xymphora

On Falluja:

1. Maj. Gen. John Sattler, director of operations for the United States Central Command:

   "Although this is a cease-fire, they're not purely defensive rules of engagement. In other words, if in fact the insurgent forces start to make attempts to set up weapons systems, to resupply units that are within the town, the marines have it within their rights to go in and take pre-emptive measures, i.e., strike against these units."



2. Tony Blair:

   "If American soldiers are being fired on, American soldiers are going to have to fire back."



3. Brig.-Gen. Mark Kimmitt:

   "Even though it may not look like it, there is still a determined aspiration on the part of the coalition to maintain a ceasefire and solve the situation in Falluja by peaceful means."



4. Donald Rumsfeld:

   "What's going on are some terrorists and regime elements have been attacking our forces, and our forces have been going out and killing them."



5. And, for comedy's sake, George Bush:

   "most of Falluja is returning to normal."

The Americans have established an 'Israeli ceasefire', where the other side is supposed to lay down its arms while the Americans continue to take provocative actions, up to and including massacres using tanks and gunships (remember the 'hudna', where the Palestinians stopped the fighting until provoked by the series of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian leaders?). Each of the quotes above (except, of course for the Chimp's) accurately reflects the realities of the American provocation of Falluja. The Americans got off on the wrong foot with Falluja, and are now upset because the locals won't let them wonder around unmolested. The Americans claim to be defending themselves, but only need to defend themselves because they are attacking the people of Falluja. The American military has taken the high colonialist attitude that it is intolerable for any vassal to object to its going wherever it wants. If the military doesn't like being attacked, why doesn't it stay away until a diplomatic solution can be found? There is absolutely no necessity for the Americans to continue to provoke Falluja, and in the process massacre hundreds of civilians. Instead, we get the Israeli approach, and a fairly obvious ploy by the neocons to turn American attacks on Falluja and Najaf into the beginnings of WW III in the Middle East.

The United States is now using AC-130 gunships in its attack on Falluja, firing into urban areas of an inhabited city. This represents yet again a new low in American military conduct since the end of World War II (the new lows keep coming faster and faster, with the United States now having descended completely into subhuman behavior). The AC-130 is an airplane developed to kill every human being that is under it. The Americans are sending a wall of lead down on targets with no possible way to know whether the targets are civilians or insurgents (although it seems to me that everybody who is defending himself, his home, and his family from an illegal attack by an illegal and brutal occupying army must be considered to be a civilian; on the other hand, the Americans define everyone who they kill as a terrorist). Do I hear any uproar from Americans on what is being done in their names? No. Just a deafening silence.

Uri Avnery puts the following facts together:

1. the revelations of Mordechai Vanunu actually did not hurt the State of Israel, but allowed information about Israel's nuclear deterrent to become public (a nuclear deterrent isn't much good if it is secret), while allowing Israel to officially deny it;


2. one of the first things Vanunu said on his release was that the female agent who entrapped him wasn't a Mossad agent, but was working for the FBI or CIA;


3. neocon undersecretary of state for arms control and international security John Bolton made a special visit to Israel to discuss the implications of Vanunu's release with Gideon Frank, the director general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission;

to conclude that the real reason Vanunu was imprisoned was to stop his revealing the American involvement in the Israeli nuclear program. All the restrictions on Vanunu are not to prevent him from talking about the nuclear program, for after all what else could he say that he hasn't already said, but to prevent him from mentioning the American sponsorship of it. Avnery's theory makes perfect sense. Israel's spectacular kidnapping, show trial, and brutal treatment of Vanunu has done nothing but emphasize Israel's nuclear program. There must be some other reason why he needed to be hidden away. The Americans would be deeply embarrassed if it was revealed that they created Israel's illegal nuclear program as part of their ongoing use of Israel as a weapon in their control of the Middle East. The entrapping agent, 'Cindy', whose real name is Cheryl Hanin Bentov, now lives in a suburb of Orlando, Florida.

I'm a great fan of the DOE Network and its website (for more on the DOE Network, see here and here and here and here). They try to identify unidentified bodies and try to discover what happened to missing persons. Some of the individual stories are quite eerie (to see the newest cases scroll down on the sidebar of the site to 'Site Updates'; older cases are located under the headings 'Unexplained Disappearances' and 'Unidentified Victims' on the sidebar). The story of these two people gives me the creeps. Somebody must know who they are.

Why did they set the referenda up in Cyprus so that they gave the Greek side an effective veto over whether the Turkish side of Cyprus gets to join the European Union? Since the Greek side was going to be in regardless of the results, there was no downside to their voting in such a way to exclude the Turks. The whole structure of the voting was set up in such a way that the Turks never had a chance. How dumb is that? Is this another part of the battle to keep Turkey out of Europe (revenge for 1683)? At the very least, it is time to lift the embargoes against the Turkish side.

This post by Josh Marshall probably hits one of the reasons why Cheney is so secretive about his oil discussions. His post-9-11 designs on Iraqi oil fields may provide the clue to the contents of his March 2001 and still very secret oil discussions (Cheney has been wearing the courts out trying to keep these discussions under wraps). If Cheney was out to steal another country's oil fields starting even before September 11, it clarifies why all the lies about Iraq - weapons of mass destruction, ties of Saddam to al Qaeda, etc. - were necessary. It also means the attack on Iraq, up to and including the massive war crimes currently being conducted by American troops against Iraqi civilians, was even more illegitimate than we thought. It was about the oil!

We have enough information now that we can figure out some of the conspiracy behind 9-11. There were three groups, each with differing amounts of information - the mainstream of the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, and the actual plotters of the attack:

1. Much as it is fun to say 'Bush knew', I don't think he did, or at least not everything. It is apparent from the information that we have that at least the main part of the Bush Administration (Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, etc. - I pointedly leave out Cheney from this list) did not anticipate that airplanes would be hijacked and flown into buildings. Given all the specific warnings that they had, including the threat of an actual attack against Bush in Genoa in July, this seems incredible, but I think the Bush Administration was fooled, or managed to fool itself, into believing that another kind of attack was coming (there is a characteristic arrogance in the certainty they have in all their decisions and opinions). There was so much information that an attack was coming that Tenet was described to be 'nearly frantic', and the specific CIA warning to Bush on August 6 was entitled 'Bin Laden determined to strike in US' (which, at its most specific, stated: ". . . FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."). At the same time, the Pentagon, while preparing for just such an attack against buildings, was poo-pooing the idea that it would ever actually occur. I think the lack of imagination in the Bush Administration, together with probable specific disinformation from the Pentagon, led the main part of the Bush Administration into believing that a terrorist attack on American soil by al Qaeda was imminent, but that such an attack would take the form of a run-of-the mill hijacking of a commercial aircraft with the taking of American hostages. I imagine that they thought that such an attack might result in minimal American deaths, and an Entebbe-style rescue would make Bush look like a strong leader. As well, they could immediately tie the attack into Iraq, and use it as the excuse for the attack on Iraq that we now know was being planned even before the inauguration. From the point of view of the Bush Administration, a simple hijacking was not something that could be stopped. Efforts to prevent it would have entailed expensive security arrangements which would have hurt Bush's friends in the airline industry, and would not have provided much opportunity for the kind of parasitic profiteering by Bush's military-industrial complex friends that the Bushites see as the real purpose of government. There were no big profits to be made in stopping a hijacking, and lots of profits to be made in missile defense, so Bush wanted to dedicate American taxpayer money to missile defense and not counterterrorism (and the pervert Ashcroft wanted to spend the counterterrorism money looking for pictures of naked people). It is as simple as that. The theory that the Bush Administration was expecting a hijacking explains a lot of things:
   
   
   • Why the whole Administration was so seemingly passive in the face of Tenet's frantic warnings, not to mention the whole history of warnings from various sources, including just about any government you could name (not to mention, from the revelations of Sibel Edmonds, the FBI's specific information; note that Edmonds assumes that if the FBI knew, the Bush Administration knew, which is an incorrect assumption if the FBI was intentionally withholding information).
   
   
   • Why Ashcroft changed his flying habits in July (his recent testimony before the 9-11 commission was obviously a barefaced lie).
   
   
   • Why Bush did nothing in the classroom in Florida, and didn't even seem that upset at the news, while he waited for his speech writers to rewrite the speech they had prepared for him to give when a normal hijacking occurred, and why Ari Fleisher held up a sign telling Bush "DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET" (they didn't want him to jump the gun and start giving his inappropriate pre-planned hijacking speech).
   
   
   • How this bunch of people, who certainly aren't moral but also aren't psychopaths - except, of course, for Cheney - could have allowed planes to crash into buildings (they were as surprised as everyone else as they expected a normal hijacking).
   
   
   • Why the whole Administration - except, of course, for Cheney - seemed completely addled and confused, and let the Pentagon, which seemed to know exactly what it was doing, take Bush on a day-long tour of American air force bases.
   
   
   
   


2. The second group is the Pentagon, and in particular those people who control NORAD. No thinking person can look at the facts of 9-11 and conclude that the NORAD planes weren't intentionally held back from preventing the crashes. Given the speed of the NORAD aircraft, the short distance to the targets, and the time that they had, all the attacking planes could have been intercepted. The only one that possibly was intercepted is Flight 93. We therefore can say with certainty that the Pentagon, or a part of it, was involved in the plot. It is important to note that it was the Pentagon which downplayed the risk of a plane attack against buildings while preparing for such an eventuality. The Pentagon officials cancelled their travel plans for the morning of September 11 because they knew the timing and nature of the attack (whoever warned Willie Brown was more likely to be in the Pentagon or the FBI than in the Bush Administration: if Rice knew, do you think she'd risk her life telling Brown, and would he risk her life talking about it?). It was in part the Pentagon which set the Bush Administration up to think it would be a normal hijacking (do you think that former Secretary of Defense Cheney might have been the main liaison in that regard?).


3. The last group are the people who planned the whole attack. I am amused we're still hearing stories about alleged Saudi involvement. Whatever financial connections the Saudis may have to fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups, and I have no doubt that there are such connections, I know they don't control NORAD or the FBI. Americans are going to have to come to grips with the fact that this had to be a home-grown operation. Besides all the inside help the terrorists had in their various confrontations with authorities in the months preceding 9-11, and the inside help that they had to have had at the airports to smuggle in the weapons we now know they had (forget about box cutters), and the fact that it is completely implausible that this extremely sophisticated operation was carried out by a motley crew of people most of whom had never been in the United States before, directed by a man living in a cave in Afghanistan, there is the most important fact of all. After each hijacking, the hijackers were in no hurry to get to their targets. Any normal hijackers would have feared interception, and would have made a bee-line for their goal. Not these guys. In fact Flights 77 and 93 almost seemed to go on sightseeing tours of the northeastern United States, and the Pentagon may have eventually had to shoot down Flight 93 because the length of time it was in the air was getting embarrassing. All the hijackers knew they weren't going to be intercepted, just as they knew they could have innumerable contacts with authorities in the United States without being detained or even put under suspicion. They knew that nobody would try to stop them. Therefore, the planners of the attack knew that NORAD would be stood down on the morning of September 11.

In summary, the Bush Administration thought the attack was coming but thought it would be a normal hijacking. They didn't see any profitable way to stop it, and thought they could use it to make Bush look presidential while giving them an excuse to attack Iraq. They were deceived into their views in part by the Pentagon, who prepared for an airplane attack against buildings while downplaying the risk of it ever happening (and in part by the FBI, who withheld information). NORAD's normal automatic protective actions were subverted. The American plotters of the attack were able to tell the hijackers that they were safe from interception, which they could only do if they had very high connections to the Pentagon and other parts of the American government.

We're going to be hearing a lot more of the idea that terrorist actions can affect elections in democratic countries, and that if the electorate votes for certain political parties the terrorists will have won. The neocons have been very successful in blanketing the world with their insane ideas about the nature of terrorism, ideas which serve their purposes very well but which are completely against the interests of normal people around the world. The neocon world-view is based on the following assumptions:

• The United States is inherently good.


• The terrorists are inherently evil.


• There are no rational reasons for terrorism.


• Terrorism is the Manichaean battle between the Forces of Good, consisting of the United States and its allies, and the Forces of Evil, consisting of Islamic fundamentalism.


• The battle against terrorism is an actual war, where victory will only be achieved through military means.

This world-view suits the interests of the neocons for the following reasons:

• It allows them to trumpet American moral superiority, with the implication that God is behind the actions of the United States.


• It allows them to wallow in a racist hatred of the Muslim world.


• It allows them to build theories of the inherent inferiority of the Muslim and Arab worlds, thus allowing them to assert that these worlds can't have democracy as they are not suited to it.


• It allows them to avoid taking responsibility for years of colonial oppression which has stolen resources and deprived the people of the Middle East access to democracy and modern liberal ideas.


• It allows them to avoid having to face the issue of root causes, and avoid having to change American behavior, exploitative and colonialist, in the Middle East.


• By turning the war on terror into a war rather than a police or intelligence operation, it allows them to have excuses for wars which were desired for other reasons (Afghanistan, and, as we have seen with all the recent revelations about Bush, Iraq, not to mention upcoming wars against Syria and Iran).


• It allows them to engage in a massive military build-up in fighting the war on terror, thus benefiting the military-industrial complex at the expense of everyone else.


• It allows them to hide one of the main causes of the problem, Israel's ongoing theft of Palestinian lands coupled with Israeli state terrorism against the Palestinian people, and the American encouragement of Israel's actions.


• It allows them to realize Michael Ledeen's nirvana of a United States completely militarized, ruled by fear which ends civil rights, and on a constant war footing, with every aspect of American life disciplined by the all-pervasive need to fight the war on terror.


• By encouraging terrorist reprisals against the implementation of the American war on terror, it allows them to have a continuing fuel for the fear which is their main weapon against the people of the world.

The model of the world proposed by the neocons suits them very well. Under the neocon assumptions, if terrorism occurs and an electorate votes for a party with a sane, constructive and non-fear-ridden attitude towards terrorism, the terrorists have succeeded in blackmailing the country into agreeing to the terms of the terrorists. While this is the prevailing view of almost every commentator in the United States, it is also wrong, and actually quite insane. It is the world-view to have if you want to live in fear for the rest of your life, with dwindling civil liberties, in a constant state of war, and with social programs ruined to pay the military-industrial complex for the tools of war. With the bumbling and overtly mendacious actions of the Aznar government in Spain, the people of Spain woke up to what the rest of the world must see, that the war on terrorism is a sham perpetrated by the neocons and their followers to achieve goals none of the rest of us want. There are real ways to stop terrorism, and in fact the methods of the neocons actually increase terrorism (which suits them just fine). Governments have to start taking the following steps:

1. Treat the fight against terrorism as a police and intelligence matter, and not as an excuse for wars which only increase the risk of terrorism. Bush could have made real efforts to prevent terrorism before 9-11, but that would have involved paying salaries to FBI and intelligence agents, and not diverting money to his corporate friends to fund the scam that is missile defense. The deep truth is that the Bush Administration's profound disinterest in preventing terrorism was due to the fact that they could see no way for their corporate friends to make money from it. After September 11, Bush could have sent FBI agents to Afghanistan to capture the alleged perpetrators behind 9-11, but chose to use 9-11 as an excuse to attack Afghanistan and later Iraq, countries he wanted to attack for other reasons. It is not a coincidence that the only terrorists who have been apprehended have been apprehended by countries other than the United States. Fighting terrorism through war is not only ineffective, it is actually completely counterproductive, increasing the future risk of terrorist attacks by the relatives of the victims of the wars. Terrorists could not have better recruitment advertising that the actions of the United States. The United States is going to suffer the fallout from the attack on Iraq for a long time.


2. Stop seeing the war against terror as a comic-book battle between Good and Evil. Americans have to start viewing the terrorists as something other than animals. They are human beings the same as everyone else, and want the same goals as everyone else. These goals are pretty boring. They would like to be able to live in peace in countries whose assets are not being stolen by corrupt governments run by puppets of American oil companies, they would like to be able to live without jackbooted American thugs wandering around their neighborhoods, and they would like to be able to choose their own leaders. By casting racist aspersions against the entire Muslim world, the neocons play into inherent racist ideas and dehumanize the enemy. This allows them the excuse to impose unspeakable horrors on these people ('shock and awe'), while denying them a normal existence because they claim these untermenschen aren't capable of handling ideas like democracy.


3. Start paying attention to root causes. A good starting point would be to acknowledge the essential justice behind bin Laden's main demands. Stop supporting tyrants who are bribed by American money to allow national assets to be stolen by American corporations, stop basing troops in areas of holy sites, and stop the completely one-sided support of the Israeli state terrorism which is being used in the theft of Palestinian lands. The neocon thesis is that the terrorists have no reason other than an essential evil for what they do. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real evil is what one hundred years of colonial repression has done to the Middle East, and the United States is the current sole colonial power. Any group of people subject to the horrors imposed on them by the Americans would try to fight back in self-defense. If Americans want to see terrorism as a war they have to realize that they started it, and only they can make the changes which will stop it.


4. Stop living in a culture of manufactured fear. Not only were the Spanish not caving in to terrorism, they were actually exhibiting a considerable amount of courage by refusing to continue to live in the insane world of the neocons. You don't have to be constantly in terror, hoping that your militaristic government will save you from the forces of evil. By voting for governments with adult and responsible attitudes towards the rest of the world, you can actually take steps to break the culture of fear.

The Spanish people realized that the neocon war on terror is actually a deception created for many purposes, not one of which is the elimination of terrorism. In fact, the way the war on terror is being waged by the U. S. and its allies actually increases the danger of terrorism. There are actually two groups of terrorists in the world, the Islamic fundamentalists, and the American neocons. Each group feeds off the other, and the rest of us get caught in the crossfire. Of the two groups, the neocons are by far the better armed, and by far the more dangerous. It is time for the rest of us to stop feeding their insanity.

Americans have a remarkable moral obtuseness when it comes to the sins committed in their name. The current debate over whether Iraq is Vietnam centers on American casualty rates, with the millions of people who were killed or whose lives were ruined in Vietnam and Cambodia and the hundreds of thousands of people who where killed or whose lives were ruined in Iraq completely irrelevant to most Americans. Americans are concerned about four guns-for-hire killed in a war zone in Iraq - a war zone because the Americans were in the middle of an attack against the city of Falluja - and could care less that they are morally responsible for a massacre of massive proportions which is still going on in that same city. Sharon can continue to get away with his targeted assassinations because the general American racist assumption is that the lives of brown-skinned people are irrelevant to American interests. Here is where it gets interesting. Those four guns-for-hire may very well have been killed and mutilated as a result of Iraqi fury over perceived American involvement in the targeted assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin. The latest assassination, that of Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, will cause at least equal outrage in Iraq. Americans are probably going to attack the holy city of Najaf, a move which will cause even greater fury, and will lead to a major battle. Sharon's assassinations are blamed on the Americans, and will directly increase the strength and ferocity of the resistance. Americans couldn't care less about the Palestinians, but will they care that there will certainly be more dead American soldiers in Iraq as a direct consequence of Sharon's actions?

The ground has been prepared for Americans to be set up for a pre-election terrorist attack meant to turn a close election in favor of Bush. Condoleezza Rice said:

". . . I think that we do have to take very seriously the thought that the terrorists might have learned, we hope, the wrong lesson from Spain. I think we also have to take seriously that they might try during the cycle leading up to the election to do something. In some ways, it seems like it would be too good to pass up for them, and so we are actively looking at that possibility, actively trying to make certain that we are responding appropriately."

"We hope"? Can't you just see the arguments after an October attack. The terrorists want you to be scared like the Spanish and vote for the appeasers. If you vote Democrat, the terrorists will have won. It would probably be enough to win the election for Bush.

The number of U. S. troops killed in Iraq in the first two weeks of April is the highest such total since October 1971 in Vietnem. The warmongers who have been trying desperately to downplay the carnage can no longer deny the obvious: Iraq is Vietnam.

Ninety-three American troops died in Iraq in the first half of April. These are official Pentagon numbers; the real total is no doubt higher. We also have to take into account the fact that modern military medicine is so good that soldiers who would have died in other wars are kept alive, albeit with a considerably reduced quality of life. On top of that, we should include dead military contractors in the total, who are doing much of the work that soldiers used to do (one of the main reasons the Pentagon uses contractors is that they keep the casualty figures down). We have no way of knowing how many dead contractors there are. Things are not getting better, they are getting worse. Bremer's decisions have led to an all-out war with much of the country, and the massacre in Falluja, which continues, together with the bombing of mosques, ensures that Iraqis will be good and mad for a long time. Bush's amazing remarks on Israel and the Palestinians, which were so one-sided that even the Israelis were shocked, guarantee that the United States is entering into some sort of long-term conflict with the whole Muslim world. Sharon has confirmed that there will be no Palestinian state, which makes all the more ludicrous Bush's assertion that such a state will have to be the destination for those Palestinians seeking a right of return. With Bremer's actions, the atrocities of the American military in Iraq, and Bush's remarks on Palestine, the United States has essentially declared war on the Muslim world, and the future looks grim. But let's just take the ninety-three dead in two weeks in Iraq. The United States was in Vietnam for twelve or fifteen years and lost 58,000 soldiers (and very few of those in the first years). If we say twelve years is 144 months, that is a rate of a little over 400 per month. Iraq is now at a rate of 186 a month, and getting worse. Just wait til the real fighting begins!

Bush (or here):

"In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

So that's it, then. Fifty years of extreme right-wing lunatic Israeli yearnings have been realized in these few words. Despite years of tacit approval - not to mention funding - by the American government of the process of stealing the land from the Palestinians, no American president has ever been stupid enough to put into words an explicit approval for the ongoing Israeli breach of international law (needless to say, you can be sure that despite Sharon's assurances no major Israeli settlement in either the Gaza Strip or the West Bank will be given up). Bush even used the term 'realities on the ground', which of course directly refers to fifty years of illegal Israeli incursions on Palestinian lands, culminating in a frenzy of theft under the rule of Sharon, all with a scheme of pretending that the thefts are temporary while intending them to be permanent (the Israelis call this 'facts on the ground', and the Bush reference is crystal clear). Bush's approval of Israeli actions is a massive tragedy, for Israelis, for Palestinians, and, ultimately, for Americans, and represents the apotheosis of Zionist neocon power in Washington (you can bet there were a lot of Washington parties celebrating - mazel tov! - their overwhelming victory). In all the darkness, there is yet some hope:

1. For years the Israelis have defended the settlements as temporary measures intended only for Israeli 'security'. The express promise was that Israel would abandon the settlements and live up to international law once its security was assured in a peace treaty with the Palestinians. We've heard constant stories about the desire to the Palestinians to destroy the state of Israel, and even references to the Holocaust ('never again') to explain why this policy was necessary. Sharon's final corruption of Bush has put an end to all that. The veils have been lifted, the lies revealed. It never had anything to do about security. This was an elaborate fifty-year old hoax perpetrated on the world to hide the real goal of stealing as much land from the Palestinian inhabitants of that land as possible. Once Sharon revealed that the land theft was to be permanent, regardless of the state of peace negotiations with the Palestinians, he put paid to the Israeli lies about security. We need never again give any credence to Israeli whining of how the Palestinians want to push them into the sea, of how they have to shoot children in the face and bulldoze building over their occupants in self-defense, of how the obvious cause of Palestinian unrest is actually the guarantee of Israeli peace. The lying is over. The goal was always land theft, and Sharon and Bush have proved it.


2. The Palestinians have learned a valuable lesson. For years they have been torn between the single-state and the two-state solutions, and this has made their political efforts unsuccessful. Now they know for certain that a two-state solution is impossible. Sharon not only gets to keep the best lands Israel has already stolen, but can expand as much as he wants. All that would be left for a Palestinian state are the worst lands, waterless, disconnected, and bisected by Israeli military roads. There is no possibility for a Palestinian state, but only a Palestinian bantustan. Therefore, Palestinians now know they must direct their political, diplomatic, and direct action efforts towards a single-state solution, with one-person, one-vote over the whole area comprising Israel and the Occupied Territories. Demographics will take care of the rest.

Even though Bush's words usher in an era of immense tragedy, there is room for hope. American have allowed Israel to lie about its true motives while constantly expanding the settlements. The world now has conclusive proof of the lies, and the chance to move forward with a much clearer understanding of what is really going on.

As a result of the American massacre in Falluja, there are so many dead that the survivors have had to resort to burial in mass graves. I guess we won't be hearing any more from the American propaganda machine about the evils of Saddam's mass graves (just as Bush can no longer campaign on 9-11 when it is so apparent that his inadvertence - or worse - allowed it to happen). Americans can apparently put up with an infinite amount of evil produced by their own military, and have a surprisingly large tolerance for deaths of their own soldiers, but there is one thing they will not put up with. Hostages. The cease-fire in Falluja, which really wasn't a cease-fire but did represent a reduction in the American rate of slaughter, was as a result of as little as one American hostage. Bremer claims he won't be forced to negotiate due to hostage taking, but he is doing just that. Carter's misadventures in Iran and Reagan's misadventures in Lebanon were caused by worries over American hostages. For some reason, hostages drive Americans crazy. Iraqis are in a particularly fortunate situation as Rumsfeld's privatization of the American army (the privatization is becoming the Achilles heel of the American military), together with the mass of parasites from companies like Halliburton who arrived to steal all they could carry, mean that Iraq is crawling with juicy potential hostages. Just imagine the disgusting American media interviewing the tearful family members of some carpetbagger caught with his hand in the cookie jar and now threatened with becoming a living charcoal briquette. The Iraqis now realize that if they want to rid their country of evil they must start picking up hostages, dozens or even hundreds of them, preferably American. Bush's claims that he will not be moved will fall apart as soon as his poll results start to fall apart.

The current American outrage is of course Falluja, but we mustn't forget Haiti. Here is a good article on the history of Haiti as background to the coup, the thugs the Americans support, and the thugs in the Bush Administration (Reich and Noriega) who were almost certainly involved. Information is starting to come out about direct American military involvement in training the armed gangs who have taken over the country. A preliminary report issued by the Investigation Commission on Haiti, a group investigating the matter, concluded that "200 soldiers of the US Special Forces arrived in the Dominican Republic, with the authorization of Dominican President Hipolito Mejia, as a part of the military operation to train Haitian rebels." In an interview with Amy Goodman, Dr. Luis Barrios, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College in New York City and a member of the Commission, said:

"We were running interviews at the Dominican Republic and also field trips trying to get the information on what was going on in the Dominican Republic for the last two years. And preliminary reports from the report that we put together on the commission is that at least for two years, the group of rebels were living in the Dominican Republic. They were training different settings, military settings that belongs to the Dominican government. Also in San Cristobar. Also that they were receiving technical training every month through the so-called International Republican Institute at Santo Domingo hotel every month. That was also the day for payment."

The International Republican Institute (IRI) is the front used by extreme U. S. right-wing interests to stifle democracy around the world. In this case it worked with American Special Forces for a period of two years to train the army led by the murderers and gangsters who the Americans have now put in charge in Haiti. Dr. Barrios continues, talking about the IRI:

"They are behind this training. Not only the technical but also the money, and they were also some of the people who facilitate the so-called 20,000 M-16 rifles that were supposed to go into the Dominican armed forces and in some way most of them went into the houses of the rebels in the Dominican Republic. In addition to that, also, we identified through information for lawyers, journalists and also ex-militaries and militaries from the Dominican Republic that 200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels, Haitian rebels before going into Haiti."

and, tying together the American pattern of behavior:

"Well, it's the same pattern we have been following for years. It happened with Panama. It happened with Chile. It happened with all of the atrocities they have been running against Cuba and also Venezuela. It happened in my country, Puerto Rico, with all of the situations of being a colony. Going there, saying that we underestimate this kind of investigation. We understand it's not necessary. We have already run the investigation. Please believe in what we're saying is this kind of blind faith that makes people stupid, is they want to assess what Colin Powell is trying to get us to believe. We understand it's a lot of illegal actions here, violations of the Haiti constitution, but also a violation of international laws. He knows that, but he's trying to go there as a puppet and mask all of these crimes on behalf of the U.S.A. government. He knows he's guilty. He knows this government is guilty of overthrowing a democratic government. This is the third one, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti and now they're looking at Cuba and Venezuela. This is how they do this."

This is how they do this. Condoleeza Rice, who you'd think would have other things to do these days, has threatened Jamaica with dire consequences if they do not immediately expel President Aristide. Jamaica, to its credit, has ignored her.

The United States hasn't engaged in a massacre like Falluja since Vietnam days, and despite all the nasty things I write about the United States, I am a little shocked. It all happened so quickly and so easily, and American troops committed the vilest of war crimes with no obvious complaints. One theory is that the style and intensity of the fighting is a reflection of American weakness in Iraq, with the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz changes to the American military leaving it so undermanned that it has to resort to mass civilian slaughter to achieve what a proper army could do more humanely. Whatever the reason, the Americans hit all the high points:

• extremely violent collective punishment against thousands of civilians supposedly for having had something to do with the deaths of four Americans who were said to be civilian security guards;


• breach of every international law you could think of;


• murder of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, and the denial of medical treatment and supplies to the surviving wounded, who may number in the thousands;


• the Israeli style of slaughter introduced to the American army;


• bombing of at least one mosque;


• senseless and counterproductive carnage which will have the opposite effect than the stated goal of pacifying the population, and has served to radicalize the whole country, if not the whole world;


• all of the above immediately broadcast in living color to the entire Muslim world (wonderful recruiting posters for violent Islamic fundamentalists).

All of this goes on while Bush catches fish and Cheney is in Japan. Have the Americans gone mad, or is this the conclusive proof that the insane neocons are trying to start WW III? They are already starting to blame Iran for the unrest in Iraq, a story reminiscent of the lies they told about Iraq to justify that attack. As far as I can tell, Americans could care less that they are morally responsible for all this mayhem. All they care about is being whipped up into a jingoistic fury because a few American mercenaries might have died on some mysterious mission in the middle of a war zone. It's funny that the last excuse the Americans have for the attack on Iraq, all the other justifications having proven to be lies, is that the lives of Iraqis are better than they would have been under Saddam. Even the so-called left-wingers continue to trot out the excuse that a dictator as evil as Saddam had to be removed. Whatever you may say about Saddam, he would never have committed this kind of atrocity as collective punishment for the deaths of four of his security guards. There is no longer any possible argument that the Iraqi people are better off under the American dictatorship than they were under Saddam's dictatorship. Every single last argument for the attack, both from the right and the 'left', has died along with the many victims of the American massacre in Falluja.

I have the feeling that the importance of events in Iraq isn't really registering:

1. The United States is in the middle of a full-fledged Chechnya- or Jenin-style massacre of civilians in Falluja (pictures), and is compounding the war crimes by not allowing aid to be delivered or the injured to be rescued (very Israeli). This represents a new step into the moral abyss that the United States has largely tried to avoid until now: a hands-on massacre with denial of medical relief for the civilian casualties. Remember, this is all due to the fact that four mercenaries who were accompanying a shipment of 'goods' - they must have been some 'goods' - got turned into briquettes.


2. The Americans thought they had conquered Iraq, but just like the movie 'Groundhog Day', they wake up and find they have to do it all over again.


3. The Americans have lost control of a significant chunk of Baghdad, Sadr City, and aren't going to get it back without another massacre, even worse than the one in Falluja.


4. This same sort of problem is repeated all over southern Iraq.


5. All Iraqis, Sunni and Shi'ite, are absolutely furious at the Americans for what they are doing (including blowing up a mosque, which must be part of Bremer's plan to start WW III against the Muslim world), and anger at the Americans is bringing them together. This anger isn't going to go away, and will make the country completely ungovernable.


6. The American general in charge of the carnage, Gen. John Abizaid, is washing his hands (Pontus Pilot at Easter!) of the consequences of having to fight this war with the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz emaciated U. S. Army, perhaps signaling that he thinks he will fail.

All of this is happening behind the backs of the main part of the American government. Bush has gone fishing! Can you name another American President who goes on holiday during a war? Cheney has gone off to Asia, conveniently away from having to take any action or blame. Gen. Abizaid is trying to indicate, as best he can, that the United States is being led down the road to disaster by the neocons fronted by Bremer in Iraq. The parallel government of neocons is now completely in control, and is leading the United States to ruin. It is not American policy to start WW III or to take actions which will delay the June transfer of power, but these things are happening at the instance of the neocons and nobody seems to notice! While Bush hooks the big one, Iraq devolves into the start of WW III, Afghanistan is falling apart, and the North Koreans say Washington is "driving the military situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war."

From Agence France-Presse:

"THOUSANDS of Sunni and Shiite Muslims forced their way through US military checkpoints Thursday to ferry food and medical supplies to the besieged Sunni bastion of Fallujah where US marines are trying to crush insurgents.

Troops in armoured vehicles tried to stop the convoy of cars and pedestrians from reaching the town located 50 kilometers west of Baghdad.

But US forces were overwhelmed as residents of villages west of the capital came to the convoy's assistance, hurling insults and stones at the beleaguered troops."

Even by American moral standards, which as we all know are lower than whale shit, preventing food and medical supplies from reaching a largely civilian population is pretty despicable, not to mention a breach of international law. But it is the actions of the Iraqis which are truly interesting. Besides the fact we are seeing Shi'ites and Sunnis working side by side to right an unspeakable wrong, the nature of their resistance is also remarkable. It has already been compared to the Palestinian intifada. Despite a little bit of rock throwing, I think it is much more reminiscent of the political tactics of Martin Luther King, whose thinking was of course based on that of Mahatma Gandhi. The civilian march to Falluja reminds me of Gandhi's famous Salt March to Dandi in 1930, which was the beginning of the end of British rule in India.

From Time:

"It's still unclear whether the four Blackwater employees found themselves in Fallujah inadvertently or were on a mission gone awry. Even by Pentagon standards, military officials were fuzzy about the exact nature of the Blackwater mission; several officers privately disputed the idea that the team was escorting a food convoy. Another officer would say only the detail was escorting a shipment of 'goods.'"

So I guess we can forget about the breakfast burritos. They were escorting a shipment of 'goods' (which is a totally different thing than a shipment of quotation-mark-less goods). What is the Pentagon trying to hide behind all the lies?

He may be dead - hell, he may never have even existed - but it's nice to know that official al Qaeda bogeyman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who most recently appeared as the patsy behind the Spanish strategy of terror, has two legs. You have to laugh.

From an interview by Amy Goodman of Naomi Klein:

"I think it's really important to understand this is not a civil war. It's an uprising against a foreign occupation. It's erupting all over the country. Iraqis are not fighting each other. They are fighting the United States. They're fighting the coalition forces. It used to be just the Sunnis doing the fighting. Now it's the Sunnis and the Shiites, who are both fighting the occupation forces. If anything, they're more united, and less divided. Basically what Paul Bremer has done is united the country against him. The other thing I just want to say is that this was not sparked by Sadr himself. It was actually provoked by Paul Bremer, in a series of actions: of targeting the newspaper, arresting his deputies, surrounding his mosque, and now issuing a warrant for his arrest. They really goaded him into this."

The good news is that the Shi'ites and the Sunnis have not taken the bait, quite possibly offered by Israel, to fight against each other. The bad news is that Bremer of Baghdad has ignited a powder keg of resistance against the U. S., and the American response to this is going to be fearful. I repeat what should be blindingly obvious to everyone: Bremer's actions are not a mistake. As the point man for the neocons on the spot he has taken every step possible to make Iraq blow up. He and the neocons want this to happen as the first step in the war which will revitalize the neocon influence and benefit their client state Israel. What Bremer has done is not only an act of treason against the United States, but an end around the mainstream non-neocon parts of the Bush Administration. It's too bad Bush is too stupid to realize what is going on.

Given recent events in Israel and Iraq we have to consider the very real possibility that it is the intention of leaders in both the United States and Israel to start World War III in the Middle East. Sharon and the Israeli right have completely run out of ideas and time. The demographics continue to destroy the future of a Jewish Israel, with each day bringing a net increase in the Palestinian population, and the IDF, in spite of its best efforts, unable to murder sufficient Palestinians to make up the difference. Despite the official Israeli statistics, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Jewish population of Israel is actually dropping due to the violence. In a few years the Palestinians will insist on voting rights in the combined Israel and Occupied Territories, and the area will finally return to Palestinian control. In the United States, the neocons have suffered horrible reversals due to the abject failure of their Iraqi war and the continuing revelations of all the lies they told to fool Americans that it was a good idea, and normal conservatives have had just about enough of them. Even if Bush gets reelected due to crooked computer voting machines - an increasingly likely prospect - the old-fashioned conservatives are likely to greatly reduce the role of the neocons in the second term. Without the power the neocons have now, their main goal, that of Greater Israel, will be impossible. World War III is the answer to all their prayers. It would make Bush a war president and ensure he is reelected while giving the Israeli right and their Israeli-American neocon friends the excuse they need both to enact the 'final solution' for the Palestinians and to go after full control over all the Middle Eastern oil fields under the guise of an all-out war against the Arabs. Richard Perle's insane ideas would become commonplace, and the war would make the Pentagon even more powerful than it is now (if that is possible). World War III explains why Sharon would assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, an otherwise baffling decision which is certainly going to lead to numerous Israeli deaths (baffling unless the Israeli deaths are actually what Sharon wanted). It also explains why the American occupation of Iraq is being conducted with such incompetence. Why does Bremer of Baghdad close down a newspaper which hardly anyone read, thus creating the tipping point to turn the Shi'ites against the Americans? Why do the Americans do everything they can to stir up unrest in Falluja, a place which could have and should have been cultivated as an American ally? Why are the Americans massing to create what looks like a huge war crime in Falluja? Why have they gone out of their way to make their natural allies, the Shi'ites, radicalized anti-Americans? Why have they gone out of their way to so antagonize specific Shi'ite clerics? Iraq is about to explode due to intentional acts by the American authorities. This isn't incompetence. The neocons appear to have decided that Iraq is their last chance to create the world war against the Arabs. Once the Shi'ites in Iraq explode, various groups in neighboring countries will also be set alight, and the resulting disaster will force the Americans to invade to protect the security of the oil fields. In the resulting wars, the Palestinians could be removed from the Occupied Territories, and the neocons would retain their reign in Washington.

From a BBC News article on the supposed leaders of the bombing plot in Spain, Serhane ben Abdelmajid Fakhet and Jamal Ahmidan:

"Neighbours who lived near Fakhet, and many of the other suspects, had little reason to think that they were militants with a fundamentalist agenda.

Many of them appeared westernised and integrated into the Spanish community, with a liking for football, fashion, drinking and Spanish girlfriends, say Spanish press reports."

and:

"Ahmidan is also said to have seemed happily integrated in Spanish society, whose Spanish friends are said to have included women who sported crop tops, tattoos and piercings."

These guys, and most of the guys alleged to have been involved in 9-11, are not Islamic fundamentalists. That should, but probably won't, entirely change the way these events are analyzed.

The original Falluja story was that there were non-Americans killed, and at least one woman. I assume these little lies were intended to support the story that the dead were not American spies or Special Forces. The story that they were supposed to be guarding a food convoy in an unarmored SUV in the middle of a war zone already under attack for a week by the American marines and a definite no man's land for Americans is a silly elaboration of the original lies. The lies indicate that the Pentagon is trying to cover something up. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of U.S. military operations in Iraq, said:

"Coalition forces will respond. They are coming back and they are going to hunt down the people responsible for this bestial act. It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. It will be methodical, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming."

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said:

"There will be a price extracted. There will be a response and it will be obvious to all."

Bremer of Baghdad said that the killings "will not go unpunished" and that the victims "have not died in vain". Say what? Officially, the dead were security guards for a cargo of food. Their official service to America (and thus to truth, liberty, democracy and justice) was to ensure that some marines got their breakfast burritos in time for breakfast, so they would not have to go out and murder the civilians of Falluja on an empty stomach (I find the concern about the plight of the American dead by American right-wingers laughable, crying over people who take money to kill other people while having absolutely no concern about the Iraqi children burned to death as a direct result of American bombs dropped on the basis of justifications which have all proven to be lies). "Not died in vain." What the hell is Bremer talking about? I have a simple question. American military contractors have been killed before in Iraq. In fact, their deaths are not uncommon. The bodies of American soldiers have been mutilated (although the Pentagon later denied it). So why are the American authorities promising to go apeshit over Fallujah? It's not like the killings were completely unprovoked, as the civilians of Falluja had already been under attack by the American military. Might the Pentagon have a special reason for being so mad about the deaths of these particular 'civilian contractors'? If the deaths of your 'civilian contractors' are not violently avenged, you might have difficulty recruiting more 'civilian contractors', and the 'civilian contractors' you have operating behind enemy lines might want to find a line of work other than being 'civilian contractors'.

Based on the series of lies told by the Pentagon to explain the Falluja killings, we can see with a great degree of certainty what really happened. The disgusting American media is so lazy and disgusting that it simply retypes the lies released by the Pentagon and presents them as gospel truth. This has made the Pentagon very sloppy in its lying. The latest version has it that the American victims were civilian 'contractors' working as private security guards for a shipment of food (they must have had to restrain themselves from claiming it was a shipment of baby formula). So let me get this straight. Falluja is so dangerous for Americans that the American military decides to ship its food through there, and hires security guards traveling in an unarmed, unarmored vehicle to protect it? This, through country that is so dangerous that when the Americans were attacked the U. S. army wouldn't go in to try to save them? Yeah, right. The way the story is presented is that these poor unarmed American civilians were set upon by a bloodthirsty and completely unprovoked mob of savage beasts. What has just come out, however, is that the marines were already one week into an operation intended to 'pacify' the civilian population of Falluja by attacking them with the might of the American military (as was done in Vietnam, with remarkably similar failure). In other words, the context of the Falluja attack on the Americans was that the civilian population of Falluja was in the middle of a military assault by American forces. The story about the 'civilians' being mercenaries working for a civilian contractor is also almost certainly a lie (claiming that they are mercenaries is a form of limited hang-out, masking the deeper truth, and Americans have been conditioned to believe it by by a mysterious sudden interest in the American media about mercenaries). Much more likely is that the contractor is an intelligence 'cut out' used to mask the real nature of the CIA or Special Forces agents who are assigned to appear to work for them. The reason they were in an unmarked, unarmored SUV is that they were working as spies involved in reconnaissance for the military operation that was already underway. They were probably pretending to be something that they were not, businessmen or, most likely, journalists (the American intelligence use of journalistic cover just makes the world more dangerous for real journalists), and were trying to find out something about the freedom fighters in Falluja. The real scandal of Falluja isn't the fact that some Americans got a small piece of what they so richly deserved, but that the American military has no ideas about Falluja - not a stronghold of Saddam as has been falsely reported by the disgusting American media but a city radicalized by incompetence and ham-handedness in the American occupation - other than to mount a military campaign against a city of civilians. In the middle of a military assault by the strongest military in the world against these civilians, some of them catch some spies operating to make their lives even worse. Can you blame them for what they did? The American military is now using the excuse of the killing of the American spies to justify what they were already doing before the Americans were killed!

From an article in the Guardian about the never-ending Israeli complaints - yawn - that the coverage of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is anti-Semitic:

"CNN sources say the network has bowed to considerable pressure on its editors. Israeli officials boast that they now have only to call a number at the network's headquarters in Atlanta to pull any story they do not like."

And you wonder why I call the American media disgusting.

Philip Zelikow is the executive director of the 9-11 commission. On September 10, 2002 he gave (or here) a speech to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in which he said that Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but he did pose a threat to Israel, and that threat was one reason why Washington would invade Iraq. Imagine how furious Americans would be if they knew they were spending billions and billions of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of lives in a war waged to protect another country, with absolutely no American security interest involved. Indeed, the war has clearly made the risk to Americans all the greater. The craziest thing is that Zelikow was absolutely wrong, and must have known that what he said was wrong. Iraq posed no threat to Israel, and American and Israeli experts knew it. The real reason the United States attacked Iraq on behalf of Israel was to further the nutty goal of Zionists and Christian Zionists of a Greater Israel extending from the Nile to the Euphrates. The war was waged not for Israel's security, which would have been bad enough, but to satisfy the religious hallucinations of some fruitcakes. Imagine how furious Americans would be if they ever figured that out.

Being a conspiracy theorist is fun. Every day you wake up and have to fight your way through the jungle of a new bunch of preposterous lies presented as gospel truth by the disgusting American media. Today we have some colorful fabrications about Rwanda - of which more later - and a real doozy about the dismemberment of some Americans in Falluja. Americans are all up in arms about this Somalia-style greeting to some no-doubt humanitarian American 'contractors' (also described as civilians "working for a security company", and, in case you are still doubtful, confirmed by the Pentagon as being civilians), serving in Iraq to make the lives of the Iraqi people better. Look at how the ingrate barbarians treat their liberators! Why we ought to . . . what? Drop bombs on them? Take over their country and steal their oil? Before analyzing the obvious problem with the story, I should consider the role of the contractors. These are evil, greedy, parasitic carpetbaggers who have come to Iraq under cover of the illegal American occupation to steal everything in Iraq that isn't nailed down. Death and dismemberment is just about what they deserve. But let us consider these 'contractors'. Falluja isn't a welcoming place for Americans. It is so bad, the American army won't go in there. Indeed, it appears that the 'contractors' were put in jeopardy because the army wasn't willing to take the risk of attempting to save them. Now we're supposed to believe that these 'contractors' were just having a swell time driving around Falluja enjoying the sights? These people weren't contractors. CIA or Special Forces, but not contractors. The truth has started to appear in that they were driving the type of vehicle driven by Special Forces and were wearing military-style dogtags. They were spies or worse, and were given the proper treatment for spies. The disgusting American media put out the usual Pentagon propaganda to incite immediate American hatred, and the truth comes later, when no one is paying attention.