Drugs and Mental Illness Behind Chattanooga Shooting
FBI: no link found to ISIS
Kurt Nimmo
A representative for the family of Mohammod Abdulazeez says the 24-year old Chattanooga shooter had abused both prescription and non-prescription drugs, including sleeping pills, opioids, painkillers, marijuana and alcohol.
Abdulazeez’s diary reveals he was suicidal and entertained thoughts of “becoming a martyr” after losing a job due to his drug and alcohol abuse.
Moreover, Abdulazeez was thousands of dollars in debt and was considering bankruptcy before he attacked two military targets in Tennessee.
His family attempted to get Abdulazeez help for mental illness and tried without success to keep him away from friends who drank and smoked marijuana.
Prior to the emergence of the dairy the corporate media portrayed Abdulazeez, a naturalized American citizen, as a radicalized Muslim.
The SITE Intelligence Group said Abdulazeez blogged that “life is short and bitter” and Muslims should not miss an opportunity to “submit to Allah.”
The blog posts have yet to be independently verified and the FBI has said it has yet to find a link between Abdulazeez and ISIS or any other extremist group.
The Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group (SITE) was co-founded by Rita Katz and consists of her and two “senior advisers,” one of whom is Bruce Hoffman, the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and former director of the RAND’s Washington DC office.
In 2003 and 2004, SITE received financial support from the US government. Also in the early 2000s SITE was on contract providing consulting services to the FBI.
Over the weekend Infowars.com reported that retired US Army General and the former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe for NATO Wesley Clark advocated rounding up “radicalized” and “disloyal” Americans and putting them in internment camps for the “duration” of the war on terror.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/drugs-and-mental-illness-behind-chattanooga-shooting.html
Monday, July 20, 2015
"The Confederacy and the Confederate Battle Flag are symbols of rebellion against an overreaching, socialistic, highly centralized and authoritarian government; so it’s no wonder the elite power brokers want it erased from memory. While it was waved by racists during the Civil Rights movement, so was the American flag in at least equal numbers. In fact, the American flag flew over a “racist America” far longer than the Confederacy stood as a nation. These facts demonstrate the abject hypocrisy and vapid thought processes of the elites, the race hucksters and their MSM propaganda machine."
Why is the war on the Confederacy still going on today?
by Bob Livingston
America and Americans are saturated with propaganda about everything. You can’t find the truth in the media and political system with a search warrant.
Is the big lie serious? Yes, indeed! Propaganda alters brain chemistry, controls parameters of thought and triggers controlled response mechanisms.
You will never get the truth from the controlled media. The inner elite who rule the world control all major sources of the media, as I told you in “The battle for your mind.” (For the record, conservatives, this includes Fox News.)
The media use very carefully and deliberately prescribed organized propaganda to build a thought system which subverts the population to think and act in perfect harmony with the system. People literally do not think their own thoughts. This allows cover for the ruling class and their nefarious activities. Evidence of this can be seen in the widespread dogpiling on the removal of all vestiges of Southern culture and heritage and the images of the Confederacy and the old South.
Attempts to whitewash Southern culture from existence and distort the true nature of the Confederate cause, fueled by Northern progressive elites (in and out of both major political parties) white apologists and race hucksters and agitators, have been ongoing since Appomattox. In fact, assaults on Southern culture began long before Fort Sumter and, as I will describe, was a major precipitator of the Southern secession.
But the whitewashing has reached a fever pitch of late, touching the absurd heights of calls to remove Confederate emblems from Civil War battlefield museums, the iconic carvings of President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson from Stone Mountain, and even extending to exhuming the remains of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife from their graves in Memphis.
One wonders how future historians will tell the tale of the so-called “Civil War” and “Great Emancipator” when all vestiges of the Confederacy have been shoved down the memory hole and there is no longer a “traitorous and rebellious” enemy for the North to vanquish in order to “preserve the union.”
This is no coincidence. It is part of the long-term war on liberty, independent thought and rural America and the attempted destruction of the predominantly white, productive American middle class.
In the United States, the dismantling of the middle class has become the appointed, full-time task of the largest government alphabet soup agencies. Wall Street has been enrolled in the effort as well, to assure the success of globalism. Their logic is that if those big middle-class producers and consumers can be decimated once and for all, then they can join the ranks of low-wage workers, as in Asia and Central America. When the stock market blows this time, that will certainly be the effect.
Globalism is the ultimate form of collectivism. Globalism as a permanent aspect of American government was enshrined in the 20th century, beginning with the Woodrow Wilson administration and World War I and culminating in an irrevocable, imperialistic, military presence all over the world.
The middle class — particularly the Middle and Southern American middle class (flyover country, so called) — is the globalist’s chief nemesis. For as they are the world’s greatest producers, middle-class Americans by and large are more independent, self-reliant and also demand equitable reward for their labor and product, placing them in competition for resources and goods with the global elite. And they stand in the way of the march toward a socialist/Marxist “utopia” in the minds of the globalists and collectivists.
It is for this reason that there is a growing cadre of Northern progressives advocating for the South — in fact, all “Red States” — to leave because it is “holding America back.”
A solid block of Southern states continues to refuse to expand Medicaid, thus squashing one of the linchpins of the president’s health-care reform. The South will likely be the last and most stubborn battleground in the fight for gay marriage. Gun control? The more the two sides seem to get cozier with each other, the faster gun-control legislation gets watered down — and more and more red states are passing laws making it legal to carry a concealed weapon. As for immigration, the red states seem to be relaxing their anti-immigrant fervor, but nothing approaching new legislation is even on the horizon.
The sad truth is that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can only be achieved at this point if the nation is split in half. Far from being fanciful or fanatical, the proponents of secession have a stronger grasp of political reality than just about anyone else. In fact, there are serious reasons why the North itself should take the lead in a secessionist movement.
This is a growing movement among liberal policymakers at Gamechanger Salon, a secretive closed echo chamber forum of progressive leaders, activists and journalists.
The greatest blows to the middle class were the income tax and so-called “free trade” deals like NAFTA and GATT, because socialist economic warfare is the most reliable way to transfer the wealth of middle-class Americans to the elite without awakening their complaint. Indeed, because of the altruistic propaganda attached to socialism, Americans often believe that their wealth (and, thus, their own destruction) is necessary to “save the world.”
The Confederacy and the Confederate Battle Flag are symbols of rebellion against an overreaching, socialistic, highly centralized and authoritarian government; so it’s no wonder the elite power brokers want it erased from memory. While it was waved by racists during the Civil Rights movement, so was the American flag in at least equal numbers. In fact, the American flag flew over a “racist America” far longer than the Confederacy stood as a nation. These facts demonstrate the abject hypocrisy and vapid thought processes of the elites, the race hucksters and their MSM propaganda machine.
But as it was truly a symbol of standing against tyranny, the Confederate Battle Flag was also waved by protesters demonstrating against Soviet oppression in the 1980s and is seen as a symbol against oppressive government today.
Contrary to what you were taught in school and the propagandists continue to convey ad nauseam, the secession of the Southern states was neither an act of rebellion nor an act of hostility against the union. It was a separation from a voluntary contract that joined states in a common bond. But that bond was developing — in the minds of many — into an increasingly repressive institution.
The victory of the Republican Abraham Lincoln cemented in the minds of Southerners that their culture was doomed, as Michael F. Holt writes in his book, “The Political Crisis of the 1850s”:
Since the 1840s, Southerners had insisted that slavery restriction was a denial of Southern equality in the nation; in the 1850s Democrats echoed that theme when vilifying Republicans’ free-soil principles. Thus, Southern Rights, and not positive desires for expansion, remained central in the territorial issue of the 1850s. Just as with the Republicans, however, the slavery extension issue was often but a pretext for secessionists. The essence of their message was that Republicanism was antirepublican… Because the Republicans organized exclusively as a Northern party, government by the Republicans could not possibly be government of, by, or for the Southern people. By insisting that the Northern majority rule, moreover, the Republicans persistently identified the South as a minority that was inherently unequal and inferior. Southerners, insisted the secessionists, could not and would not tolerate that degradation… Without question the most persistent theme in secessionist rhetoric was not the danger of the abolition or restriction of black slavery, but the infamy and degradation of submitting to the rule of a Republican majority. To acquiesce in Lincoln’s election, to allow his inauguration, was to legitimize and accept the Republican doctrine that Southerners were inferior to Northerners and should not have an equal voice in the government.
Prior to the bombardment of Fort Sumter — an incident instigated by Lincoln, who went back on his word regarding resupplying the fort while negotiations were underway over returning it to South Carolina’s control — there was widespread sentiment in the North in favor of allowing the South to peacefully secede, writes Thomas J. DiLorenzo in “The Real Lincoln.”
This sentiment was so pervasive, in fact, that there were individual secession movements in what at the time were called “middle states” — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. The states, which accounted for more than 40 percent of the country’s gross national product, contained three types of secessionists: those who wanted to join the Southern Confederacy, those who wished to form their own “Central Confederacy,” and those who simply preferred to allow the South to go in peace rather than essentially destroying the Union by holding it together by military force.
The separation by the Confederate states held true to the words in the Declaration of Independence written less than 100 years prior that pronounced it was the right of the people to alter or abolish any government that became destructive of the ends of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
So we see that secession was not a wholly Southern construct, nor was 1860 the first time it was discussed. On Dec. 15, 1814, delegates from the Northeastern states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire convened at the Hartford Convention Center. They met in secret for three weeks to draft a protest against the U.S. involvement in the War of 1812 and to seek concessions for its battered economy. Separation, the word of the day for secession, was discussed as a possible remedy. But the moderates, fearing such a move would spark a civil war, quelled the effort.
Upon learning of the movement, Thomas Jefferson said, “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation … to a continuance in the union …. I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.’”
That seemed to mirror his thoughts expressed in his first inaugural address when said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it.”
As economist and George Mason professor Walter E. Williams writes:
Secession is not protection against establishing a government to prevent the abolishment of slavery. The key issue in the right to secession is not separating oneself from a government that prevents the “self-determination” of “peoples,” but separating oneself from a government that fails in its purpose: the protection of individual rights. (Emphasis his.)
There is a growing secession movement in the country fueled mainly by Middle-American and Southern middle-class people fed up with 1) the failed American system of representative government that no longer represents the people but instead does the bidding of the crony capitalists and banksters; and 2) government promotion of cultural decadence, humanism and universalism and of the destruction of long-held morality and the Christian faith, as championed by the undocumented alien occupying the Rainbow House and his LGBT agitators.
The ramped-up efforts to destroy the last vestiges of the independent spirit and middle-class culture are part of the ongoing struggle of the globalists, collectivists and cultural Marxists to maintain their grip on power until One World Governance is cemented.
But the Obama regime’s war on the middle class and Middle and Southern America does not end there. In fact, it is just getting started with the Obama Housing and Urban Development Department’s new Affirmatively Further Fair Housing Rule, finalized and announced on July 8, which is a direct assault through social re-engineering, on every American neighborhood, and which has been hidden or papered over by the mainstream propaganda media for some two years.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/why-is-the-war-on-the-confederacy-still-going-on-today/
by Bob Livingston
America and Americans are saturated with propaganda about everything. You can’t find the truth in the media and political system with a search warrant.
Is the big lie serious? Yes, indeed! Propaganda alters brain chemistry, controls parameters of thought and triggers controlled response mechanisms.
You will never get the truth from the controlled media. The inner elite who rule the world control all major sources of the media, as I told you in “The battle for your mind.” (For the record, conservatives, this includes Fox News.)
The media use very carefully and deliberately prescribed organized propaganda to build a thought system which subverts the population to think and act in perfect harmony with the system. People literally do not think their own thoughts. This allows cover for the ruling class and their nefarious activities. Evidence of this can be seen in the widespread dogpiling on the removal of all vestiges of Southern culture and heritage and the images of the Confederacy and the old South.
Attempts to whitewash Southern culture from existence and distort the true nature of the Confederate cause, fueled by Northern progressive elites (in and out of both major political parties) white apologists and race hucksters and agitators, have been ongoing since Appomattox. In fact, assaults on Southern culture began long before Fort Sumter and, as I will describe, was a major precipitator of the Southern secession.
But the whitewashing has reached a fever pitch of late, touching the absurd heights of calls to remove Confederate emblems from Civil War battlefield museums, the iconic carvings of President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson from Stone Mountain, and even extending to exhuming the remains of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife from their graves in Memphis.
One wonders how future historians will tell the tale of the so-called “Civil War” and “Great Emancipator” when all vestiges of the Confederacy have been shoved down the memory hole and there is no longer a “traitorous and rebellious” enemy for the North to vanquish in order to “preserve the union.”
This is no coincidence. It is part of the long-term war on liberty, independent thought and rural America and the attempted destruction of the predominantly white, productive American middle class.
In the United States, the dismantling of the middle class has become the appointed, full-time task of the largest government alphabet soup agencies. Wall Street has been enrolled in the effort as well, to assure the success of globalism. Their logic is that if those big middle-class producers and consumers can be decimated once and for all, then they can join the ranks of low-wage workers, as in Asia and Central America. When the stock market blows this time, that will certainly be the effect.
Globalism is the ultimate form of collectivism. Globalism as a permanent aspect of American government was enshrined in the 20th century, beginning with the Woodrow Wilson administration and World War I and culminating in an irrevocable, imperialistic, military presence all over the world.
The middle class — particularly the Middle and Southern American middle class (flyover country, so called) — is the globalist’s chief nemesis. For as they are the world’s greatest producers, middle-class Americans by and large are more independent, self-reliant and also demand equitable reward for their labor and product, placing them in competition for resources and goods with the global elite. And they stand in the way of the march toward a socialist/Marxist “utopia” in the minds of the globalists and collectivists.
It is for this reason that there is a growing cadre of Northern progressives advocating for the South — in fact, all “Red States” — to leave because it is “holding America back.”
A solid block of Southern states continues to refuse to expand Medicaid, thus squashing one of the linchpins of the president’s health-care reform. The South will likely be the last and most stubborn battleground in the fight for gay marriage. Gun control? The more the two sides seem to get cozier with each other, the faster gun-control legislation gets watered down — and more and more red states are passing laws making it legal to carry a concealed weapon. As for immigration, the red states seem to be relaxing their anti-immigrant fervor, but nothing approaching new legislation is even on the horizon.
The sad truth is that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can only be achieved at this point if the nation is split in half. Far from being fanciful or fanatical, the proponents of secession have a stronger grasp of political reality than just about anyone else. In fact, there are serious reasons why the North itself should take the lead in a secessionist movement.
This is a growing movement among liberal policymakers at Gamechanger Salon, a secretive closed echo chamber forum of progressive leaders, activists and journalists.
The greatest blows to the middle class were the income tax and so-called “free trade” deals like NAFTA and GATT, because socialist economic warfare is the most reliable way to transfer the wealth of middle-class Americans to the elite without awakening their complaint. Indeed, because of the altruistic propaganda attached to socialism, Americans often believe that their wealth (and, thus, their own destruction) is necessary to “save the world.”
The Confederacy and the Confederate Battle Flag are symbols of rebellion against an overreaching, socialistic, highly centralized and authoritarian government; so it’s no wonder the elite power brokers want it erased from memory. While it was waved by racists during the Civil Rights movement, so was the American flag in at least equal numbers. In fact, the American flag flew over a “racist America” far longer than the Confederacy stood as a nation. These facts demonstrate the abject hypocrisy and vapid thought processes of the elites, the race hucksters and their MSM propaganda machine.
But as it was truly a symbol of standing against tyranny, the Confederate Battle Flag was also waved by protesters demonstrating against Soviet oppression in the 1980s and is seen as a symbol against oppressive government today.
Contrary to what you were taught in school and the propagandists continue to convey ad nauseam, the secession of the Southern states was neither an act of rebellion nor an act of hostility against the union. It was a separation from a voluntary contract that joined states in a common bond. But that bond was developing — in the minds of many — into an increasingly repressive institution.
The victory of the Republican Abraham Lincoln cemented in the minds of Southerners that their culture was doomed, as Michael F. Holt writes in his book, “The Political Crisis of the 1850s”:
Since the 1840s, Southerners had insisted that slavery restriction was a denial of Southern equality in the nation; in the 1850s Democrats echoed that theme when vilifying Republicans’ free-soil principles. Thus, Southern Rights, and not positive desires for expansion, remained central in the territorial issue of the 1850s. Just as with the Republicans, however, the slavery extension issue was often but a pretext for secessionists. The essence of their message was that Republicanism was antirepublican… Because the Republicans organized exclusively as a Northern party, government by the Republicans could not possibly be government of, by, or for the Southern people. By insisting that the Northern majority rule, moreover, the Republicans persistently identified the South as a minority that was inherently unequal and inferior. Southerners, insisted the secessionists, could not and would not tolerate that degradation… Without question the most persistent theme in secessionist rhetoric was not the danger of the abolition or restriction of black slavery, but the infamy and degradation of submitting to the rule of a Republican majority. To acquiesce in Lincoln’s election, to allow his inauguration, was to legitimize and accept the Republican doctrine that Southerners were inferior to Northerners and should not have an equal voice in the government.
Prior to the bombardment of Fort Sumter — an incident instigated by Lincoln, who went back on his word regarding resupplying the fort while negotiations were underway over returning it to South Carolina’s control — there was widespread sentiment in the North in favor of allowing the South to peacefully secede, writes Thomas J. DiLorenzo in “The Real Lincoln.”
This sentiment was so pervasive, in fact, that there were individual secession movements in what at the time were called “middle states” — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. The states, which accounted for more than 40 percent of the country’s gross national product, contained three types of secessionists: those who wanted to join the Southern Confederacy, those who wished to form their own “Central Confederacy,” and those who simply preferred to allow the South to go in peace rather than essentially destroying the Union by holding it together by military force.
The separation by the Confederate states held true to the words in the Declaration of Independence written less than 100 years prior that pronounced it was the right of the people to alter or abolish any government that became destructive of the ends of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
So we see that secession was not a wholly Southern construct, nor was 1860 the first time it was discussed. On Dec. 15, 1814, delegates from the Northeastern states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire convened at the Hartford Convention Center. They met in secret for three weeks to draft a protest against the U.S. involvement in the War of 1812 and to seek concessions for its battered economy. Separation, the word of the day for secession, was discussed as a possible remedy. But the moderates, fearing such a move would spark a civil war, quelled the effort.
Upon learning of the movement, Thomas Jefferson said, “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation … to a continuance in the union …. I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.’”
That seemed to mirror his thoughts expressed in his first inaugural address when said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it.”
As economist and George Mason professor Walter E. Williams writes:
Secession is not protection against establishing a government to prevent the abolishment of slavery. The key issue in the right to secession is not separating oneself from a government that prevents the “self-determination” of “peoples,” but separating oneself from a government that fails in its purpose: the protection of individual rights. (Emphasis his.)
There is a growing secession movement in the country fueled mainly by Middle-American and Southern middle-class people fed up with 1) the failed American system of representative government that no longer represents the people but instead does the bidding of the crony capitalists and banksters; and 2) government promotion of cultural decadence, humanism and universalism and of the destruction of long-held morality and the Christian faith, as championed by the undocumented alien occupying the Rainbow House and his LGBT agitators.
The ramped-up efforts to destroy the last vestiges of the independent spirit and middle-class culture are part of the ongoing struggle of the globalists, collectivists and cultural Marxists to maintain their grip on power until One World Governance is cemented.
But the Obama regime’s war on the middle class and Middle and Southern America does not end there. In fact, it is just getting started with the Obama Housing and Urban Development Department’s new Affirmatively Further Fair Housing Rule, finalized and announced on July 8, which is a direct assault through social re-engineering, on every American neighborhood, and which has been hidden or papered over by the mainstream propaganda media for some two years.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/why-is-the-war-on-the-confederacy-still-going-on-today/
“The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015” fraud...
S-1177: Common Core Will Be Imposed on Private Schools That Get Fed Funds
By Gary North
Senate bill 1177 is a bipartisan measure to federalize education, all in the name of preserving local control.
It will be imposed on charter schools and all private schools that accept a nickel of aid.
As I said 30 years ago, “If you take the government’s nickel, you also take its noose.”
S-1177 is about to pass.
Here is a warning:
Protecting our children from increasing oppressions and loss of freedoms will require not allowing federal S.1177 to pass.
The name of S.1177, which now sits in the Senate on Capitol Hill, is also: “The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015,” “No Child Left Behind – rewritten,” “Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” and is virtually the same as House Bill HR5, “The Student Success Act” which passed the House yesterday.
In my own mind I have given all its versions this name: Nasty Orwellian Progressive Education (NOPE) –a convenient, more honest, and recyclable title. We will surely have to recycle S.1177 and its clones because it will not die. Although it died in HR5 form in Congress earlier this year, thanks to We the People being alert and active, now it has risen, passed the House as HR5– and will rise again until that relentless, growing clique (Duncan/Gates/Tucker/Pearson NGA/NCSL/CCSSO/REL/ et al) gets its way– until there is no longer any such thing as student privacy or local autonomy in any school. If you think I’m exaggerating, please study the words and actions of each of those ed reform moguls.
I decided to skim the near-800 page bill using American Principles Project’s 21 items as my guide. The hide and seek that readers must wield with the real purposes and powers of this bill is ridiculous. Clearly, the authors of S.1177 aim to obscure its true purposes, which I now see only serve the Obama-UN agenda for education.
The media’s calling S.1177 “a bipartisan compromise” but that’s far from true. It’s all part of the Common Core bipartisan profiteering scheme that aligns federal tests and standards, but elbows out parents and voters. Many in Congress are fooled, but don’t you be fooled by the word “bipartisan” –nor by the bill’s misleading talking points.
Read more here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/07/gary-north/take-a-federal-nickle-get-the-federal-noose/
By Gary North
Senate bill 1177 is a bipartisan measure to federalize education, all in the name of preserving local control.
It will be imposed on charter schools and all private schools that accept a nickel of aid.
As I said 30 years ago, “If you take the government’s nickel, you also take its noose.”
S-1177 is about to pass.
Here is a warning:
Protecting our children from increasing oppressions and loss of freedoms will require not allowing federal S.1177 to pass.
The name of S.1177, which now sits in the Senate on Capitol Hill, is also: “The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015,” “No Child Left Behind – rewritten,” “Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” and is virtually the same as House Bill HR5, “The Student Success Act” which passed the House yesterday.
In my own mind I have given all its versions this name: Nasty Orwellian Progressive Education (NOPE) –a convenient, more honest, and recyclable title. We will surely have to recycle S.1177 and its clones because it will not die. Although it died in HR5 form in Congress earlier this year, thanks to We the People being alert and active, now it has risen, passed the House as HR5– and will rise again until that relentless, growing clique (Duncan/Gates/Tucker/Pearson NGA/NCSL/CCSSO/REL/ et al) gets its way– until there is no longer any such thing as student privacy or local autonomy in any school. If you think I’m exaggerating, please study the words and actions of each of those ed reform moguls.
I decided to skim the near-800 page bill using American Principles Project’s 21 items as my guide. The hide and seek that readers must wield with the real purposes and powers of this bill is ridiculous. Clearly, the authors of S.1177 aim to obscure its true purposes, which I now see only serve the Obama-UN agenda for education.
The media’s calling S.1177 “a bipartisan compromise” but that’s far from true. It’s all part of the Common Core bipartisan profiteering scheme that aligns federal tests and standards, but elbows out parents and voters. Many in Congress are fooled, but don’t you be fooled by the word “bipartisan” –nor by the bill’s misleading talking points.
Read more here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/07/gary-north/take-a-federal-nickle-get-the-federal-noose/
The truth about John McCain???
John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President
By Ron Unz
Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.
The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs. But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.
Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.
The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.
My earliest recollections of John McCain are vague. I think he first came to my attention during the mid-1980s, perhaps after 1982 when he won an open Congressional seat in Arizona or more likely once he was elected in 1986 to the U.S. Senate seat of retiring conservative icon Barry Goldwater. All media accounts about him seemed strongly favorable, describing his steadfastness as a POW during more than five grim years of torture by his Vietnamese jailers, with the extent of his wartime physical suffering indicated by the famous photo showing him still on crutches as he was greeted by President Nixon many months after his return from enemy captivity. I never had the slightest doubts about this story or his war-hero status.
McCain’s public image took a beating at the end of the 1980s when he became one of the senators caught up in the Keating Five financial scandal, but he managed to survive that controversy unlike most of the others. Soon thereafter he became prominent as a leading national advocate of campaign finance reform, a strong pro-immigrant voice, and also a champion of normalizing our relations with Vietnam, positions that appealed to me as much as they did to the national media. By 2000 my opinion had become sufficiently favorable that I donated to his underdog challenge to Gov. George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of that year, and was thrilled when he did surprisingly well in some of the early contests and suddenly had a serious shot at the nomination. However, he then suffered an unexpected defeat in South Carolina, as the large block of local military voters swung decisively against him. According to widespread media reports, the main cause was an utterly scurrilous whispering campaign by Karl Rove and his henchmen, which even included appalling accusations that the great war-hero candidate had been a “traitor” in Vietnam. My only conclusion was that the filthy lies sometimes found in American politics were even worse than I’d ever imagined.
Although in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I turned sharply against McCain due to his support for an extremely bellicose foreign policy, I never had any reason to question his background or his integrity, and my strong opposition to his 2008 presidential run was entirely on policy grounds: I feared his notoriously hot temper might easily get us into additional disastrous wars.
Everything suddenly changed in June 2008 when I read a long article by an unfamiliar writer on the leftist Counterpunch website. Shocking claims were made that McCain may never have been tortured and that he instead spent his wartime captivity collaborating with his captors and broadcasting Communist propaganda, a possibility that seemed almost incomprehensible to me given all the thousands of contrary articles that I had absorbed over the decades from the mainstream media. How could this one article on a small website be the truth about McCain’s war record and everything else be total falsehood? The evidence was hardly overwhelming, with the piece being thinly sourced and written in a meandering fashion by an obscure author, but the claims were so astonishing that I made some effort to investigate the matter, though without any real success.
However, those new doubts about McCain were still in my mind a few months later when I stumbled upon Sidney Schanberg’s massively documented exposeabout McCain’s role in the POW/MIA cover up, a vastly greater scandal. This time I was presented with a mountain of hard evidence gathered by one of America’s greatest wartime journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times. In the years since then, other leading journalists have praised Schanberg’s remarkable research, now giving his conclusions the combined backing of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes, while two former Republican Congressmen who had served on the Intelligence Committee have also strongly corroborated his account.
In 1993 the front page of the New York Times broke the story that a Politburo transcript found in the Kremlin archives fully confirmed the existence of the additional POWs, and when interviewed on the PBS Newshour former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the document was very likely correct and that hundreds of America’s Vietnam POWs had indeed been left behind. In my opinion, the reality of Schanberg’s POW story is now about as solidly established as anything can be that has not yet received an official blessing from the American mainstream media. And the total dishonesty of that media regarding both the POW story and McCain’s leading role in the later cover up soon made me very suspicious of all those other claims regarding John McCain’s supposedly heroic war record. Our American Pravda is simply not to be trusted on any “touchy” topics.
I have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War myself nor do I possess expertise in that area of history. But after encountering Schanberg’s expose in 2008, I soon got in touch with someone having exactly those strengths, a Vietnam veteran who later became a professor at one of our military service academies. At first, he was quite cagey regarding the questions I raised, but once he had read through Schanberg’s lengthy article, he felt he could respond more freely and he largely confirmed the claims, partly based on certain information he personally possessed. He said he found it astonishing that in these days of the Internet the POW scandal had not attracted vastly more attention, and couldn’t understand why the media was so uniformly unwilling to touch the topic.
He also had some very interesting things to say about John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential campaign. Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar charges, and Schanberg had speculated that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious wartime broadcasts.
In late September 2008 another fascinating story appeared in my morning New York Times. An intrepid reporter decided to visit Vietnam and see what McCain’s former jailers thought of the possibility that their onetime captive might soon reach the White House, that the man they had spent years brutally torturing could become the next president of the United States. To the journalist’s apparent amazement, the former jailers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects of a McCain victory, saying that they hoped he would win since they had become such good friends during the war and had worked so closely together; if they lived in America, they would certainly all vote for him. When asked about McCain’s claims of “cruel and sadistic” torture, the head of the guard unit dismissed those stories as being just the sort of total nonsense that politicians, whether in America or in Vietnam, must often spout in order to win popularity. A BBC correspondent reported the same statements.
Let us consider the implications of this story. Throughout his entire life John McCain has been notable for having a very violent temper and also for holding deep grudges. How plausible does it seem that the men who allegedly spent years torturing him would be so eager to see him reach a position of supreme world power?
But what about the famous photo, showing McCain still on crutches even months after his release from captivity? In early September 2008, someone discovered archival footage from a Swedish news crew which had filmed the return of the POWs, and uploaded it to YouTube. We see a healthy-looking John McCain walking off the plane from Vietnam, having a noticeable limp but certainly without any need of crutches. After returning home he had eventually entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for corrective surgery on some of his wartime injuries, and that recent American surgery was what explained his crutches in the photo with Nixon.
It is certainly acknowledged that considerable numbers of American POWs were indeed tortured in Vietnam, but it is far from clear that McCain was ever one of them. As the original Counterpunch article pointed out, throughout almost the entire war McCain was held at a special section for the best-behaving prisoners, which was where he allegedly produced his Communist propaganda broadcasts and perhaps became such good friends with his guards as they later claimed. Top-ranking former POWs held at the same prison, such as Colonels Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have gone on the record saying they are very skeptical regarding McCain’s claims of torture.
I have taken the trouble to read through John McCain’s earliest claims of his harsh imprisonment, a highly detailed 12,000 word first person account published under his name in U.S. News & World Report in May 1973, just a few weeks after his release from imprisonment. The editorial introduction notes the “almost total recall” seemingly demonstrated by the young pilot just out of captivity, and portions of the story strike me as doubtful, perhaps drawn from the long history of popular imprisonment fiction stretching back to Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. Would a young navy pilot so easily develop and remember a “tap code” to extensively communicate with others across thick prison walls? And McCain describes himself as having a “philosophical bent,” spending his years of solitary confinement reviewing in his head all the many history books he had read, trying to make sense of human history, a degree of intellectualizing never apparent in his life either before or after.
One factual detail, routinely emphasized by his supporters, is his repeated claim that except for signing a single written statement very early in his captivity and also answering some questions by a visiting French newsman, he had staunchly refused any hint of collaboration with his captors, despite torture, solitary confinement, endless threats and beatings, and offers of rewards. Perhaps. But that original Counterpuncharticle provided the link to the purported text of one of McCain’s pro-Hanoi propaganda broadcasts as summarized in a 1969 UPI wire service story, and I have confirmed its authenticity by locating the resulting article that ran in Stars & Stripes at the same time. So if crucial portions of McCain’s account of his imprisonment are seemingly revealed to be self-serving fiction, how much of the rest can we believe? If his pro-Communist propaganda broadcasts were so notable that they even reached the news pages of one of America’s leading military publications, it seems quite plausible that they were as numerous, substantial, and frequent as his critics allege
When I later discussed these troubling matters with an eminent political scientist who has something of a military background, he emphasized that McCain’s history can only be understood in the context of his father, a top-ranking admiral who then served as commander of all American forces in the Pacific Theater, including our troops in Vietnam. Indeed, the alleged headline of the UPI wire story had been “PW [Prisoner of War] Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral,” highlighting that connection. Obviously, for reasons both of family loyalty and personal standing it would have been imperative for John McCain’s father and namesake to hush up the terrible scandal of having had his son serve as a leading collaborator and Communist propagandist during the war and his exalted rank gave him the power to do so. Furthermore, just a few years earlier the elder McCain had himself performed an extremely valuable service for America’s political elites, organizing the official board of inquiry that whitewashed the potentially devastating “Liberty Incident,” with its hundreds of dead and wounded American servicemen, so he certainly had some powerful political chits he could call in.
Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.
Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men had their breaking point. Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important patriotic narrative. Similarly, when McCain ran for Congress and the Senate a decade or so later, stories of his torture became a central theme of his campaigns and once again constituted a powerful defense against any possible rumors of his alleged “disloyalty.”
And so the legend grew over the decades until it completely swallowed the man, and he became America’s greatest patriot and war hero, with almost no one even being aware of the Communist propaganda broadcasts that had motivated the story in the first place. I have sometimes noticed this same historical pattern in which fictional accounts originally invented to excuse or mitigate some enormous crime may eventually expand over time until they totally dominate the narrative while the original crime itself is nearly forgotten. The central theme of McCain’s presidential campaign was his unmatched patriotism and when he went down to defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, the widespread verdict was that even the greatest of war-heroes may still lose an election.
I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not. However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.
John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in 1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.
His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year though certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.
As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once friendly New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New York, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a 2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one in the mainstream media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning Kerrey’s activities, just as the media has also totally ignored all of Schanberg’s remarkable revelations. I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have almost totally vanished from public consciousness.
We must always draw an important distinction between the actions of individual journalists and the behavior of the American media taken as a whole. I believe that the overwhelming majority of reporters and editors are honest and sincere, and although their coverage may sometimes be slanted or mistaken, they do seek to inform rather than to mislead. Consider how many of the explosive facts discussed above or in Schanberg’s massive expose were drawn directly from the New York Times and other leading media outlets. But after those crucial stories run, the facts they have established often seem to vanish from subsequent coverage, causing them to be forgotten by most casual readers. Thus, the detailed account of Kerrey’s apparent massacre of civilians received the greatest possible initial coverage—a huge cover story in The New York Times Magazine and a top-rated CBS News television segment—but within a year or so the history had seemingly been flushed down the memory hole by almost all political reporters. The facts are still available for interested readers to uncover, but they must do the work themselves rather than simply relying on the summary narratives produced by mainstream publications.
The realization that many of our political leaders may be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.
Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI. Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile, he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures. These days it is widely believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such deep personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate significant FBI resources to combat it.
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
Such notions may seem utterly absurd, but let us step back and consider recent American history. Just a few years ago an individual came very close to reaching the White House almost entirely on the strength of his war record, a war record that considerable evidence suggests was actually the sort that would normally get a military man hanged for treason at the close of hostilities. I have studied many historical eras and many countries and no parallel examples come to mind.
Perhaps the cause of this bizarre situation merely lies in the remarkable incompetence and cowardice of our major media organs, their herd mentality and their insouciant unwillingness to notice evidence that is staring them in the face. But we should also at least consider the possibility of a darker explanation. If Tokyo Rose had nearly been elected president in the 1980s, we would assume that the American political system had taken a very peculiar turn.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/07/no_author/sen-tokyo-rose-r-az/
By Ron Unz
Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.
The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs. But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.
Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.
The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.
My earliest recollections of John McCain are vague. I think he first came to my attention during the mid-1980s, perhaps after 1982 when he won an open Congressional seat in Arizona or more likely once he was elected in 1986 to the U.S. Senate seat of retiring conservative icon Barry Goldwater. All media accounts about him seemed strongly favorable, describing his steadfastness as a POW during more than five grim years of torture by his Vietnamese jailers, with the extent of his wartime physical suffering indicated by the famous photo showing him still on crutches as he was greeted by President Nixon many months after his return from enemy captivity. I never had the slightest doubts about this story or his war-hero status.
McCain’s public image took a beating at the end of the 1980s when he became one of the senators caught up in the Keating Five financial scandal, but he managed to survive that controversy unlike most of the others. Soon thereafter he became prominent as a leading national advocate of campaign finance reform, a strong pro-immigrant voice, and also a champion of normalizing our relations with Vietnam, positions that appealed to me as much as they did to the national media. By 2000 my opinion had become sufficiently favorable that I donated to his underdog challenge to Gov. George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of that year, and was thrilled when he did surprisingly well in some of the early contests and suddenly had a serious shot at the nomination. However, he then suffered an unexpected defeat in South Carolina, as the large block of local military voters swung decisively against him. According to widespread media reports, the main cause was an utterly scurrilous whispering campaign by Karl Rove and his henchmen, which even included appalling accusations that the great war-hero candidate had been a “traitor” in Vietnam. My only conclusion was that the filthy lies sometimes found in American politics were even worse than I’d ever imagined.
Although in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I turned sharply against McCain due to his support for an extremely bellicose foreign policy, I never had any reason to question his background or his integrity, and my strong opposition to his 2008 presidential run was entirely on policy grounds: I feared his notoriously hot temper might easily get us into additional disastrous wars.
Everything suddenly changed in June 2008 when I read a long article by an unfamiliar writer on the leftist Counterpunch website. Shocking claims were made that McCain may never have been tortured and that he instead spent his wartime captivity collaborating with his captors and broadcasting Communist propaganda, a possibility that seemed almost incomprehensible to me given all the thousands of contrary articles that I had absorbed over the decades from the mainstream media. How could this one article on a small website be the truth about McCain’s war record and everything else be total falsehood? The evidence was hardly overwhelming, with the piece being thinly sourced and written in a meandering fashion by an obscure author, but the claims were so astonishing that I made some effort to investigate the matter, though without any real success.
However, those new doubts about McCain were still in my mind a few months later when I stumbled upon Sidney Schanberg’s massively documented exposeabout McCain’s role in the POW/MIA cover up, a vastly greater scandal. This time I was presented with a mountain of hard evidence gathered by one of America’s greatest wartime journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times. In the years since then, other leading journalists have praised Schanberg’s remarkable research, now giving his conclusions the combined backing of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes, while two former Republican Congressmen who had served on the Intelligence Committee have also strongly corroborated his account.
In 1993 the front page of the New York Times broke the story that a Politburo transcript found in the Kremlin archives fully confirmed the existence of the additional POWs, and when interviewed on the PBS Newshour former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the document was very likely correct and that hundreds of America’s Vietnam POWs had indeed been left behind. In my opinion, the reality of Schanberg’s POW story is now about as solidly established as anything can be that has not yet received an official blessing from the American mainstream media. And the total dishonesty of that media regarding both the POW story and McCain’s leading role in the later cover up soon made me very suspicious of all those other claims regarding John McCain’s supposedly heroic war record. Our American Pravda is simply not to be trusted on any “touchy” topics.
I have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War myself nor do I possess expertise in that area of history. But after encountering Schanberg’s expose in 2008, I soon got in touch with someone having exactly those strengths, a Vietnam veteran who later became a professor at one of our military service academies. At first, he was quite cagey regarding the questions I raised, but once he had read through Schanberg’s lengthy article, he felt he could respond more freely and he largely confirmed the claims, partly based on certain information he personally possessed. He said he found it astonishing that in these days of the Internet the POW scandal had not attracted vastly more attention, and couldn’t understand why the media was so uniformly unwilling to touch the topic.
He also had some very interesting things to say about John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential campaign. Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar charges, and Schanberg had speculated that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious wartime broadcasts.
In late September 2008 another fascinating story appeared in my morning New York Times. An intrepid reporter decided to visit Vietnam and see what McCain’s former jailers thought of the possibility that their onetime captive might soon reach the White House, that the man they had spent years brutally torturing could become the next president of the United States. To the journalist’s apparent amazement, the former jailers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects of a McCain victory, saying that they hoped he would win since they had become such good friends during the war and had worked so closely together; if they lived in America, they would certainly all vote for him. When asked about McCain’s claims of “cruel and sadistic” torture, the head of the guard unit dismissed those stories as being just the sort of total nonsense that politicians, whether in America or in Vietnam, must often spout in order to win popularity. A BBC correspondent reported the same statements.
Let us consider the implications of this story. Throughout his entire life John McCain has been notable for having a very violent temper and also for holding deep grudges. How plausible does it seem that the men who allegedly spent years torturing him would be so eager to see him reach a position of supreme world power?
But what about the famous photo, showing McCain still on crutches even months after his release from captivity? In early September 2008, someone discovered archival footage from a Swedish news crew which had filmed the return of the POWs, and uploaded it to YouTube. We see a healthy-looking John McCain walking off the plane from Vietnam, having a noticeable limp but certainly without any need of crutches. After returning home he had eventually entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for corrective surgery on some of his wartime injuries, and that recent American surgery was what explained his crutches in the photo with Nixon.
It is certainly acknowledged that considerable numbers of American POWs were indeed tortured in Vietnam, but it is far from clear that McCain was ever one of them. As the original Counterpunch article pointed out, throughout almost the entire war McCain was held at a special section for the best-behaving prisoners, which was where he allegedly produced his Communist propaganda broadcasts and perhaps became such good friends with his guards as they later claimed. Top-ranking former POWs held at the same prison, such as Colonels Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have gone on the record saying they are very skeptical regarding McCain’s claims of torture.
I have taken the trouble to read through John McCain’s earliest claims of his harsh imprisonment, a highly detailed 12,000 word first person account published under his name in U.S. News & World Report in May 1973, just a few weeks after his release from imprisonment. The editorial introduction notes the “almost total recall” seemingly demonstrated by the young pilot just out of captivity, and portions of the story strike me as doubtful, perhaps drawn from the long history of popular imprisonment fiction stretching back to Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. Would a young navy pilot so easily develop and remember a “tap code” to extensively communicate with others across thick prison walls? And McCain describes himself as having a “philosophical bent,” spending his years of solitary confinement reviewing in his head all the many history books he had read, trying to make sense of human history, a degree of intellectualizing never apparent in his life either before or after.
One factual detail, routinely emphasized by his supporters, is his repeated claim that except for signing a single written statement very early in his captivity and also answering some questions by a visiting French newsman, he had staunchly refused any hint of collaboration with his captors, despite torture, solitary confinement, endless threats and beatings, and offers of rewards. Perhaps. But that original Counterpuncharticle provided the link to the purported text of one of McCain’s pro-Hanoi propaganda broadcasts as summarized in a 1969 UPI wire service story, and I have confirmed its authenticity by locating the resulting article that ran in Stars & Stripes at the same time. So if crucial portions of McCain’s account of his imprisonment are seemingly revealed to be self-serving fiction, how much of the rest can we believe? If his pro-Communist propaganda broadcasts were so notable that they even reached the news pages of one of America’s leading military publications, it seems quite plausible that they were as numerous, substantial, and frequent as his critics allege
When I later discussed these troubling matters with an eminent political scientist who has something of a military background, he emphasized that McCain’s history can only be understood in the context of his father, a top-ranking admiral who then served as commander of all American forces in the Pacific Theater, including our troops in Vietnam. Indeed, the alleged headline of the UPI wire story had been “PW [Prisoner of War] Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral,” highlighting that connection. Obviously, for reasons both of family loyalty and personal standing it would have been imperative for John McCain’s father and namesake to hush up the terrible scandal of having had his son serve as a leading collaborator and Communist propagandist during the war and his exalted rank gave him the power to do so. Furthermore, just a few years earlier the elder McCain had himself performed an extremely valuable service for America’s political elites, organizing the official board of inquiry that whitewashed the potentially devastating “Liberty Incident,” with its hundreds of dead and wounded American servicemen, so he certainly had some powerful political chits he could call in.
Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.
Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men had their breaking point. Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important patriotic narrative. Similarly, when McCain ran for Congress and the Senate a decade or so later, stories of his torture became a central theme of his campaigns and once again constituted a powerful defense against any possible rumors of his alleged “disloyalty.”
And so the legend grew over the decades until it completely swallowed the man, and he became America’s greatest patriot and war hero, with almost no one even being aware of the Communist propaganda broadcasts that had motivated the story in the first place. I have sometimes noticed this same historical pattern in which fictional accounts originally invented to excuse or mitigate some enormous crime may eventually expand over time until they totally dominate the narrative while the original crime itself is nearly forgotten. The central theme of McCain’s presidential campaign was his unmatched patriotism and when he went down to defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, the widespread verdict was that even the greatest of war-heroes may still lose an election.
I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not. However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.
John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in 1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.
His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year though certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.
As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once friendly New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New York, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a 2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one in the mainstream media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning Kerrey’s activities, just as the media has also totally ignored all of Schanberg’s remarkable revelations. I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have almost totally vanished from public consciousness.
We must always draw an important distinction between the actions of individual journalists and the behavior of the American media taken as a whole. I believe that the overwhelming majority of reporters and editors are honest and sincere, and although their coverage may sometimes be slanted or mistaken, they do seek to inform rather than to mislead. Consider how many of the explosive facts discussed above or in Schanberg’s massive expose were drawn directly from the New York Times and other leading media outlets. But after those crucial stories run, the facts they have established often seem to vanish from subsequent coverage, causing them to be forgotten by most casual readers. Thus, the detailed account of Kerrey’s apparent massacre of civilians received the greatest possible initial coverage—a huge cover story in The New York Times Magazine and a top-rated CBS News television segment—but within a year or so the history had seemingly been flushed down the memory hole by almost all political reporters. The facts are still available for interested readers to uncover, but they must do the work themselves rather than simply relying on the summary narratives produced by mainstream publications.
The realization that many of our political leaders may be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.
Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI. Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile, he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures. These days it is widely believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such deep personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate significant FBI resources to combat it.
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
Such notions may seem utterly absurd, but let us step back and consider recent American history. Just a few years ago an individual came very close to reaching the White House almost entirely on the strength of his war record, a war record that considerable evidence suggests was actually the sort that would normally get a military man hanged for treason at the close of hostilities. I have studied many historical eras and many countries and no parallel examples come to mind.
Perhaps the cause of this bizarre situation merely lies in the remarkable incompetence and cowardice of our major media organs, their herd mentality and their insouciant unwillingness to notice evidence that is staring them in the face. But we should also at least consider the possibility of a darker explanation. If Tokyo Rose had nearly been elected president in the 1980s, we would assume that the American political system had taken a very peculiar turn.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/07/no_author/sen-tokyo-rose-r-az/
Sunday, July 19, 2015
No more opting out???
Education Bill: Parents Cannot Opt Kids Out of Federally Mandated Tests
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
The U.S. Senate voted July 14 to deny parents the right to opt-out of standardized tests administered as part of the federal government’s education mandates.
By a vote of 32-64, senators defeated Senator Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) amendment to the Every Child Achieves Act that would have added language to the bill specifically protecting parents’ right to opt their children out of standardized tests used by the federal government for data mining and fund allocation.
“Parents, not politicians or bureaucrats, will have the final say over whether individual children take tests,” Lee said, as reported in the Washington Post.
Would have had, but have now lost thanks to the Republican majority in the upper chamber.
Specifically, the Lee amendment would required schools that receive federal Title I money to notify parents in advance of the planned administration of any standardized test, including the subjects covered by the tests. Once they received the information, parents could then keep their kids from taking the federally-mandated “assessments.”
Undeterred, Senator Lee took another shot at returning power to parents over education of their children.
The measure was included in the final version of the bill passed by the Senate and it prohibits schools (or the federal Department of Education) from restricting parents’ right to decide how their kids get to school. Here’s the exact language:
Subject to subsection (b), nothing in this Act shall authorize the Secretary to, or shall be construed to (1) prohibit a child from traveling to and from school on foot or by car, bus, or bike when the parents of the child have given permission; or (2) expose parents to civil or criminal charges for allowing their child to responsibly and safely travel to and from school by a means the parents believe is age appropriate.
You read that right. The federal government actually debated a provision to a $23 billion nationalized education bill about how whether parents should be allowed to decide how their kids get to school.
Believe it or not, such a measure was necessary as government has grabbed kids who were walking home and punished their parents for neglect. Here’s a story of one such encounter as reported in April by The New American's Warren Mass:
Ten-year-old Rafi Meitiv and his six-year-old sister, Dvora, were picked up by police while walking home from the park in their Silver Spring, Maryland, neighborhood on Sunday afternoon, April 12. The children were about a third of a mile from home when the police intercepted them.
While the children’s parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, waited anxiously for them to return home, police — who were acting on a tip from a “concerned citizen” — held the children in their patrol car for three hours before dropping them off at a local Child Protective Services Crisis Center. The children were kept at the center for another two and a half hours, without being fed anything, though it was well past the normal dinner hour when they arrived.
Fox News cited the Meitivs' account of how this bizarre scenario played out. They said that CPS didn’t call them to let them know they had their children until about 8:00 p.m. — three hours after the police picked them up. (Remember, they were just a few minutes’ walk from their home at the time.) The Meitivs drove to CPS, thinking it would be a simple matter of picking them up and taking them right home. But in today’s world of the all-knowing nanny state, nothing is that simple.
The decision to let parents decide to let their kids walk home or ride bikes actually has a name: Free Range Kids movement.
That’s right. We live in an era of such obscene overreaching on the part of the government — federal, state, and local — into every possible facet of family life, where the act of letting kids walk to school actually has a name!
Obviously, there is something rotten in the state of education in the United States and that something is statism.
Statism is the belief that finding solutions to problems is part of the exclusive jurisdiction of government. And, if there aren’t enough problems to match the millions of solutions debated by the despots, then problems can be created, such as the horror of children walking to school.
Here’s how Frederic Bastiat so elegantly and accurately described this process in his seminal pamphlet The Law, published in 1850:
When a politician views society from the seclusion of his office, he is struck by the spectacle of the inequality that he sees. He deplores the deprivations which are the lot of so many of our brothers, deprivations which appear to be even sadder when contrasted with luxury and wealth.
Perhaps the politician should ask himself whether this state of affairs has not been caused by old conquests and lootings, and by more recent legal plunder. Perhaps he should consider this proposition: Since all persons seek well-being and perfection, would not a condition of justice be sufficient to cause the greatest efforts toward progress, and the greatest possible equality that is compatible with individual responsibility?
Would not this be in accord with the concept of individual responsibility which God has willed in order that mankind may have the choice between vice and virtue, and the resulting punishment and reward?
But the politician never gives this a thought. His mind turns to organizations, combinations, and arrangements — legal or apparently legal. He attempts to remedy the evil by increasing and perpetuating the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
Plunder is the perfect word for it. In the post-Common Core United States, when it comes to education, the government giveth and the government taketh away.
It seems odd, therefore, that conservatives and constitutionalists would praise these gifts from the government.
For proponents of individual liberty, the goal would be for parents to keep the fruits of their labor and then be free to spend that money in any way they see fit, including on the education of their children. That goal is far from being reached, however. For now, government keeps creating programs that take the property of parents and shift it to others.
Such a redistribution of weath, even when it is done for an aruguably good cause, is a perversion of the law, which should be to protect, not violate, basic rights. As Bastiat explained in the law: “Since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.”
Ultimately, even Senator Lee could not vote for the final verstion of the Every Child Achieves Act.
The focus now must be on the rejection by states and school districts of any and every act of government on any level to dictate to parents the boundaries of the natural right of sovereignty they possess over their children.
Whether it’s how they get to school or what they learn when they get there, parents have the God-given right to rule over their children and now they must fight fearlessly to retain those rights.
The Every Child Achieves Act as passed by the Senate (81-17) will now be sent to the House of Representatives for consideration there.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/21281-education-bill-parents-cannot-opt-kids-out-of-federally-mandated-tests
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
The U.S. Senate voted July 14 to deny parents the right to opt-out of standardized tests administered as part of the federal government’s education mandates.
By a vote of 32-64, senators defeated Senator Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) amendment to the Every Child Achieves Act that would have added language to the bill specifically protecting parents’ right to opt their children out of standardized tests used by the federal government for data mining and fund allocation.
“Parents, not politicians or bureaucrats, will have the final say over whether individual children take tests,” Lee said, as reported in the Washington Post.
Would have had, but have now lost thanks to the Republican majority in the upper chamber.
Specifically, the Lee amendment would required schools that receive federal Title I money to notify parents in advance of the planned administration of any standardized test, including the subjects covered by the tests. Once they received the information, parents could then keep their kids from taking the federally-mandated “assessments.”
Undeterred, Senator Lee took another shot at returning power to parents over education of their children.
The measure was included in the final version of the bill passed by the Senate and it prohibits schools (or the federal Department of Education) from restricting parents’ right to decide how their kids get to school. Here’s the exact language:
Subject to subsection (b), nothing in this Act shall authorize the Secretary to, or shall be construed to (1) prohibit a child from traveling to and from school on foot or by car, bus, or bike when the parents of the child have given permission; or (2) expose parents to civil or criminal charges for allowing their child to responsibly and safely travel to and from school by a means the parents believe is age appropriate.
You read that right. The federal government actually debated a provision to a $23 billion nationalized education bill about how whether parents should be allowed to decide how their kids get to school.
Believe it or not, such a measure was necessary as government has grabbed kids who were walking home and punished their parents for neglect. Here’s a story of one such encounter as reported in April by The New American's Warren Mass:
Ten-year-old Rafi Meitiv and his six-year-old sister, Dvora, were picked up by police while walking home from the park in their Silver Spring, Maryland, neighborhood on Sunday afternoon, April 12. The children were about a third of a mile from home when the police intercepted them.
While the children’s parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, waited anxiously for them to return home, police — who were acting on a tip from a “concerned citizen” — held the children in their patrol car for three hours before dropping them off at a local Child Protective Services Crisis Center. The children were kept at the center for another two and a half hours, without being fed anything, though it was well past the normal dinner hour when they arrived.
Fox News cited the Meitivs' account of how this bizarre scenario played out. They said that CPS didn’t call them to let them know they had their children until about 8:00 p.m. — three hours after the police picked them up. (Remember, they were just a few minutes’ walk from their home at the time.) The Meitivs drove to CPS, thinking it would be a simple matter of picking them up and taking them right home. But in today’s world of the all-knowing nanny state, nothing is that simple.
The decision to let parents decide to let their kids walk home or ride bikes actually has a name: Free Range Kids movement.
That’s right. We live in an era of such obscene overreaching on the part of the government — federal, state, and local — into every possible facet of family life, where the act of letting kids walk to school actually has a name!
Obviously, there is something rotten in the state of education in the United States and that something is statism.
Statism is the belief that finding solutions to problems is part of the exclusive jurisdiction of government. And, if there aren’t enough problems to match the millions of solutions debated by the despots, then problems can be created, such as the horror of children walking to school.
Here’s how Frederic Bastiat so elegantly and accurately described this process in his seminal pamphlet The Law, published in 1850:
When a politician views society from the seclusion of his office, he is struck by the spectacle of the inequality that he sees. He deplores the deprivations which are the lot of so many of our brothers, deprivations which appear to be even sadder when contrasted with luxury and wealth.
Perhaps the politician should ask himself whether this state of affairs has not been caused by old conquests and lootings, and by more recent legal plunder. Perhaps he should consider this proposition: Since all persons seek well-being and perfection, would not a condition of justice be sufficient to cause the greatest efforts toward progress, and the greatest possible equality that is compatible with individual responsibility?
Would not this be in accord with the concept of individual responsibility which God has willed in order that mankind may have the choice between vice and virtue, and the resulting punishment and reward?
But the politician never gives this a thought. His mind turns to organizations, combinations, and arrangements — legal or apparently legal. He attempts to remedy the evil by increasing and perpetuating the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
Plunder is the perfect word for it. In the post-Common Core United States, when it comes to education, the government giveth and the government taketh away.
It seems odd, therefore, that conservatives and constitutionalists would praise these gifts from the government.
For proponents of individual liberty, the goal would be for parents to keep the fruits of their labor and then be free to spend that money in any way they see fit, including on the education of their children. That goal is far from being reached, however. For now, government keeps creating programs that take the property of parents and shift it to others.
Such a redistribution of weath, even when it is done for an aruguably good cause, is a perversion of the law, which should be to protect, not violate, basic rights. As Bastiat explained in the law: “Since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.”
Ultimately, even Senator Lee could not vote for the final verstion of the Every Child Achieves Act.
The focus now must be on the rejection by states and school districts of any and every act of government on any level to dictate to parents the boundaries of the natural right of sovereignty they possess over their children.
Whether it’s how they get to school or what they learn when they get there, parents have the God-given right to rule over their children and now they must fight fearlessly to retain those rights.
The Every Child Achieves Act as passed by the Senate (81-17) will now be sent to the House of Representatives for consideration there.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/21281-education-bill-parents-cannot-opt-kids-out-of-federally-mandated-tests
OOPS!!!
We are in 21st Year of Declining Temperatures
Martin Armstrong
The most amazing thing is how government is trying to claim there is global warming simply to introduce a carbon-tax. We are entering the 21st year of declining temperatures – not rising temperatures. This is like the tax on cigarettes when people have began to smoke less, governments cry they are losing revenue so many places are now taxing electronic cigarettes. Governments are also losing tax revenue as cars have become more efficient. Sales of gasoline have declined for cars have pollution controls and get much better gas mileage with more people buying from the internet and driving to the local mall less. The solution to the collapse in tax revenues – states now are preparing to tax people based upon the miles they drive requiring odometer readings to register cars. It is never about what they pretend to care about – its is just about new schemes to raise taxes. Regardless of the truth about global warming, governments need this bogus research to raise taxes.
The Global Warming crowd is the MOST unethical and corrupt group of pretend scientists ever to exist. When I was called upon for research back to form the G5 and then wrote the White House warning that manipulating the dollar down would create volatility and a crash within two years (1987), I was told I would never again be asked by government for anything. I was told outright to do studies they provide the conclusion up front and I would earn millions of dollars a year for bogus research reports. I said – no thanks! This is the way government studies are funded and conducted. They ALWAYS tout the desired end result to support some predetermined objective. Government studies are simply an exercise in political corruption no matter what the field.
Global Warming is another great scam. Clearing the air – yes, we all want that. Yet it is extremely arrogant to assume we have the capability to alter the climate cycle. Furthermore, you could set off all the atomic bombs and it still would not destroy the earth. In the 28 years that have passed since the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine (then Russia), birds and mice have learned to not only survive, but to thrive on the radioactive land. Nature adapts. Just as disease now is rendering antibiotics gradually useless for they are mutating to survive. That is simply how everything functions. Even our politicians change their stories to match their revenue desires – political adaption.
Link:
http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/35118
Martin Armstrong
The most amazing thing is how government is trying to claim there is global warming simply to introduce a carbon-tax. We are entering the 21st year of declining temperatures – not rising temperatures. This is like the tax on cigarettes when people have began to smoke less, governments cry they are losing revenue so many places are now taxing electronic cigarettes. Governments are also losing tax revenue as cars have become more efficient. Sales of gasoline have declined for cars have pollution controls and get much better gas mileage with more people buying from the internet and driving to the local mall less. The solution to the collapse in tax revenues – states now are preparing to tax people based upon the miles they drive requiring odometer readings to register cars. It is never about what they pretend to care about – its is just about new schemes to raise taxes. Regardless of the truth about global warming, governments need this bogus research to raise taxes.
The Global Warming crowd is the MOST unethical and corrupt group of pretend scientists ever to exist. When I was called upon for research back to form the G5 and then wrote the White House warning that manipulating the dollar down would create volatility and a crash within two years (1987), I was told I would never again be asked by government for anything. I was told outright to do studies they provide the conclusion up front and I would earn millions of dollars a year for bogus research reports. I said – no thanks! This is the way government studies are funded and conducted. They ALWAYS tout the desired end result to support some predetermined objective. Government studies are simply an exercise in political corruption no matter what the field.
Global Warming is another great scam. Clearing the air – yes, we all want that. Yet it is extremely arrogant to assume we have the capability to alter the climate cycle. Furthermore, you could set off all the atomic bombs and it still would not destroy the earth. In the 28 years that have passed since the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine (then Russia), birds and mice have learned to not only survive, but to thrive on the radioactive land. Nature adapts. Just as disease now is rendering antibiotics gradually useless for they are mutating to survive. That is simply how everything functions. Even our politicians change their stories to match their revenue desires – political adaption.
Link:
http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/35118
Six major publishers control fields of chemistry, psychology and social sciences...
Academic oligarchy: Majority of science publishing is controlled by just six companies
by: Ethan A. Huff
The flow of science in this modern age is largely controlled by just six corporate publishing groups, which by calculated design have been gobbling up the journal market since at least the 1970s. And a new study out of Canada reveals that this mass consolidation of publishing power is, to a large extent, skewing what passes as scientific progress.
Researchers from the University of Montreal pored through the whole of scientific literature published between 1973 and 2013 and found that the publishing realm has changed dramatically during this time. Many smaller publishers have been absorbed into larger ones, for instance, and academic research groups have become increasingly beholden to the interests of these major publishers, which tend to favor large industries like pharmaceuticals and vaccines.
Much of the independence that was once cherished within the scientific community, in other words, has gone by the wayside as these major publishers have taken control and now dictate what types of content get published. The result is a publishing oligopoly in which scientists are muzzled by and overarching trend toward politically correct, and industry-favoring, "science."
"Overall, the major publishers control more than half of the market of scientific papers both in the natural and medical sciences and in the social sciences and humanities," said Professor Vincent Lariviere, lead author of the study from the University of Montreal's School of Library and Information Science.
"Furthermore, these large commercial publishers have huge sales, with profit margins of nearly 40%. While it is true that publishers have historically played a vital role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the print era, it is questionable whether they are still necessary in today's digital era."
The following Natural News infographic illustrates the disturbing reach of this academic oligarchy:
Six major publishers control fields of chemistry, psychology and social sciences
The fields most controlled by this academic oligarchy include those dealing with chemistry, psychology, social sciences and the professional fields. On the flip side, biomedical research, physics, and the arts and humanities are influenced to a much lesser degree by these six corporate publishers, according to the study.
What this suggests is that, over time, certain disciplines have become more corrupted than others as they've been absorbed into the corporate publishing fold. Such content, though often skewed, is highly profitable for publishers which not only don't have to pay for the articles they publish but also resell such content digitally at profit margins upwards of 40%.
"As long as publishing in high impact factor journals is a requirement for researchers to obtain positions, research funding, and recognition from peers, the major commercial publishers will maintain their hold on the academic publishing system," added Lariviere.
Publishing in one of "Big Six" corporate journals doesn't add value, study finds
But does publishing in high-impact journals really make much of a difference in terms of article exposure and the quantity of citations? Not really, the researchers found. The reach is roughly the same, they found, except that smaller publishers are less likely to be actively promoting a special interest agenda, and are thus less likely censor science that doesn't correspond with the official narrative.
"One would expect that a major publisher acquiring a journal would have the effect of increasing the latter's visibility," said Lariviere. "However, our study shows that there is no clear increase in terms of citations after switching from a small to large publisher."
"Our findings question the real added value of big publishers. Ultimately, the question is whether the services provided to the scientific community by these publishers warrant the growing share of university budgets allocated to them."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050457_science_publishing_academic_oligarchy_corporate_corruption.html#ixzz3gNd5x1RI
by: Ethan A. Huff
The flow of science in this modern age is largely controlled by just six corporate publishing groups, which by calculated design have been gobbling up the journal market since at least the 1970s. And a new study out of Canada reveals that this mass consolidation of publishing power is, to a large extent, skewing what passes as scientific progress.
Researchers from the University of Montreal pored through the whole of scientific literature published between 1973 and 2013 and found that the publishing realm has changed dramatically during this time. Many smaller publishers have been absorbed into larger ones, for instance, and academic research groups have become increasingly beholden to the interests of these major publishers, which tend to favor large industries like pharmaceuticals and vaccines.
Much of the independence that was once cherished within the scientific community, in other words, has gone by the wayside as these major publishers have taken control and now dictate what types of content get published. The result is a publishing oligopoly in which scientists are muzzled by and overarching trend toward politically correct, and industry-favoring, "science."
"Overall, the major publishers control more than half of the market of scientific papers both in the natural and medical sciences and in the social sciences and humanities," said Professor Vincent Lariviere, lead author of the study from the University of Montreal's School of Library and Information Science.
"Furthermore, these large commercial publishers have huge sales, with profit margins of nearly 40%. While it is true that publishers have historically played a vital role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the print era, it is questionable whether they are still necessary in today's digital era."
The following Natural News infographic illustrates the disturbing reach of this academic oligarchy:
Six major publishers control fields of chemistry, psychology and social sciences
The fields most controlled by this academic oligarchy include those dealing with chemistry, psychology, social sciences and the professional fields. On the flip side, biomedical research, physics, and the arts and humanities are influenced to a much lesser degree by these six corporate publishers, according to the study.
What this suggests is that, over time, certain disciplines have become more corrupted than others as they've been absorbed into the corporate publishing fold. Such content, though often skewed, is highly profitable for publishers which not only don't have to pay for the articles they publish but also resell such content digitally at profit margins upwards of 40%.
"As long as publishing in high impact factor journals is a requirement for researchers to obtain positions, research funding, and recognition from peers, the major commercial publishers will maintain their hold on the academic publishing system," added Lariviere.
Publishing in one of "Big Six" corporate journals doesn't add value, study finds
But does publishing in high-impact journals really make much of a difference in terms of article exposure and the quantity of citations? Not really, the researchers found. The reach is roughly the same, they found, except that smaller publishers are less likely to be actively promoting a special interest agenda, and are thus less likely censor science that doesn't correspond with the official narrative.
"One would expect that a major publisher acquiring a journal would have the effect of increasing the latter's visibility," said Lariviere. "However, our study shows that there is no clear increase in terms of citations after switching from a small to large publisher."
"Our findings question the real added value of big publishers. Ultimately, the question is whether the services provided to the scientific community by these publishers warrant the growing share of university budgets allocated to them."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050457_science_publishing_academic_oligarchy_corporate_corruption.html#ixzz3gNd5x1RI
Saturday, July 18, 2015
So, what good did it do???
FBI Tracked Chattanooga Shooter's Family for Years
Source: Tony Cartallucci, Land Destroyer
Once again, another convenient shooting has helped supercharge anger, hatred, fear, and division across the Western World after an alleged "Islamist extremist" opened fire on and killed 4 US Marines at a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Without any knowledge of how the US has in fact created Al Qaeda and its many global affiliates, including vicious terrorist groups plaguing Southeast Asia, and the most notorious to date, the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS), the American public will predictably react in a manner that will simply further justify America's meddling across the globe amid its self-created and perpetuated "War on Terror." It will also help in efforts to further tighten control over the American public itself, with increased justifications for expanding police state measures and future pushes to disarm the American people.
Yahoo News would report in their article, "Shootings at Chattanooga military facilities leave 4 Marines, gunman dead; act called 'domestic terrorism'," that:
A U.S. official told the Associated Press that Abdulazeez had not been on the radar of federal law enforcement before Thursday's shooting.
But also added:
His father had been investigated several years ago for "possible ties to a foreign terrorist organization" and added to the U.S. terrorist watch list, according to a report in the New York Times, but that probe did not surface information about Abdulazeez, the paper said.
This means that yet another case of "domestic terror" has involved someone either investigated by the FBI, entrapped by an active FBI operation where FBI investigators posed as terrorist leaders and walked a patsy through every step of a terrorist attack before arresting them and thus "foiling" the attack, or linked directly to someone the FBI was investigating.
Ironically, the immense omnipresent police state the West has erected to combat the so-called "terrorist" threat, including the total surveillance of all communications online and across all telecommunication networks, at home and abroad under the National Security Agency (NSA) will only expand, despite it once again apparently failing, and despite attempts by special interests on Wall Street and in Washington to claim this latest attack "again" somehow circumvented these already sweeping measures.
Meanwhile, The US Continues Supporting Extremists Abroad
And while this latest attack is passed off as a "domestic terrorist attack" and the result of "Islamic extremists," rather than a false flag event, the US continues to openly support the very "terrorists" it claims threatens its homeland and has inspired these sort of attacks.
Just recently, the Washington Post literally allowed a spokesman of Al Qaeda to defend his faction's role in the fighting in Syria, and his condemnation of the United States for not rendering more aid for the cause of overrunning and destroying the Syrian nation - a goal the US itself is likewise pursuing.
Labib Al Nahhas, "head of foreign political relations" for terrorist organization Ahrar al-Sham, wrote in his Washington Post op-ed titled, "The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries," that:
Stuck inside their own bubble, White House policymakers have allocated millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support failed CIA efforts to support so-called “moderate” forces in Syria. But these “moderate” groups have proved to be a disappointment on nearly every count, not least of all in confronting the Islamic State.
He also states:
That question should prompt Washington to admit that the Islamic State’s extremist ideology can be defeated only through a homegrown Sunni alternative — with the term “moderate” defined not by CIA handlers but by Syrians themselves.
Essentially, the Washington Post afforded a terrorist organization space to make an appeal to the American public for military support. Ahrar al-Sham regularly coordinates with and fights within operations led by Al Qaeda's Al Nusra Front, a US State Department designated terrorist organization from which ISIS itself sprung.
Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are described as the "closest" of allies by Western think-tanks and media reports. It is also revealed that Ahrar al-Sham worked along side ISIS itself.
A Stanford University report under "Mapping Militant Organizations" explained (emphasis added):
Ahrar al-Sham quickly became one of the largest military organizations operating in Syria, and it has been active in efforts to unite the Islamist opposition under a single banner. It rejects the idea of Western intervention but sometimes works alongside Free Syrian Army brigades. It routinely cooperates with al-Nusra and, until relations soured in 2013, also worked with ISIS. In February 2014, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence called Ahrar al-Sham one of the three most effective rebel groups in Syria.
The Washington Post isn't the only voice in the Western media promoting Al Qaeda. Foreign Policy in 2012 abhorrently proclaimed, "Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists: So the rebels aren't secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is concerned, it doesn't much matter." As much as an admission that the US is backing what is essentially terrorism in Syria, the Foreign Policy article attempted even then to promote the alleged "pragmatism" of supporting Al Qaeda to eliminate America's foreign enemies.
Read the rest here:
http://www.blacklistednews.com/FBI_Tracked_Chattanooga_Shooter%27s_Family_for_Years_/45097/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Source: Tony Cartallucci, Land Destroyer
Once again, another convenient shooting has helped supercharge anger, hatred, fear, and division across the Western World after an alleged "Islamist extremist" opened fire on and killed 4 US Marines at a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Without any knowledge of how the US has in fact created Al Qaeda and its many global affiliates, including vicious terrorist groups plaguing Southeast Asia, and the most notorious to date, the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS), the American public will predictably react in a manner that will simply further justify America's meddling across the globe amid its self-created and perpetuated "War on Terror." It will also help in efforts to further tighten control over the American public itself, with increased justifications for expanding police state measures and future pushes to disarm the American people.
Yahoo News would report in their article, "Shootings at Chattanooga military facilities leave 4 Marines, gunman dead; act called 'domestic terrorism'," that:
A U.S. official told the Associated Press that Abdulazeez had not been on the radar of federal law enforcement before Thursday's shooting.
But also added:
His father had been investigated several years ago for "possible ties to a foreign terrorist organization" and added to the U.S. terrorist watch list, according to a report in the New York Times, but that probe did not surface information about Abdulazeez, the paper said.
This means that yet another case of "domestic terror" has involved someone either investigated by the FBI, entrapped by an active FBI operation where FBI investigators posed as terrorist leaders and walked a patsy through every step of a terrorist attack before arresting them and thus "foiling" the attack, or linked directly to someone the FBI was investigating.
Ironically, the immense omnipresent police state the West has erected to combat the so-called "terrorist" threat, including the total surveillance of all communications online and across all telecommunication networks, at home and abroad under the National Security Agency (NSA) will only expand, despite it once again apparently failing, and despite attempts by special interests on Wall Street and in Washington to claim this latest attack "again" somehow circumvented these already sweeping measures.
Meanwhile, The US Continues Supporting Extremists Abroad
And while this latest attack is passed off as a "domestic terrorist attack" and the result of "Islamic extremists," rather than a false flag event, the US continues to openly support the very "terrorists" it claims threatens its homeland and has inspired these sort of attacks.
Just recently, the Washington Post literally allowed a spokesman of Al Qaeda to defend his faction's role in the fighting in Syria, and his condemnation of the United States for not rendering more aid for the cause of overrunning and destroying the Syrian nation - a goal the US itself is likewise pursuing.
Labib Al Nahhas, "head of foreign political relations" for terrorist organization Ahrar al-Sham, wrote in his Washington Post op-ed titled, "The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries," that:
Stuck inside their own bubble, White House policymakers have allocated millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support failed CIA efforts to support so-called “moderate” forces in Syria. But these “moderate” groups have proved to be a disappointment on nearly every count, not least of all in confronting the Islamic State.
He also states:
That question should prompt Washington to admit that the Islamic State’s extremist ideology can be defeated only through a homegrown Sunni alternative — with the term “moderate” defined not by CIA handlers but by Syrians themselves.
Essentially, the Washington Post afforded a terrorist organization space to make an appeal to the American public for military support. Ahrar al-Sham regularly coordinates with and fights within operations led by Al Qaeda's Al Nusra Front, a US State Department designated terrorist organization from which ISIS itself sprung.
Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are described as the "closest" of allies by Western think-tanks and media reports. It is also revealed that Ahrar al-Sham worked along side ISIS itself.
A Stanford University report under "Mapping Militant Organizations" explained (emphasis added):
Ahrar al-Sham quickly became one of the largest military organizations operating in Syria, and it has been active in efforts to unite the Islamist opposition under a single banner. It rejects the idea of Western intervention but sometimes works alongside Free Syrian Army brigades. It routinely cooperates with al-Nusra and, until relations soured in 2013, also worked with ISIS. In February 2014, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence called Ahrar al-Sham one of the three most effective rebel groups in Syria.
The Washington Post isn't the only voice in the Western media promoting Al Qaeda. Foreign Policy in 2012 abhorrently proclaimed, "Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists: So the rebels aren't secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is concerned, it doesn't much matter." As much as an admission that the US is backing what is essentially terrorism in Syria, the Foreign Policy article attempted even then to promote the alleged "pragmatism" of supporting Al Qaeda to eliminate America's foreign enemies.
Read the rest here:
http://www.blacklistednews.com/FBI_Tracked_Chattanooga_Shooter%27s_Family_for_Years_/45097/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Hypocrisy dominates this debate...
Amid Confederate flag racism uproar, a reminder that Obama's ancestors once owned slaves
by: J. D. Heyes
It was mentioned a few times and then dropped about the time that then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was considering his first run for the Oval Office.
In a March 2, 2007, report, The Baltimore Sun noted an ironic twist about the man who would become the first African American president of the United States: Forebears of his white mother owned slaves themselves.
As reported by the paper:
According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.
The records reviewed by the Sun show that Overall, who was 30 at the time, owned a 15-year-old black girl and a 25-year-old black man. Mary Duvall, his mother-in-law, owned a 60-year-old black male and a 58-year-old black female. The paper noted further that during the period around the 1850 census slaves were listed by owner, age, sex and "colour," not by name.
When the Sun contacted the Obama campaign, a spokesman did not refute the information, brushing off the history by claiming Obama's ancestors "are representative of America."
Really? Like the Confederacy?
Hypocrisy dominates this debate
"While a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union in the Civil War," campaign spokesman Bill Burton said. "And it is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for president of the United States."
But wait – isn't slavery at the core of the battle to rewrite or eliminate Confederate history?
What do you call someone who labels any and all former slave owners as racist bigots, while blowing off the fact that his own relatives did the same thing?
A hypocrite.
The research traces the Duvalls to Mareen Duvall, a major land owner in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in the 1600s, the Sun reported. The inventory of his estate in 1694 names 18 slaves, according to a family history published in 1952.
So, Obama's relatives weren't just slave owners – they were big time slave owners.
"The twist is very interesting," Ronald Walters, a political scientist who was director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, told the Sun at the time of publication. "It deepens his connection with the experience of slavery, even if it deepens it on a different side of the equation."
You could say that. But if Obama really felt like he had some sort of unique perspective on the subject, you might think he would have made mention of it before – say, in his 1995 memoir, which just happened to be titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Yet, he didn't; he made no mention of his mother's slave-owning relatives in that tome.
So, is this relevant? Should this knowledge provide at least some context and perspective to the Left's, and Obama's, continual references to "our dark past" – a past that his own family, however distant, perpetuated? Should it matter that Obama's mother's ancestors were among the few Southern families who held any slaves at all?
Does this mean that Obama should be banned – banished and shamed from public – like all the Confederate memorabilia the Left is now calling for?
What about the latest Democratic presidential candidate?
Or how about current Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton?
As reported by The Weekly Standard, she appeared June 26 at the Virginia Democratic party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Friday in northern Virginia.
That would be Thomas Jefferson, U.S. president and slave owner, and Andrew Jackson, U.S. president and slave owner. Hillary, meanwhile, has called for all Confederate symbols to be taken down all over the country.
"America's descent into a totalitarian regime of hysterical thought police is nearly complete. In just the last 72 hours, total P.C. insanity has swept the nation and all its big retailers as howling leftist maniacs have used the label 'tolerance' to initiate what can only be called a modern-day book burning and Orwellian censorship of artistic expression," noted Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050444_Confederate_flag_Obama_slave_owners.html#ixzz3gFwzTR3s
by: J. D. Heyes
It was mentioned a few times and then dropped about the time that then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was considering his first run for the Oval Office.
In a March 2, 2007, report, The Baltimore Sun noted an ironic twist about the man who would become the first African American president of the United States: Forebears of his white mother owned slaves themselves.
As reported by the paper:
According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.
The records reviewed by the Sun show that Overall, who was 30 at the time, owned a 15-year-old black girl and a 25-year-old black man. Mary Duvall, his mother-in-law, owned a 60-year-old black male and a 58-year-old black female. The paper noted further that during the period around the 1850 census slaves were listed by owner, age, sex and "colour," not by name.
When the Sun contacted the Obama campaign, a spokesman did not refute the information, brushing off the history by claiming Obama's ancestors "are representative of America."
Really? Like the Confederacy?
Hypocrisy dominates this debate
"While a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union in the Civil War," campaign spokesman Bill Burton said. "And it is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for president of the United States."
But wait – isn't slavery at the core of the battle to rewrite or eliminate Confederate history?
What do you call someone who labels any and all former slave owners as racist bigots, while blowing off the fact that his own relatives did the same thing?
A hypocrite.
The research traces the Duvalls to Mareen Duvall, a major land owner in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in the 1600s, the Sun reported. The inventory of his estate in 1694 names 18 slaves, according to a family history published in 1952.
So, Obama's relatives weren't just slave owners – they were big time slave owners.
"The twist is very interesting," Ronald Walters, a political scientist who was director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, told the Sun at the time of publication. "It deepens his connection with the experience of slavery, even if it deepens it on a different side of the equation."
You could say that. But if Obama really felt like he had some sort of unique perspective on the subject, you might think he would have made mention of it before – say, in his 1995 memoir, which just happened to be titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Yet, he didn't; he made no mention of his mother's slave-owning relatives in that tome.
So, is this relevant? Should this knowledge provide at least some context and perspective to the Left's, and Obama's, continual references to "our dark past" – a past that his own family, however distant, perpetuated? Should it matter that Obama's mother's ancestors were among the few Southern families who held any slaves at all?
Does this mean that Obama should be banned – banished and shamed from public – like all the Confederate memorabilia the Left is now calling for?
What about the latest Democratic presidential candidate?
Or how about current Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton?
As reported by The Weekly Standard, she appeared June 26 at the Virginia Democratic party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Friday in northern Virginia.
That would be Thomas Jefferson, U.S. president and slave owner, and Andrew Jackson, U.S. president and slave owner. Hillary, meanwhile, has called for all Confederate symbols to be taken down all over the country.
"America's descent into a totalitarian regime of hysterical thought police is nearly complete. In just the last 72 hours, total P.C. insanity has swept the nation and all its big retailers as howling leftist maniacs have used the label 'tolerance' to initiate what can only be called a modern-day book burning and Orwellian censorship of artistic expression," noted Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050444_Confederate_flag_Obama_slave_owners.html#ixzz3gFwzTR3s
OOPS!!!
Concealed Carry Permits Skyrocket, While Crime Plummets – Study Shows More Guns = Less Crime
Eva Decesare
According to a recent study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the election of Barrack Obama may have played a significant part in reducing crime in the U.S. – but not in a way he is likely to brag about. In short, the election of Obama, a very vocal advocate of “gun control, has persuaded more and more Americans that they should keep and bear arms themselves. And that has, in turn, led to significantly lower crime rates.
Each year from 1999 to 2007, a little under a quarter of a million new permits were issued to Americans, allowing them to legally carry concealed firearms. In the four years after that, during Obama’s first term, the rate of new permits being issued more than tripled, and has continued to grow since then. In 2007, about 4.6 million Americans already had concealed-carry permits. Now that number is over 12.8 million, with more new permits being issued to women and minorities than to white males.
That’s a lot of average citizens carrying guns, and these numbers don’t even include those who live in the eight states where one can legally carry a concealed firearm without a permit.
Meanwhile, gun sales have continued to rise since Obama took office. Around 14 million guns were purchased in the U.S. between 2008 and 2011 and over 20 million were purchased between 2012 and 2013 – around five million of those being sold to first-time gun buyers.
So what has been the effect on crime? Advocates of gun control have long insisted that arming average citizens would lead to bloody mayhem and chaos in the streets. However, while the number of Americans carrying firearms has soared, murder rates have fallen by a full 25%, from 5.6 down to 4.2 per 100,000 people, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center study.
As Larry Keene, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, says,
“It puts the lie to the myth promulgated by anti-gun individuals that somehow more law-abiding citizens carrying guns will lead to more crime.”
But some advocates of public disarmament remain clinging to their illogical assertion that more legally-obtained guns mean more violent gun crime. The Violence Policy Center still insists that average citizens with guns “are a threat to public safety,” and that “all too often, private citizens use their concealed handguns to take lives, not to save them.” To support that claim, they point to a total of 561 incidents in which permit holders shot and killed a total of 743 people.
How many of those were justified acts of self-defense? The Center was not specific (shocker), but said that a “tiny fraction of these cases [were] ever ruled to be in self-defense.”
Of course, advocates of gun control such as Obama and the Violence Policy Center never advocate that agents of government be disarmed. However, maybe they should due to the fact that the recent study also shows that average citizens who possess carry permits commit crime at a far lower rate than police officers do.
According to Edward Stringham, although official statistics have historically been scant, we now know that police killed 1,100 Americans in 2014 and 476 Americans in the first five months of 2015. Given that America has roughly 765,000 sworn police officers, that means the police-against-citizen kill rate is more than 145 per 100,000.
That means that police kill more than 30 times that of the average citizen.
In Florida and Texas, for example, permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies one-sixth as often as police are, despite how rarely violent police actually get prosecuted for the crimes they commit.
In the battle of ideas, the gun-grabbers are losing. Badly. In a Gallup poll in 2000, 35% of those polled thought that owning a gun made their home safer. By 2014, 63% thought so. And a Pew Research poll in 2014 confirmed that a majority of Americans believe that preserving the right of people to own guns is more important than the government trying to control gun ownership.
“The public increasingly understands that gun control is a failed social experiment, and it doesn’t work,” explains Larry Keene. “All gun control ever does is infringe upon the rights of the law-abiding citizens and does nothing to stop criminals from illegally acquiring firearms, and it doesn’t stop them from misusing them in crime.”
Ironically, what seems to increase gun sales the fastest is politicians calling for “gun control.” Furthermore, when police prove daily that they not only choose not to protect the people but actually pose a threat to the people, it’s no wonder more and more Americans are making it their personal responsibility to defend themselves, their families and their fellow citizens. As that mindset continues to spread, violent crime will continue to decrease.
In the meantime, however, we’ll just sit by and watch while attempts to strip citizens of their means of protection blows up directly in the faces of the politicians trying to make that happen.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/concealed-carry-permits-skyrocket-while-crime-plummets-study-shows-more-guns-less-crime.html
Eva Decesare
According to a recent study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the election of Barrack Obama may have played a significant part in reducing crime in the U.S. – but not in a way he is likely to brag about. In short, the election of Obama, a very vocal advocate of “gun control, has persuaded more and more Americans that they should keep and bear arms themselves. And that has, in turn, led to significantly lower crime rates.
Each year from 1999 to 2007, a little under a quarter of a million new permits were issued to Americans, allowing them to legally carry concealed firearms. In the four years after that, during Obama’s first term, the rate of new permits being issued more than tripled, and has continued to grow since then. In 2007, about 4.6 million Americans already had concealed-carry permits. Now that number is over 12.8 million, with more new permits being issued to women and minorities than to white males.
That’s a lot of average citizens carrying guns, and these numbers don’t even include those who live in the eight states where one can legally carry a concealed firearm without a permit.
Meanwhile, gun sales have continued to rise since Obama took office. Around 14 million guns were purchased in the U.S. between 2008 and 2011 and over 20 million were purchased between 2012 and 2013 – around five million of those being sold to first-time gun buyers.
So what has been the effect on crime? Advocates of gun control have long insisted that arming average citizens would lead to bloody mayhem and chaos in the streets. However, while the number of Americans carrying firearms has soared, murder rates have fallen by a full 25%, from 5.6 down to 4.2 per 100,000 people, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center study.
As Larry Keene, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, says,
“It puts the lie to the myth promulgated by anti-gun individuals that somehow more law-abiding citizens carrying guns will lead to more crime.”
But some advocates of public disarmament remain clinging to their illogical assertion that more legally-obtained guns mean more violent gun crime. The Violence Policy Center still insists that average citizens with guns “are a threat to public safety,” and that “all too often, private citizens use their concealed handguns to take lives, not to save them.” To support that claim, they point to a total of 561 incidents in which permit holders shot and killed a total of 743 people.
How many of those were justified acts of self-defense? The Center was not specific (shocker), but said that a “tiny fraction of these cases [were] ever ruled to be in self-defense.”
Of course, advocates of gun control such as Obama and the Violence Policy Center never advocate that agents of government be disarmed. However, maybe they should due to the fact that the recent study also shows that average citizens who possess carry permits commit crime at a far lower rate than police officers do.
According to Edward Stringham, although official statistics have historically been scant, we now know that police killed 1,100 Americans in 2014 and 476 Americans in the first five months of 2015. Given that America has roughly 765,000 sworn police officers, that means the police-against-citizen kill rate is more than 145 per 100,000.
That means that police kill more than 30 times that of the average citizen.
In Florida and Texas, for example, permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies one-sixth as often as police are, despite how rarely violent police actually get prosecuted for the crimes they commit.
In the battle of ideas, the gun-grabbers are losing. Badly. In a Gallup poll in 2000, 35% of those polled thought that owning a gun made their home safer. By 2014, 63% thought so. And a Pew Research poll in 2014 confirmed that a majority of Americans believe that preserving the right of people to own guns is more important than the government trying to control gun ownership.
“The public increasingly understands that gun control is a failed social experiment, and it doesn’t work,” explains Larry Keene. “All gun control ever does is infringe upon the rights of the law-abiding citizens and does nothing to stop criminals from illegally acquiring firearms, and it doesn’t stop them from misusing them in crime.”
Ironically, what seems to increase gun sales the fastest is politicians calling for “gun control.” Furthermore, when police prove daily that they not only choose not to protect the people but actually pose a threat to the people, it’s no wonder more and more Americans are making it their personal responsibility to defend themselves, their families and their fellow citizens. As that mindset continues to spread, violent crime will continue to decrease.
In the meantime, however, we’ll just sit by and watch while attempts to strip citizens of their means of protection blows up directly in the faces of the politicians trying to make that happen.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/concealed-carry-permits-skyrocket-while-crime-plummets-study-shows-more-guns-less-crime.html
"I have rarely found anything President Obama has done to be praiseworthy...but..."
All Praise To Barack Obama For Stiffing The War Party—- Peace Is Finally Being Given A Chance
By David Stockman
I have rarely found anything President Obama has done to be praiseworthy, and believe his domestic policies of Keynesian borrow and spend and incessant statist intervention in capitalist enterprise to be especially deplorable. But finally he has stood up to the War Party——and that could mark a decisive turning point in rolling back Washington’s destructive interventionism and imperial pretensions in the Middle East and, indeed, around the world.
The Iranian nuclear agreement is a decisive refutation of the War Party’s hoary claim that Iran is hell-bent upon obtaining nuclear weapons. This deafening but untruthful narrative was long ago debunked by the 2007 National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). These authoritative findings were issued by the nation’s 16 top intelligence agencies in November 2007, and they held that what had possibly been a small-scale Iranian weapons research effort was abandoned in 2003 and never restarted. That NIE verdict has been reiterated several times since then.
Not surprisingly, it was also these NIE findings that stopped cold in its tracks George Bush’s plan to bomb the alleged Iranian nuclear sites in late 2007. In his memoirs the Great Decider admitted that it would have been hard to explain to the American public why he was launching another war to eliminate an alleged Iranian WMD threat when his own intelligence agencies had just concluded it did not even exist!
Indeed, it was the same crowd of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Feith et.al. which had falsified the WMD claims against Saddam Hussein that had been beating the war drums so loudly about the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program.
And, as it has turned out, they had resorted to the same kind of falsified intelligence which the first time around had generated the infamous “curveball” pictures of biological weapons labs that were actually pasturized milk plants. This time it was a bunch of falsified drawings and plans mysteriously found on a laptop computer that had been turned over by a Iranian dissident group called the MEK, which, ironically, had long been allied with Saddam Hussein and had been on the State Department terrorist list from 1997 to 2012.
So it needs to be shouted from the rafters at the outset that all the arm-waving and screeching against this deal by the GOP war-mongers and the Israeli lobby is grounded in a Big Lie. The whole Iran-is-after-the-bomb narrative is just WMD 2.0.
Indeed, the War Party has been so shrill and unrelenting in promulgating this trumped-up story that the other side of the equation is hardly known to the American public. Namely, that the overwhelming weight of the evidence over more than three decades—–including information obtained by the IAEA during the course of extensive investigations—-is that Iran’s primary aim has been to obtain enrichment capacity for its civilian reactors.
In fact, when an incipient weapons research program was shutdown in 2003, the Ayatollah Khamenei took a decisive step to remove all doubt inside the Iranian government. He issued a fatwa (ban) against the possession of nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic.
This anti-WMD edict was in keeping with a similar fatwa against biological and chemical weapons issued by his predecessor, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in the midst of Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. At the time, Saddam was dropping these horrific weapons on Iranian battle forces—-some of them barely armed teenage boys—- with the spotting help of CIA tracking satellites and the concurrence of Washington.
Thus, the real history demonstrates an Iranian posture that is wholly contrary to the War Party’s endless blizzard of false charges about its quest for nukes. However benighted and medieval its religious views, the theocracy which rules Iran does not consist of demented war mongers. In the heat of battle they were willing to sacrifice their own forces rather than violate their religious scruples to counter Saddam’s WMDs.
At the end of the day, the War Party’s narrative is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
So in the context of all of that history we now have a solemn international agreement that’s designed to insure that the nuclear weapons program that the CIA has never found and that the Iranians say they never had and that their Supreme Leader has forbidden—does, in fact, never happen.
That’s not only a very good thing; it also an overwhelmingly sure thing by the light of any rational analysis.
After all, why would a nation purportedly motivated by a fiendish desire to get the bomb ever agree to a network of restrictions, controls, roadblocks and handcuffs from which not even Houdini could escape? All of this containment machinery would keep the Iranian regime many steps—nay, many miles— removed from anything even remotely resembling an A-bomb capability.
In fact, it’s actually designed to virtually suffocate even the civilian nuclear industry that Iran has proclaimed to be its purpose all along. And, needless to say, that is something which it is entitled to—including uranium enrichment capabilities— as one of the 193 signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter, of course, is most definitely a non-exclusive club—-since it includes every nation on the planet Earth except India, Pakistan, South Sudan and Israel.
Under any rational assessment of the agreement, therefore, suffocation of its incipient civilian nuclear power industry is exactly what Iran has embraced. It has done so in the name of ending the wholly unnecessary confrontation with the West over its mythical nuclear weapons program and to thereby gain relief from the sadistic regime of sanctions that have so drastically and unfairly punished its 77 million innocent citizens.
To wit, Iran will eliminate 98% of its existing stockpile of mostly low-enriched uranium and convert the limited number of centrifuges at its one truly hardened site (Fordow) to non-uranium research activities. Further, it will cut the number of centrifuges at its large Natanz facility from 20,000 to 5,060 units, and this absolutely minimal capacity will be restricted to three-decade old slow, inefficient first generation technology. Not even research on more advanced enrichment technologies may be undertaken for the next eight years.
Moreover, the centrifuges that it will be permitted to operate will be restricted to enriching uranium to only 3.67% purity, meaning that Iran will not be remotely capable of producing the 90% purity material needed for bomb making.
It will also dismantle the core of its heavy water reactor at Arak, which would produce plutonium as a by-product. Although such waste material cannot be used to make a bomb without a reprocessing plant which Iran does not have and could not likely get, Iran has agreed to replace the current core with an alternative non-weapons capable reactor technology.
Finally, wrapped around all of these limited capacities for civilian enrichment will be a cradle-to-grave inspection regime covering its entire nuclear fuel cycle. This will put inspectors on the ground and sophisticated monitoring equipment in place at its uranium mines, milling plants, storage and transportation facilities, processing plants, centrifuge operations, civilian reactors, waste handling and processing stations and all the supporting services and equipment supply and maintenance activities along the entire route.
In short, Iran has agreed to put what will be a tiny civilian nuclear power and uranium enrichment industry into a wholly transparent fishbowl. The inspection and monitoring system will be so exhaustive and intrusive that it will resemble the lockdown in a high security Federal prison; and, in fact, will make Iran’s entire sovereign territory subject to inspection demands “anytime and anywhere-“—-including its military facilities.
Yes, in the case of suspected sites not on the primary inspection system it will require a request by the international inspectors. And if the Iranian authorities say no, it will go to a resolution panel where the majority of the members will represent the US and the other western signatories to the agreement. But the key thing is all of this must happen within 24 days.
Can any one in their right mind really believe that Iran could build an illicit facility with tens of thousands of unauthorized centrifuges and all the rest of the bomb cycle equipment that would be required to stage a “break-out”, and that this could first escape US intelligence satellite discovery; and then, if found out, be dismantled and have every trace removed within 24 days?
Here’s the thing, folks. The fulminations of Senator Lindsay Graham and the rest of the GOP War Party, along with the hysterical bellowing of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his legions of lobbyists on the Potomac, have nothing to do with the actual nation of Iran and the actual leaders who signed the agreement. The War Party is attacking a giant fiction and tissue of lies of its own-making—-an untruthful narrative that is grounded in pure politics, not the security interests of the citizens of either America or Israel.
Indeed, the three decade long demonization of Iran has served one over-arching purpose. Namely, it enabled both branches of the War Party to conjure up a fearsome enemy, thereby justifying aggressive policies that call for a constant state of war and military mobilization.
When the cold-war officially ended in 1991, the Cheney crowd in the George H.W. Bush White House feared the kind of drastic demobilization of the US military-industrial complex that was warranted by the suddenly more pacific strategic environment. In response, they developed an anti-Iranian doctrine that was explicitly described as a way of keeping defense spending at high cold war levels.
And the narrative they developed to this end is one of the more egregious Big Lies ever to come out of the Beltway. It puts you in mind of the young boy who killed his parents, and then threw himself on the mercy of the courts on the grounds that he was an orphan!
To wit, during the 1980s the neocons in the Reagan Administration issued their own fatwa again the Islamic Republic based on its open hostility to America—-an enmity grounded in Washington’s 25-year support for the tyrannical and illegitimate regime of the Shah.
That they had a case is beyond doubt. The open US archives now prove that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and put the utterly unsuited and megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Shah on the peacock throne to rule as a puppet in behalf of US security and oil interests.
During the subsequent decades the Shah not only massively and baldly plundered the wealth of the Persian nation; with the help of the CIA and US military, he also created a brutal secret police force known as the Savak. The latter made the East German Stasi look civilized by comparison.
All elements of Iranian society including universities, labor unions, businesses, civic organizations, peasant farmers and many more were subjected to intense surveillance by the Savak agents and paid informants. As one critic described it:
Over the years, Savak became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest, detain, brutally interrogate and torture suspected people indefinitely. Savak operated its own prisons in Tehran, such as Qezel-Qalaeh and Evin facilities and many suspected places throughout the country as well. Many of those activities were carried out without any institutional checks.
Ironically, among his many grandiose follies, the Shah embarked on a massive civilian nuclear power campaign in the 1970s, which envisioned literally paving the Iranian landscape with dozens of nuclear power plants. He would use Iran’s surging oil revenues after 1973 to buy all the equipment required from Western companies—– and also fuel cycle support services such as uranium enrichment——in order to provide his kingdom with cheap power for centuries.
At the time of the Revolution, the first of these plants at Bushehr was nearly complete, but the whole grandiose project was put on hold amidst the turmoil of the new regime and the onset of Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in September 1980. As a consequence, a $2 billion deposit languished at the French nuclear agency that had originally obtained it from the Shah to fund a ramp-up of its enrichment capacity to supply his planned battery of reactors.
In 1983 the new Iranian regime decided to complete the Bushehr power plant and some additional elements of the Shah’s grand plan. But when they attempted to reactivate the French enrichment services contract and buy necessary power plant equipment from the original German suppliers they were stopped cold by Washington. And when the tried to get their $2 billion deposit back, they were curtly denied that, too.
To make a long story short, the entire subsequent history of off again/on again efforts by the Iranians to purchase dual use equipment and components on the international market, often from black market sources like Pakistan, was in response to Washington’s relentless efforts to block its legitimate rights as a signatory to the NPT to complete some parts of the Shah’s civilian nuclear project.
Needless to say, it did not take much effort by the neocon “regime change” fanatics which inhabited the national security machinery after the 2000 election to spin every attempt by Iran to purchase even a lowly pump or pipe fitting as evidence of a secret campaign to get the bomb. The exaggerations, lies, distortions and fear-mongering which came out of this neocon campaign are truly disgusting.
In that context, it only required one more giant lie to complete the demonization of the Iranian government. That is the utterly false claim that Iran is an aggressive would be hegemon that is a fount of terrorism and is dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, among other treacherous purposes.
That giant lie was almost single-handedly fashioned by Bibi Netanyahu and his coterie of power-hungry henchman after the mid-1990s. Indeed, the false claim that Iran posses an “existential threat” to Israel is a product of the pure red meat domestic Israeli politics that have kept Bibi in power for much of the last two decades.
But the truth is Iran is no better or worse than any of the other major powers in the Middle East. In many ways it is far less of a threat to regional peace and stability than the military butchers who now run Egypt on $1.5 billion per year of US aid. And it is surely no worse than the corpulent tyrants who squander the massive oil resources of Saudi Arabia in pursuit of unspeakable opulence and decadence to the detriment of the 27 million citizens which are not part of the regime, and who one day may well reach the point of revolt. And when it comes to the support of terrorism, the Saudis have funded more jihadists and terrorists throughout the region than Iran ever even imagined.
In this context, the War Party’s bloviation about Iran’s leadership of the so-called Shiite Crescent is especially obnoxious. Yes, the Iranians support the Assad government in Syria, but that’s a long-standing alliance that goes back to his father’s era and is rooted in the historic confessional politics of the Islamic world.
The Assad regime is Alawite, a branch of the Shiite, and despite the regime’s brutality, it has been a bulwark of protection for all of Syria’s minority sects, including Christians, against a majority-Sunni ethnic cleansing. The latter would surely occur if the Saudi supported rebels, led by ISIS, were ever to take power.
Likewise, the fact that the government of the broken state of Iraq——an artificial, non-sustainable 1916 concoction of two stripped pants European diplomats (Messrs. Sykes and Picot of the British and French foreign offices, respectively)——–is now aligned with Iran is also a result of confessional politics and geo-economic propinquity.
For all practical purposes, the Kurds of the northeast have declared their independence and the western Sunni lands of the upper Euphrates have been conquered by ISIS with American weapons dropped in place by the hapless $25 billion Iraqi army minted by Washington’s departing proconsuls. Accordingly, what is left of Iraq is a population that is overwhelmingly Shiite, and which nurses bitter resentments from decades of Sunni repression under Saddam. Why in the world, therefore, wouldn’t they ally with their Shiite neighbor?
Likewise, the claim that Iran is now trying to annex Yemen is pure claptrap. The ancient territory of Yemen has been racked by civil war off and on since the early 1970s. And a major driving force of that conflict has been confessional differences between the Sunni south and the Shiite north.
In more recent times, Washington’s blatant drone war inside Yemen against alleged terrorists and its domination and financing of Yemen’s governments eventually produced the same old outcome. That is, another failed state and an illegitimate government which fled at the 11th hour, leaving another vast cache of American arms and equipment behind.
Accordingly, the Houthis forces now in control of substantial parts of the country are not some kind of advanced guard sent in by Tehran. They are indigenous partisans who share a confessional tie with Iran, but which have actually been armed by the US. And the real invaders in this destructive civil war are the Saudis, whose vicious bombing campaign against civilian populations controlled by the Houthis are outright war crimes if the word has any meaning at all.
Finally, there is the fourth element of the purported Iranian axis—–the Hezbollah controlled Shiite communities of southern Lebanon and the Beka Valley. Like everything else in the Middle East, Hezbollah is a product of historical European imperialism, Islamic confessional politics and the frequently misguided and counter-productive security policies of Israel.
In the first place, Lebanon was not any more a real country than Iraq was when Sykes and Picot laid their straight-edged rulers on a map. The result was a stew of religious and ethnic divisions—-Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Copts, Druse, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Armenians, Jews and countless more—– that made the fashioning of a viable state virtually impossible.
At length, an alliance of Christians and Sunnis gained control of the country, leaving the 40% Shiite population disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged, as well. But it was the inflow of Palestinian refugees in the 1960s and 1970s that eventually upset the balance of sectarian forces and triggered a civil war that essentially lasted from 1975 until the turn of the century.
It also triggered a catastrophically wrong-headed Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, and a subsequent repressive occupation of mostly Shiite territories for the next eighteen years. The alleged purpose of this invasion was to chase the PLO and Yassir Arafat out of the enclave in southern Lebanon that they had established after being driven out of Jordan in 1970.
Eventually Israel succeeded in sending Arafat packing to north Africa, but in the process created a militant, Shiite-based resistance movement that did not even exist in 1982, and which in due course became the strongest single force in Lebanon’s fractured domestic political arrangements. After Israel withdrew in 2000, the then Christian President of the county made abundantly clear that Hezbollah had become a legitimate and respected force within the Lebanese polity, not merely some subversive agent of Tehran:
“For us Lebanese, and I can tell you the majority of Lebanese, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement. If it wasn’t for them, we couldn’t have liberated our land. And because of that, we have big esteem for the Hezbollah movement.”[
So, yes, Hezbollah is an integral component of the Shiite Crescent and its confessional and political alignment with Tehran is entirely plausible. But that arrangement—-however uncomfortable for Israel—–does not represent Iranian aggression on Israel’s northern border. Instead, it’s actually the blowback from the stubborn refusal of Israeli governments—–especially the rightwing Likud governments of modern times—–to deal constructively with the Palestinian question.
In lieu of a two-state solution in the territory of Palestine, therefore, Israeli policy has produced a chronic state of war with nearly half the Lebanese population represented by Hezbollah. The latter is surely no agency of peaceful governance and has committed its share of atrocities. But the point at hand is that given the last 35 years of history and Israeli policy, Hezbollah would exist as a menacing force on its northern border even if the Shah or his heir was still on the Peacock Throne.
And that goes to the heart of Netanyahu’s Big Lie. His relentless claim that Iran is out to annihilate Israel and by implication liquidate its Jewish population is a preposterous distortion and exaggeration of Iran’s policy, as articulated by its Supreme Leader himself.
The real issue is the Palestinian question and the gross injustices that the Palestinian diaspora outside of Israel’s current borders, and the occupied populations inside the massive settler communities of the West Bank, have suffered for decades. But Iran does not propose to seek redress for the Palestinians by dropping nuclear bombs on Israel or sending in its own feeble military or even hordes of hired terrorists.
No, the Ayatollah Khamenei has proposed to vote the present sectarian state of Israel out of existence by referendum, not A-bombs!
In one of his most recent pronouncements on the topic in March 2012, in fact, he said the following during a Friday prayer sermon calling for a multi-religious secular state in Palestine:
Holding a referendum in Palestine among the Palestinians, and all those that became refugees—if, of course, they want to return to Palestine—is a rational solution [to the problem]. Those [Palestinians], who live in Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere, can return home. I am not advocating forcible return of anybody. Then, [Palestinians should] hold a referendum among these who were living there before 1948, when the illegitimate state of Israel was formed, whether Muslim, or Jew or Christian, which will then decide the type of government that must be formed there. This is democracy. Why is democracy good for others, but not for the Palestinians? Why it is that all the people of the world can decide their own fate, but not the Palestinians? There is no doubt that the present regime [Israel] took over through deception, trickery, and force. Thus, the people there have an imposed regime. Fine! Let the people of Palestine hold a referendum to choose the type of the government that they want for themselves. That regime and that government should form and then decide what to do with the people who moved there after 1948. Whatever decision it made, that would also be the fruit of people’s vote, as well as democracy, respect for human rights, and in line with the world’s present rationale. This is a good solution that must be implemented.
Needless to say, the wizened old man who rules Iran for the time being has no right or authority to call for a referendum among peoples outside his own borders. But that he preaches the doctrine of a secular state solution that was accepted by most of the civilized world as a plausible answer to the Palestinian question only 40 years ago is surely not evidence that Iran is led by fiendish men who plan another holocaust.
So what is at stake here is of truly epochal importance. The Iranians have signed the agreement in good faith and have locked-up any potential for development of a nuclear weapon that they do not want, and have thrown away the key.
Look at the jubilation on the streets of Iran today owing to the prospect that the West’s brutal sanctions will be lifted, and that their country now has a pathway back into the community of nations. Once prosperity and self-respect return to the ancient land of Persia—–not this Ayatollah nor any other will ever be in a position to do anything more harmful to Israel than what is embodied in the quoted paragraph above. That is, preach vainly about a history that might have been.
In the interim, Israel ought to thank its lucky stars that two flawed but inspired politicians—Barack Obama of the US and Hassan Rouhani of Iran—–found it possible to transcend 30 years of lies and enmities on both sides in order to give peace a chance.
More importantly, as Iran comes back into the community of nations and re- enters global commerce it will give the citizens of Israel an opportunity to see that they have been betrayed and jeopardized by the terrible lies, bullying, megalomania and insuperable will to power of Bibi Netanyahu.
Their path to a better, safer future does not lie in the defeat of this agreement on the floor of the US Congress; it lies in a resounding defeat of Netanyahu government the very next time they have the chance to go to the polls.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/07/david-stockman/all-hail-barack-obama/
By David Stockman
I have rarely found anything President Obama has done to be praiseworthy, and believe his domestic policies of Keynesian borrow and spend and incessant statist intervention in capitalist enterprise to be especially deplorable. But finally he has stood up to the War Party——and that could mark a decisive turning point in rolling back Washington’s destructive interventionism and imperial pretensions in the Middle East and, indeed, around the world.
The Iranian nuclear agreement is a decisive refutation of the War Party’s hoary claim that Iran is hell-bent upon obtaining nuclear weapons. This deafening but untruthful narrative was long ago debunked by the 2007 National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). These authoritative findings were issued by the nation’s 16 top intelligence agencies in November 2007, and they held that what had possibly been a small-scale Iranian weapons research effort was abandoned in 2003 and never restarted. That NIE verdict has been reiterated several times since then.
Not surprisingly, it was also these NIE findings that stopped cold in its tracks George Bush’s plan to bomb the alleged Iranian nuclear sites in late 2007. In his memoirs the Great Decider admitted that it would have been hard to explain to the American public why he was launching another war to eliminate an alleged Iranian WMD threat when his own intelligence agencies had just concluded it did not even exist!
Indeed, it was the same crowd of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Feith et.al. which had falsified the WMD claims against Saddam Hussein that had been beating the war drums so loudly about the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program.
And, as it has turned out, they had resorted to the same kind of falsified intelligence which the first time around had generated the infamous “curveball” pictures of biological weapons labs that were actually pasturized milk plants. This time it was a bunch of falsified drawings and plans mysteriously found on a laptop computer that had been turned over by a Iranian dissident group called the MEK, which, ironically, had long been allied with Saddam Hussein and had been on the State Department terrorist list from 1997 to 2012.
So it needs to be shouted from the rafters at the outset that all the arm-waving and screeching against this deal by the GOP war-mongers and the Israeli lobby is grounded in a Big Lie. The whole Iran-is-after-the-bomb narrative is just WMD 2.0.
Indeed, the War Party has been so shrill and unrelenting in promulgating this trumped-up story that the other side of the equation is hardly known to the American public. Namely, that the overwhelming weight of the evidence over more than three decades—–including information obtained by the IAEA during the course of extensive investigations—-is that Iran’s primary aim has been to obtain enrichment capacity for its civilian reactors.
In fact, when an incipient weapons research program was shutdown in 2003, the Ayatollah Khamenei took a decisive step to remove all doubt inside the Iranian government. He issued a fatwa (ban) against the possession of nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic.
This anti-WMD edict was in keeping with a similar fatwa against biological and chemical weapons issued by his predecessor, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in the midst of Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. At the time, Saddam was dropping these horrific weapons on Iranian battle forces—-some of them barely armed teenage boys—- with the spotting help of CIA tracking satellites and the concurrence of Washington.
Thus, the real history demonstrates an Iranian posture that is wholly contrary to the War Party’s endless blizzard of false charges about its quest for nukes. However benighted and medieval its religious views, the theocracy which rules Iran does not consist of demented war mongers. In the heat of battle they were willing to sacrifice their own forces rather than violate their religious scruples to counter Saddam’s WMDs.
At the end of the day, the War Party’s narrative is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
So in the context of all of that history we now have a solemn international agreement that’s designed to insure that the nuclear weapons program that the CIA has never found and that the Iranians say they never had and that their Supreme Leader has forbidden—does, in fact, never happen.
That’s not only a very good thing; it also an overwhelmingly sure thing by the light of any rational analysis.
After all, why would a nation purportedly motivated by a fiendish desire to get the bomb ever agree to a network of restrictions, controls, roadblocks and handcuffs from which not even Houdini could escape? All of this containment machinery would keep the Iranian regime many steps—nay, many miles— removed from anything even remotely resembling an A-bomb capability.
In fact, it’s actually designed to virtually suffocate even the civilian nuclear industry that Iran has proclaimed to be its purpose all along. And, needless to say, that is something which it is entitled to—including uranium enrichment capabilities— as one of the 193 signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter, of course, is most definitely a non-exclusive club—-since it includes every nation on the planet Earth except India, Pakistan, South Sudan and Israel.
Under any rational assessment of the agreement, therefore, suffocation of its incipient civilian nuclear power industry is exactly what Iran has embraced. It has done so in the name of ending the wholly unnecessary confrontation with the West over its mythical nuclear weapons program and to thereby gain relief from the sadistic regime of sanctions that have so drastically and unfairly punished its 77 million innocent citizens.
To wit, Iran will eliminate 98% of its existing stockpile of mostly low-enriched uranium and convert the limited number of centrifuges at its one truly hardened site (Fordow) to non-uranium research activities. Further, it will cut the number of centrifuges at its large Natanz facility from 20,000 to 5,060 units, and this absolutely minimal capacity will be restricted to three-decade old slow, inefficient first generation technology. Not even research on more advanced enrichment technologies may be undertaken for the next eight years.
Moreover, the centrifuges that it will be permitted to operate will be restricted to enriching uranium to only 3.67% purity, meaning that Iran will not be remotely capable of producing the 90% purity material needed for bomb making.
It will also dismantle the core of its heavy water reactor at Arak, which would produce plutonium as a by-product. Although such waste material cannot be used to make a bomb without a reprocessing plant which Iran does not have and could not likely get, Iran has agreed to replace the current core with an alternative non-weapons capable reactor technology.
Finally, wrapped around all of these limited capacities for civilian enrichment will be a cradle-to-grave inspection regime covering its entire nuclear fuel cycle. This will put inspectors on the ground and sophisticated monitoring equipment in place at its uranium mines, milling plants, storage and transportation facilities, processing plants, centrifuge operations, civilian reactors, waste handling and processing stations and all the supporting services and equipment supply and maintenance activities along the entire route.
In short, Iran has agreed to put what will be a tiny civilian nuclear power and uranium enrichment industry into a wholly transparent fishbowl. The inspection and monitoring system will be so exhaustive and intrusive that it will resemble the lockdown in a high security Federal prison; and, in fact, will make Iran’s entire sovereign territory subject to inspection demands “anytime and anywhere-“—-including its military facilities.
Yes, in the case of suspected sites not on the primary inspection system it will require a request by the international inspectors. And if the Iranian authorities say no, it will go to a resolution panel where the majority of the members will represent the US and the other western signatories to the agreement. But the key thing is all of this must happen within 24 days.
Can any one in their right mind really believe that Iran could build an illicit facility with tens of thousands of unauthorized centrifuges and all the rest of the bomb cycle equipment that would be required to stage a “break-out”, and that this could first escape US intelligence satellite discovery; and then, if found out, be dismantled and have every trace removed within 24 days?
Here’s the thing, folks. The fulminations of Senator Lindsay Graham and the rest of the GOP War Party, along with the hysterical bellowing of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his legions of lobbyists on the Potomac, have nothing to do with the actual nation of Iran and the actual leaders who signed the agreement. The War Party is attacking a giant fiction and tissue of lies of its own-making—-an untruthful narrative that is grounded in pure politics, not the security interests of the citizens of either America or Israel.
Indeed, the three decade long demonization of Iran has served one over-arching purpose. Namely, it enabled both branches of the War Party to conjure up a fearsome enemy, thereby justifying aggressive policies that call for a constant state of war and military mobilization.
When the cold-war officially ended in 1991, the Cheney crowd in the George H.W. Bush White House feared the kind of drastic demobilization of the US military-industrial complex that was warranted by the suddenly more pacific strategic environment. In response, they developed an anti-Iranian doctrine that was explicitly described as a way of keeping defense spending at high cold war levels.
And the narrative they developed to this end is one of the more egregious Big Lies ever to come out of the Beltway. It puts you in mind of the young boy who killed his parents, and then threw himself on the mercy of the courts on the grounds that he was an orphan!
To wit, during the 1980s the neocons in the Reagan Administration issued their own fatwa again the Islamic Republic based on its open hostility to America—-an enmity grounded in Washington’s 25-year support for the tyrannical and illegitimate regime of the Shah.
That they had a case is beyond doubt. The open US archives now prove that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and put the utterly unsuited and megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Shah on the peacock throne to rule as a puppet in behalf of US security and oil interests.
During the subsequent decades the Shah not only massively and baldly plundered the wealth of the Persian nation; with the help of the CIA and US military, he also created a brutal secret police force known as the Savak. The latter made the East German Stasi look civilized by comparison.
All elements of Iranian society including universities, labor unions, businesses, civic organizations, peasant farmers and many more were subjected to intense surveillance by the Savak agents and paid informants. As one critic described it:
Over the years, Savak became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest, detain, brutally interrogate and torture suspected people indefinitely. Savak operated its own prisons in Tehran, such as Qezel-Qalaeh and Evin facilities and many suspected places throughout the country as well. Many of those activities were carried out without any institutional checks.
Ironically, among his many grandiose follies, the Shah embarked on a massive civilian nuclear power campaign in the 1970s, which envisioned literally paving the Iranian landscape with dozens of nuclear power plants. He would use Iran’s surging oil revenues after 1973 to buy all the equipment required from Western companies—– and also fuel cycle support services such as uranium enrichment——in order to provide his kingdom with cheap power for centuries.
At the time of the Revolution, the first of these plants at Bushehr was nearly complete, but the whole grandiose project was put on hold amidst the turmoil of the new regime and the onset of Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in September 1980. As a consequence, a $2 billion deposit languished at the French nuclear agency that had originally obtained it from the Shah to fund a ramp-up of its enrichment capacity to supply his planned battery of reactors.
In 1983 the new Iranian regime decided to complete the Bushehr power plant and some additional elements of the Shah’s grand plan. But when they attempted to reactivate the French enrichment services contract and buy necessary power plant equipment from the original German suppliers they were stopped cold by Washington. And when the tried to get their $2 billion deposit back, they were curtly denied that, too.
To make a long story short, the entire subsequent history of off again/on again efforts by the Iranians to purchase dual use equipment and components on the international market, often from black market sources like Pakistan, was in response to Washington’s relentless efforts to block its legitimate rights as a signatory to the NPT to complete some parts of the Shah’s civilian nuclear project.
Needless to say, it did not take much effort by the neocon “regime change” fanatics which inhabited the national security machinery after the 2000 election to spin every attempt by Iran to purchase even a lowly pump or pipe fitting as evidence of a secret campaign to get the bomb. The exaggerations, lies, distortions and fear-mongering which came out of this neocon campaign are truly disgusting.
In that context, it only required one more giant lie to complete the demonization of the Iranian government. That is the utterly false claim that Iran is an aggressive would be hegemon that is a fount of terrorism and is dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, among other treacherous purposes.
That giant lie was almost single-handedly fashioned by Bibi Netanyahu and his coterie of power-hungry henchman after the mid-1990s. Indeed, the false claim that Iran posses an “existential threat” to Israel is a product of the pure red meat domestic Israeli politics that have kept Bibi in power for much of the last two decades.
But the truth is Iran is no better or worse than any of the other major powers in the Middle East. In many ways it is far less of a threat to regional peace and stability than the military butchers who now run Egypt on $1.5 billion per year of US aid. And it is surely no worse than the corpulent tyrants who squander the massive oil resources of Saudi Arabia in pursuit of unspeakable opulence and decadence to the detriment of the 27 million citizens which are not part of the regime, and who one day may well reach the point of revolt. And when it comes to the support of terrorism, the Saudis have funded more jihadists and terrorists throughout the region than Iran ever even imagined.
In this context, the War Party’s bloviation about Iran’s leadership of the so-called Shiite Crescent is especially obnoxious. Yes, the Iranians support the Assad government in Syria, but that’s a long-standing alliance that goes back to his father’s era and is rooted in the historic confessional politics of the Islamic world.
The Assad regime is Alawite, a branch of the Shiite, and despite the regime’s brutality, it has been a bulwark of protection for all of Syria’s minority sects, including Christians, against a majority-Sunni ethnic cleansing. The latter would surely occur if the Saudi supported rebels, led by ISIS, were ever to take power.
Likewise, the fact that the government of the broken state of Iraq——an artificial, non-sustainable 1916 concoction of two stripped pants European diplomats (Messrs. Sykes and Picot of the British and French foreign offices, respectively)——–is now aligned with Iran is also a result of confessional politics and geo-economic propinquity.
For all practical purposes, the Kurds of the northeast have declared their independence and the western Sunni lands of the upper Euphrates have been conquered by ISIS with American weapons dropped in place by the hapless $25 billion Iraqi army minted by Washington’s departing proconsuls. Accordingly, what is left of Iraq is a population that is overwhelmingly Shiite, and which nurses bitter resentments from decades of Sunni repression under Saddam. Why in the world, therefore, wouldn’t they ally with their Shiite neighbor?
Likewise, the claim that Iran is now trying to annex Yemen is pure claptrap. The ancient territory of Yemen has been racked by civil war off and on since the early 1970s. And a major driving force of that conflict has been confessional differences between the Sunni south and the Shiite north.
In more recent times, Washington’s blatant drone war inside Yemen against alleged terrorists and its domination and financing of Yemen’s governments eventually produced the same old outcome. That is, another failed state and an illegitimate government which fled at the 11th hour, leaving another vast cache of American arms and equipment behind.
Accordingly, the Houthis forces now in control of substantial parts of the country are not some kind of advanced guard sent in by Tehran. They are indigenous partisans who share a confessional tie with Iran, but which have actually been armed by the US. And the real invaders in this destructive civil war are the Saudis, whose vicious bombing campaign against civilian populations controlled by the Houthis are outright war crimes if the word has any meaning at all.
Finally, there is the fourth element of the purported Iranian axis—–the Hezbollah controlled Shiite communities of southern Lebanon and the Beka Valley. Like everything else in the Middle East, Hezbollah is a product of historical European imperialism, Islamic confessional politics and the frequently misguided and counter-productive security policies of Israel.
In the first place, Lebanon was not any more a real country than Iraq was when Sykes and Picot laid their straight-edged rulers on a map. The result was a stew of religious and ethnic divisions—-Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Copts, Druse, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Armenians, Jews and countless more—– that made the fashioning of a viable state virtually impossible.
At length, an alliance of Christians and Sunnis gained control of the country, leaving the 40% Shiite population disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged, as well. But it was the inflow of Palestinian refugees in the 1960s and 1970s that eventually upset the balance of sectarian forces and triggered a civil war that essentially lasted from 1975 until the turn of the century.
It also triggered a catastrophically wrong-headed Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, and a subsequent repressive occupation of mostly Shiite territories for the next eighteen years. The alleged purpose of this invasion was to chase the PLO and Yassir Arafat out of the enclave in southern Lebanon that they had established after being driven out of Jordan in 1970.
Eventually Israel succeeded in sending Arafat packing to north Africa, but in the process created a militant, Shiite-based resistance movement that did not even exist in 1982, and which in due course became the strongest single force in Lebanon’s fractured domestic political arrangements. After Israel withdrew in 2000, the then Christian President of the county made abundantly clear that Hezbollah had become a legitimate and respected force within the Lebanese polity, not merely some subversive agent of Tehran:
“For us Lebanese, and I can tell you the majority of Lebanese, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement. If it wasn’t for them, we couldn’t have liberated our land. And because of that, we have big esteem for the Hezbollah movement.”[
So, yes, Hezbollah is an integral component of the Shiite Crescent and its confessional and political alignment with Tehran is entirely plausible. But that arrangement—-however uncomfortable for Israel—–does not represent Iranian aggression on Israel’s northern border. Instead, it’s actually the blowback from the stubborn refusal of Israeli governments—–especially the rightwing Likud governments of modern times—–to deal constructively with the Palestinian question.
In lieu of a two-state solution in the territory of Palestine, therefore, Israeli policy has produced a chronic state of war with nearly half the Lebanese population represented by Hezbollah. The latter is surely no agency of peaceful governance and has committed its share of atrocities. But the point at hand is that given the last 35 years of history and Israeli policy, Hezbollah would exist as a menacing force on its northern border even if the Shah or his heir was still on the Peacock Throne.
And that goes to the heart of Netanyahu’s Big Lie. His relentless claim that Iran is out to annihilate Israel and by implication liquidate its Jewish population is a preposterous distortion and exaggeration of Iran’s policy, as articulated by its Supreme Leader himself.
The real issue is the Palestinian question and the gross injustices that the Palestinian diaspora outside of Israel’s current borders, and the occupied populations inside the massive settler communities of the West Bank, have suffered for decades. But Iran does not propose to seek redress for the Palestinians by dropping nuclear bombs on Israel or sending in its own feeble military or even hordes of hired terrorists.
No, the Ayatollah Khamenei has proposed to vote the present sectarian state of Israel out of existence by referendum, not A-bombs!
In one of his most recent pronouncements on the topic in March 2012, in fact, he said the following during a Friday prayer sermon calling for a multi-religious secular state in Palestine:
Holding a referendum in Palestine among the Palestinians, and all those that became refugees—if, of course, they want to return to Palestine—is a rational solution [to the problem]. Those [Palestinians], who live in Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere, can return home. I am not advocating forcible return of anybody. Then, [Palestinians should] hold a referendum among these who were living there before 1948, when the illegitimate state of Israel was formed, whether Muslim, or Jew or Christian, which will then decide the type of government that must be formed there. This is democracy. Why is democracy good for others, but not for the Palestinians? Why it is that all the people of the world can decide their own fate, but not the Palestinians? There is no doubt that the present regime [Israel] took over through deception, trickery, and force. Thus, the people there have an imposed regime. Fine! Let the people of Palestine hold a referendum to choose the type of the government that they want for themselves. That regime and that government should form and then decide what to do with the people who moved there after 1948. Whatever decision it made, that would also be the fruit of people’s vote, as well as democracy, respect for human rights, and in line with the world’s present rationale. This is a good solution that must be implemented.
Needless to say, the wizened old man who rules Iran for the time being has no right or authority to call for a referendum among peoples outside his own borders. But that he preaches the doctrine of a secular state solution that was accepted by most of the civilized world as a plausible answer to the Palestinian question only 40 years ago is surely not evidence that Iran is led by fiendish men who plan another holocaust.
So what is at stake here is of truly epochal importance. The Iranians have signed the agreement in good faith and have locked-up any potential for development of a nuclear weapon that they do not want, and have thrown away the key.
Look at the jubilation on the streets of Iran today owing to the prospect that the West’s brutal sanctions will be lifted, and that their country now has a pathway back into the community of nations. Once prosperity and self-respect return to the ancient land of Persia—–not this Ayatollah nor any other will ever be in a position to do anything more harmful to Israel than what is embodied in the quoted paragraph above. That is, preach vainly about a history that might have been.
In the interim, Israel ought to thank its lucky stars that two flawed but inspired politicians—Barack Obama of the US and Hassan Rouhani of Iran—–found it possible to transcend 30 years of lies and enmities on both sides in order to give peace a chance.
More importantly, as Iran comes back into the community of nations and re- enters global commerce it will give the citizens of Israel an opportunity to see that they have been betrayed and jeopardized by the terrible lies, bullying, megalomania and insuperable will to power of Bibi Netanyahu.
Their path to a better, safer future does not lie in the defeat of this agreement on the floor of the US Congress; it lies in a resounding defeat of Netanyahu government the very next time they have the chance to go to the polls.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/07/david-stockman/all-hail-barack-obama/
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