Prevaricator President Backed by Weirdo Zealots & Zionists

The weird men behind George W Bush's war
Michael Lind
Published 07 April 2003
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Imagine a new British invasion of Egypt orchestrated by the followers of Ian Paisley, and you will have some idea of what is happening in Washington. Michael Lind dissects a neoconservative coup
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.


...The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

...

The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con "in-and-outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists....


The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist". While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
...
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "Gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement....

...
So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the US into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the US and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaeda attacks, any US president would likely have gone to war to topple Bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the US has done since then would have been different had America's 18th-century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of Reverend Ian Paisley, extreme Eurosceptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types - all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.
Michael Lind, the Whitehead Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, is the author of Made in Texas: George W Bush and the southern takeover of American politics. The book is reviewed on page 52

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..... For over SIXTY years the US media have been complicit with corporate America in the largest cover-up in history. American corporations funded BOTH sides of WWII, indeed they sold Germany trucks, provided iron, and made weaponry ...even provided the gas that killed the millions of slave laborers (once they had been worked and tortured to death.)


Constitutional Crisis
Near Paul Revere Country, Anti-Bush Cries Get Louder -- Three of Massachusetts' 10 House members have called for the investigation and possible impeachment of President Bush.
The Case for Impeachment of George W. Bush (Harper's Magazine, 2/27)
Impeach or Indict Bush and Cheney (The Texas Observer, 1/27)
Impeach Bush Movements, Wikipedia source article
ImpeachPAC: Electing a Congress to Impeach Bush and Cheney - http://www.impeachpac.org/
The World Can't Wait
After Downing Street

...
While the US TV "news"media" provide us with an enslaught of gossip exploiting media-created victim Anna Nicole Smith, thousands are dying daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. While a criminal US congress and "president" complete the bilking of America, the Bush barbarians are once again, unchecked, unbalanced and unaccountable.

American Media - Silence of the Lambs

"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan," Isaacson wrote in October. "We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people."
With all of Washington competing to be more patriotic than the next, no media outlet wants to be too critical--and the Bush gang knows it. As top White House adviser Karl Rove told a meeting of the Republican National Committee, the war is good for the GOP's election hopes in November--not to mention Bush's approval ratings.


...
Yet the media still acted shocked when Bush, in his State of the Union address, ignored the Enron scandal and the recession--and instead hyped the administration's plans for extending the war on terrorism.
But then again, that had to be good news for the media bosses, too. After September 11, cable news outfits like CNN got a triple-digit boost in their ratings, and newsstand sales of Time and Newsweek jumped by almost 100 percent. The bottom line is that war is also good for the media business.


Americans are being brainwashed to ask only the questions the Bushites allow and they are programmed to see everything the Bush junta does as unquestionably correct. The brainwashing has gone so far that Americans no longer see what has happened to our country.


...
ROTHSCHILD: The mainstream media's role has been disgraceful. They're enlisting as the front men for the Pentagon. They're acting as cheerleaders. They're flag wavers and flag wearers, and they're limiting the information that the American people are getting.
They intentionally didn't record the full extent of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Walter Isaacson, the head of CNN, admitted as much in a memo to his staff.
And I saw it go up on CNN one day--in a report from one of their reporters in Afghanistan, who talked about some of the civilian casualties. And at the bottom was an editor's note, saying essentially that these casualties should be kept in the context of the many more casualties that happened on September 11.


Goodman: How many Americans know,

September 11 is also a significant day in Chilean history. It's the day President Salvador Allende died in the midst of the rise of the Pinochet regime, fully supported by the United States. At the time, it was President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, responsible for thousands of Chilean dead.
Look at Vietnam: 2 million. Look at Indonesia: up to 1 million. And then you look at East Timor, where one-third of the population was killed in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Who gave the go-ahead? That was Henry Kissinger and President Ford.
These are acts of state terror, and people have to be held responsible for them. Just as Milosevic is being tried right now in The Hague, there should be an international court for the likes of Henry Kissinger.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/Media_Lapdogs.html

more,
BARSAMIAN: What the media do nationally is to imperceptibly create an amnesiac-like feeling. There's no context for actions, there's no background, there's no history. Things just happen.
The whole sordid history of U.S. support for the mujahideen, for Osama bin Laden, for the Taliban--these are all bundled together, as George Orwell would say, as inconvenient facts, and they're dropped down the memory hole at the Ministry of Truth, to be forever lost.
EVEN BY the standards of the media in past wars, though, they seem to be especially spineless right now.

We Lost WWII to American Nazi Corporations

How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany throughout World War II

UK Charles Higham Eleanor Jones Florian Ritzmann North America Western Europe Cable & Wireless Chase Bank Coca-Cola fascism Ford General Motors Germany I.G. Farben ITT Morgan Bank RCA Rockefeller Standard Oil World War II

The following excerpts thoroughly document how capitalists really acted during the Second World War. Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class to slaughter each other in the interests of competing national interests, international capital quietly kept the commodity circuits flowing and profits growing across all borders.

We begin with some excerpts from "Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949" by Charles Higham; Hale, London, 1983.

This is followed by "The Coca Cola Company under the Nazis" by Eleanor Jones and Florian Ritzmann; From the "Coca Cola Goes to War" website; http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CLASS/coke/coke.html

http://libcom.org/library/allied-multinationals-supply-nazi-germany-world-war-2

From the "Trading With the Enemy" cover blurb;
"Here is the extraordinary true story of the American businessmen and government officials who dealt with the Nazis for profit or through conviction throughout the Second World War: Ford. Standard Oil, Chase Bank and members of the State Department were among those who shared in the spoils. Meticulously documented and dispassionately told, this is an alarming story. At its centre is 'The Fraternity', an influential international group associated with the Rockefeller or Morgan banks and linked by the ideology of Business as Usual.
Higham starts with an account of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland - a Nazi-controlled bank presided over by an American, Thomas H. McKittrick, even in 1944. While Americans were dying in the war, McKittrick sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British and American executive staff to discuss the gold bars that had been sent to the Bank earlier that year by the Nazi government for use by its leaders after the war. This was gold that had been looted from the banks of Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia or melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, and wedding rings of millions of murdered Jews.
...
But that is only one of the cases detailed in this book. We have Standard Oil shipping enemy fuel through Switzerland for the Nazi occupation forces in France; Ford trucks transporting German troops; I.T.T. helping supply the rocket bombs that marauded much of London ; and I.T.T. building the Focke-Wulfs that dropped those bombs. Long and shocking is the list of diplomats and businessmen alike who had their own ways of profiting from the war."

Preface to the book TRADING WITH THE ENEMY: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham; Hale, London, 1983.
Preface
It would be comforting to believe that the financial Establishment of the United States and the leaders of American industry were united in a common purpose following the Day of Infamy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Certainly, the American public was assured that Big Business along with all of the officials of government ceased from the moment the war began to have any dealings whatsoever with the enemy. That assurance sustained the morale of millions of Americans who bore arms in World War II and their kinfolk who stayed at home and suffered the anguish of separation.
But the heartbreaking truth is that a number of financial and industrial figures of World War II and several members of the government served the cause of money before the cause of patriotism. While aiding the United States' war effort, they also aided Nazi Germany's.
...
It thus came as a severe shock to learn that several of the greatest American corporate leaders were in league with Nazi corporations before and after Pearl Harbor, including I.G. Farben, the colossal Nazi industrial trust that created Auschwitz. Those leaders interlocked through an association I have dubbed The Fraternity. Each of these business leaders was entangled with the others through interlocking directorates or financial sources. All were represented internationally by the National City Bank or by the Chase National Bank and by the Nazi attorneys Gerhardt Westrick and Dr. Heinrich Albert. All had connections to that crucial Nazi economist, Emil Puhl, of Hitler's Reichsbank and the Bank for International Settlements.
The tycoons were linked by an ideology: the ideology of Business as Usual. Bound by identical reactionary ideas, the members sought a common future in fascist domination, regardless of which world leader might further that ambition.
Several members not only sought a continuing alliance of interests for the duration of World War II but supported the idea of a negotiated peace with Germany that would bar any reorganization of Europe along liberal lines. It would leave as its residue a police state that would place The Fraternity in postwar possession of financial, industrial, and political autonomy. When it was clear that Germany was losing the war the businessmen became notably more "loyal." Then, when war was over, the survivors pushed into Germany, protected their assets, restored Nazi friends to high office, helped provoke the Cold War, and insured the permanent future of The Fraternity.
...
While corporate owned, highly censored mainstream media beat the drums of war, playing a video showing "Iran's interference in Iraq where they are, gasp, "killing AMERICAN soldiers."
I recall Hitler dressing up some poor Polish people they had captured, tortured then dressed in Polish army uniforms and placed their bodies on the German side of the border, claiming the Poles had invaded Germany - Hitler then marched into Poland.

We have watched American pre-emptive war(s) and genocide for decades, and generations...the American involvement, conscience and responsibility unexamined, unprosecuted and therefore repeated, blindly again and again.

The real shock and awe will be if America can wake up and come to terms with the actions of the fascist corporate psychopaths who have promoted slavery, genocide and murder throughout the world. Every American oil company in Darfur involved in stealing land from indigenous people, every auto company and armaments company who arm both sides of every war, is oppressing us as surely as they are the rest of the world. Every pharmaceutical company that uses South Africa and the gay community as its concentration camp for drug testing.

Millions of black people have been driven out of New Orleans and death squads now roam the streets like El Salvador and everywhere else the USA is. or has been involved.

During WWII the Russians liberated Nazi death camps, the Canadians liberated Nazi death camps....the Americans showed up late for WII after arming both sides. THAT IS WHY THE USA IS HATED...no more - no less. The lies, the constant, unrelenting mockingbird of justice the mainstream media of the USA has become. The USA was practicing, sanctioned slavery while claiming to be a democracy for over two hundred years. Not much has changed, the slavery exported abroad has simply come home to roost - now to be foisted on the middle class of America.

The suits occupying the White House are criminal corporate thugs who answer to no one.
(Please correct me if I am wrong - what law, or legality governs their behavior?)
The mainstream media has protected the Bush crime family for over three decades, hiding the truth buried in the National Archives that shows Bush involvement in war from the Merchants of Death in WWI to today.

There is no habeas corpus in the USA - it is a police state run by corporations, who seized control illegally in a fraudulent election in 2001. You cannot spread abroad what you have never had at home. The press is not free - it is a paid off mouth piece for psychopathic corporations who justify everything one way - does it make money (?). Conscience, intellect,
integrity and character have no part in this psychopathic narcissism that is provided as justification for their actions.

We lost WWII. We lost it to Nazi corporations and individuals who were never prosecuted, yet they made it all possible in the first place. Isn't THAT the root of most of the evil in the world today - the unprosecuted behavior of US criminal corporations, and the "families" like the Bush's who have been an integral part of every war.

It looks incredibly bizarre for a country that has illegally, immorally and genocidally (shock and awe bombing in a country with no airforce to defend itself?) invaded and now occupies Iraq, to accuse Iran of "meddling" or "intefering". Interfering in what - trying to keep the USA away from THEIR borders.

What would we do in Canada if someone invaded the USA?

Memories of Molly

Ever since I was a little girl I loved the iconoclast, the rebel, the bad girl, the one who saw the inequity and nonsense and played it back to me with a style that left me wiping tears of laughter from my eyes one moment and gasping at the courage of the author the next.

Molly Ivins was such a woman...

The Nation - Washington Correspondent John Nichols (in the first of a series of remembering Molly) had this to say:

"The warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of calling the rabble to the battlements, Ivins understood that change came only when some citizen in some off-the-map town passed a petition, called a Congressman or cast an angry vote to throw the bums out. The nation's most widely syndicated progressive columnist, who died January 31 at age 62 after a long battle with what she referred to as a "scorching case of cancer," adored the activists she celebrated from the time in the late 1960s when she created her own "Movements for Social Change" beat at the old Minneapolis Tribune and started making heroes of "militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

"Troublemaker" might be a term of derision in the lexicon of some journalists--particularly the on-bended-knee White House press pack that Ivins studiously refused to run with--but to Molly it was a term of endearment. If anyone anywhere was picking a fight with the powerful, she was writing them up with the same passionate language she employed when her friend the great Texas liberal Billie Carr passed on in 2002. Ivins recalled Carr "was there for the workers and the unions, she was there for the African-Americans, she was there for the Hispanics, she was there for the women, she was there for the gays. And this wasn't all high-minded, oh, we-should-all-be-kinder-to-one-another. This was tough, down, gritty, political trench warfare; money against people. She bullied her way to the table of power, and then she used that place to get everybody else there, too. If you ain't ready to sweat, and you ain't smart enough to deal, you can't play in her league."

Molly Ivins could have played in the league of the big boys. They invited her in, giving her a bureau chief job with the New York Times--which she wrote her way out of when she referred to a "community chicken-killing festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck." Leaving the Times in 1982 was the best thing that ever happened to Molly. She settled back in her home state of Texas, where her friend Jim Hightower was about to get elected as agricultural commissioner and another friend named Ann Richards was striding toward the governorship. As a newspaper columnist for the old Dallas Times Herald--and, after that paper's demise, for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram--Molly began writing a political column drenched in the good humor and fighting spirit of that populist moment. It appealed beyond Texas, and within a decade she was writing for 400 papers nationwide


As it happened, the populist fires faded in Texas, and the state started spewing out the byproducts of an uglier political tradition--the oil-money plutocracy--in the form of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins's columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

...
Keeping a promise she'd made when her old friend and fellow Texan John Henry Faulk was on his deathbed, Molly accepted a steady schedule of invites to speak for local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in dozens of communities, from Toledo to Sarasota to Medford, Oregon. Though she could have commanded five figures, she took no speaker's fee. She just came and told the crowds to carry on for the Constitution. "I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being 'un-American,' but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years," she told them. "The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's."
She also told them, even when she was battling cancer and Karl Rove, that they should relish the lucky break of their consciences and their conflicts. Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say:

"So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070219/molly_ivins

Good night Molly Ivins, thanks for your time on the planet.

Mother Earth and Father Sky
From whence we come
then return to die,

Please hold Molly safe, and know for sure
a treasure she is
tested, true and pure.

Blessed Be.