NEW! Podcast: Who are the Ummites? Part 1
NEW! Podcast: Who are the Ummites? Part 2
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Signs Editorials
Editorial: Is The Capitol Building Next, Or Do The Tunnels Go Deeper?
Signs of the Times
07/04/2006
In light of the 'insider' fingerprints left all over the 9/11 attacks, a few recent stories made us sit up and take notice.
On Monday, the U.S. Capitol building (seat of the great American Democracy inaction) expericend a 'power out' that caused an evacuation for about an hour. Strangely enough, a spokeswoman for Potomac Electric Power Co., said the electricity shut off automatically after there was "a momentary drop in voltage due to customer operations up the lines" away from the Capitol.
"The protective equipment sensed the significant change in voltage and tripped," she said.
U.S. Capitol police however said a power spike that affected much of the metropolitan area "knocked out power to the Capitol building and caused lights and cable TV reception to flicker throughout the Capitol complex." In response, police evacuated the building and investigated, along with architect of the Capitol and fire officials.
Normally, this apparently innocuous event would not be interesting, except for the fact that, on the weekend prior to the 9/11 attacks, power to the WTC complex was also shut off, allowing, as is now expected, the conspirators to enter the complex and 'prep' the buildings for the very obvious demolition that occured just a few days later.
Added to that, we have the following very interesting story from "The Hill", a newspaper "for and about the U.S. Congress":
Some officers are trained to patrol tunnels, police say
A select group of U.S. Capitol Police have undergone special training to access the miles of utility tunnels underneath the Capitol complex, according to a police spokeswoman.
The spokeswoman, however, would not provide further detail about how the tunnels are protected because of national-security concerns.
“Specific information regarding our capabilities in this area cannot be discussed, as this is a security-related matter,” said the spokeswoman, Sgt. Kimberly Schneider.
The Washington, D.C., fire department, which serves the Capitol campus, also says it is equipped to respond to any emergency involving the tunnels. Alan Etter, a spokesman for the department, said firefighters possess the training and equipment necessary should they need to enter the tunnel system.
“We have just completed training involving the large underground steam tunnels that run throughout the city,” he said. "We have had limited exposure to the tunnels under the Capitol; however, they are the same as the [General Services Administration] tunnels."
The comments came in response to questions about what the U.S. Capitol Police are doing to secure the tunnels.
Ten Architect of the Capitol employees who work in the Capitol Power Plant tunnels asserted that there is no police presence in the underground tunnels in a letter sent to four members of Congress nearly two weeks ago.
The tunnels provide steam to heat and cool the Capitol campus and run from the Capitol Power Plant to the House and Senate office buildings, the Capitol and other, surrounding buildings.
The letter contends that the police are not permitted to patrol the tunnels because of their dangerous conditions, which include crumbling concrete that could fall at any time and large amounts of carcinogenic asbestos.
“The United States Capitol Police has made the entire tunnel system off limits to their staff because of the safety conditions as well as the lack of communication because phones and radios do not work in the tunnels,” the workers wrote.
When asked about the concerns raised in the letter, the police spokeswoman said only that some members of the force have undergone special training and that the training allows them to access the tunnel system. Rank-and-file officers, however, are forbidden from entering utility tunnels because of the hazardous conditions.
In the letter, the workers said that the police policy presents a security problem.
“This should be a real concern to the Congress and Senate as all buildings on the complex can be entered through the steam tunnels,” they wrote. “Realize that it is on a regular basis [that] we see people in the tunnels that we don’t know why they are down there.”
Citing documents received from the police, the letter adds: “The Capitol police not only won’t go down there [but] they stated ‘We won’t let our dogs down.’”
Safety precautions regarding the tunnels have been taken in the past for special events, according to Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the Architect of the Capitol (AoC), the office responsible for managing the buildings and utilities on the Capitol campus. To prepare for inaugurations or State of the Union speeches, manholes are sealed to prevent unauthorized entry.
“After Sept. 11, 2001, there was more emphasis on securing [the tunnels] for security purposes,” Malecki said. “The AoC has started replacing the old hatches with new ones that have emergency-release features that secure the hatches from the outside, but allow egress from inside the tunnels in an emergency.”
D.C. firefighters already use self-contained breathing apparatuses, or breathing masks, that protect them from asbestos and other particles.
Did you know that there are miles of tunnels underneath the Capitol complex?
Is it really believeable that these tunnels have been left in such a poor state of repair that they could collapse at any minute?
Is it really believeable that the Washington Police Department cannot obtain phones or walkie talkies that would work in these tunnels?
Is the claim that only select teams of officers can patrol these tunnels because of the health threats really believeable when D.C. firefighters already have self-contained breathing masks that protect them from asbestos and other particles?
After this news report, we tend to conclude that if there ever was a plan to detonate a nuke in these tunnels and take out all of Congress and lots of DC citizens and open the path to an overt political coup by way of the Continuity of Government group , then these plans have now been shelved. What is perhaps even more interesting is the other possible reasons why no one is allowed to go down into these tunnels.
After all, it's not like the U.S. is a stranger to burrowing into other people's business.
And just in case you are dismissing all of this as "secret government conspiracy nonsense", then understand that to hold such a view you will also have to accept the fact that the mainstream press and government is in on this little plot along with us, which brings you to the startling conclusion that it's all one big conspiracy to try and make you, the ordinary person, think that conspiracies exist! How's that for conspiratorial?
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Editorial: Feigned Emotion
Henry See
Signs of the Times
6 April 2006
"One of the great things about America, one of the beauties of our country, is that when we see a young, innocent child blown up by an IED, we cry." - George W. Bush, Mar. 29
" All judgements of value and emotional appraisals are sane and appropriate when the Psychopath is tested in verbal examinations.
"Only very slowly and by a complex estimation or judgment based on multitudinous small impressions does the conviction come upon us that, despite these intact rational processes, these normal emotional affirmations, and their consistent application in all directions, we are dealing here not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly.
"This smoothly operating psychic apparatus reproduces consistently not only specimens of good human reasoning but also appropriate simulations of normal human emotion in response to nearly all the varied stimuli of life.
"So perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.
"And yet we eventually come to know or feel we know that reality, in the sense of full, healthy experiencing of life, is not here." - Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity
After five years of his oh-so fake John Wayne strutting and his obviously oh-so genuine "I've pulled one over on you this time" smirk, his equally genuine mangling of the English language, and his determination to maintain his course like a compulsive-obsessive Energizer bunny no matter the arguments thrown in his way, I thought I was inured to the verbal expressions of the vacuity of George W. Bush's inner life. George's reflex machine seems to be malfunctioning and his ability to mimic real emotion is slipping.
We know that George places the United States of America far above the rest of the world. Did he not say, in the days following the self-inflicted wound of September 11, about the need for the US to wage war against terrorism no matter what others might say: "At some point, we may be the only ones left. That's okay with me. We are America"? (Cited by Rodrique Tremblay in The New American Empire, p. 46) So what are we to think of his tears over children blown apart by bombs that would not be there if the US had not invaded Afghanistan or Iraq? If he is willing to sacrifice the rest of the world in some crazed effort to render "America" secure, how much does he care about this child or any other child? How much does he care about the sons and daughters who are in the US military?
Implicit in his statement at the top of the page is the idea that "Americans" alone are capable of tears at the sight of a shattered and dismembered body. Perhaps the US media isn't showing the images in prime time in order to spare the sensitive followers of the Commander-in-Chief from daily bouts of crying.
How thoughtful.
Bush's double-standard is one area where he is consistent. Here is his comment on what Tremblay calls "the relationship between his religious morality and American military power": "The best way to fight evil is to do some good. Let me qualify that--the best way to fight evil at home is to do some good. The best way to fight them abroad is to unleash the military". However, Bush, like the rest of the chickenhawks in his administration, didn't want any part of "fighting evil" themselves. They all found ways of avoiding military service altogether or of going AWOL from the National Guard.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see through the mask of sanity worn by Bush. More and more of his concitizens are doing just that; yet there remain the staunch supporters, the ones who think Jesus is going to be returning in their lifetime to escort them through the pearly gates. If you buy that, I suppose taking Bush at his word is less difficult. But, then, these statements are for public consumption only, and the Straussian stringpullers behind Bush don't believe at word of it. As an example, we can look at Bush's statements, oft repeated, that "they hate us because of our freedoms". Whenever someone makes the case that "they" hate "us" because of US politics in the Middle East, its one-sided support of Israel in the genocide of the Palestinians, its encouraging Israel's attacks on the Palestinians while denouncing the Palestinians as "terrorists", its rape and pillage of Iraq, and the other items on the long list of US crimes in the Middle East, Latin America, and anywhere it has set its jackboot, the right-wing pundits bring out the tar and feathers. Again, for public consumption.
What do the people committing these crimes think? A report entitled "Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century", published in April 2001, that is, before 9/11, and written by a group composed of energy industry people, including Ken Lay of Enron, who had advised Dick Cheney, had this to say:
"Bitter perceptions in the Arab world that the United States has not been evenhanded in brokering peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have exacerbated these pressures on Saudia Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and given political leverage to Iraq's Saddam Hussein to lobby for support among the Arab world's populations." (Tremblay, p. 81.)
Clear, isn't it? The leaders know full well that anger against the United States is founded in actions and not some vague opposition to "freedom", but these reports are not published in USA Today or discussed on Fox News. The two-layer media system in the US ensures that those who need to know have the data they need while keeping the population at large in ignorance, the better to be led by the nose via their emotional reactions to false flag terrorist attacks and the right-wing hatemongers so prominent in the mainstream media. The strategy is part of the Straussian textbook, along with the promotion of religion as a means of controlling the population. What is happening in the United States is not an accident; it is the result of a decades old plan on the part of the neo-conservatives, and, most likely the neo-conservative bid is part of an even older plan, one that goes back centuries or millennia. But, then, it is easier to believe in 19 Arabs led by a caveman pulling off 9/11 than it is to consider the possibility of such an idea.
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Editorial: Another Shrine Bombing, More Conflicting Reports
Signs of the Times
07/04/2006
What kind of people would deliberately massacre dozens of people attending their place of worship? Are these agents of MI5 and the Mossad human at all? Because let's face it, it is absolutely clear that the only beneficiaries of the spate of shrine bombings in Iraq are the ones currently illegally occupying that country - Britain America and Israel.
Today, there was another attack. at least 50 dead and 130 injured, and like the previous bombings, there are again conflicting reports that suggest that this was NOT a "suicide bombing". The BBC reports that:
"there was initial confusion after the blasts, with first reports suggesting the explosions were caused by mortar fire, but police then said they believed three suicide bombers were responsible.
"
The Associated Press tells us how they knew that suicide bombers and not mortars were involved:
The Associated Press reported that at least 30 people were killed in the blast in northern Baghdad today. Police officials had originally described the incident as a mortar attack, but later found shrapnel inside the shrine that indicated a suicide bomber, the news service said.
Yet what does "shrapnel" have to do with 3 suicide bombers walking in to a mosque? The presence of shrapnel would suggest a car bomb rather than suicide bombers walking into the building. Of course, none of this will be analysed by the mainstream press. They are not interested in the truth. Thankfully, we have past evidence of British involvement in fake "suicide bombings" to prove that the push towards civil war in Iraq is part of the American, British and Israeli strategy to divide and conquer the greater Middle East.
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Editorial: The Real Iraq News
By Rory O'Connor
AlterNet
April 7, 2006
Reporters from across the spectrum gathered to answer the question: 'Is the Media Telling the True Story?'
It's good news, bad news time. Again.
By now the pattern is blatantly obvious: As the war in Iraq worsens, so too does the war on journalists. While still clinging to the tired canard that most reporters are too liberal to tell the truth -- the "real" story -- about Iraq, the Bush administration and its allied conservative commentators also impugn the journalists' motives and question their patriotism.
"It begins to look like you're invested in America's defeat," says radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, in a typical distillation of the meme. You've heard before -- and you'll hear again and again -- the armchair analysts' claim that reporters in Iraq (where Ingraham has spent a total of eight days) deliberately ignore positive stories -- the "good news" of nation building, democratization and development -- and relentlessly focus on the "bad news" of death and destruction.
Our leading newspapers have already issued mea culpas apologizing for their inaccurate cheerleading for the war, and our network news presidents are on record as having "failed the American people" with their blind acceptance of the false rationales offered for starting it.
So it's a sad reflection on our highly partisan, shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions-later media environment that there's still even a debate over claims that reporters are biased against the war. Yet last month, with violence in the country reaching new levels, a new round of whack-a-media began, reaching its nadir with personal attacks on Christian Science Monitor correspondent (and recently freed hostage) Jill Carroll.
Have the media declared war on the war? Or have the Bush administration and its support team of pontificating pundits instead declared war on the media? Is the U.S. media biased against the war, or too supportive of it? Had the press reported different facts, would the war have unfolded differently? These and related questions were the subjects of a recent, regrettably all-male (some things never change!) Reuters Newsmakers panel discussion entitled, "Iraq: Is the Media Telling the True Story?"
James Taranto, editor of the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com site, commenced by proclaiming that "the culture of the American newsroom grew out of Vietnam and Watergate." In their Iraq reporting, "journalists always fight the last war and are following the Vietnam script," he added, and see their role as "exposing foolishness and knavery." (Instead, Taranto posited, they should be exploring Cindy Sheehan's "fringe political beliefs.") New York Times "International Writer-at-Large" Roger Cohen countered by pointing out that "errors have landed the U.S. in a very bad situation, and you don't need to have an ax to grind to point that out." Cohen also decried America's polarized politics, saying that, as a result, "The problems of 26 million Iraqis get lost in the war over the war in the U.S."
Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, former director of the Combined Press Information Center in Iraq, surprisingly said that in his view there are very few journalists reporting from Iraq with a "specific agenda" and that the "good news, bad news" debate was really "opinion-based." Still, Boylan said, "the complete story isn't being told." To the lieutenant colonel, the complete story would include more reporting on schools and water purification plants that are being built -- but he also noted that drastic cutbacks in the number of reporters in Iraq have had a dramatic effect, as the media is "forced to do more with less."
Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad offered a different perspective: We're not being told the "complete story" about the war because that story is "so bad now" with "daily massacres and a civil war raging," that the full truth about the horrors of the U.S. occupation is actually being downplayed by the media. "It's not about water plants!" he concluded in exasperation.
The other representative of the Arab media, Al Hayat political editor Zaki Chehab, echoed those comments. "You can't drink the water, there's little electricity, the roads are worse than ever," Chehab said. "So what kind of good news should I talk about?"
Each panelist who had actually set foot in Iraq (Taranto was the sole exception) agreed with Chehab's conclusion that "security is the most important issue above all else," and that the situation has deteriorated to the point where it is difficult to perform even the most basic and routine journalistic endeavors. Reuters Iraq Bureau Chief Alistair MacDonald, who oversees a staff of 70, cited the frequent death threats his staff has received and admitted that the "risk is now so large I don't even want to send people out." Abdul-Ahad added, "No one likes journalists in Iraq at the moment -- not the insurgents, not the government -- and surely not the Americans!"
And equally surely not the likes of right wingnuts like Ingraham, John Podhoretz, Hugh Hewitt, and Don Imus, who, from the insulated safety of their plush perches, insult and assault practicing journalists who are literally risking their lives on the ground in Iraq -- a fact alluded to by Times man Cohen, who noted the "lack of nuance" among critics of the media reporting from Iraq, saying it may be due to the fact that "they've never set foot there." Nuance, said Cohen, comes from "putting your feet on the ground -- otherwise there is no intelligent debate possible."
Ultimately, of course, America's armchair analysts have as little interest in intelligent debate as they do in reporting "the real news" or "complete story" from Iraq. They serve only as polemicists and partisan political operatives, willing to say or do almost anything to advance a political agenda at the expense of all else -- including, apparently, basic decency and truth. The "complete story" of Iraq, as one Iraqi blogger at the Reuters panel pointed out, would inevitably include the perspectives of the vast majority of Iraqis (87 percent in the latest poll) who feel that ending the U.S. occupation of their country would remove a major cause of the conflict there -- as well as those of the majority of Americans who now agree with them.
So it's good news, bad news time again, I'm afraid. First, the good news: The U.S. occupation of Iraq will end one day. Then the bad: That day may sadly be far in the distance, after not just two thousand but tens of thousands of Americans (and literally countless Iraqis) have perished needlessly, and with the Green Zone being hastily evacuated just before being overrun by onrushing insurgents, and our ambassador clinging desperately to the skids of the last helicopter out of Baghdad.
How's that for fighting the last war?
This and other articles by Rory O'Connor are available on his blog.
[ Read Original ]
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Editorial: Word Control Part 2
Mathew Kristin Kiel
15 March, 2006
Let us again open with a Word on words from a brilliant scholar.
"Words are means by which Human Beings communicate and we call it a language. In order to communicate, you have to have an understanding of the words you use and that is where the problem arises.
The meanings of most of the words we use were learned in context with other words, and we assume from this that we know the meaning of the word. When you do this, and your understanding of a word is the same as its real meaning, no problem arises. However, when what you assume the meaning of a word is does NOT agree with the true meaning of the word, then misunderstanding is the result.
It is most rewarding to understand the words; by understanding, the true meaning of the word is meant. The best sources for obtaining this information are dictionaries, encyclopedias and dictionaries in OTHER languages." [Karl von Eckartshausen, Principles of Higher Knowledge, 1788
Before we go to the latest survey of the politically shifting word definitions found in U.S. dictionaries, there is news on adult literacy in America that is very directly related to this subject, and at the most fundamental levels.
The most recent U.S. adult literacy studies, conducted nationwide in 2003, have revealed that only 31% of the 19,000 college graduates tested in the survey were able to read, comprehend and extrapolate information from a complex text or book. Participation was voluntary, and as clinical psychologists know well it suggests that the respondents who agreed to take the tests would have been those people most likely to be sure that they would pass with flying colors. The figures disclose a precipitous 10% decline in this group's overall literacy levels in just the past 10 years.
On another interesting note, these new findings were not released to the public until late last December. So far, the only source where the information has appeared in the mainstream U.S. press and media was the print edition of the Christmas Day, 2005, Washington Post, on page A12, rather well buried from view and given no other coverage until very recently. We owe a debt of gratitude to the person who scanned it from the print page into a computer and posted it this month at www.dumbingdown.com or we'd still not have had these crucial facts to guide our Seeing.
The tests used included reading and then accurately following directions to perform a task correctly, understanding what is sought and then correctly providing the information that is being requested on a form, working "word problems" in basic math, and accurately reading and following a standard prescription label's instructions. This is not the stuff of rocket science and quantum physics.
Worse still, only 41% of post graduate students, a term that includes masters and doctoral degree candidates and recipients who participated, could pass these basic tests. Again one must add the "volunteer factor" to this equation. The operant premise is that the situation for all college graduates and post graduates will be even worse than the results shown in the test groups.
That at least 69% of U.S. college graduates, and 59% of post graduates cannot read well enough to accurately follow the instructions on a prescription bottle's label or correctly fill out an employment application form, is a death sentence for the next generation's intellectual and cognitive development. A full 10% drop in the tested levels of functional literacy, afflicting the intellectual creme de la creme in the U.S., and transpiring in only 10 years time is catastrophic.
If this abysmal state of semi-literacy exists among college graduates and post graduates, then just how bad is it among average Americans? Those who've completed only the standard public school educational requirements would logically be expected to fare even worse, since, as a general rule, it is those who are in the top 50% or higher in high school academic achievements who go on to attend college. If 69% of the best cannot dependably read and write with sufficient comprehension to accurately complete simple tasks, what does this say of the rest?
Last week I received a new dictionary, the 2005 edition of the New International Webster's Concise Dictionary of the English Language. Shall we See now what has become of those shifting definitions we took note of in the first critique, back in January of 2005? A link to the previous article is available by clicking on the Signs of the Times daily news page's Site Map link, then, in the Quantum Future Group's page, in the left hand column, is a link for the first article, "Word Control, Thought Control, World Control."
The test words we closely examined back then and found to be undergoing decidedly political shifts were CULT, CONSERVATIVE, TERRORIST, and TERRORISM. The dictionaries consulted also showed a progessive impoverishment in the concepts and language used for the wordings of the definitions, over the 30 years they spanned, having been published in 1975, 1984 and 1994. Here that span is updated by another decade. This theft of words and concepts, systematically stolen from the American people over the past several decades, is in fact related to why so many just do not and cannot "get it."
The dictionaries consulted for this study are intended for quick reference use by the most educated of Americans. All four have a general literacy rating of 14 years plus. These are not dictionaries aimed at grammar and high school students or marketed to less educated readers on supermarket and Wal-Mart shelves, most of which have ratings of 9 to 12 years. All four of the dictionaries used for these articles were marketed to and sold through various university and college bookstores across the country in addition to other book retailers.
The dictionary examinations certainly indicate that the dismal state of semi-literacy among U.S. graduates has been achieved by the processes, and with the specific consequences and goals, that were well explained and illuminated by George Orwell, both in his prophetic book 1984 and in his lectures, essays and other Works. When the overwhelming proof of massive reductions to functional literacy and numeracy in the vast majority of Americans is considered in conjunction with observable changes in the definitions of politically loaded words provided by a series of dictionaries compiled and published in the U.S. over the course of the past 40 years, the Big Picture gets much clearer, and quite terrible to See.
One of the words we most carefully examined before was CULT. It is necessary to again stress the severity of the U.S public's verbal, thus conceptual and intellectual impoverishment. There is no failing to spot the fact of iti when one compares the definitions provided for the word CULT in the oldest dictionary, 1975, with those now found in the newest. It is a stunning change, beyond description except by making direct comparison. (Those who would like to review the intermediate definitions and the internet one will find them in the first article.)
This time it is imperative to emphasize the damages done by the alterations found in this particular word's new definitions. The direction of the shift clearly suits Pathocratic political purposes, and the changes are a matter of concern to all who Seek Truth.
Between 1975 and 2005, the alteration of the definitions given for the word CULT, and of the very words used to define it, is staggering. Note the stark differences in difficulty, quantity and richness of conceptual and informational content; note the reduced numbers of syllables. Major changes have now been achieved, and the word CULT does not mean what it did before, not in America at least, not any more.
The Random House College Dictionary, 1975:
cult: n. 1. A particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies. 2. An instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers; a cult of Napoleon. 3. The object of such devotion. 4. A group or sect bound together by devotion to or veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc. 5. Sociology. A group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols. 6. A religion that is considered to be false or unorthodox, or its members.
The New International Webster's Concise Dictionary of the English Language, 2005.
cult: n. 1. a system of religious observances. 2. extravagant devotion to a person, cause or thing. 3. the object of such devotion. 4. a group of persons having an excessive interest in something.
Regarding that last, italicized for emphasis, brand new and wide open "definition," note that it does not define any recognizable structural, social, or other characteristics whatsoever that are in fact associated with the real and historical definitions of a cult. Nor do any of these new "definitions" provide any context in which to consider the merits of a group as to whether it may, or may not, be a cult. These definitions have been stripped of nearly all meaningful and definitive content. Do not neglect to note the glaring absence of the last two definitions from 1975, numbers 5 and 6. That too is significant, because one of those two residuals, 5, held the last traces of the oldest meanings of the word CULT as it was known throughout most of Human history.
Except for the first of the new definitions, which does vaguely refer to a religious component to a cult, all of these new context and content purged "definitions" could potentially be used to describe any group of devotees to any specific ideas or pursuits, especially under definition number 4. From teenagers in a garage band living for their music, to a group of scientists dedicated to investigating a particularly intriguing theoretical question, to, indeed, esotericists and Truth Seekers, no closely knit group with a shared and avid "excessive interest in something" is excludable under the new definition. There is in fact no solid, factual definition at all, which means there are no limitations imposed upon the spurious and "off the cuff" interpretations that can be made of the word CULT.
Without the last definition provided in 1975 too, it is no longer necessary for the ideas or behaviours of a group to be in any way outside of mainstream society's points of view or practices, nor for it to be in any way associated with religion for the label of "cult" to be applied. It is probable that this is why that definition vanished. Both the religious context and that of being at odds with mainstream views and practices in society were weakened but still present back in 1994, but they are now gone. Considering the advances made by the Pathocracy in exactly these last 10 years, both in the U.S. and globally, it defies logic to think there is no connection.
The definitional changes in CULT present a significant danger. The new definitions can easily be extended to bring the label of "cult," and possibly the fate of Waco's Branch Davidians, down upon the heads any group of closely associated and like minded individuals who share an avid field of interest(s). Let's remember too that new definitions appear at the bottom, but in the political shiftings noted previously they move upward over time. If this holds true, then the "excessive interest in something" definition now introduced will, in the not so far future, likely become secondary, and possibly even primary. It would be a good bet, based on the previous shifts noted, that it is headed in that direction, likely on a "fast track" to the top.
The last new definition means that so long as there are accusers, such as were the Holy Inquisitors of the Roman Catholic Church for over 400 years, or as was the Cult Awareness Network at Waco, who are vested with sufficient credibility, power and tacit or even legal sanctions from government and/or other presiding enforcement authorities, then any persons engaging in group activities focused around a central set of ideas, in which all of the group's members have and share an avid and abiding, "excessive interest in something" are, by right of these very terms, a "cult."
What "something?" "Excessive" by whose judgment? The only limits are what the accusers choose to say and what they are allowed to get away with. There are no guidelines, no logical criteria, no restraints at all in the new definition. It is wide open to every possible abuse, and all upon the whims, say so and opinions of the accusers and/or society at large.
Seekers beware, for in every real way this does include us all. It means anyone who particpates in any group at all against whom the finger of official oppression may now choose to level the accusation of being a "cult" as redefined. No exaggeration was made in saying that the changes over the past 10 years are straight from George Orwell's visions of a totalitarian hell on Earth. This change in definitions can readily become the enablement of officially sanctioned attacks upon any interest groups who are disliked by their rulers. Naturally: That is the most probable purpose in making such changes.
The evidence of this would not be so solid, and one might dismiss it as just being evidence of a "bad" new dictionary, if not for the ability to track this change taking place in very specific increments in the three earlier volumes. The changes in both political direction and concept removal are consistent, not only in one edition of one dictionary bought anew as each updated volume was released, but through four different volumes, from four different publishers, spanning four different decades. The 1975 volume actually would have been researched and compiled between 1964 and 1974, the 1984 from 1974 to 1984, and so on. Thus each dictionary displays the official Knowing on Words from the entire previous decade.
Those dependent upon these new definitions for comprehension of the word CULT will at best have an extremely vague idea of what characteristics might be found in the behvaiour and structure of a real cult. The intellectually stumbling, semi-literate and ever more over-stressed average American is left without any descriptive guidance to give the slightest protection from those who are indeed members of real cults, especially not if they may be among officially encouraged and sanctioned, politically and ponerologically expedient religious groups.
Having little to no means to learn about or develop a firm grasp of the historical and factual attributes of real cults either, the public will be even more easily persuaded that any group the authorities might label as a "cult" really must then be one. In the final analysis, this is exactly how the Pathocracy got away with the Branch Davidian massacre. The public was already too confused and too intellectually incapacitated by that time to really "get it." Bear in mind that literacy levels fell by 10% these last 10 years, meaning that the problem of the U.S. public's loss of cognitive capacity would have already been at a 59% minimum at the time of the tragic events in Waco, Texas. That some significant changes in the definitions and thus the meanings of the word CULT had already been achieved by then is not unrelated.
The redefining of words is a two edged sword of Deceit and a weapon of enormous political, social, religious and worldly power, made entirely of Words. Word control IS thought control, in the Truest sense of that term, and here we can See an example of it's direct use in the pursuit of Pathocratic world control.
Next, from the oldest to the newest, we'll examine the definitions given for CONSERVATIVE. We spotted some troubling shifts and weightings of that set of definitions before. Now we can see how it has progressed.
The Random House College Dictionary, 1975:
conservative - adj. 1. Disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., and to resist change. 2. Cautious, moderate: a
conservative estimate. 3. Traditional in style or manner; avoiding showiness: a suit of conservative cut. 4. (cap.) Of or pertaining to the Conservative party. 5. Of or pertaining to political
conservatism. 6. Having the power or tendency to conserve; preservative. 7. Of or pertaining to Conservative Judaism or Conservative Jews. - n. 8. A person who is conservative in principles, actions, habits, etc. 9. A member of a conservative political party. 10. A preservative.
The New International Webster's Concise Dictionary of the English Language, 2005:
conservative - adj. 1. Adhering to and tending to preserve the existing order of things; opposed to change. 2. Often cap. Of, pertaining to, or characterizing a political party or philosophy that favors the preservation of the status quo and is critical of proposals for change. 3. Conserving; preservative. 4. Moderate; cautious: a conservative estimate or statement. -- n 1. A conservative person. 2. Often cap. A member of a conservative political party.
There are some notable alterations here too, although not as obvious at first glance. What is most apparent is the shifting in the orders of the definitions, and, again, the severe reduction in overall informational and verbal content. What was the secondary definition in 1975 is now down to fourth place, and, since it is conceptually ad odds with the observable characteristics and behaviours of the radically totalitarian Pathocracy calling itself "conservative", it will likely be gone by the next round of verbal deconstructions, just as two of the most essential concepts and definitions for CULT were removed after dropping to last place gradually.
Although the tertiary definition is largely unchanged, except for its much poorer descriptive content, further indication that the political shift in this word's definitions is still under way is that all mention of religious conservatism, via the example of Conservative Judaism and Jews is gone. A most germaine concept has been deleted, considering how closely tied the U.S. Pathocracy is to a "conservative" form of Christian religion and to the type of Zionist Judaism that also masquerades as conservative.
Now for the word TERRORISM, and also TERRORIST, if present. Since these words are possibly the most dominant ones in the socio-political discourses we read and hear daily, and in the geo-politcal nightmares we are witnessing as the global Pathocracy pursues its final goals, one would think that these words would logically have become much better and more clearly defined and in the last 10 years. Seeing what has actually transpired is most illuminating.
The Random House College Dictionary, 1975:
terrorist: 1. A person who uses or favors terrorizing methods. 2. {formerly} a member of a political group in Russia aiming at the demoralization of the government by terror. 3. An agent or partisan of the revolutionary tribunal during the Reign of Terror in France.
As a point of fact, by definition number one, George W. Bush's policies and actions, domestically and abroad, do indeed define him as a terrorist. Apologies for not having made note of this in the first article.
The New International Webster's Concise Dictionary of the English Language, 2005:
No entry for terrorist. per se.
It does now seem rather conclusive that the elimination of the word TERRORIST was and is deliberate. One possible motive is to allow, just as has been done with CULT, for the broadest and most vague extensions of it being used to cover the greatest numbers of people. That it is simply gone from three out of four good American dictionaries, the three newest ones, covering the years from the midpoint of the Reagan administration and onward, turns the idea of coincidence, in view of all that has since transpired and is happening this very day, into an impossibility.
So what does our New International Webster's tell us about TERRORISM?
terrorism: n The act or practice of terrorizing, esp. by violence committed for political purposes, as by a government seeking to intimidate a populace or by revolutionaries seeking to overthrow a government, compel the release of prisoners, etc. -- terrorist, n; terroristic, adj.
The continuing shift is toward defining terrorism solely or primarily in terms of acts of violence. To do so is leaving wide the door to denying that psychologcial, emotional and economic brutalization, threats and intimidation of all kinds are also forms of terrorism. Of major importance is that the word threat is gone from the latest definition altogether, and the clearest implication of the new definition's wording is that intimidation is also conducted through violent acts.
The previous article's earlier intermediate source, the Webster's New World Dictionary had not yet, as of 1984, eliminated the specific mention of threats as acts of terrorism, retained the political basis of terrorism, and still included the concept of subjugation, showing for its entry:
terrorism. 1. The act of terrorizing; use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate or subjugate, esp. such use as a political weapon or policy. 2. The demoralization or intimidation produced in this way.
By 1994, the Webster II New Riverside University Dictionary had only the briefest definition from which the word threat had been removed and the shift of emphasis to terrorism by violence only had taken place:
terrorism n. Systematic use of violence, terror and intimidation to achieve an end.
Let's go back now to the old Random House Collegiate Dictionary of 1975 and check what that one said about TERRORISM. Since it did actually also contain a definition of TERRORIST, maybe it gives a somewhat more complete view of the companion word too.
terrorism: n 1. the use of terrorizing methods. 2. the state of fear and submission so produced. 3. a terroristic way of governing or of resisting a government.
Neither of the older sets of definitions allow as well for bending meanings, but the "wiggle room" to distort and manipulate the word and its core concepts has been progressively increased by the two newer ones. Most telling here is the elimination of the definition that includes the induced state of fear, subjugation and submission in a populace. Thus there will be no access to the fact that the daily growing fear and submission present in many Americans is the direct result of their living in and under a growing and deliberate terrorization being done to them by their own government.
The necessary definitions to inform them of their own terrorization are long and truly gone, as is, for the majority of them, the very literacy and congnition required for them to understand the definitions. Again, this beggars the idea of coincidence in light of recent history and current events.
What we have here is factual evidence that a state of ideational, intellectual and verbal impoverishment has been deliberately inflicted upon a sizable majority of the U.S. populace, depriving them of operational literacy and inflicting upon them all of those injuries such loss includes in terms of active and significant congitive, interactive and interpretive deficits. These losses have been induced in them over the course of the past 40 to 60 years, and have now been demonstrated, in part, by a 40 years long body of evidence found in the presence of specific, directionally consistent, politically consistent, and conceptually consistent changes in the definitions provided by a series of college level dictionaries published in the U.S. during that time.
Here is a "smoking gun" of induced cognitive incapacitation, and a set of politicaly expedient changes in word definitions, being inflicted upon the populace of the most heavily armed and aggressive nation on Earth. Again, it beggars all suggestions of coincidence.
As an integral, coordinated part of this process, one of the most basic of all reference sources, the dictionary, has been made into a subtle and effective weapon of Pathocratic, Orwellian mind control. Dictionaries have always been the single most trusted quick, general reference sources for information about what any word means and for the most basic description and concept of what something is or does. Many an argument over what something is, or is not, has been ended by consulting the nearest dictionary, with whatever its definitions say being accepted as valid without question. Destroying the reliability and factual accuracy of the dictionaries we've all been conditioned to consult first and most for our basic grasp of words is an appallingly Evil and terribly cunning Deceit that is almost unimaginable in its scope.
Bear in mind too that our public libraries and schools "update" the dictionaries they provide for the use of their patrons and students regularly, and the old volumes are not kept. The fact once was the case, and is still believed to be so, that the new dictionary is of course a better source of more and improved information. A logical conclusion from the research done for these two articles is that the two youngest generations of now adult Americans, those currently under 40 years of age, have never had access to the old and true definitions at all. For them there weren't any such to be learned.
Not the least of the concerns raised by these dictionary investigations is that each new dictionary has had fewer words in it than the one before, and in the same oldest to newest, most to least progression as is shown for the verbal and conceptual changes. There are more than 25,000 words less in the newest volume than in the oldest. Exactly which 25,000 words do Americans no longer have any need to know? Who decided this and why? Had the word counts been randomly lower or higher from edition to edition basically averaging out over time, fine. But again a progressive loss of words, from four equivalent volumes, having four different publishers, and spanning four decades, simply defies chance as the explanation.
My sincerest advice to those who intend to continue to Learn and Grow in Knowing, and not only Americans but all who place the highest of personal values upon the quality of the information they permit to occupy their Minds, is that they begin haunting yard sales, estate sales, rummage sales, public auctions, public library book sales and used book stores in search of the oldest and most comprehensive dictionaries they can find. Buy them, cherish them, rebind them, mend their torn pages, use them often and share their contents with those you encounter who also Seek Knowledge. This now seems an imperative task for those younger English speaking Seekers, Americans especially, who are reading the Works of modern and historical esotericists, alchemists, mystics and gnostics.
It is almost certain that the definitions learned by those who are 40 and under, the younger the more so, the basic word meanings that they have been taught, have probably been altered and at the very least partially deprived of their original meanings or twisted deceitfully away from the objective or original definitions. What has been proved True for the few words examined here is undoubtedly also True for a vast array of other words, from the simplest to the most complex, whose deepest and fullest understandings is essential to a study of crucial esoteric and scientific subjects.
This is no doubt precisely why the Glossary available at the Signs web sites has been attacked, as have the other, related, information rich web sites working hard to maintain a high degree of accuracy in their content. Accuracy is now as Politically Incorrect as it can get. Being highly accurate is now far more unaccepatable than being liberal, and possibly far more dangerous. It is a downright radical and not at all tolerable behaviour in a Pathocratic world.
In Truth the ability to do such Truth Seeking as we do here is likely to have been a part of what the entire program of "dumbing down" was and is intended to prevent and defeat. It in fact likely that this is also in progress in other countries and societies. Truth Seekers living in the rest of the developed and western nations, regardless of their languages, might do well to begin checking their own oldest and newest dictionaries to See for themselves what is happening in their own "neighbourhoods." The available data strongly point to a conclusion that the Global Pathocracy, and its hidden Bosses, want to impose the same foul "dumbing down" upon all of Humanity.
In every nation where relatively high levels of literacy among the general populace have become prevalent, it is logical to assume that they will induce the loss of functional literacy by the vast majority through all possible avenues of attack. An ignorant populace is a far more easily manipulated, deceived and controlled populace. The systematic diminishment of Americans' verbal skills and thus of their Minds is a done deal here, but it may not yet be quite so done elsewhere. Let us all hope not, fervently.
In the U.S. we See the end stage of the process. The War on Human Minds was launched in the U.S. immediately after World War II ended. To expose the entire, ugly Reality, we need to take a look the history of U.S. public education, while bearing in mind that this destruction of public education is not limited only to schools in the U.S., not at all. There are discernible indicators of its utilization throughout western society. Those living outside the U.S. would be prudent to check what has happened with literacy levels among public school and university graduates in their own countries over the past 3 to 4 decades. Finding the answer to that question may also provide a clue as to how far into Pathocracy their own "neighbourhood" may have already descended.
It is necessary to now use a bit of anecdotal evidence, but please bear with it. It illustrates the Objective Reality more prescisely than is otherwise possible.
My parents married late in life, so I didn't arrive until they were in their 40s. My father was born in 1905 and my mother in 1910. An important point here is that they were solid working class poor, throughout their lives. Thus, what educational benefits they received were precisely the minumum available to all U.S. children at that time.
My father's education ended with his completion of the eighth grade, all the education that the public schools in his area provided for free, and all that was federally mandated back then. Yet he read for pleasure on subjects ranging from philosophy, political science and horitculture to theoretical physics, to engineering manuals, science fiction, and anything to do with electricity, electronics, aviation and, toward the end of his life, space exploration. He could and did "grok" Einstein, Tesla and anything else he chose to explore, from Kant, to Marx, to Plato, Voltaire, Heinlein and Clarke. He was not all that exceptional for his generation and society. Most of the men I have met from his generation were very much like him.
My mother made it through the tenth grade, in an area where high school was free. Her hereditary visual impairment became legal blindness that year, after a serious eye infection, and it ended her formal education in 1926. Retaining sight in only one eye and able to read only with a thick magnifying glass and in very bright light for the rest of her life, still she read, and read and read. Histories of ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt, England and anywhere else on Earth, and the works of the great poets from Homer and Virgil to Shakespeare and Whittier filled our house. Again, she was not all that exceptional for a woman of her generation. I have met many of them who had those tastes and read as avidly.
I ask readers to now consider what they may have been told about pre-World War II public education by their own parents, grandparents and others, for as far back as they can go with their older family members and others. Pay especially close attention to their demonstrated levels of literacy, their abilities to think, to reason and figure out new or unusual things independently, and to the continued processes of learning throughout their lifetimes that they might have displayed. Their reading for pleasure no matter what kind of reading, their participation in hobbies, their pursuing of technical skills such as playing a musical instrument, gardening, doing carpentry and so forth all count a great deal in that fundamental characteristic of an active Mind, lifelong learning.
The next points cannot be more important to understanding the full dynamics of the American public's dreadful inability to "get it."
The standarized U.S. Department of Education adult literacy tests are possibly the only aspect of education in this country that has not been changed in the past 60 years. Until after World War II, basic literacy and numeracy were considered a done deal by the fourth grade. My mother's younger sister was certainly living proof of that. She didn't finish all of the fourth grade, but she was as wide ranging and literate a reader as anyone I've ever met. Again, I have met others from her generation who also went no further than the fourth grade and were equally literate and numerate.
THIS IS WHAT HAS BEEN DESTROYED. This is the educational quality and the capacity of Mind that has been taken away from this nation's ordinary citizens, its poor, working class, and middle class people. This nation's educational history shows that a fourth grade, bare bones, U.S. public school education provided literacy and numeracy to every child who attended school long enough to obtain it, barring those few who had developmental or learning disabilities making reading beyond their grasp.
An eighth grade education completed in 1920 was demonstrably better than what has now been proved to be true for an early 21st century college or higher education.
Reason says that only deliberate and extremely careful design and implementation could and would account for such results.
Education in the first half of the 20th century was virtually unchanged from previous formal education throughout the known history of western civilization. In the schools of ancient Greece and Rome the teaching methods and student practices that would become the foundation of all subsequent, western, formal educational systems were first established. They proved themselves most effective for many centuries, and would be used until the mid 20th century almost unchanged.
The next real change in education came throughout America, Britain and most of Europe in the 17th through early 20th centuries, when basic education for all children, as nearly as possible, became ever more broadly implemented. For the first time in history, the masses, rather than the elite only, were provided with the skills of basic literacy and numeracy, mostly in response to the demands of the technolgical and societal changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and also facilitated by ever more efficient and numerous printing presses.
Public education in the U.S. truly "got it together" shortly after the Civil War, with the result that adult literacy and numeracy among the general populace all went up, decade after decade, nationwide, among all graduates from the fourth grade to the Ph.D., with a stable, residual incidence of incomplete literacy and numeracy among graduates of just under 10%, for the next hundred years.
Beginning in 1946 and onward, public high school, university and college courses and requirements were changed significantly, ostensibly to meet the "less traditional" educational needs of the thousands of returning WW II veterans who began taking advantage of the new GI Bill's educational benefits. It was the beginning of the elimination of the most ancient components of a higher education, those studies essential to teaching and honing the ability to systematically and logically comprehend and utilize language and numbers, words and reason, to the highest degree.
The traditionally manadatory high school and college educational requirements in the "classics," Latin, Greek, foreign languages, ancient and modern history, political science, fine art, music, literature, basic chemistry and phsyics, advanced mathematics, an entire body of previously mandatory studies, fundamental General Knowledge courses that one and all had to pass if they wanted to graduate, were pared down, or waived, or dropped entirely in short order.
In U.S. colleges, the final remnants of required liberal arts, fine arts and basic maths and sciences, those ancient Gerenal Knowledge courses, have been almost completely removed in the past 2 decades, and again, especially in the past 10 years when the technical requirements of specific careeers or trades have taken over most college course work.
The first drastic, "inexplicable" drop in the overall U.S. adult literacy levels among high school graduates and above showed up in 1975's nationwide tests. The first catastrophic drop had arrived. It came after exactly the right span of years for the testing of that first generation of graduates to have been entirely educated by teachers who had received revised, post WW II college educations, and the first generation of students to "benefit" from several "reforms" in public school methods and courses, such as the introduction of the new "Dick and Jane" types of basic reading courses and the "new math" instruction innovations of the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s.
When reports on the findings of that decade's testing were released early in 1976, they raised a public furor. After that report the purveyors of "education reform" had carte blanche, and they went into high gear. For the past 30 years, U.S. public education has been thrown into an endlessly repeating loop of "reforms" and "improvements" which have successfully delivered a remarkably reduced, steadily dropping capacity for literacy, numeracy and Thought to U.S. public school and college graduates.
But, in the elite, private, residential primary and secondary schools for the scions of the wealthiest, guess which subjects are still mandatory? Yes indeed, those old liberal arts, fine arts and basic maths and sciences must still be completed if a student wants to graduate from one of the upper crust, private preparatory schools. Some of the most exclusive even retain the requirement for either Latin or Greek to be studied.
Simple logic does indeed tell us that, had all of the "reforms" done and the "innovations" introduced to public education since the end of WW II even been entirely random, half of them would have been beneficial to the learning processes of students, and the results would have been a balancing off of losses in some areas with an equal set of gains in others. None such has happened. The results have been a steady downhill slide in the abilities to read, write, speak, utilize basic math, learn and think among graduates of the "improved" educational system.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the last 10 years are the end and intended results of a deliberate, progressive, systematic destruction of the minds of a majority of Americans over the preceding 60 years. Between creeping Pathocracy, television's mind control bombardment, subliminals galore, and the deconstruction of both educational and informational content, the average American of today had little chance. Since WW II, each generation has become less literate than the previous one, thus less able to discern let alone correct what was wrong, less able to teach adequate skills to the next generation, and so on.
Welcome to the world of New Speak and New Think. WE ARE THERE.
The simple reality looming behind surveys over the last ten years consistently showing that some 70% of all Americans get their news information from television alone may well be that reading a newspaper and really understanding what it says is beyond them now and has been for a while. That 70% figure is suspiciously close to the 69% of college graduates who are not functionally literate, isn't it? If a Pathocratic government can effectively ensure that 70% or more of its populace is intellectually incapacitated, the other 30% will be hard put to overcome the surrounding ignorance and incomprehension of the majority well enough to engender significant levels of sustained opposition.
We must never forget that an ingnorant, gullible, easily manipulable and controllable populace is the goal of Pathocratic "educational" systems. The full presence and good use of Mind is what they cannot withstand and will do everything to stop.
When their lack of access to accurate information, even in dictionaries, is laid side by side with the deliberate destruction of their literacy, their numeracy and their cognitive capacities, the American public suddenly makes sense, totally heartbreaking, terrible sense. Orwell's dystopian realm is, unfortunately, present here and now, and, for those of us born and living in the U.S, it is the place we call Home.
Knowing how much has been stolen from the majority of Americans, let us, in their behalf, be sure to list the destruction of their precious, sacred Human Minds among the greatest and cruelest of the Pathocracy's countless crimes against Humanity when we Name the final tally of all those Crimes and demand a full reckoning.
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Freedom, Bush Style
Guantanamo defendant calls tribunals a con
By Jane Sutton
Reuters
Thu Apr 6, 7:45 PM ET
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba - An Ethiopian prisoner called his Guantanamo war crimes tribunal a con on Thursday and said that after four years of interrogations, the U.S. military had not even managed to learn the correct spelling of his name.
The defendant, a 27-year-old British resident, is identified in the charge documents as Binyam Muhammad but he said his surname is Mohammad. He is accused of conspiring with al Qaeda to commit war crimes, including plotting to set off a radioactive bomb, and would face life in prison if convicted.
There is no uniform system of transliteration of Arabic names into English, and so either Muhammad or Mohammad could be correct.
Mohammad, as he said he prefers to be called, has proclaimed his innocence and has stated in court documents that he made false confessions after being extrajudicially transferred to a Moroccan prison where he was beaten, strung up by his arms and cut on the chest and penis with scalpels.
"This is four years of interrogation, highly intensive ... torture, and you still don't have the right name," he told the tribunal's presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann. "The man you are looking for is not here."
The defendant compared Kohlmann to Adolf Hitler and prosecutors to vampire slayers. He calmly criticized the tribunals as "crap" that set a bad example for the world and poked fun at their formal name, commissions.
"This is not a commission. It's a con mission. It's a mission to con the world," he said.
Kohlmann let him speak at first, then ordered him to stop using profanity, put down a handwritten sign reading "conn-mission" and conduct himself politely.
Mohammad refused to enter a plea and the presiding officer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
MOROCCAN RENDITION
The military charges say the defendant joined al Qaeda in 2001 and got weapons and explosives training at the group's camps and guest houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He was arrested trying to leave Pakistan in 2002 and his lawyer said he was sent to a Moroccan prison via extraordinary rendition, the practice of secretly transferring terrorist suspects between countries, outside normal legal channels.
Mohammad was held in Morocco for 18 months and gave false confessions including that he plotted with al Qaeda and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, according to his civilian lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.
Padilla was held at a U.S. military brig for three years but was never charged in a radioactive plot. He has since been charged in a civilian court with being part of a cell that supported terrorists overseas.
Mohammad was sent from Morocco to a secret facility known as the "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan and then brought to Guantanamo, his lawyer says. He is the first British resident to appear before the tribunals President George W. Bush created after the September 11 attacks to try foreigners for terrorism. British citizens held at Guantanamo were all sent home.
Defendants at the tribunals wear civilian clothes provided by their lawyers. Mohammad's lawyers brought him a bright orange shirt and trousers, reminiscent of the infamous orange jumpsuits Guantanamo detainees wore during the early days of the prison camp. He also asked to wear shackles to court but the request was denied, his lawyer said.
Human rights groups and legal scholars have harshly criticized the U.S. decision to indefinitely hold foreign prisoners at Guantanamo without the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the rights afforded in U.S. courts.
The Bush administration has defended the detention and interrogation of detainees as critical to national security in the war against terrorism.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legitimacy of the tribunals by the end of June.
Mohammad is one of 10 Guantanamo detainees facing war crimes charges and one of four appearing at pretrial hearings this week. The camp holds about 490 prisoners.
Comment: Feel safer now? What if instead of Binyam Mohammad, it was you or your child that was detained, tortured, and tried in a kangaroo court? If the American people continue to remain too silent about the highly illegal actions of the Bush admiminstration, it will be you or your child. You can take that to the bank.
And if you think that being a US citizen will protect you, see the following flashback.
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Flashback: Court backs Bush over US terror suspects
03 Apr 2006
Financial Times
The Bush dictatorship won a significant legal victory in the "war on terror" on Monday when the US Supreme Court refused to question the government's power to hold US citizens indefinitely as enemy combatants, even those captured on US soil.
The justices voted 6-3 not to review the case of Jose Padilla, one of the most high-profile cases testing the administration's anti-terrorism powers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Mr Padilla, a US citizen captured in Chicago, was held in military detention without charges for three years before the government decided to try him in the civilian court system.
The shift to try Mr Padilla as a civilian was widely criticised as an attempt by the administration to avoid a Supreme Court review of the case, and the tactic appears to have worked.
Three justices who held the balance of power in the case - Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice John Paul Stevens - took the unusual step of issuing an opinion to justify their refusal to hear the case, focusing on the fact that Mr Padilla is no longer being held as an enemy combatant.
"Any consideration of what rights he might be able to assert if he were returned to military custody would be hypothetical, and to no effect, at this stage of the proceedings," Justice Kennedy wrote for the three men, noting that civilian custody was "part of the relief he sought, and that its lawfulness is uncontested".
"It's a shame that the Supreme Court didn't use this opportunity to address the claim of the United States that it can pick up anybody on US soil in connection with the war on terror," said Jennifer Daskal, director of advocacy for Human Rights Watch.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of three justices who voted to hear the case, said Mr Padilla risked being transferred back into military custody at the end of his civilian trial.
Justice Kennedy acknowledged that Mr Padilla "has a continuing concern" that he might be reclassified as an enemy combatant but said that concern "can be addressed if the necessity arises". But he also issued a veiled warning to the government not to return Mr Padilla to the military, and invited him to bring his appeal straight back to the Supreme Court if they did so. At the moment, no US citizens are being held as enemy combatants.
The case appears to have been an extraordinarily difficult one for the justices, who discussed it at eight separate private meetings before Monday's ruling.
The decision highlights the central role that Justice Kennedy, a moderate conservative, is likely to play when the court rules on another terrorism case that tests the constitutionality of the military tribunals set up to try detainees. A ruling in that case, which involves the detention of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, is expected by June or July.
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Teens charged under terror law
BY GEOFF MULVIHILL
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
April 6, 2006
Four accused of plotting to kill classmates at South Jersey high school
CAMDEN -- Four teenagers accused of plotting to kill about 25 people in a lunch-period massacre at Winslow Township High School were charged today with terrorism, a crime no one has ever been convicted of in New Jersey.
The boys, between the ages of 14 and 16, were arrested Wednesday after police heard about the alleged plot from administrators at the school, where three of the teens are students. Authorities did not release their names because of their ages.
The boys initially were charged only with low-level crimes and were not eligible to be moved to adult court.
Authorities said the teens planned to target students, and teachers and others.
The terrorism charge and other charges added Thursday -- two counts each of conspiracy to attempt murder -- are serious enough that prosecutors could ask a judge to move the case from family court to adult criminal court, where the penalties could be much stiffer.
Prosecutors have 30 days to consider whether to request moving the case; no decision on that was made by Thursday afternoon.
The four boys -- including a 15-year-old from Hammonton whose arrest Wednesday night had not been announced -- appeared together in family court. Superior Court Judge Angelo DiCamillo ordered them held until the state Department of Human Services could complete thorough psychological and psychiatric evaluations.
DiCamillo said the court counselors who had interviewed the teens Wednesday recommended they not be released to their parents' care until a full picture of their mental conditions could be learned.
Public defenders for the teens argued that they should have been able to go home with their parents. "My client is rather frail and vulnerable," public defender Ruth Ann Mandell, who was representing a 14-year-old, told the judge. "No one was hurt in this case."
Authorities said the boys did not have any weapons to carry out the alleged plot. But one law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the teens attempted to buy a handgun.
DiCamillo on Thursday also disclosed that some of the teens charged have had brushes with the law in the past. Two of them were charged with fighting while they were still in elementary school; both cases were diverted out of the court system.
The 14-year-old was charged Wednesday with grabbing a girl by the neck and threatening to kill her.
The father of one of the 15-year-old boys said after the hearing Thursday that the charges were a mistake. "I think it's just kids hanging out together and having a little wild time, that's all," he said.
State judiciary spokeswoman Winnie Comfort said no one in New Jersey has been convicted of terrorism, a charge lawmakers created four years ago in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Under the statute, people convicted of the crime in adult court must be sentenced to at least 30 years in prison and are not eligible for parole for 30 years.
Prison sentences that long would be far steeper than those meted out to three teenagers in another Camden County town, Oaklyn, after they pleaded guilty in a case in which they were caught with guns, ammunition and swords in 2003. Each of them received a prison sentence between four and 10 years.
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USA won't pursue seat on U.N. Human Rights Council
USA Today
4/7/2006 7:26 AM
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United States decided to forgo a seat on the new U.N. Human Rights Council this year rather than risk a losing battle for a panel it considers deeply flawed. But 42 countries announced their candidacy, including Cuba and Iran.
The United States was alone among the five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council to avoid the 47-nation human rights body. Russia, China, Britain and France all applied for a seat.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday the United States would not be a candidate in the May 9 election, though it will support and finance the new council and likely seek a seat next year.
"The United States will actively campaign on behalf of candidates genuinely committed to the promotion and protection of human rights and ... will also actively campaign against states that systematically abuse human rights," he said.
The United States was virtually alone in voting against establishing the council to replace the highly politicized and often criticized Human Rights Commission, arguing that the new body was only marginally better and wouldn't keep rights-abusing countries from winning seats.
The 53-member commission was discredited in recent years because some countries with terrible human rights records used their membership to protect one another from condemnation. Members in recent years have included Sudan, Libya, Zimbabwe and Cuba.
A key sticking point during the negotiations was U.S. insistence that members be elected by two-thirds of the 191-nation General Assembly - a step aimed at keeping out rights abusers. The U.S. effort failed, and members of the new council must be elected by an absolute majority - 96 member states.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the United States concluded that since the council has "fundamental flaws" Washington would skip this year's election and concentrate on other priorities, including the overhaul of U.N. management. But he indicated the United States was also concerned about whether it could win a contested election.
President Bush's administration has been strongly criticized in many countries for invading Iraq and for the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison.
During a U.S. National Security Council meeting earlier this week, U.S. officials raised the possibility of U.S. defeat, according to a person who was at the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the closed session.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Bolton recalled the U.S. defeat for a seat on the Human Rights Commission in 2001 and said the United States would face another contested election if it ran this year.
"I think that a decision by us to run had to be a decision that we were going to win, and that would mean either defeating other Western candidates or getting some of the rest of them to withdraw," Bolton said.
Some human rights groups and members of the U.S. Congress were dismayed at the U.S. decision.
Rep. Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, called it "a major retrenchment in America's long struggle to advance the cause of human rights around the world."
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said "it's unfortunate that the Bush administration's disturbing human rights record means that the United States would hardly have been a shoe-in for election to the council."
The new council was endorsed by key human rights groups, a dozen Nobel Peace Prize laureates including former president Jimmy Carter, and 170 countries that voted "yes" on the resolution - including a surprise approval by Cuba.
Under the rules for the new council, any U.N. member can announce its candidacy any time until the vote is completed. Countries can serve a maximum of two three-year terms and must leave the council before running again.
To ensure global representation, Africa and Asia would have 13 seats each; Latin America and the Caribbean eight; Western nations, seven; and Eastern Europe, six.
In a statement appealing for support for its candidacy, Cuba said it has "tremendous achievements" in human rights, most importantly in exercising the right of self-determination against "the unilateral policy of hostility, aggression and blockade imposed on it by the superpower."
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Bushwhacked
Poll: Bush, GOP hit new lows in public opinion
AP
April 7, 2006
'These numbers are scary,' GOP pollster says as Democrats eye opportunity
WASHINGTON - President Bush's approval ratings hit a series of new lows in an AP-Ipsos poll that also shows Republicans surrendering their advantage on national security - grim election-year news for a party struggling to stay in power.
Democratic leaders predicted they will seize control of one or both chambers of Congress in November. Republicans said they feared the worst unless the political landscape quickly changes.
"These numbers are scary. We've lost every advantage we've ever had," GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio said. "The good news is Democrats don't have much of a plan. The bad news is they may not need one."
There is more at stake than the careers of GOP lawmakers. A Democratic-led Congress could bury the last vestiges of Bush's legislative agenda and subject the administration to high-profile investigations of the Iraq war, the CIA leak case, warrantless eavesdropping and other matters.
In the past two congressional elections, Republicans gained seats on the strength of Bush's popularity and a perception among voters that the GOP was stronger on national security than Democrats.
Those advantages are gone, according to a survey of 1,003 adults conducted this week for The Associated Press by Ipsos, an international polling firm.* Just 36 percent of the public approves of Bush's job performance, his lowest-ever rating in AP-Ipsos polling. By contrast, the president's job approval rating was 47 percent among likely voters just before Election Day 2004 and a whopping 64 percent among registered voters in October 2002.
* Only 40 percent of the public approves of Bush's performance on foreign policy and the war on terror, another low-water mark for his presidency. That's down 9 points from a year ago. Just before the 2002 election, 64 percent of registered voters backed Bush on terror and foreign policy.
* Just 35 percent of the public approves of Bush's handling of Iraq, his lowest in AP-Ipsos polling.
"He's in over his head," said Diane Heller, 65, a Pleasant Valley, N.Y., real estate broker and independent voter.
Troubled Congress
As bad as Bush's numbers may be, Congress' are worse.
Just 30 percent of the public approves of the GOP-led Congress' job performance, and Republicans seem to be shouldering the blame.
By a 49-33 margin, the public favors Democrats over Republicans when asked which party should control Congress.
That 16-point Democratic advantage is the largest the party has enjoyed in AP-Ipsos polling.
On an issue the GOP has dominated for decades, Republicans are now locked in a tie with Democrats - 41 percent each - on the question of which party people trust to protect the country. Democrats made their biggest national security gains among young men, according to the AP-Ipsos poll, which had a 3 percentage point margin of error.
The public gives Democrats a slight edge on what party would best handle Iraq, a reversal from Election Day 2004.
"We're in an exceptionally challenging electoral environment," said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former GOP strategist. "We start off on a battlefield today that is tilted in their direction, and that's when you have to use the advantages you have."
Those include the presidential "bully pulpit" and the "structural, tactical advantages" built into the system, Cole said.
One of those advantages is a political map that is gerrymandered to put House incumbents in relatively safe districts, meaning Democrats have relatively few opportunities to pick up the 15 seats they need to gain control.
For Dems, raised expectations
In the Senate, the Democrats need to pick up six seats.
"I think we will win the Congress," Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean said, breaking the unwritten rule against raising expectations.
"Everything is moving in our direction. If it keeps moving in our direction, it's very reasonable to say there will be a Democratic Senate and House," said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Strategists in both parties say it would take an extraordinary set of circumstances for Democrats to seize control of Congress.
First, the elections would need to be nationalized. Democrats hope to do that with a burgeoning ethics scandal focused on relationships between GOP lobbyists and lawmakers.
Secondly, the public would need to be in a throw-the-bums-out mood. It's unclear whether that is the case, but 69 percent of Americans believes the nation is headed in the wrong direction - the largest percentage during the Bush presidency and up 13 points from a year ago.
Third, staunch GOP voters would need to stay home. Nobody can predict whether that will happen, but a growing number of Republicans disagree with their leaders in Washington about immigration, federal spending and other issues.
Bush's approval rating is down 12 points among Republicans since a year ago. Six-in-10 Republicans said they disapproved of the GOP-led Congress.
"I'd just as soon they shut (Congress) down for a few years," said Robert Hirsch, 72, a Republican-leaning voter in Chicago. "All they do is keep passing laws and figuring out ways to spend our money."
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Standing For Something
by P. Anthony Farruggio
OpEdNews.com
April 6, 2006
They arrive, once a week, like clockwork. From the back seat of each car, or trunk, they unload their signs. Each sign states another aspect of what they are all about. Some signs declare the immorality or illegality of this war on Iraq. Others demand that our soldiers come home now. Others state how many young Americans have already been killed. There are signs calling for impeachment. Signs asking " Honk for Peace". Statements for Medicare for All Americans. Protest signs on the $ 400 billion spent for this unnecessary attack and occupation of Iraq, or asking what really might have happened on 9/11. There are signs alerting the public to the Downing Street Minutes. All in all, a vast array of signs and statements in dissent of this President, Vice President and their neo con allies.
Who stands each week on those corners in Port Orange, Daytona Beach and Ormond? Are these campus radicals or anarchists? No, those who stand are our neighbors, folks who study history and current events and see beyond the mainstream claptrap news . A blend of retired teachers, librarians, union organizers and working nurses (Rita, Frances, Walt, Bernice and Mona). . Former and present educators, store managers, landscapers, even a " Ph D." (Jack, Sue, Rod, Rene, and John D). Retired government employees, working professors, county officials, veterans (Robert, Ruth, Barbara, Jamie, Don). In Daytona we see a CPA, working moms with two jobs (Phil, Kathy, Doreen) regularly standing together in earnest. In Ormond, outside of Wal-Mart, of all places, a single mom schoolteacher, a banker and an infirmed Viet Nam veteran (Marge, Donna and Pete). Little by little, more are joining them on those street corners each Tuesday at 5 pm, Thursday at 6 pm and Saturday at 10 am. Students, postal workers, small business owners, all kinds of regular folks seeking change. Making a statement before even that becomes forbidden in this fragile republic of ours.
Cars whiz by, as cars always whiz by at rush hour in any town. For 19 months, the Port Orange group has watched and waved, and yes, debated issues of war, health care, corruption, cronyism and wasted life. All on that very same corner, at the very same time and day, in a very ordinary town in Florida. Strange occurrence lately, though. More and more of the folks in those cars are beginning to get it. A symphony of honks and waves and thumbs up sent forth to the demonstrators. Some even heed the most imperative sign displayed: " WE NEED YOU ... PLEASE PARK AND JOIN US! " And, as the line of sign holders grows from the original eight per week, to now well over 30, hope does spring eternal. Yet, in Ormond this Saturday, the three aforementioned stalwarts stood alone. And, as the "bully loves the vulnerable", so too does this trio meet the most terrible assortment of sneers and ****. If only their numbers could increase, would then the cowards and hypocrites shrink from view.
When change and sanity finally come to America, and we have a Congress and White House that puts people before politics, remember those street corner protesters. Remember the street corners throughout America, and those who stand there, week after week. Not the twice a year events that draw the crowds but never the consistency. It seems it's always the dedicated and selfless who bring about a better world. Confucius said it best: "You succeeded because you tried again!!" Perhaps more Americans need to stand for something, now don't they?
P. Anthony Farruggio is a progressive talk radio host in Port Orange Florida
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Sarandon: 'This is 1984'
04/04/2006
Movie star Susan Sarandon is terrified US society is mirroring George Orwell's chilling book 1984 - because individual rights are being trampled on.
The Thelma & Louise star was stunned by the "fraudulent" 2000 election of George W Bush - and is keen for the country's next election to be closely monitored, according to website The Scoop.
She says: "I believe our next election should be monitored by international entities, just like it happened in Haiti and Iraq.
"The last one was an embarrassment. Everybody knew there was fraud, but nothing was done about it. In some states there were more votes than people able to vote.
"I think we've never been as close to George Orwell's 1984 as before.
"We live in a society where individual rights and legality are definitely threatened and that's scary."
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German inquiry to probe Iraq war, CIA links
By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent
Reuters
Fri Apr 7, 2006 06:33 AM ET
BERLIN - Germany's parliament gave the green light on Friday for a parliamentary inquiry into whether German spies in Baghdad helped the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 at a time when the government was publicly opposed to the war.
Lawmakers voted to approve the probe, which will examine various sensitive aspects of the security services' work and their cooperation with the United States.
It will also look into the Central Intelligence Agency's alleged abduction of a German national and secret transfer of at least one terrorist suspect via Germany.
The government of conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel had previously argued in vain that the investigation would be a time-wasting distraction that would stir up anti-American feeling at a time when Berlin is trying to repair U.S. ties.
But the three opposition parties teamed up to force the inquiry after a spate of media reports alleging that two German agents in Baghdad helped the United States launch its invasion, including by picking out bombing targets.
Questions for the inquiry include whether ministers or officials knew and approved of the handing of information to the Americans, and of the details that were passed on.
Among those who may face pressure are Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who at the time was chief of staff and intelligence coordinator under Merkel's predecessor, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder.
SOME INTELLIGENCE PASSED ON
The issue is controversial in Germany because public opinion strongly opposed the Iraq war.
Schroeder, won an election in 2002 on the back of his public opposition to any military "adventure" in Iraq.
Merkel's conservative-Social Democrat coalition government has acknowledged that some intelligence from the two agents was passed on to the United States, including information on the Iraqi police and military presence in Baghdad.
But it says they played no role in selecting bombing targets, except to warn the Americans against hitting civilian sites such as hospitals.
Merkel herself is not under fire because her party was in opposition at the time. But by keeping the Iraq war in the headlines, the inquiry could hinder her efforts to turn over a new leaf in relations with Washington, which were badly strained by Schroeder's opposition to the invasion.
Comment: Gee, we're so shocked that Merkel was against the investigation!
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Iran
'Two B-2s could take out Iran's nuclear assets'
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions will be history by the time US President George W Bush leaves office, said a report published here.
Veteran foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, writing for the United Press International, quotes a "prominent neo-con" with good White House and Department of Defence contacts, as the source of the assertion. Asked what would the US do if sanctions did not make Iran turn away from its nuclear target, the source replied, "B-2s. Two of them could do the job in a single strike against multiple targets."
De Borchgrave writes in an amused vein, "So we looked up B-2s. The US Air Force only has 21 of them. Perhaps price had something to do with it. They came in at $2.2 billion a copy. But they can carry enough ordnance to make Iranians nostalgic for the Shah and his role as the free world's gendarme in charge of the West's oil supplies in the Gulf. These stealthy bombers have one major drawback in the Persian magic carpet mode. They can only attack 16 targets simultaneously; one short of the 17 underground nuclear facilities pinned red on Mossad's target-rich PowerPoint presentations to the political leadership. Presumably, that's why two B-2s would be required."
De Borchgrave points out that most of Iran's secret nuclear installations are not only underground, but also close to population centres. "The first pictures of a B-2 raid would be dead women and children on al-Jazeera television newscasts, now as globally ubiquitous as CNN and FOX. The collateral damage would then rival Abu Ghraib's devastating impact on America's good name. The perceived American indifference over the loss of Arab lives would now be seen as spreading to another Muslim country," he writes. The neo-con informant told the correspondent that there is "absolutely no way" Bush will accommodate to an Iranian nuke or two, the way he blinked first with North Korea. Bush uncompromising view of the Iranian nuclear danger and his determination to prevent it by force of two B-2s if necessary is "as solid as his resolve to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein," he said.
According to de Borchgrave, "This is also the British assessment of Bush's intentions against Iran, a power whose president has vowed to wipe Israel off the map. Today (April 3, 2006), senior British officials met with defence and intelligence chiefs to assess the consequences of air strikes against Iran - as well as European and global repercussions. Neo-cons are unfazed by the fact that Iran is an ancient civilisation of 70 million people with retaliatory assets that range from a choke-hold on the world's most important oil route in the Strait of Hormuz, to an anti-US Shiite coalition in Iraq with two private militias, funded and armed by Iran, to terrorist groups throughout the Middle East that have a global reach. Iran is also a power that not only resisted an Iraqi invasion, but fought Saddam Hussein's legions to a standstill in an eight-year-war of attrition that killed about 1 million soldiers on both sides. If, as Bush has indicated, US troops were still in Iraq in 2009 under the next president, Tehran, in retaliatory animus, would pull out all the stops to ensure a Vietnam-like send-off for remaining US forces in Iraq. For the time being, Tehran is delighted to keep US troops in Iraq as protective cover for Iran as it consolidates its influence throughout 60 percent of the country."
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Iranian crisis - the inevitable result of Israel's US-backed WMD monopoly in the region
David Hirst
Tuesday April 4, 2006
The Guardian
The Iranian crisis can only be understood as the inevitable result of Israel's US-backed WMD monopoly in the region
There is widespread international agreement that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons is an alarming prospect, but very little attention is paid to the most obvious, immediate reason why: that there is already a Middle Eastern nuclear power, Israel, insistent on preserving its monopoly.
So the crisis has been foreseeable for decades; it would be automatically triggered by the emergence of a second nuclear power, friendly or unfriendly to the west. Iran is the unfriendliest possible, encouraging the widespread assumption that it alone is responsible for creating the crisis - and settling it. But is it?
It certainly isn't blameless. First, its nuclear arming would deal a major blow to an already fraying international non-proliferation regime. Second, it would involve a huge deceit. Third, the US divides actual or potential nuclear powers into responsible and irresponsible ones. Iran would be irresponsible, being already the worst of "rogue states".
Typically, a "rogue state", as well as being oppressive, ideologically repugnant and anti-American, unites an aggressive nature with disproportionate military strength, thereby posing a constant, exceptional threat to an established regional order. What could now more emphatically consign Iran to such company than its new president, with his calls to "wipe Israel off the map"?
Yet, in nuclear terms in the Middle East, Israel is the original sinner. Non- proliferation must be universal: if, in any zone of potential conflict, one party goes nuclear, its adversaries can't be expected not to. No matter how long ago it was, by violating that principle Israel would always bear a responsibility for whatever happened later. Second, its deceit was no less than Iran's, though, there being no non-proliferation treaty at the time, it was only the US it deceived. Mindful of what Israel's mendacity portended, the CIA warned in 1963 that, by enhancing its sense of security, nuclear capacity would make Israel less, not more, conciliatory to the Arabs; it would exploit its new "psychological advantages" to "intimidate" them.
Which, thirdly, points to the irresponsible use Israel has indeed made of it. Sure, it always justified it as its "Samson option", its last recourse against neighbours bent on destroying it. There is no such threat now; but if there was once, or will be again, the question is why.
A major part of the answer is that on most counts except hostility to the US Israel has always behaved like a "rogue state". It came into being as a massive disrupter of the established Middle East order, through violence and ethnic cleansing. Such a settler-state could only achieve true legitimacy, true integration into a still-to-be-completed new order, by restoring the Palestinian rights it violated in its creation and growth.
That, at bottom, is what the everlasting "peace process" is about. The world has a broad definition of the settlement lying at the end of it. It doesn't involve the full emancipation of an indigenous people that has been the norm in European decolonisation; only a compromise vastly more onerous for the defeated Palestinians than the Israelis.
But settlement never comes, because Israel resists even that compromise. Its nuclear power, on top of its already overwhelming conventional superiority, ensures that. Such irresponsible use of it is what Shimon Peres was alluding to when he said that "acquiring a superior weapons system would mean the possibility of using it for compellent purposes - that is, forcing the other side to accept Israeli political demands". Or what Moshe Sneh, a leading Israeli strategist, meant when he said: "I don't want the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to be held under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb." As if the Arabs haven't had to negotiate under the shadow of an Israeli bomb these past four decades.
There are three ways the crisis can go. The first is that Israel insists on, and achieves, the unchallenged perpetuation of its "original sin". For it isn't so much "the world", as President Bush keeps saying, that finds a nuclear Iran so intolerable, but the world on Israel's behalf; not the risk that Iran will attack Israel that makes the crisis so dangerous, but that Israel will attack Iran - or that the US will take on the job itself. In effect, Israel's nuclear arsenal, or the protection of it, has become a diplomatic instrument against its benefactor.
t is a legacy of America's own "original sin", that first, reluctant acquiescence in a nuclear Israel, subsequently turned into uninhibited endorsement of it by seemingly ever more pro-Israeli administrations. So here is a superpower, wrote the US strategic analyst Mark Gaffney, so "blind and stupid" as to let "another state, ie Israel, control its foreign policy". And, in a brilliant study, he warned that a US assault on Iran could end in a catastrophe comparable to the massacre of Roman legions at Cannae by Hannibal's much inferior army. For in one field of military technology, anti-ship missiles, Russia is streets ahead of the US. And Iran's possession of the fearsome 3M-82 Moskit could turn the Persian Gulf into a death trap for the US fleet. And sure enough, from the Bush administration itself, the first hints have been coming that, given the regional havoc Iran could indeed wreak, there may be nothing the US can do to stop it going nuclear.
This points to a second way the crisis could go - with Israel obliged to renounce its monopoly and the Middle East entering a cold-war-style "balance of terror". It could be a stable one. Clearly, like Israel, the mullahs would make irresponsible, political use of their nukes. But, like Israel's, Iran's nuclear quest is essentially defensive, even if not in quite the same fundamentally "existential" sense. Nothing could have more convinced it of the need for an unconventional deterrent than the fate of that other "rogue state", Saddam's Iraq, which the US had no qualms about attacking because it didn't have one.
The third way - Iran's abandonment of its nuclear ambitions - would stand its best chance of being accomplished if Israel were induced to do likewise; not just because reciprocity is the essence of disarmament, but because it would signify a fundamental change in America's whole approach to the region.
And that might have positive effects beyond the nuclear. "There is only one way," said the Israeli military analyst Ze'ev Schiff, "to avoid a nuclear balance of terror: to use the time left, while we still have a monopoly in this field, to make peace ... In the framework of peace, a nuclear-free zone can be established." But that is the wrong way round.
To make peace, as the CIA foresaw, Israel doesn't need the intransigence that absolute security brings, but the spirit of compromise that a judicious dose of insecurity might. A utopian notion perhaps, with the world now so focused on the villainy of Iran - yet better than a US onslaught that would add so thick a layer to an already mountainous deposit of anti-western feeling that Israel could barely hope ever to win acceptance in the region.
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War Pimp Bolton: Look Past Security Council on Iran
By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer
Thu Apr 6, 4:04 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is considering diplomatic and economic options to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons if diplomacy at the United Nations fails, and it envisions sanctions if Tehran won't back down, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said Thursday.
"It would be, I think, simply prudent to be looking at other options," Bolton said at a breakfast meeting of the State Department Correspondents Association.
He said the United States could suspend import allowances for Iranian rugs and pistachios, which were relaxed years ago in hopes of stimulating small business in Iran, and consider a crackdown on alleged financial crimes similar to U.S. pursuit of alleged fraud by North Korea. There are steps other governments could take as well, Bolton said, including financial and travel restrictions.
The United States has had no diplomatic and few economic ties with Iran since the 1979 storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Bolton dangled the possibility, however, that Iran could improve its relations with the U.S. if it ended its alleged drive for weapons of mass destruction.
"The Iranian government ... can get out of the trap they've put themselves in by reversing the strategic decision to seek nuclear weapons, and the example that's out there of what lies in store for them is the case of Libya," Bolton said.
He said Libya three years ago made a "hardhearted, national interest calculation" that it would gain more by forswearing further nuclear weapons development and thereby "opened the possibility of substantially different relations with the United States and other countries."
If Iran followed the Libya model, "we'd be prepared to consider a new relationship with them, too," Bolton said. U.S. officials said last year they planned to re-establish full diplomatic relations with Libya by the end of 2005, but the plans stalled.
Bolton's Iranian counterpart, Ambassador Javad Zarif, contended in a New York Times op-ed piece Thursday that Iran is committed to nuclear nonproliferation and eager for talks.
"Pressure and threats do not resolve problems," the Iranian diplomat wrote. "Finding solutions requires political will and a readiness to engage in serious negotiations. Iran is ready. We hope the rest of the world will join us."
The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons under the cover of a legitimate civilian energy program, and has long favored using the punitive deterrent powers of the Security Council to bring international pressure to bear on the clerical regime.
The Iran case is now finally before the Security Council but Bolton did not sound confident the strategy will work.
He said the "obvious difficulty" represented by the three-week delay and hefty diplomatic muscle required to win a first, mild rebuke to Iran from the Security Council last month "says something about the difficulty of the road ahead."
Iran allies Russia and China opposed a tougher stance sought by Bolton and European diplomats but eventually signed on to a written demand that Iran comply with previous U.N. nuclear watchdog requirements for its disputed nuclear program. Russian and China are also on record opposing punitive sanctions for Tehran if it does not comply, although U.S. officials say they do not rule out getting some kind of sanctions approved in the future.
Bolton laid out what he called a "calibrated, gradual and reversible approach," that ratchets up diplomatic pressure on Iran at the Security Council.
Last month's "presidential statement" gives Iran 30 days to comply with directives from the International Atomic Energy Agency. If Iran refuses, the next step would be a Security Council resolution saying the same thing, but which Bolton said would be legally binding on Iran. It would probably carry another grace period for Iran to comply, he said.
If that failed, "then we will consider the next step, which could well be a ... resolution that imposes sanctions of some kind," Bolton said.
It is unclear whether Russia and China, permanent members of the Security Council that hold veto power, would agree to either resolution.
Iran denies it is building a bomb, but insists it must retain control of sensitive aspects of nuclear development that can be used either for energy or weaponry.
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Iran's Nukes: Are the U.S. and Europe Out of Sync?
By TONY KARON
Time.com
Thursday, Apr. 06, 2006
The international community is united, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says, in demanding that Iran refrain from building nuclear weapons. But behind the statements of common purpose, there is not nearly as much agreement on how to achieve that end as the U.S. would like to admit. That's because the Europeans, who are running the diplomatic process, are not only talking about threatening greater penalties, but also offering Iran more incentives, particularly security guarantees .
This carrot and stick approach may be standard diplomatic practice, but it raises an awkward question for an administration whose own de-facto Iran policy veers towards regime change. Almost every nation that backs the U.S. against Iran going nuclear would be equally adamant against any U.S. effort to force a change of regime in Tehran. The Europeans believe that regime change, although desirable, must occur as a result of internal pressure, because - as the nuclear standoff has shown - any external threat rallies even opponents of the mullahs behind their regime, and any attack on Iran would create chaos in the region.
Thus, while Secretary Rice was telling British audiences last week that military action "is not what is on the agenda now" but that President Bush "never takes any option off the table," her host and British counterpart Jack Straw has repeatedly and strenuously made clear that military action is "inconceivable."
Until now, the Bush administration and the Europeans have done their best to paper over the inherent conflicts in their respective positions. But that is fast becoming untenable: Security guarantees, after all, involve giving Tehran cast-iron promises that it will not be attacked and working to normalize relations with the regime, in order to remove any incentive it might have for creating a nuclear deterrent. The conflict in strategies was visible this week when administration officials rebuffed the suggestion by Germany, backed by Britain, that Washington hold direct talks with Tehran to break the nuclear deadlock.
The dynamic with Iran, in fact, is starting to look a lot like the diplomatic wrangling over that other notorious member of the "Axis of Evil," North Korea. In that on-again, off-again six-party negotiating process, which includes North Korea, South Korea, Russia, China, the U.S. and Japan, the consensus among everyone but the U.S. is that walking Pyongyang back across the nuclear threshold requires offering it security guarantees and direct talks with the U.S. Washington hawks have long balked at those conditions, but the agreement of principles concluded last September does, in fact, include a security guarantee from the U.S. in exchange for North Korea renouncing nuclear weapons. Those talks have remained deadlocked since last fall, but the suspicion that Washington is seeking the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang has resulted in an increasingly open split between the U.S. and South Korea, the democracy whose protection is the reason U.S. still has troops on the Korean peninsula.
Long before the current nuclear standoff heated up, this preference for regime change has caused the White House to duck opportunities for dialogue with Tehran. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, says an Iranian offer of talks to address all U.S. concerns was rebuffed in 2003 at the behest of the regime-change faction of the Bush administration. Former Bush National Security Council official Flynt Leverett has confirmed this account, and warns that the administration lacks a serious Iran policy by virtue of President Bush's refusal to engage with a regime he considers fundamentally illegitimate. Everett notes: "Because of the administration's deliberate decision to rule out serious strategically grounded diplomacy with Iran on this issue, [Security Council action and a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities] are the only two options they've got, and neither is going to work."
The Europeans know that, which is why in the coming months they will insist, ever so delicately, that Iran be offered expanded incentives along with the threatened penalties. The really bad news for Washington hawks is that the only incentives that matter are those that can be offered by, you guessed it, the U.S. And if Washington balks at offering Tehran what most of the international community would regard as reasonable security guarantees, it won't only be Iran that finds itself isolated.
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Amerika
Shocking Diebold conflict of interest revelations from secretary of state further taint Ohio's electoral credibility
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Online Journal Guest Writers
Apr 6, 2006
Ohio is reeling with a mixture of outrage and hilarity as Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has revealed that he has owned stock in the Diebold voting machine company, to which Blackwell tried to award no-bid contracts worth millions while allowing its operators to steal Ohio elections. A top Republican election official also says a Diebold operative told him he made a $50,000 donation to Blackwell's "political interests."
A veritable army of attorneys on all sides of Ohio's political spectrum will soon report whether Blackwell has violated the law. But in any event, the revelations could have a huge impact on the state whose dubiously counted electoral votes gave George W. Bush a second term. Diebold's GEMS election software was used in about half of Ohio counties in the 2004 election. Because of Blackwell's effort, 41 counties used Diebold machines in Ohio's highly dubious 2005 election, and now 47 counties will use Diebold touch screen voting machines in the May 2006 primary, and in the fall election that will decide who will be the state's new governor.
Blackwell is the frontrunner for Ohio's Republican nomination for governor. The first African-American to hold statewide office, the former mayor of Cincinnati made millions in deals involving extreme right-wing "religious" radio stations.
As part of his campaign filings he has been required to divulge the contents of his various stock portfolios. Blackwell says that in the process he was "surprised" to learn he owned Diebold shares. According to central Ohio's biggest daily, the conservative Republican "Columbus Dispatch," Blackwell claims his multi-million-dollar portfolio has been handled "by a financial manager without his advice or review."
Blackwell says he gave verbal instructions to a previous fund manager about which stocks not to buy, but failed to do so when he brought in a replacement. He claims the new manager bought 178 Diebold shares in January 2005 for $53.67/share. He says 95 shares were sold sometime last year, and that the remainder were sold this week after Blackwell conducted