How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Welfare State Read online

  Judith Miller filled that newspaper with the neoconservative/ Bush regime propaganda that was orchestrated to make the public accept US aggression toward Iraq. The Times later sort of apologized and Miller departed the paper.

  That left the Washington Post, apparently long a CIA asset, as the “liberal media” that is destroying America, until on October 31 the paper’s long-time pundit, David Broder, wrote that Obama should spend the next two years disarming the Republicans and renewing the economy by orchestrating a showdown with Iran. Going to war with Iran, “the greatest threat to the world,” would simultaneously unite Republicans with Obama and restore the economy. By following Broder’s prescription, Obama “will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.”

  Here we have the “liberal” Broder at the “liberal” Washington Post advocating the neoconservative’s desired war with Iran. The irony deepens. My acquaintances regard Obama as a Marxist and a Muslim. It does not occur to my acquaintances that the military/security complex and Wall Street would not put a Marxist in the White House, or that AIPAC would not put a Muslim in the White House, or that a Muslim would not have chosen a dual Israeli citizen as his chief of staff and staffed up his government with Zionists friendly to Israel, or that a Muslim would not have renewed the war in Afghanistan and started new ones in Pakistan and Yemen, or that, if a Muslim, Obama would be averse to slaughtering Muslims in behalf of the neocons’ world hegemony agenda.

  Chris Hedges writes in Truthdig:

  The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for ‘moderation.’ The corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.

  But that’s America. It seems like people simply cannot put two and two together. Thinking is not a widespread activity among the American public.

  Indeed, many Americans are incapable of thought on any subject. Consider the latest bomb scare initially blamed on a young pro-

  American female student in Yemen who luckily was released before she was tortured and raped. Allegedly, bombs disguised as printer ink modules passed through lax cargo security and were on their way to blow up something. Everyone immediately endorsed the story. UPS pilots urged US officials to tighten cargo screening worldwide. The US has sent a team into Yemen to take over security.

  Somehow the security services that were unable to foil the 9/11 plot were able to penetrate this plot before it succeeded.

  Consider the timeliness of the foiled plot. British Airways Chairman Martin Broughton and other European officials recently accused the US of making inane demands on airport passengers, such as removing their shoes and separate examinations of laptop computers. Broughton even declared: “Europe should not have to kowtow to the Americans every time they want something done to beef up security on US bound flights.”

  The owner of London’s Heathrow Airport agreed. The European Union has challenged the US requirement for European passengers to have online checks before boarding flights bound for the US, declaring the requirement a “burdensome measure.”

  Miraculously, a plot is exposed that brands British Airways, London’s Heathrow, and the EU as “soft on terrorism security.”

  Or what about this motive? The Obama regime wants to send CIA hunter-killer teams into Yemen to murder people suspected of hostility to America. CIA drones would be used to blow up suspects despite the proven fact that the CIA drones used in Afghanistan and in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty mainly kill innocent people.

  Yemen’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh said that he opposes America’s violation of his country’s sovereignty, but, alas, it was the Yemeni President’s lax air cargo security that let the bombs through. So his protests, too, are discredited by the lax security that enabled the printer ink plot. Unless US forces are in Yemen eliminating terrorists, the world is not safe.

  Americans never ask the old Roman question, “Who benefits?”

  Consider, for example, the “underwear bomber.” How likely is it that Al Qaeda, allegedly having successfully outwitted all 16 US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, NORAD, airport security, the Pentagon, and the security agencies of all US allies including Israel and brought down the World Trade towers and successfully attacked the Pentagon itself, would choose as a sequel blowing up a mere airliner with an underwear bomb, a shoe bomb, and a shampoo/toothpaste/underarm deodorant bomb? Having acquired the stature associated with 9/11, blowing up an airliner is a big comedown in prestige. It conveys the image of a washed-up Al Qaeda.

  Again, who benefits? The most obvious beneficiary of the underwear bomber is the corporation that manufactures the full body scanners that show people as if they are naked. Obviously, the machines were already produced and awaiting a contract. Without the underwear bomber and the hype and fear the media generated over the new threat, it is unlikely the government could have succeeded with such massive violation of personal privacy.

  It would be interesting to know what company manufactures the body scanners and what its relationship is to the US and Israeli governments. But these questions never occur to Americans or to the “liberal media.”

  As a member of the Congressional staff during the 1970s, both House and Senate and committee and member staffs, I learned that except for rare occurrences, the legislation that Congress passes and the President signs is written either by executive agencies or by lobbyists. Congress did not write the PATRIOT Act. It was written in advance of 9/11 awaiting its opportunity. President Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, is on record saying that no one ever suspected such an event as 9/11 with terrorists using hijacked airliners as missiles against the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Why then was the voluminous PATRIOT Act sitting waiting?

  Whose crystal ball read the future and had the PATRIOT Act drafted in advance?

  Whose crystal ball foresaw the underwear bomber and had the full body scanners ready to be deployed?

  Are these amazing coincidences or orchestrated events?

  THE NEW AMERICAN CREDO:

  MIGHT IS RIGHT

  November 3, 2011

  In my last column, “Who Has the Crystal Ball,” I questioned the existence of “the liberal media,” and I remarked that it would be interesting to know the manufacturer of the full body scanners and the company’s relationship to the US and Israeli governments.

  Conservative readers wrote to me saying that, as I had not mentioned National Public Radio, I had hidden “the liberal media” under the table. Another reader, well informed on the subject, told me about the full body scanner company and its relationship to the US and Israeli governments.

  Let’s begin with the latter.

  The full body scanners are manufactured by Rapiscan Systems, a firm represented by the Chertoff Group. The Chertoff Group is Michael Chertoff, a dual Israeli/US citizen appointed Secretary of Homeland Security in 2005 by Puppet President George W. Bush. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) used Obama’s economic stimulus, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to purchase 150 Rapiscan machines. Much larger purchases are in the works.

  Chertoff has been a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and was the federal prosecutor who convicted and destroyed the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, apparently illegally as the conviction was overturned by the US Supreme Court. But, of course, the firm and the careers of its employees were already destroyed by Chertoff.

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bsp; Chertoff was also appointed Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice by George W. Bush. Chertoff supervised the 9/11 investigation or non-investigation.

  Chertoff is also the co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act, a piece of fascist legislation that destroys American civil liberties.

  Today Chertoff is using his government credentials to push full body scanners into American airports. A rights group, FlyersRights.org, has criticized Chertoff for abusing “the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners.”

  Now let’s have a look at National Public Radio. Once upon a time NPR was an alternative voice. That voice was discarded during the Bush administration when Republican fundraiser Gay Hart Gaines was appointed by Dubya as vice chair for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Cheryl Feldman Halpern, was appointed chair of the Corporation by Dubya, and Elizabeth Sembler was appointed by Dubya to the board of the corporation.

  These women are certainly not liberals. Gaines is affiliated with right-wing and neoconservative organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the National Review Institute. According to Common Cause, Gaines was “an ardent fundraiser for Newt Gingrich.”

  Halpern is a Republican donor and a critic of NPR. Halpern has accused NPR of anti-Israel bias and said that public broadcasting journalists should be penalized for biased programs. Biased programs are those that don’t fit Republican and AIPAC agendas. Halpern accompanied President George

  W. Bush to Jerusalem for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state in May 2008. Halpern is a board member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off organization from AIPAC tasked with focusing primarily on influencing the US executive branch while AIPAC focuses on Congress. At her confirmation hearing, Halpern expressed her opinion that Public Broadcasting System’s Bill Moyers was not objective and regretted that as chair of the corporation she lacked the authority to “remove physically somebody who had engaged in editorialization of the news.”

  Sembler is director of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Day School in Clearwater, Florida. Her husband is CEO of the Sembler Company, a shopping center development firm.

  The Corporation for Public Broadcasting board distributes federal funds to noncommercial radio and TV stations. It became clear to NPR that their funding was in question, and NPR deserted truth for money.

  The Republican takeover was completed by an infusion of corporate money into NPR.

  Today the station has as many advertisements for corporate donors as a commercial station. It still pretends to be financed by listeners, but NPR is now part of the corporate media and sounds like the voice of Israel.

  On November 2, NPR’s news broadcast showed its new colors. Reporting on the 40-year sentence handed to Omar Khadr by a Gestapo military tribunal for “war crimes,” NPR provided commentary from a widow of a US soldier killed in the firefight that captured the wounded 15-year old Khadr and by a retired US military officer. NPR did not provide any commentary by legal experts who have shown the “trial” to be a travesty of law.

  Khadr was captured in wounded condition following a four-hour firefight in the Afghan village of Ayub Kheyl, which came under US attack.

  He was accused of throwing a hand grenade that fatally wounded a US soldier. It is impossible to know who threw a grenade during a firefight. Moreover, the use of lethal force in military encounters does not constitute a war crime.

  Khadr was held for seven years in Guantanamo where he was tortured into confession. At his trial, his confession became a plea bargain.

  What Khadr’s trial was about is establishing that “enemy combatants” who resist US aggression are war criminals. The assumption is that only “terrorists” resist American invasion of their countries.

  None of this information was revealed by the NPR report. Instead America’s “alternative voice” was thoroughly neoconservative. NPR presented its listeners with the self-righteous celebration of the US soldier’s widow, who, The Guardian reported (Nov. 2) “pumped her fist and cheered ‘yes.’ The widow said that now, finally, that justice was done she could get on with her life. NPR followed up with a retired US military officer, who said that Khadr’s sentence was equivalent to freeing a murderer.

  Khadr’s prosecutor, Jeffrey Groharing, declared that Khadr’s sentence “will send a message to Al Qaeda and others whose aims and goals are to kill and cause chaos around the world.” The irony in this assertion escaped the tamed NPR. The deaths that can be attributed to Al Qaeda are tiny in number compared to the deaths inflicted by gratuitous US and Israeli naked aggression against Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Groharing declared the 15-year old Khadr to have been “an accomplished terrorist” who committed the offense of resisting American aggression.

  Now, really, what kind of idiot would interpret NPR’s report as a product of “the liberal media.”

  What message did Khadr’s sentence send? To insouciant Americans only that finally a terrorist got his comeuppance despite the liberal media. To the rest of the world the message is: the US is a morally bankrupt, self- righteous country that believes that might is right. The American claim to world leadership is discredited.

  AMERICA’S DEVOLUTION INTO DICTATORSHIP

  November 12, 2010

  The United States Department of Justice (sic) routinely charges and convicts innocents with bogus and concocted crimes that are not even on the statute book. The distinguished defense attorney and civil libertarian, Harvey A. Silverglate, published a book last year, Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, which conclusively proves that today in “freedom and democracy” America we have punishment without crime.

  This same Justice Department, which routinely frames and railroads the innocent, argued in Federal Court on November 8 that the US government, if approved by the president, could murder anyone it wishes, citizens or noncitizens, at will. All that is required is that the government declare—without evidence, charges, trial, jury conviction or any of the due process required by the US Constitution—that the government suspects the murdered person or persons to be a “threat.”

  The US Justice Department even told US Federal District Court Judge John Bates that the US judiciary, formerly a co-equal branch of government, has absolutely no legal authority whatsoever to stick its nose into President “Change” Obama’s decision to assassinate Americans. The unaccountability of the president’s decision to murder people is, the US Justice Department declared, one of “the very core powers of the president as commander in chief.”

  The argument by the Justice Department that the executive branch has unreviewable authority to kill Americans, whom the executive branch has unilaterally, without presenting evidence, determined to pose a threat, was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Attorneys for these organizations understand that once the principle of extra-judicial execution is established, it will be expanded by those who wield law as a weapon. Therefore, they want to nip it in the bud.

  The outcome of the case will determine whether the neoconservative and Israeli stooge, President George W. Bush, was correct when he said that the US Constitution was nothing but a “scrap of paper.”

  It is my opinion that the American people and the US Constitution haven’t much chance of winning this case. The Republican Federalist Society has succeeded in appointing many federal district, appeals and supreme court judges, who believe that the powers of the executive branch are superior to the powers of the legislature and judiciary. The Founding Fathers of our country declared unequivocally that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches were co-equal, However, the Republicans who comprise the Federalist Society have implanted the society’s demonic ideology in the federal bench and Justice Department. Today the erroneous belief is widespread that the executive branch is supreme and that the other branc
hes of government are less than equal.

  If Americans have a greater enemy than neoconservatives, that enemy is the Federalist Society.

  Disagree with me as you will, but now let’s look at this development from another perspective. I am old enough to remember the Nixon years, and I was a presidential appointee, confirmed by the US senate, in the Reagan administration. For those of you too young to know and those who are too old to remember, President Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment simply because Nixon lied about when he learned about the burglary of the Watergate office of the Democratic Party.

  Nixon lied about when he learned of the burglary, because he knew that the Washington Post would make an issue of the burglary, if he launched an investigation, to defeat his re-election. The military/security complex and the black ops groups in the US government were angry at Nixon for smoothing US- China relations. The Washington Post, long regarded as a CIA asset, hid behind its “liberal” image to bring Nixon down. Woodward and Bernstein wrote thriller-type reports of midnight meetings with “deep throat” in dangerous parking garages to get the scoop on the date of Nixon’s knowledge of the meaningless burglary.

  Let’s assume that I have it all wrong. The fact remains that Nixon was driven from office because of the Watergate burglary. No one was harmed. Nixon did not kill anyone or claim the right to kill, without proof or accountability, or to indefinitely detain American citizens. If the dastardly President Nixon had a Justice Department like the present one and the powers accumulated in the presidency by Bush and Obama, Nixon could have invoked “national security” and/or brought charges against Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post to force them to reveal the identity of the leaker, who could have been detained indefinitely and tortured until he confessed that he lied in order to injure the president of the US.