Category : war

The US Veterans Administration has quietly dropped this bombshell during the holidays: 150,000 US troops returning from Iraq are receiving disability benefits. 70,000 have asked the VA for mental health care. 1,502 are 100% disabled. At least 1,000 vets are homeless.

Excuse me while I go vomit in anger. Have you ever puked in anger before? It’s extremely fucking painful.

But not as painful as what these guys are going through. Don’t read this article if you’ve eaten recently….. but DO read it. Please. Our nation depends on it.

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18 Secret Armies Of The CIA

Having trouble keeping track of all the secret armies that the CIA has financed and controlled all over the world? Well this handy list will help you keep them all straight, from the Bay of Pigs Invasion Force to the Salvadoran Death Squads, Chinese Brigade in Burma, and many more.

The best part concerns the Nungs:

Fearsome and brutal fighters, the Nungs were employed throughout Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Nungs proved costly since they refused to fight unless constantly supplied with beer and prostitutes.

Ah, now there’s a secret invasion force after my own heart.

This just in from the Electric Monkey Pants Intergalactic News Network (EMPINN):

Washington insiders say that today’s execution of former Iraqi dictactor Saddam Hussein was moved forward by neo-conservatives eager to punish the traitorous hippies for the alleged assassination of former President Gerald Ford.

Our sources indicate that the neocons, led by Dick Cheney, believe that a covert hippy assassination squad was responsible for the untimely death of Cheney’s old boss, Gerald Ford. The prevailing theory is that a Greenpeace-trained eco-terrorist squad was responsible for the hit, citing Ford’s love of meat as the main beef.

EMPINN correspondants report that most people on “the street” believe that a poisoned carton of applesauce was smuggled into the Ford residence and deployed remotely, via “secret hippy-powers.”

A call to Hippy Headquarters in San Francisco reached the “main dude” of the Hippy Network who responded to the allegations forcefully, stating, “What?! Uh… man, that’s fucked up. No way, dude; these people are on acid. Fuck them, dude.”

Now insiders are indicating that the hanging of Saddam Hussein was, in part, a retaliation for the hippy hit on Ford. An anonymously dressed source maintains “it was payback for the Ford hit. Since, you know, hippies are in league with Saddam the Cheneyites figured that killing Saddam would sap them of their powers.”

The vice president’s office refused to comment, saying, “Dick doesn’t have time to respond to every little rumor that his office leaks out. Besides, he’s in a meeting with the Prince of Darkness and can’t be interrupted.”

This has been an Electric Monkey Pants Intergalactic News Network special report.

First and foremost, I want to say that my thoughts are with the victims of the attacks of September 11th, 2001. This 5-year anniversery is going to be tough on many of their family members and friends, and I wish the best for those still dealing with their loss.

Secondly, my thoughts are focused on seeing the real terrorists brought to justice, whomever they may be.

Surprisingly, the Minneapolis & St. Paul Star Tribune has actually done a story on the conspiracy theories surrounding the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

As the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks looms, skepticism about the official version of the atrocities that day has gained traction in the minds of many Americans and among a small, but growing, number of academics.

Yeah, and it’s about time you covered it!!

The story doesn’t delve into the details at all, however. It just covers the emergence of the alternate theories and what the “experts” have to say about all these “kooks.” But it’s not a total hatchet job, so I guess that’s something.

We have to have a real investigation of 9/11, not the whitewash that was the 9/11 Commission Report. We owe it to the victims and their families to make sure justice is served.

I don’t have much time for commentary, but this article speaks for itself. It’s a great one. Here are some excerpts:

Anderson says that even the small talk was difficult to tolerate. “I hate Iraqis,” he quotes his peers as saying. “I hate these damn Muslims.” At first he was puzzled by such talk. “After a while I started to understand. I started to feel the hatred myself. My friends were dying. What am I here for? We went to fight for our country; now we’re just fighting to stay alive.” In addition to taking shrapnel from a roadside bomb – the injury that earned him the Purple Heart – Anderson says he often found himself in firefights. But it was work at a checkpoint that made him seriously question his role. He was guarding the “backside” of a street checkpoint in Baghdad, he says. If a car passed a certain point without stopping, the guards were supposed to open fire.

“A car comes through and it stops in front of my position. Sparks are coming from the car from bad brakes. All the soldiers are yelling. It’s in my vicinity, so it’s my responsibility. I didn’t fire. A superior goes, ‘Why didn’t you fire? You were supposed to fire.’ I said, ‘It was a family!’ At this time it had stopped. You could see the children in the back seat. I said, ‘I did the right thing.’ He’s like, ‘No, you didn’t. It’s procedure to fire. If you don’t do it next time, you’re punished.’”

Wow, thanks, Commander Psychopath. A soldier’s gotta follow orders, but there comes a time when he needs to refuse to take an unjust order. Every soldier is supposed to have a moral compass to guide him, whatever his CO might say. It’s a last line of defense against tyranny, something Germany didn’t have in Hitler’s time. The right to refuse to take an illegal order is a fundamental human right.

We was going along the Euphrates river,” says Joshua Key, detailing a recurring nightmare that features a scene he stumbled into shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “It’s a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies. The heads laying over here and the bodies over there and US troops in between them. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What’s caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?’ We get out and somebody was screaming, ‘We f***ing lost it here!’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh yes, somebody definitely lost it here.’” Key says he was ordered to look for evidence of a firefight, for something to explain what had happened to the beheaded Iraqis. “I look around just for a few seconds and I don’t see anything.”

Then he witnessed the sight that still triggers the nightmares. “I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like soccer balls. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and thought, ‘I can’t be no part of this. This is crazy. I came here to fight and be prepared for war, but this is outrageous.’”

He’s convinced that there was no firefight.

Uh…. I don’t know what to say about this. Is this winning hearts and minds?

There are psychopaths in every army. The problem with war is that it allows them to do what they really want instead of pretending to be a normal human being instead of a monster. War hurts everyone, but I think it hurts good men more. A psychopath is more likely to enjoy war. Clearly the guys playing soccer with severed heads are having a good time…. which makes me wonder what the fuck is wrong with their souls.

Key seems still in shock at the utter senselessness of it all. “Why did it happen and what was the cause for it? When I asked that question, I was told, basically, ‘You didn’t see anything, you know?’ Nobody asked no questions.” Assigned to raid houses, Key was soon appalled by the job. “I mean, yeah, they’re screaming and hollering out their lungs. It’s traumatic on both parts because you’ve got somebody yelling at you, which might be a woman. You’re yelling back at her, telling her to get on the ground or get out of the house. She don’t know what you’re saying and vice versa. It got to me. We’re the ones sending their husbands or their children off, and when you do that, it gets even more traumatic because then they’re distraught. Of course, you can’t comfort them because you don’t know what to say.”

While the residents are restrained, the search progresses. “Oh, you completely destroy the home – completely destroy it,” he says. “If there’s like cabinets or something that’s locked, you kick them in. The soldiers take what they want. Completely ransack it.” He estimates that he participated in about 100 raids. “I never found anything in a home. You might find one AK-47, but that’s for personal use. But I never once found the big caches of weapons they supposed were there. I never once found members of the Ba’ath party, terrorists, insurgents. We never found any of that.”

It goes on like this.

What the hell are we doing over there?

I think the people who support this war need to remember what war does to the souls, minds and bodies of the soldiers who have to fight it. When you send a soldier to fight and die in combat, you’d better have a damn good reason to do so. That’s the deal — they defend our country with everything they’ve got and we don’t send them into harm’s way unless we’re positive it needs to be done.

I get the feeling that we’re in Iraq because somehow their country ended up ontop of our oil. Maybe we should be up-front with the troops and tell them why they’re really there, instead of feeding them all this “spreading democracy” bullshit. There’s lots of places that don’t have democracy. We just happened to invade one that has a shitload of oil. Go figure.

I don’t blame the soldiers for wanting to believe the democracy lie while they’re over there — whatever gets you through. But when they come back home and start to count the cost, they soon discover that there’s a lot that doesn’t add up.

The Florida company which makes implanted RFID chips is lobbying the US government to stick them under the skin of 1.4 million US soldiers. According to the DC Examiner, VeriChip is hoping to convince the Pentagon to allow them to insert the chips under the skin of the right arms of military personnel instead of the traditional dog tags.

Very creepy shit. Unfortunately, this is the type of thing the Bush administration loves. They would love to have real-time tracking of every soldier under their command. That would make war even more like a video game than it already is.

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This sounds absolutely awful. A curse to live with until he dies — but every day he lives he must wish for death.

It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills – morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

Can somebody tell me why we use depleted uranium? Yes, it’s extremely dense material, but there are some major drawbacks. Foremost among them is the radioactivity part, coupled with a half-life of 4.5 billion years (which is approximately the current age of our planet).

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it – thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he’d never experienced in his previously healthy life.

The article goes on to reveal how he found out about the DU poisoning. He started meeting other people from his unit with the exact same symptoms. Then the Dutch took over their old camp:

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They’d brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

The Dutch were smart. Their lives would be a hellish nightmare like Reed’s if they had used Camp Smitty.

The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

Oh, the DoD says the depleted uranium is safe, eh? Okay, then they won’t mind if we store a couple thousand tons of it throughout the Pentagon. Hey, it’s safe, right? So why don’t we put a few hundred pounds of it the offices of everybody in the Pentagon — including the generals and Rumsfeld. I wonder how that would go over. Suddenly, they might just change their tune.

It’s pretty sick, but the DoD under Rumsfeld simply does not care. He’s willing to condemn these soldiers to a shitty lifetime of hell and suffering to achieve his war aims. That’s the only thing that matters to the neocons. Soldiers are merely pawns to them.

The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.

“The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all,” said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. “Then you have far-left groups that … declare it a crime against humanity.”

I’d like to see Rumsfeld eat a big chunk of DU for breakfast. That would be fucking funny. He already looks like some sort of undead skeleton creature… hmmm…. now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn’t encourage him — he might gain more unholy powers and start shooting lightning bolts out of his empty eye sockets, throwing cars at people and generally scaring the living shit out of all of us.

I think the people who deny the danger of DU must be part of Rumsfeld’s Undead Zombie Army — they know it’s dangerous, but they don’t give a fuck. It’s not like they could honestly believe it’s safe and friendly — we use it in war after all. And what part of “depleted uranium” don’t they understand? They know what uranium is, don’t they? The depleted part only makes it slightly less radioactive. There are many well-known dangers associated with DU:

There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.

Iraqi authorities “found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities,” the U.N. reported.

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.

Oh, well good thing there are no sandstorms in Iraq–…. uh, wait a minute. There are! In fact it’s a fucking desert!

Man, don’t you ever get tired of them lying to us? The neocons pretend to love the soldiers soooo much, but when you turn around and look at how they treat them you see that that can hardly be the case. They love having soldiers at their command. They love using soldiers to conquer their enemies. But do they just love soldiers? Clearly, the answer is “no.”

About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed’s unit.

Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.

But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.

But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they’d been exposed? Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell. And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested?

It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange – a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy – was linked to those sufferings.

When the Pentagon’s track record is this great, how could I possibly question their motives or their truthfulness?! [/sarcasm]

It almost seems as if the Pentagon wants to have an Agent Orange-type chemical/munition in order to increase the suffering of their own. Hopefully they’re not that sick in the head, but I think there is a case to be made for not using a munition on your enemy if there’s a good chance that your own forces will be contaminated simply by being in the neighborhood. The military puts a lot of money into training and outfitting these soldiers; it seems reckless and stupid to treat them so poorly.

The Pentagon is like the kid who treats his toys like shit and then complains to Congress/mommy that he needs more money to buy more so he can treat those like shit, too. Let’s hope, for the sake of all those soldiers suffering from DU-related ailments, that Congress doesn’t bend over backwards for the little brat. But it always does.

Title says it all. Here’s the story from the Central Valley IndyMedia:

As I’m filling out my name and address on the petition I notice that the young lady is filling out a very official looking form. Probably just the ballot initiative form, I think to myself. Then, she says “is it OK if I register you as a Republican?” “What?!?” I say “yes, I do mind! What are you doing?” She says that if I register Republican she will get an extra 10 cents. But, I complain, “I don’t want to re-register.” She explains that this is just to update the records for the County Clerks office. I repeat that “I do not want or need to update my records.” I am repeatedly told that it is OK and that they just want to update my voter registration records. She also tells me that she is working for the Republican party, being paid hourly, and that the ploy about the “10 cent bonus” was not accurate.

This Republican party employee goes on to tell me that she is there to attract people to the table that is set up in Fresno’s Courthouse Park, and that the legalize marijuana petition is just a prop. She confirmed that there is no ballot initiative to legalize marijuana. She said that the petition will be given to an elected official in Sacramento. I have my doubts about that.

Man, who can you trust when the Republican Party lets you down? [snort!] [snort!]

It looks like the Republicans are desperately using every trick in the book to make people register as Republicans so that their electoral ploys this November will look more plausible. I’ll keep an eye for any of these fake campaigns in my neck of the woods.

At least the Republicans know how popular their drug policy is; which is to say, not at all! Both parties remain committed to the continuation of the failed War on Drugs, despite its unpopularity with voters. Gee, sounds a bit like Iraq, doesn’t it?

These ideological wars aren’t waged because they’re popular — though they may be at the start — they are waged to serve as a distraction and a power amplification conduit. The distraction part is obvious, but the power conduit part is less recognized. These wars transfer massive amounts of political, financial and military power to certain people within the government; that is the point of these wars. Bush/Cheney’s wartime expansion of executive power is the prototypical example for this type of power amplification, and it is repeated down the chain of command, at least where it’s relevant. The Dept. of Education hasn’t gained much power from the War in Iraq. But the Drug Czar, the FBI, DEA and the CIA have all benefitted hugely from the War on Drugs.

Of course, the fact that the War on Drugs and the War in Iraq don’t make sense from a rational point of view also constitutes an unanncounced War on Logic. Many of the neocons’ statements seem to portend an upcoming War on Reality. We can only guess at what comes after that. Perhaps a War on Everybody is in the works?

Before that war, we’ve got a series of additional wars that need waging. The War on Syria and the long-awaited War on Iran are coming down the pipeline shortly. What other wars will we need after that? Well, perhaps a War on Every Other Islamic Nation will be needed because I suspect they will assume they’re next even if they aren’t. And who can blame them? We’ve been invading Islamic nations for awhile now. If we go into Iran and Syria that will make 4 that we’ve taken out in the last half-decade.

War, war, war!! It’s a dirty business, but it hasn’t to be waged, doesn’t it?

Well, what about the power amplification conduit I mentioned earlier? What about the incredible amount of power we’ve transferred to the Pentagon, the White House, NSA, CIA and all the corporations helping them wage the war? Doesn’t it seem clear that they are addicted to power? They constantly need more of it. They feed, but they’re still hungry. More power!

When does it end?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. It ends with the War on Everybody.

A group of 9/11 widows are demanding a full and independent investigation into the crimes of September 11th after new allegations reveal that the Kean 9/11 Commission suspected that they were being deceived by the Pentagon. The 9/11 widows released a withering statement criticizing the Kean Commission for not properly investigating the attack from all angles:

“Recent stories in the Washington Post, the New York Times, as well as the release of the transcripts of the NORAD tapes in Vanity Fair, clearly show that the 9/11 Commission failed in its duties,” says the widows’ statement.

“Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate,” reported Dan Eggan for The Washington Post.

“As one of its last acts before disbanding, in July 2004, the 9/11 commission made referrals to the inspector general’s offices of both the Department of Transportation (which includes the F.A.A.) and the Defense Department to further investigate whether witnesses had lied,” wrote Michael Bronner for Vanity Fair.

In light of these reports, the 9/11 widows “question the veracity of the entire Commission’s report.”

“The fact that the Commission did not see fit to tie up all loose ends in their final report or to hold those who came before them accountable for lying and/or making misleading statements puts into question the veracity of the entire Commission’s report,” the widows write.

“Furthermore, the lack of tenacity and curiosity, by the Commissioners themselves, to determine why NORAD had deceived them is unconscionable,” the statement continues. “Knowing full well that the lack of military response was such a critical failure, begs the question of whether that same lack of tenacity and curiosity was applied to other critical areas of the 9/11 investigation.”

Indeed. The 9/11 Omission Commission stank from day 1. For one thing, “day 1” was over a year after the attacks. The Bush administration stalled for over 400 days before finally backing down. The 9/11 Widows are probably the only reason we even got an investigation. The Bush Regime showed a distinct lack of curiosity and tenacity, too.

And of course, they initially wanted to have Henry Kissinger lead the Commission, which is a bit like having Joseph Goebbels lead the Nuremberg Trials. Luckily, Goebbels was dead by then. It’s a shame we can’t say the same about the war-criminal Kissinger.

The 9/11 Widows have exposed a progressive crumbling of the official story. I would say that that the official conspiracy (remember: the official story is a conspiracy theory, too. It states that 19 al-Qaeda members conspired to orchestrate the attacks) is in tatters. It’s being attacked from all angles because it doesn’t make any sense.

The 9/11 Commission looks increasingly like part of a massive coverup. The Commission knew that they were being lied to by somebody, but did they bother to follow up and demand the truth? According to the Washington Post, they dithered about it for awhile and then passed the buck:

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

Although the commission’s landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department’s early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.

Tension? The Bush administration was tense before they even created the Commission. They were dragged, kicking and screaming into it. So yeah, there was tension there. The same kinda tension that a murderer feels when the cops are getting uncomfortably close.

A new level of tension must be ratcheting up over in the Bush White House as magazines like Vanity Fair creep closer to the truth and reveal dangerous amount of truth to a public that is starting to wake up to the serious questions that have been posed (mostly online) about the attacks of September 11th.

I wonder how many Americans are aware of the 5+ war games that were being played out on 9/11, many of which included simulated hijackings. At least one of these war games involved putting false blips on the screens of FAA air-traffic controllers. This led to incredible confusion not only at the FAA, but also at NORAD and NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector):

For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once. What emerges from the barrage of what Nasypany dubs “bad poop” flying at his troops from all directions is a picture of remarkable composure. Snap decisions more often than not turn out to be the right ones as commanders kick-start the dormant military machine. It is the fog and friction of war live—the authentic military history of 9/11.

Once you realize that there were multiple simultaneous war-games on 9/11, some involving hijackings and others which diverted our air defense to other sectors, certain questions arise… Questions that may cause Americans to wonder if this was all some amazing coincidence or if something darker was involved. One has to wonder if Al-Qaeda has moles within the Defense Department, the CIA, FEMA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Justice Department, and the City of New York. Oh and somehow the NSA, the FBI and the CIA
would have to be totally unaware of that fact.

That seems a bit unlikely.

I’m not going to jump to any conclusions for you, but I will give you a list of the War Games of September 11th for your googling pleasure:

Northern Vigilance
Northern Guardian
Vigilant Guardian
Vigilant Warrior
TRIPOD II

And there was an exercise involving the NRO and the CIA which evacuated NRO offices. Apparently it involved a plane crashing into a building. Hmm…

If you want to know more about the war games on 9/11, check out Michael Ruppert’s site for volumnous additional info, and a finger pointed at the man most likely responsible:

Dick Cheney.

Oh shit. Sistani is the only reason Iraq is going as well as it is. I know that sounds retarded, but he’s the only person keeping it from full-blown chaos! Okay, it’s that bad already, but if al-Sistani withdraws his support of the U.S. invasion everything will crumble.

Sistani is the number one cleric of Iraq (at least for the Shiite majority), sort of like the pope of Iraq or something. If he says “attack Americans” we’re going to see U.S. casualties skyrocket. We need him on our side, for our troops’ sake.

Iraq’s top Shiite cleric demanded an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, warning Sunday that the Muslim world will “not forgive” nations that stand in the way of stopping the fighting.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued the call following the Israeli airstrike that killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, in the village of Qana. It was the deadliest attack in nearly three weeks of fighting.

“Islamic nations will not forgive the entities that hinder a cease-fire,” al-Sistani said in a clear reference to the United States.

Oooohhh, he’s talking shit about our pathetic excuse for a diplomatic effort over in the Middle-east. Was Condi Rice even trying to make peace or was she just over there stalling for time?

To be sure, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, started her tour of the region in Beirut, giving that warred-over capital a brief respite. But no sooner had she moved to Jerusalem than Israel resumed massive air strikes on Beirut’s teeming southern suburbs, the heartland of Hizbollah, the heavily armed Shia Islamist group.

The message she brought to both parties was that there would be no return to the status quo ante. Hizbollah had to pull back from the border, disarm and hand back the two Israeli soldiers it seized two weeks ago, precipitating the crisis.

The chances of this happening are virtually nil, as Israel should know. Hizbollah was spawned by the Israeli invasion of 1982, and its shrewd but implacable guerrilla warfare forced Israel finally to abandon its occupation in 2000. Ignoring the hard reality of the region, Washington appears to believe diplomacy is about achieving Israel’s unrealisable war aims by other means.

The U.S. effort so far has not been a genuine attempt to achieve a cease-fire or a lasting peace. It’s been a charade, a phony, a fake pageant of pretending to want peace. The neocons want war. War is the only thing that will save them.

It’s not even a fair negotiation strategy to allow the U.S. to intervene when it’s clear that Israel is our dog in this race. We stand to gain from their actions and we give then diplomatic and international cover, which enhances their stand against Hezbollah. The Europeans would perhaps be a better group to try and negotiate peace, but everyone looks to America. It’s a shame our government is so cruel and contemptable.

But we risk alienating a powerful “ally” in al-Sistani. Now the choice is clear: continue our shameful pseudo-attempts to bring peace and we will face increasing pressure in Iraq from the Shia majority.

But the point is that fighting could now easily spread, and not just by sucking in Hizbollah’s patrons in Syria and Iran. Israel’s assault on Shia Lebanon has inflamed the Shia majority in Iraq – the community preventing the total meltdown of the US occupation. Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, modelled on Hizbollah, which fought alongside it in the 2004 siege of Najaf, is itching to launch a new uprising. Even Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shia who has held the Iraqi ring, is reportedly on the verge of withdrawing his tacit but vital support for the American project.

If he withdrawls his already-unenthusiastic support for America’s war then this whole thing falls apart into a regional war that will probably escalate into World War IV.

That’s horrible!

That’s tragic!

That’s…. exactly what the neocons want.

Pat Roberts has a difficult job; he has to do exactly nothing while making it look like he’s working hard. Right now it looks like he’s got the “do nothing” part down, but he’s not very adept at making it look like he’s working:

When angry Democrats briefly shut down the Senate last year to protest the slow pace of a congressional investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) claimed a rare victory.

Republicans called it a stunt but promised to quickly wrap up the inquiry. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is overseeing the investigation, said his report was near completion and there was no need for the fuss.

That was nine months ago.

The Republican-led committee, which agreed in February 2004 to write the report, has yet to complete its work. Just two of five planned sections of the committee’s findings are fully drafted and ready to be voted on by members, according to Democratic and Republican staffers. Committee sources involved with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they are working hard to complete it. But disputing Roberts, they said they had started almost from scratch in November after Democrats staged their protest.

That’s funny. Before the Democrats protested he hadn’t done jack shit! Now 2 sections are done, but I’m betting that the 2 sections completed are the most harmless. Any sort of competent or thorough investigation would reveal far more than Roberts is prepared to show us. He’s a cover-up guy. This is a cover-up. At most he will put a few mildly damaging bits in there to make it seem like he has teeth. He’s a naked partisan, sucking at Cheney’s wrinkled, wart-filled little cock with his toothless mouth.

The Republicans cannot be trusted to investigate themselves.

Part of the investigation that focuses on the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was run by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, is on hold, staff members said, pending a separate inquiry by the Defense Department’s inspector general.

Feith is the guy charged with justifying the invasion of Iraq by the neocons. He did his job and he did it well. Now they will go to great lengths to provide cover for him. They will lie, obstruct, assassinate, and stall to make sure the public doesn’t learn what really went on in Feith’s dungeon.

This is all part of a complex political dance, most of it designed to lull the public to sleep and assure us that we have a responsive and non-criminal government when the reverse is actually true.

Everybody knows that our excuses for the Iraq War were manufactured in the Office of Special Plans. Everybody knows those excuses were bullshit, there were no WMDs (except the ones we gave Saddam) and Iraq was not a threat to us (just as Iran is not a real threat). That doesn’t matter. Nobody has the political will or power to take on the Bush administration and start throwing people in jail. Until the likely-to-be-fraudulent elections in November we don’t have a prayer of seeing real action on this investigation. Only if the neocons don’t manage to successfully rig the election will we see action. Let’s hope they fuck up and don’t stuff enough ballot boxes.

At this rate it looks like they will have to stuff a lot of ballot boxes.

“[The] Five-year campaign plan [includes]… a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan” (Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark)

read more | digg story

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This should come as a surprise to no one who reads this blog regularly. For the rest of the world, it might be a bit of a shock. Alas, it’s hard to prove that we are in “Imperial” mode. Neocons on Digg have simply attacked Clark’s character rather than dealing with the revelation.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink
You can lead a person to truth, but you can’t make him think.