Douglas Caddy

Less Than Zero by William S. Lind 1/13/2007 www.lewrockwell.com On the surface, President Bush's Wednesday night speech adds up to precisely nothing. The President said, "It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq," but the heart of his proposal, adding more than 20,000 U.S. troops, represents no change in strategy. It is merely another "big push," of the sort we have seen too often in the past from mindless national and military leadership. Instead of Dave Petraeus, why didn't Bush ask Sir Douglas Haig to take command? Relying on more promises from Iraq's nominal government and requiring more performance from the Iraqi army and police are equally empty policies. Both that government and its armed forces are mere fronts for Shiite networks and their militias. If the new troops we send to Baghdad work with Iraqi forces against the Sunni insurgents, we will be helping the Shiites ethnically cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis. If, as Bush suggested, our troops go after the Shiite militias in Baghdad and elsewhere, we will find ourselves in a two-front war, fighting Sunnis and Shiites both. We faced that situation briefly in 2004, and we did not enjoy it. All this, again, adds up to nothing. But if we look at the President's proposal more carefully, we find it actually amounts to less than zero. It hints at actions that may turn a mere debacle into disaster on a truly historic scale. First, Mr. Bush said that previous efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two reasons, the second of which is that "there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have." This suggests the new "big push" will be even more kinetic that what we have done in the past, calling in more firepower – airstrikes, tanks, artillery, etc. – in Baghdad itself. Chuck Spinney has already warned that we may soon begin to reduce Baghdad to rubble. If we do, and the President's words suggest we will, we will hasten our defeat. In this kind of war, unless you are going to take the "Hama model" and kill everyone, success comes from de-escalation, not from escalation. Second, the President not only upped the ante with Syria and Iran, he announced two actions that only make sense if we plan to attack Iran, Syria or both. He said he has ordered Patriot missile batteries and another U.S. Navy aircraft carrier be sent to the region. Neither has any conceivable role in the fighting in Iraq. However, a carrier would provide additional aircraft for airstrikes on Iran, and Patriot batteries would in theory provide some defense against Iranian air and missile attacks launched at Gulf State oil facilities in retaliation. To top it off, in questioning yesterday on Capitol Hill, the Tea Lady, aka Secretary of State Rice, refused to promise the administration would consult with Congress before attacking Iran or Syria. As I have said before and will say again, the price of an attack on Iran could easily be the loss of the army we have in Iraq. No conceivable action would be more foolish than adding war with Iran to the war we have already lost in Iraq. Regrettably, it is impossible to read Mr. Bush's dispatch of a carrier and Patriot batteries any other way than as harbingers of just such an action. The final hidden message in Mr. Bush's speech confirms that the American ship of state remains headed for the rocks. His peroration, devoted once more to promises of "freedom" and democracy in the Middle East and throughout the world, could have been written by the most rabid of the neo-cons. For that matter, perhaps it was. So long as our grand strategy remains that which the neo-cons represent and demand, namely remaking the whole world in our own image, by force where necessary, we will continue to fail. Not even the greatest military in all of history, which ours claims to be but isn't, could bring success to a strategy so divorced from reality. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's words give the lie to those who have hoped the neo-cons' influence over the White House had ebbed. From Hell, or the World Bank which is much the same place, Wolfi had to be smiling. No, Incurious George has offered no new strategy, nor new course, nor even a plateau on the downward course of our two lost wars and failed grand strategy. He has chosen instead to escalate failure, speed our decline and expand the scope of our defeat. Headed toward the cliff, his course correction is to stomp on the gas. January 13, 2007 William Lind [send him mail] is an analyst based in Washington, DC. Find this article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind118.html

Military analyst believes recent US actions could signal Iran conflict soon 01/12/2007 @ 2:35 pm Filed by David Edwards www.rawstory.com http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Video_Re...ignal_0112.html US forces raided a facility that Iran claimed was being used for diplomatic purposes, alleging that Iranians were funneling weapons to the enemy. Six Iranians were captured in the raid at the consulate, with one being released earlier today. Several analysts consider parts of President Bush's latest speech as an obvious threat to Iran. One, John Pike of GlobalSecurity, notes that U.S. actions could signal a conflict in the near future. "It's really unclear what the President was saying," Pike said. "It's a little more clear what the United States is actually doing, [President Bush] was basically calling on Iran not to interfere with Iraq, not to further interfere with Iraq." Pike added, "But, also, look at what he said the United States is going to do. As previously reported, several weeks ago, the aircraft carrier, John Stennis, is being dispatched to the Persian Gulf. That gives the United States two aircraft carriers in the Gulf. Round the clock operations. He also, surprisingly, announced that the United States was going to be deploying Patriot anti-missile interceptors to the region. It's difficult to imagine whose missiles those would be shooting down other than Iran. It's looks to me like the United States is, at least, raising its capabilities in preparation for possible military confrontation with Iran." Pike provides a time frame in which the U.S. or Israel might first strike Iran, explaining, "I think the month of February is certainly a time of heightened probability. It's very difficult to understand exactly what the thinking is at the White House and in the Israeli government but for sometime now we've been saying that 2007 is probably the time, if there's going to be military action, it's probably going to come this year. Possible as soon as next month. Probably no later that August of this year." Nearly a year ago, Pike warned about a "cycle of escalation." "When the Americans or Israelis are thinking about [military force], I hope they will sit down and think about everything the ayatollahs could do to make our lives miserable and what we will do to discourage them," John Pike said in Feb. 2006. "There could be a cycle of escalation," Pike added.

From the Houston Chronicle of Wednesday January 10, 2007: JFK ASSASSINATION OFFICIAL DIES AT 86 Dr. Charles Petty, who opened the Dallas County medical examiner’s office and served as medical adviser to a U.S. House committee that reviewed President Kennedy’s assassination, died Tuesday. He was 86. Petty, a native of Seattle, was not in Dallas when Kennedy was shot in 1963. But he worked with the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s to review the findings. In a 2003 appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, Petty said he concluded that Kennedy was struck by two bullets.

I think you're right John, but judging by Iran's reponse I don't think they are going to be bluffed. Both Israel and the US know that using even small scale nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's facilities is too risky. If anything goes wrong the whole world, not just the Arab world, would condemn Israel and the US. The justification of using nuclear force to prevent a second holocaust, which is currently being put forward by sections of the western media, doesn't hold up under serious scrutiny. Just as Israel will baulk at the prospect of using a nuclear weapon, so would Iran if it ever possessed one. The consequence of Iran ever using a nuclear weapon to destroy Israel would be the complete destruction of Iran within hours. Iran will build a nuclear weapon one day, and they already have an adequate missile delivery system. The US and Israel will have to accept that the balance of power within the region will inevitably change. That's what all the fuss is about---the US and Israel are having trouble coming to terms with this reality. Iran threatens to block strategic oil strait Pakistan Daily Times January 9, 2007 http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?p..._9-1-2007_pg7_4 TEHRAN: A senior officer in the volunteer Basij militia said on Monday Iran could block oil traffic through the strategic Strait of Hormuz if the West threatens its economy over Tehran’s nuclear programme. “Given Iran’s authority over the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway to more than 40 percent of the world’s energy, we have become so strong that the world’s economic and energy security are in the hands of Iran,” deputy Basij commander General Majid Mir Ahmadi was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency. “We can exert pressure on the US and British economies as much as we ourselves are put under pressure,” he said. “US allies, especially those who host US military sites or facilitate American strategies against us, are exposed to our threat,” Mir Ahmadi added. “This is the Islamic republic’s strategy in the Persian Gulf – security for everyone or for nobody.” Meanwhile, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said that Tehran would never yield to international pressure to deprive it of its right to nuclear technology, state radio said. “The Iranian nation will surely not abandon its right and Iranian officials have no right to deprive the nation of its right,” Khamenei was quoted as saying on the occasion of the Shia feast of Eidul Ghadir. Khamenei, who was shown on television, was making his first public appearance since rumours appeared on websites on Thursday that he had died. Iran last week denied the reports. Khamenei has final say on all state matters in the Islamic republic, including Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West. agencies

New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush By Chris Floyd t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent Monday 08 January 2007 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807A.shtml I. Surging Toward the Ultimate Prize The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand. At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reported. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," says the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March. As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: "Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and "The US Takeover of Iraqi Oil." From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry - while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits - more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes. Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" - i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq - prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives. The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing." The "surged" troops - mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty - are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on - and it will go on and on - the Bush administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises to uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" - as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions. So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse - as it almost certainly will - Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" - a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, who then answered his own question: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands." This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neo-cons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla. II. The Win-Win Scenario And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what comes out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles. And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below. Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation - indeed, the world - as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them - not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases. The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions - like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh - have cashed in their insider chips for blood money. The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the US arms industry - and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses. But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases, their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan US war machine - 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military. Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths - or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles, and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil. As for Wall Street - both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome. [by the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues - the neo-cons - somehow "hijacked" US foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined to pursue an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neo-cons and their bag of tricks - their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes - as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.] So Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" - who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state - until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen. So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq - these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is - and they like it.

January 8, 2007 Nuking Iran Are Bush's Wars Winding Down or Heating Up? By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01082007.html Most Americans believe that Bush's Iraqi misadventure is over. The occupation has lost the support of the electorate, the Congress, the generals and the troops. The Democrats are sitting back waiting for Bush to come to terms with reality. They don't want to be accused of losing the war by forcing Bush out of Iraq. There are no more troops to commit, and when the "surge" fails, Bush will have no recourse but to withdraw. A little longer, everyone figures, and the senseless killing will be over. Recent news reports indicate that this conclusion could be an even bigger miscalculation than the original invasion. On January 7 the London Times reported that it has learned from "several Israeli military sources" that "Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons." The Israeli Foreign Ministry denied the report. The Times reports that "Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack." In other news reports Israeli General Oded Tira is quoted as follows: "President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran. As an American strike in Iran is essential for our existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iranian issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure." General Tira gives the Israel Lobby the following tasks: (1) "turn to Hilary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran," (2) exert influence on European countries so that "Bush will not be isolated in the international arena again," and (3) "clandestinely cooperate with Saudi Arabis so that it also persuades the US to strike Iran." Israel's part, General Tira says, is to "prepare an independent military strike by coordinating flights in Iraqi airspace with the US. We should also coordinate with Azerbaijan the use of air bases in its territory and also enlist the support of the Azeri minority in Iran." British commentators report that "the British media appears to be softening us up for an attack on Iran." Robert Fox writing in The First Post (January 6) says, "Suddenly the smell of Britons being prepared for an attack on Iran is all pervasive." On January 7 the Jerusalem Post reported that Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told the Israeli newspaper that "iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable" and that "the use of force against Teheran remained an option." The Jerusalem Post notes that "Hoyer is considered close to the Jewish community and many Israeli supporters have hailed his elevation in the House." Hoyer was the Israel Lobby's first victory over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who preferred Rep. John Murtha for the post. Murtha was the first important Democrat to call for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. On November 20 the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported that President Bush said he would understand if Israel chose to attack Iran. Bush showed that he was in Israel's pocket when he blocked the world's attempt to stop Israel's bombing of Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure. Many commentators believe that the failure of the neoconservatives' "cakewalk war" has destroyed their influence. This is a mistaken conclusion. The neoconservatives are long time allies of Israel's right-wing Likud Party and are part of the Israel Lobby in the US. The Israel Lobby represents the views of only a minority of American Jews but nevertheless essentially owns both political parties and most of the US media. As the neoconservatives are an important part of this powerful lobby, they remain extremely influential. The Lobby works to increase the neoconservatives' influence. To appreciate the Lobby's influence, try to find columnists in the major print media and TV commentators who are not apologists for Israel, who do not favor attacking Iran, and who support withdrawing from Iraq. Recently, Billy "One-Note" Kristol, a rabid propagandist for war against Muslims, was given a column in Time magazine. Why would Time think its readers want to read a war propagandist? Could the reason be that the Israel Lobby arranged for Time to receive lucrative advertising contracts in exchange for a column for Kristol? Neoconservatives have called for World War IV against Islam. In Commentary magazine Norman Podhoretz called for the cultural genocide of Islamic peoples. The war is already opened on four fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iran. The Bush administration has used its Ethiopian proxies to overthrow the Somalian Muslims who overthrew the warlords who drove the US from Somalia. The US Navy and US intelligence are actively engaged with the Ethiopian troops in efforts to hunt down and capture or kill the Somalian Muslims. US Embasy spokesman Robert Kerr in Nairobi said that the US has the right to pursue Somalia's Islamists as part of the war on terror. For at least a year the Bush administration has been fomenting and financing terrorist groups within Iran. Seymour Hersh and former CIA officials have exposed the Bush administration's support of ethnic-minority groups within Iran that are on the US State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Last April US Representative Dennis Kucinich wrote a detailed letter to President Bush about US interference in Iran's internal affairs. He received no reply. The Israeli/neoconservative plan, of which Bush may be a part or simply be a manipulated element, is to provoke a crisis with Iran in which the US Congress will have to support Israel. Both the Israeli government and the American neoconservatives are fanatical. It is a mistake to believe that either will be guided by reason or any appreciation of the potentially catastrophic consequences of an attack on Iran. US aircraft carriers sitting off Iran's coast are sitting ducks for Iran's Russian missiles. The neoconservatives would welcome another "new Pearl Harbor." The US media is totally unreliable. It cannot go against Israel, and it will wrap itself in the flag just as it did for the invasion of Iraq. The American public has been deceived (again) and believes that Iran is on the verge of possessing nuclear armaments to be used to wipe Israel off the map. The fact that Americans are such saps for propaganda makes effective opposition to the neoconsevatives' plan for WW IV practically impossible. Large percentages of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attack. Recent polls show that 32% still believe that Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaeda, and 18% believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attack. WXIA-TV in Atlanta posted viewers comments about Hussein's execution on its web site. Atlantan Janet Wesselhoft was confident that Saddam Hussein is "the one who started terrorism in this country, he needs to be put to rest." Even the London Times is in the grip of Israeli propaganda. In its report of Israel's plan to attack Iran with nuclear weapons, the Times says that Iranian president "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared that 'Israel must be wiped off the map.'" It has been shown by a number of credible experts that this quote is a made-up concoction taken completely out of context. Ahmadinejad said no such thing. In a world ruled by propaganda, lies become truths. The power of the Israel Lobby is so great that it has turned former President Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent man ever to occupy the Oval Office and certainly the president who did the most in behalf of peace in the Middle East, into an anti-semite, an enemy of Israel. The American media, from its "conservative" end to its "liberal" end did its best to turn Carter into a pariah for telling a few truths about Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians in his book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. If truth be known, there is nothing to stop the Israeli/neoconservative cabal from widening the war in the Middle East. As I previously reported, the neoconservatives believe that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran would force Muslims to realize that they have no recourse but to submit to the Isreali/US will. The use of nuclear weapons is being rationalized as necessary to destroy Iran's underground facilities, but the real purpose is to terrorize Islam and to bring it to heel. Until the US finds the courage to acquire a Middle East policy of its own, Americans will continue to reap the evil sowed by the Israel Lobby. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01082007.html

John: Your assertion about the role of Israel in the upcoming war against Iran is proven to be accurate, if one is to believe the following article from today's Times (U.K.): The Sunday Times January 07, 2007 Focus: Mission Iran Israel will not tolerate Iran going nuclear and military sources say it will use tactical strikes unless Iran abandons its programme. Is Israel bluffing or might it really push the button? Uzi Mahnaimi in New York and Sarah Baxter in Washington report In an Israeli air force bunker in Tel Aviv, near the concert hall for the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, Major General Eliezer Shkedi might one day conduct operations of a perilous kind. Should the order come from the Israeli prime minister, it will be Shkedi’s job as air force commander to orchestrate a tactical nuclear strike on Iran. Two fast assault squadrons based in the Negev desert and in Tel Nof, south of Tel Aviv, are already training for the attack. On a plasma screen, Shkedi will be able to see dozens of planes advance towards Iran, as well as the electronic warfare aircraft jamming the Iranian and Syrian air defences and the rescue choppers hovering near the border, ready to move in and pluck out the pilots should the mission go wrong. Another screen will show live satellite images of the Iranian nuclear sites. The prime target will be Natanz, the deep and ferociously protected bunker south of Tehran where the Iranians are churning out enriched uranium in defiance of the United Nations security council. If things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole. The theory is that they will explode deep underground, both destroying the bunker and limiting the radioactive fallout. The other potential targets are Iran’s uranium conversion facility at Isfahan — uncomfortably near a metropolis of 4.5m people — and the heavy water power reactor at Arak, which might one day be able to produce enough plutonium to make a bomb. These will be hit with conventional bombs. In recent weeks Israeli pilots have been flying long-haul as far as Gibraltar to simulate the 2,000-mile round trip to Natanz. “There is no 99% success in this mission. It must be a perfect 100% or better not at all,” one of the pilots expected to fly on the mission told The Sunday Times. The Israelis say they hope as fervently as the rest of the world that this attack will never take place. There is clearly an element of sabre-rattling in their letting it be known the plan exists and that the pilots are already in training. But in the deeply dangerous and volatile Middle East, contingency plans can become horrible reality. NO nuclear weapon has been fired in anger since the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Should Israel take such a drastic step, it would inflame world opinion — particularly in Muslim states — and unleash retaliation from Iran and its allies. But Israelis have become increasingly convinced that a “second holocaust” of the Jews is brewing, stoked by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president and chief Holocaust denier, who has repeatedly called for Israel to be destroyed. Western Europe and the United States have been trying to persuade Tehran to drop its nuclear ambitions, using the carrot of co-operation with a legitimate nuclear energy programme and the stick of UN sanctions. But they have had no effect. As a result, Israel sees itself standing on its own and fighting for its very existence. It got a taste of what Iran was capable of during last summer’s war in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, Tehran’s proxy troops fighting from bunkers secretly built by Iranian military engineers, humiliated the Israeli army and rained missiles into northern Israel. Every Israeli government has vowed never to let Iran acquire nuclear weapons. Ariel Sharon, when he was prime minister, ordered the military to be ready for a conventional strike on Iran’s nuclear programme. Since then, however, the Iranians have strengthened their nuclear facilities and air defences, making a conventional strike less likely to succeed. “There are 24 strong batteries around Natanz, making it one of the most protected sites on earth,” said an Israeli military source. Its centrifuge halls, where the uranium is enriched, are heavily protected at least 70ft underground. Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, recently “let slip” the world’s worst-kept secret that Israel is a nuclear power; Israeli defence experts are now openly debating the use of nukes against Iran. Shlomo Mofaz, a reservist colonel in Israeli military intelligence, believes that tactical nuclear weapons will be required to penetrate the defences that Iran has built around its nuclear facilities. Israel developed tactical nuclear weapons in the early 1970s for use on the battlefield. In an attack on Iran, its air force would be expected to use a low-yield nuclear device of 1 kiloton (equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT), loaded on a bunker-buster missile. “If the nuclear device explodes deep underground there will be no radioactive fallout,” said Dr Ephraim Asculai of the Tel Aviv Institute for Strategic Studies, who worked for the Israel Atomic Energy Commission for more than 40 years. Professor Peter Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist at King’s College, London, was less sure. “The definition of low-yield nuclear weapons is not easy,” he said. “I assume that it includes any device which is less than 5 kilotons. If such a bunker-buster missile is exploded at 70ft below ground” — thought to be the minimum depth of the hidden centrifuges in Natanz — “some radioactive fallout is expected.” Nonetheless, Professor Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military expert, said last week that tactical nuclear weapons were “the only way, if there is a way at all, to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites”. Some senior American defence analysts agree. One source with ties to the Pentagon said: “There is no way for Israel to engage effectively in such a strike without using nuclear weapons.” But, he asked: “Would the Israelis dare?” For all their military preparations, not even the Israelis are sure of the answer. Their decision rests to a great extent on their assessment of two further questions. How close is Tehran to having a nuclear bomb? And what does Washington really intend to do about it? The actions and rhetoric of Ahmadinejad have been deliberately provocative. Last week he boasted that the Iranians would not only continue their atomic programme but also give a “historic slap in the face” to nations that opposed it. He has vowed that America, Israel and Britain will disappear “like the pharaohs” of Egypt and he believes that oil-rich Iran is well on its way to becoming the regional superpower. Next month, on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution, he intends to celebrate what he calls his country’s mastery of nuclear technology. He promised that 3,000 centrifuges would be ready by the end of last year and that 60,000 would ultimately be in place. In the event, technical problems have slowed the programme. The Iranians are believed to have installed only 500 centrifuges at Natanz and they will reach 2,000 by spring at the earliest. This is enough, however, to convince some Israelis that Iran is reaching the “point of no return” at which it has the technical know-how to build a nuclear bomb. Ahmadinejad insists that Iran is developing only peaceful nuclear energy, but the development of long-range ballistic missiles such as the Shehab-3 suggests a different story. Israeli intelligence sources say Iran recently tested this missile with dummy nuclear weapons for its warheads. “The Iranians are progressing quickly with their delivery platform for their future nuclear weapons,” said a source. “With an approximate range of 1,000 miles, the Shehab-3 can reach all of Israel.” Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, has told members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that his organisation assumes the Iranians will have a complete nuclear device by 2009. In these circumstances, sabre-rattling by the Israelis has its uses. Whether or not Israel intends to go nuclear, it might be in its interest to spread the word that it will. “In the cold war, we made it clear to the Russians that it was a virtual certainty that nukes would fly and fly early,” said an American defence source. “Israel may be adopting the same tactics: ‘You produce a weapon; you die’.” Michael Rubin, an expert on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, believes it could be a dangerous ruse. “You never want to threaten something you don’t follow through on,” he said. Rubin believes the Israeli debate about using tactical nuclear weapons is “much more likely to be about pressing the United States to do the job”. President George W Bush included Iran in his original “axis of evil”. Bogged down now in Iraq, he has cooled on the idea of attacking Iran. At a private meeting in the Oval Office last autumn, he was openly sceptical that America possessed enough intelligence data to carry out the job thoroughly. Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, told Congress at his confirmation hearings last month that he would be willing to give the order for strikes on Iran only as an “ absolute last resort”. However, the Bush administration is still tempted to deliver a punishing blow to Iran for its regional meddling in Iraq and Lebanon. At the very least, it would like the swaggering regime in Tehran to believe that the United States might yet decide to cut it down to size. The nomination of Admiral William Fallon, a former navy fighter pilot, to command US military operations in the area is regarded as a sign of forward planning. Fallon does not have a reputation as a hawk, but in the words of a Pentagon source: “If you go after Iran, you have a naval war on your hands.” Retired Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former National War College professor who has wargamed airstrikes on Iran, believes an American attack remains a possibility. The current deployment of a second US aircraft carrier strike force to the Gulf region, as well as British minesweepers, is a “huge deal”, he said. “It is only necessary to do that if you are planning to strike Iran and deal with the consequences” — including an attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the sea route for much of the world’s oil from the Gulf states. General John Abizaid, whom Fallon is due to replace, warned last year that an American attack on Iran could cripple oil supplies, unleash a “surrogate” terrorist army and provoke Iranian missile attacks on America’s Middle Eastern allies. Should Israel launch a tactical nuclear strike, the consequences could be catastrophic. Gardiner believes that there would not only be “low DNA operations” — difficult to trace directly back to the Iranians — such as terrorist attacks, but the Muslim world would also be so inflamed that the stability of pro-western regimes would be threatened. “It doesn’t take much imagination to see Pakistan (a nuclear power) falling to Islamic fundamentalists,” Gardiner said. “It could mean that in order to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons, we could be handing them to a terrorist nation.” According to a senior British defence official, an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran is simply unthinkable: “The damage to Israel to be the only state to use nuclear weapons in anger since 1945 is dangerous stuff. They cannot be seen to be taking the lead on this.” Or can they? Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s deputy defence minister, said recently: “At the end of the day it is always down to the Jews to deal with the problem.” US analysts concur that America would never give its consent for such an operation, but as in the attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant in 1981, it may not object all that vociferously after the event. Nor is it thought that Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt would mourn the humbling of Shi’ite Iran, their main regional rival. Are Israel’s plans an elaborate bluff or not? In today’s dangerously volatile world, who will dare to make that call? Strike one: Israel took out Saddam’s reactor in 1981 IF Israeli forces attack nuclear sites in Iran, it will not be their first pre-emptive strike against a perceived nuclear threat. In 1981 Israeli jets bombed a reactor in Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein getting nuclear weapons. The Iraqi dictator had built a 40-megawatt research reactor just south of Baghdad with the aid of France, which supplied technology, expertise and about 27lb of uranium-235. Fearing this could be used in the long term to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, Israel decided to destroy what became known as the Osirak reactor. Israel’s first move was in 1980 when war broke out between Iraq and Iran: its chief of army intelligence urged Iran to bomb Osirak. A pair of Iranian jets attacked the site, but damage was minor. So Israel decided to bomb it, secretly building a dummy site and carrying out full dress rehearsals. On June 7, 1981, Israel launched Operation Opera: six F-15I and eight F-16I jets flew over Jordanian and Saudi Arabian airspace and caught Iraqi defences by surprise. The raid crippled the reactor. Many countries, including the United States, condemned the attack. Opposition parties in Israel claimed that it had been cynically timed to coincide with a looming election. Some Iraqi scientists later said the attack spurred Saddam to redouble his efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Attempts were made to rebuild the Osirak facility. However, Saddam’s nuclear ambitions were again halted when coalition forces bombed Osirak during the 1991 Gulf war. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2535177,00.html

I received two emails from Floyd Stephens last year and provided him with any information that I had that might help him in his research project. In response to my encouraging him to post in the forum what he had learned, he wrote that for the time being he wanted to proceed quietly without drawing too much attention to his endeavor. I respected his desire to do so. However, in light of his passing, I think it might be his wish that the contents of his two emails to me be posted now as a means of furthering research into a great historical event, JFK's assassination. These are reproduced below. Of course, there is no way of knowing what he learned subsequently to writing his emails that might have changed the content of these. ------------------------------------------ A couple of questions about Billie Sol, Jun 24 2006, 02:35 AM Mr. Caddy My name is Floyd Stephens and I am a new member of the forum. I have read your bio and wonder if you would be open to a couple of questions about your contact with Mr. Estes. I have seen your correspondence to the department of justice and their replies via the net , but how and when did you come to know and represent Mr. Estes. I guess what I am getting at is did you represent Mr. Estes at Franklin, were you at the 1984 grand jury hearing with him. Secondly, were you present for Mr. Estes' short lived meeting with the FBI agents. Is there any light you can shed as to his change of mind concerning that meeting. Do you still represent or keep in touch with Mr. Estes any more. I have talked to Glen Sample in California a couple of months ago, we had a real nice conversation and he has an amazing story. A puzzle he started piecing together that led him to Johnson by way of Mr. Estes via Malcolm Wallace via Loy Factor. This puzzle is still yet in complete, in talking with Glen I ask what's the next piece to which he responded find out about Mr. Estes' meeting with Marina Oswald Porter. In his recent book Mr. Estes writes of his meeting with Marina and he made a curious statement.... You see Marina knew both Jack Ruby And Malcolm Wallace, and I'll say no more than that. I attempted to bring this up to Mr. Carroll and seek his response through the Marina Oswald topic within this forum, but was immediately shot down in his usual holier than thou attitude. I did not think that this question was out of line, but he did. Do you have views to Mr. Estes' statement? I never paid that much attention to the assassination, until about two years ago right after my Fathers passing. Two days after his funeral his house was burnt and the next day the rest of the structures that were adjacent to his home were torched also. I was told that the house was burnt to destroy any old evidence my father may have had that would connect him or the sheriffs department to the death of Henry Marshall, say what! And then there's that strange suicide, the mortician had some concerns of foul play, but the authorities closed the case any way that very afternoon. And this time I'm not talking about Henry Marshall in 1961 , but rather one of the sheriffs departments main suspects in the above mentioned arson in 2004, some things never change when your form Booger County. I thank you in advance for any reply you may have, and wish only the best for you in your endeavors. Respectfully, Floyd Stephens Class of 1977, Franklin, Texas ---------------------- May our conversation continue?, Jun 25 2006, 01:21 AM Dear Mr. Caddy I was delighted to receive your response and look forward to anything that you can provide me with. About three months after my Fathers death I sought out and found Mr. Estes up in Grandbury. We talked of Franklin and Henry Marshall it seems he was also a little curious about what I know. Mr. Estes and I have talked on the phone about 7 or 8 times, in fact he called me last week while he was killing time up at Scott and White Hospital in Temple Texas. His wife was up there for a couple of days and his other daughter Cathy lives in Leander Texas about 8 miles from me. Mr. Estes said that he is still having a little trouble with his leg that he broke last year. I am going to visit him in Grandbury in a couple of weeks. He hasn't elaborated much on his discussion with Marina, but I am working on him. One of my old friends in Franklin told me of a visit that Mr. Estes paid to Sheriff Howard Stegall the morning of his first grand jury appearance in Robertson County back in 1962. He remembered the white caddies pulling up his Fathers driveway, it only took a minute or so before Howard ran them off, yelling don't you ever come back here again. I haven't related this story to Mr. Estes yet , but I plan to try to get his version of it. He has recently been discussing the Henry Marshall thing in much more detail speaking of my Father and the Sheriff as he knew or knew of them. I don't press him too hard, but yet I long to know what he knows. I first became aware of the Henry Marshall thing over twenty-five years ago when my Mother told me that my father was involved in a killing with some of his law enforcement buddies there in Franklin. She had no details for me of the crime but knew for sure that my Father was involved. This stunned me, because I had spent my highschool years in Franklin and never heard of Henry Marshall or any kind of killing to which she referred. I was in the same class as the son and daughter of L M Owens the brother-in-law that found Henryand I delivered eggs to the sheriffs son-in-law Pryce Metcalf's egg processing facility. I hauled hay with the son of the local game warden who was on the scene June 3 1961. Could every one know but me? I left Texas when I was 4 or 5 and didn't return until I was in highschool. The people were always nice to me and everyone knew who I was and knew my Father. I now that they did know. A year or two after my Mothers revelation I heard a story as related to by my father to another person from my past. This was the story of what happened that afternoon that Henry Marshall died. It was a tell of a botched payoff that got out of hand, everything was going OK, then Henry said that he would be part of it and he was leaving, he began to fight with the group and that's when someone hit him in the head with a rifle. The whack caved in his orbital bone and left his eyeball dangling, that's when they knew Henry must die and that's when he died. I have shared this story with only a select few. No one in Franklin knows that I know what went down back then. I continue to research on a low key, slowly piecing together what I may find along the way. I noticed a generations theme forming within the story that I am putting together, sort of a Sin of The Fathers type of premise. I believe that Franklin and what happened there is the geniuses of the conspiracy. One thing lead to another and it kept compounding until it consumed a president and forever tainted the fabric of our country. To me Franklin has became a microcosm, sort of a biopsy of the conspiracy to be studied and understood. From this knowledge I hope to better understand what happened in a broader since to our nation as a whole, how the Sin of The Fathers has transpired through the generations to bring us to the point where we are at today. Douglas, please hold these things I communicate to you in confidence. I find it much easier to do what I am doing with out drawing attention to myself. Respectfully, Floyd Stephens

The New York Times today prints a large photograph of a group of American troops with the caption underneath: "Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division boarded a plane yesterday in North Carolina. About 3,300 are to be sent to Kuwait by the end of the week." Another ominous development is reported below: Second U.S. carrier group to deploy to Gulf: sources By Kristin Roberts Wed Jan 3, 4:40 PM ET Reuters The Pentagon will send a second aircraft carrier and its escort ships to the Gulf, defense officials said on Wednesday, as a warning to Syria and Iran and to give commanders more flexibility in the region. Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Bremerton, Washington-based USS John C. Stennis strike group would deploy this month. It will put 5,000 more U.S. sailors in the region, bringing the total to 16,000. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier group entered the Gulf in December. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to comment, saying the Defense Department would not discuss future deployments or ship movements. But military analysts said the move was intended to demonstrate U.S. resolve in the face of acts by Iran and Syria that it sees as provocative, such as Tehran's pursuit of its nuclear program. The Stennis had been scheduled to deploy to the Pacific region. But the Pentagon agreed instead to send the carrier group to the Gulf after a request from U.S. Central Command, the military command responsible for Middle East operations. Senior defense officials have said that request was aimed at increasing Central Command's flexibility in a variety of operations and providing deterrence in the region. INCREASED U.S. PRESENCE Washington has locked horns with Tehran over the Iranian nuclear program. American defense officials also regularly charge Iran and Syria with fanning sectarian violence in Iraq and contributing to the deteriorating situation there by providing arms and technologies. The second carrier, while adding relatively few service members to the region, is valuable as a symbol of America's increased presence in the Gulf, military analysts said. Longer term, however, the Bush administration must decide if it will keep two carrier groups in the Gulf indefinitely. Defense Secretary Robert Gates previously said the increased American presence in the Gulf was a message to the region as a whole and not a response to any specific action by Iran. "I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world," Gates told reporters on a December visit to Baghdad. "We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that -- both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries."

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007 “Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.” – Walter Cronkite http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm

To understand what is happening in the Mideast, Professor Juan Cole’s daily blog is required reading. Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, is a frequent guest on PBS’ Lehrer New Hour. Last Friday, before Suddam’s death, Prof. Cole in his blog printed a commentary by Larisa Alexandrovna, editor of www.rawstory.com. So perceptive are her observations that they merit immediate attention. http://www.juancole.com/ By Larisa Alexandrovna 'PROLOGUE: When someone does something obviously egregious, we tend to look past it because it is our nature to believe that people are naturally sane, good, and honest. We cannot imagine that anyone would willfully destroy their own country, violate their own laws, trample on their own people, and do it with such naked bravado while the world looked on. But people have done it and do it even still, because there is also a darker side to human nature. Those of us who see the good in people look past actions that appear to be willfully evil not only because it is in our nature but it is also a foundation of our culture, as Americans, we believe guilt must be proved. So we do not see what is going on before our eyes and directly in front of us. We look past it, around it, through it, but not at it. We cannot look directly at it, because if we do, we lose the vision of our beloved America and see something so sinister, that our minds would rather collapse than accept it. But chess forces us to abandon our preconceptions and emotions. It pushes us to think in terms of cause and effect and it forces us to consider each action and counteraction in terms of the whole game. That is to say, chess forces us to think beyond our own present and fixed position, forcing us to reason every possible outcome of each action and counteraction. Furthermore, chess teaches us to calculate not against a person, or a group, or a nation, but against a strategy that has no inherent religious, moral, or human characteristics. Master players can suspend their fixated self at will. Sadly, I am no master, and so I continue to struggle in seeing the game despite my human nature as an obstacle. But sometimes, it just happens, something sets it off and there you are, inside the board, walking each action out in your mind and seeing the whole from beginning to end. QUESTIONS AND SEEING THE BOARD Sometime this morning, all the various and truly bizarre events the Bush administration has been engaged in recently with regard to troop levels and surges suddenly crystallized for me, as though I were sitting at a chess board and seeing the entire strategy unfold before my eyes. This is of course my opinion and I may very well be wrong. In fact, I hope I am wrong. But the news that Saddam Hussein would be executed soon, and then the news that it would be in the next 48 hours, boggled my mind. Why on earth would anyone want to set off an ideological bomb during an already chaotic situation? I do not defend Saddam Hussein, not by any measure. But when Iraq is falling into total chaos and civil war, and as American troops continue to die, why would anyone want to add fuel to that fire, enough fuel to destroy what is left? Suspend your emotions and think strategically. Now look at the question again and in context. The administration is stalling as it supposedly weighs its Iraq options, when in fact they have already made their decision. How do I know they have made their decision? One need only look at the slow leaks coming out, not the least of which was Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Washington Post, to understand that we are going to be sending more troops to Iraq. So why does the administration wait to tell us this? In the meantime, naval carriers are deployed to send Iran “a warning,” as though the threats thus far and the passing of sanctions are not warning enough. Add to that the detainment of Iranian diplomats invited to Iraq by the Iraqi leadership. Why is the US arresting diplomats invited to a country that the US claims is a sovereign nation governing itself? And what about those sanctions, which ultimately mean nothing and sadly mean everything? The sanctions are so watered down as to have no real effect on the Iranian population or economy. Why even bother passing them? Why censor Dr. Leverett's opinion piece on Iran when the CIA already cleared it? Now given this entire context, ask yourself again why Saddam Hussein is being executed now, during Hajj even? What is the urgency? THE UGLY STRATEGY I SEE This is what I think may be playing out, my opinion of course. And yes, the strategy is so brazenly obvious, arrogant, and antithetical to everything America is supposed to be and stand for that it will be difficult to digest. What the Bush administration appears to be waiting for, stalling for, while they allegedly mull over the Iraq question, is for the naval carriers and other key assets to fall into position. This will happen in the first week of January. Saddam Hussein is being executed (and I would not be surprised if every major network aired it) to enrage tempers and fuel more violence in Iraq. This violence will justify an immediate need for a troop surge, although I think it will be described as temporary. Remember too that the British press has for the past week done nothing but report that Britain will be attacked by the New Year. Clearly they are preparing themselves for a contingency, and that contingency is the massive violence that will erupt across the Muslim world as they watch (and I really believe it will be televised) Saddam’s hanging just before the New Year. Why is the rush to execute Saddam Hussein not account for Hajj? Or does it? The carriers will be in position. I imaging there will be an event of some sort in Iraq, or the violence will spill into friendly (our friends) territory. It will be dramatic, even more so than the immediate violence. The attacks will be blamed on Iran, with the help of the Saudis and Pakistan. Iran will be blamed for something that happens in Iran. The naval carriers, again, will be in position. The sanctions, as watered down as they are, have given the administration the blank check they needed from the world (and they still have their blank check from Congress) to order aerial strikes. The surge troops will be in position, and I estimate that ground support will begin around late February, early March. Saddam’s execution and the violence will also be a convenient cover while the administration moves pieces into position. But what the planners in the administration don’t seem to realize is that the Persians are the most expert of chess players, and they are a patient, strategy minded opponent. They are watching this develop, all of it, and they too are planning their counteraction. They know better than to strike first, because in doing so, they would lose the moral argument in the eyes of the world, as well as the advantage of counteraction. The US has a superior air force, but Iran has a formidable navy, and while the house of Saud will fuel this, the fallout will be fatal. Why? Here is why: Because the US is too stretched to be able to protect Israel, and Israel cannot sustain a long term attack. They can sustain a few hits, but they will not be able to sustain a full blown attack. If you have any doubt, go back to the recent war with Lebanon. The British will pull out, despite promises of support. Blair is on his way out, and the British public will not tolerate support for Israel, because of its help in supporting US imperialistic aggression. Whatever terrorist cells lurk in the US, and make no mistake, our administration has done little to address this issue, will be activated. Also consider that the house of Saud is not prepared to defend itself against an uprising, and that the US cannot protect it while simultaneously operating on three different fronts and covertly in god knows how many. Despite the various sectarian differences in the Muslim world, there are two enemies that they all agree to fight and die fighting against: the US and Israel. This attack will set off a Muslim counterattack so large, that nothing will be able to stop it or contain it. But our leadership does not see this, because they cannot think strategically and won't think in human terms, so they are left with nothing but arrogance. And we ae left with a world ablaze. Note: Larisa Alexandrovna maintains the blog At-Largely and is Managing Editor - of Raw Story.

Kennedy Targeted on 1963 Ireland Trip By SHAWN POGATCHNIK The Associated Press Thursday, December 28, 2006; 8:31 PM DUBLIN, Ireland -- President John F. Kennedy was the subject of three separate death threats during his visit to Ireland in 1963, according to newly declassified police documents released Friday. The documents released by the Irish Justice Department said police received two anonymous telephoned warnings in the weeks before the arrival of the United States' first Irish Catholic president. A third threat went to the newsroom of the Irish Independent newspaper. Kennedy's June 26-29 visit went ahead trouble free as he was greeted by adoring crowds in Dublin, Cork, Galway and at his family homestead in County Wexford, in southeast Ireland. He was assassinated in Dallas five months later. One threat claimed a sniper would target Kennedy as his motorcade traveled from Dublin Airport to the residence of the Irish president at the start of his visit. The second warned a bomb at Shannon Airport, in southwest Ireland, would detonate as Air Force One was about to depart. According to the documents the third threat, phoned to the newspaper, indicated that Kennedy would be attacked at Dublin Airport, although the method wasn't specified. The documents detailed police security concerns _ and also reflected officials' desire to impress both U.S. visitors and onlookers in Britain, Ireland's colonial master until 1922. In a letter, Commissioner Daniel Costigan, the commander of Ireland's national police force in 1963, described the Kennedy tour as "the most important visit to this country since the establishment of the state, with worldwide publicity. British journalists are likely to be ready to criticize any fault in arrangements." He wrote that although unlikely, "we cannot overlook the possibility" of an assassination attempt. Costigan said his officers would use binoculars to monitor rooftops along the route of the presidential motorcade. He said an unspecified number of police would be armed with handguns, rifles and submachine guns _ an exceptional measure in a country with a largely unarmed police force _ to engage any would-be sniper. The documents indicated that 6,404 police officers were on duty the night Kennedy arrived, and 2,690 lined the U.S. president's route from Dublin airport to the Phoenix Park mansion of Irish President Eamon de Valera. ___ On the Net: JFK Library & Museum guide to 1963 visit, http://www.jfklibrary.org

The new British film “638 Ways to Kill Castro” contains a clip with new information about Oswald. To view the clip, click on the link below: http://www.638waystokillcastro.com/video.asp

I am told that in the early morning hours of today, Robert Duncan was interviewed on the international radio show Coasttocoastam. In answer to a question about John Kennedy, he stated that a week before his death JFK spoke at Columbia University. During the course of his speech, according to Duncan, JFK said that he had uncovered an immense plot and was determined to tell the American people about it before he left office. Has anyone in the Forum ever heard of such a statement by JFK and, if so, is any more information available about it? Below is the link that summarizes Duncan’s fascinating interview on the radio program: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2006/12/05.html#recap

Feral cats, beware By Chan Akya Asia Times (Hong Kong) December 2, 2006 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/HL02Ag01.html With the US government firmly on the back foot in Iraq and President George W Bush rendered a lame duck by a Democratic Congress, the end of the American century is approaching rather faster than previously expected. [1] My characterization of the United States as Garfield may have been too gentle in the context of what is likely to happen going forward, when the cat becomes feral. The death of any superpower usually carries with it a combination of military and economic defeat and, as with the Soviet Union's demise in the 1990s, America's decline will prove equally cruel. Iraq has descended into a civil war in recent weeks, as a feckless US military attempts to recover lost ground with the same failed tactics of the past few years. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Bush, reeling from stunning losses in mid-term elections, had to fire defense chief Donald Rumsfeld, but has since failed to signal any changes in strategy. The matter may not be entirely up to him as insurgents and terrorists, sensing a potential shift in US strategy, have stepped up their attacks to record levels. This makes an early US exit not only more likely, but also more ignominious. For a people imbued with a sense of infallibility, this turn of events would be nothing short of a catastrophic reality check. As with the end of the Vietnam conflict, it might take 10 years or more for any resurgence in national optimism in the US. The difference is that this time around, putative successors are much better positioned to inherit the mantle of superpowers. Echoes elsewhere The impact of a significant foreign-policy setback is hardly minor for any economy, and will be quite marked for the US economy. A decline in government spending on the "military-industrial complex" would reduce profits for many US companies, especially the ones that tend to fund policymakers or send their executives into politics. The downward adjustment of such sectors would, however, pale in comparison to the impact of reduced optimism at the top level. Simply put, US consumers would be less likely to spend on new houses, cars or home improvements. The notion of "keeping up with the Joneses", which underpins vast swaths of the US economy, would operate in reverse under such circumstances, with people cutting their spending in competition. Financial markets are already signaling the possibility that the US confronts a recession at home, as the US dollar has declined sharply in recent days. While the prestige factor mentioned above is only part of the story, the other part is the likely monetary easing that makes the currency less attractive going forward. Stock markets have also seen a wobble in recent days. The immediate impact of a decline in the US economy is of course negative for exporting countries, including China, Japan and pretty much the whole Middle East. However, to the extent that China and India continue to build their infrastructure, and allow their currencies to appreciate against the US dollar, one can expect increased consumption from these countries to take up the slack created by the US decline. The worst-positioned countries are those that do most of their business with the US today, namely those in Latin America. Some financial commentators have pointed out that a falling US dollar is good for the country's exports. This might be the case when a country produces anything that others want to buy, but that's largely not the case with the US. In a previous article, [2] I wrote: The US has lost its competitive edge in manufacturing ... The simple fact is that after the Cold War ended, US innovation stopped dead in its tracks. Evaluate the engineering aspects of any American car, and you are likely to walk away completely unimpressed. A six-liter engine used by US car companies produces the same power as an engine half that size from the Germans, and one-third of the size by the Japanese (tuned, admittedly). Leave out engineering, and simple design dynamics don't work either - Detroit has not produced a single desirable car in the past decade. The United States came to the forefront of righting human-rights wrongs such as racism, but only when its economic prosperity was threatened by the status quo. Now, America's lost competitiveness in manufacturing comes alongside its declining demographics (when keeping immigrants out of calculations), and rising threats from the likes of India and China in all areas of the global economy that it currently dominates. In this high-pressure economic environment, rising geopolitical risks argue for an unwelcome acceleration of the country's transition. Much like a worker who becomes a wife-beater when threatened with losing his job, the US lashes out, with its anger directed toward garnering any resource advantage that it can to lengthen its reign at the top. As I pointed out then, the US is unlikely to go quietly into the night. It will attempt to lash out at the rest of the world, particularly at its potential successors - the Eurozone, Russia and China.[3] Of these, the Eurozone has neither the military nor social mandate to pose a strategic counterbalance to the US. This leaves Russia and China to consider. I have already written about the latter in the aforementioned article, concluding that China would make necessary accommodations to its currency and economic policy to avoid confrontation with the US. Russia's role, though, is more intriguing. Russia's sinister game That President Vladimir Putin has stepped up his great Asian game comes as no surprise in the context described above. To a large extent, his strategy has been shaped by the impact of a dying Soviet Union on the national psyche, something that he has personally mourned more than once. A shameful withdrawal of the US from Iraq guarantees a strong role for his country in the immediate aftermath, particularly given the proximity of concerns with Iran, whose potential to disturb southern Russian regions has never been doubted in Moscow. The assassinations of various dissidents, including journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, show a return to the "bad old days" of the KGB under Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, while apparent intransigence on energy businesses show that the Kremlin is keen to maximize every advantage it perceives. What this means for Putin himself is a matter of much conjecture, but it seems a fairly safe bet that he will not slide into oblivion quite as easily as president Boris Yeltsin did. At the logical extreme, one can expect that Russia will hold Europe hostage with its gas supplies, while increasing its shrill behavior on world forums against US interests. This would in turn cause the US to dial back its old suspicions on Russia. The nomination of Robert Gates (of "Mikhail Gorbachev is a fraud" fame) as US defense secretary makes it ever more likely that the US would prefer to pick battles with known enemies, particularly one that appears to be so willing to become recognized once again as the strategic counterbalance to the US. The only event that could derail this train would be a large terrorist attack on Russia, perhaps mounted by Chechen Muslims. [4] Similarly, a bigger attack on the US may make Americans more amenable to concessions for the Russians, making any conflict escalation unlikely. Over the longer term, though, Russia's tilt toward regaining the Soviet Union's lost dominance is ill-conceived for both historical and demographic reasons. However, it provides just enough breathing room for China to emerge fully into the limelight. For this reason, more than anything else, China's foreign policy in the next few months is likely to "encourage" adventurism on the part of the Russians, while playing lip service to the United States. Notes 1. Garfield with guns, Asia Times Online, September 2. 2. In-Sen!, Asia Times Online, September 16. 3. China's four-play, Asia Times Online, November 11. 4. It is interesting to note that Alexander Litvinenko alleged that it was the KGB rather than the Chechens who bombed Moscow apartment buildings.

I was listening to the radio show when the new witness called in. It is my recollection that she said the police officer, whom she claimed was Tippit, told the driver to move the car, which he reluctantly did. So when the shooter exited the building running soon thereafter he was perplexed for a moment as the car was not where it should have been but was instead in a nearby location where it could not be seen. The shooter, holding the rifle, then started running at a gallop with his jacket blowing in the wind towards a nearby tunnel under a road and the police officer immediately pursued him in his vehicle. That was the last that was seen by the new witness. She did say that she later learned that the driver of the car that was forced to move was named "Elrod." For a small charge anyone can listen to the rebroadcast of the radio show. I would do so but my schedule prevents me. Hopefully my recollection of what I heard around 3 a.m. in the morning is accurate. The account by the new witness had a ring of truth to it, which was remarked upon by the primary guest being interviewed on the show.

Alex Jones’ fantastic new video TerrorStorm can be seen in its entirety on Google. It is highly recommended. To view it, clink on the link below. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=786048453686176230

JFK Assassination Special IV From the coastocoastam radio show of Nov. 22, 2006 In a special 4-hour program, various guests individually presented information and conclusions about the conspiratorial aspects of the JFK assassination. In the first hour, Paul Groody, the mortician in charge of Lee Harvey Oswald's burial, and the exhumation of his body in 1981, presented details about a possible second 'Oswald.' In November 1963, he said he removed the top of Oswald's skull as part of the postmortem procedure-- yet the exhumed body's skull showed no markings or damage. View material we received from Groody. [see link at end of article] Author Jim Marrs noted that a paraffin test on Oswald showed that he didn't have gunpowder residue, as a person would that had fired a rifle, and that voice stress analysis of his statement "I'm just a patsy," suggested he was telling the truth. The problem, said Marrs, is that Oswald never got a fair trial. Kennedy, he said, may have become a target because he authorized the printing of money through the Treasury (which was interest free) instead of using the Federal Reserve. Researcher Lamar Waldron updated his work with new details from FBI files concerning mob lawyer Morris Shenker and the confession of one of Shenker's clients. Three Mafia bosses organized the killing of JFK, Waldron reported, and Bobby Kennedy couldn't prosecute them because they had information about a coup JFK had planned in Cuba. Radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones posited that the JFK assassination was a case of infighting amongst the Global Elite, and that Kennedy sided with the European elite, rather than the American/British branch. LBJ was a puppet for the Elite and the Mafia provided "low level trigger men," said Jones, who argued that JFK was killed for a "cocktail of reasons" including his plan to withdraw troops from Viet Nam. Jones also shared that his new video, Terrorstorm, can be viewed for free at Google Video. Author Brad Steiger cited the possibility that Howard Hughes was involved in the assassination, as he was a passionate Nixon supporter. He also outlined the connections between David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and the city of New Orleans. Additionally, a caller to the show named Velma, 85 years old, shared her account of seeing a gunman running out of a building at Dealey Plaza. Neither his appearance nor gun matched that of Oswald's, she said, adding that she kept quiet for many years to protect her family. For more on the JFK assassination, check out recaps from our shows in 2003, 2004 and 2005. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2006/11/22.html#recap

From westword.com Originally published by Westword 2006-10-05 Kill the Messenger The tragic death of one of America's most important investigative journalists By Nick Schou http://www.westword.com/Issues/2006-10-05/...news2_full.html A college dropout with 20 years of reporting experience and a Pulitzer Prize on his résumé, Gary Webb broke the biggest story of his career in August 1996 when he published "Dark Alliance," a three-part series for The San Jose Mercury News that linked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to America's crack-cocaine explosion via the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing army that aimed to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government during the 1980s. Many reporters had written about the CIA's collusion with contra drug smugglers, but nobody had ever discovered where those drugs ended up once they reached American soil. "Dark Alliance" provided the first dramatic answer to that mystery. But in the months following its publication, the story was subjected to ferocious attacks by the nation's biggest newspapers — the New York Times,the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — and soon, Webb found himself out of a job. After being assigned to a tiny regional bureau, Webb quit the paper and never worked in daily journalism again. Nick Schou's new book, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Gary Webb, examines the tragic unraveling of one of America's most talented yet enigmatic investigative journalists. The following excerpt is being printed with the permission of Nation Books. All rights are reserved. After days of unrelenting winter rain from a powerful Pacific storm, the clouds moved east and the skies cleared above the Sacramento valley. The snowcapped peaks of the western range of the Sierra Nevada glowed pink in the glinting early morning sun. On days like this, Gary Webb normally would have taken the day off to ride his motorcycle into the mountains. Although it was a Friday morning, Webb didn't need to call in sick. In fact, he hadn't been to work in weeks. When his ex-wife garnished his wages, seeking child support for their three kids, Webb asked for an indefinite leave from the small weekly alternative paper in Sacramento where he had been working the past four months. He told his boss he could no longer afford the $2,000 mortgage on his house in Carmichael, a suburb 20 miles east of the state capital. There was no time for riding. Today, December 10, 2004, Webb was going to move in with his mother. It wasn't his first choice. First, he asked his ex-girlfriend if he could share her apartment. The two had dated for several months and continued to live together until their lease expired a year earlier, when Webb had bought his new house. They had remained friends, and at first she had said yes, but she changed her mind at the last minute, not wanting to lead him on in the hope that they'd rekindle a romance. Desperate, Webb asked his ex-wife, Sue, if he could live with her until he regained his financial footing. She refused. "I don't feel comfortable with that," she said. "You don't?" Sue recalls that her ex-husband's words seemed painfully drawn out. "I don't know if I can do that," she said. "Your mother will let you move in. You don't have any other choice." Besides losing his house, Webb had also lost his motorcycle. The day before he was to move, it had broken down as he was riding to his mother's house in a nearby retirement community. After spotting Webb pushing the bike off the road, a helpful young man with a goatee and a spider-web tattoo on his elbow had given him a lift home. Webb arranged to get a pickup truck, but when he went back to retrieve his bike, it had disappeared. That night, Webb spent hours at his mother's house. At her urging, he typed up a description of the suspected thief. But Webb didn't see much point in filing a police report. He doubted he'd ever see his bike again. He had been depressed for months, but the loss of his bike seemed to push him over the edge. He told his mother he had no idea how he was going to ever make enough money to pay child support and pay rent or buy a new home. Although he had a paying job in journalism, Webb knew that only a reporting gig with a major newspaper would give him the paycheck he needed to stay out of debt. But after sending out 50 résumés to daily newspapers around the country, nobody had called for an interview. His current job couldn't pay the bills, and the thought of moving in with his mother, at age 49, was more than his pride would allow. "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" he asked. "All I want to do is write." It was 8 p.m. by the time Webb left his mother's house. She offered to cook him a dinner of bacon and eggs, but Webb declined, saying he had to go home. There were other things he had to do. She kissed him goodbye and told him to come back the next day with a smile on his face. "Things will be better," she said. "You don't have to pay anything to stay here. You'll get back on your feet." The next morning, Anita Webb called her son to remind him to file a police report for the stolen bike. His phone rang and rang. She didn't bother leaving a message, figuring the movers already had arrived. They had. It's possible they heard the phone ringing. As they approached his house, they noticed a note stuck to his front door. "Please do not enter," it warned. "Call 911 for an ambulance. Thank you." When her son failed answer the phone for more than an hour, Anita Webb began to panic. Finally, she let the answering machine pick up. "Gary, make sure you file a police report," she said. Before she could finish, the machine beeped and an unfamiliar voice began to speak: "Are you calling about the man who lives here?" It is normally the policy of the Sacramento County Coroner's office not to answer the telephone at the scene of a death, but apparently the phrase "police report" startled the coroner into breaking that rule. At some point early that morning, Gary Webb had committed suicide. The coroners found his body in a pool of blood on his bed, his hands still gripping his father's 38-caliber pistol. On his nightstand were his Social Security card — apparently intended to make it easier for his body to be identified — a cremation card and a suicide note, the contents of which have never been revealed by his family. The house was filled with packed boxes. Only his turntable, DVD player and TV were unpacked. In the hours before he shot himself in the head, Webb had listened to his favorite album, Ian Hunter Live, and had watched his favorite movie, the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In a trash can was a poster Webb had saved from his first journalism job with the Kentucky Post. The poster was an open letter to readers from Vance Trimble, Webb's first editor. Decades earlier, Webb had clipped it from the pages of the paper. Although he had always admired its message, something about it must have been too much to bear in his final moments. Trimble had written that, unlike some newspapers, the Post would never kill a story under pressure from powerful interests. "There should be no fetters on reporters, nor must they tamper with the truth, but give light so the people will find their own way," his letter stated. That morning, Sue Webb was at home in Folsom, just minutes away from Carmichael, when her cell phone started ringing. She was about to walk out the door to bring her fourteen-year-old daughter, Christine, to school. Because Sue was running late for a business meeting in Stockton, she didn't answer. But when she recognized the number of the caller as Kurt, her ex-husband's brother, she began to worry. "I was standing in the bathroom, and when I saw that number, I knew something had happened," she says. "I kept saying, 'No, this is not happening, this is not happening.' I was afraid to pick up the phone." Thoughts raced through her mind. Two days earlier, Webb had taken Christine to a doctor's appointment. At the doctor's office, there was a copy of Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham, which Webb had loved reading to her years earlier. He jokingly asked her if she wanted him to read it aloud to her. When he dropped Christine off at Sue's house later that day, Christine said her father made a special point of walking up to the door to kiss her goodbye. "He told her to be good to her mom," Sue says. "And he handed her some little bottles of perfume and said, 'I love you.' When she asked him if he wanted to come in, he said no." Sue put her daughter in the car and drove a few blocks to the entrance of the middle-class neighborhood of tract houses where she lives on a wooded hillside on the outskirts of town. "I couldn't stand it anymore, because the phone kept ringing," she says. "It was Anita, and she was just sobbing. And I said, 'Is he gone?' and she said, 'Yes.' And I just pulled off the road and started crying and said, 'Christine, your daddy's dead.' We had to get out of the car, and we sat on the grass together and just started crying. I don't even know how long we sat there." A woman driving by pulled over and asked what was wrong. Sue gave her the number of the health-care company where she worked as a sales agent. She asked the woman to call and let them no she wouldn't be able to keep her appointments that day. Then she called her twenty-year-old son, Ian, and Eric, her sixteen-year-old, who was already at school, to tell them to meet her and Christine at Anita's house. "I had to tell them on the phone what had happened because they wouldn't let me hang up," she says. When she arrived at Anita's house, Ian was sitting on the front lawn, tears streaming down his face. "The police had already left," she says. "I told him not to go inside." A block away from the house was a bench with a view of a duck pond. The tranquil scene seemed surreal, dreamlike, frozen in time. "I remember feeling this sense of loss. It was the weirdest thing in the world. I had moved to California to be with Gary and had left my family behind and suddenly I felt alone. And I knew almost immediately that he had killed himself." That afternoon, Sue met Kurt at the coroner's office. "They took us into a room, and the coroner came in and told us that Gary had shot himself and what gun he had used," she says. "It was his dad's gun that he had found when he was a security guard at a hospital in Cincinnati. Some patient had left it there, and his dad had kept it. He used to keep it under the bed. I'd get mad because we had kids, and he'd stick it in the closet." Kurt asked the coroner if he was certain it was a suicide. "There's no doubt in my mind," he answered. He added that sometimes, people who shoot themselves have bruises on their fingers from squeezing the trigger. Apparently the will to live is so strong that suicide victims often grip the gun so tightly and for so long they lose blood circulation in their hands. "Gary had bruises on his fingers," Sue says. A few days later, four letters arrived at Sue's house, one each for her and the three kids. Webb had mailed them before he died. He sent a separate letter to his mother, and a last will and testament to his brother Kurt. He told his children that he loved them, that Ian would make a woman happy someday, and that he didn't want his death to dissuade Eric from considering a career in journalism. His will divided his assets, including his just-sold house, among his wife and children. His only additional wish was that his ashes be spread in the ocean so he could "bodysurf for eternity." While it was Gary Webb who pulled the trigger, the bullet that ended his life was a mere afterthought to the tragic unraveling of one of the most controversial and misunderstood journalists in recent American history. "Dark Alliance" was the first major news expose? to be published simultaneously in print and on the Internet. Ignored by the mainstream media at first, the story nonetheless spread like wildfire through cyberspace and talk radio. It sparked angry protests around the country by African-Americans who had long suspected the government had allowed drugs into their communities. Their anger was fueled by the fact that "Dark Alliance" didn't just show that the contras had supplied a major crack dealer with cocaine or that the cash had been used to fund the CIA's army in Central America but also strongly implied that this activity had been critical to the nationwide explosion of crack cocaine that had taken place in America during the 1980s. It was an explosive charge, although a careful reading of the story showed that Webb had never actually stated that the CIA intentionally started the crack epidemic. In fact, Webb never believed the CIA had conspired to addict anybody to drugs. Rather, he believed that the agency had known that the contras were dealing cocaine and hadn't lifted a finger to stop them. He was right, and the controversy over "Dark Alliance" — which many consider to be the biggest media scandal of the 1990s — would ultimately force the CIA to admit it had lied for years about what it knew and when it knew it. In the wake of "Dark Alliance," the series and Webb himself were subjected to unprecedented attacks in the mainstream media, which took advantage of the story's most serious flaw — implying but failing to prove the CIA helped spark the crack epidemic — to assert that the CIA had no ties whatsoever to the drug ring Webb exposed. The attacks continued even after Webb's death. The Los Angeles Times published an obituary that ran in newspapers across the nation and summed up his life by claiming that he was author of "discredited" stories about the CIA. The paper would later publish a lengthy feature story revealing that Webb had suffered from clinical depression for more than a decade — even before he wrote "Dark Alliance." Titled "Written in Pain," it painted Webb as a troubled, manic-depressive man who had repeatedly cheated on his wife, and a reckless "cowboy" of a journalist. Such a portrait offers only a misleading caricature of a much more complicated man. Interviews with dozens of Webb's friends, family members and colleagues reveal that Webb was an idealistic, passionate and meticulous journalist, not a cowboy. Those who knew him before "Dark Alliance" made him famous and then infamous say he was happy until he lost his career. His colleagues, with the exception of some reporters and editors at the Mercury News who found him arrogant and self-promoting, almost universally loved, respected and even revered him. The controversy over "Dark Alliance" was the central event in Webb's life and the critical element in his eventual depression and suicide. His big story, despite major flaws of hyperbole abetted and even encouraged by his editors, remains one of the most important works of investigative journalism in recent American history. The connection that Webb uncovered between the CIA, the contras and Los Angeles' crack trade was real — and radioactive. Webb was hardly the first American journalist to lose his job after taking on the country's most secretive government agency in print. Every serious reporter or politician that tried to unravel the connection between the CIA, the Nicaraguan contras and cocaine had lived to regret it. Senator John Kerry investigated it through congressional hearings that were stonewalled by the Reagan administration, and for this, he was alternately ridiculed and ignored in the media. Journalists such as the AP's Bob Parry quit their jobs after being repeatedly shut down by their editors. Some reporters, working on the ground in Central America, had even been subjected to police harassment and death threats for pursuing it. Webb was simply the most widely and maliciously maligned of these reporters to literally die for the story. The recent history of American journalism is full of media scandals, from the fabulist fabrications of the New Republic's Stephen Glass and the New York Times' Jayson Blair to Judith Miller's credulous and entirely discredited reporting on Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction for the New York Times, which helped pave the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Webb, despite his stubborn refusal to admit his own errors, hardly deserves to be held in such company. What truly distinguishes his fate is his how he was abandoned by his employer in the face of unprecedented and ferocious attacks by the nation's major newspapers, the likes of which had never been seen before or occurred since. The controversy over "Dark Alliance" forced Webb from journalism and ultimately led him to take his own life. Besides Webb, however, nobody else lost a job over the story — nobody at the CIA, certainly, and not even any of Webb's editors, who happily published his work, only to back away from it under withering media attacks before getting on with their lives and receiving promotions. Gary Webb's tragic fate, and the role of America's most powerful newspapers in ending his career, raises an important question about American journalism in an era when much of the public perceives the fourth estate as an industry in decline, a feckless broadcaster of White House leaks with a penchant for sensationalized, consumer-driven tabloid sex scandals. Webb spent two decades uncovering corruption at all levels of power, at the hands of public officials representing all ideological facets of the political spectrum. Indeed, his very fearlessness in taking on powerful institutions and officials was an ultimately fatal character trait that nonetheless embodies the sort of journalistic ethic that should be rewarded and celebrated in any healthy democratic society. In 2002, Webb reflected on his fall from grace in the book Into the Buzzsaw, a compendium of first-person accounts by journalists whose controversial stories pushed them from their chosen profession. His words are worth remembering now more than ever. "If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me," Webb concluded. "And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job..... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." http://www.westword.com/Issues/2006-10-05/...news2_full.html

Autopsy: No Arabs on Flight 77 By Thomas R. Olmsted, M.D Originally published 07/6/03. Updated 9/28/06 Sierra Times Please click on the link below and then click on the images to read the official documents that accompany the article: http://www.sierratimes.com/03/07/02/article_tro.htm Now Updated: No Arabs on Flight 77: Part II -The Passengers I am an ex Naval line officer and a psychiatrist in private practice in New Orleans, a Christian and homeschool dad. It troubled me a great deal that we rushed off to war on the flimsiest of evidence. I considered various ways to provide a smoking gun of who and why Sept 11th happened. Astute observers noticed right away that there were no Arabic sounding names on any of the flight manifests of the planes that “crashed” on that day. FOIA Cover Page A list of names on a piece of paper is not evidence, but an autopsy by a pathologist, is. I undertook by FOIA request, to obtain that autopsy list and you are invited to view it below. Guess what? Still no Arabs on the list. It is my opinion that the monsters who planned this crime made a mistake by not including Arabic names on the original list to make the ruse seem more believable. When airline disasters occur, airlines will routinely provide a manifest list for anxious families. You may have noticed that even before Sep 11th, that airlines are pretty meticulous about getting an accurate headcount before takeoff. It seems very unlikely to me, that five Arabs sneaked onto a flight with weapons. This is the list provided by American of the 56 passengers: On September 27th, the FBI published photos of the “hijackers” of Flight 77: Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), does a miraculous job and identified nearly all the bodies on November 16th 2001. Official Autopsy List - Page 2 The AFIP suggest these numbers; 189 killed, 125 worked at the Pentagon and 64 were “passengers” on the plane. The AA list only had 56 and the list just obtained has 58. They did not explain how they were able to tell “victims” bodies from “hijacker” bodies. In fact, from the beginning NO explanation has been given for the extra five suggested in news reports except that the FBI showed us the pictures to make up the difference, and that makes it so. Now, being the trusting sort, I figured that the government would want to quickly dispel any rumors so we could get on with the chore of kicking Osama/Sadaam’s butt (weren’t these originally two different people?). It seemed simple to me. . .produce the names of all the bodies identified by the AFIP and compare it with the publicized list of passengers. So, I sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the AFIP and asked for an expedited response, because we were getting ready to send our boys to war on the pretext that Osama/Sadaam had done the deed. Fourteen months later, a few US soldiers dead, many Iraqi civilians pushing up daisies, and I finally get the list. Believe me that they weren’t a bit happy to give it up, and I really have no idea why they choose now to release it. Official Autopsy List - Page 2 No Arabs wound up on the morgue slab; however, three ADDITIONAL people not listed by American Airline sneaked in. I have seen no explanation for these extras. I did give American the opportunity to “revise” their original list, but they have not responded. The new names are: Robert Ploger, Zandra Ploger, and Sandra Teague. The AFIP claims that the only “passenger” body that they were not able to identify is the toddler, Dana Falkenberg, whose parents and young sister are on the list of those identified. The satanic masterminds behind this caper may be feeling pretty smug about the perfect crime, but they have left a raft of clues tying these unfortunates together. Stay tuned for part two to take a much closer look of the cast of characters on this ill-fated flight. Click on Images for Full Size Graphic

September 25, 2006 A Regression in Consciousness Flying Saucers and the Decline of the Left By ALEXANDER COCKBURN counterpunch.org http://www.counterpunch.org/ The world is in tumult, but here in the heart of Empire the level of creative political energy runs flat along the bottom of the graph. As Iraq disintegrates amid frightful slaughter, US generals propose to bring to life the mad plan they once ascribed to Saddam Hussein, to dig a defensive ditch round Baghdad, one of the larger cities on the planet. In Afghanistan the Taliban are once again on the rise. Amid these vivid implosions of the "war on terror," the US antiwar movement is near dead. Here in the homeland, the mightiest names of the auto-industrial age have their backs to the wall. Tens of thousands of men and women face grim times as Ford and GM shutter plant after plant. Yet the pulse of organized labor amid this devastation is feeble. From the environmental movement there is an even fainter heartbeat, even as an actual conspiracy -- official concealment of the toxic toll on New Yorkers from the 9/11 attack -- finally comes to light. There's no convincing energy plan beyond posturing about ANWR; no protest at the giveaways of public lands. Less than two months from the midterm elections, the Democrats cower from confrontation with a widely hated President. When Bush tries to annul America's always frail commitment to the Geneva Conventions on torture, Joe Biden complacently announces that the Democrats are happy to sit this one out and let Republican Senators McCain, Warner and Graham attempt to mount a counterattack. This is the way to rally millions of antiwar voters in November? Bush's present bounce in the polls shows the bankruptcy of Democratic strategy, as supervised by Rahm Emanuel. Outrage burns in many an American breast, but there's scant outlet for it in the political arena. A friend of mine took his family to the annual Puyallup Fair near Tacoma, Washington. There was a CNN booth, in which a mini "Democracy Wall", an 8-by-4-foot sheet of butcher paper, was available for people to scrawl their sentiments in felt-tip. Fast as the CNN staffers changed the paper, scores more hastened forward to scribble their views, almost all of them harsh in language toward both CNN and the President. Families photographed each other in postures vulgarly disrespectful to the life-size cutout of Wolf Blitzer. When an older man -- he turned out to be the retired commander of a nuclear submarine -- rebuked the crowd and called for loyalty to Bush, the mood turned ugly, and for reasons of his personal safety he was advised to leave. "And yet," said my friend, the anthropologist David Price, "try getting these people to an antiwar rally." It's as dismal a political landscape as I can remember in thirty years. Yet some discover a silver lining. They find it in the 9/11 conspiracy cult, which I have discussed here in recent weeks. A politically sophisticated leftist in Washington, DC, wrote to thank me for my attack, but added, "To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it [the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If that number or anything close to that is true, that's a huge base of people that are more than deeply cynical about their elected officials. That would be the real news story that the media is missing, and it's a big one." "I'm not sure I see the silver lining about cynicism re government," I answered. "People used to say the same thing about the JFK conspiracy buffs and disbelief in the Warren Commission. Actually, it seems to demobilize people from useful political activity. I think the nuttishness stems from despair and political infantilism. There's no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It's like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be a great orator. The nearest thing to it all is the Flying Saucer craze. 'Open up the USAF archives!' It's a Jungian thing." The 9/11-ers, who've insulted me and other radical critics for years as "gatekeepers for the neocons", "CIA agents," and "fearful for their jobs", are wounded when I call them nuts.* I've had many e-mails repeating their delirious litanies about NORAD, the collapse of the WTC buildings or the "missile" that really struck the Pentagon. On this last matter, Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant public service exposing the Pentagon's budgetary outrages, wrote to me that "there ARE pictures taken of plane hitting Pentagon -- they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon's heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen themÖboth stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was ID'd by dental remains found in the Pentagon." This won't faze the nuts. They're immune to any reality check. Spinney worked for the government ... They switched the dental records ... The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendez-vous with President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney's friend's teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon, the same way the paleontologists did in the Sussex gravel pit when they faked Piltdown Man. Such fantasists are not the foot soldiers of any movement for constructive social change. Richard Aldrich's book on British intelligence, The Hidden Hand (2002), describes how a report for the Pentagon on declassification recommended that "interesting declassified material" such as information about the JFK assassination "could be released and even posted on the Internet, as a 'diversion,'" and used to "reduce the unrestrained public appetite for 'secrets' by providing good faith distraction material". Aldrich adds, "If investigative journalists and contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious, but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome." By the same token, I'm sure that the Bush gang, and all the conspirators of capital, are delighted at the obsessions of the 9/11 cultists. It's a distraction from the 1,001 real plots of capitalism that demand exposure and political challenge. "The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness", Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia. "The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it ... The offal of the phenomenal world becomes, to sick consciousness, the mundus intelligibilis." Note: A shorter version of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.

Theory that U.S. orchestrated Sept. 11 attacks 'not absurd': Sept. 12, 2006 CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it's at least plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination. The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory that the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001. "The hypothesis is not absurd . . . that those towers could have been dynamited," Chavez said in a speech to supporters. "A building never collapses like that, unless it's with an implosion." "The hypothesis that is gaining strength . . . is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world," Chavez said. "Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq." Chavez has said the U.S. launched those wars to ensure its political and economic power. The U.S. government says al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "A plane supposedly crashed into the Pentagon, but no one ever found a single remnant of that plane," Chavez said, citing a television program he had seen on Venezuela's state television. Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro raised the same theories in an earlier speech Tuesday, and called for an independent investigation. "It's really worrisome to think that all of that could have been a great conspiracy against humanity," Maduro said. "An independent international investigation must be carried out one day to discover the truth about the events of Sept. 11."

Oliver Stone hints at darker 9/11 film in future www.globeandmail.com Sept. 12, 2006 Moscow -- U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone, who surprised many with the patriotic flavour of his new film World Trade Center, hinted in Moscow yesterday that he is considering a more controversial follow-up investigating the "conspiracy" around 9/11. "There is a great story in a movie, a conspiracy by a group of people in the American administration who have an agenda and who used 9/11 to further that agenda," he told journalists in Russia. There could be a "fascinating project [on] what happened after Sept. 11," the director said at his packed press conference on the fifth anniversary of the attacks. Stone accused U.S. President George W. Bush of mishandling the fight against Osama bin Laden's militants and using the crisis to stoke fear and bolster his own power at home in a way that was "right out of George Orwell." AFP

The SS Brotherhood of the Bell A new book by Joseph Farrell In 1945, a mysterious Nazi secret weapons project code-named The Bell left its underground bunker in lower Silesia, with its project documentation, and the 4-star SS general Hans Kammler. Taken aboard a massive six engine Junkers 390 ultra-long range aircraft, The Bell, Kammler, and all project records disappeared completely, along with the gigantic Junkers 390 carrying them. It has been speculated that it flew to Argentina. As a prelude to this disappearing act, the SS murdered most of the scientists and technicians involved with the project, a secret weapon that, according to one German Nobel prize-winning physicist, was given a classification of decisive for the war--the highest security classification. Farrell investigates the technologies researched by the Nazis and challenges to the conventional views of the end of World War Two. There are a number of revelations in the book about the Kennedy assassination. For one of the most enlightening but disturbing discussions of the entire subject, you are directed to the September 9, 2006 edition of Dreamland, a free Internet radio program. Jim Marrs and Whitley Strieber interview author Joseph Farrell on Dreamland in an exchange of new and vital information. To listen to the free program, go to the link below and click on the section titled “Listen Now” at the top of the masthead: http://www.unknowncountry.com/

How They Let the Guilty Parties of 9/11 Slip Off the Hook The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Weekend Edition Counterpunch September 9/10 , 2006 http://www.counterpunch.org/ You trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts -- -- the ones who say Bush and Cheney masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- in the first paragraph of the opening page of the book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. “In many respects,” Griffin writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself… In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes… not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them.” The operative word here is “should”. One characteristic of the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency, thus many of them start with the racist premise that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capable of the mission. They believe that military systems work the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work. They believe that at 8.14 am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the National Military Command center and NORAD. They believe, citing reverently (this is from high priest Griffin) “the US Air Force’s own website”, that an F-15 could have intercepted AA flight 11 “by 8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30”. They appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because if they did they’d know that minutely planned operations – let alone responses to an unprecedented emergency -- screw up with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality, weather and all the other whims of providence. According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command, an impending Soviet attack would have prompted the missile silos in North Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets. The tiny number of test launches actually attempted all failed, whereupon SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defense contractor venality or… CONSPIRACY? (In that case, presumably, a Communist conspiracy, as outlined by ancestors of the present nuts, ever intent on identifying those who would stab America in the back.) Did the British and French forces in 1940 break and flee a Wehrmacht capable of only one lunge, because of rotten leadership, terrible planning, epic cowardice, or … CONSPIRACY? Did the April 24, 1980 effort to rescue the hostages in the US embassy in Teheran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters, because the helicopters were poorly made, because of a lousy plan or because of agents of William Casey and the Republican National Committee poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet another CONSPIRACY? Have the US military’s varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn’t intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes stemmed from absolutely predictable attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because of CONSPIRACY? Is Mr Cohen in his little store at the end of the block hiking his prices because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or because the Jews want to take over the world? August Bebel said anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools. These days the 9/11 conspiracy fever threatens to become the “socialism” of the left, and the passe-partout of many libertarians. It’s awful. My in-box overflows each day with fresh “proofs” of how the WTC buildings were actually demolished, often accompanied by harsh insults identifying me as a “gate-keeper” preventing the truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking me “what I think about 9/11”. What they are actually trying to find out is whether I’m part of the coven. I imagine it was like being a Stoic in the second century A.D. going for a stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, with seeming casualness, whether it’s possible to feed 5,000 people on five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Indeed, at my school in the 1950s the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison’s book, Who Moved The Stone? It sought to demonstrate, with exhaustive citation from the Gospels, that since on these accounts no human had moved the stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it must beyond the shadow of a doubt have been an angel who rolled it aside and let Jesus out, so he could astonish the mourners and then Ascend. Of course Morison didn’t admit into his argument the possibility that angels don’t exist, or that the gospel writers were making it up. It’s the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts, who proffer what they demurely call “disturbing questions”, though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, torturing the data –- as the old joke goes about economists -- till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories – like witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon -- is contemptuously brushed aside. Anyone familiar with criminal, particularly death penalty defense – I had such an opportunity for a number of years – will know that there are always anomalies the prosecution cannot account for and that the defense teams can exploit, in hopes of swaying a jury either in the guilt or penalty phase of a trial. Time and again I would see the defense team spend days and weeks, even months, back-checking on a possibly vulnerable link in the evidentiary chain that could be attacked, at least to the all-important level of creating “reasonable doubt” in the mind of a juror. Expert witnesses would be imported at great expense –- unlike states such as Texas, the justice system of California is generous in the provision of money for death penalty defense -- to challenge the prosecution’s forensic evidence. Such challenges weren’t hard to mount. Contrary to prosecutorial claims, there is far less instrinsic certainty in forensic evaluation than is commonly supposed, as regards fingerprints, landing marks on bullets and so forth. But minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one such weak link often leads to a distorted view of the whole case. I remember more than one case where, after weeks of interviewing witnesses at one particular crime scene, the defense’s investigator had collected enough witness reports to mount a decent attack on this aspect of the prosecution’s overall case. At least this is what I thought, hearing the daily bulletins of the investigator. But when, in such instances, the camera pulled back, so to speak, and I saw the prosecution’s whole case – chain of evidence, cumulative witness statements, accused’s own movements and subsequent statements – it became clear enough to me and, in that case to the juries , that the accused were incontestably guilty. But even then, such cases had a vigorous afterlife, with the defense trying to muster up grounds for an appeal, on the basis of testimony and evidence withheld by the prosecution, faulty rulings by the judge, a prejudiced jury member and so on. A seemingly “cut and dried case” is very rarely beyond challenge, even though in essence it actually may well be just that, “cut and dried”. Anyone who ever looked at the JFK assassination will know that there are endless anomalies and loose ends. Eyewitness testimony – as so often – is conflicting, forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or just missing. But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course – as the years roll by, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related scenarios -- the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever. Naturally, there are conspiracies. I think there is strong evidence that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the north Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to get the US into the war. Of course it’s very probable that the FBI or US military intelligence, even the CIA, had penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 attacks; that intelligence reports – some are already known – piled up in various Washington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught and even the manner in which it might be carried out. The history of intelligence operations is profuse with example of successful intelligence collection, but also fatal slowness to act on the intelligence, along with eagnerness not to compromise the security and future usefulness of the informant, who has to prove his own credentials by even pressing for prompt action by the plotters. Sometime an undercover agent will actually propose an action, either to deflect efforts away from some graver threat, or to put the plotters in a position where they can be caught red-handed. In their penetrations of environmental groups the FBI certainly did this. Long before the Yom Kippur war, a CIA analyst noted Egyptian orders from a German engineering firm, and deduced from the type and size of equipment thus ordered that Egypt was planning an attack across the Suez canal. He worked out the probable size of the Egyptian force and the likely time window for the attack. His superiors at the CIA sat on the report. When the Egyptian army finally attacked on October 6, 1973 the CIA high command ordered up the long-buried report, dusted it off and sent it over to the White House, marked “current intelligence”. Was there a “conspiracy” by the CIA high command to allow Israel to be taken by surprise? I doubt it. Bureaucratic inertia and caution prevailed, until the moment came for decisive CYA acitvity. The nuts make dizzying “deductive” leaps. There is a one particularly vigorous coven which has established to its own satisfaction that the original NASA moon landing was faked, and never took place. This “conspiracy” would have required the complicity of thousands of people , all of whom have kept their mouths shut. The proponents of the “fake moon landing” plot tend to overlap with the JFK and 9/11 nuts. One notorious “deductive” leap involves flight 77, which on 9/11 ended up crashing into the Pentagon. There are photos of the impact of the “object” -- i.e., the Boeing 757, flight 77 -- that seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, the nuts assert, it WAS a missile and a 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. As regards the hole, my brother Andrew -- writing a book about Rumsfeld and the DoD during his tenure -- has seen photos taken within 30 minutes of Pentagon impact clearly showing outline of entire plane including wings. This was visible momentarily when the smoke blew away And if it was a missile, what happened to the 757? Did the conspirators shoot it down somewhere else, or force it down and then kill the passengers? Why plan to demolish the towers with pre-placed explosives if your conspiracy includes control of the two planes that hit them. Why bother with the planes at all. Why blame Osama if your fall guy is Saddam Hussein? Why involve the Israeli “art students”. The nuts simultaneously credit their targets – the Bush-Cheney “conspirators” -- with superhuman ingenuity and grotesque carelessness. In Webster Griffin Tarpley’s book “9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA” he writes that “in an interview with Parade magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld also referred to the object which hit the Pentagon as a ‘missile’. Was this a Freudian slip by the loquacious defense chief?” (And, a nut might add, is it mere coincidence that Webster Griffin Tarpley shares one of his names with David Ray Griffin? The demolition scenario is classic who-moved-the-stonery. The WTC towers didn’t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, they fell because Dick Cheney’s agents methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom –- party to mass murder –- have held their tongues ever since. The “conspiracy” is always open-ended as to the number of conspirators, widening steadily to include all the people involved in the execution and cover-up of the demolition of the Towers and the onsslaujght on the Pentagon, from the teams acquiring the explosives and themissile, inserting the explosives in the relevant floors of three vast buildings, (moving day after day among the unsuspecting office workers), then on 9/11 activating the detonators. Subsequently the conspiracy includes the disposers of the steel and rubble, the waste recyclers in Staten Island and perhaps even the Chinese who took the salvaged incriminating metal for use in the Three Gorges dam, where it will submerged in water and concretye for ever. Tens of thousands of people, all silent as the tomb to this day. Of course the buildings didn’t suddenly fall at a speed inexplicable in terms of physics unless caused by carefully pre-placed explosives, detonated by the ruthless Bush-Cheney operatives. High grade steel can bend disastrously under extreme heat. People inside who survived the collapse didn’t hear a series of explosions. As discussed in Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin’s excellent book Grand Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed warnings nine minutes before the final collapse that the South Tower might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before the North Tower’s fall. What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled the firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn’t have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers. That’s the real political world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held accountable. The nuts disdain the real world because, like much of the left and liberal sectors, they have promoted Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, instead of being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more than usual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally favor in imperial leaders.) The Conspiracy Nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction, just as Danny Sheehan did with his Complaint, that mesmerized and distracted much of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and which finally collapsed in a Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the Towers. * Footnote: I should add that one particular conspiracy nut, seeing that Roosevelt’s grandson Ford – a schoolteacher in Los Angeles – was for a while, some years ago, on the board of CounterPunch’s parent non-profit, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity – wrote an enormous onslaught on CounterPunch a while ago, “proving” to his own satisfaction that CounterPunch was a pawn of the Democratic Party, the CIA and kindred darker forces. I suppose the fact that CounterPunch attacked the Democratic Party and the CIA on a weekly basis was just one more example of our cunning in deflecting suspicion away from our true sponsors. The fact that from time to time that we also quite regularly attacked FDR – and posited his foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor – should again be taken as evidence of our cunning in deflecting suspicion away from Ford’s supervisory roile in our affairs. In fact we’d put Ford on the board in the hopes (vain, as they turned out to be) that he would persuade film stars to give CounterPunch money. A much shorter, earlier version of the column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Thursday.