing this book has been my own humble and ‘lesser Jihad’ against these primal merchants of death. So I suppose I must be a ‘jihadi’ too.

end postscript

The Weapons of Mass Deception

Imagine an exactly identical group in Germany – how would these documents and their authors have measured up at Nuremberg where the Chief Prosecutor, the United States of America, hung the Nazi’s for the crimes of invading other countries, of “goosestep[ing] the Herrenvolk across international frontiers”?

Please use a search engine on the internet like Google, and especially use the Wikipedia grass-roots encyclopedia, to lookup each of these 118 public names and to learn about their backgrounds, their professions, their philosophies, and the confluence of their interests in Zionism and “The Iron Triangle”, to make manifest whom and what do they all predominantly shill for, and for what cause is the blood of America’s sons and daughters being spilled for and an entire humanity outside the shores of America being killed for.

Please add to these names, those of Zbigniew Brzezinski – the pragmatist, as the author of the New Mein Kampf for the New American Century; Leo Strauss – the late political philosopher and heir to Machiavelli, as the ideological mentor and godfather of the neoconservatives; and Irving Kristol – the Strauss disciple, as the senior Fellow at the influential AEI, and some claim as the immediate father of contemporary neoconservatism, but certainly as the parent of William Kristol who founded PNAC with money from Rupert Murdoch. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush Jr., acquired dozens of thinkers and doers from AEI who brought with them the Straussian philosophy of deception in politics, and moral imperatives of American hegemony over the world – the cost and consequences to others is immaterial. This was amply witnessed in the destruction of Afghan society during the proxy war with the USSR, of which much of the ideological underpinnings, strategic thinking, and tactical execution came from the AEI affiliated thinkers. AEI hides in plain sight of the Americans, as Public policy planning “think tank” since 1943, and exactly espouses the philosophy laid out by George F. Kennan that is quoted in Chapter 1.

Do the Americans want to continue harboring their supercriminal superterrorists under legalism and wait to be vanquished like the Third Reich who did exactly just that – their tyranny upon the world was also the official policy of the Nazi State, only their gullible German people did not know it. Well I am bringing you this knowledge – and I await a Robert Jackson over the vanquished who will proclaim, what the original one proclaimed before he hung them: “The plans of Adolf Hitler for aggression were just as secret as Mein Kampf, of which over six million copies were published in Germany.

If only all these brilliant hectoring hegemons could work in the ideological space of Luke Skywalker, or vent all their imperial longings and Zionist fantasies of hijacking other peoples and their nations to create a “Zion that will light up all the world” by writing science fiction novels like Isaac Asimov. They already seem to be implementing his themes of oppressing and manipulating through thought control and social conformance – the internal prisons that require no overt totalitarian control – perfect Prisoners of the Cave whose chains are invisible, but nevertheless still there. Like Asimov, by writing science fiction novels instead of political doctrines and philosophies, they can enjoy a much bigger canvas and many universes to conquer, with as many clashes of civilizations and fault-lines they can eat, and life-times of wars galore with other aliens’ and lesser peoples’ blood until end of time. But on earth, and in the docks, with real peoples’ blood on their hands, they will resemble only Eichmann.

Statement of Principles June 3, 1997 {A1 25}

(http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm)

PNAC founders William (Bill) Kristol and Robert Kagan, founded 1997.

Elliot Abrams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett Jeb Bush

Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes

Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Fred C. Ikle

Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby Norman Podhoretz

Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen Henry S. Rowen

Donald Rumsfeld Vin Weber George Weigel Paul Wolfowitz

Letter to President Clinton on Iraq January 26, 1998 {A2 18}

(http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm)

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

CPSG Letter to President Clinton February 19, 1998 {A3 40}

(http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=papers&code=01-D_76)

Hon. Stephen Solarz

Former Member, Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. House of Representatives

Hon. Richard Perle

Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Former Assistant Secretary of Defense

Hon. Elliot Abrams

President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Former Assistant Secretary of State

Richard V. Allen

Former National Security Advisor

Hon. Richard Armitage

President, Armitage Associates, L.C.; Former Assistant Secretary of Defense

Jeffrey T. Bergner

President, Bergner, Bockorny, Clough & Brain; Former Staff Director, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Hon. John Bolton

Senior Vice President, American Enterprise Institute; Former Assistant Secretary of State

Stephen Bryen

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

Hon. Richard Burt

Chairman, IEP Advisors, Inc.; Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany; Former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs

Hon. Frank Carlucci

Former Secretary of Defense

Hon. Judge William Clark

Former National Security Advisor

Paula J. Dobriansky

Vice President, Director of Washington Office, Council on Foreign Relations; Former Member, NSC

Doug Feith

Managing Attorney, Feith & Zell P.C.; Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy

Frank Gaffney

Director, Center for Security Policy; Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces

Jeffrey Gedmin

Executive Director, New Atlantic Initiative; Research Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Hon. Fred C. Ikle

Former Undersecretary of Defense

Robert Kagan

Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Zalmay M. Khalilzad

Director, Strategy and Doctrine, RAND Corporation

Sven F. Kraemer

Former Director of Arms Control, National Security Council

William Kristol

Editor, The Weekly Standard

Michael Ledeen

Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Former Special Advisor to the Secretary of State

Bernard Lewis

Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern and Ottoman Studies, Princeton Univ.

R. Admiral Frederick L. Lewis

U.S. Navy, Retired

Maj. Gen. Jarvis Lynch

U.S. Marine Corps, Retired

Hon. Robert C. McFarlane

Former National Security Advisor

Joshua Muravchik

Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

Robert A. Pastor

Former Special Assistant to President Carter for Inter-American Affairs

Martin Peretz

Editor-in-Chief, The New Republic

Roger Robinson

Former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs, National Security Council

Peter Rodman

Director of National Security Programs, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom; Former Director, Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State

Hon. Peter Rosenblatt

Former Ambassador to the Trust Territories of the Pacific

Hon. Donald Rumsfeld

Former Secretary of Defense

Gary Schmitt

Executive Director, Project for the New American Century; Former Executive Director, President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board

Max Singer

President, The Potomac Organization; Former President, The Hudson Institute

Hon. Helmut Sonnenfeldt

Guest Scholar, The Brookings Institution; Former Counsellor, U.S. Department of State

Hon. Caspar Weinberger

Former Secretary of Defense

Leon Wienseltier

Literary Editor, The New Republic

Hon. Paul Wolfowitz

Dean, Johns Hopkins SAIS; Former Undersecretary of Defense

David Wurmser

Director, Middle East Program, AEI; Research Fellow, AEI

Dov S. Zakheim

Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense

Letter to Gingrich and Lott on Iraq May 29, 1998 {A4 17}

(http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm)

Elliot Abrams William J. Bennett Jeffrey Bergner

John R. Bolton Paula Dobriansky Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan

Zalmay Khalilzad William Kristol Richard Perle Peter Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber Paul Wolfowitz

R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

Rebuilding America’s Defenses September 2000 {A5 27}

(http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf)

Roger Barnett

U.S. Naval War College

Alvin Bernstein

National Defense University

Stephen Cambone

National Defense University

Eliot Cohen

Nitze School of Advanced International

Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Devon Gaffney Cross

Donors’ Forum for International Affairs

Thomas Donnelly

Project for the New American Century

David Epstein

Office of Secretary of Defense,

Net Assessment

David Fautua

Lt. Col., U.S. Army

Dan Goure

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Donald Kagan

Yale University

Fred Kagan

U. S. Military Academy at West Point

Robert Kagan

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Robert Killebrew

Col., USA (Ret.)

William Kristol

The Weekly Standard

Mark Lagon

Senate Foreign Relations Committee

James Lasswell

GAMA Corporation

I. Lewis Libby

Dechert Price & Rhoads

Robert Martinage

Center for Strategic and Budgetary

Assessment

Phil Meilinger

U.S. Naval War College

Mackubin Owens

U.S. Naval War College

Steve Rosen

Harvard University

Gary Schmitt

Project for the New American Century

Abram Shulsky

The RAND Corporation

Michael Vickers

Center for Strategic and Budgetary

Assessment

Barry Watts

Northrop Grumman Corporation

Paul Wolfowitz

Nitze School of Advanced International

Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Dov Zakheim

System Planning Corporation

Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism September 20, 2001 {A6 41}

(http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm)

William Kristol

Richard V. Allen Gary Bauer Jeffrey Bell William J. Bennett

Rudy Boshwitz Jeffrey Bergner Eliot Cohen Seth Cropsey

Midge Decter Thomas Donnelly Nicholas Eberstadt Hillel Fradkin

Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Jeffrey Gedmin

Reuel Marc Gerecht Charles Hill Bruce P. Jackson Eli S. Jacobs

Michael Joyce Donald Kagan Robert Kagan Jeane Kirkpatrick

Charles Krauthammer John Lehman Clifford May Martin Peretz

Richard Perle Norman Podhoretz Stephen P. Rosen Randy Scheunemann

Gary Schmitt William Schneider, Jr. Richard H. Shultz Henry Sokolski

Stephen J. Solarz Vin Weber Leon Wieseltier Marshall Wittmann

Letter to President Bush on Israel, Arafat and the War on Terrorism April 3, 2002 {A7 34}

(http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter-040302.htm)

William Kristol

Ken Adelman Gary Bauer Jeffrey Bell William J. Bennett

Ellen Bork Linda Chavez Eliot Cohen Midge Decter

Thomas Donnelly Nicholas Eberstadt Hillel Fradkin Frank Gaffney

Jeffrey Gedmin Reuel Marc Gerecht Charles Hill Bruce P. Jackson

Donald Kagan Robert Kagan John Lehman Tod Lindberg

Rich Lowry Clifford May Joshua Muravchik Martin Peretz

Richard Perle Daniel Pipes Norman Podhoretz Stephen P. Rosen

Randy Scheunemann Gary Schmitt William Schneider, Jr. Marshall Wittmann

R. James Woolsey

Statement on Post-War Iraq March 19, 2003 {A8 26}

(http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-20030319.htm)

Ronald Asmus Max Boot Frank Carlucci Eliot Cohen

Ivo H. Daalder Thomas Donnelly Peter Galbraith Jeffrey Gedmin

Robert S. Gelbard Reuel Marc Gerecht Charles Hill Martin S. Indyk

Bruce P. Jackson Robert Kagan Craig Kennedy William Kristol

Tod Lindberg Will Marshall Joshua Muravchik Danielle Pletka

Dennis Ross Randy Scheunemann Gary Schmitt Walter Slocombe

James B. Steinberg R. James Woolsey

Cross Reference Listing of Zionist Neocons and the Documents they Signed

Aaron Friedberg A1 A6

Abram Shulsky A5

Alvin Bernstein A5

Barry Watts A5

Bernard Lewis A3

Bruce P. Jackson A6 A7 A8

Caspar Weinberger A3

Charles Hill A6 A7 A8

Charles Krauthammer A6

Clifford May A6 A7

Craig Kennedy A8

Dan Goure A5

Dan Quayle A1

Daniel Pipes A7

Danielle Pletka A8

David Epstein A5

David Fautua A5

David Wurmser A3

Dennis Ross A8

Devon Gaffney Cross A5

Dick Cheney A1

Donald Kagan A1 A5 A6 A7

Donald Rumsfeld A1 A2 A3 A4

Doug Feith A3

Dov S. Zakheim A3 A5

Eli S. Jacobs A6

Eliot A. Cohen A1 A5 A6 A7 A8

Ellen Bork A7

Elliot Abrams A3 A4

Elliott Abrams A1 A2

Francis Fukuyama A1 A2 A4 A6

Frank Carlucci A3 A8

Frank Gaffney A1 A3 A6 A7

Fred C. Ikle A1 A3

Fred Kagan A5

Frederick L. Lewis A3

Gary Bauer A1 A6 A7

Gary Schmitt A3 A5 A6 A7 A8

George Weigel A1

Helmut Sonnenfeldt A3

Henry S. Rowen A1

Henry Sokolski A6

Hillel Fradkin A6 A7

I. Lewis Libby A1 A5

Ivo H. Daalder A8

James B. Steinberg A8

James Lasswell A5

Jarvis Lynch A3

Jeane Kirkpatrick A6

Jeb Bush A1

Jeffrey Bell A6 A7

Jeffrey Bergner A2 A4 A6

Jeffrey Gedmin A3 A6 A7 A8

Jeffrey T. Bergner A3

John Bolton A2 A3

John Lehman A6 A7

John R. Bolton A4

Joshua Muravchik A3 A7 A7

Ken Adelman A7

Leon Wienseltier A3 A6

Linda Chavez A7

Mackubin Owens A5

Mark Lagon A5

Marshall Wittmann A6 A7

Martin Peretz A3 A6 A7

Martin S. Indyk A8

Max Boot A8

Max Singer A3

Michael Joyce A6

Michael Ledeen A3

Michael Vickers A5

Midge Decter A1 A6 A7

Nicholas Eberstadt A6 A7

Norman Podhoretz A1 A6 A7

Paul Wolfowitz A1 A2 A3 A4 A5

Paula J. Dobriansky A1 A2 A3 A4

Peter Galbraith A8

Peter Rosenblatt A3

Peter W. Rodman A1 A2 A3 A4

Phil Meilinger A5

R. James Woolsey A2 A4 A7 A8

Randy Scheunemann A6 A7 A8

Reuel Marc Gerecht A6 A7 A8

Rich Lowry A7

Richard Burt A3

Richard H. Shultz A6

Richard L. Armitage A2 A3

Richard Perle A2 A3 A4 A6 A7

Richard V. Allen A3 A6

Robert A. Pastor A3

Robert B. Zoellick A2 A4

Robert C. McFarlane A3

Robert Kagan A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A8

Robert Killebrew A5

Robert Martinage A5

Robert S. Gelbard A8

Roger Barnett A5

Roger Robinson A3

Ronald Asmus A8

Rudy Boshwitz A6

Seth Cropsey A6

Stephen Bryen A3

Stephen Cambone A5

Stephen J. Solarz A3 A6

Stephen P. Rosen A1 A6 A7

Steve Forbes A1

Steve Rosen A5

Sven F. Kraemer A3

Thomas Donnelly A5 A6 A7 A8

Tod Lindberg A7 A8

Vin Weber A1 A2 A4 A6

Walter Slocombe A8

Will Marshall A8

William Clark A2 A3

William J. Bennett A1 A2 A4 A6 A7

William Kristol A2 A3 A4 A5 A7 A8

William Schneider, Jr. A2 A4 A6 A7

Zalmay M. Khalilzad A1 A2 A3 A4

The following resources are used in the text.

Overarching Themes

  1. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
  2. Plato. The Republic. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
  3. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: Applause, 1996.

American Domestic Front

  1. Asimov, Isaac. Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation (it’s a trilogy)
  2. D’souza, Dinesh. What’s so Great About America. Maryland: Regnery Publishing Co., 2002.
  3. Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir Of Vietnam And The Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002.
  4. Hatfield, J. H. Fortunate Son. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2002.
  5. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. Translated by Ralph Manheim.
  6. Kettl, Donald F. Team Bush – leadership lessons from the Bush White House. New York: McGraw Hill Co., 2003
  7. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince.
  8. Miller, Mark Crispin. The Bush Dyslexicon. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.
  9. Moore, Michael. Stupid White Men. New York: Regan Books, 2001.
  10. Moore and Slater. Bush’s Brain. New Jersey: Wiley, John & Sons., 2003
  11. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Classics, 1976.
  12. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York: Signet Classics, 1996.
  13. Palast, Greg. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. New York: Plume Books, 2003.
  14. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: MJF Books, 1990.
  15. Stone, I. F. The I. F. Stone Reader.
  16. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Perrennial Classics, 1999.

American Military-Industrial Complex

  1. Ambrose, Stephen. Eisenhower: Soldier and President. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
  2. Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.
  3. Briody, Dan. The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.
  4. Caldicott, Helen. The New Nuclear Danger – George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex. New York: The New Press, 2002.
  5. Chomsky, Noam & Herman, Edward. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Maryland: Pantheon Books, 2002.
  6. Hartmann, Thom. Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Domination and the Theft of Human Rights. Rodale Inc., 2002.
  7. Melman, Seymour. After Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
  8. Prashad, Vijay. Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage Of Capitalism. Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003.

9-11

  1. Abu Khalil, Asad. Bin Laden, Islam and America’s new war on Terrorism. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002.
  2. Ahmed, Nafeez M. The War on Freedom. United Kingdom: Media Messenger Books, 2002.
  3. Brisard and Dasquié, Forbidden Truth: U.S. – Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy And The Failed Hunt For Bin Laden. New York: Thunder Mouth’s Press, 2002.
  4. Chomsky, Noam. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
  5. Chossudovsky, Michel. War And Globalization – The Truth Behind September 11. Canada: Global Outlook, 2002.

American Foreign Policy Front

  1. Ali, Tariq. Clash of Fundamentalisms. U.K. Verso Books, 2002.
  2. Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. U.K. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  3. Bennis, Phyllis. Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003.
  4. Bennis, Phyllis. Calling the Shots. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2000.
  5. Chomsky, Noam. Of Pirates and Emperors. Boston: South End Press, 2003.
  6. Chomsky, Noam The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many. Arizona: Odonian Press, 1994.
  7. Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power – The Indispensable Chomsky. New York: The New Press, 2002.
  8. Chomsky, Noam. Western State Terrorism. Out of Print. Chapter 2 available on the web.
  9. Clark, Ramsey. the children are dying – The impact of sanctions on Iraq. Second Edition. New York: International Action Center, 1998.
  10. Danaher, Kevin. 10 Reasons to abolish the IMF and World Bank. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
  11. Davies, Meryl Wyn and Sardar, Ziauddin. Why Do People Hate America. New York: The Disinformation Company, 2002.
  12. Ghosh, Amitav. The Glass Palace. New York: Random House, 2002.
  13. Hiro, Dilip. Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002.
  14. Hiro, Dilip. The Longest War: The Iran- Military Conflict. New York: Routeledge, 1991.
  15. Hitchen, Christopher. The Trial Of Henry Kissinger. New York: Verso, 2001.
  16. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone Books, 1996.
  17. Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Owl Books, 2000.
  18. Malik, Aftab A., ed. Shattered Illusions – Analyzing the War on Terrorism. England: Amal Press, 2002.
  19. Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hitman. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005.
  20. Pilger, John. The New Rulers of the World. New York: Verso, 2002.
  21. Powell, Colin. My American Journey. Maryland: Ballantine Books, 1996, reprint 2003.
  22. Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
  23. Woodward, Bob. Bush at War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
  24. Zunes, Stephen. Tinderbox. Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003.

America-Israel-Zionists-Palestine

  1. Arendt, Hannah Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. See The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000.
  2. Aruri, Naseer H. Dishonest broker – The US Role in Israel and Palestine. Cambridge: South End Press, 2003.
  3. Aruri, Naseer ed. Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return. London: Pluto Press 2001.
  4. Baker, William W. Theft of a Nation. Las Vegas: Defender’s Publications, 1982.
  5. Carey, Roane and Shainin, Jonathan Ed., The Other Israel – Voices of Refusal and Dissent. New York: The New Press, 2002.
  6. Chmiel, Mark Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
  7. Chomsky, Noam. Middle East Illusions. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
  8. Chorover, Steve. From Genesis to Genocide.
  9. Fisk, Robert. Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon. New York: Thunder Mouth’s Press, 2002.
  10. Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Maryland: Bantam Books, Inc., 1993.
  11. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. New York: Random House, 1991.
  12. Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002.
  13. Said, Edward W. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
  14. Weir, Alison Pamphlet, Rachel’s Letters published by ‘If Americans Knew’
  15. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.
  16. Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

Making War & Peace

  1. Boyle, Francis A. The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2002.
  2. Collins, John and Glover, Ross, Ed. Collateral Language: A Users Guide to America’s New War. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
  3. Hedges, Chris. War is a Force that gives us Meaning. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002.
  4. Herken, Gregg Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. Virginia: Henry Holton Company Inc., 2003.
  5. Nagler, Michael N. Is There No Other Way? – The Search for a Nonviolent Future. Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2001.
  6. Roy, Arundhati. War Talk. Cambridge: South End Press, 2003.
  7. Zinn, Howard. The Zinn Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.
  8. Zinn, Howard. You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Boston MA: Beacon Press, 2002.

America-Islam-Christianity-Judaism

  1. Ajami, Fouad. The Dream Palace Of The Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
  2. Bucaille, Maurice. ‘La Bible, le Coran et la Science’ (The Bible The Qur’an And Science). Pakistan: Idratul Qur’an, 1995.
  3. Hitti, Philip K. History of the Arabs. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, tenth edition 1970. Reprint 2002.
  4. Lewis, Bernard. Crisis of Islam – Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern Library, 2003.
  5. Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong? – The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. New York: Perrennial Books, 2002.
  6. Maccoby, Hyam. The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1986.
  7. Russel, Bertrand. Why I Am Not A Christian. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.
  8. Russel, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy. Second Edition, London, George Allen & Unwin 1961. Reprint 1991 by Routledge.
  9. Said, Edward. Covering Islam. Maryland: Random House Inc., 1996
  10. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Cambridge Mass: Knoef Publishing Group, 1979.
  11. Shahak, Israel. Jewish History Jewish Religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years. London: Pluto Press, 1994. Also available free on the web.
  12. Turner, Howard R. Science in Medieval Islam. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
  13. Dalafi and Hassan, Ed. Renaissance of Sciences In Islamic Countries – Dr. Abdus Salam. World Scientific Publishing Co, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste Italy, 1994.

Video Sources

America-Israel-Palestine

  1. Truth: Exposing Israeli Apartheid” (http://www.ifamericansknew.org)
  2. S. Smith Patrick’s “The Children of Ibdaa: To Create Something Out of Nothing” (cinesmith at earthlink.net)
  3. Maren Karlitzky’s film “No One Need Cry” Cooperativa Suttvuess 2002 (info at norcalism.org)
  4. People And The Land” The Story of a People Under Occupation (Diverse Media Zone, Inc.)

America-Iraq

  1. Children of the Cradle” by International Relief Association IRA (1-800-827-3543)
  2. Iraq 12 Years of Sanctions” Life For Relief & Development Life (1-800-827-3543, http://www.lifeusa.org)
  3. Unsafe Drinking Water: The ‘Prime Killer’ of Children in Iraq From 1991-2001” (http://www.endiraqsanctions.org)

American Election 2000 and 9-11

  1. Aftermath – Unanswered Questions From 911” (http://www.gnn.tv)
  2. Coverup or Complicity” Featuring talks by Michel Chossudovsky & Barrie Zwicker with excerpts from “The Great Deception” aired on Canadian TV (1-888-713-8500, http://www.globalresearch.ca)
  3. Danny Schechter’s PBS video documentary “Counting on Democracy” (http://www.CountingonDemocracy.org)
  4. The Truth and Lies of 9-11” Talk by Michael Ruppert, and interviews with Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Barbara Lee (D-CA). (1-818-788-8791, http://www.copvcia.com)
  5. The Great Deception” documentary series produced by Barrie Zwicker for Canadian Television (1-416-651-5588)

Interesting Politics

  1. Noam Chomsky’s life and interview “Power and Terror”
  2. Noam Chomsky “Peering into the Abyss of the Future” (http://www.peaceandjustice.org)
  3. Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s “75th Anniversary Celebrations” documentary
  4. Michael Moore’s 2003 Academy award winning documentary “Bowling for Columbine”

Internet Sources (2003)

(web sites change frequently – these references can be found again by searching for them as keywords)

News related to America and Robert Fisk’s reports The UK Independent Daily (http://www.independent.co.uk) and (http://www.robert-fisk.com)

News related to America and Greg Palast’s reports The UK Guardian Daily (http://www.guardian.co.uk) and (http://www.gregpalast.com)

Editorials, Opinions, and Commentaries culled from worldwide press not often seen in mainstream media (http://www.CommonDreams.org), (http://www.antiwar.com), (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com)

Pacifica Network, Flashpoints & DemocracyNow investigative reports (http://www.pacifica.org), (http://www.kpfa.org)

Michael Ruppert’s From the Wilderness Publications (http://www.copvcia.com) & soon “Across the Rubicon”

William Clark’s Dollar vs. Euro foreign policy analysis (http://www.mediamonitors.net)

Food First and Export Credit Agency (http://www.foodfirst.org) and (http://www.ECA-watch.org)

Israel Shamir’s articles on a democratic and united Palestine-Israel (http://www.IsraelShamir.net)

PNAC Project for the New American Century (http://www.newamericancentury.org)

National Security Strategy for America (http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc)

Discussion of William Kristol, President of PNAC, on NPR’s Terry Gross/Fresh Air on 4/1/03 (http://www.npr.org)

A “Citizen’s response to the National Security Strategy” by Poet Wendell Berry (http://www.oriononline.org)

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1998 translated interview to French magazine “Le Nouvel Observateur” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html)

American lead prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson’s Closing Speech at the Nuremberg Trials, Day 187, July 26, 1946 (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/07-26-46.asp)

Acknowledgment

Thanks to the friends and well-wishers who agreed to plow through earlier versions of this manuscript. To Linda Sherif of AA-ADC, and Riva Enteen of NLG for their quick perusal, valuable comments, and moral support. To Physician Dr. Kamyar Hedayat for spending hours reading the book the very day I gave it to him despite his busy physician’s schedule and for his invaluable encouragement and moral support. To my courageous attorney Dan Mayfield for his generous good will, guidance, and wisdom. To my American friends and colleagues who I used as a focus-group to gauge American public reaction and gleaned valuable insights from their quick feedback on some of the material, and they shall remain anonymous. To my close friends who set time out to favor me once again with their friendship and read through my writings, and they shall remain anonymous too. To my retired American neighbor friend who came up to me after 9/11 and offered to speak on my behalf at any time if anyone hassled me just because I am a Muslim.

Many thanks to the distinguished American historian Howard Zinn who honored me with encouragement and review of the manuscript twice, and also very generously wrote me a letter to give to publishers. Although I have never met him or formally had him as a teacher in the classroom, his courageous books and speeches have taught me a great deal.

Thanks to my wife and children for supporting and tolerating me through the intense absorption of writing this book; my wife who stayed up late hours with me to read the ink I was spewing all over the floor, for her constant encouragement to speak the truth, and her courageous and spirited defense when the Homeland Security agents had come knocking at our home; my lovely and amazing young children who proof read pages after pages and made invaluable suggestions for organizing the material into a book. They marched with me hand in hand in the antiwar protests and were dismayed at its impotency and the supposed ‘empowerment’ of Western peoples when the bombs still fell.

Finally, to the two FBI agents who politely left after I declined to talk to them, and the two Homeland Security agents who tolerated my taking a stand at my front door. I have nothing against them, only their badges which had given them powers to do pretty much anything they wanted, but they did not let these go to their heads. I owe them my first expression of dissent and freedom from my own invisible chains, as much as I hope that they too will endeavor to free themselves and escape from their own cave.

As is customary to state, despite the review of friends and well-wishers, any errors are my own, and I am solely responsible for all positions taken.

About the Author

The author, an electrical engineer, computer architect, and I/T professional, temporarily gave up his high-tech career in the Silicon Valley in the late 1990s to spend time raising his kids. He is presently an independent investigative journalist. Prisoners of the Cave is his first book, and is available for free download from Project HumanbeingsfirstTM which he founded as a humble antidote to the poison of hectoring hegemons. He is a graduate of M.I.T. in EECS, and has about two dozen U.S. Design patents. He lives in the United States and is a Pakistani.

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Notes

Notes

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