Black Ops and Fort Hood

By JAYNE LYN STAHL

There are lots of places to start looking if we want clues as to what happened yesterday at an Army base at Fort Hood, Texas. One obvious clue is Virginia Tech. We know that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan, among the perpetrators of the largest shooting at a military base in U.S. history, graduated from the college where another massacre took place.

There are striking similarities between the modus operandi in both cases: 32 people were gunned down at Virginia Tech with many wounded, both perpetrators were non-Caucasian, both appear to have had murder/suicide as part of their game plan. While Hassan was born in Arlington, his complaints about religious discrimination in the Army could only have made him feel like a pariah, or outsider. Indeed, both the Virginia Tech and now the Fort Hood shooters were outsiders doubtless angry about being on the outside.

It is entirely possible that Hassan took his cues from the massacre at his alma mater and there is little room for coincidence in the similarities between the two crime sprees.

But, ultimately, what happened at Fort Hood had little to do with the 2007 debacle at Virginia Tech. To really know what happened to Hassan, we will have to know why he was being deployed to Iraq later this month, and whether he was to work with those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, as reported, or whether he was called upon instead to combine his considerable psychiatric expertise, eight years at Walter Reed, with his knowledge of Arabic to serve in an intelligence capacity.

Simply stated, was Dr. Hassan, a devout Muslim, being sent to Iraq to work with U.S. interrogators as a sort of liaision between the American military and Iraqi detainees? We know that Hassan didn't want to deploy, and that he felt strongly about it. What we don't know is why. For another clue, we might want to consider a soldier who was also a psychology major, fluent in Arabic, whose career ended in violence, Alyssa Peterson.

Peterson, a U.S. Army Specialist, received her Arabic language certification, and served with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. She was an enlistee, a career intelligence officer, whose concentration was interrogation techniques. She found herself part of black ops, expected to participate in a clandestine operation in what we now know to have been so-called "alternative enhanced interrogation techniques" which she refused to do.

While the Army has denied it, sources close to Peterson say she was so deeply despondent about what she witnessed at the detention camp in Iraq that, on September 15, 2003, she was found with a bullet wound to her head, a victim of what the Army euphemistically called "non-hostile weapon discharge."

Like Hassan, Peterson was deeply religious. She was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day saints. Within days of taking her life, she was placed on suicide watch after refusing to participate in interrogation sessions at the airbase on the Syrian-Iraqi border, interrogations which she believed involved the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

One must look to Alyssa Peterson only for clues not for answers. Answers won't come fast, and they won't come easily, but the place to start is what were Hassan's exact duties with the Army, why was he being sent to Iraq, what were his duties going to be in Iraq, and did his knowledge of Arabic, as well as his Islam faith have anything to do with the mission the Army had in mind for him?

Though, unlike Alyssa Peterson, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan was not a trained career intelligence officer who specialized in interrogations, could he have found himself in much the same circumstances as a young Christian enlistee before him?

And, as one of Middle Eastern descent who strongly opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, if called upon to participate in interrogation sessions, using what to him might constitute dubious interrogation techniques, what happened at Fort Hood today may well have been a deranged response to a righteous concern.

The Iraq war may someday come to be known as the longest covert war in history. Most wars have a secret component, but this war has been doused with secrecy. There are contract mercenaries fighting side by side with a volunteer civilian army, the press has been neutralized by the Pentagon, and the broadcast media chooses to cherry pick which videos to display that best spin their side of the story. The decision to focus on the depraved acts of one individual, rather than systemic failure, will someday be seen as the most deadly decision of all.

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Capitalism's third century

A triumph of the unplanned over the directed
By J.T. Young

To many, the economic torch already has passed from old to new. They see today's emerging markets as tomorrow's international economic engines. What Britain was to the 19th century and America to the 20th, China will be to the 21st. Such a perspective sees the trees only to miss the forest. What is dawning is not another country's "century," but capitalism's third.
The recent Group of 20 meeting of the world's 20 most significant economies was a testament to the last half century's economic growth. Fifty years ago, America was the world's lone economic superpower. Just 30 years ago, Japan was breaking the Western monopoly on economic superiority.
Today, more than half of G-20's membership comes from what once were dubbed Third World nations - Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey.
It is easy to seek to put another national link on the global growth chain. In the 19th century, free markets at home and free trade abroad unleashed Britain. Its natural attributes hardly predicted such an outcome, yet an island on the periphery of Europe became the world's predominant economic power.
The same principles applied to a much vaster nation produced an even more impressive result in 20th-century America. A nascent nation at the 19th century's beginning, it was the world's economic leader slightly more than 100 years later.
The last 50 years' significance comes from their clarity: What primarily propelled England and America forward was capitalism. Because of their historical, political and cultural overlaps, it is easy to overlook capitalism's impact when viewing just Britain and America. Yet recent global economic successes have strayed further from the noneconomic roots, remaining attached only to capitalism.
In contrast to other economic ideologies, capitalism alone is differentiated by its negative emphasis on the state. Capitalism sees the state'sabsence as central to the economy's success; other systems see the state'spresence as central to the economy's success. Its "markets over mavens" approach has only become more imperative as societies grow more complex. Planning has failed repeatedly in far simpler societies. With planning's failures manifest and societies' complexity growing rapidly, planning is neither preferable nor possible today.
Capitalism straddles today's globe. Every economic competitor has fallen before it - predecessors, feudalism and mercantilism, and would-be successors, communism and socialism. It is the greatest wealth generator in history, and it has done, or is doing, so on every continent and in every culture.
In the broad span of its ascendancy, the current economic crisis is barely a blip. Yet many on the left seek to advance the dubious argument that capitalism precipitated this crisis. Even more preposterous is their assumption that planned economies are devoid of crisis.
Those systems choosing planning over capitalism exist in perpetual disequilibrium. They are distinguished not only by their reliance on the state, but in an inability to right themselves. As a result, they move to ever greater disequilibrium.
Capitalism remains the only system that can fix itself. As much as we may lament its cures on occasion, competition makes capitalism self-equilibrating.
As with a body, the fundamental health of an economic system lies not in never getting sick, but in its response to contagion. The current financial crisis apparently has ended in less than two years. Compare that to the continuous degeneration of communist and socialist systems.
Communism's response to capitalism offers two versions of the same tale. In the late 1980s, communism imploded across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The rot of communism sapped the economy, the state collapsed, and capitalism rushed in.
China and Vietnam, despite capitalism being antithetical to their ruling ideologies, have sought to harness capitalism's productivity to sustain their economies and, they hope, their power. Rather than imploding, they will explode. Both have unleashed forces they can neither control nor roll back. And even if successful in the impossible, they would only - like North Korea and Cuba - succeed in falling further behind the Asian capitalists.
The rise of capitalism well beyond its Western roots is not just its own validation but also its refutation of the managed economy. The managed economies fell first in their most extreme forms but are no less endangered in their milder forms of entitlement societies - those seeking to manage the necessities to which all are "entitled."
The West, having first received capitalism, now faces its own reckoning as its entitlement societies increase their tax and debt burdens and decrease their competitive advantages. The first nation to resolve this will reap an enormous advantage. Those that fail or that deny the necessity to resolve it need only look back to the history that is rapidly gaining on them.

Rush Limbaugh calls President Obama's Dover salute a 'photo-op'

WASHINGTON - Talk radio bomb thrower Rush Limbaugh ripped President Obama Sunday for his ego, health care reform effort - and a "photo-op" with the casket of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan.

BY Kenneth R. Bazinet
"It was a photo-op precisely because he's having big-time trouble on this whole Afghanistan dithering situation," Limbaugh told "Fox News Sunday."
"He can create the impression that he has all this great concern," Limbaugh charged.
Obama said his overnight trip to view the returning flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan at Dover Air Force Base Thursday will "bear on how I see" the war. He is expected to unveil a new strategy that could send up to 40,000 more troops into the warzone.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who has clashed with Obama on domestic and homeland security issues, rushed to defend the President's action.
"I think he was there as commander-in-chief for all Americans. And I don't fault him or question his motives at all," Lieberman said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "I was proud that my President was there."
In his multi-pronged attack, Limbaugh also said the health care reform effort is a government power grab driven by a "very narcissistic" President who has "an out-of-this-world ego."
White House adviser David Axelrod scoffed to CBS: "I think it's a surreal day when you're getting lectures on humility from Rush Limbaugh. The fact is that he is an entertainer. The President has to run the country."

Iraq: US military contractor burns recyclables, violating contract

KBR was contracted to recycle cafeteria waste at Forward Operating Base Warhorse. Such spotty accountability is coming under new scrutiny; an Oct. 30 report reveals that transactions worth $10.7 billion are being audited.
By Tom A. Peter

Forward Operating Base Warhorse, Diyala Province, Iraq - In this desert fortress of housing trailers and concrete barriers, military contractor KBR has launched a recycling campaign – a kind of oasis in the military, an institution not exactly renowned for environmental activism.
As soldiers exit the dining facility, run by KBR and its subcontractor Najlaa International Catering Services Iraq, they see signs along the emerald walkway urging those who "like to recycle" to follow the path and "Think Green." At the end of the path, soldiers sort aluminum cans and plastic silverware into separate bins.
But there's one problem: The recyclable goods are thrown into a pit with the rest of the trash and burned. While this is likely to disappoint soldiers who "like to recycle," it also is a breach of the government's contract with KBR to run the dining facility on FOB Warhorse, according to the US government's Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA).
The chimerical recycling program is apparently a microcosmic example of the spotty accountability under which contractors have operated – at substantial expense to US taxpayers. A report issued Oct. 30 by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) said that audits of $6.4 billion worth of contracts revealed "internal weaknesses," including inadequate oversight of invoices and excessive change orders. The report also noted evidence of duplicate payments and payments sent to fictitious addresses and unapproved contractors.
Eyewitness account: 'recycling' burned in trash pit
When first asked about the recycling program at FOB Warhorse, Xopher Bryant, program manager of Najlaa International Catering Services Iraq, responded in an e-mail, "The innovative recycling efforts we conduct at FOB Warhorse are a direct result of our company's wish to make a positive impact in all areas of our business dealings and are offered as a cost benefit to our client and customers."
When asked to show the actual recycling operations to a reporter at FOB Warhorse, Mr. Bryant, who was not on site, cited media policies that did not allow for such interaction between company officials and the press, but encouraged this reporter to investigate for himself. With two escorts from the military's public relations outfit – Spc. Christopher Bruce and Sgt. Jeremy Pitcher – the Monitor sought out the KBR manager in the FOB Warhorse's cafeteria, which serves 2,000 to 3,000 people. But the manager, who refused to be named, repeatedly refused to help the Monitor verify the existence of KBR's recycling program.
A soldier checking badges at the cafeteria's entrance said, however, that she was fairly certain that the recycling material was thrown in with the trash – a practice the Monitor witnessed firsthand.
When one of the trash cans used for "recyclables" in the cafeteria filled up, workers emptied it into a dumpster placed in a long row with identical dumpsters. That dumpster was then emptied into a dump truck that proceeded to collect the contents of numerous other dumpsters, confirmed by the military PR officials to be used for trash only, around the base. Then the truck's cargo – trash and "recycling" alike – was emptied into a huge burn pit and set ablaze. Apart from the cafeteria trash cans, nowhere on the base was there any evidence of infrastructure – dumpsters, trucks, or sorting facilities – for separating recycling and trash.
After the Monitor's eyewitness confirmation that the recycling program was not operational, Bryant and his colleagues did not respond to nearly a dozen e-mails asking for a comment.
Heather Browne, KBR's director of corporate communications in Houston, Texas, did respond, however. She said in a statement that KBR "is committed to environmental responsibility" and, based on its "ongoing review, at sites where KBR provides services related to waste disposal, KBR complies with all applicable military directives and contractual requirements."
Mission taking precedence over transparency
With contractors providing almost all basic services for US forces, their numbers have already reached unprecedented levels: Contractors now outnumber uniformed US military personnel in Afghanistan, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.
"The fundamental problem is that the government has no capacity to do things itself," says Pratap Chatterjee, author of "Halliburton's Army." "As a result, they're willing to overlook little things like recycling and even big things like fraud so long as their mission is met."
Although the US has used military contractors as far back as the Revolutionary War, they didn't begin to proliferate until the early 1990s. Former President George H. W. Bush began relying more heavily on contractors to reduce the government's footprint. In the Balkans conflict, the first billion-dollar contract was awarded to KBR.
As the role of contractors increased, the Clinton administration passed a ruling in December 2000 to weed out firms with felony charges in their pasts and "blacklist" contractors that had past environmental, labor, or federal-trade violations lodged against them. Former President George W. Bush, who took office a month later, repealed the law in 2001.
Obama administration may take harder line
Today, if a contractor fails to fulfill its obligations, a DCMA spokesperson says that the normal protocol is that the firm will be issued a "corrective action request" to tell the government how it will address the cause of the compliance issue. He refused to discuss KBR's recycling case, and declined to be named, in accordance with the agency's policy.
Allegations of misconduct in Iraq targeting companies including KBR, its former parent company, Halliburton, and Blackwater – renamed Xe Services – have periodically drawn the wrath of US lawmakers. But government-contractor experts say that the focus on providing for troops in the field often may trump such concerns.
"All of these negative things that are happening are not seemingly making an impact at a significant level where policymakers are paying attention. Instead, it's quite the opposite; policymakers are still seeing them as cost-effective," says Dawn Rothe, a criminology professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., citing an August 2008 Congressional Budget Office report as evidence.
Before the government reconsiders its use of contractors, Dr. Rothe says she thinks there will have to be "more revelations of some serious harm, legal discrepancies, and criminal behavior."
But while allegations and investigations of corruption have so far done little to crimp contractors' style in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are signs that the Obama administration is looking to effect systemic change. SIGIR, which reports to the secretaries of State and Defense, is auditing a further 22,000 transactions involving $10.7 billion – a substantial chunk of the $50 billion the US has spent to date on reconstruction efforts in Iraq.
"We're at a point now with tightening budgets and the economic crisis ... that we're also not going to put up with waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending," says Scott Amey, general consul at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight in Washington, who adds that there's a push to increase the government's ability to defer, detect, and prosecute fraud."At that point we're going to place an emphasis on contractor accountability as well as getting the most value out of the dollars that we're awarding these contractors."

Battle satire 'Men Who Stare at Goats' has a Maryland link

By Michael Sragow

The makers of "The Men Who Stare At Goats" have planted this epigraph before the movie: "More of this is true than you would believe." But I heard one young man emerging from a preview saying, "I don't think any of this is true."

After all, who in their right mind would buy a story about a visionary Army officer embracing Eastern martial arts and West Coast encounter sessions, then recruiting new American fighting men who would "fall in love with everyone," "sense plant auras," "attain the power to pass through objects such as walls," "have out-of-body experiences" and "be able to hear and see other people's thoughts"?

And who could accept that this battalion employed psychic powers to locate a hostage halfway around the world - and to stop the heart of a goat?

But that visionary, Bill Django, played by Jeff Bridges, is based on a real man, Jim Channon, who did his military-intelligence training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore County (and lived at the Colony in Towson when he was doing it). In the 1970s and 1980s, he did engage commanding officers and fellow members of the think tank Task Force Delta in his dream of transforming the military into a holistic band of brothers. They rewarded him by reading him official orders to become commander of the First Earth Battalion.

Of course, this battalion (in the film, the New Earth Army) was a mind-expanding network, not a formal fighting group, with no set address except Task Force Delta and maybe Mother Earth. Its members were among the first on the planet to keep in touch through e-mail

And many of the exploits that the filmmakers ascribe to Channon's troops were done just a few miles from Baltimore, at Fort Meade. The site was two crumbling barracks belonging to a Defense Intelligence Agency unit devoted to "remote viewing" - the term for envisioning an unseen target using extra-sensory perception. Dale Graff, a sometime-Marylander who now lives in Hamburg, Pa., directed the program and gave it an enduring name: "Stargate."

Channon's goal was to re-imagine the American soldier as a "warrior monk" - equally deft at war and peace, destruction and healing. Graff aimed to pursue untapped powers of perception while locating Cold War targets or drug smugglers through Stargate members' super-intuitions.

Both men have healthy appetites for humor and similar mixed feelings for the movie. On the phone from Hawaii, Channon says it's only "one-third accurate." But he salutes the moviemakers because "it's really hard in the modern world of the trivia hairball to get anything important out to the public ... and they have made it so the paranormal doesn't seem like witchcraft."

As a man with a talent for seeing a few days into the future, Graff, a subtle joker, wrote these words before he saw the movie: "I laughed at the ridiculous antics of the characters. ... [But] while we laugh, are we not also acknowledging something hidden within ourselves that can be uncovered?" Afterward, he considered his pre-review pretty accurate.

The film's surefire, black-comic attention-getter is the scene of a New Earth soldier named Lyn Cassady ( George Clooney), under duress, focusing a high-energy glare on a still, silent goat - and killing it.

But the best sources believe that in real life, no kind of psychic projection leveled the animal. John Alexander, Channon's close friend and one of the models for Clooney's character, says that what felled the goat was "dim mak, a relatively obscure martial arts skill known in English as the death touch." On the phone from Las Vegas, where he lives, Alexander asks, "Have you ever seen a bullet wound in a body? You see not just a hole but a path of radiating energy. I saw the photos of the necropsy of that goat. And there was a similar path of energy across the chest - except there was no exit or entrance wound."

Alexander objects to the way Jon Ronson's book and Peter Straughan's screenplay erroneously connect this action to Channon's group and obscure the serious point behind the episode. An American army hero named Col. Nick Rowe explored the death touch - a light touch, not a heavy blow - as a method that hostages or POWs could use after days or weeks of physical weakening in captivity.

But Channon and Graff praise the movie for continually pushing its audience to think outside the banker's box of the traditional military-industrial complex.

Graff might practice precognition, but when he watched the film last week in Baltimore, he felt something else: "deja vu." Graff says the film gets several anecdotes dead right. The psychic who stops a hamster dead in its tracks - or, rather, stops it dead before it even hits the tracks of its rotating wheel?

"That was based on a Soviet test, but the Soviets staged the test with rabbits instead of hamsters." The use of remote viewing to rescue a U.S. general kidnapped by the Red Brigade in Italy? Joe McMoneagle, one of the Stargate psychics, won the Army's Legion of Merit "for providing information of critical value unobtainable from any other source on over 200 specific targets," including Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier, who was taken in Italy in December 1981 and rescued in 1982.

Some key scenes re-enact or echo several of Graff's pivotal experiences. In a skit straight out of an Abbott and Costello farce, two American military men discuss the need to ignite an inner-space race with the Soviets. At one point, our Cold War enemies thought that American authorities had experimented with ESP to communicate with the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine.

International investigators uncovered a French hoax behind the Nautilus story. But the Soviets thought the hoax was a hoax - just another cover story - and raced full-bore into psychic research.

Graff says he had that same discussion with his commander at the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division, right after he "instinctively" put his hands on a classified report of Soviet ESP research. That talk eventually led him to the top of Stargate. (Now he's convinced that the U.S. did perform ESP experiments with submarines.)

Graff objects to the film depicting American psychics recklessly ingesting LSD and even spiking eggs and water with acid. "Our work could not involve 'non-ordinary consciousness,' meaning - No drugs! Those parts were silly." But some of the movie's intimate observations genuinely connected to him, especially a near-death experience that opens Bridges' heart and brain to new human potential. Graff had one of those himself.

And the psychics' use of idiosyncratic warm-up techniques rang clatteringly true. One of Graff's men, an American Indian, "worked with beads" to prepare for remote viewing, and another listened to hard rock.

On the phone from Austin, Texas, the hard-rock man, Paul H. Smith, laughs as he adds, "But I'd listen to Dolly Parton, too! It was all to get me 'psyched up.' " When approached at Fort Meade to join the unit in 1983, he had what he calls "a 'Men in Black' moment" as he walked toward the ramshackle barracks. It was all so mysterious and exciting - and well-funded, despite the headquarters' appearance. He made the decision to join "in 10 seconds." The decrepit quarters helped Stargate hide in plain sight. Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, on a briefing tour, once peered under the deteriorating steps and asked "Where's the wino?"

"Remote viewing should be called 'remote perception,' " says Smith. His own most startling vision came with a huge audio component. In 1987, on a Friday, he was asked to answer the question, "What's important for us to know about the next few hours?" He received an impression of a large metallic structure in a body of water and, in the distance, an aircraft dropping two cylindrical, winged objects that made "a whirring, guttering sound." When he came in Monday, he learned that an Iraqi plane had struck the USS Stark with a couple of roaring winged Exocet missiles.

Smith says, "Pardon the pun, there's a tiny kernel of truth" when it comes to Channon's influence on the be-all-you-can-be, all-volunteer army. "And I shouldn't say tiny - Col. Channon isn't small." Smith has criticized "The Men Who Stare at Goats" for linking ESP and Channon's New Age mind experiments to Abu Ghraib, a connection that "doesn't stand up to scrutiny."

Graff and Channon agree. Graff says remote viewers are especially sensitive to "staying away from 'the dark side' because it usually comes back to haunt you." Channon abhors the way "four of my ideas out of 125" have been connected to psychological warfare and atrocities in Iraq in order to fit a predetermined thesis: "How does good stuff go bad?"

It certainly didn't go bad for these two men. Graff has continued to write books and lead seminars and workshops aimed at extending human instinct and perception. Channon lives "on an eco-homestead" and promotes a crusade dubbed "Operation Noble Steward," calling for a united global military to handle ecological problems.

Channon's First Earth Battalion never recruited psychics. But he believes that he saved lives in Vietnam by relying on hunter's skills that could be considered psychic. And he feels ESP is "necessary" for American successs in contemporary conflicts. "The secret of modern warfare is, don't get into danger zones. You can't do that without extended awareness."

So in the end, the entertaining farrago of make-believe and scrambled history in "The Men Who Stare At Goats" doesn't faze Channon. He compares his collision with Hollywood to "a 'meeting engagement.' That's when two armies bump into each other and make a mess. The ones that are quickest on their feet win. I've been quick in this case. So far it has been an amazingly successful engagement."

Spoken like an honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood Jedi warrior.

The Plain and Simple Truth: Social Ideology and Capitalism

By Richard Taylor

Hippies had it right back in the 60`s and 70`s when they were trying to profess peace and love. But our government would have none of that. There was too much money to be made with wars. It`s the plain and simple truth. Never mind that it came at the expense of our youth who had to go over to wherever we were waging these so-called wars and get killed. But then we would call them hero`s and put their names up on a wall for giving their lives for their country.
Is that what America is all about? First we had the world wars which were real wars. Countries attacked other countries trying to dominate the world. But after that, the government saw what a real boon it was for our economy to wage war. So they made up wars. Next came Korea. Did Korea attack us and try to take us over? No. But the government invented the fact that communism was running amuck over there and could spread to America and threaten our idea`s of capitalism. They couldn`t have that. So they started what they called a war. Besides, it was good for our economy. Here is the definition of communism.

Communism, a theory and system of social and political organization that was a major force in world politics for much of the 20th century. As a political movement, communism sought to overthrow capitalism through a workers` revolution and establish a system in which property is owned by the community as a whole rather than by individuals. In theory, communism would create a classless society of abundance and freedom, in which all people enjoy equal social and economic status.

But communism never got the chance to express itself the way it was meant to. It was a good theory, but the governments that implemented it screwed it up and used it as a power thing. And that`s what the world is really all about isn`t it. He who has the most power wins. That`s what America has become. Isn`t this life here on earth supposed to be about the quality of life? Good health and freedom to do the right thing as we choose? It seems to me it has gotten a little out of hand. Our politicians have gotten just as bad as the politi-buro over in Russia, only the reason why it works here is that they are more devious. They know how to make things appear good when in fact they`re really not. They know how to tell us what we WANT to hear, not what we NEED to hear.
I`m not rallying for communism nor trying to defend capitalism. I`m just pointing out the truth. And truth is relative. What is the truth for you isn`t the truth for everybody else. So isn`t that what the government is really doing. Forcing what is their truth onto the rest of America? People, we have to wake up at some point in time or we are going to go extinct like the Inca`s and Mayan`s. Nobody knows what really happened to them, they only have suppositions. No real documented facts. I think they got too big for their pants, got out of control, and probably had massive revolts and killed each other over it. Who knows? All I know is I think we`re headed in the same direction. After Korea, and many deaths, we created the Vietnam War. And we saw where that went. A lot more deaths. But hey, it was good for our economy. We got rich at the expense of our youths.
And after that mess was over we had to have another war. So what did they come up with? Yep, that`s right. The cold war. And it too was not a war. It was an imaginary war that they made up. And they spent billions on it. It`s crazy. Don`t you think that we could have made Russia just THINK we had all of these nuclear weapons. They would never have known for sure no matter how many spies they had over here. During that time we spent 800 billion on submarines alone. Who`s running America? It sounds like a paranoid person to me.
And now we have Iraq at the expense of 6 billion a month, and once again, the expense of our youths lives. Only now we have changed the excuse from communism to terrorism. It couldn`t be that we`re over there for the oil, could it? Oh, but our politicians are so good at telling us what we WANT to here. Right? And look at all the smart bombs and weapons we get to manufacture. America is really thriving. And let me remind you once again, I`m not against America. We`re great. But at who`s expense? And couldn`t we really be greater? Just think. We`ve built the greatest war machine in the world, think if we applied it to peace and well-being. We`d have heaven on earth.
Here is one definition of capitalism:
An economic system built upon the profit motive. Capitalism depends upon private individuals or companies investing money in order to make profits. In Marxist analysis, these profits are secured by exploiting workers who provide their labor.
Here`s another:
It is important to define "Capitalism" correctly because a proper definition is a prerequisite to a proper defense. Capitalism is the only moral political system because it is the only system dedicated to the protection of rights, which is a requirement for human survival and flourishing. This is the only proper role of a government. Capitalism should be defended vigorously on a moral basis, not an economic or utilitarian basis.
So capitalism can be good or bad depending on how it is expressed. Kind of sounds like what happened to communism. It could have been good, but went bad. And corporations are outsourcing to exploit poor people who will work for almost nothing and then turn around and sell their product for an arm and a leg here in America. It sounds like morality has gone south. If we continue maybe we`ll end up like Russia. And Russia`s government was always lying to its people and telling them propaganda about how bad America was. Look what happened to them. Lying is defined as the deliberate act of deviating from the truth.
But it kind of sounds like another government I know of. Ours. And I must remind you once again that I`m not cutting America. I think it`s great. It`s the government, like Russia`s, that is getting out of hand. They have lulled Americans to sleep by lying to us and telling us what they think we want to hear, not what we need to hear. And Bush has been good at doing that. Go to this website and you will be horrified at what you will learn. http://www.wanttoknow.info/051130ciasecrets Click on the link and watch the movie. What you will learn is that ever since Pearl Harbor and the Second World War the CIA has been the dominant force running the world. They should be called the CAA, not CIA. The Covert Action Agency. And they lie, and lie, and lie. And they are so secret that I wonder of our own presidents know what they are up to. And if they do, what does that say about America. The CIA has carte blanche and is above the law. They have unrestricted power to act at their own discretion.
Go to this link and learn more. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2470052 It tells about the terminal experiments they did and mind control and assassinations.
So here it is America. What does this tell you about the Kennedy assassinations and the assassination of Martin Luther King? These were good people. Who in their right mind would go out and kill them? That`s right. The people that killed them weren`t in their right mind. Could it be that the CIA used their mind control on the patsy`s they used to kill them? The CIA couldn`t have somebody like JFK in office because he would have probably shut them down. It`s all about control with the CIA. Here`s something to think about. Could they have been behind 9/11 and the towers coming down. Look at it. It got us another war. So what if it killed a lot of people. They don`t care. And don`t go calling me un-American. I`m as American as you are. I was born and raised here. The only deffererence is that I can SEE what is happening. Isn`t it time for you to SEE?
Okay, I`ll tell you what gives me the authority to bring these things to light. It`s time for you to find out who I am. I was born in 1956 and I was a part of the hippy generation. The baby boomers. Only I had one thing against me from the start. I didn`t know it at the time, but I suffered from chronic depression. I didn`t know it was depression, I just thought that it was the way that everybody felt. So when I got in my teens I found pot. It was an excellent prescription for depression. As I got older I went through all the turmoil`s and worries of being drafted and going over to the so-called war in Nam. But it turned out it ended in time. So I got married instead. I might as well of enlisted. Talk about a controller.
It was good at first, but as time went on she wouldn`t let me smoke pot. So I suffered through my depression for about eight years. There came a time when she said it was okay to drink on the weekends. Great! I thought. That was when I turned into a functioning alcoholic. The next four years of my life were pure hell. Now if she would have let me smoke pot I don`t think I would have ever become one. It ended in a divorce. I went through a couple of rehabs and got sober. Then came the second marriage. She smoked pot so I remained sober and un-depressed for the next nine years. She had two boys from her first marriage but wanted another one which I couldn`t supply her with as I had been fixed from my first marriage. Divorce number two.
I had a good job and when my friends there found out about my divorce they turned me onto what they had just been turned onto for about a month now. Crack cocaine. This all plays into my finding out what America is really all about. After going through addiction to alcohol I knew this was not the route for my friends to go through. It explained to me why they were missing a lot of work lately and why some had even quit. It`s a nasty relentless addiction. I go home and contact the DEA and sheriff`s narcotics department to try to help my friends. To make a long story short of which I am trying to get the book published that tells all about it, I end up going to prison for it.
When I get out I try to commit suicide, for my life is no life at all now. I`m unsuccessful so they put me back in prison for trying it. I ask you, how screwed up is our society? I needed help, not prison. Society makes it legal to go out and get addicted to the drug alcohol, which is defined as poison, and make the non- physically addictive drug of marijuana illegal. You can go out and get drunk and have a blackout and have wrecks that kill people, and it`s legal to buy this stuff. But pot doesn`t do that to you. How dysfunctional is that?
So when I get out again I suffer a stroke from all of the stress caused from being there. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. An Angel comes to me one night and heals me not only of my stroke, but my alcoholism as well. Many, many miracles have come from my stroke. This led me on to find out the answers to life and why we are here, and you will be surprised at what I have found out.
I researched quantum physics, the near death experience, and our reality, the nature of God, whom I call The All, and have made many fascinating realizations. I have written two books and a screenplay but can find nobody here in America that will publish them. I think it`s because they contain nothing but the truth, and as we all know, America doesn`t want to hear the truth. I think I shouldn`t say America, but rather, I should say the republicans don`t want to hear the truth. They`re conservatives. They don`t care about anyone else, things are fine the way they are and they want to keep them that way. That`s why Bush got elected AGAIN! And they call democrats liberals and make it out to be a nasty un-American thing. I pulled some more of the truth off the web. Here is the truth about liberals.

Although I do not like to generalize, for the purposes of a (somewhat) concise dictionary definition, here is the very basic liberal (American sense) ideology:

Politics:

The federal government exists to protect and serve the people, and therefore, should be given sufficient power to fulfill its role successfully. Ways in which this can be accomplished include giving the federal government more power than local governments and having the government provide programs designed to protect the interests of the people (these include welfare, Medicare, and social security, but should also include healthcare of all Americans). Overall, these programs have helped extensively in aiding the poor and unfortunate, as well as the elderly and middle class.
To make sure that the interests of the people are served, it was liberals (or so they were considered in their time) that devised the idea of a direct democracy, a republic, and modern democracy. This way, it is ensured that the federal government represents the interests of the people, and the extensive power that it is given is not used to further unpopular goals. Liberals do not concentrate on military power (though that is not to say they ignore it), but rather focus on funding towards education, improving wages, protecting the environment, etc. Many propose the dismantling of heavy-cost programs such as the Star Wars program (no, not the film series), in order to use the money to fund more practical needs.

Social Ideology:
As one travels further left on the political spectrum, it is noticed that tolerance, acceptance, and general compassion for all people steadily increases (in theory at least). Liberals are typically concerned with the rights of the oppressed and unfortunate this, of course, does not mean that they ignore the rights of others (liberals represent the best interests of the middle-class in America). This has led many liberals to lobby for the rights of homosexuals, women, minorities, single-mothers, etc. Many fundamentalists see this is immoral; however, it is, in reality, the most mature, and progressive way in which to deal with social differences. Liberals are identified with fighting for equal rights, such as those who wanted to abolish slavery and those who fought hard for a woman`s reproductive right (see Abortion). Liberals have also often fought for ecological integrity, protecting the environment, diversity of species, as well as indigenous populations` rights. Almost all social betterment programs are funded by liberal institutions, and government funded social programs on education improvement, children`s` rights, women`s` rights, etc. are all supported by liberals. Basically, social liberalism is the mature, understanding way in which to embrace individual differences, not according to ancient dogma or religious prejudice, but according to the ideals of humanity that have been cultivated by our experiences throughout history, summed up in that famous American maxim: with liberty and justice for all.

Economics:
Using the term "liberal` when speaking of economics is very confusing, as liberal in America is completely opposite to the rest of the world. Therefore, here, as I have been doing, I will concentrate on the American definition of liberal concerning economics.
Liberals believe that the rights of the people, of the majority, are to be valued much more sincerely than those of corporations, and therefore have frequently proposed the weakening of corporate power through heavier taxation (of corporations), environmental regulations, and the formation of unions. Liberals often propose the heavier taxation of WEALTHY individuals, while alleviating taxes on the middle class, and especially the poor. Liberals (American sense) do not support laissez-faire economics because, to put it simply, multinational corporations take advantage of developing countries and encourage exploitation and child labor (multinational corporations are spawned from laissez-faire policies). Instead, many propose the nationalization of several industries, which would make sure that wealth and power is not concentrated in a few hands, but is in the hands of the people (represented by elected officials in government). I am not going to go into the extreme intricacies of the economic implications of privatization of resources, etc., but will say that privatization and globalization have greatly damaged the economies of Latin America, namely Argentina and Mexico (see NAFTA).

This summation of the leftist ideology may not be 100% correct in all situations, as there are many variations on several issues and I may have depicted the current definition of liberal as too far to the left than it is generally accepted.
On that note, many leftists are critical of the political situation in America, claiming that the left is now in the center, as the general populace has been conditioned by institutions such as Fox News to consider everything left of Hitler " (as one clever person put it) as radical liberalism.
I, myself, have observed that, in America, there are two basic types of liberals: those who concern themselves only with liberal policies on the domestic front, and either ignore international affairs or remain patriotic and dedicated to the American way (Al Franken, Bill Clinton, etc.)
And then there are those, despite the criticism they face from many fellow liberals " (classified under the former definition), who are highly critical of US foreign policy, addressing such issues as Iran-Contra, the Sandinistas, Pinochet, Vietnam, NATO`s intervention in Kosovo, our trade embargo on Cuba, etc, etc. (such as Noam Chomsky, William Blumm, etc.)
Unfortunately, it seems that adolescent rage has run rampant on this particular word, and most definitions are either incoherent jumbles of insults and generalizations or deliberate spewing of misinformation (see the definition that describes the situation in Iraq, without addressing our suppression of popular revolts in Iraq, our pre-war sanctions on Iraq that have caused the death of some 5 million children, and our support for Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, and even our post-war sale of biological elements usable in weapons to Saddam`s regime).
Him...it seems that people have the terms "liberal" "socialist" and "communist" all confused. A communist is liberal. A socialist is liberal. But a liberal is not necessarily communist or socialist.
I am a liberal; I believe in equal rights for all, fair trade, compassionate foreign and domestic policies, and diplomacy instead of war.

Here are some examples and descriptions of what conservatives have done for us.

Today however, at least in the U.S., the terms have become fairly meaningless. Or, at very least, they are ambiguous. We have had recent administrations led by "conservatives" such as Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush II
that have done things like:

1. Incur huge federal government debts;
2. Increase the number of federal government employees beyond the wildest dreams of `liberals`;
3. Promote and legislate federal government intervention in ways that both increase the absolute level of regulatory activity, and intrude [my view] into areas previously managed or mis-managed by local and regional [state/provincial] governments: National educational program..The so-called `No child left behind` law.

4. Call for constitutional amendments to restrict the rights of citizens, in an arena until now left to the States to regulate...Anti-gay marriage amendment The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote. Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).
Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.

So all on all America, here is an overview of the true America, and conservatives are going to hate me and ridicule me for exposing the truth. But hey, how can I be bad for telling the truth? Our government lied to us when they set off the first nuclear bomb. They said it was an accident from an explosion of some dynamite. They lied to us and told us Korea was a war. Then Viet Nam was a war. Then the cold war with Russia. Then there`s been a bunch of smaller wars that I`m sure the CIA has been running, and it`s all been in the interest of the CIA running the world. But it`s been for all the wrong reasons. Too many people have died because of them.
Are we going to sit here and let it continue? Now we have the war in Iraq. And I`m sure they`re in on it. And we send our children to go over there and get killed. Is this the America that everyone dreams about? We have changed justice into revenge. Justice, to me, is what is right, not getting back at somebody. We need to better define who we Americans really are. So far with the CIA and the corporations, it looks to me like we are out to try and dominate the world, not make it a better place for everybody to live. Because they don`t care about anybody else`s lives. They only care about themselves and their power over everybody else.
It`s time for us Americans to wake up and see what is really happening. We all seek the reason for BEING, and I have found it. You see, I have discovered something else that our government is LETTING happen. The Taliban pays the poor farmers in Afghanistan to grow the poppy seed and make heroine. They produce 6000 tons of it and then pay for their terrorism with it to the tune of roughly 50 billion dollars. Our government says it has gotten tough on terrorism, which to me has only been the spread of fear at our airports. So why don`t they go to the real source of terrorism? Their drugs that they pollute America and the rest of the world with. We have the resources to stop this evil drug from ever entering our country. It`s the source that we have over in Iraq fighting a make-believe war. Why don`t we cut of their source of income thereby crippling them?
I`ll tell you why, and it that seems that I am the only one that can see it. The truth is, the government and the CIA would lose control of their tactics of drugs and their most formidable source of control over us. Fear. Yes America, their tactics of the use of lies, fear, and drugs has controlled America and the world now for over a half century. Ever since the Second World War ended. We have never really been free. We have been led to believe that we are, but we have been shackled with fear ever since then. We make up 5% of the world population, but our privatized prisons make up 25% of it. Something is wrong. They have created a very believable illusion. One that everyone in America seems to have fallen for.
So what are we going to do about it? We need another revolution. And the word revolution isn`t a bad word. It means to complete a circle. You go around in a circle and when it`s complete it`s a revolution. And in each revolution we are supposed to evolve. So let us set our goals on doing just that. Let us evolve into the beings we are truly meant to be. But the question now is, who is going to take us there? We have to look for and find a leader. And no, I don`t mean a politician. Let us start in a new direction before it is too late. Here`s to a new and spiritual America. Amen.
Richard Lee Taylor

The U.S. can't bind Iraq together

by ctucker

In a gambit designed to make him appear a strong leader of a proud nation — in advance of a national election, of course — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered some security measures put in place earlier to be discontinued. In particular, he ordered some roads in Baghdad re-opened to vehicle traffic and security barriers discarded.

The street where the blasts occurred had been reopened to vehicle traffic just six months ago. Shortly after, blast walls were repositioned to allow traffic closer to the government buildings — all measures hailed by al-Maliki as a sign that safety was returning to the city.

Helpless civilians have paid for that, as the death toll from two huge blasts yesterday continues to rise.

As the floodwater from broken water mains and sewers drained away, workers continued to hunt for victims amid the wreckage from Sunday’s bomb blasts, recovering still more bodies on Monday as the death toll climbed to as much as 155 — including an uncertain number of children — with more than 500 wounded.
The extent of the damage was even worse than initially feared, with three major government buildings destroyed rather than the two reported in the hours after Sunday’s pair of suicide vehicle bombs.

This tragedy is likely to be followed by calls from U.S. neo-calls for President Obama to delay pulling U.S. troops of of Iraq, even as those same neo-cons demand Obama send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. No. The U.S. should never have invaded Iraq; and we certainly shouldn’t be in the middle of sectarian warfare.
Besides, the Iraqis have asked us to leave. We should, sooner rather than later.