Imperial Bankruptcy

The illegal Iraq war that began 5 years ago might continue for up to 100 more, according to John McCain, confirming his professed weakness in economics. At the current $12 billion per month rate, it’s doubtful that even the Federal Reserve can print money fast enough to keep up with the dollar’s vanishing act.

American casualties so far include: 4000 dead soldiers. Several thousand severely wounded. American prestige and influence abroad. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution, and the venerable system of checks and balances laid out in that document. A decimated volunteer Army. And what once was the world’s most productive economy. And what exactly have Americans received for all this sacrifice? Cheap oil? The only winners in this fraudulent “War on Terror” are the Daddy Warbucks contractors and oil pirates fattening like ticks on a sick hog. And the wingnut Zionists who had a large role in luring us into another Middle East occupation — the #1 cause of terrorism. Has it occurred to them that a broke America jeopardizes Israeli security?

Eisenhower warned us against the insidious predations of this complex. Surely he spins in his grave as the U.S. now borrows and spends as much as the rest of the world combined for “defense,” while our industrial infrastructure has deteriorated or been exported to China in the ultimate triumph of voodoo economics: Uncle Sam in hock up to his ears to the world’s most powerful Communist nation. And the ultimate historical irony: we are bankrupting ourselves exactly like the Soviet Union by overinvesting in non-productive weapon systems and maintaining 800 bases in 130 foreign countries. We’re still “defending” Japan, Korea and Germany while their economies boom and their citizens enjoy universal health care.

As the Chinese and Saudi credit cards have maxed out along with our national debt and plummeting currency, it is inevitable that the never-ending “War on Terror” will require taxes and the draft to be raised. But those who continue to support this ruinous insanity shouldn’t wait for government mandates: our troops don’t need more yellow ribbons – after three or four extended rotations, with 145 vet suicides, they need relief. Volunteer boots on the ground. For those too old to serve, we could offer WWII-style war bonds. Then all the neofascist chickenhawks and their goosestepping followers can finally put their own flesh or money where their lip service is —or just shut up.

November Super Bowl

Several people on my email list replied to my celebration of the New York Giants SuperBowl victory with dismissive harrumphs, and I'm sure others quietly did the same. For those who are not football or sports fans in general, suspend your disinterest or prejudice for a moment and consider the following narrative — a parable if not a harbinger of the times we live in:

The New England Patriots, losers in last Sunday's SuperBowl, have been the dominant NFL team throughout the Bush era, winning their first championship in 2002. A victory on Sunday would have earned the players their 4th SuperBowl ring, and was deemed all but inevitable by Vegas bookmakers, the nation's whole cadre of sportswriters, and anyone at all familiar with the season, for the Patriots had racked up an unprecedented record — 18-0 — and were poised to become the Greatest Team of All Time. In the 87-year history of the NFL, only one team has achieved a perfect season — the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who went 14-0.

All year long, the Patriots didn't merely defeat their opponents — they crushed them, in some cases racking up huge, unnecessary and humiliating scores in the final quarter, an unsportsmanlike practice rarely indulged in the NFL or any professional sport. But skeletons have been discovered in the Patriots' locker room...

In the third game of the season, the team was fined $200K and the head coach Bill Belichek $500K for illegally videotaping an opponent coach's sideline signals. And last week, the Boston Herald (the Pat's hometown paper) revealed that their source, a Pats' staff employee in 2002, had admitted to secretly videotaping the St. Louis Rams' workout on the day before the 2002 Super Bowl — the final practice, wherein teams hone the patterns, plays and strategies to be used against a particular team. Gaining "intelligence" about such a workout in a covert operation is an egregious cheat that, unchecked, could lead to runaway escalation: bugs in the coach's office, double-agent waterboys, biological warfare against the opponent's Gatorade, encrypted signals beamed to the quarterback's earpiece, codebreakers furiously trying to hack it... we don't want to go there.

In response to the Herald exposé, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the league's czars had been aware of such "rumors" all along, had already conducted an investigation, accepted the Patriot's profession of innocence —that nothing untoward had been done with admittedly once extant tapes — which Goodell subsequently destroyed (this has prompted Sen. Arlen Specter to initiate his own investigation).

The "missing tapes."
Illegal electronic surveillance.
Violation of the league's "constitution."
Steamrolling all opposition.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? It appears that Coach Belichek borrowed the playbook of Karl Rove, and all the team's stunning victories may have been aided by dirty tricks. And like our supine Congress, the NFL Commission has decided to sweep the tainted victories under the rug, in the interest of maintaining faith in the system, however much it has been corrupted — with furtive camcorders, or the hacked results from Diebold voting machines.

Some juggernauts, ruthless in their exercise of raw power, are simply too formidable to tackle with any genuine hope of success. So it was said of the 2007 Patriots, with the trail of carnage in the wake of their historic 18-0 season. The "19-0, Undefeated SuperBowl Champs," "Greatest Team in History" T-shirts, caps and other memorabilia had already been printed. A Boston publisher had already printed commemorative books with the same title. That the Patriots would insure the perfect season by demolishing any foe in the biggest game of the year was a foregone conclusion, and only hopeless-cause romantics could entertain any delusion otherwise.

The New York Giants got off to a rocky start, losing 2 of their first 3 games, and struggled to a second-place finish in their own division. But they entered the playoffs as a "wildcard" team — second-chancers who would have to play an extra game while all the top seeds enjoyed a rest. The Giants won their wildcard game, then handily defeated their own division champs, the Cowboys, in the next round.

In the third round, they played on the Green Bay Packers frozen home turf. Air temperature at game time was —2 degrees, with a wind chill factor of —35 — the kind of brutal conditions that the heavily favored Packers excel in. Lombardi's progeny even pulled their own dirty trick, shutting off the heaters on the Giant's sideline. But the Giants battled to a tie at the end of regulation time, then won in overtime. Now all they had to do to cap an improbably successful season was make an appearance in the Super Bowl and lose to the Greatest Team of All Time.

Incredibly, they pulled off a shocking upset, scoring the winning touchdown with 35 seconds remaining — one to rank with Seabiscuit's victory over War Admiral, or the American hockey team's victory over the invincible Russians (all pros) in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics. So what is the parable here?

Sometimes, a seemingly inconsequential sporting event may signal a shift in the Zeitgeist. Those familiar with the peculiar workings of Synchronicity know that, in Jung's definition, some coincidences are meaningful — a timely eruption of the implicate order that may be shifting under our feet. The relevant coincidence herein:

The fraudulently invincible dynasty of the New England Patriots. And the fraudulently invincible dynasty of the magnificently corrupt Bush-Clinton machine.

The pundits have been assuring us that Hillary is certain to be the Democratic nominee, and that a wildcard like Ron Paul on the Republican side hasn't a ghost of a chance. These become self-fulfilling prophecies, when the GOP establishment and MSM ban Paul from debates and do everything in their power to marginalize him, while HIllary almost certainly benefited from Diebold fraud in the New Hampshire primary. For those who believe that her tearjerk performance was responsible for erasing Obama's 13-point lead... please send me your bank account information post haste — I have a wealthy acquaintance in Nigeria earnestly seeking to augment your net worth.

The dirty tricks have only just begun in this campaign season. Gutterball is the order of the day. Will we succumb to the vile manipulations? A friend who reviles spectator sports laments the lardass Americans who never get any exercise watching superbly conditioned athletes exert themselves — an apt analogy to our political process in recent years. If we stand any chance of taking our democracy back from the cheats, liars and military-industrial complex shills, we are going to have to turn off the TVs, climb down from the bleachers, and get involved.

We are going to have to play with the same indefatigable determination as the New York Giants.

The Case for Impeaching Dick Cheney

1. Espionage and Treason: The Valerie Plame Affair
Cheney’s chief aide, Scooter Libby, was the fall guy for the Valerie Plame affair, but Cheney was almost certainly the mastermind. Plame’s CIA network, operating under the front company Brewster Jennings, was tracking nuclear proliferation rings in the Middle East, and her exposure resulted in the arrests and deaths of agents in this network. From Sibel Edmonds’ testimony, we now know that corrupt U.S. officials were engaged with Turkish, Pakistani and Israeli agents in selling American nuclear secrets. The exposure of Plame’s network now seems to involve more than retaliation against her husband, Joe Wilson.

And if Edmond’s allegations are correct, the nuclear smuggling ring funneled nuclear technology to the black market network run by Pakistani nuke scientist A.Q. Khan, with North Korea, Libya and Iran as principal beneficiaries. It would be hard to imagine a greater crime against national security. The relevant U.S. Code espionage statute, (18 USC Sec. 794, see below*), mandates the death penalty or imprisonment for these offenses.

2. Torture
Cheney has publicly argued for allowing CIA agents to use torture against prisoners in secret detention centers, and most likely issued directives permitting waterboarding and other abusive practices. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States, and the Constitution makes such treaties the law of the land, and their violation a criminal offense.

3. Illegal surveillance
Cheney has been the leading advocate for extra-constitutional surveillance, including illegal CIA and Pentagon spying on American citizens, outlawed since Watergate. The procedures include warrantless wiretaps, “National Security Letters” issued by the FBI and DOD to fish through bank accounts and other private records without court approval. After Congress outlawed the Orwellian TIA (Total Information Awareness) program, it has gone underground, and a massive database on all American citizens, Main Core, is being populated in secret, effectively abolishing the 4th Amendment.

9/11
The ostensible justification for all these high crimes and misdemeanors is the “national emergency” ensuing from 9/11. But there is compelling evidence that, at the very least, the 9/11 attacks were abetted and allowed to happen, and Dick Cheney was the crucial kingpin in this atrocity. Most suspicious is the unprecedented failure of air defense to impede the attacks (in the year prior to 9/11, USAF jets had scrambled to intercept aircraft that had lost transponder signals or veered off course a total 67 times, and the average response time was between 15–20 mins.).

1. PNAC and "the new Pearl Harbor"
In 2000, Cheney is signatory to the PNAC’s (Plan for a New American Century) manifesto, calling for a global American military empire, and virtually praying for “a new Pearl Harbor” to catalyze the revolution.

2. Cheney delegated emergency defense powers
On May 8, 2001, four months prior to 9/11, Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of “[A]ll federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction consequence management within the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies…” This included all “training and planning” which needed to be “seamlessly integrated, harmonious and comprehensive” in order to “maximize effectiveness.” This mandate created the Office of National Preparedness in FEMA, overseen by Dick Cheney.

3. 9/11 War Games:
The Air Force was running multiple war games on the morning of 9/11 simulating hijackings over the continental United States that included (at least) one “live-fly” exercise as well as simulations that placed “false blips” on FAA radar screens. These war games eerily mirrored the real events of 9/11 to the point of the Air Force running drills involving hijacked aircraft as the 9/11 plot actually unfolded. The war games & terror drills played a critical role in ensuring no Air Force fighter jocks - who had trained their entire lives for this moment - would be able to prevent the attacks from succeeding. These exercises were under Dick Cheney’s management:

4. Cheney and the Secret Service
While Bush sat reading “My Pet Goat” to elementary school children in Florida for 30 minutes after the attacks were acknowledged, Cheney was running a completely separate chain of Command & Control via the Secret Service, assuring the paralysis of Air Force response on 9/11. The Secret Service has the technology to see the same radar screens the FAA sees in real time. They also have the legal authority and technological capability to take supreme command in cases of national emergency. Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11.

5. Norman Mineta’s testimony: the Stand Down
Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, Former Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta related his experience in the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operation Center) as the attack unfolded:

“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President...the plane is 50 miles out...the plane is 30 miles out....and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!??”

Mineta explains that while he had not known it at the time, he had surmised that the standing order the young man asked about must have been a stand down order.

Over 3000 Americans and foreign nationals were murdered on 9/11. An untold number have been kidnapped and tortured under "extraordinary rendition," many of them innocent of any crime or connection with terrorism. In 2006, the Bush administration successfully ramrodded a law through Congress giving all members of his administration retroactive immunity for war crimes. Impeachment hearings, with no possibility of "executive privilege," would surely provide enough evidence to rescind the legislated immunity.

*18 USC Sec. 794
(a) Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life, except that the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds that the offense resulted in the identification by a foreign power (as defined in section 101(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) of an individual acting as an agent of the United States and consequently in the death of that individual, or directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.

Sibel Edmonds update

A follow-up article in the London Times:

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets...

She (Edmonds) says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...

One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file...

The freedom of information request had not been initiated by Edmonds. It was made quite separately by an American human rights group called the Liberty Coalition, acting on a tip-off it received from an anonymous correspondent...

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US...

Edmonds: “This gag was invoked not to protect sensitive diplomatic relations but criminal activities involving US officials who were endangering US national security.”

Sibel Edmonds vs. The MSM Iron Curtain

Any remaining doubt that the American MSM (Mainstream media) has degenerated into the functional equivalent of Pravda and Izvestia in the late Soviet Union — submissive oracles of Orwellian obfuscation--has been banished by the recent case of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in January of this year.

A U.S. citizen and former Turkish language translator hired by the FBI after 9-11, Ms. Edmonds turned whistleblower after reading intercepts indicating a network of foreign intelligence agents was dealing with corrupt U.S. State department and intelligence officials in narcotics trafficking and smuggling of American nuclear secrets to Middle Eastern figures with connections to 9-11. Like any bureaucracy, the FBI fired her and denied her allegations. Edmonds filed suit, and presented her case in unclassified hearings before Senators Charles Grassley (Rep.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy, (Dem.). Both have publicly attested to her credibility, along with several knowledgeable FBI officers. And a senior official of the Justice Dept., Glenn Fine has stated: "We found that many of Edmonds' core allegations relating to the [espionage allegation] were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds.”

In 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft slapped Ms. Edmonds with a “states secret privilege” gag order, and In 2004 took the unprecedented step of retroactively classifying all the documents and testimony that she had given the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There are legitimate national security motives for keeping FBI and CIA employees from becoming blabbermouths, but the Sibel Edmonds scandal trumps these concerns morally and legally — a treasonous and criminal rogue enterprise embedded in our government that may have transmitted nuclear know-how into the hands of Middle Eastern terrorists needs to be exposed and investigated. For the last seven years, her case has been widely disseminated in alternative newspapers, magazines, books, websites, and the blogosphere. Like Erin Brockovich, the heroine of the eponymous true-story film, Ms. Edmonds has refused to be intimidated, shut up, and go away.

And it may take Hollywood to tell her story, because the MSM has gagged itself and erected an iron curtain of silence around her revelations.

In January 2008, the major media blackout finally lifted when the London Sunday Times published an article thoroughly laying out her case, including some of the information she was prohibited from discussing by Ashcroft — that the smuggling-spy ring included citizens of Turkey, Pakistan and Israel, and that prior warnings from FBI agents about an imminent terror attack by Osama bin Laden had been suppressed. She also named an American official — former undersecretary of State Marc Grossman — as a central figure in these machinations (he denies all).

Another central figure is former Pakistani ISI General Mahmoud Ahmad, infamous (except in the U.S.) for wiring $100,000 to lead 9/11 hijacker Muhammed Atta shortly before the attacks, and who was in Washinton visiting top American intelligence and political figures the week before. As Libertarian writer Justin Raimondo asserts, “The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds' testimony.”

The London Times story was picked up by newspapers in many countries, including Ha’aretz in Israel, The Daily Times in Pakistan, and The Daily News in Turkey — all nations whose agencies were implicated in the story, and some where freedom of the press is a far more restricted and dangerous affair than, ostensibly, in the cradle of free speech itself, the United States, where the sum total of major media coverage remains absolute zero. The NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, none of the second or third tier papers, CNN, MSNBC, Fox... a perfect vacuum, excepting the unbridled reporting on Antiwar.com, BradBlog.com, and the online editions of the foreign newspapers above.

There is something rotten to the core here, and it’s not in Ankara, Islamabad, or Tel Aviv.

Edmond’s allegations are directly related to the accounts of other FBI whistleblowers — Colleen Rowley, Robert Wright — who have implicated high-level FBI bureaucrats in spiking field investigations that were homing in on the 9/11 plotters. So far, none of them have suffered even a slap on the wrist — rather, a few have even been promoted. In the face of patent negligence, malfeasance, and perhaps worse — outright treason involving the security of our people against terrorism — it is up to the Fourth Estate to take up where habitual government secrecy and bureaucratic CYA stymie the necessary housecleaning. But it appears the press in Turkey, Israel and even Pakistan is more honest and vigorous than our pathetic lapdogs.

Those who believe we are getting anything resembling the truth about the crucial dangers threatening our society — from electoral fraud to nucelar proliferation — from our press lords are as deluded as the babushka who trusted Pravda to give an honest accounting of Uncle Joe and his KGB thugs. For inquiring minds hungry for the uncensored news about the United States, the online editions of British and foreign newspapers, and many websites publishing these feeds, are the only fully reliable sources. But I have found one good use for the Washington Post , New York Times and other major dailies — excellent tinder for my fireplace.

See these online articles for more complete information about Sibel Edmonds:

For sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets, London Times

Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11, Antiwar.com