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The shooting in London on Friday of Charles de Menezes by the British Metropolitan police is indeed a watershed. To the unemotional observer able to dispense with the propaganda, there can be only one conclusion - the terrorists and Western government authorities have teamed up to wage a war on innocent civilians. No one should doubt the psychological trauma inflicted upon the British public by the London bombings and the murder of de Menezes, nor the message that it delivers to their collective unconscious.

How has it come to this? How do we explain the rationale behind these attacks on the British public by alleged Islamic terrorists when a majority of British citizens were against the Iraq invasion and consider their Prime Minister a war criminal? Is al-Qaeda really determined to murder and maim the citizens of all Western nations and thereby alienate anyone that might possibly be sympathetic to their cause?

Of course, some would say that the terrorists' believe that they can force a change in British and American foreign policy by murdering the citizens of those countries, but surely the response of the Bush and Blair regimes to the 9/11 attacks should have convinced the terrorists that such attacks are counterproductive to their cause and simply serve to strengthen the hand of people like Bush, Blair and Sharon to deepen their stranglehold on the Middle East.

Digging a little deeper for a reasonable explanation, we remember that we have been told that the terrorists not only hate Western governments for their exploitation of Middle Eastern nations and their populations, but they apportion equal blame to Western peoples for electing their leaders. But are we to believe that these terrorists who, by definition are well-versed in the workings of Western politics, are unaware that the British, and particularly the American, public have been effectively disenfranchised by the lies, propaganda and manipulation of their elected (or in some cases unelected) officials? Can anyone reasonably blame the British or American public for the actions of their political leaders when those leaders have, at every turn, lied to them about their real intentions? Is it logical to punish the British public for British troop involvement in the Iraq war when Blair openly lied and went as far as to fabricate evidence to convince the unwitting public that Saddam was about to attack them?

Indeed, it is all the more perplexing that the terrorists murdered 56 British civilians at a time when Blair was embroiled in the bogus Iraq war intelligence scandal and the growing public outcry may well have cut short his third term. Now however, thanks to the terrorists who we presume would like nothing better than to see Blair removed from office, the traumatised British public have run back into the arms of their militaristic government for protection and will no doubt be more amenable to further British involvement in the overall war on Islamic terror and Islam itself.

In the final analysis then, it seems we are forced to conclude that the terrorists are just a bunch of crazed fanatics, plain and simple, and no amount of analysis will ever find rhyme or reason for their actions. But even then, such a pat answer fails to satisfy in the face of evidence that seems to suggest otherwise. Take for example the fact that, on several previous occasions, al-Qaeda has stated that it is the US and British occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan that has precipitated these terror attacks. Indeed, not only do the terrorists appear to have a very definite goal and rationale for their atrocities, they are evidently far from insane when it comes to planning and carrying out such attacks. The hijackings of September 11th 2001 involved a level of co-ordination and skill that is certainly not in keeping with the idea that they were perpetrated by a group of insane madmen inspired by the puerile rantings of fundamental Islam.

Thankfully, we can find an answer if we use some real logic, analysis of the facts and a little background research. It is a little-known yet publicly available fact that the British, American and Israeli governments have in the past considered using, or actually used, false flag terror operations to achieve a specific goal.

The Northwoods document show how the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US drew up plans to bomb an American civilian airliner and then pin the blame on Cuba as a way to garner public support for a US military overthrow of the Castro government.

In Northern Ireland, on several occasions agents of the British government carried out attacks against the security forces that were later blamed on the IRA. The British government also covertly murdered innocent civilians of the Irish Republic in order to ensure that legislation that would be damaging to the IRA would be passed in the Irish parliament. (This point has particular relevance to the recent London bombings which have cleared the way for legislation to be passed that will lead to the introduction of ID cards for British citizens, legislation which had been in serious doubt before the bombings.) The 1974 Guilford (England) pub bombings is another case in point. In the aftermath of the attacks, the British government extracted confessions through torture from four innocent Irish citizens who were incarcerated for 17 years as IRA terrorists and then released when their innocence was proven. The real perpetrators of the attacks have never been caught, and it seems today that the greatest suspicion must fall on British intelligence.

In 1967 during its six day war with its Arab neigbours, the Israeli government ordered the bombing of the USS Liberty while it was stationed off the Israeli coast. The attack was carried out by the Israeli air force with full awareness that they were attacking a US ship. At least part of the goal it seems was to pin the blame on the Egyptians and thereby involve the US in Israel's war. Israeli intelligence has also been exposed in attempting to set up phony al-Qaeda terrorist cells in Palestine as a way to demonise legitimate Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Indeed, there is much evidence to show that Israeli intelligence played a central role in the formation of Palestinian resistance group Hamas as a way to offset the influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Coming back to the London bombings, as we have noted here on Signs of the Times, there remain serious doubts about the British government's claim that al-Qaeda operatives carried out the attacks of 7th July 2005. Initial reports stated that British police had warned the Israeli embassy in London before the bombs exploded, a claim which British police later refuted claiming that it was the Israelis who had informed them. Either way, it seems clear that the security apparatus of either Israel or Britain had advance warning of the attacks.

Indeed, like the 9/11 attacks where at least 7 of the 19 alleged hijackers (who all perished in the attacks of course) were later found to be quite alive and eager to tell the world, one of the four alleged London bombers has spoken up from Pakistan where he lives and claimed that he too is alive and well. Combine that fact with reports that the four alleged bombers may have been "tricked" into carrying out the operation (and we have to ask "by whom) and the report that at least one of the bombers had been assessed by MI5 as posing "no threat", and a very different picture of the real reasons for, and perpetrators of, the London bombings starts to emerge.

The beleaguered war criminal Blair remains in power, British citizens will soon be 'tagged' with biometric ID cards, the phony "war on terror" for profit and power continues unabated and an innocent Brazilian man who ran from police and then surrendered and lay down on the floor of a train was shot five times in the head by agents of the British government tasked with protecting the British people. We have all been warned; the war on terror is real, whether we agree or not, and our governments will not hesitate to murder innocent civilians to prove their point.

Submit or die seems to be the message.

A recent poll shows six in ten Americans think a new world war is coming: the same poll says about 50 percent approve of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Somewhat inexplicably, about two-thirds say nuking those two cities was "unavoidable." One can only wonder, then, what their reaction will be to this ominous news, revealed in a recent issue of The American Conservative by intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi:

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing – that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections."

Two points leap out at the reader – or, at least, this reader – quite apart from the moral implications of dropping nukes on Iran. The first is the completely skewed logic: if Iran has nothing to do with 9/11-II, then why target Tehran? As in Iraq, it's all a pretext: only this time, the plan is to use nuclear weapons. We'll wipe out the entire population of Iran's capital city because, as Paul Wolfowitz said in another context, "it's doable."

The other weird aspect of this "nuke Iran" story is the triggering mechanism: a terrorist attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11. While it is certain that our government has developed a number of scenarios for post-attack action, one has to wonder: why develop this plan at this particular moment? What aren't they telling us?

I shudder to think about it.

The more I look at it, and the more I think of it, the more I sense a monumental evil casting its shadow over the world, and I have to tell you, it makes me wonder how much more time I want to spend on this earth. In my more pessimistic moments, I doubt whether we can avoid the horrific fate that seems to await us just around the next corner, the next moment, looming over the globe like a gigantic devil stretching its wings and blotting out the sun.

It seems to me that the question of whether life is really worth living anymore is inextricably bound up with the question of whether or not these madmen can be stopped. If not, then the only alternative is to live it up while we can and laugh defiantly in the face of the apocalypse. Why write columns, why comment at all, if we can't have any effect on the outcome? On the other hand, some ask

"Surely the New York Times and the Washington Post can find a lede here: 'US has plan to nuke Tehran if another 9/11.' Can we get at least a bloody story out of this?"

Might I suggest another lede?: "Armageddon approaches." Or perhaps, for the literary-mind secularists among us: "After many a summer dies mankind."

Where oh where is the "mainstream" media on this? That's a laughable question, because the answer is heartbreakingly obvious: they are nowhere to be found, and for a very good reason. As the Valerie Plame case is making all too clear, the MSM has been a weapon in the hands of the War Party at every step on the road to World War IV. It's an American tradition. As William Randolph Hearst famously put it to an employee in the run-up to the Spanish-American conflict of 1898:

"You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

Any objective examination of the Anglo-American media's role as a megaphone for this administration's "talking points" would have to conclude that the Hearst school of journalism has been dominant since well before the invasion of Iraq. Aside from the post-9/11 hysteria that effectively swept away all pretenses of a critical stance, the MSM was well acclimated to simply reiterating the U.S. government line on matters of war and peace all through the Clinton era, when friendly media coverage of the Balkans and numerous other Clintonian interventions habituated the press corps to a certain mindset. By the time the Bush administration set out on a campaign of deception designed to lie us into invading and occupying Iraq, the MSM was largely reconciled to playing the role of the government's amen corner.

With the U.S. and British media in the pocket of the Powers That Be, what hope is there that the American people – who don't believe anything if they don't see it on television – will awaken to the danger in time? Again, in my more pessimistic moments, there doesn't seem to be any such hope: television news seems firmly in the camp of the War Party, and the "mainstream" print media also doesn't seem a likely venue for this kind of reporting.

On my more optimistic days, however, I almost believe it's possible to outflank the War Party on the media front – because the Internet is a mighty weapon that will defeat them in the end. A recent Pew study shows that this is not just a technophilic fantasy:

"The Internet continues to grow as a source of news for Americans. One-in-four (24%) list the internet as a main source of news. Roughly the same number (23%) say they go online for news every day, up from 15% in 2000; the percentage checking the Web for news at least once a week has grown from 33% to 44% over the same time period.

"While online news consumption is highest among young people (those under age 30), it is not an activity that is limited to the very young. Three-in-ten Americans ages 30-49 cite the Internet as a main source of news.

"The importance of the Web for people in their working years is even more apparent when the frequency of use is taken into account. One-third of people in their 30s say they get news online every day, as do 27% of people in their 40s. Nearly a quarter of people in their 50s get news online daily, about the same rate as among people ages 18-29."

What this means is that we can put the news the MSM won't cover – e.g., the story about Cheney's Dr. Strangelove plan to strike Iran – on the front page of Antiwar.com and potentially reach one-in-four Americans. Last month we had over 2 million readers; this month is headed toward the same range – and that's in summertime, a traditionally slow time for us. Yet we're setting new records.

This, it seems to me, is the only reason for hope: a strategy of doing an end run around the mass media. We must mount a last desperate attempt to stand athwart the apocalypse shouting "No!" The alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

Never for a minute did any of us who founded Antiwar.com imagine we would one day be front and center in a twilight struggle to protect the country and the world from such a monumental evil, and yet here we are, a band of hobbits up against all the dark powers of Mordor. Without getting any more melodramatic than is absolutely unavoidable, I can only note that we've come a long way on our quest to rid the world of this particular Ring of Power, and the battle seems to be reaching some sort of dramatic climax. As to whether or not the Cheney-neocon-War Party axis of evil will be defeated in the end, no one can confidently predict at the moment. Yet one thing does seem clear: as long as Antiwar.com is around, we have at least a fighting chance.

I want to thank each and every one of our readers who have supported us down through the years, even as I remind them that their future support is even more vitally important than ever before. Together we can beat the War Party – but not without constant vigilance. We stand on the watchtower just as long as you, our readers and supporters, keep us there. I hope and trust we will continue until the end – whatever that end may turn out to be.

The days are now numbered for surfing an uncensored, open-access Internet, using your favorite search engine to search a bottomless cyber-sea of information in the grandest democratic forum ever conceived by humankind. Instead you can look forward to Googling about on a walled-off, carefully selected corpus of government propaganda and sanitized information "safe" for public consumption. Indoctrinated and sealed off from the outer world, you will inhabit a matrix where every ounce of creative, independent thinking that challenges government policies and values will be squelched. Just a wild conspiracy theory, you say? No longer can this be rationally maintained.

Federal government--from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the White House--and corporate mainstream media have worked cooperatively to quietly block open access to cyberspace. Seizing its infrastructure, corporate mainstream media have censored and covered up its logistical moves—including lobbies in Congress and the FCC, the filing of suits in state and federal courts, and quid pro quo with the highest government officials--to commandeer, monopolize, and turn the Internet into an extension of itself. From Fox News to CNN, there has been dead silence as the greatest bastion of democracy in history is being torn down and resurrected in its own image. Now, as the corporate newsrooms remain mum, it has gotten the green light from the highest federal court in the land.

On June 27, 2005, in a 6 to 3 decision (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services) the United States Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies like Comcast and Verizon are not required to share their cables with other Internet service providers (ISPs). The Court opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, was fashioned to serve corporate interests. Instead of taking up the question of whether corporate monopolies would destroy the open-access architecture of the Internet, it used sophistry and legally- suspect arguments to obscure its constitutional duty to protect media diversity, free speech, and the public interest.

The Court accepted the FCC's conclusion reached in 2002 that cable companies don't "offer" telecommunication services according to the meaning of the 1996 Telecommunication Act, which defines telecommunication purely in terms of transmission of information among or between users. According to the FCC, cable modem service is not a telecommunications offering because consumers always use high speed wire transmission as a necessary part of other services like browsing the web and sending and receiving e-mail messages. The FCC maintained that these offerings are information services, which manipulate and transform data instead of merely transmitting them. Since the Act only requires companies offering telecommunication services to share their lines with other ISPs (the so-called "common carriage" requirement), the FCC concluded that cable companies are exempt from this requirement.

However, the FCC's conceptual basis for classifying cable modem services as informational was groundless. Not even the FCC could deny that people use their cable modems to transmit information from one point to another over a wire, regardless of whatever else they use them for. The FCC's classification could not possibly have provided a reasonable interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunication Act since it was inconsistent with it. Section 706 (C) (1) of this Act defines "advanced telecommunications capability"

without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.

Broadband cable Internet offers "advanced telecommunications capability" since it clearly fits this legal definition. Therefore, cable modem service must legally be regarded as telecommunications service.

To classify it as an information service is instead to treat high-speed broadband Internet as though it were similar to cable services such as Fox News and CNN. These networks send information down a one-way pipe unlike Internet transmissions, which, in contrast, are interactive, two-way exchanges resembling telephone conversations. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made this quite clear in its decision in AT&T v. Portland:

Accessing Web pages, navigating the Web's hypertext links, corresponding via e-mail, and participating in live chat groups involve two-way communication and information exchange unmatched by the act of electing to receive a one-way transmission of cable or pay-per-view television programming. And unlike transmission of a cable television signal, communication with a Web site involves a series of connections involving two-way information exchange and storage, even when a user views seemingly static content. Thus, the communication concepts are distinct in both a practical and a technical sense. Surfing cable channels is one thing; surfing the Internet over a cable broadband connection is quite another.

The Supreme Court had to strain to find some alleged legal basis to defer to the FCC's classification of high-speed Internet as an information service. So it put the entire weight of its argument on the FCC's claim that cable companies do not "offer" the telecommunication aspects of its services to consumers. Instead, it "offers end users information-service capabilities inextricably intertwined with data transport." Justice Scalia, writing the minority opinion in Brand X, analogized, you might as well say that a pizza service doesn't deliver pizzas because it also bakes them! Countering with its own analogy, the majority rationalized that you might as well say that a car dealership "offers" engines to consumers because it offers them cars. According to the majority's perspective, since the finished product is the car and not the engine, it makes more sense to say they offer consumers cars rather than engines. Similarly, it argued, the finished product that cable modem customers seek is Internet services such as being able to surf the net, not simply a transmission over a wire. [...]

The main alternative to high speed Internet (broadband) via cable is presently slower modem connectivity via Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service over telephone lines. Telephone companies have traditionally been required by government to share their lines with other ISPs, thereby assuring greater competition and diversity in content. But the Court has now given the FCC the right to abandon this common carriage requirement to render it consistent with the broadband cable industry; and, as FCC Chair Kevin Martin has already given the nod to the telephone companies, it should only be a matter of time before the telephone lines are also deregulated and alternative, independent commercial ISPs are banished altogether from cyberspace.

Broadband and DSL are therefore on their way to becoming extensions of corporate mainstream media. In fact, the companies that have taken control of the Internet are themselves part of an intricate web of corporate media ownership. For example, Time Warner and Comcast, have recently purchased Adelphia. Moreover, companies such as Google are in a strategic position to become front men for mainstream corporate Internet. This financially prosperous dot com, which now rivals Time Warner in net worth, has advertising relations with Verizon and partnerships with companies such as News Corp. There have also been a number of documented instances in which Google has engaged in questionable censorship practices. It is therefore no stretch to imagine this company taking its place as gatekeeper of a government-friendly mainstream corporate Internet.

The logistics of this well organized assault on American democracy by corporate mainstream media can be summed up in this one simple principle: Whoever controls the conduit controls the content. Media broadcast corporations like CBS, ABC, and NBC control the spectrum that carries their broadcasts; they are therefore able to determine the content of their programming. Cable TV news networks like News Corp's Fox News and Time-Warner's CNN own the cables that carry their news shows, and therefore can control what passes as "news." Gigantic radio empires like Clear Channel and Infinity have crowded out the smaller broadcasters and now determine the content of mainstream radio. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, now on a campaign to restrict "liberal" programming, controls National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Colossal media corporations like Time Warner, which also own mainstream movie distribution companies, also control the content of the movies most Americans watch. Publishers of books are also part of this intricate corporate media web. For example, News Corp. owns Harper-Collins.

All of these companies have interconnected corporate boards with a relatively small number of officers. And they have well entrenched business relationships with the government, for example, dependence on government officialdom for the content of their news reports; enormous financial incentives to receive government contracts (for example, General Electric's NBC has interests in military contracts to produce jet engines); interests in government deregulation of media ownership caps and cross-market ownership, and lucrative tax incentives. As a result of this intricate web of quid pro quo, the mainstream media is to America what Pravda used to be for the now defunct Soviet Union: disseminators of an array of government-friendly, self-censored, whitewashed propaganda.

When the London Times leaked the so called "Downing Street Memo," the Internet buzzed with how Americans were deceived and lied to about the Bush Administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq. While at first, the mainstream media gave scant attention to this memo, the shockwaves sent out from the Internet were simply too strong to be ignored indefinitely. Even so, the mainstream broadcast media, from NBC's Chris Matthews to Fox's O'Reilly, still ignored the substance of the memo (namely that "the facts" about the threat to U.S. security posed by Saddam Hussein were being "fixed" to fit a policy of preemptive war). Instead, it focused on peripheral issues (such as whether the Bush Administration had an exit plan) and it largely dismissed the memo as "nothing new."

So what if the Internet blogs were themselves walled off and thereby prevented from sounding the alarm in the first place? No American would then have even been aware of the memo's existence! And the Bush Administration would have avoided being placed in the position of answering to the American people. Without a free Internet, Americans are therefore vulnerable with no defense against media and government propaganda. The government is protected against the people instead of conversely. Walled off from a free Internet, America is walled off from the truth, and there is no longer freedom in America.

The mainstream media have systematically played down the Supreme Court's decision to deregulate broadband cable Internet just as it has ignored the Downing Street Memo. The decision was not even mentioned by cable TV networks like Fox and CNN. The New York Times covered it only on the bottom of C1 of the business section while the details of the BTK killer got front page press along with other decisions handed down by the Supreme Court on June 27 (including the Grokster file sharing case). The Palm Beach Post, which is published by Cox--another mainstream media company in the cable business--didn't cover it at all. Censoring stories that have potential to subvert corporate and government interests has already become the rule in this brave new world of corporate media coverage. And with open-access Internet now on its last leg, things promise to get even worse. Unless we are prepared to do something about it before it's too late!

What can we, the people, do to save the Internet from becoming the latest casualty of the corporate mainstream media?

Americans can no longer afford to sit back and permit others to defend freedom of speech for them. We are all the victims of the same concerted effort by the corporate political establishment to amass power and wealth for the few at the expense of the many. We can no longer afford to wait until all of our outlets of free speech have been shut down. The collective American voice can be a powerful one. There is great strength in numbers.

This power can be harnessed if we all take the time to write letters to our congress persons, letting them know our opposition to corporate monopolistic control of the Internet. History has shown that these protests can produce change. In 2003, when it was deluged with millions of letters from constituents protesting the FCC's deregulation of corporate media ownership rules, Congress responded by legislatively reducing the FCC's proposed market ownership cap. Now, with the demise of open-access Internet hanging in the balance, this problem of media consolidation is more crucial than ever. By our collective efforts, we can make a difference.

You should also send e-mail messages, including chain messages, to friends and associates alerting and educating them about the attack on the free architecture of the Internet. You can also join organized efforts such as the Center for Digital Democracy's Digital Destiny Campaign, a grass roots effort to protect Internet freedom and diversity. Other organizations like the Free Press have well organized and successful outlets for making your voice heard in Washington.

While they last, you should support diversity in search engines by using alternative independent, search engines. Google is not the only comprehensive search engine, and by supporting alternatives, we make it harder for one search engine to usurp the authority of others. Given that there are biases internal to the selection criteria of search engines, reliance on one engine to the exclusion of all others renders us more vulnerable to organized attempts at censorship, propagandizing, and control over what we can know.

You should also contact your federal, state and municipal leaders and let them know that you are concerned about the effects of corporate media consolidation of the Internet and that you would like to see municipal Internet service ensuring access for all residents of your community. Dominant cable and telephone companies have successfully lobbied state legislatures to forbid such competition and there have been at least fourteen states that have already banned or restricted municipal telecommunications utilities, and bills are presently being introduced in other states outlawing the offering of free or discounted access to Internet service by municipalities. A bill has also been introduced in the House that would prohibit such community and municipal services. You can join the Free Press initiative against it. On the other hand, the Community Broadband Act has been introduced in the Senate that would protect the right of communities to offer affordable broadband access.

Defenders of deregulation of corporate media have always pointed to alternative technologies in order to justify further deregulation. Before the present deregulation of Internet, the FCC pointed to the Internet to justify further deregulation of commercial broadcast TV and radio. Now the friends of deregulation, including the Supreme Court itself in the Brand X decision, are claiming that there are other platforms like wireless terrestrial and satellite as well as municipal Internet. But if the future resembles the past, these too will fall under corporate control with the help of the federal government. To see this you need only consider who now owns the satellites and controls the spectrum for wireless Internet and how vigilant mainstream corporate media have been in attempting to thwart the development of municipal and community Internet. It is therefore essential that we stand firm in our conviction and not fall for the old line. Affordable, uncensored Internet for all Americans is presently in danger of becoming a pipe dream. Unless we act now, the outlook for survival of democracy in cyberspace is dismal, and it grows dimmer with each successive conquest by mainstream corporate media.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. His most recent book on the dangers of corporate media is News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy (Prometheus Books, March 2005).

Let's pretend, just for the moment, that this is a hypothetical question.

Let's pretend, just for argument's sake, in the comfort of your own easy chair, in front of your own big screen TV, just a few easy steps away from your favorite, anxiety-reducing snacks in your refrig, that this is just an academic exercise in geopolitical and psychological speculation, a polite brainstorming session that imaginary participants might conduct if certain coincidental worst case scenarios were to come to pass ... all at the same time.

And let us acknowledge, in the calm certainty of our own typically secure routines, that any resemblance of this imaginary debate to actual persons and events living or dead may not be purely coincidental.

OK? Got it? Pretend it's hypothetical. Just for fun. Then let's begin.

Are you ready for World War Three?

What kind of pathetic paranoid poppycock is that? What IS this? Another Y2K drill? Much ado about nothing, I think.

Remember. You're pretending it's hypothetical. You agreed.

Oh, all right. Let's see. Mmmmmm .... of course I'm not ready. Nobody is ready for World War Three. You CAN'T get ready for that.

What will you do when it happens?

Sit here and be vaporized, I guess. What could anybody do?

So ... does that mean you're not ready?

Of course I'm not ready for World War Three! Is anybody ready for World War Three?

Yes, I think there are some people who are ready?

Oh yeah? Who?

Well, three types of groups, at least. First, there are the people who are already victims of major wars, the people in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Colombia, not to mention Burma, the Philippines, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Congo, and certain other countries, people who are already scavenging in often-radioactive garbage dumps just to make ends meet; many of their relatives or children have already been killed by invaders, and they're just living hand to mouth, not caring whether the food they eat or the things they find might be radioactive or not, because when your expected life span is only a few more weeks or months, you don't much care about those things. Survival becomes a day-by-day operation. If the superpowers who have these weapons destroy themselves by using them, that would be good news for the folks routinely diving in dumpsters.

Second, there are the people who plan and wish to execute nuclear wars. They have already built themselves secure bunkers miles beneath the earth's surface. There are many in the U.S. and Europe. The figure they can ride it out, and they have a new, secret technology that actually detoxifies radioactive contamination, but they're keeping it under wraps until after the Big One so then they can come out when the coast is clear and continue making scads of money doing two things: cleaning up radioactive rubble and repossessing real estate whose owners have been obliterated, are slowly and agonizingly died of radiation poisoning, or simply have scampered off to more hospitable climes.

Third, there are the people who saw it coming and had the foresight to move to remote locations in the Southern Hemisphere. As long as widespread nuclear explosions didn't trigger a pole shift, those in the lower Southern Hemisphere would be relatively safe from the nuclear winter that will follow World War Three and render the entire Northern Hemisphere completely uninhabitable. The winds in the world are pretty much hemisphere specific, so that the winds that blow around the world in the Northern Hemisphere don't cross over into the southern, and vice versa, although with the magnitude and volume of these explosions in all-out nuclear war, there is bound to be some crossover.

Humph. Sonofagun. You have this all worked out, don't you?

What will you do when it actually happens?

When what actually happens?

When World War Three actually happens.

How will I find out about it?

Well, there are several ways you could find out about it. If you lived in an urban area like New York or Beijing or Cairo or Teheran, you'd probably find out about it when you saw a flash of light brighter than anything you've ever imagined, but it would last for only a millisecond and then you'd see nothing ever again. If, like most people, you lived in towns moderately close to these cities, you'd probably feel these humongous thumps and wonder why your house was disintegrating all around you. If you lived way out in the sticks you'd start to see these radiant atmospheric flashes, feel relatively gentle ground tremors, and then in a few hours you'd see a smoky blackness creeping toward you from the direction of the cities that would grow blacker and blacker as the hours passed. Depending on each person's individual perceptual skills, it would be a matter of minutes or hours before you realized you would never see the sun again, because you will never survive the abject cold that would be produced by the sun being blotted out for probably from five to 15 years, except, as I said before, in extremely lucky places in the way Southern Hemisphere. Didn’t you ever wonder why all those Israelis are buying up huge chunks of real estate in Patagonia?

You mean I won't see something on television and be able to briefly feel a pang of remorse about someone else being killed far away, and then be able to put it out of my mind so I could watch Monday Night Football with my usual intense focus?

Not likely. Here’s a variation on the initial question. What would you do if you got information that you really believed and trusted that World War Three was about to start in a few months? What steps would you take to prepare yourself?

How would I know I could trust the information?

Well, you’d hear it from the sources you always trusted. Your newspapers, your TV, maybe even from some particularly reliable Internet site.

But would I believe it? Would I be willing to give up everything I’ve worked for all my life, and just bolt into the wild blue yonder because I read something some journalist, no matter how well connected, might have just dreamed up?

Well, let’s say you had an inside source in the secret government, and he told you about the plan. Let’s say you regarded it as having the authenticity of all those insider stock tips he’d given you over the years that had made you a bundle. Someone who could discourse effortlessly on Masonic kingpin Albert Pike’s 1871 prediction that there would be THREE World Wars and final one would begin in the Middle East and erase both Zionized Christendom and Islamic world in one mighty stroke. And someone who had scary connections with alphabet intelligence agencies.

Yes, I see. What would I do? Hmmm.

Would you run, or would you try to alert others?

Oh dogbiscuits! You know what it’s like to tell people that you really know what’s going on, and that they don’t. They think you’ve got marbles rattling around in your brain, and they just ignore you, at best. At worst, they call Homeland Security and the men in the little white coats with the large guns show up at your door. At least, you become socially ostracized for not going along with what everybody else believes.

So which would you do?

Well, I guess I’d try to find out if the tip was real or not, and if I determined it WAS real, I’d try to alert the most important people I know to see if they could do something about it.

What would make you decide if the tip was real or not?

Well, our best sources are on TV, I think. At least that’s what everybody believes. Most people don’t believe something is really real unless they see it on television.

So you’re saying that what you see on TV is actually real?

No, I’m not that naive. I know stuff that appears on the news is often shaded by those who own the TV networks to inflict the spin they want to put on most world events. Hell, that’s how we got in all those wars.

So what if someone on TV, highly reputable, came on and predicted all-out nuclear war? Would you act on that?

Probably not. I wouldn’t believe him.

OK, say you were certain of the tip you received being real. Then what would you do?

I’d call the police, then my congressperson.

And what would you do if they all said you were nuts? And then they said they knew who the bad guys really were, because they had this evidence that they couldn’t really tell you about because of National Security, but they were going to nuke them all to smithereens.

I don’t know. Cry? Or run into the street screaming.

OK, one more question. If you had the power to impact a large number of people and the money to arrange some effective plan of action to the catch the people who were planning to use nuclear weapons, and you were certain that they were going to carry out their plan on the basis of at least 50 years of continuing atrocities perpetrated against innocent people which they later blamed on completely innocent patsies, what would you do ..... ?

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida and whose works are seen on hundreds of websites around the world. These have been collected into two anthologies, “America’s Autopsy Report” and “The Perfect Enemy.” He has also written the best-selling booklet, “The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001,” which is aimed at those who still believe the government’s story of what happened on that tragic day. For more information go to www.johnkaminski.com

The American Right, for four years a fount of rapturous praise for Tony Blair, is showing signs of falling out of love with Britain over what it sees as its soft and ineffective record on terrorism.

The July 7 bombings prompted outpourings of sympathy from Americans. But the media coverage of the bombings was marked by a tone of frustration at London's record of tolerance for Islamist preachers. This has intensified on the Right in the wake of Thursday's botched attacks.

Two prominent articles in the latest edition of The Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative journal with close ties to the Bush administration, have laid into Britain's domestic approach to fighting terrorism.

Under the headline "Letter from Londonistan" Irwin Stelzer concludes that British policy amounts to "easy entry for potential terrorists" and "relative safety from deportation and detention as enemy combatants".

He concludes that Mr Blair is the "prisoner of a dominant political class that is preventing Britain from responding to the threat the nation faces".

Another article suggests President George W Bush's administration take the dramatic step of ending the 1986 visa waiver programme which allows Britons and citizens of most other western European states three months in the US without a visa.

"The transatlantic crowd in Washington might rise in high dudgeon at the damage this could do to US-European relations," writes Reuel Marc Gerecht, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think-tank which primed many of the radical ideas of the Bush administration.

But, he said, warnings that this would lead to the swamping of embassies and consulates by visa applicants should be ignored.

"American-European relations were just fine when we required all Europeans to obtain visas before crossing our borders … Issuing visas to Europeans would be an annoying inconvenience for all; it would not, however, be an insult."

Calls for such drastic action, first raised in a column in the New York Times, are to date confined to the media. Officials say the Bush administration has not raised the issue and that rather it has just offered to help in any way it can.

Officials also point out that consular authorities proved no defence against the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks, as Mr Gerecht concedes.

But his frustration at British policy is shared by swaths of influential Americans, both on the Right and in the intelligence community.

The Heritage Foundation, another prominent Right-wing think-tank, last week called on Britain to strengthen its anti-terrorist laws and consider withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.

It also wants Britain to adopt a policy of zero-tolerance against radical Islamic preachers.

Why "Suicide Bombing" Must be a Myth and What Purposes it Really Serves 

After reading The Logic of Suicide Terrorism--It’s the Occupation, Not the Fundamentalism by Robert Pape, the main idea that we come away with is that suicide bombers are real, very real indeed. Though we were promised a revelation of the logic, these questions remain: 

• If the purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is not to die, but to kill and to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society, why do they die? 
• If the purpose of the suicide bomber is to end the occupation of his country, why is the suicide tactic not as old as war and territorial occupation itself? 
• If the purpose of the suicide bomber is to end the occupation of his country and to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society why are the targets so disparate and scattered, without a clear relation to the occupation? 
• Why are suicide bombings publicized before any proof is brought by investigation? 

For me these questions underline the illogical nature of suicide bombings. I believe to find logic you have to see the suicide bomber as a fabrication of the Zionists for their own purposes: 

• To demonize Islam 
• To make Muslims look stupid, fanatical, and murderous. 
• To create worldwide terrorism that they can claim has nothing to do with Israel, but everything to do with Islam. 
• To attack those who think themselves to be allies, but are not, e.g. America, Spain, Britain. 
• To shift the blame for any bombing Zionists perpetrate onto the Muslims, simply by calling it a suicide bombing. 
• To control public opinion in favor of Israel as the most grieved victim of terrorism. 
• To justify apartheid in Israel. 
• To justify war in the Middle East with the spoils of war accruing to themselves, while the costs are borne by their “allies”. [...] 

Israel Uses the Myth as a Cover to Attack "Allies" 

[Israel uses the suicide bomber myth as a cover] to attack those who think themselves to be allies, but are not, e.g. America, Spain, Britain. 

In 1983 Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon. The US and France had peacekeeping forces i