Freedom and Democracy is Dying

Robert Fisk

30 December 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2112555.e...

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.

"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.

I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners.

I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.

It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.

But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".

When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought. So many crimes avenged.

But we will have got away with it.

by Paul Craig Roberts - December 29, 2006

Find this article at: http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=10239

 

In her historical mystery, The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey (a pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh), has Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, while confined to his hospital bed, solve the 15th century murder of the two York princes in the Tower of London. The princes were murdered by Henry VII, and the crime was blamed on Richard III in order to justify the upstart Tudor’s violent seizure of the English throne.

Tey makes the point that if a 20th century mystery writer can detect the truth about a 15th century murder, historians have no excuse to persist in writing in school textbooks that Richard murdered his nephews. British historians remained loyal to the Tudor propaganda long after the Tudors were no longer around to be feared or served.

At the beginning of the scientific era, men had the hope that the ability to discover truth would free mankind from superstition, dogma, and the service of power. The belief in truth was powerful. Truth would deliver justice and bring an end to status-based privileges and the falsehoods propagated by privilege. The faith in truth was short-lived. Today propaganda is everywhere in the ascendency.

In the panoply of left-wing propaganda about Pinochet, it is nowhere mentioned that Allende was appointed president of Chile by the Chilean congress, which three years later called on Chile’s military to oust Allende for his totalitarian ways. Instead, Allende is portrayed as a "popularly elected president who was overthrown by a tyrant."

Every week another apologist for President Bush compares "Bush’s fight for Iraqi freedom" to Abraham Lincoln’s "fight to free the slaves." The American civil war was not fought to "free the slaves," as Thomas DiLorenzo and other scholars have thoroughly documented, any more than the purpose of Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq was to "bring freedom to Iraqis." The freedom excuse was invented after it became impossible to maintain the fictions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connections to Osama bin Laden. Bush has yet to tell the real reason he invaded Iraq.

In the US today, demonization and propaganda substitute for facts and analysis. Professors and journalists are quick to lend their names and voices to the untruths that rule our lives. Just as Hitler’s foreign policy was based in propaganda, so is Bush’s and Blair’s.

The success of propaganda enhances government’s illusion that it has a monopoly on truth. It is the monopoly on truth that gives the Bush regime the right to define the "Iran problem," the "Syria problem," the "Lebanon problem," and the "Korea problem" and to apply coercion in place of understanding and negotiation.

Secure in its possession of truth, the Bush administration refuses to talk to the enemies it has manufactured. It will only fight them.

When scholars, such as John Walt and Stephen Mearsheimer, or President Jimmy Carter, who has tried harder than anyone else to achieve Arab-Israeli peace, point out that Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians is a cause of Middle East turmoil, they are immediately denounced as anti-Semites. Columnists and academics who know nothing about the Middle East or its troubles nevertheless know what they are supposed to say whenever anyone mentions Israel in any critical context. And they have no compunction about saying it, the truth be damned.

Without commitment to truth, science, justice, and debate falter and disappear.

The belief in truth is fading from our society. It is unclear that scientists themselves any longer believe in truth or the ability to discover it.

The discovery of truth is no longer the purpose of our criminal justice system. Once prosecutors believed that it was better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent person to be wrongfully convicted. Today prosecutors believe in high conviction rates to justify their budgets and re-election.

In the past police solved crimes. Today they round up suspects and pressure them.

There was no debate in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and none today in the US. Many Americans, who imagine themselves to be conservatives even though they have never read, nor could they identify, a conservative writer, equate truth-telling with hatred of America. They are of Bush’s mindset: "you are with us or against us." Bush supporters respond to factual articles about Iraq and the rending of the US Constitution by suggesting that as the writer hates America so much, he should move to Cuba or China.

In America today each faction’s "truths" are defined by the faction’s dogma or ideology. Each faction bans factual analysis that it doesn’t want to hear. This is as true within the universities as it is at political rallies. The old liberal notion that "we shall follow the truth wherever it may lead" has long departed from America. Think tanks reflect the views of the donors. Studies are no longer independent of their financing. In America, truth has become partisan.

All societies have elements of myth, untruths that nevertheless serve to unite a people. But many myths serve as camouflage for evil. One of the greatest myths is that "GIs have died for our freedom." GIs have died for American empire, for the American elite’s commitment to England, and for the military-industrial complex’s profits. Some may have died in Korea for the freedom of South Koreans, and some may have died trying to save South Vietnamese from the North Vietnamese communists. But it is hogwash that GIs died for our freedom.

There was no prospect of North Korea attacking America in the 1950s or Vietnam attacking America in the 1960s and none today. The Nazis were defeated by Russia before US troops landed in Europe. The US never faced any threat of invasion from Germany, Italy, or Japan.

America’s wars have created hysteria that endanger our freedom. Abraham Lincoln shut down the freedom of the press and arrested editors and state legislators. Woodrow Wilson arrested war critics. Franklin Roosevelt interred American citizens of Japanese descent. George W. Bush has destroyed most of the Bill of Rights. In 2006 Congress appropriated funds for building concentration camps in the US.

Recently, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, said that freedom of speech is inconsistent with "the war on terror." If it takes a police state to fight terror, the country is lost even if Muslim terrorists are defeated. Americans have far more to fear from a homeland police state than from terrorists.

The vast majority of the world’s terrorists are the recent creations of Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and brutality toward the Palestinians. Bush is simultaneously creating terrorists and a police state. It serves no one but the police to make their power unaccountable.

On December 26 Jeff Cohen explained on Truthout how war propaganda took over TV news and demonized everyone who spoke the truth about Iraq, while pushing war fever to a frenzy. Fox "News" was the worst with its ranks of generals and colonels who sold their integrity for dollars and TV exposure. One of Fox’s loudest voices for war was a retired general who sat on the board of a military contractor.

When the Clinton administration allowed the media concentration in the 1990s, the independence of the American media was destroyed. Today there are a few large conglomerates whose values depend on broadcast licenses from the government. The conglomerates are run by corporate executives who are not journalists and whose eyes are on advertising revenues. They publish and broadcast what is safe. These conglomerates will take no risks in behalf of free speech or truth.

The challenges that America faces are not terrorism and oil supply. The challenges that we face are the police state that Bush has created and the disrespect for truth that is endemic in government, the universities, and the media. The US has entered a dark age of dogmas and unaccountable power.

by Jacob G. Hornberger, December 27, 2006

Soldiers who join the military voluntarily sign a very unusual contract with the federal government. It is a contract that effectively obligates the soldier to go anywhere in the world on orders of the president and kill people as part of an invasion force against other countries. It doesn’t matter whether the intended victims deserve to die or not. That issue is irrelevant as far as the soldier is concerned. His job is not to question why people he is ordered to kill should be killed; his job is simply to invade and carry out the killing, no questions asked.

 

For the rest of this excellent article, click here... 

Robert Fisk

23 December 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2097774.e...

Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise.

I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".

Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".

Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".

Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".

But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.

But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his book? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book.

At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report - which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate title - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".

The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freedman of The New York Times.

But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.

I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!

Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts188.html

Friday, December 22, 2006

Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time from our harried lives to give them thought.

The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.

In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice.

This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations.

The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.

In recent decades we have begun losing sight of the historic achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools, colleges and universities. The voices that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by "political correctness." Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from public life. Diversity is becoming the consuming value and is dismantling the culture.

There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.

All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard. One hundred million people were exterminated by National Socialists in Germany and by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority.

Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as "unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything."

Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.

By Robert Parry

December 17, 2006

Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," a violent capture-and-escape movie set 500 years ago in the territory of a fictional Mayan city-state, ends ironically when European explorers arrive and interrupt the final bloody chase.

The surprise appearance of the Europeans was good news for Gibson's hero – distracting his last pursuers – but, as history tells us, the arrival of the Europeans actually escalated the New World's violence, bringing a more mechanized form of slaughter that devastated the Mayas and other native populations.

An even greater irony, however, may be that the U.S. media has done a better job separating fact from fiction about Gibson's movie than in explaining to Americans how some of their most admired modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, were implicated in a more recent genocide against Mayan tribes in Central America. 

 Click here for the rest of the article...

The Official Government Version of 9-11 Is Just Another Lie In A Whole Litany of Lies But Many People Believe It. Why?

By Douglas Herman
12-12-6

"I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent." -- John Calvin

Liberals and conservatives make strange bedfellows, especially when it comes to uncovering the truth about 911. Curious indeed: some of the most outspoken, liberal, leftwing opponents of the Bush crime spree share the same, uncritical acceptance of 911 events as rabid, rightwing conservatives.

Below I have listed ten "Great Lies" of the Bush regime. These are all verified, bald-faced lies. Even staunch Bush defenders might have a difficult time defending these documented lies. Yet when it comes to the official government version of 911 events, the Left and Right lock hands in what can only be described as an unexplainable, aberrant disorder.

"Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society," said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Pity Emerson never knew the neocons. In the interest of fairness, I listed some pretty flagrant lies, in no particular order. Ironically, one of the lies turns out to be the truest thing GWB ever uttered.

Great Lie #1. Bush as Uniter.

"I'm a uniter, not a divider....I am someone who is a uniter, not a divider. I don't believe in group thought, pitting one group of people against another." -GW Bush, Nov 22, 1999

Great Lie #2. Nation-building.

"I don't think our troops should be used for what's called nation building." -GW Bush, 2000 (In other words, our troops should be used for nation destroying).

Great Lie #3. Hurricane Relief.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"  (Praise for FEMA Director, Michael Brown, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina).

 

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." -President Bush, on Good Morning America, Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina and months after the National Geographic featured an exact scenario of disastrous events.

Great Lie #4. The Capture of Osama Bin Laden.

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."  -GW Bush, Sept 13, 2001

"So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him...to be honest with you." - GW Bush, March 13, 2002

"I don't know where [Osama bin Laden] is and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."  -GW Bush, March 13, 2003

"Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations." -GW Bush, Oct 13, 2004

Great Lie #5. Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction....We know Saddam has them...We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories...and we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, we found them."

Great Lie #6. Mission Accomplished

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."

"The Mission Accomplished sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished." -GW Bush, News Conference, 10/28/03. In fact, the banner was produced by White House personnel.

Great Lie #7. We Don't Torture.

"There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq...It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of Americ and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective." -GW Bush, Sept 15, 2006

Great Lie #8. Budget Deficit.

"Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term." ---GW Bush, State of the Union, 2002. In Fact: The deficit would become the largest in history and will exceed $400 Billion annually for the next ten years.

Great Lie #9. Post--911 Attack Speech.

"The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice...This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace."

Great Lie #10 (The Greatest Lie of Them ALL).

Solemn Oath To Uphold The US Constitution.

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." -GW Bush, Being sworn into office, Jan. 20, 2001

After listing the litany of lies above (only a partial listing of lies in the last six years), one cannot help but conclude: The government of George W. Bush, and everyone connected with it, lies ALL THE TIME, as standard operating procedure.

I am reminded of what that great Sioux leader, Red Cloud said: "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they kept only one: they promised to take our land and they took it." Can someone, anyone, perhaps some 911 debunker, Alexander Cockburn or Sean Hannity for example, point to a single honest remark or a single honest person in the administration? And if not, then why should any reasonable person believe a commission appointed by the administration, a cabal of liars?

Logically then, one could conclude, that anyone who believes the official version of 911 events, the Bush government version of events, whether liberal or conservative, prefers a litany of unbelievable lies to the harsh truth. Since nothing about 911 rings true, the acceptance of the monstrous lie (told by liars) appears most perplexing when one considers not a single other lie listed above has ever been proven truthful (Except the nation-building/ nation-destroying treachery which turned out to be true).

Thus one could rightly say, anyone who believes 911 occurred exactly as the government-sanctioned, Bush--appointed, Kean Commission described it, is either a damn fool, a pathetic coward, an indoctrinated dupe, or an ignorant ass. Truthfully, no other description suffices.

Douglas Herman writes for Rense regularly. Email me if YOU can recall a single honest or truthful remark made by BushCo in the last six years. Thanks-- douglasherman7@yahoo.com

The Repeatedly Re-Elected Autocrat

By Steve Rendall

Original Source: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3009

Hugo Chávez never had a chance with the U.S. press. Shortly after his first electoral victory in 1998, New York Times Latin America reporter Larry Rohter (12/20/98) summed up his victory thusly:

All across Latin America, presidents and party leaders are looking over their shoulders. With his landslide victory in Venezuela’s presidential election on December 6, Hugo Chávez has revived an all-too-familiar specter that the region’s ruling elite thought they had safely interred: that of the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo.

Notwithstanding that interring caudillos has not been a consuming passion of Latin America’s ruling elite (or U.S. policy makers), it is fitting that the Times reporter sided with that elite. A few years later, in April 2002, following Chávez’s re-election by an even greater margin, Times editors cheered a coup against Chávez by Venezuelan elites (Extra! Update, 6/02), declaring in Orwellian fashion that thanks to the overthrow of the elected president, “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.”

For Pedro Carmona—the man who took power in Chávez’s brief absence, declaring an actual dictatorship by dismissing the Venezuelan legislature, Supreme Court and other democratic institutions—Times editors had much nicer language, calling the former head of Venezuela’s chamber of commerce “a respected business leader.”

Following Chávez’s return to office a few days later, Times editors issued a grudging reappraisal of their coup endorsement (Extra! Update!, 6/02). Still insisting that Chávez was “a divisive and demagogic leader,” the editors averred that the forcible removal of a democratically elected leader “is never something to cheer.”

As if this pro-opposition bias were not enough, in January 2003 the Times was forced to dismiss one of its Venezuela reporters, a Venezuelan national named Francisco Toro, when it was revealed that Toro was an anti-Chávez activist (FAIR Action Alert, 6/6/03).

The Times anti-Chávez campaign was manifest in a recent book review (9/17/06) of Nikolas Kozloff’s Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the United States, in which Times business columnist Roger Lowenstein rebuked the author for praising the Chávez government, explaining that Chávez “has militarized the government, emasculated the country’s courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela’s once-democratic institutions.” But Lowenstein failed to provide much evidence for his charges—a frequent characteristic of Chávez bashing—or to note that similar charges can be made against other governments, including one much closer to home.

Calling names

The New York Times is not alone. A Newsweek column (11/7/05) asserted that Venezuela has turned to “destructive populism” under Chávez, while a news report in the magazine (10/31/05) cited the “increasingly authoritarian tilt of the Chávez regime, which has packed the Venezuelan judiciary with pliable magistrates and enacted legislation curtailing press freedoms.” In his May 2006 Atlantic profile, New Republic editor Franklin Foer complained that under Chávez’s presidency Venezuela had taken an “anti-democratic turn.”

The Washington Post’s news pages have relentlessly criticized Chávez in news stories, calling him “autocratic” (8/12/04) and “authoritarian” (8/7/06). However, a much more ferocious campaign is waged against Chávez on the Post’s editorial and op-ed pages. In one column after another, the Post’s opinion pages have charged him with assaulting democracy and stifling dissent. In one column (10/16/06), deputy editorial editor Jackson Diehl called Chávez an “autocratic demagogue” and accused him of “dismantl[ing] Venezuela’s democracy.” Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt (12/26/05) explained that Chávez had “consolidated one-party rule and moved to export his brand of populist autocracy to neighboring nations.”

Even putative liberal commentators have joined the media chorus. On the O’Reilly Factor (12/5/05), Fox News contributor and NPR reporter Juan Williams said of Venezuela, “What you’re seeing there is really communism.” In September, when Democratic operatives Paul Begala and James Carville appeared on New York City public radio station WNYC (9/25/06), Begala told host Brian Lehrer that Chávez was “an autocrat, not a democrat,” and said he had “a terrible human rights record.” Carville told Lehrer, “I’ve worked in Venezuela and I would be very reluctant to call Chávez a democrat.” What Carville didn’t say was that he worked in Venezuela as an advisor to Venezuelan opposition groups leading an economically devastating strike by managers of the national oil company in an effort to destabilize the government (Washington Post, 1/20/03).

Is Venezuela undemocratic? And is Hugo Chávez an autocrat who has consolidated one-party rule? An examination of Venezuelan elections, governing institutions and public opinion indicates otherwise.

Certified elections

Venezuela has held half-a-dozen major elections for national offices and issues since 1998, the year of Chávez’s first presidential victory. That election saw Chávez beating his nearest rival by 16 percentage points, 56 percent to 40 percent, in a vote that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called “a remarkable demonstration of democracy in its purest form.” (Chicago Tribune, 12/8/98.) In 2000, in a re-election required by the new Venezuelan constitution, Chávez increased his winning margin, 60 percent to 38 percent. In each case the elections were monitored and certified by a variety of observers including the Organization of American States, the European Union and the Carter Center.

A 1999 referendum backed by Chávez, which called for the convening of a constituent assembly to draft a new Venezuelan constitution, passed with 72 percent of the vote, in an election likewise certified by international observers. The resulting constitution, which strengthened the office of the president, also set up clear checks and balances between five branches of government, including a provision for a recall vote to remove the president after the mid-point in a presidential term was reached. (See box: “Unseparate and Unequal?”)

This provision was invoked in 2004 when the opposition amassed the required signatures over challenges by the Chávez government and a recall was held in August. Despite the U.S. bankrolling some of the opposition groups organizing the recall through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the secretive Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), Chávez retained his office with 58 percent of the vote (Christian Science Monitor, 2/6/06).*

Though the OAS and Carter Center certified the recall referendum as fair, some opposition groups, like the anti-Chávez, NED-funded Sumate, charged (and continue to charge) a fraudulent vote tally. Such charges have been largely dismissed by an otherwise anti-Chávez U.S. press, but Sumate has managed to convince Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl of the righteousness of its cause. More than a year after the failed referendum (4/10/06), Diehl wrote favorably of “the election-monitoring group Sumate, which has meticulously documented Chávez’s manipulation of the electoral system.”

Sumate is not an “election-monitoring group,” but a prominent political opposition group that spearheaded the recall. The group’s co-founder, María Corina Machado, was a coup supporter who signed the 2002 Carmona Decree that suspended Venezuela’s democracy. No actual election monitoring group challenged the referendum’s official results (Miami Herald, 7/8/05).

A legislative election in December 2005 ended with a twist when four opposition parties decided to withdraw their candidates, allowing Chávez allies to win virtually all the seats. Not that they would have done well had they stayed in the race. As Venezuela political observer and Chávez critic Alberto Garrido told the New York Times (12/5/05), “Chávez would have annihilated them anyway.’’ The predictable dominance of a Chávez-aligned coalition in the legislature was followed by a column by Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt (12/26/05) that charged Chávez had “consolidated one-party rule.”

Participatory democracy

Free elections are a necessary condition for democracy, but aren’t sufficient evidence to ensure that a functioning democracy is in place. Actual democracy depends on how elected institutions function and on day-to-day citizen involvement in between elections.

During his tenure, Chávez has tried to implement an agenda he has alternately called “21st century socialism” and “capitalism with a human face,” which he says takes into account socialism’s past failures. But rumors of communism in Venezuela are greatly exaggerated. The private sector has actually grown during his presidency. According to the Associated Press (7/7/06), Venezuelan central bank statistics show “the private sector accounted for more of the economy last year, 62.5 percent of gross domestic product, than when [Chávez] was elected in 1998, when it stood at 59.3 percent.”

This doesn’t mean Chávez isn’t a strong believer in the public sector and a government supported cooperative sector, particularly when it comes to programs for the poor. He has created a series of programs dubbed “missions” to fight poverty, malnutrition, disease, illiteracy and other pressing social problems. In many cases, the administration, budgeting and other decision-making for these programs have been delegated to neighborhood councils located in Venezuela’s poor neighborhoods. Even New Republic editor Franklin Foer (Atlantic, 5/06) conceded the impact of the missions:

Chavista investments in the slums are obvious. For the first time, blighted neighborhoods have government-subsidized grocery stores, access to the Internet, and doctors tending to their children. These improvements have translated into palpable optimism. Some polls show that Venezuelans are more sanguine about their economic future than Canadians or Americans.

Charges that Chávez has “militarized” the Venezuelan government (New York Times, 9/17/06) have their origins in an early Chávez government program. In 1999, when a recession left Venezuela short of money to fund poverty programs, Chávez implemented “Plan Bolívar 2000,” under which the underutilized military was ordered to construct housing, build roads and carry out mass vaccination drives—hardly what one imagines upon hearing warnings of government militarization.

Venezuela’s aggressive anti-poverty programs and “participatory democracy” have energized the poor and given them a stake in the country’s fortunes. By the democratic measure of citizen involvement, Venezuela is doing rather better than many democracies. And Venezuelans seem to agree; a 2005 Latinobarometro poll surveying opinion in 18 Latin American countries found Venezuelans near the top in their preference for democracy over other forms of government, and in satisfaction with how their democracy is functioning. The poll found Venezuelans considered their country “totally democratic” at a higher percentage than in any other nation in Latin America.

The NED has given $2.9 million in “pro-democracy” grants to Venezuelan groups since 2002; the more secretive OTI, a branch of USAID whose website says it works to “support U.S. foreign policy objectives,” has spent over $26 million in Venezuela to “strengthen democratic institutions” since 2002 (AP, 8/27/06).

by Jacob G. Hornberger

December 1, 2006

Original Source: http://www.fff.org/comment/com0612a.asp 

Amidst all the comparisons of the Vietnam War with the occupation of Iraq, people seem to be ignoring an important question: Why not invade Vietnam too?

After all, everyone knows that Vietnam is not a democracy. In fact, unlike Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime in Iraq, the Vietnam dictatorship is communist, and as U.S. officials reminded us throughout the Vietnam War, communists are committed to burying America. Moreover, let’s not forget that the Vietnamese communists killed almost 60,000 American men — that is, many more Americans than Saddam ever killed and, in fact, 20 times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.

Wouldn’t an invasion of Vietnam not only spread democracy in that country but also avenge the deaths of tens of thousands of American men?

So why was President Bush recently visiting Vietnam and shaking hands with its communist dictators instead of leading a U.S. invasion force into Vietnam in his capacity as commander in chief?

By shaking hands and partying with the Vietnamese communist dictators, Bush was implicitly conceding that the issue of regime change in Vietnam properly lies with the Vietnamese people, not with the U.S. government. By his actions, he was saying that the U.S. government would have no more right to invade Vietnam and liberate the Vietnamese people than the Vietnamese government would have to invade the United States to liberate the American people. Regime change — whether through the ballot box or through violent revolution — properly lies with the citizenry of each particular country, not with foreign governments, especially since the price of such regime change is oftentimes extraordinarily high in terms of death and destruction, as the people of Iraq have involuntarily discovered.

Bush’s refusal to invade Vietnam is not much different from how U.S. presidents treated Eastern Europe during the Cold War. As miserable as the citizens of Eastern Europe were after U.S. officials delivered them into the clutches of the Soviet communists at the end of World War II, the issue of violent regime change properly lay with the Eastern Europeans, not with the U.S. government. They chose peaceful means, even though it took almost half a century to throw off the shackles of Soviet tyranny. Who is to say that Eastern Europeans would have been better off with a U.S. invasion that would have killed hundreds of thousands of them and left Eastern Europe a wasteland?

Why did Bush invade Iraq rather than travel to Baghdad and shake hands with Saddam, as U.S. envoy Donald Rumsfeld did during the 1980s on behalf of the U.S. government, and as Bush himself recently did with the Vietnamese communist dictators?

The answer lies in a very simple fact: U.S. presidents use their standing army, which loyally and obediently follows presidential orders, to attack weak and relatively defenseless Third World countries, such as Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and only when U.S. casualties are expected to be low. With Iraq as with Vietnam, it’s obvious that they simply miscalculated a bit.

As the Iraq debacle continues to spiral downward, sucking ever-growing numbers of people into its death throes, all too many Americans continue to judge the invasion and occupation of Iraq by how many U.S. troops have been killed. But from a moral standpoint, Americans should also be asking themselves two important questions: (1) Under what moral or legal authority did the U.S. government invade Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process? and (2) If the U.S. government invaded Iraq to spread freedom and democracy, as U.S. officials maintain, why is it cozying up to such totalitarian regimes as the communist dictatorship in Vietnam?

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

by Greg Palast

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

(Signed copies available for the holidays at www.palastinvestigativefund.org

Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006

Chile’s former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet died today at the age of 91.

Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.

All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.

But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk.

The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.

Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value - and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers - then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.

The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.

By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos” defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs. In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Reagan/Thatcher. New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the nation’s long-term recovery and growth since then is the result of - cover the children’s ears - a large dose of socialism.

To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry on a scale unimagined by Communist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained ownership of one industry: copper.

For nearly a century, copper has meant Chile and Chile copper. University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, “Its absurd to describe a nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine of the economy remains in government hands.” Copper has provided 30% to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his nation.

Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic miracle,” says Dr. Vasquez, “maybe you need a socialist government first to commit agrarian reform.”

So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.

But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining.

In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil. But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver, they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction through savage cuts in government services and social security.

In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous results.

But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which everyone did not live happily ever after.

******

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse”. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com

Get a signed copy of Armed Madhouse for the holidays or browse for other signed gifts at www.palastinvestigativefund.org