The Holy Hustle - North America's Religious Right

Ralph Reed, pretty boy Floyd of the religious right, is now directly implicated with Jack Abramoff in the casino/ money laundering case prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago.





Stephen Harper, trying on the Bush costume in little USA wanta-be, Calgary.

Ralph Reed campaigned all over Western Canada for the current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. Stephen Harper has called the American religious right "a light and inspiration." The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) did not ask Mr. Harper ONE question pertaining to this connection.














A foremost member of the American religious right Tom Delay is indicted for money laundering. (The gerry mandering of Texas is not, apparently, criminal.)








Jack Abramoff the center of a huge scandal that could engulf completely the Bush adminstration. Gambling, murder, money laundering
and cheating the Indians.




Susie Bright's site is like a breath of fresh air as she asks the question:

"When Will Ralph Reed Take Out the Laundry?"

http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2006/02/in_bed_with_sus.html

Excerpt:

Thanks to the Abramhoff scandal revelations, we're getting an candid look at the dirt. Ralph Reed thinks it's a laugh-riot to get his "flock" to send donations to him to stop gambling. Then he takes all those dollars and pours them into the Indian casino of his choice. Whoopee! Gambling scams are a great way to fool people and make tons of money! I bet he'd launder a suitcase of meth and hooker's underwear if you'd like to load it in the back of the van.

It's time to stop "debating" these crooks as if they take a principled interest in their "positions." I don't believe they do, and this is the topic of my audio show this week:

In Bed radio show with Susie Bright #235: Looking for One Chaste Man.

The Phony-Phaithful don't care about abortion— they don't hesitate a moment to arrange for their mistresses and daughters to have one. They don't care about drugs— they enjoy them. They don't care who fucked who— but they'd like their followers to assume the position. Just show them the money, and they'll punch your ticket.

In their elite world, anything goes. The Abramoff exposé has shown one slice of sleaze. But I'm more interested in how the revelations have changed the social discourse between "right" and "left."

Where can you find me an honest neo-conservative? Are they in hiding? Are they dying of shame? Is there any one of them that actually believes in anything besides being a bagman?
Such an earnest diehard is likely a theoretical impossibility. The last true-blue John Bircher wandered off the deep end a long time ago. As a shame-faced conservative wrote in the NYT last week: Evangelicals in the United States have undermined the credibility of their moral and evangelistic witness in the world by pursuing political power.

I'll say! Honest, tolerant people don't run around trying to shame and stone others for their personal lives. This is why Jesus was so popular.

If you can't tolerate "certain people," on principle, you will rely on exclusion and discrimination. If you rely on the faith that you're better than anyone else because God and Money have chosen you, you'll never get any rest. Others must be humiliated and vanquished if they refuse to serve. Democracy becomes impossible, a villain.

If I was canvassing door-to-door today, I'd go pay sympathy calls to the households who sent money to Ralphie, Lou Sheldon, James Dobson, and all these other "perverts" (in the classic sense of the word!). These guys set up money-laundering operations with titles like "American," "Family," and "Values" attached to them, turning the very descriptions into vulgarities. I can't hear these group's names anymore without blushing. How many more dead bodies are under the prayer mat?

It goes from the violent and criminal to the awkward and ridiculous— very quickly:
Lisa Baron, the spokesperson for Ralph Reed, is popping up in print these days with the shockingly saucy— often downright ribald— weekly column she writes for The Sunday Paper, an alt-weekly aimed at Atlanta's young upscale types.


....Susie's site is a keeper ... Thanks for the light Susie.

911 Truthiness Fundamental to US Freedom

Stephen Colbert and the Colbert Report, one of the funniest political satires on television, has coined the phrase "truthiness" ...pointing to the need for truth in a sea of propaganda spewing largely from the White House and mainstream TV.


The Village Voice has this to say about the 911 TRUTH movement:


http://villagevoice.com/news/0608,murphy,72254,6.html

It's dark in the basement of St. Mark's Church and dark outside on a mid-December Sunday night, but inside they have seen the light. Among the 100 or so people in the room, many wear buttons that read "9/11 Was An Inside Job." Others grip the vital texts in their hands—Crossing the Rubicon, The New Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 Synthetic Terror. Most in the largely (but not exclusively) white and male crowd can quote you the important passages from "Rebuilding America's Defenses" or The 9/11 Commission Report. A few can guide you through the details of concepts like "peak oil" and pyroclastic flow. All of them suspect—and a few simply know—that their government was somehow complicit in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans four Septembers ago.

...
It is a matter of public record that the government did not always voluntarily tell the whole truth about 9-11. In the first days after the tragedy, the EPA said the air was safe (see "Truth Out," page 32). The Bush administration claimed there had been no warnings of the attacks. A congressional inquiry was prevented from discussing information the intelligence community provided to the White House. The White House resisted forming an independent commission, stalled on releasing documents, delayed in allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify in public, and agreed to let the president meet with the commission only on the conditions that there be no oath administered, no formal transcript made, and that Vice President Dick Cheney be at his side. Several members of the commission had to recuse themselves from parts of the probe because their government or private-sector careers posed conflicts. And in its final report, the commission punted on such questions as where the money for the attacks originated, dubbing that issue "of little practical significance."

...more at the link noted above.

One doubts that we will EVER know the truth, when congress is so criminal it refuses to put the likes of Alberto Gonzales under oath when testifying about extracting the USA from the Geneva Convention. Instead of rising to the level of statesmen and women we have instead a gang covering one another's criminal money trail.

The Politics of Treason

The "intelligence" representative of American religion, politics, and the justification used for constant wars.




A horrid excuse for an attorney, Alberto Gonzales wrote the Texas Clemency Memos (outlined in Harpers), wherein he did not even put forth the case FOR the defense - making a sentence of DEATH
a given in Texas under George W. Bush.

TODAY CNN announced that documentation had been found showing Saddam sentenced over 140 Shia to death. Gee ten less than the number sentenced to death in Texas under the Bush Crime Family and the attorney who pulled the USA out of the Geneva Convention.



Indeed, everyone in the WORLD (except the US media and Govt) seems to know who stood down for 911 then escorted over 300 Saudis from the country (classifying the documents when requested by congress).




http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.01A.wrp.treason.htm

Four years ago William River Pitt (like many of us) had already seen through the fog of deceit and published the article below:


The Politics of Treason

By William Rivers Pitt

T r u t h o u t Friday, 31 May, 2002

It would be funny if it were not so terribly sad.
Politics became entwined in our national conversation regarding the September 11th attacks before the fires in Manhattan were extinguished, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson chose to blame the attacks on gays, feminists and the ACLU. Politics became entwined in the attacks once the Bush administration chose to use our national shock as cover for ramming through ruinous tax and environmental policies.

Politics became entwined in the attacks when Attorney General Ashcroft sat in the well of the Senate and proclaimed that anyone who questioned the erasure of basic American freedoms in the name of security was aiding and abetting terrorism. More recently, politics became entwined in the attacks when a story emerged from the Toronto Globe and Mail. The story quoted a White House official's blunt statement that all the terrorism warnings America has recently received from the Bush administration were being used solely to deflect criticism.

Recent revelations have surfaced that the Bush administration had been specifically warned of 9/11-style attacks by a host of foreign intelligence services, and failed to properly address them. In order to get out from under any censure for failing to deal with these warnings, politics transmogrified into the use of fear to cow the populace.

On May 30th, politics came into the 9/11 issue from a totally unexpected direction.
Enter Larry Klayman, General Counsel for the conservative activist group Judicial Watch. Klayman has been on the scene for years, coming into prominence as one of the foremost anti-Clinton bombardiers on the Right. Best known for his preponderance of the theory that Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was assassinated, and that the plane crash that actually killed him was merely a coverup, Klayman spent a great deal of time spreading the story of the 'Clinton Body Count' - those unfortunate souls whacked by Bill because they got too close to his drug-running out of Arkansas airports, or because they asked too many questions about his sex life, etc. Klayman managed to sue the Clinton White House some 18 times before 1999.

On May 30th, Klayman emerged from the mists of anti-Clintonism and fired a stupendous broadside across the bow of the Bush administration and the FBI. Appearing before members of the press in a conference broadcast by C-SPAN, Klayman introduced an 11-year veteran FBI agent named Robert Wright. Judicial Watch has claimed Wright as a client, and intends to defend him against what Klayman describes as a serious campaign by the FBI and the Department of Justice to intimidate and destroy him.

Why?

According to Klayman, Wright has been sounding an alarm within the FBI for years about terrorist activities within the United States. Rather than heed Wright's warnings, the FBI has deflected and obstructed his efforts to curtail dangerous movements by agents of Hamas and Hezbollah. Wright's activities within the FBI were geared towards thwarting money-laundering activities by these agents, and he is claiming that his efforts were stymied because important government officials like Colin Powell have been coddling these pro-Palestinian groups to protect the reputation of Yasser Arafat. One can only assume the higher purpose of this coddling was to preserve tattered hopes for a negotiated settlement in the Mideast.

Klayman leaned across the podium at the press on Thursday and claimed that the FBI "did not do its job" regarding 9/11, that Wright had been trying since 1999 to get the FBI to clean house before disaster struck, and that his reward for doing so was threats of civil suits, loss of employment and criminal charges. Klayman juxtaposed this against the recent praise heaped upon Colleen Rowley, the Minnesota FBI agent whose whistleblowing memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller outlining all of the agency's failures to see 9/11 coming was lionized by the Director as he announced the dawn of a new improved FBI. Wright was threatened while Rowley is praised, said Klayman. The comparison was devastating.

The FBI bore the brunt of Klayman's lashing, but it was definitely not alone. The Bush administration was blasted as, "...an administration which, despite being elected on the basis of restoring national security, slept for nine months, and did virtually nothing to shore up the inadequacies of the FBI."

Klayman went on to describe the Bush administration as, "...an administration which comes forward yesterday to cover their backside after it becomes apparent that they hid information from the American people for nine months - material information as to how, in the new admission of FBI Director Robert Mueller, the 9/11 attacks could have possibly been prevented."

Klayman addressed Vice President Dick Cheney specifically, lambasting his recent claim that America is defenseless against future terrorism. According to Klayman and Wright, our defenselessness is based on nothing more or less than rank incompetence on the part of the FBI. That incompetence reaches into the highest offices of government and into the responsibility of men like Cheney and Bush, who should be doing more to change the inadequate capabilities of intelligence branches like the FBI.

"What have you, the Bush administration, been doing for the last nine months," railed Klayman, "that just now you're advising the American people that we don't have the defenses even after having lost 3,000 lives?"

Klayman yielded the podium moments later to the speakerphoned voice of David Schippers, another infamous anti-Clinton warrior standing forth for Robert Wright. Schippers recapitulated the threats levied against Wright by the FBI regarding his intended disclosure of intelligence failures, calling Wright "a great American." Before his voice was cut off, Schippers warned Wright, "Don't go into any specifics, any particulars about any case, even though you and I both know there is no case. But they claim there is, so we'll follow their guidelines - the same guidelines that put 3,000 people on the street, dead."

Wright stepped to the podium and presented himself as a vividly different breed of man than Klayman and Schippers. Dressed in somber tones and adorned with the severest of conservative hairstyles, Wright appeared to have come straight out of FBI central casting. He began by stating that he did not in any way stand as a representative of the Bureau - he was speaking freely here of his own views and opinions, and was not representing the FBI in any capacity.
Wright went on to describe his work with the FBI. For many years, he had worked in the Chicago office on counter-terrorism cases that focused on money-laundering efforts by terrorist cells operating within the United States. His work developed into an operation that was named 'Bulgar Betrayal,' which seemed on the verge of becoming officially designated as a major case because of its far reach and national security implications. Before he was finished, a Saudi businessman named Yasin Kadi became implicated in the terrorism funding. Wright was careful to note on Thursday that, one month after the 9/11 attacks, Kadi was named by the Federal government as a financial supporter of Osama bin Laden.

Yet Kadi's name was known to Wright well before 9/11, when the Bulgar Betrayal investigations were taking place. Did his work take root within the FBI? Did his superiors note the dangers implicit in the activities of the terrorists Wright had pinpointed? "FBI management," said Wright on Thursday, "intentionally and repeatedly thwarted my attempts to launch a more comprehensive investigation to identify and to neutralize terrorists."

Wright had to purchase computer software and hardware necessary for his investigations because the FBI failed to allocate the necessary funds to help his work. A week after 9/11, Wright attempted to deliver his concerns to several members of Congress so the glaring gaps in American national security could be addressed, but was threatened by the FBI and the Justice Department. In fact, he was told that he could not travel beyond Chicago without specific permission from the FBI.

Wright's frustration at the FBI's inaction regarding his warnings led him to write a 500 page manuscript detailing the Bureau's anti-terrorism failings entitled "Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission." Beyond describing the myriad ways the FBI and the government have failed to protect Americans from terrorism, the manuscript goes on to demand a thorough house-cleaning within the FBI. It seems clear after listening to Wright's press conference that the main reason why FBI Director Mueller has chosen to embrace whistleblowing agent Rowley while threatening agent Wright comes down to the existence of that manuscript.
Wright concluded his remarks on Thursday in dramatic and emotional fashion. "My efforts," he said, "have always been geared towards neutralizing the terrorist threats that focused on taking the lives of American citizens, in addition to harming the national and economic security of America. However, as a direct result of the incompetence, and at times intentional obstruction of justice by FBI management to prevent me from bringing terrorists to justice, Americans have unknowingly been exposed to potential terrorist attacks for years."

He went on to state, "Knowing what I know, I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are removed from the FBI, I will not feel safe."

At this point, Wright paused a long moment before continuing. "To the families and victims of September 11th," he finally said through choked voice, wiping a tear from his eye, "on behalf of John Vincent, Barry Carmody and myself...we're sorry." These last words were essentially sobbed into the microphone, and with that Wright fled the podium. It should be noted that the names he mentioned - Vincent and Carmody - were later described by Klayman as FBI agents preparing to come forward "with the truth" as Wright did.

What to make of all this? On one side stands Larry Klayman, clown-man extraordinaire who shattered his credibility years ago by spreading tales of Clinton death squads. On the other side stands FBI agent Robert Wright, shadowed by agents Vincent and Carmody. Anyone who watched the Wright press conference - available via link at JudicialWatch.org - could sense the man's earnestness. Perhaps he believed Klayman was the only vehicle he had to get his story out. Perhaps, after eight years of anti-Clinton jihad along the halls of the FBI, Klayman was the only lawyer he'd ever heard of.

The politics behind the fact that Klayman has begun attacking the Bush administration and its FBI head cannot be ignored. Klayman's name is gold among ultra-conservatives; if he has it in for Bush and the FBI, by-God, so will the grass rooters who still think Clinton had Vince Foster killed. The fact that such people make up a substantial portion of Bush political base spells trouble if Klayman's claims resonate. Never mind the left-wingers who have been waiting for this shoe to drop. Bush's foreknowledge of 9/11 has been gospel for months, and the fact that Klayman has helped confirm their suspicions only adds humor to a truly bleak scenario.
All of this falls under the broader political spectrum of these recent 9/11 revelations. Wright's claims of FBI malfeasance have become an accent in the symphony of accusation that include Rowley's assertions and dozens of terror warnings from foreign intelligence services such as the French Directorate of Territorial Security (DST). The DST was screaming at Rowley's Minnesota FBI office about Zacarias Moussaoui and terrorist plans to crash airplanes into important targets, but no one from Rowley's office could get FBI headquarters to pay attention to these warnings until it was too late.

What the FBI and the Justice Department will do with the information coming from these truth-telling agents, who squat above Ashcroft's door like the raven, remains to be seen in the long run. The immediate return upon this informational investment does not bode well. On the same day that Wright revealed his information, the FBI released a warning for everyone to be on the look-out for terrorists bearing shoulder-launched missile weapons. If that terror-warning dog gets wagged any harder, someone's going to get bit.

More ominously, Ashcroft announced on Thursday that the Justice Department plans to extend its Patriot Act mandate into the surveillance of churches and political groups. Congressman John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, blasted this move: "The Administration's continued defiance of constitutional safeguards seems to have no end in sight. This decision decimates the Fourth Amendment. The Justice Department is intent on another power grab when it has become clear that a lack of competence - not law enforcement authorities - prevented the Administration from connecting the dots before September 11. I call on the Bush Administration to immediately halt any efforts to unilaterally expand surveillance authority and to consult Congress before implementing further intrusions on our civil liberties."

Klayman, Schippers, Wright, Vincent, Carmody, Rowley, Conyers...it is getting awfully loud around here. Can the Bush administration and the FBI avoid the shouting? Have we crossed a line here, from freedom-hating terror attacks to willful negligence on the part of this government? Where will the politics of treason take us next?
-------

A Thousand Points of Light

Rock on First Baptist ...seeing the light


















Folks in Tulsa wakened to this gem in their daily news today !

Thanks for the light Tulsa - keep talking truth!









Patrick Fitzgerald, prosecutor trying Abramoff, who also exposed Ralph Reed (Christian Coalition) links to Abramoff and the mafia.

If Mr. Fitzgerald is successful in trying this treason, then he should be awarded the Medal of Freedom.

Thanks for the light Mr. Fitzgerald, it is heartening to see a glimmer of integrity in a sea of corruption.









Paid off Republican reporter, White House pimp and call boy, Jeff Gannon, the most under-reported scandal in the history of Washington. A gay hooker with carte blanche to the president, whose history goes all the way back to Bush I and Franklingate (the pedophile scandal during Bush I's reign).

Thanks to the bulldog bloggers who have NOT let this story die.



A thousand points of light...all speaking truthiness at once... an awesome concept - one could say - divine.

Truth to Treason

Four years ago William Rivers Pitt published in Truthout the details of a class action suit that cited George W. Bush as one of ten defendents.

WHY has mainstream media not covered this case?


All Along the Watchtower

By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t Opinion

Thursday, 20 June, 2002

Stanley Hilton, a San Francisco attorney and former aide to Senator Bob Dole, filed a $7 billion lawsuit in U.S. District Court on June 3rd. The class-action suit names ten defendants, among whom are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Norman Mineta.

Hilton's suit charges Bush and his administration with allowing the September 11th attacks to take place so as to reap political benefits from the catastrophe. Hilton alleges that Osama bin Laden is being used as a scapegoat by an administration that ignored pressing warnings of the attack and refused to round up suspected terrorists beforehand. Hilton alleges the ultimate motivation behind these acts was achieved when the Taliban were replaced by American military forces with a regime friendly to America and its oil interests in the region.
Hilton's plaintiffs in this case are the families of 14 victims of 9/11, numbering 400 people nationwide. These are the same families that rallied in Washington recently to advocate for an independent investigation into the attacks. The current 9/11 hearings are being conducted by Congress behind closed doors, a situation these families find unacceptable.

Mr. Hilton, by filing his lawsuit, has joined the ranks of an ever-increasing body of Americans who subscribe to what they call the LIHOP Theory. LIHOP stands for Let It Happen On Purpose. The LIHOP Theory puts forward the accusation that Bush and his people allowed the September 11th attacks to take place, despite the fact that they had been repeatedly warned of an impending strike.

The LIHOP Theory is straightforward: In the months before 9/11, American intelligence agencies received ominous warnings from the intelligence services of nations like Israel, Russia, Egypt and Germany. These warnings were pointed - an attack involving hijacked aircraft and prominent American landmarks was imminent, our security forces were told. Bush himself was briefed of these warnings weeks before they happened. Instead of responding vigorously to these warnings, the Bush administration and its security apparatus did nothing.
LIHOP is, of course, the purest breed of conspiracy theory, involving high-ranking members of government from both parties, as well as the CIA, FBI and NSA. Like all good conspiracy theories, LIHOP is surrounded by disturbing facts and bits of evidence that are difficult to ignore.

The warnings from all those foreign intelligence services, after all, are quite real. Egypt, Germany, Russia and the Israelis were vociferous in their concerns. The German intelligence service BND told US and Israeli intelligence that Middle East terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." The BND's information came through Echelon, the American-controlled network of 120 satellites that monitors all worldwide electronic communications.
Egypt voiced similar warnings that same month regarding aircraft attacks. Delivered just before the G-8 summit in Genoa, Egypt's alert carried such weight that anti-aircraft batteries were placed around Columbus Airport in Italy. The Russians warned the US that same summer of 25 pilots who had been trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself delivered the warning "in the strongest possible terms" to the US government. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad delivered a warning to both the FBI and the CIA detailing "a major assault on the United States" against "a large-scale target" that was "very vulnerable."

The Washington Post has reported that the NSA intercepted two messages on September 10, 2001, warning that something was going to happen the next day. "Tomorrow is zero hour," was one of the messages. The NSA's charter is to intercept, translate and pass on to FBI and CIA operatives important electronic signals from all across the globe. The Echelon satellite network which provided the German BND with their 9/11 information last June is part of that system.
According to the NSA, the September 10th data was not translated until September 12th, but it stands to reason that they were privy to the same electronic data the other foreign services were using as the basis for their warnings. One US intelligence source claims the data provided "no actionable intelligence," a fair claim given the vagueness of the messages and the volume of material NSA must deal with. Yet in combination with the strident foreign intelligence warnings, the words intercepted by our large electronic ears on September 10th add to the growing questions.

Then, there are the threads. A FEMA official told Dan Rather that the disaster agency had been at the World Trade Center on September 10th. Why? Governor Jeb Bush of Florida signed executive order #01-261 on September 7th, putting his state's National Guard on heightened alert status, essentially placing Florida under martial law for no demonstrable reason. Why? Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft in the weeks before 9/11, something he had commonly done since his entry into the administration. Why?
At the core of the LIHOP Theory lies motivation - what possible purpose could be served by the Bush administration allowing a terrorist attack to take place on American soil? It is flatly inconceivable to most Americans that Bush and his people could demonstrate such callous disregard for American lives, and accusations that they allowed an attack to happen reek of the worst kind of poisonous partisan politics.

LIHOP Theory, however, is not so easily dismissed. Two French intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, have published an extensively-researched book entitled "Osama bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth." In it, they allege that the Bush administration put energy policy before national security concerns. According to Brisard and Dasquie, a foundering pipeline project aimed at exploiting natural gas reserves along the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan was revived by the Bush administration when it arrived in Washington in January of 2001.
The pipeline project, which sought to bring oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a warm water port, had been the brainchild of American petroleum giant Unocal for much of the 1990s. After the destruction of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 by Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration forbade any American companies from doing business with the Taliban, which had been sheltering bin Laden in Afghanistan. Unocal's pipeline project was frozen.

After the Bush administration came to power, Brisard and Dasquie allege that reinvigorating the pipeline project became a high-priority matter of policy. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was dispatched to Pakistan to discuss the pipeline with Taliban officials in August of 2001. Rocca, a career officer with the CIA, had been deeply involved in Agency activities within Afghanistan. According to documents Brisard and Dasquie claim to hold, the main subject of their discussion was oil. A Pakistani foreign minister was also present at the meeting, and witnessed the exchange.

How does this pipeline relate to September 11th? According to Brisard and Dasquie, the main obstacle to the completion of the pipeline was the fact that it had to pass through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The project would receive no international support unless the Afghan government somehow became legitimized. In bargaining for the pipeline, the Bush administration demanded that the Taliban reinstate deposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah as ruler of Afghanistan, and demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden for arrest. In return, the Taliban would reap untold billions in profit from the pipeline. According to Brisard and Dasquie, part of the Bush administration's bargaining tactics involved threats of war if these conditions for the legitimization of Afghanistan were not met.

The BBC of London reported on September 18th, 2001 of the existence of war plans on Bush's desk aimed at Afghanistan. Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, stated that the war plans were slated for October of 2001. Conditions set by the Bush administration to avoid war involved the Taliban's handing over of bin Laden and the acceptance of King Zahir Shah. Naik went so far as to doubt that America would hold off on war even if these conditions were met.
The result, according to the French analysts, was total disaster. The Bush administration fundamentally misunderstood the Taliban regime - to bring back the King and hand bin Laden over to the West would have been tantamount to suicide for the Taliban. Instead of acquiescing to the hard-sell tactics of the Bush administration, the Taliban unleashed their pet attack dog, Osama, upon America. They were going to lose everything, and chose to attack first in the hope that all-out war would break out in Central Asia and rally other Muslim nations to their cause.
Motive suddenly becomes far more clear. The Bush administration very much wanted the Unocal pipeline to go through, and put intense pressure on the Taliban to see it happen. As this was happening, American intelligence services were flooded with warnings of an impending attack upon American targets by bin Laden and Al Qaida. The decision was made - let the attack come, and in the ensuing outrage American forces can carve out the guts of the Taliban government like a ripe gourd, replacing them with a 'legitimate' regime more receptive to the pipeline plan.

Did the Bush administration have an inkling of the massive death and destruction that would come on September 11th? Those who espouse the LIHOP Theory disagree on this point. Some believe that FEMAs presence at Ground Zero on the day before the attack, coupled with specific language within the international intelligence warnings pertaining to aircraft and high-profile targets, are prima facie evidence of specific prior knowledge. Others believe that the Bush administration only knew vaguely that an attack would come, but not where or when. They did not foresee the level of destruction, and were caught flat-footed when those planes appeared along the New York skyline.

In the end, LIHOP Theory can encompass either view. Whether they had specific knowledge beforehand, or merely decided to let some attack happen somewhere, the final results were the same. The Taliban were routed and replaced by an interim government headed by a man named Harmid Karzai. Karzai was recently elected President of Afghanistan in his own right, legitimizing the Afghanistan government. Soon after this, Karzai announced the impending construction of a pipeline that would exploit Turkmenistan's natural gas reserves He named Unocal as the lead company for the project. Before becoming President, Karzai was an advisor to Unocal.

For LIHOP Theorists, the evidence is clear. The Bush administration got the pipeline it wanted. Along the way, they used the horrors of 9/11 to place themselves above reproach. In the patriotic fervor that resulted from the attacks, both the press and the Democratic opposition were bracketed by the administration-espoused idea that any questions or criticism were tantamount to treason.

The passage of the PATRIOT Anti-Terror Act has given the US government sweeping abilities to snuff dissent by defining it as terrorism, thanks to the loosely-defined wording of the bill. Bush enjoyed stratospheric approval ratings that persist to this day, and American citizens were given new enemies to hate. The Defense Department, and the weapons contractors who cater to them, received billions from the federal budget to do with as they pleased in order to address the objects of that hate.

Even the most hardened political observer must admit the dismal truth - September 11th was the greatest thing ever to happen to the Bush administration. Attorney Stanley Hilton has brought LIHOP Theory into the federal court system with his class-action suit, and with the families of 9/11 victims he represents. It will be interesting to see what transpires when these two facts collide in an American courtroom. Given the current climate, it does not seem likely that much will come of it. After all, these conspiracy theorists are just a bunch of nuts.
Right?
-------
William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. His new book, 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence,' will be published soon by Pluto Press.
Print This Story E-mail This Story

Kow Towing to Treason

Ah...the little port sale to the Saudis.

I wonder if Bandar Bush helped broker the deal?

http://www.thedubyareport.com/bushbin.html

BBC reporter Gregory Palast: "I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to 'back off' investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I'm told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: 'There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no-one else ought to know.'" ....more at the link

Osama ...sunning himself at the Bush Ranch, while George explains the part of the Geneva convention to Saddam, that says you can illegally invade a country and slaughter the leader's sons, then photograph their bodies and expose them for the world to see on TV.

Dying for Dick

Indeed - wonderful at starting war and profiting ..

Showing up and being accountable.. forget about it...(as Tony Soprano would say)










The illegal, immoral GANG of thugs and dead enders running the USA into the ground and bilking what is left in the coffers.













Cheney CAN clearly say and do anything. He is completely above the law.

















a Cheney moment of empathy, likely read from script











Cheney's free pass from the US press core and the Supreme Court.

Treason. Abuse of Power. Money laundering.