Will American Empire End Before It Ends the World?

Kosovo and the Empire Crazies

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The hypocrisy of US government officials is boundless. On February 18, the US government inflamed Serbians by recognizing Muslim separatists in Kosovo, a historic province of Serbia, as an independent country. Two hundred thousand Serbs marched in protest and the US embassy in Belgrade was damaged. Is this surprising? No, not unless you are an official in the American Empire. The notorious Empire Neocon Counsel, Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's representative to the UN, declared: "I'm outraged by the mob attack."

What's an embassy building compared to a province of Serbia, a province that stirs nationalist sentiments associated with the Serbs' long military struggles with the Turks? Had it not been for the Serbs, Europeans would probably be Turks.

To neocon Khalilzad a province of Serbia is nothing. It is merely real estate to be given away by US recognition bestowed on a break-away movement led by what some consider to be a gang of Muslim drug runners.

Secretary of State Condi Rice also found the Serbian response to the US giving away part of their country to be "intolerable."

Former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke also sees no reason for the Serbs to be upset that America gave away part of their country. He explained away the Serbian protests by declaring: "The Russians are behind this."

We can understand why US diplomacy is a failure when we see our diplomats explaining that, had it not been for the Russians stirring them up, Serbians wouldn't have noticed the loss of a historic part of their country.

Perhaps Kosovo should have its independence. However, the US government could not have handled the issue in a more provocative way.

Washington has been interfering in Serbian internal affairs since the Clinton administration. Told that Americans had to prevent genocide, few paid enough attention to Washington's facilitation of the breakup of the Yugoslav state during the 1990s and to the Clinton administration's bombing and murder of Serbian civilians in order to support Muslim separatists in Kosovo in 1999. Clinton used NATO as cover, but the bombing campaign was not backed by the UN Security Council. Bombs fell on Serbia for 78 days, taking out public infrastructure, bridges, factories, power stations, petrochemical plants, telecommunications facilities, markets, refugees, the Chinese Embassy and a passenger train.

Cluster bombs and depleted uranium were used. Clearly, the US government and its NATO puppets were guilty of war crimes under the Nuremberg standard.
Americans were told by an obedient media that the bombings were necessary in order to prevent Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic, from committing war crimes against the separatists who were stealing part of his country. After Clinton's bombings intimidated the Serbian political establishment, Milosevic was turned out of office and handed over to the Americans for a payment of several hundred million dollars and delivered to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.

Milosevic represented himself at his trial and was more than a match for the trumped up charges. Unfortunately, he died in prison. Many believe he was helped on his way by an embarrassed American Empire unable to convict him.

What is the US government's secret agenda in the Balkans?

Why is the US government on the side of Muslims intent on severing Kosovo from Serbia?

What is being served by creating a new Muslim state closer to Europe?

Supposedly our time is the era of globalism and one worldism. Ancient European nationalities are dissolving into the European Union, a new super state. US corporations now have transnational interests devoid of any national loyalties.

Yet, the US is hard at work dissolving a small Balkan state into even smaller constituent parts. Why is this happening? Why did Bush order US puppets in Britain, France and Germany to instantly recognize the historic Serbian province as a new Muslim state?

Is the new state of Kosovo, as rumors would have it, Richard Perle's payoff to the Turks, or is the explanation that Serbia, like Palestine, Iraq, and Iran, lacking any international media reach, was easy for Empire Neocons to demonize in order to establish the precedent that Washington decides what territory belongs to who and who rules it. Clinton's bombing of Serbia was a precedent for Bush's bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq and now Africa and tomorrow Iran and Syria.

The day the Empire Crazies bomb Russia or China, we are all fried.

Be a macho super patriot, believe your government, help to fry the world. It's the American way.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Religion’s Purpose: Peace

by Rev. John Downing

Peace is religion’s purpose. In Jesus we purpose a way to peace.

The way we purpose is contrary to the way of the world for the world uses violence to achieve its ends, we purpose nonviolence and love.

What does the Bible teach us about how to live in peace?

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets” (Jesus in Matthew 7:12).

And from Rabbi Hillel, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

“The Golden Rule” a guide for Christians and Jews for millennia. But are only Christians and Jews given this truth, this guide to peaceful living?

“If good men were to administer the government for a hundred years, violence could be overcome and capital punishment dispensed with” (Confucius, 551-479 B.C.).

“The ruler imbued with the Tao will not use the force of arms to subdue other countries. In nature the softest overcomes the strongest. There is nothing in the world so weak as water. But nothing can surpass it in attacking the hard and strong; there is no way to alter it. Hence weakness overcomes strength, softness overcomes hardness” (Lao Tsu ca. 400 B.C.).

“For if every man were to regard the persons of others as his own person, who would inflict pain and injury on others? If they regarded the homes of others as their own homes, who would rob other’s homes? Thus in that case there would be no brigands or robbers. If the princes regarded other countries as their own, who would wage war on other countries? Thus in that case there would be no more war” (Mozi ca. 470-390 B.C.).

“Whoever kills a human being should be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind” (The Holy Qur’an Surah 5:32). “But if the enemy incline towards peace, do thou also incline towards peace and trust in Allah; for He is the One that heareth and knoweth all things” (8:61).

My knowledge of world religions is limited, but I see illustrated in the above quotes a central teaching in major faiths of a way to peace among people. Religion is the communal expression of our chosen faith. I believe that all religions’ overarching purpose is peace.

In the world many leaders have co-opted religion to achieve human purposes like power and greed. These people claim a faith and then use religion to cause division, war and hate.

Division, war and hate is not the will of the One God who created all people. I believe it is God’s will that all of God’s creation live at peace. The world is at war; what is happening in the world is contrary to the Creator’s will.

Christians call Jesus Christ, Lord and Master, and in so doing try to live our lives in accordance with all of Jesus’ teaching. When we do that, we receive the blessing of knowing God as Father.

Experiencing the wonderful blessing of God as Father carries with it the desire and responsibility of peacemaking. Gloriously, God the Father enables us by the Holy Spirit to live in love and make peace. Leaders in the Christian faith who teach otherwise, who promote and justify war and violence are wrong.

The purpose of religion is peace God made it so. The governments of the world cannot make enduring peace; the religions of the world can. It is time for religious leaders of all faiths to stand and lead the way to peace among peoples. Disciples of Jesus, let us call upon our religious leaders to gather with leaders of all faiths and talk peace.

Because of our faith and trust in God revealed in Christ we can confidently talk with, walk with, work with and love people of other religions who also seek peace.

Jesus the Christ impels me to call out to people of faith who seek peace, from every religion, let us gather, honor one another and talk of the way to peace. If we do not, violent people will continue to twist religion to serve selfish ends and be the cause of continuing suffering in the world.

A parting thought: In our country’s “new strategy” for the war effort against terrorism especially in regards to the volatile situation with Iran and Syria, we should remember an “old strategy” from Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” (ca. 544- 496 B.C.). Peace begins with talk.

Still In One Peace ~ pastor john http://www.stjohnspeace.com/

Iraqis: 'Surge' Is a Catastrophe

by Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail

BAGHDAD - What the US has been calling the success of a "surge," many Iraqis see as evidence of catastrophe. Where US forces point to peace and calm, local Iraqis find an eerie silence.

And when US forces speak of a reduction in violence, many Iraqis simply do not know what they are talking about.

Hundreds died in a series of explosions in Baghdad last month. This was despite the strongest ever security measures taken by the US military, riding the "surge" in security forces and their activities.

The death toll is high, according to the website icasualties.org, which provides reliable numbers of Iraqi civilian and security deaths.

In January this year 485 civilians were killed, according to the website. It says the number is based on news reports, and that "actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site."

The average month in 2005, before the "surge" was launched, saw 568 civilian deaths. In January 2006, the month before the "surge" began, 590 civilians died.

Many of the killings have taken place in the most well guarded areas of Baghdad. And they have continued this month.

"Two car bombs exploded in Jadriya, killing so many people, the day the American Secretary of Defense (Robert Gates) was visiting Baghdad last week," a captain from the Karrada district police in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.

"Another car bomb killed eight people and injured 20 Thursday (last week) in the Muraidy market of Sadr City, east of Baghdad, although the Mehdi army (the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr) provides strict protection to the city," the officer said. "There is no security in this country any more."

Unidentified bodies of Iraqis killed by militias continue to appear in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The Iraqi government has issued instructions to all security and health offices not to give out the body count to the media. Dozens of bodies are found every day across Baghdad, residents say. Morgue officials confirm this.

"We are not authorized to issue any numbers, but I can tell you that we are still receiving human bodies every day; the men have no identity on them," a doctor at the Baghdad morgue told IPS. "The bodies that have signs of torture are the Sunnis killed by Shi'ite militias; those with a bullet in the head are usually policemen, translators or contractors who worked for the Americans."

The "surge" of 30,000 additional troops came to Iraq, mostly Baghdad, in February of last year. The total current number of US troops in Iraq is approximately 157,000. They were sent to end violence, and with a declared aim of helping political reconciliation.

But where peace of sorts has descended in Baghdad, Iraq's capital city of six million (in a population of 25 million), it comes from a partitioning of people along sectarian lines. The Iraqi Red Crescent reports that one in four residents has been driven out of their homes by death squads, or by the "surge."

According to an Iraqi Red Crescent report titled "The Internally Displaced People in Iraq" released Jan. 27, 1,364,978 residents of Baghdad have been displaced.

The Environment News Service reported Jan. 7 that "many of the capital's once mixed areas have become either purely Sunni or Shi'ite after militias forced families out for belonging to the other religious branch of Islam."

Some of the eerie calm in areas of Baghdad comes because togetherness has ended. Sunnis and Shi'ites who lived together for generations are now partitioned. This is not the peace many Iraqis were looking for, surge or no surge.

On Jan. 8, UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond announced that there were at least 2.2 million Iraqis internally displaced within the country, and that at least another two million had fled the country altogether. This, no doubt, would make many areas quieter.

The US military has erected three to four meter high concrete walls around several neighborhoods, forcing residents to choose either Sunni or Shi'ite areas in which to live. Such separation has brought large-scale displacement, and protests.

Sunni Muslims seem to have the worst of it. Many Iraqis are outraged by the number of Sunni detainees the "surge" has taken.

Residents of Amiriya district of western Baghdad demonstrated Feb. 11 against mistreatment by US and Iraqi forces involved in the "surge." The "surge" aims to eradicate al-Qaeda from Iraq, but this has meant that most military operations have been carried out in Sunni areas like Amiriya.

"We are here to protest against the unfair arrests and raids conducted against the innocent people of Amiriya," Salih al-Mutlag, chief of the Arab Dialogue Council in the Iraqi government told IPS at the demonstration. "This has gone too far under the flag of fighting terror."

Al-Mutlag said they were also demonstrating against arrests in the western parts of Baghdad, despite an apparently peaceful situation there as a result of residents' cooperation with Iraqi army units. Large numbers of residents came out in the Dora region of southwest Baghdad to protest against the US military for arresting 18 people, including an 80-year-old man.

"We are the ones who improved the situation in western parts of Baghdad without any interference from the Americans and their puppet Iraqi government," former Iraqi Army Major Abu Wussam told IPS in Amiriya. "We negotiated with our brothers in the Iraqi national resistance who agreed to conduct their activities in a different way from the traditional way they used to work.

"It seems Americans did not like it, and so they are punishing us for it, instead of releasing our detainees as they promised."

Some of the apparent peace on the street is a consequence of rising detentions. In November last year Karl Matley, head of the Iraqi branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, declared that more than 60,000 prisoners and detainees are held in prisons and other detention centers. A large number of these were taken during the "surge."

By August 2007, half a year into the "surge," the number of detainees held by the US-led military forces in Iraq had swelled by 50 percent, with the inmate population growing to 24,500, from 16,000 in February, according to US military officers in Iraq.

The officers reported that nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody were Sunni Arabs.

Given that the majority of the detained are Sunnis, the "surge," rather than bridging political differences and aiding reconciliation between Sunni and Shi'ite groups, appears to have had the opposite effect.

And yet, there could be more dangerous reasons to doubt such success of the "surge" that is claimed.

Among the recent arrests in Baghdad, the US military counted six members of the Sahwa (Awakening) forces. This is a force of resistance fighters now ostensibly working with the US military. The US pays each member 300 dollars monthly. More than 80 percent of about 70,000 Sahwa members are Sunni.

The arrest of some Sahwa members is indication of US military doubts about the loyalties of some of these Sahwa fighters. Shi'ite political parties and militias already accuse them of being resistance fighters in disguise. Many believe that large numbers of Sahwa forces are resistance fighters simply riding the "surge."

"How come Sunni parts of Baghdad became so quiet all of a sudden," says Jawad Salman, a former resident of Amiriya who fled his house in 2006 after Iraqi resistance members accused him of being a government spy. "It is a game well played by terrorists to divert the fight against Shi'ite groups. I lived there and I know that all residents fully support what the US calls the terrorists."

The Sahwa strategy has brought down the number of US casualties – for now. But the US strategy seems to have done less for Iraq than for its own forces.

The Year of the Insurgents

Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and the new politics of protest
by Justin Raimondo

Back in December, I said this election year would be characterized by the collapse of the alleged "front-runners" – i.e. presidential candidates favored by the pundits and the Beltway know-it-alls – and so it has come to pass. Barack Obama has upended the supposedly inevitable Hillary, and the GOP electorate, too, has humbled those formerly exalted as "major" candidates. What explains this inversion of expectations, as I put it last year, is the rise of a new politics in this country:

"The paradigm that best describes what is happening on the ground in Iowa, New Hampshire, and beyond, isn't 'right' versus 'left,' 'Christianism' versus secularism, or red-versus-blue state mindsets, but populist demands for change against our hidebound, insular, arrogant elites in the media as well as in government. And no issue has underscored the growing chasm between the people, on the one hand, and the Washington-New York axis of power, on the other, than the war in Iraq. The intersection of the war, as an issue, with the growing populist rebellion against the status quo portends a revolution."

John McCain and plenty of conservatives – especially the neocons – are now deriding Obama as a purveyor of platitudes, whose rhetoric recalls Gertrude Stein's opinion of her birthplace, Oakland, California: "There's no there there." But of course there is a there there – and it's called Iraq.

Obama has become more outspoken in his opposition to the Iraq war as the campaign has progressed, and not only that but has denounced the "mindset" among our rulers, and the leaders of both parties, that led us into that trap to begin with. This has legitimized his standing as the outsider in the year of the insurgents, and given heft to his soaring rhetoric, which, you'll note, is often delivered in terms of an anti-interventionist riff, such as in this very substantive speech laying out his foreign policy vision for America.

Yet it's hard to please some people, especially antiwar people on the right – and there are more of them than you might imagine – when it comes to Obama's candidacy. Here is Daniel Larison, a paleoconservative writer – and blogger-in-chief over at The American Conservative, who has also posted at the Antiwar.com blog – warning explicitly not to be fooled by the alluring siren song of Obama-ism:

"Given the rather grim prospects for antiwar voters this election, it is understandable why many look to Obama and think that they have found someone they can trust. But this is a mistake. It isn't that Obama is wrong on Iraq, but that he has happened to be right about it basically in spite of his own foreign policy views."

If you follow the link above, you'll arrive at my last peroration on the subject of Obama: yet Larison's affixing a warning label on Obama's medicine for the masses – keep away from children and over-enthusiastic antiwar voters – isn't really necessary. I have pointed out Obama's flaws at length, and in detail, in these pages, and there's no need to reiterate all that here. Larison also reminds us that Obama had the wrong position on Israel's latest attack on Lebanon, and that he kowtowed to AIPAC on this and other issues: all undeniably true. He also tells me something I didn't know about top Obama advisor Samantha Power: that she has no great love for us "Copperhead isolationists," as she puts it, which is always good to know.

Of course, I never said that Obama intends to fundamentally alter the direction and basic assumptions of US foreign policy – although his pledge to end the "mindset" that led to US intervention in Iraq implies an attempt to do so. Yet it is undeniable that he is directly appealing to antiwar voters and the populism that resents the arrogance of our elites – in both parties – who have ignored the popular will:

"When we end this war, we can recapture our unity of effort as Americans. The American people have the right instincts on Iraq. It's time to heed their judgment. It's time to move beyond Iraq so that we can move forward together. I will be a President who listens to the American people, not a President who ignores them."

"When we end this war" is a phrase that he repeats throughout his standard stump speech, these days, and it has become the leitmotif of his campaign. No, he isn't a pure anti-interventionist: he's no Ron Paul. Yet he is, without a doubt, the antiwar candidate this election season, and that is precisely why he has a good chance to win the White House. It is also a good reason for anti-interventionists of the left, the right, and the center to cheer.

Of course, paleocons like Larison may oppose Obama on grounds other than foreign policy, but, as for myself, I take my direction from the late Murray N. Rothbard, who rightly saw that the issue of war and peace is the decisive question, which – all by itself – determines whether we're going to have liberty or tyranny.

It was on these grounds that Rothbard, the founder of the modern libertarian movement – and the real intellectual energy behind the founding and early years of the Cato Institute – supported none other than Adlai Stevenson for President, and later joined the "League of Stevensonian Democrats" (LSD) to press John F. Kennedy to appoint Stevenson Secretary of State. As Rothbard related in his recently-published memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right:

"It was time to act; and politically, my total break with the Right came with the Stevenson movement of 1960. In 1956 I had been for Stevenson over Eisenhower, but only partly for his superior peace position; another reason was to try to depose the Republican "Left" so as to allow the Old Right to recapture the party. Emotionally, I was then still a right-winger who yearned for a rightist third party. But now the third-party lure was dead; the Right was massively Goldwaterite. And besides, Stevenson's courageous stand on the U-2 incident – his outrage that Eisenhower had wrecked the summit conference by refusing to make not only a routine, but a morally required apology for the U-2 spy incursion over Russia – made me a Stevensonian. Politically, I had ceased being a right-winger. I had determined that the crucial issue was peace or war; and that on that question the only viable political movement was the "left" wing of the Democratic Party. By consistently following an antiwar and isolationist star, I had shifted – or rather been shifted – from right-wing Republican to left-wing Democrat."

Of course, Rothbard was never a "left-wing Democrat," and yet his emphasis on the centrality of foreign policy made it seem so, at least to the superficial observer. Rothbard realized that, irrespective of the rhetoric about the "free market" and "individual liberty" that came out of the mouths of conservatives, objectively the result of their policies – specifically, their foreign policy of relentless aggression and confrontation with the Soviet Union – would lead to the exact opposite of their stated intentions. He saw that, as long as we were leading a global crusade, and pouring billions down the "anti-Communist" rat-hole, building up a huge military apparatus and national security bureaucracy – complete with an arsenal of nuclear weapons that could destroy the world several times over – our liberties, indeed our very lives, would be threatened with extinction.

The same holds true today. Obama may be a left-wing Democrat, with economic views quite the opposite of my own – although, in truth, I believe he's significantly less of an old-style statist than is Hillary – and yet I can cheer his ascendance as the Democratic nominee because he is, after all, the antiwar candidate in this race. And, no, it doesn't matter that he's not consistent – i.e. that he's no Ron Paul – and for two reasons:

1) The voters believe he's the exact opposite of the Cheneyites who have seized control of the foreign policy levers: that ‘s why he's always talking about "reclaiming" the ship of state from their grip, and that's what's propelling his campaign. This election, if Obama is nominated, will be a referendum on the war, and on our interventionist foreign policy in general. The neocons know this, which is precisely why they loathe him – and will do anything to stop him.

Larison avers: "When we see neoconservatives go after Obama and his advisors, it is tempting to want to defend them against baseless charges, and to the extent that we can draw attention to the accusations that Obama's critics have been hysterically throwing at him over Israel, then we should do that as a way of showing their style of fearmongering and misrepresenting others' views. But we shouldn't forget that" he's just fool's gold, and not the Real Deal.

Yet I have to say that, unlike the paleos, who still retain a sentimental attachment to the GOP, the neocons know who their real enemies are. They are also political realists, who realize that, once catapulted into the White House by a massive wave of antiwar/anti-interventionist sentiment, Obama's unlikely to be willing to pay the political price of launching another war, in, say, Pakistan.

2) We don't have a lot of time to turn the ship of state around and set a new course – because the course we're on is headed straight for the rocky shores of fiscal catastrophe. As Ron Paul has constantly pointed out, our present policy of guns-and-butter cannot be sustained: the value of the dollar is falling dramatically, and the economic crisis is upon us. The central bankers of the world aren't scurrying around trying to shore up the shaky foundations of our financial system just because they need the exercise. There is a very real danger that, unless we stop the bleeding of our resources into the charnel house of Iraq, we could be plunged – and very shortly – into a major worldwide depression. The complete collapse of the American economy is not out of the question – unless the war is ended, and soon.

Ending the war would send a signal to the markets that the worst excesses of the Bush era are over, and that the country just might return to some version of fiscal sanity before long. Naturally, I don't have a lot of faith in Obama's economic nostrums, which would be costly as well as counterproductive – yet not nearly as costly and damaging to the economy and the nation as a whole as the McCainiac program of perpetual war and unmitigated militarism at home and abroad.

In short, what we are facing is nothing less than an emergency: the present policies cannot be continued, without incurring the grave risk of a major catastrophe, either economic or military-political. The sand in the hourglass is fast diminishing. Obama is far from perfect, and yet his every speech and public pronouncement refutes the opening line of Larison's complaint: "Given the rather grim prospects for antiwar voters this election …"

That is not "given," not at all. It is quite enough that Obama wants to end the war in 2009, and bring all our troops home. More than that, in these dark days, we have no right to expect or hope for. Yet it is enough, for now.

It remains to be seen to what degree Obama's imperfections in the realm of foreign policy will impact our lives: if and when he decides to invade, say, Pakistan, or "liberate" Darfur, those who propelled him into the White House will either follow him, blindly, or else begin to question the doctrine of interventionism in principle. It is the latter that the anti-interventionist movement must directly address, in the event of a betrayal by an Obama administration. This is how people learn – they have to go through certain experiences in order to come out, at the end of it, transformed. That is how many liberals, who initially supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came to join the old America First Committee (yes, it's those "Copperhead isolationists," Samantha!): it is how many of today's liberals, such as Glenn Greenwald, have become sympathetic to Ron Paul and certain aspects of libertarianism.

And while I'm on the subject of electoral politics and options for antiwar voters: it looks like Ron Paul is re-energizing his presidential campaign. That's good news: the more options we have, the better. The year of the insurgents has also had its effect on the right, with Paul pulling in a good 10 percent of the Republican primary voters – and possibly more, if, as I believe he might, the Good Doctor runs as a third party candidate. Now imagine – and it's not hard – a scenario in which the Clintonian "super-delegates" snatch the nomination away from Obama, and spark a wave of populist anger. Paul, if he's on the ballot in the general election, could have a real impact, because Obama's voters, in a very real sense, are his voters.

The anti-interventionist movement – that is, the movement to make a fundamental change in our foreign policy of dominationism – is bigger than any political candidate, or party. We don't endorse candidates here at Antiwar.com, and not just because we're a nonpartisan nonprofit foundation: in order to succeed, and really make that change, we're going to have to transcend party, and even ideology, and come together as Americans to stop the carnage and the tragic loss of resources, both human and material. Politicians and parties come and go, but we're in this for the long haul.

No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos

Readings in the Age of Empire
Doug Bandow
No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos
Charles H. Ferguson
PublicAffairs, 2008
640 pp.

As is typical in Washington, the administration has solved the crisis in Iraq by redefining success. No longer is the goal a liberal, multi-ethnic nation ready to lead the rest of the Middle East towards democracy, enlightenment, and the American Way. Now the objective is preserving a nominal country in which the various sectarian groups minimize violence by living apart and ignoring the inefficient, ineffective, corrupt, and largely irrelevant central government. A situation that in 2003 would have been considered a grotesque failure is now treated as victory, a product of the far-sighted "surge," advanced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is ready to initiate as many new wars as necessary to continue promoting democracy, enlightenment, and the American Way. Bombs Away!

With the administration busy rewriting history, it is worth remembering what the neocon ivory tower warriors promised and delivered in Iraq. Charles Ferguson, an internet entrepreneur with an interest in foreign policy produced a documentary on Iraq – essentially how the administration mismanaged virtually every decision, big and small. No End In Sight draws from the research for the television show and is filled with interviews with people ranging from policymakers to front line soldiers. Ferguson, who originally leaned in favor of the war, has painted a portrait of arrogance and incompetence more devastating than anything coming from the Democratic National Committee.

To read Ferguson's summary is to marvel at the sheer stupidity of the so-called "adults" running U.S. foreign policy. Writes Ferguson:

"They won't start any planning for the occupation at all until two months before the war, and then they'll start completely from scratch. They'll exclude the State Department and CIA people who know the most about the country. They won't have telephones or email for months after they arrive in Iraq. Our troops will stand by as nearly every major building in the country is looted, destroyed, and burned."

After tossing millions of bureaucrats and soldiers onto the street, the administration was shocked to find a growing insurgency. Yet as opposition builds, writes Ferguson, "they will deny its existence and refuse to negotiate, even when leaders of the insurgency signal a desire for compromise. They will airlift $12 billion in hundred-dollar bills into the country, with no accounting controls, and three-quarters of it will remain permanently unaccounted for." Twenty-somethings will be vetted to write Iraqi laws based on their opposition to abortion rather than their knowledge of Arabic. And as sectarian violence swells, the administration and its acolytes will insist that the media is ignoring all of the good news – trash being collected, harbors being dredged, cell phones being used.

Had tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of Iraqis not been wounded, maimed, and killed because of the administration's misbegotten adventure, the Iraq saga would be a comedy routine. But there is nothing funny about the catastrophe that has enveloped Iraq, courtesy the neocon war party.

Ferguson's comprehensive volume methodically details the idiocies that masqueraded as U.S. policy. The war itself went well, but was merely the first installment of a lengthy conflict that the neocons never expected to have to fight. A matter of almost religious doctrine was the belief that Washington merely had to show up to rule. George Packer, a journalist who helped convince Ferguson to make his documentary, observed that the administration idea of installing Ahmed Chalabi as president and then cutting troop levels to 30,000 "was a ludicrous plan. It was a plan that didn't begin to grapple with how difficult and dangerous and complex these postwar situations are." But then, "Donald Rumsfeld and the officials under him decided that they were not going to be deterred by history" or the contrary experience of any prior conflict.

Ferguson's book well covers the many almost legendary examples of administration idiocy and hubris. Refusing to seriously plan for the occupation. Failing to involve anyone knowledgeable about Iraq in what little planning was done. Allowing the country to descend into lawless chaos. Creating a top-down occupation essentially run by College Republicans and largely excluding Iraqis. Generating tens of thousands of recruits for the insurgency by discharging the military and barring even minor Baathists from government jobs. Discounting the idea that a serious insurgency could develop. Exacerbating sectarian divisions through occupation policy. Helplessly watching the explosion in sectarian violence.

Through it all the Bush administration remained a fantasyland in which only good news was tolerated. The knock on President George W. Bush, notes Ferguson, is not that he was disengaged, but that he was involved in the major decisions. Alas, his involvement occurred in a different dimension, cleansed of inconvenient ideas, facts, and conclusions.

For instance, Feisal al-Istrabadi, for a time Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, observed: "those of us who were saying things that were different, we were not allowed. There was a – I was going to say a glass barrier, but there was a concrete barrier. Our voices were silenced. Those who were not on board the ideological, you know, the sweets-and-flowers agenda, nobody wanted to hear from us."

Similar is the account of Barbara Bodine, a senior foreign service officer employed in Baghdad by the occupation. She explains, "with this administration, the difference is they don't want to hear the inconvenient fact. And if removing you, excluding you, from the meeting or the process or the structure is the way not to have to deal with your inconvenience, then that's what they'll do. They prefer an echo chamber."

Even when good advice got through, it had no apparent impact. Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, who worked in the occupation authority, says that he "strongly urged the administration to make a clear, emphatic, declaratory statement that we were not seeking permanent military bases in Iraq, and would not seek them." But no such declaration was made because the administration in fact expected to gain permanent bases for use against any state in the region that refused to kowtow to Washington's demands. Even now it is not clear that the administration has abandoned its goal of a long-term military presence in Iraq.

Unfortunately, Iraqi civilians and American service personnel were unable to enjoy the fantasies being built in the sky by administration officials. They lived on and patrolled the bloody streets of Baghdad and other cities, towns, and villages across Iraq. "By 2006, killings were so numerous that most were no longer reported, and it became increasingly difficult to assess the level or the source of violence," writes Ferguson. Far from feeling liberated, average Iraqis complained to Ferguson that life was worse than under Saddam Hussein, that the value of life had become "trivial."

Antagonism towards the U.S. was fueled by occupation practices. Ferguson notes that "If one combines raids, arrests, detentions, and shootings of civilians, it seems likely that by 2007, U.S. military conduct had directly affected, wounded, or killed over 100,000 Iraqis, and possibly well over 200,000." Yet U.S. actions "seem to have been frequently indiscriminate or misguided," with the result "that the military's error rate was quite high in its dealings with Iraqis, both friendly and hostile." But such errors should come as no surprise for an administration that never expected to have to fight a guerrilla conflict.

Over time U.S. forces got much better, but by then the insurgency, as well as al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, had burgeoned. Increasing American force levels last year sharply reduced the levels of violence, but, like all the king's horses and all the king's men, could not put the Iraqi Humpty Dumpty back together again. Ferguson explains:

"As of late 2007, Iraq is a quasi-warlord society with a paralyzed central government whose individual ministries are controlled by various political parties and militias. The country is denominated by four regional power struggles, which often approach open warfare, conducted through a combination of politics, corruption, crime, and militia violence. ... Iraq is in a state of near civil war, which is barely contained by the American military presence. The country suffers from an extremely high level of criminal violence and pervasive corruption. The south and Baghdad are predominantly controlled by fundamentalist Shiite militias and their affiliated political parties. American occupation forces have been progressively marginalized. The recent American troop surge is generally regarded as having produced a substantial but unsustainable reduction in violence, without altering the fundamental processes under way in the country, including continuing ethnic cleansing, geographical segregation along sectarian lines, deteriorating infrastructure, and political paralysis."

No End in Sight covers all of these problems in detail. The discussion of casualties, both American and Iraqi, is particularly poignant. Moreover, four to five million Iraqis have fled their homes – one-sixth or more of the population. The equivalent number in the U.S. would be more than 50 million.

Harvard's Samantha Power makes the telling observation that "One of the elements that kind of unites the U.S. relationship to Iraq across time is a disregard or just a nonconsideration of the welfare of the Iraqi people." Indeed, one has to believe that there is a special level of Hell reserved for ivory tower social engineers who cavalierly initiate war with little concern for the likely consequences on those unwillingly providing the battlefield.

Equally important is Ferguson's assessment of the impact on the U.S. and the world. The ultimate financial cost of the war to the American people is likely to exceed $2 trillion. Washington has strengthened Iran, turning it into the region's principal Islamic power. And the Bush administration's botched preventive war has exacerbated the problem of terrorism.

Jessica Stern of Harvard told Ferguson: "The United States has facilitated the next iteration of that international jihadi movement. We have given that movement the best possible training." Contrary to the fantasies prevalent in Washington, the terrorists will not all stay in Iraq to be killed. Rather, observes Stern, "This is not a kind of roach motel, where we gather the world's international jihadis and kill them in Iraq. They will escape from that motel, and we've already seen that in Jordan – they are now very well-trained and very angry. And I believe we will eventually see them on Western streets."

Moreover, the war has created more terrorists. There is no fixed number of jihadists who must be killed. Rather, there is a large pool of potential terrorists who are motivated in part by what the U.S. government does. The war in Iraq has created yet another grievance. Thus, complains Stern, "the war in Iraq has really facilitated bin Laden's effors to continue to spread that jihadi movement internationally."

Perhaps the book's most sobering conclusion is that the so-called "surge" cannot be sustained. Iraqi observers seem to be particularly skeptical. Violence is down, yes, but they expect it to eventually rise since little has changed about Iraqi society or governance.

Larry Diamond makes much the same point. He contends: "unless we get a political consensus among the principal Iraqi parties on what the rules of the game and the constitutional structure are going to be on these and related realms, there is no chance of stabilizing the country. And the most that we can do is what we are doing there now, which is basically become the police force for the country – they certainly don't have one – and hold up the floor." And we are doing this "so these different Iraqi political parties, factions, militias, incipient warlords and whatnot, can seek to corner power and resources in the uncertainty of the current situation and with the extraordinary greed that characterizes political and military actors in this situation."

This does not warrant the sacrifice of more American lives or waste of more American treasure, he persuasively argues. Which is the bottom line that the hawks who desire to fight to the last soldier and Marine must eventually confront.

Getting out of Iraq obviously is the most important goal of U.S. policy today. The war was a horrible mistake based on flawed intelligence with horrendous humanitarian consequences for Iraqis. It is bleeding precious lives from patriotic communities across the U.S. and generating a flood of red ink for an already spendthrift government. The misbegotten conflict has weakened America, degraded American security, and wrecked America's international reputation.

There is an equally important longer-term objective. Never again. Never again a war of choice. Never again a war based on fantasy expectations. Never again a war without realistic planning. Never again a war of ideology against interest. Never again a "humanitarian" war. Never again the public turning government over to crackpot ideologues, giving them the power to kill, bomb, and destroy. Never again.

Terminating War

by Daniel H. Shubin
Part 2.

Because the Kingdom of God is within you, it is with us, every one of us as individuals that war should terminate. As a body we are members of the Kingdom of God which is in heaven, so our attitude is that of a spiritual migrant: we are temporary travelers passing through the earthly course of our life in order to attain the Kingdom when it arrives here from heaven. For this reason the political affairs of this world are not our concern: the enemies of the state are not our enemies, and so nationalism and imperialism do not concern us.

A person is not the enemy, as the Apostle wrote: For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of the present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Eph 6:12. The enemy transcends flesh and blood, the enemy is sin, that drive in a person that causes harm to another person, that wants us to hate another person. Just as the Kingdom of God is within us, so is the enemy within us, which is sin. As Jesus said, For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. Matt 15:19. The real enemy to be defeated is sin within us, not some person.

Jesus said, You have heard it said of old, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you, do not resist the evil person. If he strikes you on the left, turn to him the right. Matt 5: 38.39. Jesus is telling us not to contribute to further violence by retribution, but rather to tolerate the insult and abuse, and to indicate to the abuser that he is not your enemy. Jesus knew that mortal violence, retaliation or vengeance or retribution did not resolve any issue.

Jesus said, You have heard it said of old, Love your friends, but hate your enemies. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that persecute you, in order for you to become the children of your Father who is in heaven. Matt 5:43-45. No other person in history has taught to have a sincere concern for the welfare of the enemy, in order to indicate to him that he is not an enemy.

When Jesus healed the servant of the Roman centurion in Matt 9, and complemented his faith, he was showing kindness to the enemy, the Roman military occupation, for this person to realize that the Jews were not their enemy, but sin was. And when the Angel sent apostle Peter to evangelize to Cornelius the Roman soldier, it was with the same intent, to indicate to him that it was a Jew, the Roman’s enemy, who was bringing the message of salvation. Eventually Cornelius would accept the Gospel and cease being a soldier, now acknowledging that the Jew was not his enemy.

Jesus exemplified his message in his own life and so materialized his convictions. After Peter cut off the ear of a palace guard, Jesus immediately healed the soldier, and then told Peter to put the weapon back in its place, because whoever would live by a weapon will die by a weapon. In this manner did Jesus make it clear that Christians should not utilize a weapon in any situation.

During his trial and humiliation and crucifixion, Jesus did not defend himself using any violence, but he allowed them to kill him. By his own example he showed that it was better to suffer abuse, insult, beating, and even your own death, than to utilize violence. This is the path of the true disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, to tolerate abuse and insult, rather than implement retaliation and vengeance, and even if it means tolerating the worst abuse of all, the unjust termination of your own life.

Jesus said, Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. John 14:27. The peace of the empires and nations and kingdoms of this world are a strong military, to scare others from attacking or invading, or to be able to defend themselves militarily if attacked or invaded. But the peace of Jesus of Nazareth is no military, for no country or nation to possess a military. True peace on earth with good will toward men will occur when no nation has a military, and this begins individually with each disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, the Prince of Peace.

Dan Shubin's website http://www.peacehost.net/peacechurch/

Terminating War

by Daniel H. Shubin
Part One

The source of organized and premeditative warfare is nationalism and imperialism: the development and expansion of empires by zealous political leaders with an obsession for power and control. The Bible refers to these empires and nations as the Kingdoms of this World. The earliest historical record of an organizer of an army and his deliberate drive toward the building of an empire by militarily subduing smaller tribes and cities is Nimrod, the builder of the kingdom of Babylon. With this event there began the perennial self-destructive trend of warfare of the nation builders and nation defenders. Ultimate allegiance was now to the state, having developed into a living organism, a corporate body to be defended, and the resident was now an expendable commodity to the superficial benefit of the nation or empire. All of this nation building and nation defending occurred at the expense of the lives of the soldiers who died at the demand of their superior officers, recruited into the military of the nation builders and defenders, and at the cost of those innocent men and women and children who were killed in the process of the subjection of their small tribe and city by such political and military powers. This self-destruction trend of warfare has plagued humanity generation after generation, since the earliest era of national development.

God understood this quite well, and with the development of the nation of Israel, instituted laws to restrain the carnal nature of the person during such barbarian eras. War was fought to defeat the enemies of God, it was a manner for God to impose his judgment upon other nations for their sins against other nations: so it was with the Israelites against the 7 nations of Canaan on their entrance into the promised; kings Saul and David against the Philistines; and eventually Assyria and Babylon against Israel; and later Israel against the Greeks. It was not the good will of God for Israel to become a nation or empire, as the others during their existence in history. Israel was designed as a loose confederation of tribes, and purposefully in order to preclude their expansion. In later years, Israel became a nation, as the others, under King Saul, and this was not the good will of God, but an accommodation. God knew that once Israel became a nation, it would take the path of other nations with the development of nationalism and imperialism.

This accommodation by God to conduct warfare in Israel was temporary as a result of the barbarism of the people of earlier ages. Israelite prophets foretold the time when the Messiah of Israel would arise, the Son of God would be the Prince of Peace. Under this king and the rule of kingdom, war would exist no more.

It was about 2,000 years ago that God said enough was enough with the perennial self-destruction trend of warfare of humanity, and so God sent his Son onto the earth as the person of Jesus of Nazereth, to depict with his own life and message the manner of forever curbing war. But why was it at this point in history that God would state that enough was enough with warfare? The purpose for God sending his Son at this point in history was the future war of Rome against the Jews, with was accomplished 40 years later with the invasion of the Roman army under Vespacian and the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus. The salvation of God that Jesus preached to his people was their acceptance of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and himself at the Prince of Peace and so terminate war in the process, in order to deliver themselves from their own annihilation by the armies of Rome. This same gospel was to spread throughout all the world, that the era of warfare had now come to its conclusion.

It is through the forgiveness of our sins, to be born again, that we are sanctified by the Holy Spirit of God. His Word teaches us how to conduct ourselves during the earthly course of our life. This change in the nature of a person would mortify in us the drive to do harm or damage to another person, and would cause us to seek the Kingdom of God and its rectitude. Developing and expanding the spiritual Kingdom of God will focus our attention on heaven, and not to the temporal Kingdoms of this World and their incessant warfare to each magnify their own nation at the expense of both their lives and the lives of the other nation.

It is because Christians fail to observe the precepts of the person they claim to believe in, and capitulate to the demands of the nation builders and defenders, that wars continue. It is because Christians subject themselves to the earthly concepts of nationalism and imperialism to create a tower of Babel of military strength with which to reach to the sky of political domination that wars continue. It is only with the Christian religion that war will end, and this begins with each of us not willing to become part or participant of the state-sanctioned self-destructive trend of warfare that has plagued the world since its inception.

Dan Shubin's website
http://www.peacehost.net/peacechurch/

Inside The World Of War Profiteers

From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the U.S.

By David Jackson and Jason Grotto, Tribune reporters

ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors' pockets, records show.

Federal prosecutors in Rock Island have indicted four former supervisors from KBR, the giant defense firm that holds the contract, along with a decorated Army officer and five executives from KBR subcontractors based in the U.S. or the Middle East. Those defendants, along with two other KBR employees who have pleaded guilty in Virginia, account for a third of the 36 people indicted to date on Iraq war-contract crimes, Justice Department records show.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Rock Island sentenced the Army official, Chief Warrant Officer Peleti "Pete" Peleti Jr., to 28 months in prison for taking bribes. One Middle Eastern subcontractor treated him to a trip to the 2006 Super Bowl, a defense investigator said.

Prosecutors would not confirm or deny ongoing grand jury activity. But court records identify a dozen FBI, IRS and military investigative agents who have been assigned to the case. Interviews as well as testimony at the sentencing for Peleti, who has cooperated with authorities, suggest an active probe.

Rock Island serves as a center for the probe of war profiteering because Army brass at the arsenal here administer KBR's so-called LOGCAP III contract to feed, shelter and support U.S. soldiers, and to help restore Iraq's oil infrastructure.

In one case, a freight-shipping subcontractor confessed to giving $25,000 in illegal gratuities to five unnamed KBR employees "to build relationships to get additional business," according to the man's December 2007 statement to a federal judge in the Rock Island court. Separately, Peleti named five military colleagues who allegedly accepted bribes. Prosecutors also have identified three senior KBR executives who allegedly approved inflated bids. None of those 13 people has been charged.

A common thread runs through these cases and other KBR scandals in Iraq, from allegations the firm failed to protect employees sexually assaulted by co-workers to findings that it charged $45 per can of soda: The Pentagon has outsourced crucial troop support jobs while slashing the number of government contract watchdogs.

The dollar value of Army contracts quadrupled from $23.3 billion in 1992 to $100.6 billion in 2006, according to a recent report by a Pentagon panel. But the number of Army contract supervisors was cut from 10,000 in 1990 to 5,500 currently.

Last week, the Army pledged to add 1,400 positions to its contracting command. But even those embroiled in the frauds acknowledge the impact of so much war privatization.

"I think we downsized past the point of general competency," said subcontractor Christopher Cahill, who for a decade prepared military supply depots under LOGCAP. Now serving 30 months in federal prison for fraud, Cahill added: "The point of a standing army is to have them equipped."

KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton Co., says it has been paid $28 billion under LOGCAP III. The firm says it quickly reports all instances of suspected fraud and has repaid the Defense Department more than $1 million for questionable invoices.

In a statement, KBR said its roughly 20,000 employees and 40,000 subcontractors have performed laudably in a war zone where Army demands shift rapidly and local suppliers don't always maintain ledger books. Spokeswoman Heather Browne wrote: "Ethics and integrity are core values for KBR."

But a wiretapped transcript recently released in Rock Island underscores the brazen nature of the exceptions.
In October 2005, with federal agents tailing them, three war contractors slipped through London's posh Cumberland hotel before meeting in a quiet lounge. For the rest of that afternoon, the men sipped cognac and whiskey and discussed the bribes that had greased contracts to supply U.S. troops in Iraq.

Former KBR procurement manager Stephen Seamans, who was wearing a wire strapped on by a Rock Island agent, wondered aloud whether to return $65,000 in kickbacks he got from his two companions, executives from the Saudi conglomerate Tamimi Global Co.

One of the men, Tamimi operations director Shabbir Khan, urged him to hide the money by concocting phony business records.

"Just do the paperwork," Khan said.
Party houses, prostitutes
In October 2002, five months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Khan threw a birthday party for Seamans at a Tamimi "party house" near the Kuwait base known as Camp Arifjan. Khan "provided Seamans with a prostitute as a present," Rock Island prosecutors wrote in court papers. Driving Seamans back to his quarters, Khan offered kickbacks that would total $130,000.

Five days later, with Seamans and Khan hammering out the fine print, KBR awarded Tamimi the war's first $14.4 million mess hall subcontract, court records show.

In April 2003, as American troops poured into Iraq, Seamans gave Khan inside information that enabled Tamimi to secure a $2 million KBR subcontract to establish a mess hall at a Baghdad palace. Seamans submitted change orders that inflated that subcontract to $7.4 million.

By June, Seamans and fellow KBR procurement manager Jeff Mazon, a Country Club Hills resident, had executed subcontracts worth $321 million. At least one deal put U.S. soldiers at risk.

The Army LOGCAP contract required KBR to medically screen the thousands of kitchen workers that subcontractors like Tamimi imported from impoverished villages in Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

But when Pentagon officials asked for medical records in March 2004, Khan presented "bogus" files for 550 Tamimi workers, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeffrey Lang said in a court hearing last year.

KBR retested those 550 workers at a Kuwait City clinic and found 172 positive for exposure to hepatitis A, Lang told the judge. Khan tried to suppress those findings, warning the clinic director that Tamimi would do no more business with his medical office if he "told KBR about these results," Lang said in court. The infectious virus can cause fatigue and other symptoms that arise weeks after contact.

Retesting of the 172 found that none had contagious hepatitis A, Lang said, and Khan's attorneys said in court that no soldiers caught diseases from the workers or from meals they prepared. It remains unclear if that is because the workers were treated or because they did not remain infectious after the onset of symptoms.

Still, the incident shows how even mundane meal contracts can put troops at risk. Similar disease-testing breaches cropped up at cafeterias outsourced to firms besides Tamimi, former KBR Area Supervisor Rene Robinson said in a Tribune interview.

"That was an ongoing problem," Robinson said. "When the military asked for paperwork, it was spotty." KBR was forced to begin vaccinating the employees at their work sites, he added.

Tamimi and its U.S. lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said it is cooperating with federal authorities.

By July 2005, Tamimi had secured some 30 KBR troop feeding subcontracts worth $793.5 million, records show. Khan continued to negotiate Iraq war subcontracts for Tamimi until shortly before he was arrested in Rock Island in March 2006.

He is now serving a 51-month prison sentence for lying to federal agents about the kickbacks he wired to Seamans, who pleaded guilty and served a year and a day in prison. Both declined to comment.

Seamans, a 46-year-old Air Force veteran, once taught ethics to junior KBR employees. At his December 2006 sentencing hearing, he expressed remorse for taking the kickbacks, telling the judge: "It is not the way that Americans do business."

It was another repentant LOGCAP veteran standing before a Rock Island judge on Wednesday. Peleti, formerly the military's top food service adviser for the Middle East, wept as he admitted taking bribes from Tamimi and three other subcontractors between 2003 and early 2006.

Ribbons and badges glittered across Peleti's pressed green Army shirt. "I stand here before you today to convey my remorse and sincere regret," he said, then broke down.

One subcontractor, Public Warehousing Co., took Peleti and another top Army official to the Super Bowl, a defense investigator said in court Wednesday. The firm has denied wrongdoing. Khan also bribed Peleti to influence LOGCAP contracts with cash. Peleti was arrested in 2006 while re-entering the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base with a duffel bag stuffed with watches and jewelry as well as about $40,000 concealed in his clothing.

While prosecutors documented kickbacks in only the first two of Tamimi's mess hall subcontracts, they contend that the tone was set to corrupt the system.

"Tamimi and Mr. Khan have their hooks into Mr. Seamans, they have their hooks into KBR," Lang said in court last year. "It is difficult to assess the kind of damage that did to the integrity of the subcontracting process when the first two subcontracts are corrupted."

Auditors in the basement
Military auditors say they closely monitor the layers of KBR subcontractors who actually perform most of the LOGCAP work, stationing teams in Iraq. But one Rock Island search warrant said auditors working back in the U.S. could manage only limited reviews of the cascade of deals.

In the basement of one of KBR's Houston office buildings, a 25-member team from the Defense Contract Audit Agency had "no communications" with "personnel on the ground," so they could not confirm whether goods and services actually were delivered, the search warrant application said.

In the absence of oversight, some Middle Eastern businessmen would offer "Rolex watches, leather jackets, prostitutes, and the KBR guys weren't shy about bragging about the fact that they were being treated to all that stuff," said Paul Morrell, whose firm The Event Source ran several mess halls as a KBR subcontractor.

Such questionable relationships continued long after early procurement managers like Seamans had been rooted out. Early subcontractors such as Tamimi became almost indispensable in part by outfitting Army cafeterias with expensive power generators and refrigeration systems, records and interviews show.

"If you ever gave Tamimi a hard time, you'd get a call," former KBR subcontract manager Harry DeWolf told the Tribune.
When subcontracts came up for renegotiation, DeWolf said, companies like Tamimi "would say, 'Fine, we're going to pull out all of our people and equipment.' They really had KBR and the government over the barrel."

Complicating the investigation of war-contract crimes, the government of Kuwait has denied a U.S. request to extradite two Middle Eastern businessmen accused of LOGCAP fraud. The country's ambassador last year sent letters to the Justice Department asking the U.S. to drop its case against one of them, arguing that international agreements forbid U.S. prosecution of Kuwaiti residents for crimes allegedly committed on Kuwaiti soil. Prosecutors disagree, but a judge is considering Kuwait's assertion.

Investigators also have faced challenges in dealing with KBR. The company has withheld some internal company documents relating to Mazon, Seaman's fellow KBR procurement manager, the firm's attorneys wrote in court filings.

In response to one subpoena, the firm gave agents about 2,760 of Mazon's computer files but withheld 398 others, saying they were covered by attorney-client privilege or other protections.

Federal prosecutors say they have given KBR no special treatment and that the company has legal rights afforded to all firms whose employees have been charged with wrongdoing. "We did withhold some documents as being privileged," a KBR spokeswoman wrote, but added that the company has provided statements and grand jury testimony.

Mazon has pleaded not guilty to charges that he inflated a fuel contract. His attorneys say the fuel subcontract was accidentally inflated when figures were converted from U.S. dollars to Kuwaiti dinars then back again. At least 22 KBR troop support subcontracts were inflated through similar errors, Mazon's attorney J. Scott Arthur wrote in papers filed in Rock Island.

KBR attorneys said the company informed federal officials of three similar "double conversions" on other subcontracts. But KBR said it "has not undertaken an exhaustive search of its millions of pages of procurement documents" to determine whether other such errors exist.

Crusade of Surge and Siege

Hear No Evil, See No Evil

By Manuel Valenzuela

20/02/08 "ICH" -- -- - Americans’ ever-enduring, catatonic sleepwalk through the Empire’s vast array of bread and circus, as always produced by the Ministry of Truth and the Department of Propaganda, better known as the corporatist media, has succeeded in the creation of an ignorant, incurious and dumbed down populace completely bereft of knowledge of what is done in its name. With no concern for or understanding of geography, cultures, history, alien societies, the outside world and of the imperial aspirations of the Empire, Americans have proved easy targets to the manipulations and deceptions of the corporatist world. Seemingly unwilling to gain knowledge of anything outside American Idol or the weekly NASCAR rat race, the soldier ants and worker bees of the Empire are content to circumvent the horrors of war and the myriad crimes against humanity committed in their name in order to maintain their beautiful minds at peace.

Indeed, the corporatist media has triumphed in completely erasing America’s two disastrous occupations of Muslim lands from the peoples’ conscious and concern, in effect shifting the ongoing debacles away from the daily reality of Americans and towards the abyss of a most cavernous memory hole. Methodically and systematically, the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, with all their inconvenient truths, with all their disturbing realities, with all their corresponding death, suffering and destruction, have virtually vanished into a vacuum of nothingness, transported by the corporatist state into a clandestine and secretive reality, making of these disasters non-existent nightmares that vanish upon the waking of a new day.

This propaganda by omission, this “out of sight, out of mind” machination has virtually erased from American reality the disasters unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus guaranteeing in the public mind a complete ignorance in or understanding of a barbaric continuation to occupations stuck in the quicksand of fierce resistance and never-ending guerilla warfare. Thus, America’s aggressive wars, its imperial occupations, its crusade of surge and siege that has done so much harm to millions of people, not to mention to the moral standing of the nation, have become non-existent memories under cover of fog and haze.

To the American people, the hegemonic occupations now descending further into quagmire have become invisible creations that only surface in the rare instance that a branch of the corporate media goes off script and produces footage of death, destruction or suffering. Otherwise, the war against West Asia remains a figment of our imagination, a reality when our beautiful minds want it to be, an inconvenient truth that becomes fiction the moment we decide it is so.

As such, having been conditioned through the corporatist media’s ceaseless dehumanization propaganda to believe Arabs and Muslims sub-human enemies, having been manipulated into hating America’s new enemy and having the corporatist media erase Iraq and Afghanistan from the memory hole, the American people have developed a disturbing, almost criminal indifference for the millions of human beings dying, suffering or otherwise being affected by the Empire’s wars and occupations. To a vast majority of Americans, the malignant tumors that are Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, together with what they represent, are as hazy and as far removed from reality as last week’s episode of a favorite sitcom. These cesspools of immorality rarely, if ever, register in the beautiful minds of most Americans, only bothering the conscious when photos, video or whistleblowers surface to incriminate torturers, leaders and patsies. Only then are we forced to confront one of the myriad number of inconvenient truths the red, white and blue does across the globe.

When truth does not surface, however, we revert back to willful ignorance, aided by the fictions of television and the comfort of consumerism, for deep down, inside the dark recesses of our mind, we know exactly what is done in our name, though we chose, willfully, to erase it from memory, to suppress the reality of American criminality. Using denial and delusion in conjunction with conditioned brainwashing and manipulation, we have decided that crimes against humanity do not exist if those crimes are done to sub-human enemies. Thus the barbarian horde at our gates becomes undeserving of human rights and international laws protecting human beings because they do not fit our definition of human.

Thus, never do we seek to know the ugly realities of places like Guantanamo, nor how America’s gulags, with their brutal methods and tactics, will inevitably affect our way of life, or question why they exist in the first place. For us, America’s black sites are reserved for the evildoers wanting to destroy our way of life. Little do we realize, though, that our way of life is being eroded at these very same sites, one right at a time, done not by terrorists, but by those managing our descent into the breadbasket of despotism. Remaining passive, obedient, silently acquiescent and possessing the attention span of a gnat, hundreds of millions of Americans thus concern themselves only with what new toy they can add to the family collection, or what new product they can obediently purchase next, or what new reality show will entertain them the most. After all, we must preserve our “way of life”.

If Guantanamo and what it stands for does not directly affect us, if torture and perpetual suffering and dehumanizing conditions and sadistic treatment and the destruction of habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights only affects the dreaded dark skinned Arab or Muslim, then America’s beautiful minds need not concern themselves or have empathy, they need not contemplate the inflictions of wickedness on their fellow human beings, they need not realize the crimes done in their name, nor the evisceration of American morality, nor the new normal being established, nor the precedence beings set, nor the trial and error being conducted, nor the techniques being experimented and refined, nor the machinations of tyranny being perfected.

Thus, through our transcendental customs, our American “way of life,” of methodically following the exploits of celebrities dead or dying, of aimlessly producing and consuming, as always becoming hypnotized by modern day court jesters, jousters, gladiators and chariot races, as well as exhibiting idol-worshipping, messianic-like followings and tendencies over the Corporatist Party’s current crop of presidential contenders, we have chosen to ignore the plight of the innocent – for most prisoners are – in Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and other places of ill-repute. We have thus chosen to be good Americans, seeing no evil, hearing no evil, mistaking ashes for snow, and pretending the evil done in our name does not exist.


Reincarnation of the Habitual


To look inside one of America’s gulags is to look back at dark history, to times of brutality and primitiveness, using the tunnel of hindsight to peer at the dungeons of the Roman Empire and of the Middle Ages, with their chained and caged collections of dissidents, enemies and scapegoats, their persecuted and tortured, and their sadism and thirst for blood; it is to step back in time to days of Inquisitions and torture chambers, to eras of witch persecutions and heretic trials, of silencing threats to power and spawning a black cloud of fear and intimidation throughout society.

It is a return to days when humans had no right, to nights of barbarism, to the depravity and indecency of our mammalian past, to the possession of the human mind by the wicked demons inherent in man. Looking inside America’s gulags helps us remember that over and over, for as long as humankind has walked the plains of Earth, when authoritarians rise, as always carried high on the shoulders of fear and insecurity, morality, integrity and human rights become lost in a sea of tyranny. These institutions of immorality help us see beyond the veneer and the hypocrisy that those espousing freedom and liberty propagate, helping erase the fog of deception those claiming to be defenders of human rights engender.

America’s archipelago of gulags proves, once again, that the “western” mantra of values, modernity and morality is nothing but an empty shell built on self-adulation, delusion and echoes of ethnocentrism and exceptionalism. This hollow and cynical vociferation falls flat upon the challenge of evolving human rights, for in its claim of moral superiority, hiding behind the theoretical wonders of Judeo-Christian tradition, supposedly progressing away from the primitiveness of our past, the “western” tradition has been one of continuous mass murder, repression, tyranny, oppression, exploitation, suffering and destruction, most aimed directly at the peoples of the “south,” most directed at people not possessing the genetic mutation that turned skin color pale.

American gulags and its system of extraordinary renditions, green lighted at the very top of the food chain, proves to anyone not blinded by delusions and propaganda that America is not now and has never been morally superior to the rest of the world. From the very beginning of the republic, morality has given way to imperialism. Whether done through proxy, by puppets or by America’s own hands, control over the peoples of the world has usually involved some form of tyranny, as always dependent on the vast funding, financing, political support and training of the Empire. However, where once hidden under the veneer of democracy and freedom, under the ruthlessness of puppet dictators, America’s sordid, though clandestine, past has come to the surface thanks to the exposure of its methods and techniques, becoming an open acknowledgement of past indiscretions and present malfeasance.

From the School of the Americas, to research into psychological and physical torture at McGill University, to perfecting the art of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to support of every tin pot dictator and junta in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, to the training of their thugs, enforcers and torturers, America has always possessed the wickedness of human malevolence. Its claims of being the defender of human rights is and has always been hypocritical at best and farcical at worst. Today we can see the real America at Guantanamo and its extension of gulags and torture chambers, the America the world entire has known for the last century but that Americans are just now waking up to. For today’s gulags are evolved creations of yesterday’s criminality, just as they will be the inspirations for tomorrow’s tyranny.


Entrapment


Guantanamo, with its cages and sensory deprivation and barking dogs and dehumanization and its stress positions and forced feeding and extremes of cold and hot and its isolation and its medical/psychological experimentation and its waterboarding and its darker, more sinister methods of torture yet to be exposed magnifies American tyranny and her hypocrisy, her injustice and depravity, her criminality and arrogance. It exposes, more and more, the charade that the war on terror is, how the purpose of Guantanamo is not the imprisoning of terrorists, for most there are guilty only of bad luck, persecution, retribution and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but the methodical evisceration of the Constitution.

For Guantanamo, and its siblings, are a culmination of desperation, an attempt to rationalize the supposed existence of Arab and Muslim evil, an attempt to validate a fictional war on terror by incarcerating people falsely labeled “terrorists.” It is as much a torture center as it is a public relations and propaganda institution, a way to manipulate the American public both that Arab and Muslim terrorists exist, and that the American government is succeeding in bringing the terrorist threat to justice. It is a Hollywood-style set with its corresponding fictions and illusions of reality, a scam to convince Americans that a war that is concocted is indeed real, that it is being won.

The reality of the gulags exposes how an initial hunger for vengeance immediately after 9/11 has led to the imprisonment, suffering and torture of thousands, and how, knowing the falsity of charges and the innocence of men, America steadfastly continues shackling injustice, deciding to stage-manage the illusion of guilt as well as sacrifice the innocent to the continued myth of the so-called war on terror.

Kidnapped, traded in for money, picked up by a giant net of vengeance and imprisoned thanks to false accusations by rivals, the men at Guantanamo have become patsies in a world unconcerned for their rights. They are caged in a land of limbo, lost to the outside world, made to disappear, their lives practically an empty shell of their former selves . They are the scapegoats of American mendacity, labeled “terrorists” so that we can feel secure and protected, so that we can believe that evildoers hate us for our freedom, for our way of life. They are the poster children that grant the military-industrial complex a perpetual stream of blood money, a ceaseless parade of war, an endless flow of propaganda. They are, quite simply, the bread that gives authoritarianism sustenance, the wine that makes drunk with joy the enablers of fascism. They are, for all intents and purposes, dead men walking, ghosts without closure, phantoms forgotten by humanity.

Innocent of criminality, these individuals have been subjected to brutal and sadistic torture, as always leading to false confessions, their barbaric imprisonment and systemic dehumanization more a manifestation of American culture than of their resistance and human spirit. Many have been physically tortured, yet it is the more corrosive damage of psychological torture that has destroyed their minds, and their lives. Many will never return to normalcy, for what their minds have surely been subjected to no human brain should have to endure. Many have become the guinea pigs of psychologists and doctors experimenting with various methods of torture, trying to make torture more effective, more efficient.

Many have quietly, and conveniently, under cover of darkness or media blackout, been returned to their native countries, their innocence confirmed by their release, and by the silence of America. Forced to sign papers preventing them from speaking of their horrors, or from suing their torturers, they return a shell of their former selves, damaged beyond repair, scarred for life, forever to relive the horror they experienced in their nightmares and flashbacks. Yet many remain, shackled to American propaganda, held hostage to the illusions of the war on terror. As long as the fiction lives their guilt is assured, their imprisonment guaranteed. As long as tyrants fear persecution and imprisonment for criminality, they will live in cages. As long as they are used as the meat feeding the dogs of tyranny, they will remain encaged. As long as the authoritarian leadership seeks the continued erosion of the Constitution, and of our rights and freedoms, they will linger in perpetual purgatory, becoming the rotting carcass fed to the vultures of fascism.

Guantanamo’s cages cannot yet be opened and made empty, for to do so would be to expose the fictions, the charades, the method to the madness, the sheer immorality of the Empire. It would be to acknowledge injustice of innocence, the depravity of liberators, the criminality of leadership. Guantanamo’s gates cannot yet be closed, for the Crusade of Surge and Siege must continue, the enemy must exist, profits must remain, our rights and freedoms and liberties must be destroyed. New precedents of American legality must be established, kangaroo courts must convict, enemies must be punished, propaganda must manipulate and the innocent must be executed in order to increase leadership popularity, to refresh propaganda, to feed fear and to politicize elections.

America’s leadership is fully aware of the innocence of the vast majority of prisoners, yet cannot force itself to act against its own inhumanity. For to do so would be to admit mistakes, acknowledge criminality, condemn policies and destroy the authoritarian dream. Closing Guantanamo would expose the façade, the hall of smoke and mirrors, ending the subtleties of fear and intimidation being built around the American public. Perhaps more than anything, freeing the innocent and closing America’s torture centers would confirm the monstrosity of what America has become, destroying the foundations of a new normal being developed, maybe even shattering the bubble of manipulation cast over the population.

As long as Guantanamo remains the motives of fascists will survive, and the indifference of the American people will be assured. As long as its cages are occupied, as long as its torture rooms resonate with the screams of agony and suffering, Guantanamo will be the symbol of a new Amerika, one at war with the Arab and Muslim world, an Amerika at war with its people, and itself. As long as it remains a stain on humanity, America’s clandestine past and her immediate present will be exposed to more and more people, thereby freeing truth and knowledge, liberating the brainwashed and emancipating the manipulated.

Inside America’s gulags the future of the nation is being determined, one malevolent policy at a time, one sadistic interrogator at a time, one tortured soul at a time. It is here where our way of life is being altered, perhaps forever, not by terrorist evildoers hating us for our freedoms, but by fascism’s enablers doing the work of those domestic evildoers that hate us for our freedoms, for our way of life. In this Crusade of Surge and Siege, the Arab and Muslim victims have become a bridge of precedence set and normalcy born reaching out towards America, becoming the scapegoats and patsies granting access, and an omnipresent reach, to tyranny rising over that city on a hill once known as the United States of America.


Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet essayist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com . His essays appear regularly at various alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net .

Bush's Life of Constitutional Crime

Lies and Spies

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

President George W. Bush and his director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, are telling the American people that an unaccountable executive branch is necessary for their protection. Without the Protect America Act, Bush and McConnell claim, the executive branch will not be able to spy on terrorists, and we will all be blown up. Terrorists can only be stopped, Bush says, if Bush has the right to spy on everyone without any oversight by courts.

The fight over the Protect America Act has everything to do with our safety, only not in the way that Bush and McConnell assert.

Bush says the Democrats have put "our country more in danger of an attack" by letting the Protect America Act lapse. This claim is nonsense. The 30 year old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives the executive branch all the power it needs to spy on terrorists.

The choice between FISA and the Protect America Act has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, at least not from foreign terrorists. Bush and his brownshirts object to FISA, because the law requires Bush to obtain warrants from a FISA court. Warrants mean that Bush is accountable. Bush and his brownshirts argue that accountability is an infringement on the power of the president.

To escape accountability, the Brownshirt Party came up with the Protect America Act. This act eliminates Bush's accountability to judges and gives the telecom companies immunity from the felonies they committed by acquiescing in Bush's illegal spying.

Bush began violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 2001 when he spied on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.

Bush pressured telecom companies to break the law in order to enable his illegal spying. In court documents, Joseph P. Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communications International, states that his firm was approached more than six months before the September 11, 2001, attacks and asked to participate in a spying operation that Qwest believed to be illegal. When Qwest refused, the Bush administration withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nacchio himself was subsequently indicted for insider trading, sending the message to all telecom companies to cooperate with the Bush regime or else.

Bush has not been held accountable for the felonies he committed and for leading telecom companies into a life of crime.

As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them. As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bush's illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.

Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. For one reason or another, they have let the Orwellian-named Protect America Act expire.

With the Protect America Act, Bush and his brownshirts are trying to establish the independence of the executive branch from statutory law and the Constitution. The FISA law means that the president is accountable to federal judges for warrants. Bush and the brownshirt Republicans are striving to make the president independent of all accountability. The brownshirts insist that the leader knows best and can tolerate no interference from the law, the judiciary, the Congress, or the Constitution, and certainly not from the American people who, the brownshirts tell us, won't be safe unless Bush is very powerful.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison saw it differently. The American people cannot be safe unless the president is accountable and under many restraints.

Pray that the Democrats have caught on that they cannot give the executive branch unaccountable powers to spy and still have grounds on which to refuse the executive branch unaccountable powers elsewhere.

Republicans have used the "war on terror" to create an unaccountable executive. To prevent the presidency from becoming a dictatorial office, it is crucial that Congress cease acquiescing in Bush's grab for powers. As the Founding Fathers warned us, the terrorists we have to fear are the ones in power in Washington.

The al Qaeda terrorists, with whom Bush has been frightening us, have no power to destroy our liberties. Compared to the loss of liberty, a terrorist attack is nothing.

Meanwhile, Bush, the beneficiary of two stolen elections, has urged Zimbabwe to hold a fair election. America gets away with its hypocrisy because no one in our government has enough shame to blush.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Homeland Born and Bred

By Manuel Valenzuela

19/02/08 "ICH " -- -- Sojourn into the outer recesses of a nation bordering on madness, into a land deeply disturbed and emotionally bewildered, a world of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, of fanaticism and fundamentalism, entering a case study into fantasyland and escapism, taking a pilgrimage into realms both of purposeful ignorance and blindness, , of electing lifelong incompetents based on wanting to have a beer with them, walking through the dark valley of indifference, climbing the monolithic mountain of hubris, finally reaching the hallowed halls of smoke and mirrors, a place where only the blind lead the blind and where the deafening roars of death and destruction are easily suppressed in delusion and denial. Journey, if you will, into a nation that lost its moral compass inside the dungeons of fear and hatred.

Enter what fascists call the Homeland, what patriots used to call the United States of America, now named, simply, and appropriately, Amerika, a place where corporations enjoy more rights and protections than the People, where corporations – through their products and policies – help kill hundreds of thousands of human beings every year in the name of profit over people, making them mass murderers on a scale reserved only for humanity’s worst; a land controlled by the military-energy-industrial complex, with war the engine for unimaginable profits; a nation now without a Constitution, nor a moral standing; a country that has developed a thirst for human blood and an appetite for destruction; a land of Manifest Destiny leaving death, suffering and destruction in its wake; a sadist entity that develops and refines its crimes against humanity it inflicts upon the people of the world by first practicing them on its own citizenry.

It is inside the bowels of the Homeland that the malignant cancer that afflicts the country can be seen. The inner tumor inflicting constant pain can be seen through the eyes of a people so psychologically damaged by the never-before seen pressures on the human mind caused by capitalism run amok— conditioned to live to work and not work to live, thinking that work will set them free – that no nation on Earth has more citizens taking anti-depression and mind-numbing drugs in order to bandage an otherwise perpetually open gash. It can be seen through a people so internally despondent that only escapism through hours of fantasy-television watching or ceaseless consumption of materialistic goods, a modern version of bread and circus, can alleviate the stress and the pressures and the fatigue and the frustration and the anger developed in the pursuit of empty promises, of fictional dreams, in a world of the unreal.

Crisscross the land of the free and the home of the brave to see those who serve and protect abuse the people they serve. Tour Taser Nation, a land where authorities routinely inflict electroshock torture on the People, pulling the trigger first, asking questions later, as always enjoying inflicting pain and suffering on both innocent and guilty. Students, suspects, the infirm, the handicapped, pregnant women, motorists, the elderly, those asking questions, those protecting their rights and yes, now even children, all can be electroshocked into submission in a legalized form of torture that seems to grow by the day.

Taser Nation has become Torture Nation, zapping one unsuspecting citizen at a time, conditioning the population towards the new normal of police brutality and state-sanctioned intimidation. Welcome to the Land of the Brownshirts, a place where respect for human rights and loving your neighbor as yourself is now frowned upon, a place where bullying, intimidation, harassment and a budding police state are the new normal.

Take an excursion into the vast hinterlands of the Empire’s prison system, a network of concentration camps holding over two million human beings, most imprisoned for petty drug violations, most black or Latino or working class white, many suffering serious mental health problems, many trapped in a vicious circle of indigence, unemployment, incarceration and oppression at the hands of the state. Ostensibly designed to rehabilitate, these jails do the opposite, exacerbating mental anguish, frustration and anger, easing the transformation of human beings into rotting manifestations of lives lost and altered. It is here where Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib find their genesis.

These prisons, these cages of solitude and loneliness and madness and survival and violence, are where American society discards itself of the unwanted, the undesirable, those not comporting to the mores of Puritanical code. America’s vast prison system is where those fated from birth to the lower echelons of society’s caste system end up, those millions tattooed with the shackles of American society’s perpetual enslavement, destined to forever live in ghettos, inner city reservations and Bantustans, devoid of opportunity and a future, forced to dwell upon the realities of metaphysical imprisonment, desperate to survive either by illegality or escapism, oppressed and subjugated by authorities, marginalized by society, discriminated against by the state.

It is here, in these rotting machinations of rusted iron, metal bars and decrepit institutionalization, of fetid squalor and sadistic reality, where America’s brigade of automatons makes its problems disappear, creating an entire state and privatized prison-industrial complex dependent on crime, guilt, sentencing and prisoners. It is inside these penal institutions that America’s sadists and authoritarian personalities work, brutalizing and torturing inmates, oppressing and exploiting individuals, fomenting racism and hatred.

It is here where America trains her torturers and her malevolent warriors, her “bad apples” and her fascist enablers, exporting lessons learned abroad, infecting the innocent of occupied lands with the cruel and inhuman punishment that is as American as apple pie. It is here, in these creations of human hell, that crimes against humanity are perfected. It is inside the gates of hell that experimentation becomes indoctrination and where brutality becomes legalized torture.


Rise of a New Crusade


Enter the periphery of the Empire, where fear and hatred together form silent acquiescence to myriad crimes against humanity, where indifference and unconcern leads to war crimes going unpunished, where ignorance of the outside world leads to ignorance of forgotten occupations, where ballots cast help ease into power corruption and criminality and mass murder, where the two headed hydra of the Corporatist Party colludes to condemn millions in Muslim lands to premature death and wretched suffering, where critical thinking is shunned and backwardness embraced, and where progressive, humanist ideals find castration by the knives owned by those living inside the bubble of primitive and extinct days long since passed.

Traverse a nation conditioned to hate the Arab and Muslim world – a land of a billion strong – with its corresponding depravity of jingoism and xenophobia boiling beneath the surface, ready at a moment’s notice, or upon the happenstance of new Pearl Harbor events, to explode in searing anger, for a populace injected with the venom of fear and ignorance easily unleashes its wrath on the chosen dark-skinned scapegoats of the undeveloped world. Programmed fear and molded hatred born of inside jobs and false flag events have unlocked the flames of bigotry from the inner demons of the Empire, creating sub-human scapegoats whose only crime is inhabiting lands the vampire of hegemony needs in order to satiate its ceaseless craving for power and control. Thus, in the lands where black blood flows and the devil’s excrement spills you will find the Empire’s dripping, black stained fangs.

Enter, if you will, the land of Christian soldiers and born-again leaders, a terrain belonging to the army of Jesus and to the vengeful, disastrous deity of Old Testament belief, marching off to victory with a cross in one-hand and an M-16 in the other; a nation of bible camps, bible conventions, bible thumpers and Bible Belts; of mega-churches, mega- proselytizers and mega-hypocrisy; of fanaticism and fundamentalism; of illogical – and damaging – belief in the myth of creationism and the delusions of abstinence; of agents of intolerance, thirst for conversions and theocratic fantasy; of protection and respect of life only if life is that of a zygote, not an actual human being caught in war, terminal disease or endemic suffering; a place where belief in myth and fable and of the never seen is given prominence over reality and reason and modernity’s treatises; of blind faith trumping sound science; of a nation self-professing and monopolizing blessings by humankind’s archaic and historically grossly incompetent divinity; of extremist theism, evangelical psychosis and reactionary emotion; and of evangelical sheep being led to pasture by wolves dressed in shepherd’s clothing.

Indeed, enter the eye of the Middle East storm, the creator of hatred and blowback, the father and mother of the fictional war on terror, the epicenter of the crusade of surge and siege, the fulcrum of Christian extremism, the home of the American Taliban, the disseminator of the self-fulfilling prophesy of a so-called clash of civilizations. From the Cathedrals of Consumerism to the Enormous Edifices of Evangelism, from the Hubris of Imperialism to the Arrogance of Righteousness, it is the Empire itself, holding debauched neoliberal capitalism in one hand, the mutated, distorted principles of the Cross on the other, that has birthed this latest of Crusades into the lands of ancient history.

For it is America, through military might and the power of its weapons, though financial intimidation and market colonialism, that has proclaimed itself heir to the throne of Western imperialism, arrogantly declaring itself the next in line, of humankind’s great historical powers, to reach the apex of Empire. And so, as the maker of mankind’s new reality, as the molder of human destiny, the Pax Americana, through its legions of neoliberal capitalists, religious extremists, corporatist stooges and delusional neocons, has created a collision all its own making, a vicious cycle of hatred born and vengeance sought, of cause and effect, of boomeranging blowback, of making an enemy where none existed, of declaring war on an entire region of the planet.

Thus the fictional war on terror builds the momentum for it to invariably become real, for one billion Muslims – the vast majority peaceful and moderate – to see, and firmly believe, that a Crusade of Surge and Siege has thus been thrust upon them by Christian and uber-capitalist Amerika. By this method the fictional war on terror feeds itself, growing from an invention of fascist Amerika in search of enemies into a mature manifestation of anger and hatred, a true, and artificially engendered clash of civilizations gorging on the boiling animosity of East versus West.

Through momentum that has been building since September 2001, the architects of creative chaos, the designers of bogeymen, the fathers of shock capitalism, and the makers of artificial fear have coalesced into an amalgam of malevolence, planting the seed they hope will sprout a perpetual battle between Muslim and Christian, America and Middle Easterners. In the desert landscape of Muslim lands they have found an oasis from which to plant and grow a modern day crusade, not to reclaim the Holy Land, but to simply claim the vast fields of the Devil’s Excrement; not to rain freedom and democracy on uncivilized people, but to firmly plant permanence in strategic lands; not to bring Christianity to barbarians, but to violently force neoliberal capitalism down the throats of the Muslim world. Such is the method to the madness of the Crusade of Surge and Siege.


First they came for the Muslims…


Navigate from coast to coast, witnessing the persecution of Arab and Muslim groups, most set up by the same government that later concocts charges and smears against them in the usually unsuccessful attempt at maintaining the illusion of insecurity within the greater population. The state propagandists realize that in order to maintain the chimera of an enemy, that in order for the idea of terror to coagulate in the minds of the people, the illusion must be maintained that indeed an enemy exists. It must be made to look as though the enemy lives among us, that it is domestic as well as foreign, that it is planning to attack our way of life. This, of course, also creates the fantasy that the state is our protector, and that in order to protect us, we must sacrifice even more rights and freedoms for security.

The use of scapegoats, in this case the use of naïve, oftentimes incompetent, illiterate, indigent and sometimes even mentally deficient groups of Arab or Muslim men, usually with no political power and no financial resources, is part of a formula of fear designed inside the rubble of the Twin Towers that has been used to terrorize the American people into submitting to a fascist, despotic state. With every persecution of Arab and Muslim groups, charged with planning terrorist activity, usually with little or no proof, usually later found innocent by a court of law, the state further cements the fiction of fear and the illusion of perpetual insecurity in the citizenry. Propaganda makes bogeymen of scapegoats and scapegoats make obedient cowards of us all.

Of course every new persecution is met by a thunderous manifestation of corporate media coverage, bombarding the airwaves with the fictions and illusions of the charade that is the war on terror. There are enemies in our midst, we are told, dreaded bogeymen intent on killing us, trying to shoot up a mall, or blow up a building, or murder our children. Yet, as usually happens, when the alleged plot is discovered for the lie that it is, when the state is forced to drop charges, when a court of law throws out the case, when the innocent’s voice is validated and the condemned are once again free, there is not one camera or reporter or journalist ready or willing to bombard us with the truth. The blitzkrieg of guilt is suddenly replaced with the utter silence of innocence.

The damage, however, has already been done, for in the eyes of tens of millions the parade of fictions and the presumption of guilt that has so readily been beamed by the corporate media have already established the fear and insecurity that America is under siege by the barbarian horde and its evil religion. The illusion has thus been established, the excuse to erode yet more liberties has been successful, and the scapegoat has again been made the object of growing hatred. The people have again been manipulated, conditioned to hate the very idea of a Muslim or an Arab. The enemy has again been vilified, dehumanized and ostracized, the very term “Muslim” becoming denigrated, its practitioners and believers made to wear an invisible crescent moon on their breasts, becoming in many eyes unwelcome pariahs in the land of immigrants and the home of freedom.

Every new so-called uncovered plot, every new so-called uncovered threat, every new depiction of evil incarnate is, of course, used by the Ministry of Truth to validate the belief that the state is protecting us, that our sacrifice of freedoms and rights, that our submission to a police state has been of great service, that it is indeed working and must therefore continue, no matter how intrusive it becomes, no matter how much it destroys the Constitution and no matter how large Big Brother continues to grow. In the end, the formula of illusion, of imaginary enemies, of chosen scapegoats, works to create a harmonious narrative of terror abroad and terror at home, of a war on terror that must be perpetual and ceaseless, of a state working diligently to secure our freedom, our way of life, the American way.

The formula creates a submissive, compliant and acquiescent citizenry, one that does not blink at the mass murder of millions in the Middle East, at innumerable war crimes, at the use of torture and the creation of gulags. The scapegoating of Arab and Muslims by the state and the corporatist media has succeeded in fomenting a xenophobic hatred and anger against those people emanating from and residing in the Middle East. The mission has been accomplished, for the masses, thinking that the shredding of the Constitution has not affected them because they are not terrorists and have done nothing wrong, have voluntarily eviscerated their own rights and freedoms, for eventually, the crimes and horrors and human rights violations and erosion of liberties committed against the scapegoat class inevitably is imputed onto the majority. In a proto-fascist nation such as America, it is only a matter of time.

First the state comes for the chosen scapegoats, using them as the key to unlocking the rights and freedoms of the masses. The scapegoat is the excuse, the mirage to eviscerate the Constitution in the shadows, with the masses blinded to reality, and creating a new normal of fascism and tyranny. Thinking they are safe from the claws of the state, the masses eagerly give up more power and freedom and liberty in the belief that only the enemy is being targeted. Eventually, before the blink of a collective eye, the masses themselves are being eavesdropped, spied on, surveilled upon, interrogated, harassed, controlled, tortured and disappeared. Eventually, it is their rights and freedoms and liberties that no longer exist.

Told today’s eavesdropping and illegal wiretapping by the state is to spy on the few Muslim terrorists, and that immunity for state and corporations is needed for our vital security, we later learn that all Americans have been illegally spied on, that Big Brother is watching and listening and monitoring us all and that we have no recourse to halt or file suit or seek accountability against the same companies doing the spying. Thus yesterday’s malfeasance and criminality become the present’s new normal, and the closer we approach the precipice of despotism.

The formula works every time authoritarian entities are determined to destroy the fabric of a free and democratic people. It is written in humankind’s history books, yet it remains ignored and unlearned by those who refuse to know the history of man. It is in our history that our tendencies are deciphered. It is in our past that our patterns can be anticipated. In the end, compliant Americans become good Americans, freedom is replaced by tyranny, rights and liberties are usurped by a police and surveillance state and a constitutional past becomes a new normal of authoritarianism and corporatism.

This is what happens when the majority ignores the plight of a scapegoated minority that is powerless to fight the claws of a despotic state. This is what happens when the first signs of smoke over the horizon are seen and ignored, only later realizing, much too late to escape its wrath, that a raging inferno enveloping everything in its path has arrived. First they come for Muslims, then they come for us all.