Rants and Raves Archive

This is the nightmare that comes true, the nightmare from which we cannot awake. The nightmare that leaves us numb and hollow-eyed and fumbling when our children ask why anyone would do such a horrible thing.

To make a political statement -- that's the answer, isn't it? That's what they say is going on here.

Somebody wanted to make a point, somebody who didn't like the United States very much. So their solution was to arrange a nightmare.

Fanatics hijack planes full of innocent people and crash them into buildings packed with more innocent people. Thousands die, while thousands more are terribly injured.

And in some distant land, there's dancing in the streets.

It's a difficult thing to explain to our kids, especially because we don't actually understand it ourselves.

Oh, we can talk about ancient feuds and holy wars, but it all boils down to slaughter -- wanton, cowardly, gleeful slaughter. No reasonable explanation exists, and that's probably what we ought to tell our children -- the awful truth. Level with them.

Kids, don't waste your time trying to understand such lunacy. The lesson here is brutally simple: No place is safe. No one is out of reach.

This is the world they're inheriting, God help them.

For now we're left with feelings beyond despair and helplessness -- a vacant, bleary addiction that glues us to the television, where we watch the smoking rubble and the body bags and the replays that always end the same way. . . . The plane hits the building, the building falls down. It's like a scene out of a disaster movie, except it really happened. It's happening still.

All we can do is shake our heads and be thankful that none of our loved ones was on any of those airliners, or in any of those buildings. And we can weep for those who were lost and those they left behind.

Before long we'll know exactly how many people perished yesterday morning, and who they were. We'll hear stories of astonishing valor and of crushing sorrow.

Slowly, America will get back to business. The stock markets and airports will reopen, and the branches of government will reconvene. Then the cold consuming task of investigation will commence, producing mountains of evidence. Eventually we'll learn not only who staged the attack on New York and Washington, D.C., but precisely how it was executed.

We'll know the names and code names of the suicide hijackers, how they selected their flights, how they thwarted airport security and perhaps even how they gained control of the planes.

In this way the nightmare will be exhaustively annotated, but it won't go away.

Perhaps every modern generation of Americans is doomed to have an unthinkable tragedy imbedded in its psyche. For my parents' generation, it was Pearl Harbor; for mine, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.

Like yesterday's terrorist attack, those events seemed inconceivable at the time. The images have never lost their impact and never stopped haunting -- the USS Arizona, billowing black smoke into the Hawaiian sky; the Zapruder film, freezing the instant that President Kennedy's head was blown apart in Dallas.

And now the towers of the World Trade Center, crumbling in an inferno.

Even if a day comes when we know all there is to know about this crime, it will still defy comprehension.

History is full of such horrors and bloodbaths, unleashed on a whim -- somebody wanting to make a political statement, somebody wanting to make a point.

As our children grow older, they'll realize the futility of searching for logic in heartless evil. They'll stop asking why, for the same reasons we stopped asking. The answer is soul-deadening, the stuff of nightmares.

FROM THE MIAMI HERALD

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Death, Downtown

Dear friends,

I was supposed to fly today on the 4:30 PM American Airlines flight from LAX to JFK. But tonight I find myself stuck in L.A. with an incredible range of emotions over what has happened on the island where I work and live in New York City.

My wife and I spent the first hours of the day -- after being awakened by phone calls from our parents at 6:40am PT -- trying to contact our daughter at school in New York and our friend JoAnn who works near the World Trade Center.

I called JoAnn at her office. As someone picked up, the first tower imploded, and the person answering the phone screamed and ran out, leaving me no clue as to whether or not she or JoAnn would live.

It was a sick, horrible, frightening day.

On December 27, 1985 I found myself caught in the middle of a terrorist incident at the Vienna airport -- which left 30 people dead, both there and at the Rome airport. (The machine-gunning of passengers in each city was timed to occur at the same moment.)

I do not feel like discussing that event tonight because it still brings up too much despair and confusion as to how and why I got to live… a fluke, a mistake, a few feet on the tarmac, and I am still here, there but for the grace of…

Safe. Secure. I’m an American, living in America. I like my illusions. I walk through a metal detector, I put my carry-ons through an x-ray machine, and I know all will be well.

Here’s a short list of my experiences lately with airport security:

* At the Newark Airport, the plane is late at boarding everyone. The counter can’t find my seat. So I am told to just “go ahead and get on” -- without a ticket!

* At Detroit Metro Airport, I don’t want to put the lunch I just bought at the deli through the x-ray machine so, as I pass through the metal detector, I hand the sack to the guard through the space between the detector and the x-ray machine. I tell him “It’s just a sandwich.” He believes me and doesn’t bother to check. The sack has gone through neither security device.

* At LaGuardia in New York, I check a piece of luggage, but decide to catch a later plane. The first plane leaves without me, but with my bag -- no one knowing what is in it.

* Back in Detroit, I take my time getting off the commuter plane. By the time I have come down its stairs, the bus that takes the passengers to the terminal has left -- without me. I am alone on the tarmac, free to wander wherever I want. So I do. Eventually, I flag down a pick-up truck and an airplane mechanic gives me a ride the rest of the way to the terminal.

* I have brought knives, razors; and once, my traveling companion brought a hammer and chisel. No one stopped us.

Of course, I have gotten away with all of this because the airlines consider my safety SO important, they pay rent-a-cops $5.75 an hour to make sure the bad guys don’t get on my plane. That is what my life is worth -- less than the cost of an oil change.

Too harsh, you say? Well, chew on this: a first-year pilot on American Eagle (the commuter arm of American Airlines) receives around $15,000 a year in annual pay.

That’s right -- $15,000 for the person who has your life in his hands. Until recently, Continental Express paid a little over $13,000 a year. There was one guy, an American Eagle pilot, who had four kids so he went down to the welfare office and applied for food stamps -- and he was eligible!

Someone on welfare is flying my plane? Is this for real? Yes, it is.

So spare me the talk about all the precautions the airlines and the FAA is taking. They, like all businesses, are concerned about one thing -- the bottom line and the profit margin.

Four teams of 3-5 people were all able to penetrate airport security on the same morning at 3 different airports and pull off this heinous act? My only response is -- that’s all?

Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the “terrorist threat” and today’s scariest dude on planet earth -- Osama bin Laden. Hey, who knows, maybe he did it. But, something just doesn’t add up.

Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path?

Or am I being asked to believe that there were four religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today?

Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause -- but FOUR? Ok, maybe you can -- I don’t know.

What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin Laden guy except this one fact -- WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden!

Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!

Don’t take my word for it -- I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that laid it all out. When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.

We abhor terrorism -- unless we’re the ones doing the terrorizing.

We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers!

We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit.

We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause.

Yet, our recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted by a guy from the desert but rather by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys who hated the federal government.

From the first minutes of today’s events, I never heard that possibility suggested. Why is that?

Maybe it’s because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient in getting Americans whipped into a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It’s much easier to get us to hate when the object of our hatred doesn’t look like us.

Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the military; one Senator on CNN even said he didn’t want to hear any more talk about more money for education or health care -- we should have only one priority: our self-defense.

Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn’t living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?

In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race -- you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all.

The Senators and Congressmen tonight broke out in a spontaneous version of “God Bless America.” They’re not a bad group of singers!

Yes, God, please do bless us.

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes’ destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity…

Let’s mourn, let’s grieve, and when it’s appropriate let’s examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in.

It doesn’t have to be like this…

Yours, Michael Moore, mmflint@aol.com (More of Moore...)

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GREEN PARTY BLASTS BUSH'S RECKLESS AGENDA, BUT SEE LITTLE CHALLENGE FROM DEMOCRATS ON MAJOR ISSUES

An end-of-summer Green review of major Bush policies and Democratic complicity: the threat to raid Social Security, missile defense fraud, spoiling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, etc.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Green Party organizers and activists call the policies of the Bush Administration irresponsible and reckless, and warn of severe damage to the world environment, to the U.S. economy, and to the role of the U.S. in international relations. But Greens say that the lack of a strong, unified response from Democrats in Congress on many of these policies -- and Democratic collusion in their introduction and passage -- shows the urgent need for a progressive third party.

"When Clinton adopted the Republican Party's rhetoric about 'big government,' it gave Republicans an excuse to call for even more deregulation and privatization," said Jo Chamberlain, member of the steering committee of the Green Party of the United States and a California Green. "These extremes come out of the Bush White House on a daily basis, schemes like the privatization of Social Security and the halt on federal prosecutions for violations of the Clean Air Act."

"Both Democratic and Republican Parties have been using the rhetorical threat of 'big government' as an excuse to raid essential public services and resources.

At the same time, they're beefing up the power and wealth of corporations, through deregulation and privatization, through tax breaks and bail-outs, through military ventures and foreign policy designed to benefit corporate interests. We call that corporate welfare -- big government for the benefit of the wealthy."

The California blackouts have angered many Americans over energy deregulation. The stock market's instability has made working Americans uneasy about the dangerous plan to privatize Social Security. They realize that if the economy plummets, the least secure place to stow one's retirement money is Wall Street.

"Greens oppose 'big government' too," added Ben Manski, another member of the Green Party Steering Committee and a Green from Wisconsin. "We oppose the big government that invades our privacy, seeks to roll back abortion rights, maintains the War on Drugs, dumps our tax money into dangerous military ventures and contracts, and gives corporations the means to trample our rights and well-being."

The common policy of the Clinton and Bush Administrations in support of secretive international negotiations at the G8 Summit in July, supporting the exploitative manipulation of the global economy by the World Bank and IMF and unelected "free trade" authorities (WTO, NAFTA, FTAA, etc.), draws special criticism from Greens. Party members have participated in protests against all of these and have condemned the police provocation and abuse against peaceful demonstrators in Genoa, the site of the G8 meeting, and Quebec, at the FTAA meeting. Thousands of Greens will join the protests against the IMF and World Bank in Washington, D.C. in late September.

"Bush has been reckless as the leader of the only global superpower," said Ben Manski. "Bush refuses to sign agreements establishing the international ban on biological warfare which updates the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, a United Nations proposal to curb the international sale of small arms, an international court to investigate and prosecute genocide and war crimes, and the Kyoto Treaty committing the U.S. to a first step in slowing global warming. With the same irresponsibility, Bush is enacting national missile defense, a pipedream of Ronald Reagan, revived by Bill Clinton, which will gut the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty."

The public has now learned -- through the admissions of high level defense officials -- that the July 14, 2001 test of an anti-missile weapon was rigged, with an electronic beacon in its target that signaled the target's location.

The White House also intends to withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Conference Against Racism planned for Durban, South Africa on August 31, a move that's especially unconscionable in light of a report from the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination criticizing racially biased practices in the U.S., including the application of the death penalty, incarceration rates, and police brutality.

"How much can Americans trust the Democrats to put up a fight against Bush's destructive and regressive White House policies?," asked Jo Chamberlain. "36 Democratic members of the House joined with Republicans to allow Bush to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Democrats in Congress blocked Bush's proposed $1.6 billion tax break that benefits the rich and which will cut the safety net for the poor -- by okaying a $1.35 billion tax break, which is already erasing the budget surplus and threatening to dip into Social Security funds. Sen. Hillary Clinton, the darling of liberals, voted for a bankruptcy bill that enriches credit card companies and hurts Americans in a financial crisis because of job loss or medical bills. Sen. Russ Feingold, who's considering a White House run in 2004 as a progressive, helped Bush install John Ashcroft and Gail Norton."

"The Green Party is now the party of the newly emerging center, said Carol Miller, New Mexico Green Party member. "We're the party that supports neither the military-industrial corporate welfare big government that the two major parties now favor, nor a return to the old social welfare big government of New Deal Democrats. Instead, we demand government that's locally based and which advances environmentally healthy sustainable economies, democratic workplaces, human rights, and a strong social safety net."

MORE INFORMATION Green Party of the United States http://gpus.org

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Hell's Grannies - By George Monbiot

British women are using themselves as human shields in Israel, and they

put the rest of us to shame

Ariel Sharon's decision not to blast the Palestinians out of existence after last week's suicide bombings is, at first sight, mystifying. While jets blew up the Palestinians' police station in Ramallah and Israeli soldiers occupied their East Jerusalem headquarters, these reprisals were far less bloody than most people had predicted.

Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain this uncharacteristic restraint. Sharon is seeking to keep faith with his more conciliatory foreign minister, Shimon Peres. He is hoping to collect some moral credit, which he will use to defend much fiercer intervention at a later date. The seizure of Palestinian offices does more to hurt their cause than the murder of prominent figures. All these explanations are plausible, but there is another possible interpretation, overlooked by almost everyone. In killing Palestinians, Ariel Sharon can no longer be sure that he is killing only Palestinians.

For the past few weeks, foreign peace activists belonging to the International Solidarity Movement have been arriving in Jerusalem and the West Bank, joining demonstrations, staying in the homes of threatened Palestinians, turning themselves into human shields between the Israeli army and its targets. A few days ago they were joined by one of the most remarkable forces in British politics, a group of mostly middle-aged or elderly campaigners called Women in Black UK. These Hell's Grannies have moved straight into the front line, ensuring that the brutality with which the Palestinians are routinely treated now has international repercussions: Israel can't hurt local people without hurting them too.

For the past few nights, members of the solidarity movement have been sleeping in the homes of Palestinians in the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala. Eight hundred and fifty homes here have been shelled by soldiers stationed in the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Gilo, as the army seeks to expel the Palestinians in order to expand Israel's illegal plantation.

The foreigners have been standing at army checkpoints, photographing soldiers when they stop people trying to leave or enter their communities and recording the names of those they arrest. The soldiers hate this scrutiny, but whenever the monitors arrive at a checkpoint, there's a marked reduction in the violence there.

The Women in Black also helped to organise the demonstrations outside Orient House, the Palestinian headquarters seized by Israel on Friday. They established the physical and political space in which Palestinians could protest non-violently. Arrested and beaten up with the local people, the women witnessed the torture of Palestinian prisoners in the police station, which would otherwise have gone unrecorded.

In short, these volunteer peacekeepers are seeking to do precisely what foreign governments have promised but failed to do: to monitor and contest abuses of human rights, to defuse violence, and to challenge Israel's ethnic cleansing programme. Their actions put us all to shame.

As well as seeking to enforce peace, they are trying, hard as it is in the current atmosphere, to broker it. They have been suggesting to their Palestinian hosts some of the novel means by which injustice can be confronted without the use of violence. They have plenty of experience to draw on.

Some of these Hell's Grannies have been involved in the Trident Ploughshares campaign which, over the past fortnight, has been running rings round the marines guarding the nuclear submarines in Scotland. To the astonishment of the guards, the protesters there have managed to evade the tightest security in the United Kingdom, swimming into the docks in which the submarines are moored and spray-painting the words "useless" and "illegal" on their sides. They have launched canoes and home-made rafts into the paths of submarines trying to leave their berths. They have cut through the razor wire and roamed around the base, hoping to arrest its commander for crimes against humanity. A few days ago, they blocked the main gates of the nuclear warhead depot, their arms embedded in barrels of concrete, bringing work to a halt as the police tried to figure out how to extract them.

Two years ago, three of these women climbed into the Trident programme's floating research laboratory on Loch Goil and, as a delightful new video commissioned by the Quakers shows, threw all its computers into the sea. In Greenock court, they were acquitted of criminal damage, after the sherriff accepted their defence that the Trident programme infringes international law: rather than committing a crime, they were preventing one. Soon afterwards, the women "borrowed" a police boat from the Trident base in Coulport and drove it into the submarine docks at Faslane. Among them was one of the women who were also found not guilty in 1996 after smashing up a Hawk aircraft bound for East Timor. The subsequent publicity forced the government to stop exporting Hawks to Indonesia.

Though they're acquitted as often as they're convicted, Hell's Grannies have spent much of the past few years in jail. They take full responsibility for their actions. If the police fail to spot them, they ring them up and ask to be arrested. Their candour, clarity and humour have played well in court, but the risks of this accountable campaigning are enormous. The prosecution began yesterday of 17 British and American Greenpeace activists, who are being tried on terrorism charges after peacefully occupying the Californian launch pad being used for George Bush's missile defence tests. In the Middle East such tactics are likely to be still more dangerous, as Israeli soldiers have shown no hesitation in killing protesters in cold blood. But, as Gandhi recognised, the brutal treatment of non-violent campaigners can destroy the moral authority of the oppressor, generating inexorable pressure for change.

The Women in Black are clearly prepared not only to die for their cause, but also to make what Dostoevesky correctly identified as a far greater sacrifice: to live for their cause. They are ready to lose their homes, their comforts, their liberty, to be vilified, beaten up and imprisoned. Their accountable actions require a far greater courage than throwing bricks at the police.

Most importantly perhaps, these campaigners never cease to acknowledge the humanity of their opponents. They seek not to threaten but to persuade. The results can be astonishing. The MoD police who pulled the Trident swimmers out of the water ferried them back to their camp, rather than arresting them, while massaging their legs to stop cramp. When Angie Zelter, one of the co-ordinators of Women in Black, was on remand for her attempts to demolish the British military machine, she was visited in prison by a timber merchant whose business she had once tried to shut down. He had, as a result of her campaign, stopped importing mahogany stolen from indigenous reserves in Brazil, and started refashioning his business along ethical lines, and now he needed her advice.

All this is a long-winded way of saying something which, in the 21st Century, sounds rather embarrassing: these people are my heroes. They confront us with our own cowardice, our failure to match our convictions with action. We talk about it, they do it. Hell's Grannies are walking through fire. If they can, why can't we all?

Around 400 of George Monbiot's essays and articles are now online at

http://www.monbiot.com

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Character Assassination - Why and How it Works - Buzzflash, 7/9/01

July 9 -- How does the right wing carry out its "team" efforts at discrediting Democrats? How does it do it in such an unrelenting fashion?

For one thing, American Prospect.org and SpinSanity.com both recently ran articles on how the sound bites and language that the right uses in character assassination efforts are strikingly similar. They documented, in particular, how the Grand Hypocrisy Party (GHP) politicians and media shills were clearly reading from the same slander and smear play book in their attacks on Tom Daschle. (see

http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2001/07/mooney-c-07-07.html)

Of course, the most basic way that the GHP accomplishes this is by having one or two of their lead attack dogs start the jackals baying by appearing on a Sunday morning talk show to issue the latest call to dirty up a Democrat.

The latest example is the July 8th appearance of Joseph diGenova on FOX News Sunday. DiGenova is one of those right wing pundits with a pedigree. As former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, he's got a resume with some heft. But don't let that fool you. For years, he has carried the water for the right wing of the GHP, whenever they needed a "legal expert" to buttress their case. DiGenova was a shameless supporter of impeachment, who pursued Clinton in the media with a legalese zeal that made Ken Starr look like milquetoast.

Now, DiGenova has been unleashed to attack Congressman Gary Condit, the moderate California Democrat who has been at the center of the media circus surrounding the mysterious disappearance of Chandra Levy. On FOX, diGenova, according to a Reuters article: "said he was ``absolutely stunned'' that city police had not searched Condit's apartment.

``I cannot believe that that was not one of the first things that police did not ask him to do, especially in light of the fact that the congressman obviously lied to them in the first two interviews, and it wasn't until the third interview that he finally told the truth and admitted that he had a relationship with this missing person,'' diGenova said.

``He withheld that information from the police over a number of weeks. It's absolutely outrageous. It is indefensible,'' diGenova said. ``...He should be a suspect, under all the facts and circumstances,'' he added."

(see http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010708/ts/life_intern_dc_14.html)

Not to be outdone, Dick Thornburgh, right wing legal gopher for Grand Hypocrisy Party presidents and a former Attorney General, told CNN's ``Late Edition'' that "Condit had ``not been completely forthcoming'' until the third interview and said the delay likely damaged the investigation. ``That's two months later, all that time has been lost,'' said Thornburgh, who led the Justice Department (news - web sites) during the first Bush administration." (See Reuters article.)

By the way, did either of these guys have access to the police interviews with Congressman Condit? BuzzFlash doubts it. Maybe they should have read the AOL news headlines, which Sunday night featured this news teaser: "Police: Rep. Condit Not a Suspect. The California Congressman has been cleared of any wrongdoing in the disappearance of a D.C. intern." But the truth wouldn't have served the purposes of the Grand Hypocrisy Party discrediting campaign.

So here's the formula: Put a couple of the Grand Hypocrisy Party legal shills on two pro-Republican networks (one of which is just this side of the John Birch Society in its outlook, BuzzFlash is talking about FOX news here, run by GOP political operative Roger Ailes) and start priming the pump for a full-fledged right wing media and political assault on the chosen target. You can be sure that this week will see a torrent of abuse tossed Congressman Condit's way from Rush, Snow, Hannity and the rest of the "What Was So Bad About Mussolini?" crew of barking and braying jackals. You will hear the theme repeated that Representative Condit "imperiled" the investigation. You will hear the same slew of lascivious sewer rot that they threw at Bill Clinton.

Of course, it is fittingly ironic to note that Newt Gingrich made an appearance on ABC News Sunday morning as a commentator on the same day that diGenova and Thornburgh were playing out their roles as right wing flame throwers. Some of our BuzzFlash readers will remember that Newt ferociously and sanctimoniously attacked Bill Clinton as an adulterer and wanton sexual predator during the impeachment era. He denounced Clinton for disgracing the White House by having "sex" with a woman much younger than the President.

Of course, as with most high-octane efforts at character assassination launched by the Grand Hypocrisy Party, Gingrich's charges proved to by whorishly hypocritical. You see, at the time that he was fulminating against Clinton's sexual peccadillo, Gingrich was having an adulteress affair with a Congressional staffer more than 20 years his junior. That's right, he was engaging in a long-term sexual relationship with a young Hill staffer, while married to his second wife, at the time he was searingly attacking Clinton for moral depravity. You got to say this for Newt though; he made his Lolita an honest woman. He divorced his second wife, after resigning from Congress, to make the congressional staffer, young enough to be his daughter, the third Mrs. Gingrich.

Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary are still married and have raised a wonderful, brilliant, well-adjusted daughter. That's probably what most irks the Grand Hypocrisy Party.

Which all goes to show you, when the Grand Hypocrisy Party controls much of the media, they pretty much can get away with whatever they want. In this Orwellian world, Democrats are always evil, and Republicans can do no wrong. And the Democrats don't, for the most part, even know what is hitting them. Because Democrats find character assassination so distasteful, they don't even know how to respond to it. Many of them just cross their fingers and hope that it will go away.

But it won't. You can't expect a pit bull terrier to become a golden retriever without transplanting some genes.

And, in the meantime, the discrediting charges stick in the mind of the American public. And the damage to the image of the Democrats is much more serious than the Democratic Washington leadership understands.

The Republicans haven't been able to win on the issues in years. When Papa Bush gave Lee Atwater free rein to sick Willie Horton on Michael Dukakis, the tone was set for the Grand Hypocrisy Party to wage a permanent campaign of discrediting their opposition. It's no coincidence that the guy who rode shot gun with Lee Atwater in the '88 campaign was one George W. Bush.

Until the Democrats start fighting back, they are going to spend a long, long time on the defensive, because they don't have the temperament to counterattack the Grand Hypocrisy Party character assassination bullies and their media allies.

But a charge unanswered, as Al Gore discovered when he was slandered with the image of lying by the Karl Rove discrediting operation, is a charge that sticks.

Reported in HTTP://www.buzzflash.com for the latest news and commentary.

The Invisible Wall

Thanks for posting the information on the recent G-8 summit demonstrations in Genoa, Italy on July 20-22. It's now August 13, and the import of what happened there is still sinking in.

Living in the US these days is like being trapped behind an invisible wall that separates America from the rest of the world. This wall is like a two-way mirror. The rest of the world can see in but we can't see out. They can hear us, but we can't hear them.

They see an International Monetary Fund (IMF) made up of 183 countries - but only 5 of these countries make the decisions - US, Japan, Germany, France and Great Britain. What kind of decisions does the IMF make? Eduardo Galeano, a Uraguayan journalist, says "the IMF - which dictates orders to the entire world deciding on everything from the fate of humans, the height of clouds, to the itineraries of flies…"

They see The World Bank where 7 of the 183 countries make the decisions - US, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Canada. The World Bank is like a global loan shark or a colonial plantation boss. It helps developing countries help the masters.

They see the United Nations, where the US, Great Britain, France, Russia, and China call the shots through their veto power. The rest of the world can only make recommendations.

They see the clandestine World Trade Organization (WTO) - "which sacrifices hundreds of millions of small farmers throughout the world to the altar of free trade." All countries have an equal vote in this organization and a majority vote is possible, but it has never been used. "WTO policy is made by 'consensus' behind closed doors, after the strong nations have bullied the weaker ones into submission."

The WTO used to be secret but thanks to the action of the Seattle protests in 1999 the cover was blown and the word was out. However the Establishment was very effective in casting the Seattle protesters as deviants and enemies of progress. Same thing for the 100,000 demonstrators in Washington, Prague, Davos, and Quebec City…

Apparently discrediting the protesters wasn't working because in Genoa the Establishment raised the ante and showed their more sinister face. They showed all the world what most of the world already knew and had been protesting long before Seattle.

A taste of the ruthlessness of state power was unleashed so the rest of would know better than to try and go against their wishes. The following week there were 250,000 people demonstrating throughout the world community. There were some demonstrations in the US as well.

Word of the severity of the attack on the protesters just barely made it over the invisible wall. It was about a week before it got around the US press. By then countries around the world were already filing official protests in outrage about how their citizens were cruelly beaten, imprisoned, and denied contact with their embassies. French President Chirac, attending the conference we are told, suggested that when 150,000 people are demonstrating in the streets perhaps the G-8 members should listen.

Quick to plug any leak in the wall, (P)resident Bush said that the demonstrators weren't helping poor people. He dismissed the whole affair the way he does everything else that he doesn't care about.

And so it goes in this summer of 2001, a fresh start for a new millenium. The seeds for the next 1000 years are being planted - the future is now…

(Portions of the above are freely adapted from Galeano's article "The Rule of the Few" in the August Progressive, which unfortunately does not have this story on line) … Quixote, 8/13/01

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Missile defense test faked . . . again By Al Martin

August 3, 2001—The most recently revealed Department of Defense fraud was a "test" in which a missile was allegedly destroyed by another missile over the Pacific.

A July 13 release by the Department of Defense claimed that this so-called ABM test has been declared a success.

The videotape, released to the media and shown on CNN and other networks, however, looks
suspiciously similar to the admittedly dummied-up September 1985 Department of Defense videotape showing another supposedly successful interception of a ballistic missile under the former ASAT Program, the Anti-Satellite Ballistic Missile Program.

As a matter of fact, the videotapes are exactly the same.

How do I know? Not only do I remember it, but I have a hard copy printout. Having just compared it to the tape seen on CNN, it looks exactly the same. The only thing that's changed is the video-date readout at the bottom

This latest "successful test" is another low-cost deception from the US Department of Defense.

I really don't blame them, though. They spent a lot of money dummying up the first test. It was later estimated by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) that the Department of Defense spent $43 million to dummy up this test. It actually costs a lot of money to do it the right way.

This latest fraud, though, is a very cost-effective deception.

You could call it Star War Fraud Redux.

Now it's packaged up under new ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) expenditures, but it was exactly the same tape they had shown before in 1985—a test which the Department of Defense later admitted was dummied up in an effort to continue congressional appropriations for Star Wars expenditures.

In that time frame (at the end of 1985), the Democrats in Congress were starting to get suspicious of the enormous Star Wars spending. This Star Wars spending peaked in 1986, and then it was sharply ratcheted down.

To put it in historical context, the GAO Report of 1988 stated that of the $531 billion spent by the Department of Defense from 1982 to 1988 under the guise of developing Star Wars projects, over 50 % of the money could not be accounted for.

In 1989, FARCO (Foreign Asset Recovery Control Office) revealed that during the peak years of expenditures on Star Wars programs (1985–1986), there was an enormous increase in the opening of offshore accounts by senior Reagan-Bush officials, including senior military officers and others closely connected to the Reagan Bush Regime, particularly in the defense industry.

That's one of the mandates of FARCO–to maintain an account of the flow of US monies as to foreign deposits.

According to a syndicated Newhouse report, current Department of Defense fraud is even worse than anyone can imagine.

"For fiscal year 1999, the Pentagon Inspector General reported $2.3 trillion worth of untraceable accounting entries."

"For fiscal year 2000, auditors or the Pentagon's inspector General's Office found $1.1 trillion in bookkeeping entries that could not be tracked or justified," (http://www.newhouse.com/archive/story1a061301.html

This was barely a minor blip in the news.

Originally, in the 1980s, it was the late Senator John Tower who was going to blow the whistle on the Star Wars Defense Fraud. He had planned to do so, and in fact he had documents regarding massive Department of Defense fraud involving the Star Wars program. He was carrying it in his high-security metal briefcase—when his plane crashed.

The FAA still lists this as a "suspicious plane crash." It happened outside of Brunswick, Georgia. It should also be noted that the briefcase was never recovered after the crash The NTSB stated that they could not find the briefcase. This is the Famous Briefcase Incident [See Chapter 9 of "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider" by Al Martin]

Peggy Tower, his daughter, complained about it and asked about the briefcase's whereabouts, after she was informed by famed congressional investigator Tom Strzemienski.

Then an investigator for Charlie Rose, Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, Strzemienski was collaterally investigating the incident of the so-called "C-130 Aircraft Diversion" from the US Forestry Service. He was trying to solve the problem—why were all these C-130s from the forestry department suddenly winding up in Libya?

He mentioned to Peggy the type of documents her father was carrying.

Subsequent to this event, in 1989, the Department of Defense did in fact return Senator Tower's battered briefcase to Peggy. It was still locked, by the way. When she had it opened, there were no documents inside.

This was the incident when the FAA inspectors showed up at the airport in Brunswick, Georgia. Later it was revealed that the men were not from the FAA, but were in fact from the Department of Defense. They were simply bearing FAA inspectors' identification badges.

Today the new ABM program is nothing more than a continuation of the old fraud of the Star Wars program.

The Al Martin Raw website predicts, as Senator Robert Byrd has already intimated, that five years from now, it will be discovered that fresh hundreds-of-billions of dollars in defense expenditures on the ABM program are again unaccounted for—disappearing into shadowy Republican-connected offshore accounts and institutions.

The ongoing frauds are so rampant and egregious that even the so-called "watchdog" of the Department of Defense, the Inspector General of the Pentagon, has been publicly caught red-handed.

"Defense Department's inspector general's office is now under investigation for allegedly recreating financial records for an audit shortly before the documents were reviewed by an outside auditor," writes Judy Malone in a Cox News story.

The Pentagon even works overtime on fraud. "As described by an internal Pentagon report, the apparent fabrication required a dozen staffers to work long hours including overtime at a personnel cost of $63,000." (See "Who shall inspect the inspectors general?)

Remember, it costs a lot to commit serious fraud. But the returns are worth it according to Pentagon insiders.

The US Department of Defense should be actually commended for recycling the old Star Wars Fraud video as their latest "successful" ABM missile defense test.

After all, a really good fraud deserves a double take . . .

AL MARTIN is America's foremost whistle-blower on government fraud and corruption. He's a retired US Navy Lt. Commander and former officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, and he has testified before Congress, the Kerry Committee and the Alexander Committee, regarding Iran-Contra. Al Martin is also the author of "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider" (2001, National Liberty Press, $19.95; toll-free order line: 1–866–317–1390) He lives at an undisclosed location, since the criminals named in his book have been returned to national power and prominence. His column "Behind the Scenes in the Beltway" is published regularly on Al Martin Raw: Criminal Government Conspiracy. from onlinejournal 8/6/01

REP. KUCINICH INTRODUCES BILL TO CREATE DEPARTMENT OF PEACE - JOHN HAGELIN

Dear Friend,

Today we have a remarkable opportunity to fulfill one of the Natural Law Party's most cherished goals: the creation of a more secure foundation for national and global peace. But we need you to act immediately.

On July 11, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives to create a Department of Peace--a cabinet-level agency dedicated to peacemaking and the study of conditions conducive to both domestic and international peace.

The Department of Peace would focus on nonmilitary peaceful conflict resolutions, prevent violence, and promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights. A Peace Academy, similar to the five military service academies, would be created, its graduates dispatched to troubled areas around the globe to promote nonviolent dispute resolutions.

Since the Natural Law Party's inception in 1992, we have advocated the use of proven, peace-promoting technologies to help neutralize international tensions and conflict and to promote stability and harmony within the family of nations. Similarly, we have advocated the creation of a "prevention wing" in the military--a true peacekeeping force trained to diffuse regional tensions among warring factions, using proven nonviolent methods of conflict resolution, and to preserve and strengthen national and international peace.

Rep. Kucinich's bill (H.R. 2459), which already has 38 congressional cosponsors, opens the door for the realization of these long-standing Natural Law Party goals.

Rep. Kucinich strongly supports the Natural Law Party platform, and consequently he received the Party's enthusiastic endorsement during his 2000 campaign. He has also sponsored two bills on genetically engineered foods, one for labeling and one for testing. During the past two years, he has been in close touch with me, both before and during my 2000 presidential campaign; with Zanna Feitler, former state chair of NLP-Ohio and 1998 NLP gubernatorial candidate; and with Laura Ticciati, executive director of Mothers for Natural Law. The wording of both his peace legislation and his GE legislation reflects these ongoing conversations.

As he introduced H.R. 2459, Rep. Kucinich commented, "The time for peace is now. Peace is not only the absence of violence, but the presence of a higher evolution of human awareness with respect, trust and integrity toward humankind."

PLEASE HELP ENSURE PASSAGE OF H.R. 2459 SO THAT PEACE CAN BECOME A REALITY IN OUR TIME. PLEASE ACT TODAY!

With all best wishes,

John Hagelin, Ph.D. 2000 Presidential candidate, Natural Law Party

ACTION STEPS

Please contact your Representative immediately and strongly encourage him or her to support H.R. 2459.

Just call the national Capitol switchboard at 1-202-225-3121 and ask to speak to your Representative. You can also email your Representative directly from

http://www.house.gov/writerep

If your Representative is a cosponsor of H.R. 2459 (see list below), please contact him or her to offer your thanks and support for this decision. We also urge you to send your congratulations and support to Rep. Kucinich at

http://www.house.gov/kucinich/action/peace.htm

(just scroll to the bottom of the page). You can also find out more about the Department of Peace at this site.

Although the Senate version of H.R. 2459 has not yet been introduced, you may also contact your Senators and urge them to become familiar with and support this legislation. To obtain email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers for your Senators, just go to

http://www.senate.gov/senators/senator_by_state.cfm

to link to your Senators' websites.

A summary of H.R. 2459 is given below. For the full text of the bill, please visit

http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c107query.html#billno

and type in H.R. 2459 under Search Bill Text #2, Bill Number.

SUMMARY of H.R. 2459

o Establishes a Department of Peace, which shall be headed by a Secretary of Peace appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate. Sets forth the mission of the Department, including to: (1) hold peace as an organizing principle; (2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and (3) develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict.

o Establishes in the Department the Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Peace, which shall provide assistance and make recommendations to the Secretary and the President concerning intergovernmental policies relating to peace and nonviolent conflict resolution.

o Transfers to the Department the functions, assets, and personnel of various Federal agencies.

o Establishes a Federal Interagency Committee on Peace.

o Establishes Peace Day. Urges all citizens to observe and celebrate the blessings of peace and endeavor to create peace on such day.

COSPONSORS OF H.R. 2459 (ALPHABETICALLY BY STATE)

Rep. Farr, Sam (D-CA) Rep. Filner, Bob (D-CA) Rep. Honda, Michael M. (D-CA) Rep. Lee, Barbara (D-CA) Rep. Solis, Hilda L. (D-CA) Rep. Stark, Fortney Pete (D-CA) Rep. Waters, Maxine (D-CA) Rep. Watson, Diane E. (D-CA) Rep. Woolsey, Lynn C. (D-CA) Rep. Udall, Mark (D-CO) Rep. Lewis, John (D-GA) Rep. McKinney, Cynthia A. (D-GA) Rep. Davis, Danny K. (D-IL) Rep. Evans, Lane (D-IL) Rep. Gutierrez, Luis V. (D-IL) Rep. Jackson, Jesse L., Jr. (D-IL) Rep. Schakowsky, Janice D. (D-IL) Rep. Carson, Julia (D-IN) Rep. McGovern, James P. (D-MA) Rep. Conyers, John, Jr. (D-MI) Rep. Clay, Wm. Lacy (D-MO) Rep. Holt, Rush D. (D-NJ) Rep. Payne, Donald M. (D-NJ) Rep. Hinchey, Maurice D. (D-NY) Rep. Maloney, Carolyn B. (D-NY) Rep. Nadler, Jerrold (D-NY) Rep. Owens, Major R. (D-NY) Rep. Serrano, Jose E. (D-NY) Rep. Towns, Edolphus (D-NY) Rep. Velazquez, Nydia M. (D-NY) Rep. Brown, Sherrod (D-OH) Rep. Jones, Stephanie Tubbs (D-OH) Rep. DeFazio, Peter A. (D-OR) Rep. Jackson-Lee, Sheila (D-TX) Rep. Scott, Robert C. (D-VA) Rep. Sanders, Bernard (I-VT) Rep. Baird, Brian (D-WA) Rep. Rahall, Nick J., II (D-WV)

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