Editor’s Note: The hanging of Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for his role in using chemical weapons in Iraqi wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, silenced yet one more witness who otherwise could have filled in the blanks of the Reagan-Bush-I roles in secretly assisting Saddam Hussein’s armies, the so-called Iraq-gate scandal.
If Majid had been turned over to the International Criminal Court – rather than prosecuted by kangaroo tribunals set up in Iraq by George W. Bush’s administration – he could have been systematically debriefed about what U.S. officials, including George H.W. Bush, did to facilitate Iraq’s acquisition of dangerous chemical weapons.
Instead, Majid – wearing a red jump suit, his head covered by a black sack and a noose around his neck – was dropped through the trap door of a scaffold on Monday. His potential to embarrass the Bush Family was eliminated, just as was done to Saddam Hussein three years ago, as this Dec. 30, 2006, article (slightly modified) recounts:
The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1, 2003.
But by the end of 2006, with nearly 3,000 American soldiers already killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush was forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.
Still, Bush had done his family’s legacy a great service, while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials, both past and present.
By arranging Saddam Hussein’s execution, Bush had silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.
Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used for producing the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.
Nor will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?
Like the climactic scene from the Mafia movie “Casino” in which nervous Mob bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush guaranteed that there would be no public tribunal where Hussein could give testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals and thus threaten the Bush Family legacy.
That could have happened if Hussein had been turned over to an international tribunal at The Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as Yugoslavia’s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Instead Bush insisted that Hussein be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that the deposed Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before being put to death.
Hussein’s hanging followed his trial for executing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982 after a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and his entourage. Hussein’s death effectively mooted other cases that were supposed to deal with his alleged use of chemical weapons to kill Iraqi civilians and other crimes that might have exposed the U.S. role.
“Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a New World Order – can emerge. . . Now, we can see a New World Order coming into view. A world in which there is a very real prospect for a New World Order. . .A world where the United Nations, freed from a Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders.” -George H.W. Bush
The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, warned the American people to stop Obama from signing a ‘global climate treaty’ at the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December 7-18 that will ultimately surrender U.S. sovereignty to a World Government under the guise of helping the environment.
With every passing day it becomes more evident that Obama is nothing more than a globalist, it is obvious from health care reform that he doesn’t care about the middle class, he is in the pocket of the internationalist elite like Kissinger and the rest of the global elite that wish to establish a World Government Dictatorship under the auspices of the United Nations.
If this international climate change treaty passes, Americans will have no choice but to pay a global climate tax that will be paid directly to the United Nations, at first the tax will be introduced to the public gradually such as a barely noticeable tax at the gas pump, which will later be increased once it has been officially established.
The Bilderberg Group has discussed this new global tax this year among many other things like creating a fast-but-painful depression to better establish a New World Order. The IMF, a United Nations entity has already declared itself the global central bank that will set regulations and issue a global currency to the nations. People like George Soros, IMF and the World Bank are betting against the dollar and with the help of the Federal Reserve will topple the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the world market to destroy the U.S. economy and force the global dictatorship on the western hemisphere.
By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.
That’s probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008.
Copyright But back to the Delaware senator’s tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden’s bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.
A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department “to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks.” Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.
Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans’ ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)
All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA’s Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. (Photos are here.)
Now, it’s true that few Americans will cast their votes in November based on what the vice presidential candidate thinks of copyright law. But these pro-copyright views don’t exactly jibe with what Obama has promised; he’s pledged to “update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.” These are code words for taking a more pro-EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) than pro-MPAA approach.
Unfortunately, Biden has steadfastly refused to answer questions on the topic. We asked him 10 tech-related questions, including whether he’d support rewriting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as part of our 2008 Technology Voters’ guide. Biden would not answer (we did hear back from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Ron Paul).
In our 2006 Technology Voters’ Guide, which ranked Senate votes from July 1998 through May 2005, Biden received a mere 37.5 percent score because of his support for Internet filters in schools and libraries and occasional support for Internet taxes.
Privacy, the FBI, and PGP On privacy, Biden’s record is hardly stellar. In the 1990s, Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was “persuaded” to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this identical language:
It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.
Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys. The book Electronic Privacy Papers describes Biden’s bill as representing the FBI’s visible effort to restrict encryption technology, which was taking place in concert with the National Security Agency’s parallel, but less visible efforts. (Biden was no foe of the NSA. He once described now-retired NSA director Bobby Ray Inman as the “single most competent man in the government.”)
Biden’s bill — and the threat of encryption being outlawed — is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic debate about export controls, national security, and privacy. Zimmermann, who’s now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden’s legislation “that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups.”
While neither of Biden’s pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow the FBI’s pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that followed — and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed the FBI’s legislative proposal later that decade for banning encryption products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a vote in the Senate.)
“Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation” in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was also known as the Digital Telephony law, according to an account in Wired magazine. Biden at the time was chairman of the relevant committee; he co-sponsored the Senate version and dutifully secured a successful floor vote on it less than two months after it was introduced. CALEA became law in October 1994, and is still bedeviling privacy advocates: the FBI recently managed to extend its requirements to Internet service providers.
CALEA represented one step in the FBI and NSA’s attempts to restrict encryption without backdoors. In a top-secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush’s administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: “Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime.”
There’s another reason why Biden’s legislative tactics in the CALEA scrum amount to more than a mere a footnote in Internet history. They’re what led to the creation of the Center for Democracy and Technology — and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s simultaneous implosion and soul-searching.
EFF staffers Jerry Berman and Danny Weitzner chose to work with Biden on cutting a deal and altering the bill in hopes of obtaining privacy concessions. It may have helped, but it also left the EFF in the uncomfortable position of leaving its imprimatur on Biden’s FBI-backed wiretapping law universally loathed by privacy advocates. The debacle ended with internal turmoil, Berman and Weitzner leaving the group and taking their corporate backers to form CDT, and a chastened EFF that quietly packed its bags and moved to its current home in San Francisco. (Weitzner, who was responsible for a censorship controversy last year, became a formal Obama campaign surrogate.)
“Anti-terror” legislation The next year, months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of “terrorism” that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detection of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode “constitutional and statutory due process protections” and would “authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.”
Biden himself draws parallels between his 1995 bill and its 2001 cousin. “I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill,” he said when the Patriot Act was being debated, according to the New Republic, which described him as “the Democratic Party’s de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.”
Biden’s chronology is not accurate: the bombing took place in April 1995 and his bill had been introduced in February 1995. But it’s true that Biden’s proposal probably helped to lay the groundwork for the Bush administration’s Patriot Act.
In 1996, Biden voted to keep intact an ostensibly anti-illegal immigration bill that outlined what the Real ID Act would become almost a decade later. The bill would create a national worker identification registry; Biden voted to kill an Abraham-Feingold amendment that would have replaced the registry with stronger enforcement. According to an analysis by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the underlying bill would have required “states to place Social Security numbers on drivers licenses and to obtain fingerprints or some other form of biometric identification for licenses.”
Along with most of his colleagues in the Congress — including Sen. John McCain but not Rep. Ron Paul — Biden voted for the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act (which was part of a larger spending bill). Obama voted for the bill containing the Real ID Act, but wasn’t in the U.S. Senate in 2001 when the original Patriot Act vote took place.
Patriot Act In the Senate debate over the Patriot Act in October 2001, Biden once again allied himself closely with the FBI. The Justice Department favorably quotes Biden on its Web site as saying: “The FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What’s good for the mob should be good for terrorists.”
The problem is that Biden’s claim was simply false — which he should have known after a decade of experience lending his name to wiretapping bills on behalf of the FBI. As CDT explains in a rebuttal to Biden: “The Justice Department had the ability to use wiretaps, including roving taps, in criminal investigations of terrorism, just as in other criminal investigations, long before the Patriot Act.”
But Biden’s views had become markedly less FBI-friendly by April 2007, six years later. By then, the debate over wiretapping had become sharply partisan, pitting Democrats seeking to embarrass President Bush against Republicans aiming to defend the administration at nearly any cost. In addition, Biden had announced his presidential candidacy three months earlier and was courting liberal activists dismayed by the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping.
That month, Biden slammed the “president’s illegal wiretapping program that allows intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans without a judge’s approval or congressional authorization or oversight.” He took aim at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for allowing the FBI to “flagrantly misuse National Security Letters” — even though it was the Patriot Act that greatly expanded their use without also expanding internal safeguards and oversight as well.
Biden did vote against a FISA bill with retroactive immunity for any telecommunications provider that illegally opened its network to the National Security Agency; Obama didn’t. Both agreed to renew the Patriot Act in March 2006, a move that pro-privacy Democrats including Ron Wyden and Russ Feingold opposed. The ACLU said the renewal “fails to correct the most flawed provisions” of the original Patriot Act. (Biden does do well on the ACLU’s congressional scorecard.)
“Baby-food bombs” The ACLU also had been at odds with Biden over his efforts to censor bomb-making information on the Internet. One day after a bomb in Saudi Arabia killed several U.S. servicemen and virtually flattened a military base, Biden pushed to make posting bomb-making information on the Internet a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in jail, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
“I think most Americans would be absolutely shocked if they knew what kind of bone-chilling information is making its way over the Internet,” he told the Senate. “You can access detailed, explicit instructions on how to make and detonate pipe bombs, light-bulb bombs, and even — if you can believe it — baby-food bombs.”
Biden didn’t get exactly what he wanted — at least not right away. His proposal was swapped in the final law for one requiring the attorney general to investigate “the extent to which the First Amendment protects such material and its private and commercial distribution.” The report was duly produced, concluding that the proposal “can withstand constitutional muster in most, if not all, of its possible applications, if such legislation is slightly modified.”
It was. Biden and co-sponsor Dianne Feinstein introduced their bill again the following year. Biden pitched it as an anti-terror measure, saying in a floor debate that numerous terrorists “have been found in possession of bomb-making manuals and Internet bomb-making information.” He added: “What is even worse is that some of these instructions are geared toward kids. They tell kids that all the ingredients they need are right in their parents’ kitchen or laundry cabinets.”
Biden’s proposal became law in 1997. It didn’t amount to much: four years after its enactment, there had been only one conviction. And instead of being used to snare a dangerous member of Al Qaeda, the law was used to lock up a 20-year old anarchist Webmaster who was sentenced to one year in prison for posting information about Molotov cocktails and “Drano bombs” on his Web site, Raisethefist.com.
Today there are over 10,000 hits on Google for the phrase, in quotes, “Drano bomb.” One is a video that lists the necessary ingredients and shows some self-described rednecks blowing up small plastic bottles in their yard. Then there’s the U.S. Army’s Improvised Munitions Handbook with instructions on making far more deadly compounds, including methyl nitrate dynamite, mortars, grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive — which free speech activists placed online as an in-your-face response to the Biden-Feinstein bill.
Peer-to-peer networks Since then, Biden has switched from complaining about Internet baby-food bombs to taking aim at peer-to-peer networks. He held one Foreign Relations committee hearing in February 2002 titled “Theft of American Intellectual Property” and invited executives from the Justice Department, RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft to speak. Not one Internet company, P2P network, or consumer group was invited to testify.
Afterwards, Sharman Networks (which distributes Kazaa) wrote a letter to Biden complaining about “one-sided and unsubstantiated attacks” on P2P networks. It said: “We are deeply offended by the gratuitous accusations made against Kazaa by witnesses before the committee, including ludicrous attempts to associate an extremely beneficial, next-generation software program with organized criminal gangs and even terrorist organizations.”
Biden returned to the business of targeting P2P networks this year. In April, he proposed spending $1 billion in U.S. tax dollars so police can monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity. He made that suggestion after a Wyoming cop demonstrated a proof-of-concept program called “Operation Fairplay” at a hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.
A month later, the Senate Judiciary committee approved a Biden-sponsored bill that would spend over $1 billion on policing illegal Internet activity, mostly child pornography. It has the dubious virtue of being at least partially redundant: One section would “prohibit the broadcast of live images of child abuse,” even though the Justice Department has experienced no problems in securing guilty pleas for underage Webcamming. (The bill has not been voted on by the full Senate.)
Online sales of Robitussin Around the same time, Biden introduced his self-described Biden Crime Bill of 2007. One section expands electronic surveillance law to permit police wiretaps in “crimes dangerous to the life, limb, and well-being of minor children.” Another takes aim at Internet-based telemedicine and online pharmacies, saying that physicians must have conducted “at least one in-person medical evaluation of the patient” to prescribe medicine.
Another prohibits selling a product containing dextromethorphan — including Robitussin, Sucrets, Dayquil, and Vicks — “to an individual under the age of 18 years, including any such sale using the Internet.” It gives the Justice Department six months to come up with regulations, which include when retailers should be fined for shipping cough suppressants to children. (Biden is a longtime drug warrior; he authored the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act that the Bush administration used to shut down benefit concerts.)
Net neutrality On Net neutrality, Biden has sounded skeptical. In 2006, he indicated that no preemptive laws were necessary because if violations do happen, such a public outcry will develop that “the chairman will be required to hold this meeting in this largest room in the Capitol, and there will be lines wandering all the way down to the White House.” Obama, on the other hand, has been a strong supporter of handing pre-emptive regulatory authority to the Federal Communications Commission.
Tommy Chong: Biden ’authored the bill that put me in jail’
It turns out that Obama’s new running mate is one of the leading crusaders in the war on drugs. Which isn’t something that’s likely to sit well with Obama’s base of young, college-aged supporters
Earlier this week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Tommy Chong was asked what the average citizen can do to further the cause of decriminalization. “Check out the people you’re voting for,” Chong replied. “For instance, Joseph Biden comes off as a liberal Democrat, but he’s the one who authored the bill that put me in jail. He wrote the law against shipping drug paraphernalia through the mail – which could be anything from a pipe to a clip or cigarette papers.”
Barack Obama’s V.P. selection Sen. Joe Biden also spnsored the Rave Act, which targets music events where drug use is allegedly prevalent.
The national embarrassment that is our president once again raises its reddened face. In photographs from the Olympics in China, it appears that recovering souse, George W. Bush, is relapsing.
In one picture his face is flushed, his eyes droop, and his expression is dopey. In all fairness, that may be his normal expression. However, the bloody scrape on his arm suggests that he has recently taken a less than normal fall.
In the other picture, Bush appears to be having trouble remaining upright without considerable help. It takes three men to prop up the wobbly boozer-in-chief.
Don’t it make ya feel proud?
This is the man that John McCain’s 3rd term would seek to emulate if, Heaven forbid, he gets the chance. However, this is not the first evidence of Bush’s backsliding. First and foremost, that high bar of American journalism, the National Enquirer, wrote about it three years ago.
EOnline reported last year that Bush’s return to drinking drove Laura to move out of the White House and to a possible split-up. Other rumors had her house hunting in Dallas for a post-presidency home away from George.
Both the Globe and Examiner covered Laura’s “eruption” at her hubby’s imbibing.
Just last month Bush accused Wall Street of getting drunk and having a hangover. Perhaps they were binging together. We know how close they are.
This is a president who can’t stay upright on a bicycle and who nearly chokes to death on pretzels. Maybe we’ll get a better picture of the man when Oliver Stone’s movie “W” is released in a couple of months. Stone’s script reportedly has Bush Sr. telling his no-good progeny that…
Two former senior White House security advisors have warned that a military attack against Iran would be a catastrophe for the US.
“If we get into a war with Iran, we know there would be disaster, we know there would be a disaster,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex-president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor on Tuesday.
“The United States will become involved in a four-front war, probably for roughly two decades. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf,” he said during a discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the negotiations between the United States and Iran.
The US accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, insisting the country should either stop nuclear enrichment or face confrontation. Rejecting the allegation, Tehran argues its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.
Also, advisor to presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, said at the meeting, “Don’t talk about ’do we bomb them now or later?”
Both former advisors said only diplomacy backed by stronger sanctions and no preconditions for negotiations might work to overcome the current frigid US-Iran relations.
In a major shift from Washington’s past policy, the US Under Secretary of State William Burns attended for the first time in talks on Iran’s nuclear program in Geneva on Saturday involving Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana, as well as representatives from China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany.
Zbigniew’s Prediction of Iraqs Failure To Trigger War With Iran PBS News Hour February 1, 2007. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned terrorist attack may occur in the United States.
This was reported a few days ago, but it got surprisingly little attention, and it seems worth flagging in light of Obama’s trip abroad. Check out this little nugget buried in that New York Times piece on Barack Obama’s cast of 300 or so foreign policy advisers:
Another person who has contributed outside advice is former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whom Mr. Obama has been wooing. Mr. Powell, a Republican, has a friendship of decades with Mr. McCain, but friends say he has felt excluded from Mr. McCain’s foreign policy operation and was impressed when Mr. Obama called on him in June. Mr. Powell also met around the same time with Mr. McCain.
Powell recently met with Obama and has made it clear that he won’t let any endorsement be dictated by party allegiance, so neglecting him seems like a pretty big oversight on the McCain camp’s part. Could Obama’s wooing of him eventually pay off?
As November’s American presidential elections approach, Barack Obama’s message on Iraq is being widely interpreted as “flip-flopping” and a “retreat” from a previously unequivocal stance of fully withdrawing the US occupation forces. This is to misunderstand Obama, who is not someone who shoots from the hip. There is much more to his words than cursory reading could unravel.
His remarks before the 2003 invasion resonated well within the American antiwar movement. His scathing references to the Bush administration’s folly and his demands for “ending the war” were probably decisive in winning him the Democratic party nomination against Hillary Clinton, whose vote for war in 2003 ultimately crippled her credibility as the commander-in-chief who would bring it to an end.
Obama himself has reacted angrily to claims of a policy U-turn: “For me to say I’m going to refine my policies is I don’t think in any way inconsistent with prior statements and doesn’t change my strategic view that this war has to end and that I’m going to end it as president.” Earlier this month he resorted to an op-ed article in the New York Times to emphatically state: “On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.”
Activists from truthaction.org have obtained the official guest list for Bohemian Grove’s 2008 midsummer encampment along with a map of the Grove’s facilities. According to the guest list, this year’s attendees include George H. W. Bush, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and several former CIA directors. Also attending are two members of the Grateful Dead, one of whom is camping with the elder Bush. During an action at the entrance of the elite retreat, several 9/11 truth information packs were accepted by Bohemian Grove campers and taken into the grove, including one by former CIA Director James Woolsey’s bunkmate.
The Bohemian Grove, located in the small town of Monte Rio in Sonoma County, California is notorious for its annual summer retreats for the rich and powerful during which participants kick back, relax and enjoy a simulated child sacrifice called ’Cremation of Care’. The Grove is strictly off-limits to the uninvited and much effort is made to maintain secrecy. Workers at the retreat must sign a comprehensive confidentiality agreement and the entrance to the 2,700 acre getaway is guarded not only by private security but also the local Sheriff’s department, at taxpayers expense.
This year, 9/11 truth activists have been a regular presence at the entrance to the Grove during the two week event, talking to many of the workers coming in and out and also to several of the campers. A number of workers have expressed profound gratitude for the presence and message of the activists and at least one elite camper displayed a seemingly genuine interest in the 9/11 truth materials he was given, stopping to talk for awhile and revealing that he was camping with a former CIA director before heading back into the Grove with his infopack.
Outgoing President George W. Bush and both of his presumptive replacements John McCain and Barack Obama are rumored to be in attendance at this year’s Bohemian Grove gathering, an annual get-together of the global elite staged inside a sprawling forest encampment which kicks off tonight and runs until July 27.
Bohemian Grove is a 136-year-old all-male encampment complete with restaurants, bars, stages and lodges, which caters to around 2,000 members of the global elite along with Californian hoi polloi on a yearly basis in July. The camp is set within a 2,700 acre secluded forest replete with giant redwood trees.
Former attendees include Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, who both went on to become President, as well as regulars like Henry Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, David Rockefeller, Colin Powell, as well as George W. Bush and his father.
In 2000 radio host and film maker Alex Jones infiltrated the gathering and caught exclusive video footage of a bizarre mock human sacrifice ritual, known as “the cremation of care”, under a 40 foot stone owl that the members refer to as Molech.
Alex Jones discusses the shocking footage he obtained during his 2000 infiltration of the Grove.
Homosexual orgies are known to be part of the festivities enjoyed by the predominately “Christian conservative” leaders who go there. Former attendee Richard Nixon once referred to the Grove as, “the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine.”
A reader who got a summer job working at the Grove in 2005, Chris Jones, told us that he was regularly propositioned for sex by the old men attending the encampment and asked if he “slept around” and wanted to have some fun.
However, the media’s attitude to hundreds of powerbrokers attending an event at which the Manhattan Project was known to have been born, while frolicking around dressed up as women pissing up trees and having gay sex, has been sophomoric to say the least.
One such hit piece in the Sacramento News & Review, which ties the Grove as well as public organizations such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission with shape-shifting reptoid conspiracies, is useful for only one piece of information – the claim that Presidential hopeful John McCain may be attending this year’s gathering.
George W. Bush and his father give a lakeside talk at Bohemian Grove in this photo from the Grove’s annual yearbook.
In addition, according to an Arizona Daily Star report about a different subject, President Bush’s schedule for next week has not been released, meaning Bush, a regular attendee with his father to Bohemian Grove in past years, could be set to make a visit at some point to mark the last year of his presidency.
Thus far, there has only been one other mainstream report concerning the event, an article entitled Power brokers due at Bohemian Grove, appearing in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, a local paper that routinely covers the gathering.
“Critics, who until recent years mounted protests outside its gates, say the gatherings serve as strategy sessions for a New World Order operating outside democratic institutions,” states the article.
“Most critics raise the specter of national policy with global implications coming from behind the gates of an exclusive, closed-door gathering of largely conservative, wealthy white men.”
The Bush administration is planning to carry out air strikes against Iran by August and two U.S. Senators have already been briefed on the attack according to a report in the highly respected Asia Times, which cites a former assistant secretary of state and U.S. career diplomat as its source.
Muhammad Cohen’s article claims that Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, were informed of the attack plan and planned to voice their opposition to it in a New York Times editorial in an attempt to offset the air strike. The editorial is yet to materialize.
According to Cohen’ source, the Neo-Cons believe that they can perpetrate a “limited” air strike aimed more at sending a message than destroying Iran’s supposed nuclear program, but the consequences of such a move are likely to provoke a massive Iranian retaliation, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has consistently warned.
The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.
Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.
The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC’s elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds’ stated mission is to spread Iran’s revolution of 1979 throughout the region.
The source said the White House views the proposed air strike as a limited action to punish Iran for its involvement in Iraq. The source, an ambassador during the administration of president H W Bush, did not provide details on the types of weapons to be used in the attack, nor on the precise stage of planning at this time. It is not known whether the White House has already consulted with allies about the air strike, or if it plans to do so.
Speculating on whether such a strike will benefit either McCain or Obama on the eve of the presidential election, the report points out that McCain has built his candidacy around an aggressive foreign policy therefore would be the likelier to take advantage.
“A strike on Iran could rally American voters to back the war effort and vote for McCain,” states the article.
“On the other hand, an air strike on Iran could heighten public disenchantment with Bush administration policy in the Middle East, leading to support for the Democratic candidate, whoever it is.”
Iran’s inevitable response would send oil prices skyrocketing towards $200 dollars a barrel as global instability threatened to boil over into numerous different regions in the aftermath of any attack. McCain’s ability to grandstand as a tough war leader would no doubt be amplified by a compliant corporate media and a sizable proportion of the American public would rally behind the Arizona Senator, especially if American interests were the subject of terrorist attacks on behalf of Hezbollah and Hamas.
China’s response to any attack, with the Communist nation being Iran’s biggest customer for oil, would also be key. Any inkling of a hostile reaction would place the world under the greatest threat since the height of the cold war.
Lugar and Feinstein’s public opposition to the plan “would likely create a public groundswell of criticism that could induce the Bush administration reconsider its plan,” states the article but, “Given their obligations to uphold the secrecy of classified information, it is unlikely the senators would reveal the Bush administration’s plan or their knowledge of it.”
The impending invasion of Iran has been on the grapevine for the past three summers running and many are beginning to fear that the “boy who cried wolf” mentality is starting to discredit those who repeatedly warn of the coming attack. However, rhetoric has notably heated in the past few months.
During a recent news conference at Israel’s parliament, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House majority leader Steny Hoyer stated that the military option against Iran was still on the table.
Prominent political figures such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Gary Hart have warned that an attack on Iran won’t arrive absent a staged provocation or a new Gulf of Tonkin style incident.
During a 2007 Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting, Brzezinski alluded to the potential for the Bush administration to manufacture a false flag Gulf of Tonkin type incident in describing a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran,” which would revolve around “some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
In an open letter to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former Senator and current CFR member Hart warned the Iranian President that he would be, “Well advised to read the history of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 and the history of the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964,” two false flag events manufactured by the U.S. itself to kick start a war.
Neo-Con General Calls For Terror Attacks In Iran McInerney urges U.S. government to support terrorist organization MEK, Bush administration already bankrolling Al-Qaeda-linked Jundullah groupPaul Joseph Watson Prison Planet May 16, 2008
Fresh off the revelation of Donald Rumsfeld’s 2006 audio tape admission that a method to reinvigorate the Neo-Con agenda would be another terror attack, Neo-Cons like Ret. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who was part of the Pentagon’s “message force multipliers” propaganda program, have been calling for the Bush administration to commit acts of terror in Iran.
According to the Crooks and Liars blog, McInerney has appeared on Fox News 144 times since Jan 2002. In one of his recent appearances he publicly called for the U.S. government to support groups like MEK, which is listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization, and carry out deadly bombings in Iran.
McInerney: Here’s what I would suggest to you. Number one, we take the National Council for Resistance to Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on as well as the Mujahedin-e Khalq at the Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy which I wrote up in the Wall Street Journal a year ago: For every EFP that goes off and kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked. People don’t have to know how it was done. It’s a covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. …
McInerney’s frothing desire to see women and children blown to bits in the streets of Tehran may have something to do with the fact that “McInerney is on the Board of Directors for several companies with defense-related contracts that would seem to benefit from his pro-war propaganda. For example, Alloy Surfaces Company (ASC), whose contracts for “ammunition and explosives” with the Department of Defense appear to have grown from $15 million in 2002 to more than $169 million in 2006. A conflict of interest, perhaps?”
McInerney “tit-for-tat” strategy, to support MEK-run terror bombings in Iran in retaliation for Iran supposedly killing U.S. troops in Iraq, a baseless claim in itself, is all the more horribly ironic when one considers the fact that MEK “has killed US troops and civilians before back in the 1970s”.
As Crooks and Liars points out, the U.S. government is already funding MEK and the group has been linked with numerous bombings inside Iran over the course of the last few years.
“The CIA is giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan,” the London Telegraph reported last year.
The group has been blamed for a number of bombings inside Iran aimed at destabilizing Ahmadinejad’s government and is also active in Pakistan, having been fingered for its involvement in attacks on police stations and car bombings at the Pakistan-US Cultural Center in 2004.
Crooks and Liars documents White House efforts to censor reports about MEK and other Iranian terror groups in the U.S. corporate media.
In Dec 2006, just days after Rumsfeld was forced to step down, the NYT published a heavily redacted op-ed by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann. Though none of the info was classified, all of which had previously “been extensively reported in the news media,” much of their article was blacked out because the “White House intervened” before it went to print. In response, Leverett and Mann followed up with an accompanying piece “What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran“ where they provided citations to previously reported sources for all of the redacted info. Raw Story compiled those sources in their “The redacted Iran op-ed revealed” and, surprise, many of the articles refer directly to the MEK terrorist group, but there had been nary a mention in the portions the White House allowed.
So, to recap: One of the Pentagon’s propaganda TV analysts who has clear ties to defense industries that would likely stand to benefit from any increased hostilities is advocating that the US ought to use a terrorist organization to commit acts of terrorism against Iran in response to alleged Iranian involvement in attacks against US forces in Iraq, which might be true, or maybe not. And if that wasn’t outrageous enough, it seems that Bush may have been authorizing such tactics already.
In November 2007, Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade openly called for US support for acts of terrorism, such as car bombings, in Tehran. Colonel David Hunt, who has over 29 years of military experience including extensive operational experience in Special Operations, Counter Terrorism and Intelligence Operations, agreed with Kilmeade, stating “absolutely” in response to Kilmead’s question about whether cars should start blowing up in Tehran.
“In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.
“Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared … to duplicate the letter material,” the e-mail reads. “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ’But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’”
Indeed, 3 of the 4 suspects the FBI is investigating are employees of Fort Detrick, which is run by the Army.
Some people are pretending that someone unconnected with the army bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick stole the anthrax. However, as the above-quoted article states:
“Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It’s the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States,” a bioterrorism expert told FOX News.”
It is not very likely that someone could steal anthrax from the most secure facility in the U.S., run by the Army.
Indeed, the FBI apparently knew in 2002 who mailed the anthrax letters. See this, this, and this.
And yet government investigators and prosecutors have covered up and refused to disclose who did it for 6 years. Initially, the FBI tried to frame an innocent man for the attacks.
NY Times: McCain had possible relations to Female Lobbyist
NY Times
February 21, 2008
Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
But the concerns about McCain’s relationship with Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain faced the explosion of a long-ticking timebomb Thursday morning when the New York Times revealed allegations of his questionable conduct with a woman who lobbied for the telecommunications industry.
In a 9 a.m. press conference, McCain denied the Times report, saying he was disappointed with the paper of record’s handling of the story.
“I’m very disappointed in The New York Times piece,” McCain said. “It’s not true.”
The Arizona Senator flatly denied that he had a romantic relationship with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, and he said campaign aides never warned him about speculation the two were having an affair nor intervened to keep her from campaign events.
While he said he was unaware whether aides discussed the alleged relationship amongst themselves, McCain said he never heard the concerns personally. He went on to pan the Times‘ sourcing of the article.
“I do notice with some interest that it’s, quote, ‘former aides,’ that this whole story is based on anonymous sources. … I’m very disappointed in that,” McCain said.
One former top campaign aide, John Weaver, did speak on the record to the Times and the Washington Post, which produced its own story on McCain and Iseman Thursday.
Weaver told the papers he met Iseman in person at Union Station in Washington, DC, to warn her to stay away from McCain. In his press conference Thursday, McCain said he had not spoken about the Times investigation with Weaver before it was published and he denied knowing about the Union Station meeting.
Right off the bat, McCain was asked about the most salacious implications of the Times article.
Q Senator, did you ever have any meeting with any of your staffers in which they would have intervened to ask you not to see Vicki Iseman or to be concerned about appearances of being too close to a lobbyist? SEN. MCCAIN: No. Q No meeting ever occurred? SEN. MCCAIN: No. Q No staffer was ever concerned about a possible romantic relationship? SEN. MCCAIN: If they were, they didn’t communicate that to me. Q Did you ever have such a relationship? SEN. MCCAIN: No.
McCain also acknowledged speaking to Times editor Bill Keller while the paper was reporting its story, but he said he never tried to dissuade him from publishing it.
“I called him up when the investigation was going on and I asked him basically what was happening and that we hoped that we could bring this to closure,” McCain said. “But it was a very brief conversation.”
At one point, Cindy McCain took to the microphone to share her own criticism of the paper.
“My children and I not only trust my husband but know that he would never do anything to not only disappoint our family, but [to] disappoint the people of America,” she said. “He’s a man of great character, and I’m very, very disappointed in The New York Times.”
Pentagon Poised To Resume Open Air Biological Weapons Testing
Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois Professor of International Law: “The Pentagon is fully prepared to launch biological warfare by means of anthrax,”
The Pentagon has denied President Bush issued a directive for it to resume open-air testing of chemical and biological warfare(CBW) agents that were halted by President Richard Nixon in 1969. Yet, the Pentagon’s stated preparations make it appear it is poised to do just that.
Spokesperson Chris Isleib did not respond to a request for comment on a passage from the Defense Department’s annual report sent to Congress last April that suggests the Pentagon is gearing up to resume the tests.
Resumption of open-air testing would reverse a long-standing moratorium adopted after a public outcry against them following accidents in the Sixties.
The Pentagon’s annual report apparently calls for both the developmental and operational “field testing of (CBW) full systems,” not just simulations.
The Pentagon’s report to Congress contains the following passage: “More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live-agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infrastructure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructure will greatly enhance both the developmental and operational field testing of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response.” “T&E” is an acronym for testing and evaluation.
“Either the military has resumed open-air testing already or they are preparing to do so,” said Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois Professor of International Law who authored the implementing legislation for the U.S. Biological Weapons Convention signed into law by President George Bush Sr. and who has tracked subsequent developments closely.
“I am stunned by the nature of this development,” Boyle said. “This is a major reversal of policy.” The 1972 treaty against germ warfare, which the U.S. signed, forbids developing weapons that spread disease, such as anthrax, a pathogen that is regarded by the military as “ideal” for conducting germ warfare.
“The Pentagon is fully prepared to launch biological warfare by means of anthrax,” Boyle charged. “All the equipment has been acquired and all the training conducted and most combat-ready members of U.S. armed forces have been given protective equipment and vaccines that allegedly would protect them from that agent.”
Open-air testing takes research into deadly agents out of the laboratories in order to study their effectiveness, including their aerial dispersion patterns, and whether they actually infect and kill in field trials. Since the anthrax attacks on Congress in October, 2001, the Bush administration has funded a vast biological research expansion at hundreds of private and university laboratories in the U.S. and abroad involving anthrax and other deadly pathogens.
The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others and temporarily shut down the operations of the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, and other Federal entities.
Although a Federal statute permits the president to authorize open-air testing of CBW agents, Boyle said this “does not solve the compliance problem that it might violate the international Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention as well as their related domestic implementing legislation making such violations crimes.”
Boyle charged the U.S. is already “in breach” of both conventions and also of U.S. domestic criminal law implementing them. In February, 2003, for example, the U.S. granted itself a patent on an illegal, long-range biological-weapons grenade, evidently for offensive purposes.
Boyle said the development of anthrax for possible offensive purposes is underscored by the government’s efforts “to try to stockpile anthrax vaccines and antibiotics for 25-million plus Americans to protect the civilian population in the event there is any ‘blowback’ from the use of anthrax in biowarfare abroad by the Pentagon.”
“In theory,” Boyle added, “you cannot wage biowarfare abroad unless you can protect your civilian population from either retaliation in kind, or blowback, or both.” Under Project BioShield, Homeland Security is spending $5.6 billion to stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox, and other bioterror agents. The project had been marked by delays and operational problems and on December 12th last year Congress passed legislation to pump another $1 billion into BioShield to fund three years of additional research by the private sector.
Boyle said evidence the U.S. has super-weapons-grade anthrax was demonstrated in the October, 2001, anthrax mail attacks on Senators Thomas Daschle(D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy(D-Vt.) The strain of highly sophisticated anthrax employed has allegedly been traced back to the primary U.S. Army biological warfare campus at Ft. Detrick, Md. The attacks killed five persons and sickened 17 others. A current effort to expand Ft. Detrick has sparked widespread community opposition, according to a report in the Baltimore Sun.
“Obviously, someone working for the United States government has a stockpile of super-weapons grade anthrax that can be used again domestically for the purposes of political terrorism or abroad to wage offensive warfare,” Boyle said.
The Associated Press has reported the U.S. Army is replacing its Military Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick “with a new laboratory that would be a component of a biodefense campus operated by several agencies.” The Army told AP the laboratory is intended to continue research solely for defense against biological threats.
Undercutting the argument U.S. research is for “defensive” purposes is the fact government scientists have been creating new strains of pathogens for which there is no known cure. Richard Novick, a professor of microbiology at New York University, has stated, “I cannot envision any imaginable justification for changing the antigenicity of anthrax as a defensive measure.” Changing a pathogen’s antigenicity means altering its basic structure so that existing vaccines will prove ineffective against it.
Biological warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect, animal, or human transmission, according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Biotech Century”(Penguin).
Boyle said the Federal government has been plowing money into upgrading Ft. Detrick, Md., and other CBW facilities where such pathogens are studied, developed, tested, and stored. By some estimates, the U.S. since 2002 has invested some $43 billion in hundreds of government, commercial, and university laboratories in the U.S. for the study of pathogens that might be used for biological warfare.
According to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, more than 300 scientific institutions and 12,000 individuals have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare and terrorism. Ebright found that the Number of National Institute of Health grants to research infectious diseases with biowarfare potential shot up from 33 in the 1995-2000 period to 497 by 2006.Ebright has stated the government’s tenfold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories, such as those at Fort Detrick, raises the risk of accidents and the diversion of dangerous organisms. “If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented, that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak.”
During the Cold War era, notably in the Fifties and Sixties, various Government agencies engaged in open-air CBW testing on U.S. soil and on naval vessels at sea to study the effects of weaponized pathogens. U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, were among the targets and sickness and even a number of deaths were reported as a result.
According to an article titled “Lethal Breeze” by Lee Davidson in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City of June 5, 1994, “In decades of secret chemical arms tests, the Army released into Utah winds more than a half million pounds of deadly nerve agents.” Among them, he said, was VX, a pinhead-sized drop of which can be lethal. The tests were conducted at Dugway Proving Ground but Davidson said the evidence suggests “some (agents) may have escaped with the wind.”
Pentagon documents obtained by the News listed 1,635 field trials or demonstrations with nerve agents VX, GA and GB between 1951 and 1969, “when the Army discontinued use of actual nerve agents in open-air tests after escaped nerve gas apparently killed 6,000 sheep in Skull Valley,” Davidson wrote. The Skull Valley strike also sickened a rancher and members of his family.
Boyle has previously charged the Pentagon with “gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare” pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted in 2002 “without public knowledge and review.” He contends the Pentagon’s Chemical and Biological Defense program was revised in 2003 to implement those directives, endorsing “first-use” strike of chemical and biological weapons in war.
The implementing legislation Boyle wrote that was enacted unanimously by Congress was known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. Boyle has written extensively on the subject. Among his published works are “Biowarfare and Terrorism” and “Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism In the Middle East Before and After September 11th,” both from Clarity Press.
President Bush has declared that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, with the White House also declaring Barak Obama to be “condescending” and “intellectually lazy”.
The pseudo endorsement comes, according to the AP, in a new book by author Bill Sammon entitled Evangelical President set for release Monday.
“She’s got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary,” Bush says “And therefore the person with the national presence, who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites, has got a good chance to be nominated.”
Bush stopped sort of saying Hillary would win the election however stating:
“I think our candidate can beat her, but it’s going to be a tough race… I will work to see to it that a Republican wins, and therefore don’t accept the premise that a Democrat will win. I truly think the Republicans will hold the White House.”
The President’s pick of Hillary for nominee is not surprising given that she has supported every major Bush policy with as much if not more zeal.
Clinton voted for the Patriot Act and she voted for the war in Iraq, but so many Democrats are blinded by the cult of personality that they will overwhelmingly vote to put this crime family back in office. While we have made some progress in educating liberals as to the phony staged consensus of the left-right paradigm, the fact remains that a majority still see the White House as some kind of political super bowl, where the success of their ‘team’ is the be all and end all – to the expense of America as a whole.
“I felt that it was appropriate under the circumstances, which really went back to 1998 under the Clinton administration’s conclusion that the regime had to change, that the President (Bush) had authority to pursue that goal,” said Hillary after giving her personal approval for the mess in Iraq.
Clinton is the ultimate elitist and represents the Democrats supposed base, the poor and downtrodden, about as much as Lindsay Lohan represents grace and dignity. She was sure to inform the likes of David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands as to her presidential aspirations during her visit to last year’s Bilderberg conference in Ottawa Canada. Bilderberg has a proven history of acting in a kingmaker capacity. Both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair attended before becoming President and Prime Minister and the media reported that Bilderberg selected John Edwards as Kerry’s running mate in 2004.
Bush is right to point out that Hillary has the ability to raise the most money, given that Hillary’s presidential financiers include Neo-Con kingpin and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, with whom she often meets and parties with along with Roger Ailes and other Republican big wigs. While Bill has been hanging around with the Bushes, Hillary has also been living it up with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, John McCain and Rick Santorum.
Such elite back slapping and shoulder rubbing again highlights that when it comes to getting ahead it pays to be on the same page.
The Anglo-American aristocracy, big businesses and banks have long been pulling the strings behind the curtain in the theatre of politics and underlings such as the Clintons and the Bushes know what they have to do to satisfy their desire for political control.
We have continually exposed how Clinton and the Bushes personally profited from massive drug smuggling operations through Mena, while Clinton was Governor of Arkansas. Alex Jones has interviewed multiple former CIA officers who were unloading the cocaine. Bush Snr, met eleven times with the Clintons in the year before Clinton announced his run for President. Teenagers Don Henry and Kevin Ives were murdered for accidentally witnessing a CIA cocaine smuggling operation in Mena. Bill Clinton aided in the cover up, as well as the money laundering. The Clinton-Bush relationship is a long and fruitful one.
The Clintons and the Bushes have been known to vacation together in more recent times. Last year on CBS, Clinton revealed that he looks upon the Bushes as a surrogate family, and how Barbara Bush refers to him as “her son”. Is this really a picture of two distinct and opposed political ideologies pitted against one another?
In 2005, George W invited both Clintons as guests of honor and praised them to the hilt as he unveiled portraits of the two to be hung in the White House. Bush described him as having “…a great compassion for people in need… a man of enthusiasm and warmth”. This after Bush’s 2000 campaign was built around Clinton having no honor or dignity whilst in the White House.
Hillary returned the compliment a year later declaring that she has a good personal relationship with the Bushes and that she considers the president to have “a lot of charm and charisma”.
Another Clinton in office would mean America being under the thiefdom of either a Bush or a Clinton for a total of at least 32 years, 36 if Hillary is re-elected (many now acknowledge that H.W. Bush pulled the strings as VP during the Reagan era), and they still say anyone can become President! What a pathetic joke!
Forecasters are already predicting a success for the Senator, meaning Americans will probably be living under the same hierarchical oligarchy that brought them rampant illegal immigration, the devaluation of the dollar, the gigantic deficit, 9/11, and hatred of the U.S. around the world. The electorate got bored of drinking Coke so now the establishment is going to provide Pepsi.
Bush and his cadre have set multiple police state precedents that the Democratic opposition has proven it offers no hope of rescinding. Bush spies on Americans with no regard for the Bill of Rights or even the meager statutory restraints imposed on him, and all the Democrats do is whine that they were not in on the snooping, and that next time they want to be informed. Of course, they have an interest in keeping the police state healthy and strong. The idea that Hillary Clinton would be more sensitive to civil liberties if she were at the empire’s helm is too absurd for words.
We need to continue to push for the American public to vote for a real anti-war candidate, Congressman Ron Paul, a man who voted against the illegal invasion of Iraq unlike Hillary Clinton and who also unlike Hillary is firmly opposed to embroiling America in any further foreign entanglements such as Iran and opposes the further strangulation of freedom at home.
Ron Paul is the only candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton and wrestle America free from the ownership of the same gaggle of crooks that have ruthlessly sat on their autocratic power monopoly for the past 30 years.
The Financial Times announced last night the government of Abu Dhabi has made an investment in the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based private investment firm with close ties to former President George H. W. Bush and his family, as well as to top government officials in the Reagan and Clinton administrations.
Mubadala, a wholly owned investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, bought a 7.5 percent share of the Carlyle Group in a transaction in which the deal price was struck at a 10 percent discount to a valuation of $20 billion for all of the Carlyle Group.
Abu Dhabi is the largest of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates and the capital.
Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family is the chairman of Mubadala.
WND reported Dubai International Capital, a private equity investment capital firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dubai Holdings, has commonly participated in co-investments with the Carlyle Group.
Dubai, like Abu Dhabi, is one of the seven emirates that form the UAE.
WND reported yesterday Dubai, in a complex set of transactions, is moving to acquire 19.9 percent of the Nasdaq stock market in New York, in the first equity transaction which would place a Middle Eastern government in an ownership position in a key U.S. stock exchange.
As a result of the transaction, Dubai will also acquire 28 percent of the London Stock Exchange, one of the oldest and largest stock exchanges in the world.
The transaction is being made through Borse Dubai, a holding company 100 percent owned by the government of the Emirate of Dubai and controlled by Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the head of the Dubai ruling family.
Revelations about Senator Larry Craig that have mired the Republicans in another sex scandal over the past few days continue to rumble across the media spectrum – but the true scale of perversion, organized child sex slavery rings and their connections to the elite is uniformly omitted from polite conversation.
Last year, Republican Rep. Mark Foley was investigated by the FBI after he sent sexually suggestive e mails to boys working as congressional pages. It later emerged that House leaders had known for months about Foley’s lurid behavior yet chose to look the other way. Foley was co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus.
Larry Craig, albeit on a lesser scale, has now been exposed as a pervert and the media treadmill continues to afford this individual case blanket coverage – a deluge of attention not received by the thousands of missing children and victimized young men who were and continue to be the victims of gargantuan forced child prostitution rings that operate to service political, corporate and media elites all across the globe.
On June 29 1989, the Washington Times’ Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald reported on a Washington D.C. prostitution ring that had intimate connections with the White House all the way up to President George H.W. Bush. Male prostitutes had been given access to the White House and the article also cited evidence of “abduction and use of minors for sexual perversion.”
In July 1990 a Nebraska Grand Jury was convened to hear allegations that Lawrence “Larry” King, then manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union and a rising Republican party star, along with Washington lobbyists, had set up a child prostitution ring in which minors were transported around the country and forced to have sex with King, other top officials, and according to victims who some allege were later harassed into recanting, then-Vice-President Bush.
Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) was identified by victims as having engaged in the abuse and in a bizarre twist of fate, appeared on Bill Maher’s show last year and made jokes about the outing of Larry Craig as another homosexual Republican.
The Grand Jury dismissed the case as a hoax but former Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp later investigated the claims and was horrified to learn that they were indeed legitimate.
Click on the enlargements to read the 1989 Washington Times expose.
The video which you can watch in full below, Conspiracy of Silence, was produced by British Yorkshire Television and was scheduled to air nationwide in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel on May 3, 1994. Despite appearing in TV guides, the documentary was pulled at the last minute. Key politicians implicated in the scandal intimidated Discovery into canning the program and it was never shown in the U.S.
The documentary team interviewed victims of the Franklin cover-up scandal and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Washington’s political elite had been involved in Larry King’s pedophile ring.
Connections between male prostitutes and the White House emerged again in early 2005, when James Dale Guckert, working under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon, was given privileged access to the White House despite his lack of suitable press credentials. Gannon first came under scrutiny when he repeatedly gave President Bush softball questions during press conferences – leading many to charge Gannon was a White House plant. Photos emerged of Bush embracing Gannon and appearing very affectionate towards him during meetings. It later came out that Gannon had previously placed ads on homosexual escort service websites.
In almost every case of human trafficking for child sex slavery, from Chile to Australia, to Bosnia, to Portugal, to Belgium, court proceedings get shut down or diverted when a clear connection to the elite arises.
In the mid 1990’s, convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux built a secret prison cell in his Charleroi basement where he kept abducted young girls hostage at the behest of what he called “a big crime ring,” which in the 2004 court case was thought by many to encompass some of Belgium’s top politicians, judges and policemen. The reason why it took so long to apprehend Dutroux was that he was being legally protected by these same individuals.
Material witnesses at the trial described “child sex parties involving judges, politicians, bankers and members of the royal family.” Victims that managed to survive (most were butchered snuff style after being raped) verified the claims.
Police actually visited Dutroux’s home and heard the cries of help from children concealed in his basement yet believed Dutroux’s explanation that the sounds were coming from kids playing in the street.
Dutroux was eventually convicted for his role in the pedophile ring but the involvement of the elite of the country was never properly investigated.
After Dyncorp and Halliburton contractors were exposed as having operated child prostitution rackets in the Balkans from the late 1990’s onwards (and more recently in the case of Halliburton), Rep. Cynthia McKinney attempted to get answers as to why the U.S. government continued to do business with these corporations.
On March 11th 2005, McKinney grilled Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers on the Dyncorp scandal and its protection by the U.S. government.
“Mr. Secretary, I watched President Bush deliver a moving speech at the United Nations in September 2003, in which he mentioned the crisis of the sex trade. The President called for the punishment of those involved in this horrible business. But at the very moment of that speech, DynCorp was exposed for having been involved in the buying and selling of young women and children. While all of this was going on, DynCorp kept the Pentagon contract to administer the smallpox and anthrax vaccines, and is now working on a plague vaccine through the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program. Mr. Secretary, is it [the] policy of the U.S. Government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls?”
In late 2005, Halliburton subsidiary KBR and Dyncorp lobbyists worked in tandem with the Pentagon to stall legislation that would specifically ban trafficking in humans for forced labor and prostitution by U.S. contractors.
Where were the investigations and convictions in other cases of establishment orchestrated child slavery and prostitution? Like the NATO officials responsible for the mushrooming of child prostitution in Kosovo?
The U.S. media largely failed to even report many of these cases at the time yet Larry Craig’s bathroom activities, which are without a doubt perverted, creepy and fully worthy of a disorderly conduct charge, are given a hundred times more press coverage than huge sex slavery scandals with ties to the elite that resulted in the abduction, abuse, rape and murder of thousands of children across the globe – many of which are still missing today.
In addition, Wikipedia allows the page detailing a list of such Republican sex scandals to be deleted by trolls as if no such scandals ever took place!
While the small Canadian village of Montebello is customarily known for its posh luxury and elegant surroundings, for the last two days the village has played host to the 2008 Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America meeting between President Bush and the leaders of Canada and Mexico.
SPP meetings, which are customarily held behind closed doors and known for their secrecy, represent a time when the leaders of the three most influential nations in the western hemisphere come together to discuss various issues of policy.
At this past meeting, which concluded yesterday, the three leaders discussed issues ranging from immigration to Canadian land rights in the Arctic to the need to stop the illegal flow of drugs crossing America’s southwest border.
The purpose of the meeting is to develop ways to integrate the three nations, both economically and politically. This goal has raised serious concerns that the three nations are seeking to subtly form a North American Union that would rival its European counterpart. Such a plan could possibly lead to a NAFTA Superhighway connecting the three nations, as well as a movement for a common currency. But as Bush was engaged in discussions with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a number of conservative activists were also in Montebello voicing their opposition. Arguing that American sovereignty should not be compromised to benefit commercial interests, a new conservative grassroots organization was not shy in voicing its opposition to a North American Union.
At a press conference held Monday, Howard Phillips, president of the Coalition to Block the North American Union (CBNAU), condemned America’s participation and urged Americans to take a stand against the “New World Order” that Bush and the other two leaders are trying to create.
“George Bush and his daddy [former President George H. W. Bush] have both used the term ‘New World Order.’ It was used by Woodrow Wilson. It was used by Adolf Hitler. It was used by a number of people, and the New World Order relates to the desire of many people in the world to submerge national sovereignties to international institution,” stated Phillips at the press conference.
The CBNAU has attracted a number of influential conservatives ranging from Bay Buchanan, senior campaign advisor to Tom Tancredo, and Phyllis Schlafly, founder of Eagle Forum. Phillips’ new organization has also cut across partisan politics and attracted the congressional support of Rep. Virgil Goode Jr., D-Va.
The past few days have been a whirlwind for Phillips, as the political veteran explained that there has been a major “breakthrough” for those concerned about preserving national sovereignty and the integrity of the Constitution.
“We had a great day in Canada,” explained Phillips. “We had tremendous news coverage.”
Phillips, who was a key figure in the fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was sure to point out that the political environment that greeted NAFTA opponents in the early ’90s has become more inviting.
“This is a big difference from the ’90s, as it took a long time to wake up our people and tell them there was a serious crisis at hand,” stated Phillips. Because of Internet access, around-the-clock cable news service and other enhanced forms of communication, Phillips believes it is easier to keep grassroots America informed.
Among the main issues of contention for CBNAU is the devastating affect NAFTA has had on American manufacturing, the construction of a 12-lane NAFTA Superhighway, and the president’s usurpation of the traditional congressional power to handle commerce with foreign nations.
“Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly states that Congress – not the executive branch – has the power to ‘regulate commerce with foreign nations.’ Also, many SPP working group meetings are held in secret, and the public, the press and members of Congress have no opportunity to participate or conduct oversight,” stated Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C.
The president, at a joint press conference with Calderon and Harper, shrugged off concerns that the SPP was a threat to America’s sovereignty.
Characterizing opponents of the SPP as individuals who “like to frighten citizens” into believing that a relationship with Mexico and Canada is harmful to the United States, Bush stated, “I am amused by what actually takes place in the meeting and what some says takes place. … It is comical.”
Arguing that there are “several myths about this meeting,” Calderon chimed in and explained that at the SPP meetings, “we simply take advantage of being neighbors.”
Bush also took the time to praise NAFTA, telling reporters that trade agreement has yielded prosperity, something his critics say is false.
“Since NAFTA was approved, the United States has lost 3.1 million manufacturing jobs. More than 10,000 illegal aliens now stream across our southern border every week. The U.S. does not need its government equalizing standards and regulations that will result in more American jobs going to Mexico and more illegal aliens coming to America,” Jones said.
Members of the CBNAU are unconvinced by the three leaders, for they argue their actions do not reflect their words. Therefore, Congress has decided to take action to protect American sovereignty.